Susan E. Ramirez
National Endowment for the Humanities
Resident Scholar
1999-2000
To Feed and Be Fed: Cosmology and
Legitimacy in the Andes
"An essential key to understanding another culture," says Andean scholar
Susan Ramirez, "is the peoples’ world view or cosmology the underlying
principles and assumptions that motivate behavior and organize society." In
the case of the Incan empire, however, Ramirez contends that this essential key
has been obscured for centuries by the western biases of sixteenth-century Spanish
chroniclers.
The Incan empire was not organized as a constantly-expanding
economic territory or somehow patterned after the human body, as the prevailing
models of the last few decades hypothesize. Ramirez contends that Andean cosmology
including multi-tiered ritual, folk religion, and ancestor worship provided an
ideological underpinning of rulership and society at both the Inca and provincial
levels.
This new perspective on the link between Andean political
power and cosmology began to surface for Ramirez as she read general empire-wide
accounts written by the chroniclers of the 16th and 17th centuries, after years
of working in provincial archives with more localized documents. Certain inconsistencies
led her to suspect that a fundamental presumption about the Incan empire was
incorrect.
Based on the chroniclers’ reports, "the empire
had always been portrayed as a territorial empire with a geographic center, a ‘capital’ like
Washington, D.C.," explains Ramirez. The Spanish accounts put everything
they saw and didn’t understand into their own cultural mold so the huge
Andean empire was mistakenly assumed to be organized like a European one. But
this wasn’t the Andean way at all. The empire’s center, or the "navel
of the universe," was a person, not a place. The empire was hegemonic, based
on authority, not territory. It did not have fixed boundaries. Further, the Incans
had no merchants, no markets, and no money. The Andeans were a non-western peoples
with a different kind of society and culture.
This pivotal shift led Ramirez to document the significant
role of religious beliefs, sacrifice, divination, magic, and ritual in ordering
traditional Incan society. More broadly, she examines and illustrates the problems
of describing and understanding a non-western society using sources written with
heavy western biases and in a European language. "Basically what I’m
trying to do," Ramirez says, "is to be a political scientist for the
Incas. I want to explain what allowed them to create and hold together this huge
empire made up of hundreds of small ethnicities."
Affiliation at time of award: Professor of Latin American
History, DePaul University
Return to Resident Scholars
1999-2000.
