In Inka Bird Idiom, Claudia Brosseder presents a wide-ranging and thought-provoking review of bird imagery and featherwork in the Inca Empire and colonial-era Andean chronicles. The study foregrounds symbols and media that archaeologists, historians, and art historians have tended to engage with only as a colorful backdrop to Inca sovereign performances. In doing so, Brosseder offers a welcome new resource that will be of interest to scholars in multiple disciplines. To construct Inca bird idiom, she pores over seventeenth-century chronicles that provide rich details on Inca life and ceremony—often through the testimony or authorship of men of Andean descent—enhancing them with discussion of precontact featherwork found in museums and archaeological deposits. Brosseder argues in her introduction that this synthesis of ethnohistory and archaeology recovers a persistent transconquest Inca worldview that existed in the Andes from around 1400 until at least the mid-1600s, a period she calls the “Long Late...
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Book Review|
November 01 2024
Inka Bird Idiom: Amazonian Feathers in the Andes
Inka Bird Idiom: Amazonian Feathers in the Andes
. By Claudia Brosseder. Pitt Latin American Series
. Pittsburgh, PA
: University of Pittsburgh Press
, 2023
. Photographs. Maps. Figures. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index
. 378
pp. Cloth, $60.00.Hispanic American Historical Review (2024) 104 (4): 706–708.
Citation
R. Alan Covey; Inka Bird Idiom: Amazonian Feathers in the Andes. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 November 2024; 104 (4): 706–708. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-11384650
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