This volume is part of a laudable effort to provide the interested scholar with primary sources for the functional interpretation of Inca society. At Murra’s instigation an earlier volume was published on the visita of Garci Diez de San Miguel to the province of Chucuito in 1567 (Casa de la Cultura del Perú, 1964).
With these two publications Murra calls attention to the rich “field data” that the visita type of document offers to the cultural historian, ethnohistorian, or anthropologist. As in the case of the Garci Diez publication, the present work is accompanied by a biography and articles which show how the data can be used to reinterpret the traditional syntheses of Inca society, originally derived from rehashing the generalizations of the standard Spanish chroniclers. Singularly little progress has been made along this line since Means’ 1931 masterpiece.
For the most part these documents are not in the spectacular category of “hitherto unpublished,” but the fact that they have been available for several decades and not used has led to their republication in more accessible form, accompanied by challenging interpretative essays. Why this apathy on the part of the social historians? Zuidema and Murra are independently working out the basis for a drastic revision of what we know about the functioning of the meteoric Inca state-empire. So far, the only results are these two publications of Murra, a few more articles derived from his thesis, and Zuidema’s turgidly written (or translated) book on the Ceque system. Yet these are sufficient indication that a reworking of Cobo, Garcilaso de la Vega, or Sarmiento or a pious wait for a new unpublished manuscript will not supply the tremendous unknowns needed to make the achievements of the Inca state explicable. The Inca has appeared to social scientists as a kind of American Genghis Khan on foot. This impression is likely to continue unless we recognize that there are documents which make some sense out of the Inca empire and unless we pay attention to them.
Murra does not give us any quick solutions, but he casts great doubt on the ability of any chronicler to understand Inca society and the heterogeneous complex of states, kingdoms, chiefdoms, tribes, bands, and hamlets which composed it. He gives us the picture of a scholar struggling with problems and an invitation to join the struggle. In so doing, he presents a familiar enigma to the anthropologist—that of relating the synthetic description of complex societies as presented by the chroniclers to the regional and community units described in the detailed accounts of the visitadores, a “Mulligan stew of ethnography.”
The editing of the main document and supplementary documents is generally to be commended. The reader is well-advised at the start, however, to jump to the section called innocuously “Documentos suplementarios a la visita” in order to orient himself before reading the entire manuscript. This section, improperly buried in the index, elucidates the ethnic identity of the Chupachu. Even so, this reviewer is still not certain whether the Yacha and Queros (which will presumably appear in Volume II) are distinct ethnic entities from the Chupachu and each other.
One other criticism relates to the unevenness of the commentaries. The article by Mellafe is a solid contribution to Andean historiography, presenting a threefold periodization of sixteenth-century Peru, a really provocative proposition which challenges the formulation of Kubler (1946). The essay on archaeology should not have been presented, for it is incomplete (in one site there was no scale for the architecture, and in the other no illustration of the pottery), and it does not represent a solid methodological use of the data. Also conspicuously lacking are the findings of a reconnaissance survey which would show the correspondence between the archaeological sites and the villages visited by Íñigo and at least suggest to what extent archaeology can confirm his report.
Hadden’s essays are an attempt to establish a ratio of limited application between tribute payers and total households, while Bird’s piece only makes the reviewer wonder why a botanist was taken along on the expedition. A salacious biography of Ortiz de Zúñiga by José Antonio del Busto Duthurburu reminds us that the spirit of Suetonius lives on.
