Having lived among primitive Indian tribes of the Amazon Basin, eastern Brazil, and the Chaco, Alfred Métraux brings a refreshing new slant to the history of the “Incas,” a word which he explains has expanded from its original reference to the king to include first the royal family, then the noble caste, and finally all people of Quechua tongue. Not an archaeologist, Métraux uncritically accepts all opinions on prehistory in his eclectic chapter on the “Precursors” to the Inca Empire in the pre-Columbian Central Andes.
Beginning in the fourteenth century, when genealogies and legends attain a degree of historical accuracy, Métraux competently reports the oral traditions recorded by early conquistadors and noble half-breeds. His major contribution to this oft-told story comes in a reinterpretation of practices whose first description was distorted by a Spanish feudal frame-of-reference and subsequently has been forced into Marxist polarities. As an anthropologist, Métraux finds many parallels with the social systems of modern lowland Indian tribes in the organization of both the Inca caste and the humble high land village. In religion he emphasizes not the elaborate formal pantheon, as J. A. Mason did, but the more primitive “animatism” centered on multitudinous holy objects (huacas).
After presenting an entire chapter on European myths concerning the Incas and their empire, Métraux proceeds to demythicize these these romantic legends in the rest of his book. Unquestionably the most interesting chapter is “The Organization of the Empire,” in which he critically examines the evidence for the claim that the Inca Empire was the first great socialist state. He considers the “socialist” distribution of goods in the Empire as an extension of the Indian village customs of communal holding of property and a chief’s responsibility to share his wealth. Successfully comparing the Inca Empire with the Carolingian, he sees that both had a corvée draft of labor to service imperial possessions and missi dominici to investigate directly for the king. By understating the advanced features of the Inca Empire and stressing the archaic, however, Métraux has only substituted other imperfect comparisons for the flawed analogy with socialism.
Following the history of the descendants of the Inca Empire into the twentieth century, Métraux’s analysis ceases to be critically creative and becomes shrilly conservative, adamantly maintaining the Black Legend and the feudal status of Indian serfs. Approving the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, he fails to see its limitations or the extent of similar change in non-revolutionary countries.
With the book’s many imaginative interpretations, Métraux or his editors need not have treated it as a mere popularization. Not only are footnotes omitted when they would have been helpful, but the many interesting illustrations are seldom identified by provenance, collection, material, or size. Neither are the many drawings identified as those of Poma de Ayala. And the translation from the original French version of 1961, while workmanlike, is overly dry and rarely updated. Yet as a total record of the historic Quechuas, this book can be strongly recommended for its low price and its ethnological viewpoints.