For decades Hermann Trimborn has been a leading student of Andean and Inca social and political organization, most recently at the University of Bonn. His interpretative essays have encouraged further research on Inca law and economics, while his publication of previously unavailable Andean legends in Quechua has provided our first major early text in that language.
In recent years his Seminar für Völkerkunde has trained younger scholars like Udo Oberem who have made significant contributions to Andean ethnology. Others have been content with the elaboration of their teacher’s work and its defense against revisionists.
Angela Müller-Dango’s dissertation takes up the long-debated question of the institutionalized welfare measures which some detect in the economic organization of the Inca state. “Sozialpolitik” is defined as state-directed concern for the economic and social welfare of the wider society. Sozialpolitik should not be confused with the traditional measures of the ethnic and kinship community to feed widows and orphans, the lame and the aged, provisions which were made long before the Inca state and which continued to function after the Cuzco conquest. The author warns against assuming that the Inca regime incorporated such traditional approaches into the “state system of tribute.” They simply “took into account the organization of labor by the local community in their tribute system” (p. 143).
The one context in which we can definitely speak of the state’s assuming welfare functions involves the thousands of warehouses built along the Inca highways. Müller-Dango accepts as proven that at times of drought and other calamities the staples in these warehouses were distributed to the people in distress. Unfortunately, on this topic she has had no access to any new evidence which would clinch the argument. The work is dated 1968 but the bibliography shows no entries later than 1964-1965. Thus the author could not take into account Craig Morris’ thesis at the University of Chicago which deals with the warehousing system in the light of new fieldwork in the Huánuco area.
In a review for a historical journal, the anthropologist need not overwork the larger issue of how we all evaluate the historical sources in Inca research, but neither should he ignore it. Most of the European authors had particular trouble in perceiving and understanding the “civilization” features of what was being destroyed. To find cities, “kings,” specialized artisans, armies, and bureaucracies in alien and defeated cultures invited projection of one’s own patterns in ways which are more distorting than when dealing with small and isolated societies.
Ever since the 1890s, when Heinrich Cunow started modern anthropological work on the Inca, we have known that the corrective against such projection is the use of comparable ethnographic evidence from the “preliterate” world. Müller-Dango, though an ethnologist, does not refer to comparable non-European kingdoms when discussing welfare measures in Inca times and does not mention her reasons for such omission. Her authorities for defining “welfare” and “Sozialpolitik” are European scholars dealing with contemporary situations. Toward the end of the book she ventures a comment: “Here we have an example (proof?) of a feudal state organization in ancient Peru” (p. 176), when dealing with grants of people and land to the deserving by the Inca kings. She does not enlarge on this foray into comparative feudalism.