This is a pathbreaking book. It is the first view of Andean society under Inca and Spanish rule through the prism of gender. The author’s goal is to explore how gender relations and ideology “are pivotal to the creation of, and challenge to, social class” (p. xix). Irene Silverblatt, an anthropologist, addresses issues of social class formation and empire building that have animated other recent studies in Andean ethnohistory (for example, those of Karen Spalding, Steve Stern, and Nathan Wachtel). But by examining gender systems as metaphors and expressions of power (or defiance), the author provides startling new insights into broad historical processes. This book is not simply another attempt to place women in the historical picture; it is a bold interpretive synthesis that traces the evolution of Andean society through two periods of conquest and transition.
The book is conceptually divided into discussions of Andean society before and after the Spanish conquest. In the first part, Silverblatt engages in symbolic and structural analysis to explore how the Incas manipulated gender ideology to reinforce their political control over subject ethnic groups. She argues that the Incan polity and cosmology altered traditional Andean ideals of gender equality and complementarity in ways that rewarded men and subordinated women. The argument is most forceful in her symbolic analysis of aclla, the institution which gave the Incas jurisdiction over chaste women of newly conquered populations. While the acllas symbolized conquest, they also were given divine status and used to reinforce bonds between Cuzco and the conquered provinces. By showing how gender hierarchy could both express and mask relations of power, Silverblatt advances our understanding of Incan efforts to legitimate their rule on the eve of the European invasion.
In the second section, Silverblatt traces the destructive impact of colonial rule on Andean societies. Her premise is that Andean peasant women were particularly vulnerable, as colonial law and policy further undermined the principles of gender equality, and denied them access to wealth and prestige in their own communities. For the first time, we get glimpses of the colonial experience through the eyes of Andean peasant women. Particularly illuminating is the author’s study of idolatry trials to ferret out the role of peasant women in the ritual life of their villages. She provides a striking analysis of Andean women as witches who cared for and worshipped diabolical huacas. As clandestine witches, in the midst of a raging anti-idolatry campaign, women assumed a central role in the cultural defense of their deities, and bore the brunt of religious persecution.
Silverblatt’s recovery of peasant women as active participants in the defense of their rituals and beliefs excites the imagination and points towards new horizons of research. But her evidence is too fragmentary in the final chapters to do more than offer speculation. Indeed, Silverblatt’s schematic argument about Andean patterns of resistance holds that peasant women fled to the puna and lived in quasimaroon communities, herding and worshipping the huacas, while peasant men abandoned their villages for Spanish zones of influence. This dramatic dichotomy ends up romanticizing Andean women, and it cannot hut provoke the skepticism of historians who, in their plodding empiricism, have not yet discovered those heroic communities of puna women to which the author alludes. Nonetheless, the hook’s conceptual elegance, creative interpretation, and penetrating analysis of gender, class, and culture command respect and make it essential reading for Andeanists and colonial historians.
