This work is an elegant and all-encompassing analysis based on long, intensive, and extensive field work. The prose is somewhat turgid; this may be a result of translation. Zuidema uses as his sources primarily chronicles and dictionaries from the colonial period. His knowledge of colonial sources is detailed and thorough.
Zuidema makes a properly critical use of the chronicles. For example, he acknowledges that the figure he uses for the cover is based on a European model, not an Andean one. He does not do the same with linguistic sources. In this brief space I give only one example, typical of the analysis throughout.
Zuidema assumes that the native language of the Incas was Quechua, although he uses the Aymara dictionary of Bertonio as a primary source of Inca information. Aymara and Quechua are not related languages. For example: “The Quechua word for ‘man’s sister,’ pana, is probably related to the Aymara word pana, ‘second’ ” (p. 30). He continues “[o]n the basis of this observation” to analyze sister as secondary to brother, and “younger brother . . . in the position of ‘sister’ of his own older brother, ” and thus derives his analysis “of the relations between the noble ayllus” of Cuzco. The Quechua word is a root; the Aymara word is not but is derived from the root paya, “two,” and the suffix -ni, “human counter”; the resulting word is pani, “both (humans). ” Rostworowski, whose work he references, handles the panaca terminology and the resulting Inca ayllu structure in a way that is in accord with an Andean worldview.
There is also some problem with the translations of kin terms and the origin of surnames (European, not Andean). Zuidema is apparently unfamiliar with the work of Collins. Much of the analysis rests on a linguistic basis. For the rest, the underlying assumptions do not match those that have been discovered by other investigators, for example Hardman or Isbell whom he references, in that reciprocity and symmetry are virtually dismissed in favor of singularity in hierarchy with women considered as property (p. 78) rather than as members of the society.
The book is handsomely printed.
