These two books focus on the pre-Spanish past of the Andean highland heartlands; but beyond those broad temporal and geographical limits they overlap very little. Christine Hastorf writes a minutely detailed treatise on one region between 200 and ca. 1460 A.D., based on archaeology, anthropology, and ethnohistorical research. Constance Classen summarizes references to Inca cosmology, mostly taken from the Spanish chronicles.
Hastorf studies the relationship between agriculture (using paleoethnobotani- cal data) and power to hypothesize about the origins of political differentiation in the Montaro Valley. She argues that no one model provides scholars with a universal explanation for all political change; there are multiple paths to stratification. Her conclusions oblige the reader to reconsider the theoretical stances of scholars like Carneiro, Fried, Haas, and Wittfogel and to add political and social forces to the economic explanations for change.
Two aspects of Hastorf’s work caught this reviewer’s attention. First, following accepted conventions in her field, she divides the past into history and prehistory. That division follows the strict but now unfashionable definition of history as the reconstruction of the past based solely on written sources. This definition denies preliterate peoples a “history” and negates the work of everyone, Hastorf included, who endeavors to reconstruct the pre-Hispanic Andean past—whether by written sources or the material record. Second, I noted some inconsistencies about the concept of wealth in the Andes. In several places in the text, Hastorf confuses Western notions of wealth based on material accumulations with the Andean ideal of wealth based—according to Bernabé Cobo, a late but respected Spanish chronicler—on access to labor (pp. 34, 50, 89, 97, and 186). This is particularly unsettling given that Hastdorf dwells on the importance of labor in several places (pp. 32, 186, 209, 215).
Classen’s focus is chronologically later and limited to state-level ideology based on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chronicles. She finds that the “fundamental structures of Inca cosmology—the dualities of left and right, high and low, male and female—were, in fact, derived from the structures of the human body. … The human body therefore offers an indigenous paradigm for interpreting Inca religious practices and beliefs” (p. 3). She summarizes a good deal of the literature on the topic and provides convincing explanations for certain practices, such as burying some people head down.
Many of Classen’s findings mesh well with ethnographic studies such as those of Joseph Bastien. Readers must keep in mind, however, that Inca cosmology does not necessarily have to mirror the local thinking and practice of all the conquered peoples in the empire. The distinction between imperial-level ideology and local variations should be kept clear, as Sabine MacCormack reminds us in her recent book [Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru, 1991]. Readers should also ask to what extent post-1532 statements about Inca cosmology were distorted and idealized by the influence of colonial Catholicism, and to what extent this filter affected the record. Keeping these two potential problems in mind will enable readers better to assess Classen’s statements and apply them to their own research issues.
