Social Structural and Economic Themes in Andean Ethnohistory

Bibliographic Data

ID2581914
AuthorsJohn V Murra (corresponding author)
Year1961
Volume34
Issue2
Pages47
Publication date1961-04-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropological Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-5491 • E-ISSN: 1534-1518
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3317069
OpenAlexW2321876384
LanguageEN
Citations received15
References cited1

Although Andean ethnohistory has long been the source of much speculation about the region's social and economic structure, paradoxically, this very concern has made it difficult to raise some of the questions which in other areas are taken for granted. It has been particularly difficult to achieve a setting for the discussion where preoccupations derived from European economic history-whether the Inca were socialist or feudal, a welfare state or one with patriarchal slavery-give way to an anthropological analysis, based on what we have learned ethnographically, in the field, about non-European civilizations, with cities, state controls and public revenue systems but also with kinship institutions and ethnic values enduring and functioning at all levels of the society.' The search for Utopia in the Andes is in part due to the sources at hand. Misunderstanding the internal organization of the ethnic peasant community, the continued vitality of reciprocity and kinship bonds, and relying too heavily on their informants among the Inca elite, the European chroniclers consistently attributed to the Inca state what were actually age-old peasant reciprocity functions. This was strengthened early in the seventeenth century when Garcilaso de la Vega, the most widely read and translated of our sources, wrote his Commentaries' to impress his European readers with the excellence of the system his maternal ancestors had created and his paternal kin had destroyed. There is no need to undertake a survey of our sources. They have frequently been classified and evaluated by others.3 If one is primarily interested in the European invasion and what in Peru is called colonial history, obviously one's evaluation of the

Ethnohistory · Ethnology · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Latin American history and culture

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