El sistema económico del imperio Inca

From the time of the initial encounter between Europeans and the peoples who lived under the domination of the Inca in Andean America, outsiders were fascinated by the political and economic organization of such a large number of people who were spread over a vast and varied territory. Shortly after the first published notices of the Inca “empire,” European thinkers began the process of integrating their discoveries into their own understanding of the past. What was the nature of this system, with massive amounts of gold and silver that seemed to function without a money economy?In this mature exercise in intellectual history, Villarías Robles carefully and systematically traces the evolution of Europe’s attempt to understand the political economy of Inca Peru. The theoretical models that are constructed by European observers are based on the empirical evidence, and the nature of that evidence is an important aspect of the author’s investigation. The author pays constant attention to the primary sources, as they evolve over the four and a half centuries after the conquest. He is most interested in the published works, because it is the published evidence, at least until the archival investigations of the twentieth century, that provide the foundation for philosophical speculations on the peculiarities of the Inca system. He also probes the relationship between “present” developments and their impact on interpretation.Villarías Robles finds surprisingly little change in substance of the debate over time. By the mid-1550s the published sources provided two contrasting views of the Inca political economy. One stressed the beneficent aspects of the system, an order that provided stability and economic security, one that was seen by most as a culmination of a long entrenched Inca domination, and a system that was challenged and fell by foreign conquest. The chief primary sources for this view were Bartolomé de las Casas and Pedro de Cieza de León. On the other hand, Agustín de Zárate and Francisco López de Gomara pointed to a despotic Inca elite whose subjugation by the Christians was justifiable, for the Inca had conquered various independent lords as they expanded from their center of authority in Cuzco. Between 1570 and 1609, the basic sources for the speculation on Inca political economy were well established. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo’s efforts to justify Spanish control and the elimination of native resistance, by force if need be, bore fruit. The histories he commissioned, including Sarmiento de Gamboa, pointed to a short and despotic Inca rule. The court chronicler, Antonio de Herrera, echoes this view. On the other hand, José de Acosta, Blas Valera, and especially Garcilaso de la Vega pointed to the successes of the Inca system. Through a number of primary sources, carefully evaluated by Villarías Robles, one sees the development of two basic schools, both in a way looking at the nature of Amerindians—noble, savage, or barbarian—as they move through time. According to the author, Michel de Montaigne, in his essays (1580–88), is the first non-Spaniard, a person who had never even been in the Indies, to describe the Incas as noble savages. Tomasso Campanella’s 1609 La ciudad del sol is the classic statement of the utopian position. And, Garcilaso de la Vega’s work will put the finishing touches on the argument. These will provide the same foundations for the later positive view of the Inca political achievement as described by William H. Prescott.For Villarías Robles, there have always been two opposing explanatory models. In the one, exemplified by the Campanella/Prescott model, the state fully controlled economic resources and their distribution, including labor. In the other, the Adam Smith/Heinrich Cunow model, the Inca polity was new, and did not contribute significantly to Andean development. It was the communities, and the people and ethnic entities that composed them, that mattered. In eight, tightly argued, but sometimes repetitive, chapters the author covers the “history of an idea” from the beginning to the present. He points out that the Inca system is especially hard to understand because the Incas did not write, and the Europeans had to rely on second hand information. He states that Andean society presents problems, contradictory and conflictive, that do not fit the European experience. He argues the debate is still intellectually stimulating for a variety of reasons, including the idea of nationalism in Peru, and publication of new documents has not resolved the debate. No wonder Heinrich Cunow might label the Inca system, communist; Louis Baudin, socialist; Hermann Trimborn, feudal; Rafael Karsten, totalitarian; Gustavo Valcárcel, slave; or Karl Wittfogel, hydraulic despotism.This is a complex book, one well worth the extended reading. It is the type of text that is useful for both advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as they shift from the factual foundations to the interpretive. Villarías Robles insists that little has changed since the interpretations of the first century. Even the publication of new documents, administrative and legal, has done little to change the essence of the arguments. The author spends some time looking at the post-1946 situation, with a shift from a historical approach to an increasingly anthropological one. He argues that still the basic paradigm remains. The work of John Murra, Tom Zuidema, Pierre Duviols, and Frank Salomon fall fully within the old framework, even as they extend our understanding of important elements of the Inca system.There are topics that might warrant further examination. With just a few exceptions, the author fails to consider much of the post-1968 work; this is especially true for Peru where there was much reexamination of the Inca political economy during and following the Velasco Alvarado government. Although the author discusses the works of the Peruvian generation of the 1920s, the ferment during the debates of the Left of the 1970s and 80s as well as the impact of Sendero Luminoso are largely ignored. Nor does the serious work on the critical publication of new and old texts, led by Franklin Pease and others, secure notice. The author’s analysis is hence strongest for the period into the 1960s. Perhaps a subsequent volume is called for

Latin American history and culture · Philosophy

• La antropología posmoderna

  Open Access•Juan J R Villarias Robles, Juan J R Villarías-Robles•Disparidades. Revista de…•2008

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