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The Princess and the Parrot:

Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Approaches to the Study of
Ethnicity and Personhood in the Inka Empire and the Colonial Andes

by

Gary Urton

Mama Ocllo and a Parrot (1750)

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The Princess and the Parrot:

Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Approaches to the Study of
Ethnicity and Personhood in the Inka Empire and the Colonial Andes

by

Gary Urton

One of the most delightful and informative stories about everyday life in the streets of a

city in the post-conquest, Colonial Andes is an anecdote recounted in the chronicle of the great

mestizo chronicler, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. What we might term Garcilaso's morality tale

about the perils of identity switching, or “putting on airs,” takes place in the great mining

center of Potosí, in what was known then as Upper Peru (i.e., present-day Bolivia). The story

goes thus:

In Potosi, in 1554 and 1555, there was a loro [parrot] that spoke so well

that when the Indian men and women passed by in the street it would call

them by their respective tribes, saying ‘Colla,’ ‘Yunca,’ ‘Huairu,’

‘Quechua,’ and so on, without any mistakes, as if it realized the meaning of

the different headgear they used to wear in Inca times to distinguish

themselves. One day a beautiful Indian woman passed down the street

where the parrot was: she was attended by three or four servants, who

treated here as a lady palla [“princess”], or member of the royal blood.

When the parrot saw her, it shrieked and laughed: ‘Huairu, Huairu,

Huairu!’ the name of a tribe that is looked down on by all the rest. The

woman was very much humbled in front of the by-standers, for there was

always a crowd of Indians listening to the bird. When she was opposite it,

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she spat at the bird and called it súpay, ‘devil.’ The Indians said the same,

for it recognized the woman though she was disguised as a palla.

(Garcilaso de la Vega, 1966:525-6)

Aside from a morality tale about the folly of trying to pass one’s self off as better, or at

least different, from one’s own, given station in life, there is a powerful message in this story of

the naturalization of identity. Try to assume other than your "natural" station in life, and you

will be recognized for who and what you are, and you will be taunted and shamed. In our story,

the "princess’s" true identity is assumed to be such a part of the natural order of things that

even an animal – a bird – recognized the group to which she belonged. It appears from

Garcilaso’s recounting of the story that the princess had apparently gotten off with her trickery

until she met the prescient parrot.

There is a lesson in this tale about the importance of hueing to the natural order of

things and about how appearances cannot occlude a view into the true essence of a particular

individual, not only the Huairu woman but presumably of others, passing along the same street.

It is quite extraordinary, the status accorded to the parrot in having the ability to perceive the

essence of passersby. It suggests that identity is not malleable, changeable, subject to

negotiation, as commonly assumed today; rather, that it is essential. The oddity is that the

subterfuge was apparent only to a being who could speak (in what language? We are not told)

but who was not a player in the game of identity. For apparently the members of that crowd of

buffoons who stood around observing the parrot's antics (note: "there was always a crowd of

Indians listening to the bird") depended on the parrot's perspicacity about personhood and

identity, about its ability to ferret out the imposter in a crowd.

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Garcilaso's story naturalizes not only the individual identity of the young Huairu woman

in question (assuming the parrot was correct!), but it also made clear the threat such

transgressive behavior posed to the larger system of colonial social order within which this

woman's attempt at subterfuge occurred: people should maintain the identity that was

appropriate to them; to do differently would be to create confusion and would, thereby,

threaten the proper order of society. The "proper" social order would be increasingly policed

and controlled by colonial authorities throughout the Americas (see Graubart, 2009), a process

culminating in the 18th century with the production of "casta" paintings, family portraits -- man

(husband), woman (wife), and child, the latter the offspring of the former pair -- in which the

consequences and social significance of racial and ethnic miscegenation were catalogued and

labeled with minute care (see Majluf, 1999; Figure 1).

A Spanish man, his highland Indian wife, and their Mestizo off-spring
Casta painting by Cristóbal Lozano for Viceroy Felipe Cayetano de Amat y de Junyent (1761-76)
Museo Nacional de Antropología (Spain)

Maintaining one's identity and station in life was a crucial and essential feature of life in

the complex, increasingly miscegenized world of the Colonial Andes. But, in fact, there was

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nothing new about this phenomenon in the Andean world. For even before the Spanish

conquest of Tawantinsuyu -- "the four parts intimately connected" (the name by which the

Inkas knew their empire) -- there had been an attempt to strictly control ethnic identities in the

empire. We learn the contours of this effort from the 17th century Jesuit chronicler, Bernarbé

Cobo. In his recounting of the imperial attempt at policing the boundaries of what we today

would term "ethnicity," Cobo notes that:

The men and women of each nation and province had their insignias and

emblems by which they could be identified, and they could not go around

without this identification or exchange their insignias for those of another

nation, or they would be severely punished. They had this insignia on their

clothes with different stripes and colors, and the men wore their most

distinguishing insignia on their heads; each nation was identified by the

headdress…They were so well known by these insignia that on seeing any

Indian or when any Indian came before him, the Inca would notice what

nation and province the Indian was from; and there is no doubt that this

was a clever invention for distinguishing one group from another.

(Bernabé Cobo, 1979 [1653]:196-7).

To hear the famed 17th century Jesuit priest Bernabé Cobo tell the story, in the Inka

Empire ethnic identity was not a matter of contested, or “fuzzy” categories, as has so often

been claimed about ethnicity by modern students of the subject. Rather, for the Inkas (as Cobo

tells the story, at least on the surface) identity was a well-regulated, settled matter, one that

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was signaled by the wearing of distinctive clothing and headdresses by all the members of each

different nation in the empire (Figure 2a, b, and c).

(a) (b) (c)

North coast of Peru Central coast of Peru Atacama, Chile, trader
(Martínez Compañon) (Puruchuco, Lima) (José Pérez de Arce, MCAP)
Figure 2 - Regionally/Ethnically Distinctive Headdresses

However, even in Cobo’s account there is ambiguity and uncertainty about how such

matters were actually enacted and experienced in Tawantinsuyu. For what did Cobo mean by

pointing out that, if individuals failed to wear their proper insignia, or if they exchanged their

own insignia for that of another nation, they “would be severely punished?” Surely this

suggests a fear that some people were attempting to switch identities. But who would not

want to be identified as a member of his or her own “nation,” or would attempt to pass one’s

self off as a member of some other nation? What can have been the motives, the personal

aspirations and related strategies, underlying such subversive behavior in the Inka Empire,

which Cobo’s text evokes ever so subtly?

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One gets the sense here that even in imperial times, there might have been "Huairu"

ladies trying to pass themselves off as pallas (princesses)! The point is that even in the

testimony from the seventeenth century Jesuit observer, which has often been cited as

evidence for how clearly “ethnicity” was marked in the Inka empire, there is more nuance and

ambivalence than is often recognized. The reader might well ask, so what? Don't we assume

that one always attempts to define one’s self as well as one's neighbors and that negotiating

one's identity is a persistent feature of social life worldwide? With that admission, most people

would acknowledge that ethnicity is a highly complicated matter, full of signaling, cross-

signaling and all manner of (often submerged) intentions, obfuscation and contestation. These

things are indeed true, as we will discuss farther along.

One thing that is of particular interest in the second quotation above is the implication

that the Inka state was involved in policing ethnicity not by way of diminishing or abolishing

signs of identity differences -- perhaps in hopes of encouraging unity within the empire -- but

rather at maintaining, enforcing and policing difference. This kind of behavior on the part of a

state is unusual. While it is not uncommon for states to label and mark certain statuses within

controlled socio-political hierarchies – from kings, judges and priests to criminals – it is unusual

for states to take an active interest and role in insisting on the maintaining of identity

differences. Doing so, one might think, could have the effect of segregating the population into

different interest groups that potentially could come to be at odds among themselves.

In relation to Cobo’s claim that Inka agents were involved in policing attempts to switch

ethnic markers, we have to ask, what would have been the objective of such subversive

behavior? Unsurprisingly, the spare evidence we do have that speaks directly to this issue,

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which derives primarily from colonial era written testimony, suggests that ethnic subterfuge

and switching were in most cases acts of social, political and economic aggrandizement

performed by individuals seeking privileges and advancement -- like Garcilaso's Huairu

"princess."

As it turns out, these two anecdotes from the Andes encapsulate and exemplify quite

clearly and remarkably well what have been the two major approaches taken by modern

scholars to interpret and explain the intentions and stratagems linked to constructions of

ethnicity.

Primordialism and Instrumentalism

There have been two principal, competing interpretations in the social scientific

literatures produced over the past half century or so to account for the nature of ethnicity and

the meaning and significance of ethnicity and ethnic marking. These schools of thought, or

explanatory paradigms, are known as “primordialism” (also called “substantivism,” and

“essentialism”) and “instrumentalism” (or “constructivism”). In brief, the former sees ethnic

identity as grounded in essentialized properties claimed by groups of people, such as shared

origin (i.e., a common homeland), language, common dress, marriage within the group, and

other beliefs and actions reinforcing the shared substance uniting people into groups signaled

by identity markers (e.g., clothing, pottery, burial practices, food-ways, etc.). On the other

hand, the latter view of ethnicity (i.e., instrumentalism) sees group identities as emerging from

and within interactions between competing interest groups in which each group claims internal

unity as a part of a strategy for advancing its strategic economic and political interests vis à vis

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its neighbors. Such claims may, however, be subverted by individuals seeking (equally

strategically) to advance their own interests by switching identity. Such instrumentalist

processes will equally (i.e., as with primordialism) be signaled by a variety of material cultural

forms and behavioral practices -- yet in this case, these will be considered as stratagems of/for

the continuous constructions of identities within shifting economic, social and political

circumstances, not as static, essentialized features of the groups.

It is important to note that within these group-based strategies for constructing and

enacting ethnicity, individuals may seek to negotiate their individual place among the bounded

groups -- i.e., they may pursue individual strategies of defining personhood. The latter may

result in the individual remaining wholly within the boundaries of the natal group, or he/she

may seek some position along, or even within, the boundaries of some other group. In the two

major quotations that introduced this article, Cobo's statement is concerned primarily with

ethnic groups as (ideally) essentialized entities, whereas Garcilaso's account takes us into the

realm of an individual's attempt to move across a status and ethnic boundary while accepting

the notion that a common understanding of the existence of such boundaries is shared by all

concerned. To "put on airs" is only meaningful in the context of a recognition of the existence

of boundaries.

As I have noted, many early substantivist/primordialist theorists of ethnicity attempted

to account for ethnic groups by arguing that they were based on inalienable, primordial, and

essentialized properties, such as a shared homeland, dress, cuisine, burial practices and other

common habits and practices; a tendency to intermarry; the speaking of a unique dialect, if not

language; and the maintenance of narrative traditions, whether oral or written, about their

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common origins. This primordialist view was confronted, most notably in a highly influential

volume edited by Fredrick Barthes (1969).

The various studies in the Barthes volume laid out in specific and general terms the

“constructivist,” or “instrumentalist” perspective. As argued in these studies, instrumentalism

was characterized by “…a concern with the role of ethnicity in the mediation of social relations

and the negotiation of access to resources, primarily economic and political resources” (Jones,

1997:72; see also Bentley, 1987:25). Thus, from the instrumentalist perspective, there is

nothing “essential,” or primordial, about ethnicity; rather, it is a product of reasoned, rational

(given particular political economic circumstances) calculations. The groups of people that act

on these calculations in a concerted way assume over time many of the characteristics and

forms of expression of group solidarity which primordialists project as the essential, inalienable

features of ethnic identity.

How do these varying views of ethnicity relate to the challenges of identifying such

groups in the archaeological record? One of the most influential voices in developing the

current study of the archaeology of ethnicity has been that of Sian Jones (1997). In developing

a working definition of ethnicity based on what she terms a processual archaeological

approach, Jones defines ethnic groups as “..culturally ascribed identity groups, which are based

on the expression of a real or assumed shared culture and common descent (usually through

the objectification of cultural, linguistic, religious, historical and/or physical characteristics)”

(1997:84). While Jones is aware that the operative term in this definition, culture, is itself

highly complex and ambiguous, she concludes that for all practical purposes, the contents of

the culture concept applied to the domain of group formation coincide more or less with the

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features characteristic of ethnicity according to the “primordialist” view. Jones notes that

attempts to find a place for the concept of culture in definitions of ethnicity have commonly

equated culture with the habitus, as developed in the works of Pierre Bourdieu (esp. 1979;

Jones, 1997:92).

Citing the works of Ericksen (1992) and Bently (1987), Jones argues that “…ethnicity is

constituted in a similar manner to culture; it is both ‘an aspect of concrete ongoing interaction

and…a meaning-context for the same interaction’” (cited in Jones, 1997:92). Jones is

dissatisfied with an approach that equates culture with the habitus, as it suggests that ethnicity

is constituted primarily in terms of recognized commonalities internal to some group, rather

than to both internal commonalities and (or, at the same time as) differences between some

focal group and another, outside group(s). Nonetheless, Jones argues for the importance of

incorporating shared habitus -- “durable dispositions towards certain perceptions and

practices” (Jones, 1997:88) -- at the core of an understanding of ethnicity.

Thus, Jones produces a nicely balanced account of the processes of ethnic formation by

recognizing, on one hand, the significance of the habitus for explaining the processes of the

emergence of sentiments of commonality that promote unity within such groups and, on the

other hand, the significance of the differences that distinguish and separate any two such

groups in their encounters with each other.

As Jones noted (1997:80), the arguments between primordialists and instrumentalists

have become increasingly sterile. Several attempts have been made to find a compromise

between the two perspectives. One such attempt, by A.D. Smith (1981), places the two

explanations at the opposing ends of a single chronological continuum of development, or

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formation, over time. According to this view, the profound sentiments of unity associated with

ethnicity may be understood to derive from long-standing traditions in a manner consistent

with the claims of primordialism; however, at any moment in time, a group so formed in this

manner may find itself confronted with the need to pursue certain strategies promoting its own

interests in moves that have all the characteristics of the instrumentalist understanding of

ethnic group formation (Jones, 1997:81).

We gain an interesting perspective on these questions from Jonathan Hall’s excellent

study, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (1997). Hall notes that

[t]he knowledge of one’s membership in a social group, together with the

value and significance that is attached to this membership, constitutes the

‘social identity’ of a subject. This social identity is the internalization by the

individual of shared group norms and values, and exists alongside a

‘personal identity’…When, however, the identity of a group is threatened, a

response on the individual level is mobilized because the identity of the

ethnic group has been internalized in the individual, with the consequence

that injury to the group is seen as an injury to the self” (Hall, 1997:30).

The kind of self-interested action by individuals claiming a specific identity vis à vis his or

her mates noted by Hall is a poignant expression of the primordialist, or substantivist,

perspective on ethnic identity formation. However, I would argue that the circumstance Hall

presents as the context for the conditions under which an individual might feel called upon to

close ranks with his/her ethnic group mates is precisely the sort of circumstance in which some

other individual might choose strategically to deny their identity with their natal group and to

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claim allegiance – perhaps by adopting the overt signals (e.g., dress, etc.) – with some other

more privileged group (e.g., a Huairu woman dressing up like an Inka princess).

The above comments prompt us to look again at the testimony from Bernabé Cobo cited

at the beginning of this introduction. As I suggested earlier, when we look not only at the

normative content of that statement but as well at the implications evident in that passage of

more problematic behavior (e.g., subterfuge through signal switching), Cobo actually presents

in this passage a combination of primordialist and instrumentalist perspectives on ethnicity.

That is, he notes, on one hand, that people wear particular items of dress as “traditional” signs

of belonging to particular identity groups. On the other hand, he states that the Inka mandated

that people were required to maintain these markers, on pain of punishment, which suggests,

in good constructivist fashion, that there might have been a history (unrecorded) of people

attempting strategically to exchange their own clothing and headdress for that of another

group. Such actions are precisely the kinds of strategic appropriations of alternative identities

by individuals – and even entire groups – that Barthes and the contributors to his

groundbreaking volume (Barthes, 1969) characterized in the constructivist interpretation of

ethnic formations. Such individual actions lead us to the question of how individuals, as

members of groups, negotiate their own identities – not only ethnic, but gender, age, etc. –

within society, and of how those strategic actions might be recognizable archaeologically.

The relationship of and boundary between group identity and individual identity are

often discussed as matters of “personhood.” This is the rubric under which issues of gender,

age, and other forms of alterity, as well as what is termed the “partibility” of bodies have been

taken up as critical issues in studies of identity formation and contestation, past and present

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(Fowler, 2004). Many such approaches have made it clear that there is no bright line that

separates the concerns emerging within any one of these more recent preoccupations with

personhood and alterity and those of the longer standing concern with ethnicity (and even

older concerns; e.g., see Comaroff’s article on totemism and ethnicity, 1987). The lesson here is

that we need to adopt a comprehensive approach to the consideration of how identities –

personal and/or group – are formed, expressed and contested in social life.

One particularly creative approach to the question of the relationship between

individual and group identity formations is offered by Stuart T. Smith (2003), in his study of

ethnicity in ancient Egypt and neighboring Nubia. In this work, Smith draws on a pair of literary

tropes – topos and mimesis – to get at the question of the relationship between broad,

generalized conceptions of “the other” (i.e., in terms of inter-group relations) and narrower,

more mundane conceptions of the relationship between any individual self and a foreign

“other.” As summarized by Smith, topos represents an idealized view of the world of social

relations and interactions between groups, which serves a rhetorical, not necessarily a literal,

end; that is, of making broad, generalized, stereotypical claims about the nature of other

groups of people (e.g., they are all dirty; speak an odd, “barbaric” language; etc.). On the other

hand, what Smith terms mimesis relates to the reality of daily experiences and interactions

between individual members of such groups in their personal interactions with one another

(Smith, 2003:24).

The opposition between topos and mimesis provides a productive way to think about

the relationship between idealized, abstract conceptions of others (both individuals and

groups) that draws on the same principles as primordialist projections of ethnicity (i.e., the

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topos), as opposed to dynamic, inter-personal relations between individuals that have all the

features of strategic economic and political maneuverings that characterize “instrumentalist”

representations of ethnic group formations (i.e., the mimetic). Smith’s analysis of topos and

mimesis in the setting of the relationship between ancient Egyptians and their neighbors, the

Nubians, resonates remarkable well when viewed within the Andes, especially in terms of the

ethnohistorical representations of relations between the Inkas and their more recalcitrant

subjects in various, often distant parts of the empire.

Ethnicity in the Andes

The question that arises in these contexts is: What light can be shed on a comparative

understanding of ethnicity and processes of ethnic identity formation and contestation,

including the surveillance of ethnic signaling, on the basis of the archaeological and

ethnohistorical records of what was the largest state of the ancient New World – the Inka

Empire? In the context of the study of a non- or a-literate society, such as the Inka Empire, the

central challenge is that of determining how such factors as feelings of solidarity and

conceptions of common ancestry can be identified when the only available data are

archaeological and, to some extent, ethnohistorical. As for the former, unfortunately, artifacts

do not speak for themselves, nor do they unambiguously identify their makers and users; in the

case of the latter, such written documents were products of Spanish colonial interventions

following the conquest of the Inkas. Their authors were virtually never of the "anthropological"

disposition to inquire into local people's attitudes about group solidarity -- certainly not as long

as locals could be coerced to provide labor and tribute as demanded.

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Neither of the bodies of information mentioned above -- the archaeological and the

ethnohistorical -- is subject to querying and response for researchers today between the

researcher and the data. The information – from pots and burials to written documents –

simply exist in their natural settings (e.g., in the ground or in an archive) and the challenge to

the researcher is one of interpreting their meaning and significance in their time and place for

issues of individual and group identities. Nonetheless, we do thankfully have many models in

archaeology (e.g., Díaz-Andreu et al, 2005; Emberling, 1997; Hodder, 1982; Hudson, 1999;

Lyons and Papadopoulos, 1999, Stanish, 1992) and ethnohistory (Chance, 1996; Thomas, 1991;

Trigger, 1983) to draw on in carrying out such research today. Specifically on the Andes,

perhaps the best study to date, with many excellent case studies, is a volume edited by

Reycraft, Us and Them: Archaeology and Ethnicity in the Andes (2005)

To focus initially on the question of group identities, it may be helpful to provide an

overview of how researchers have understood and characterized the types of groups alluded to

in the statement by Cobo – what we commonly term well-defined, bounded ethnic groups;

what in earlier times might have been termed "tribes." In fact, there were different types of

groups, constituted at different levels of social complexity, in the empire. We regularly

encounter references in the colonial sources to groups referred to as ayllus, pachacas,

parcialidades, and señoríos, to mention some of the most common such entities.

Ayllus were (and in many communities still are) kin-based groups that are critical for

ritual organization, recruitment for public works, and other matters. In the pre-conquest and

early colonial Andes, each ayllu had a central place, which it recognized as its home territory

and place of origin. Some members of the ayllu were sent away to settlements ("satellites") in

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distant places, there to exploit the resources in those distant ecozones. The members of the

outlying settlements regularly returned to the home site where they all shared the resources

harvested from the varying outlying settlements. From the colonial sources, it appears that the

ayllus were the core grouping for social identity across the empire. There is no official count of

the number of ayllus within Tawantinsuyu, but I would estimate that number in the several

thousands (Urton, 2017). We have scattered references in colonial documents to local myths of

origin of the ayllus. In addition, the Spanish chroniclers recorded state-sponsored myths of a

founding deity -- Viracocha -- who was said to have passed through the sky at the beginning of

time, planting the seeds of each local group (presumably the ayllus) from where the ancestors

emerged at the beginning of time (Urton, 1990).

Ayllus are not referred to as "ethnic groups" in the colonial literature (this is a modern

term, in any case). Nonetheless, that designation has been freely imported into the

characterization of the social organization of the Andes in the social scientific literature since

the early decades of the 20th century. The modern obsession with ethnicity, however, has

generally not taken account of the centrality of ayllus in the Andean landscape. This raises the

question: Were ayllus what we would term today ethnic groups? In order to answer this

question, we would need much greater clarity than we have so far generally had available as to

how ayllu territories did or did not coincide with other features that are commonly associated

with ethnic groups, most notably, language.

Catherine Julien wrote cogently on these matters in an article on two of the major

"ethnic groups" around Lake Titicaca, on the border between present-day Peru and Bolivia

(1987). These were the Aymara and the Uru. Julien's study concerns how members of these two

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groups were classified in colonial era tribute lists and how the colonial era classifications

accorded, or not, with Inka classifications of these two groups. Julien shows that the two groups

were distinguished along two axes: economic and linguistic. The Aymara, the wealthier of the

two groups, were primarily herders and agriculturalists, while the Uru were primarily engaged

in fishing. Multiple colonial administrative sources from territories around Lake Titicaca indicate

that their settlements were commonly organized into multiple ayllus (Julien, 1987).

It appears from Julien's study that insofar as both the Inkas and the Spanish colonial

state were concerned, the principal classification relevant to their interactions with the local

populations were the larger groupings -- the Aymara and the Uru. The ayllus were recognized

by the Spanish colonial administrators (and presumably by the Inkas), but it was the Aymara

and Uru groupings that constituted not only the groups interacting with the state and with each

other, but also there were occasions when (especially) Uru would become assimilated with

Aymara (Julien, 1987:54). (The latter perhaps in a way that only a parrot might discern!) This

arrangement -- of multiple ayllus forming larger, named groups -- is well-documented in the

colonial literature from what is today central Bolivia (Platt et al, 2006).

Finally, we have another example from the central Andes in colonial references dealing

with what were termed the Huari (or Guari) and Llaquaz. The former were generally recognized

as the original inhabitants within a given territory. They were agriculturalist whose economy

depended on terraced agriculture and irrigation. The Llaquaz, on the other hand, were highland

camelid pastoralists who had migrated into the area in more recent times, pushing the Huari

further down the slopes. Each of these groups had its own, distinctive deity and sanctuaries

(Duviols, 1973; Urton, 2012). The linguistic affiliations of the two groups are not entirely clear,

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but it appears that the Huari were Quechua-speakers, while the Llaquaz were Aymara-speakers.

The two groups commonly appear in the colonial sources as living in a kind of symbiotic, though

usually tensely competitive, relationship with each other. The differences, and relations,

between these two wide-spread central Andean groups are also evidenced in the

archaeological record (Parsons et al, 1997).

On the basis of the examples referenced above, I would say that the ayllu was generally

not coincidental with what would become the ethnic groups of the current social scientific

literature; rather, these latter, larger groupings would be formed from collections of ayllus that

shared a language, a territory, and perhaps an economic specialization, or at least a common

economic status.

Pachacas ("100s") were groupings based on the Inka decimal system of administration.

Labor groups could be mustered within the decimal administration from local groups of 10

(chunka) workers up to the largest, provincial-level groups of 10,000 (hunu). The groupings

were assessed from five-year censuses carried out by the Inka administrators, the

khipukamayuq ("knot keepers/makers/animators"). The term for the groupings of 100 laborers,

pachaca, often appears in the colonial administrative records as a synonym of ayllu. However,

precisely how these two collectives -- one (the ayllu) based on kinship, common ancestry and

dispersed territorial residence, the other (the pachaca) based on administrative recruitment of

imperial subjects resident within a given territory -- is unclear from the colonial sources. It is

unlikely that any of the decimal groupings would have had the status we today assign to ethnic

groups, as they were formed by administrative fiat rather than by feelings of solidarity that

might have unified people recruited for state labor (including military duty).

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Parcialidades ("parts") appear to have been a coastal version of the ayllus of the

highlands. They were kin-based, residential groups that are often understood to designate labor

and/or artisanal groups of coastal peoples (e.g., craft specialists, irrigation associations,

fishermen, etc.). I think that, like the ayllus, the parcialidades were not in and of themselves,

individually, ethnic groups; rather, this designation would be appropriate for larger, multi-

parcialidad groupings the members of which would have spoken a single language (or dialects

of the same language) and would share an economic status.

Señoríos were colonial era administrative units often coincidental with one or more

former ayllu territories and memberships. They were commonly under the oversight of an

encomendero, a Spanish official responsible for the welfare and religious indoctrination of the

Natives, as well as for the collection of tribute. Some may have been composed of a few

different ayllus, others, of larger groupings of formerly mixed ayllu groupings. It is difficult to

discern from within the colonial administrative literature the nature of individual and group

identities within such units.

The central question for us here is: How did the above groupings relate to what are

referred to in the Western social scientific literature as “ethnic groups?” Specifically, and raising

the question of the archaeological study of ethnicity and of the study of material culture

prompts additional comments on the complexities facing attempts to account for identity

formation and expression in the Inka world -- and elsewhere within ancient societies.

The only attempt I am aware of to attempt to map, on the contours of the central and

northern portions of Tawantinsuyu, based on what may have been various combinations of the

different types of identity groupings discussed above, is the map based on one originally

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produced by John H. Rowe, in his classic study of the Inkas in the 1946 Handbook of South

American Indians (Figure 3).

Figure 3 - Ethnic Groups in the Central and Northern Regions of Tawantinsuyu

(based on an original map by John H. Rowe, 1946)

If all that was at stake in the debate over the origins and the sustaining forces of group

identities in Tawantinsuyu were stylistic differences in dress, then the question of ethnicity

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could be sorted out quite handily. All that would be required in order to produce an

archaeologically-based accounting of ethnic differences would be to survey the archaeological

record from some region, noting differences in the structure, design and iconography of

different fabrics (e.g., from slings, to mantas [shoulder cloths] to unkus [high status shirts). If

one were to identify patterned distributions of these differences, this would supposedly give a

reasonably clear picture of ethnic territories (see an excellent study along these lines in

Rodman and Fernandez Lopez, 2005). Unfortunately, the matter cannot be resolved, at least

not in all parts of the Andes, in such a straightforward manner. As many studies have shown,

ethnicity is about more than stylistic differences in dress or in any other single item of material

culture (e.g., ceramics, house form, tomb type, etc.).

But perhaps such groupings and differences are marked on bodies or are to be found in

the genetic information carried within the bodies? Recent studies of DNA and cranial

deformation, two forms (one biological, the other cultural) of marking the bodies of individuals

with distinctive identity markers, have produced important advances in the study of ethnicity in

the Andes (Buikstra, 1995; Sutter, 2000; Williams, 2005). However, while each of these

methods of analysis holds great promise for contributing to studies of ethnicity, each has its

own limitations. As a case in point, the Huairu "princess" whose exploits were detailed above

would presumably (if the parrot was correct in its ethnic identification) have carried within

herself the genetic make-up common to the Huairu populace. Nonetheless, there she was,

strolling down the street in Potosí, pretending to be something and someone she (apparently)

was not! In the absence of some indelible, unalterable marker of ethnicity on the body, none of

these methods seems to offer a foolproof body of information for the archaeological researcher

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today to go about unambiguously assigning ethnic identities to these vital groupings for social

and political action.

As I noted earlier in my comments on the quotation from Cobo about the supposed

fixity of ethnic markers, individuals don’t always play the ethnic signaling game in a consistent,

norm-based way by producing and ultimately depositing in their “proper” place, clear and

unambiguous material markers of identity. Rather, it has been amply demonstrated in the

literature that people often chose not to wear their traditional, “assigned” clothing, deciding in

some moments to don the dress or ornaments of some other group (e.g., Hodder, 1982). Just

as archaeologists long ago came to the understanding that “pots do not equal people,” neither

should we suppose that “dress equals people” – at least not in any fixed, absolute way. As a

wealth of recent literature on ethnicity attests, and as we saw with the anecdote of the

"princess" and the parrot, identity is a matter of negotiation, contestation, and policing --

whether by a bird or an official of the state.

Final Reflections

There are two comments I want to make in bringing these observations on ethnicity in

the Andes to a close. In the first place, the Inka Empire is a particularly important case study to

examine in thinking comparatively about how states, past and present, have dealt with

differences among groups that compose society. As we have seen, what we term ethnic

marking reached the level of a fine art in the Inka state. All individuals were required to wear

the particular headdress that signaled their social group identity. From what we know about

household formation in the empire (which is, regrettably, not a great deal), it appears that

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endogamy within the groups known as ayllus was the norm and that ayllu members were

spread over a broad range of ecological zones. If this model of group organization and dispersal

– worked out on the basis of some fairly good though minimal historical data (see Murra, 1972;

cf., Aldenderfer, 1993; Stanish, 1989; and Van Buren, 1996) – is roughly on the mark, then the

headdress marker for any given group would have been concentrated in a few settlements but

ones that were distributed far apart, over different geographical regions, from the Pacific coast,

over the Andes and down into the tropical lowlands. Given that there must have been

thousands of such groups (i.e., ayllus), the mosaic of mixed identity markers across the broad

expanse of the Andean landscape must have been extraordinarily complex. To add to this, the

Inkas pursued a practice of moving populations – known generically as mitimaes – around to

accomplish a variety of state goals, from keeping the peace to economic intensification.

This state-level stirring of the pot of ethnic differentiation would have only added to the

crazy quilt of mixed ethnic markers across the landscape. How did all this work? How could the

state ever have managed to maintain surveillance and control (as it claims to have done) over

such a complicated array and mix of identity signs? To answer this question, we need to

develop a more thorough understanding of Inka administration, especially relating to its record

keeping functions by means of the knotted-cord khipus (see Urton, 2003, 2010, 2017)

And second, a word on the perennial question of the salience and value of the two,

admittedly stereotyped characterizations of approaches to ethnic identification discussed

herein – primordialism and instrumentalism. As Sian Jones and others have concluded, the

opposition and difference between these two explanatory paradigms has been over-drawn in

the literature to date. As we have seen in the two principal quotations that have oriented our

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discussion in the introduction thus far (those by Cobo and Garcilaso de la Vega), there are

elements of both primordialism and instrumentalism is every situation of ethnic identity

formation, contestation and negotiation.

In the end, I would say that we are better off losing the Manichean tendency in

formulations of explanations of ethnicity. For these processes seem always and everywhere to

come down to identities (of groups and individuals) emerging from unalloyed assertions of

inherent properties and established ways of being and doing, all of which nonetheless become

imminently negotiable when individuals and groups are faced with the inevitable complexities

of life in human societies in changing, ever-challenging environments – the latter of which are

on glorious display in the central Andes, past and present.

In my view of the matter, I think the archaeologist must approach ethnicity in a

statistical manner. That is, it can only be in the predominance (not in the absolute) of this or

that type of dress, cuisine, burial, ornamentation, etc., that one can reasonably hypothesize the

existence of a fairly clear ethnic-like grouping across some given territory. However, it will

always be the case that on the margins, there will inevitably be some code- and/or signal-

switching when individuals see it to their advantage to adopt -- either temporarily or

permanently -- the signs of another group identity. At that point, it will fall to some

perspicacious parrot to determine who has attempted to make the leap to alterity.

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