Domination without Dominance

Lamana Gonzalo Lamana

Description

Offering an alternative narrative of the conquest of the Incas, Gonzalo Lamana both examines and shifts away from the colonial imprint that still permeates most accounts of the conquest. Lamana focuses on a key moment of transition: the years that bridged the first contact between Spanish conquistadores and Andean peoples in 1531 and the moment, around 1550, when a functioning colonial regime emerged. Using published accounts and array of archival sources, he focuses on questions of subalternization, meaning making, copying, and exotization, which proved crucial to both the Spaniards and the Incas. On the one hand, he re-inserts different epistemologies into the conquest narrative, making central to the plot often-dismissed, discrepant stories such as books that were expected to talk and year-long attacks that could only be launched under a full moon. On the other hand, he questions the dominant image of a clear distinction between Inca and Spaniard, showing instead that on the battlefield as much as in everyday arenas such as conversion, market exchanges, politics, and land tenure, the parties blurred into each other in repeated instances of mimicry.Lamana's redefinition of the order of things reveals that, contrary to the conquerors' accounts, what the Spanairds achieved was a "domination without dominance." This conclusion undermines common ideas of Spanish (and Western) superiority. It shows that casting order as a by-product of military action rests on a pervasive fallacy: the translation of military superiority into cultural superiority. In constant dialogue with critical thinking from different disciplines and traditions, Lamana illuminates how this new interpretation of the conquest of the Incas revises current understandings of Western colonialism and the emergence of still-current global configurations.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Perú
• América del Sur
• South America
• History of the Americas
• Peru

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822388715
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

9 D B > C 6 I > D C without 9 D B > C 6 C 8 :

A book in the series latin america otherwise: languages, empires, nations

Series editors: Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University Irene Silverblatt, Duke University Sonia SaldívarHull, University of Texas, San Antonio

9 D B > C 6 I > D C without 9 D B > C 6 C 8 :

IncaSpanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru

Gonzalo Lamana

Duke University Press Durham and London

©2008Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acidfree paper¥

Designed by Heather Hensley

Typeset in Monotype Dante by Achorn International

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data appear

on the last printed page of this book.

All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counterstance stems from a problem with au thority . . . it’s a step towards liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life. . . . The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react. —Gloria Anzaldúa,Borderlands/La Frontera

You too are Peruvian, that is to say, Indian. You are only different from me in your dress and education. —Miguel Quispe,1922, quoted in Marisol De la Cadena,Indigenous Mestizos

[The old angel smeared the pongo with excrement; the young an gel covered the master with honey. Then,] In the radiance of the heavens, the light of your body stood out, as if made of gold, transparent. . . . And in the mist of the heavenly light, I was ashamed, stinking. —Just as it should be!—affirmed the master—Keep going! Or, is that the end [of your dream]? No, my little father, my lord. When once again . . . we were together . . . before our great father Saint Francis, he took another look at us . . . , once at you, once at me, for a long while. With his eyes that saw everything in the heavens, I don’t know to what depths he understood us, joining night and day, memory and obliv ion. Then he said, “Whatever the angels had to do with you is done. Now, Lick each other! Slowly, for a long time.” —José María Arguedas,El sueño del pongo

About the Series

atin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations is a critical series. L  It aims to explore the emergence and consequences of concepts used to define “Latin America” while at the same time exploring the broad inter play of political, economic, and cultural practices that have shaped Latin American worlds. Latin America, at the crossroads of competing imperial designs and local responses, has been construed as a geocultural and geo political entity since the nineteenth century. This series provides a start ing point to redefine Latin America as a configuration of political, linguistic, cultural, and economic intersections that demands a continuous reappraisal of the role of the Americas in history, and of the ongoing process of glob alization and the relocation of people and cultures that have characterized Latin America’s experience.Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nationsis a forum that confronts established geocultural constructions, re thinks area studies and disciplinary boundaries, assesses convictions of the academy and of public policy, and correspondingly demands that the prac tices through which we produce knowledge and understanding about and from Latin America be subject to rigorous and critical scrutiny. Gonzalo Lamana’sDomination without Dominance: IncaSpanish En counters in Early Colonial Peru  is a historical and theoretical tour de force. Theoretically, it questions basic historiographic assumptions. By doing his tory in this way, he is also able to question the shortcoming of current theo retical debates in the social sciences and the humanities.

A careful, painstaking, and attentive reading of the moving “borders” between Incas and Spaniards in the first two decades of the Spanish invasion of Tawantinsuyu, Lamana’s book brings forward the disparity of accounts, then and now, of one of the historical and foundational encounters of the modern/colonial world. Lamana is not just making a claim: he shows how the ideology of writing built on the superiority of Latin alphabet supported an entire theological structure of knowledge that served the Spaniards well (and later on the British and French imperial designs) in devaluing and bring ing down Inca’s ways of knowing and Indigenous humanity. Epistemology and ontology worked hand in hand to build the foundations of epistemic and ontological racism in which we are still living today. Walking from the past to the present is one of Lamana’s main concerns. Casting a wide eye through the spatial histories of imperial expansion and modern/colonial encounters, he erodes the foundations of the ways of knowing we take for granted in the humanities and the social sciences— ways of knowing that are—willingly or not—complicitous with imperial de signs. Lamana realizes, at the end of his journey, that he was doing precisely what Quechuas and Aymaras did in the first two decades of the encoun ter; and what Waman Puma de Ayala articulated in his decolonial political philosophy, toward the end of the century. Lamana enrolls himself in the genealogy that nowadays we find in the works of the Chicana intellectual and activist Gloria Anzaldúa; the AfroAmerican radical sociologist W. E. B. Dubois or the AfroCaribbean critical theorist Frantz Fanon. “As it is clear, the ultimate claim of both sixteenthcentury and current, neocolonial proj ects is that Western subjects know reality as it is while their Others do not,” Lamana states in the introduction. And he adds, “if rationality is the way in which a Western subject finds convenient to imagine himself, Christian rationality is the way in which a sixteenthcentury Spanish subject found it convenient to imagine himself (gender intended in both cases). Christianity and Science guarantee, in each case, the selfconvincing privilege of operat ing upon the real.”

viii

a b o u t t h e s e r i e s

Contents

a b o u t t h e s e r i e s

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

i n t r o d u c t i o n Situated Interventions: Colonial Imprints, Decolonial Moves

1. Beyond Exotization and Likeness: Alterity and the Production of Sense in a Colonial Encounter 2. Christian Realism and Magicality during Atahualpa’s Imprisonment 3. Why Betting a Barrel of Preserves Can Be a Bad Thing To Do: Civilizing Deeds and Snags 4. Illusions of Mastery: Manco Inca’s War and the Colonial Normal 5. The Emergence of a New Mestizo Consciousness: An Unthinkable Inca 6. Power as Moves: A Mid1540s Repertoire of Flipping the Coin 7. “The End”

b a s i c p o l i t i c a l c h r o n o l o g y o f t h e s p a n i s h c o n q u e s t

n o t e s g l o s s a r y r e f e r e n c e s i n d e x

vii xi

1

27 65

97 125

159 193 227 231 233 249 251 275