Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

Segmentary State Formation and the Ritual Control of Water under the IncasAuthor(s): Peter GoseReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), pp. 480-514Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/179143 .Accessed: 26/11/2011 00:46

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Segmentary State Formation and the Ritual Control of Water Under the Incas PETER GOSE

University of Lethbridge

There is a strange and unacknowledged paradox in the historiography of the Incas. On the one hand, few would deny that theirs was a typically theocratic archaic state, a divine kingship in which the Inca was thought to. be the son of the Sun. On the other hand, the standard descriptions of Inca political struc- ture barely mention religion and seem to assume a formal separation between state and cult.' I believe that these secularizing accounts are misguided and will show in this essay that the political structure of the pre-Columbian Andes took form primarily around a system of sacred ancestral relics and origin points known generically as huacas. Each huaca defined a level of political organization that might nest into units of a higher order or subdivide into smaller groupings. Collectively they formed a segmentary hierarchy that tran- scended the boundaries of local ethnic polities and provided the basis for empires like that of the Incas. However, these huacas were also the focus of local kinship relations and agrarian fertility rituals. The political structure that they articulated therefore had a built-in concern for the metaphysical repro- duction of human, animal, and plant life. Political power in the pre- Columbian Andes was particularly bound up with attempts to control the flow of water across the frontier of life and death, resulting in no clear distinction between ritual and administration.

Since Frazer (1925 [1890]) and Hocart (1970 [1936]), anthropologists have recognized that political power and life-giving myths are commonly linked. Although their concept of divine kingship could and should be applied to the Inca case, I will not attempt that here. Rather, I intend to focus more narrowly on the connection between ritual and administration implicit in the notion of divine kingship but little developed outside the African literature (see Feeley- Harik 1985). There are two main reasons why this affinity between ritual and administration has not been explored more thoroughly. First, it is an anathema

1 Here I refer primarily to Espinoza (1978), Moore (1958), and Murra (1958, 1980), although it is important to add that Rostworowski (1983) has begun to rethink Inca political life in the light of what we have learned about religion in the pre-Columbian Andes during the last two decades.

0010-4175/93/3227-6142 $5.00 ? 1993 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 481

to the rationalism and evolutionism that have continued to characterize politi- cal anthropology since the days of Frazer and Hocart. These authors saw the origins of the state in a long period of magically inspired ritual association for the common good, out of which the secular administration of the moder state ultimately emerged. However even an evolutionary linkage between ritual and rational administration has proved too close for the comfort of subsequent theorists. Only recently have anthropologists directly challenged the appli- cability of rational choice models to politics in western electoral democracies by arguing that they are just as dependent on ritual as any archaic state (see Kertzer 1988). Second, ritual and administration have not often been con- nected because a transcendental bias, which takes ritual as a subspecies of religion, and religion as world renunciation, pervades most academic studies of religion. Thus, for example, when Geertz (1980) depicts the "theater state" of nineteenth-century Bali as an organization primarily dedicated to staging royal rituals, he feels obliged to contrast his semiotic approach to more traditional concerns with power and administration, as if the two were necessarily opposed. In contrast, I aim here to show how religious notions helped to create a cultural sense of what administration and political power were.

Although I will demonstrate the ritual basis of Inca administration, I readily admit that there are limits to any purely religious explanation of Inca imperial- ism. As Conrad (1981) argues, the fact that each ruler founded a separate corporate descent group or panaca, and therefore did not inherit an estate from his successor, created pressure for the constant expansion of the tributary base on which each succeeding royal estate could be founded. But since these corporations existed primarily to worship their founding sovereign, there was a religious basis for the economic pressures they generated (Conrad 1981: 17, 22). The religious dimension of Inca imperialism therefore cannot be treated as a mere legitimation of underlying economic motives. Probably the Incas (and their peculiar inheritance system) emerged under a religious regime that had already articulated an imperialist political project that many polities be- sides the Inca were eager to fulfill. By focusing on religion, then, I do not intend to deny that the Inca state was an instrument of class rule and social control on a scale without precedent in the Andean region. The point is simply that the state power of the Inca was not an end in itself but rather a means of realizing a metaphysical control that was the common aspiration of most of the fragmented political units that existed before the empire was formed.

One central metaphysical issue motivating the rise of the Inca empire and embodied in its political structure was how to control a complex cycle that linked death and the regeneration of life in Andean thought. Here human death was thought to create sources of water that lay outside the boundaries of the local political unit, such as Lake Titicaca and the Pacific Ocean. These sources had to be coaxed or coerced into sending water back to the local level

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for agricultural purposes. If these distant places could be subject to imperial control, then the complex cycle linking human death and agricultural fertility might be directly administered. As Zuidema (1978: 134) puts it:

The mountains on the horizon were organized within an ever-expanding geographic hierarchy of more potent sources of water. The horizon became a political concept to the state which wanted to control the availability of water. Snow-capped mountains, especially those along the coast, and mountain lakes were considered as the source of rivers of more immediate concern and the water of the former was believed to be derived from the ocean that surrounded and supported the known earth. Even military and economic expansion were seen in terms of this ideology.

In this essay I hope to develop these perceptive observations into a more systematic argument by reconstructing the ideological context in which con- trol over water became a matter of such political concern.

That this need to control water was not strictly functional becomes clear when we turn to the ecological and administrative facts concerning irrigation in the Andean area. Here a sharp dichotomy exists between coastal and highland situations. The coastal situation is close to the classic preconditions of the Wittfogel hypothesis: a climate with virtually no rainfall and large populations dependent on an intensively irrigated agriculture involving exten- sive canal systems sometimes linked major valleys together (Kosok 1965; Ortloff et al. 1982; Eling 1986). It was long assumed that centralized states administered these systems, and that this task may have included military control of the highland watersheds of the rivers that fed them. However, Netherly's work on the northern Peruvian coast suggests that canal adminis- tration remained a largely local matter (1984: 229; cf. Leach 1961). In the highlands themselves, local control of irrigation also prevailed but against a significantly different natural background. Here irrigation has primarily sup- plemented natural rainfall to extend the growing season of maize. In many areas, maize, like potatoes and other tubers, sometimes can be grown entirely on the basis of the available rainfall. Thus, highland agriculture is much less

dependent on irrigation. Canals only rarely extend more than ten kilometers or serve more than one community, so it has never been necessary for their administration to be more than the local matter it is today. Nonetheless, an almost obsessive concern for the ritual control of water emerged in this highland context of attenuated functional necessity.

Because this need to control water was not a compelling natural necessity, we should understand it at least in part as a human invention. Over three millennia, Andean societies appear to have developed in ritual the working assumption that they were incapable of controlling water, and hence their

agrarian livelihood, from within their localized political boundaries. This perceived aquatic dependency on an uncontrolled periphery made the regional polities of the Andes susceptible to, even complicit in, grandiose imperial

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 483

projects like that of the Inca. In this way, agrarian ritual helped generate the massive military and administrative project that was the Inca state.

PRE-COLUMBIAN POLITICAL STRUCTURE IN THE ANDES

The Inca empire fully exemplified our modem notion of the state as a govern- ing and administrative organ that directed and regulated the workings of civil society from a position of partial autonomy. As an institution that arose through acts and threats of conquest, the Inca state antagonistically differenti- ated itself from the rest of Andean society as a ruling entity that could impose its will on a subject population. However, this standard view of the state begins to change when we look into the details of its bureaucratic organiza- tion, and discover how the entire edifice was shaped and motivated by agrar- ian ritual.

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the Inca state as a distinct administrative body was the vast communication system of roads, inns, and fortresses it constructed throughout the empire. The restrictions that the Incas placed on civilian travel show that they intended to have this system facilitate affairs of state in the provinces by allowing the rapid transmission of informa- tion over long distances, and the movement of armies, tributaries, and tribute. These road systems served as a jumping-off point for an even more minute and pervasive gathering of census information about the local level by the Inca state by taking censuses, which were the basis on which the empire assessed tributary obligations. Such censuses and obligations were recorded in the multiple strands of knotted wool that made up the quipu, the encoding and decoding of which were an important specialist task and the Inca adminis- tration's primary means of information storage.

The tribute system served by this infrastructure was represented through the so-called decimal system, by which the population was organized on the basis of tribute-paying households into nesting units of 50, 100, 500, 1,000, 10,000, and 40,000. A curaca or elder oversaw each of these various units and was responsible for ensuring that they carried out tributary duties. The vast majority of these curacas were apparently descendants of the local lords who had ruled over autonomous ethnic polities prior to the Inca conquest, which have been characterized as chiefdoms or kingdoms. The fundamental social division within them was between a ruled peasantry and a hierarchy of rulers with such titles as apu (lord), huamani (falcon), and mallku (condor). Moore (1958) convincingly argues that these rulers were a landed aristocracy, whose political functions were intimately bound up with their land holdings, a situation in which property and sovereignty were tightly fused. Within this ruling group, relations of overlapping sovereignty prevailed and affected such matters as the allocation of labor tribute provided by the peasantry. After they were conquered by the Inca, these ethnic lords joined the imperial bureau-

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cracy as curacas, where they exercised many of the same administrative functions as they had when their provinces were still autonomous polities. The hereditary nature of these positions and their continuity from pre-Inca times has led both Murra (1958: 31) and Moore (1958: 63) to dismiss the decimal system as little more than a wishful attempt to standardize and ratio- nalize preexisting segmentary structures of the ethnic polities. The very fact that subsequent research, beginning with Zuidema (1964), has reconstructed non-decimal forms of local organization from the historical record suggests that Moore and Murra were largely correct in arguing that the Incas simply used and reinforced the administrative structures that they found in place. Reports that the decimal system was not instituted until the reign of Topa Inca further reinforce the idea that it was a late and superficial development (Mur- ua 1987 [1613]: 95). There is, however, limited evidence to suggest that the Incas actually did attempt to reorganize local populations to fit the decimal model (Julien 1988). The fact that the Inca appointed governors to supervise and coordinate the tribute system at levels superior to those administered by these ethnic lords suggests that this state was not wholly content to pursue a non-interventionist policy of indirect rule in the provinces.

The most common non-decimal form of organization found in the ethnic

polities was a division of their territory into two halves labelled upper (hanan) and lower (hurin). These divisions could exist at a level as minimal as the moieties of a hamlet or expand to encompass the relation between mountain

peoples and coastal peoples within the Andean area as a whole (Zuidema 1962: 161). Because this dualist schema could be applied at various organiza- tional levels, it should be understood as a generative principle, in which

political organization arose from a process of balanced opposition at increas-

ingly higher levels, creating a segmentary hierarchy of units. While sym- metric in one sense, these divisions were hierarchical in another, since the

representatives of the upper group outranked their lower counterparts on ceremonial occasions (Matienzo 1967 [1567]: 20; Cobo 1956 [1653]: 112). Furthermore, the curaca of the upper group would often act as the political representative of both groups considered as a unity (Matienzo 1967 [1567]: 20-1; Netherly 1984: 231), that is, at a higher segmentary level. Here the curaca of the lower subdivision would serve as the helper (yanapaque) or

replacement (ranti) of the upper subdivision's curaca within the larger politi- cal unit. However, within their own respective moieties, each would have their own helper or replacement, as Rostworowski has shown (1983: ch. 5). If

diarchy was the prevailing form of government in the pre-Columbian Andes, .as suggested by Zuidema (1964: 127), Duviols (1979a) and Rostworowski (1983: chs. 5-6), we must nonetheless recognize its lopsided character. Be- hind the appearance of dual power lay a more familiar pattern of delegated power and hierarchy.

A less-common, but equally hierarchical, pattern of politico-territorial or-

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 485

ganization was tripartite. Here the ethnic polity would be composed of three territorial subdivisions, their names denoting their respective ranks: superior (collana), mid-point (chawpi, taypi or payan) and inferior (callao). Examples of this sort of organization could be found in the ethnic polities around the continental divide in what is now southern Peru, such as the Collaguas, Aymaraes,2 Lucanas, Andamarcas, and Soras (Zuidema 1964: 81-2, 115-8; Earls 1979: 78). The ruler of the polity as a whole was the highest ranking curaca of the superior division. However, his replacement was the highest ranking curaca of the inferior, not the mid-point, division (Zuidema 1964: 82). In this way, tripartite polities maintained the asymmetric duality of high and low described above. Conversely, even dualistic polities organized their armies along tripartite lines (see Rostworowski 1983: 115).

Such dual and tripartite forms of organization were probably more authen- tic expressions of local Andean administrative principles than the Inca deci- mal system. Yet five- and ten-part territorial organizations were also common in the area around Cuzco and might have derived from these simpler dual and tripartite structures, as Zuidema suggests (1964: ch. 8). From these political structures, it is only a small leap to the decimal system, so it is probably a mistake to draw any radical contrast between decimal and non-decimal forms of organization. Beyond a certain numerological formality, what both had in common was a hierarchical, segmentary character, a structural relativity that allowed for collecting tribute and carrying out administrative tasks at a variety of organizational levels. Local organization in the pre-Columbian Andes was hierarchical: The asymmetry between upper and lower groups at any one segmentary level already implied the immanence of the next ascending level of the system. Structural relativity was a fundamental trait of this sort of organization, and within it no absolute opposition between the central and local was possible. Consequently, neither of the extreme positions on the Inca empire are tenable: It was more than a superficial overlay on the preexisting forms of local organization; but it did not attack the working principles of "kinship-based" local societies proposed in the evolutionist scenario by Sil- verblatt (1988) and Stern (1982). Some intergrading of local and imperial political organization is hardly surprising, but it does challenge the notion that the state as an organ needs to separate itself radically from civil society in order to govern.

What has given so many commentators the impression that there was a clean, formal break between the state and civil society in the pre-Columbian Andes, rather than a segmentary gradation of the one into the other? The most likely sources of this misconception are the blueprints for colonial govern-

2 Zuidema mistakenly interprets Aymaraes as a four-part system by treating the town of Yanaca as a territorial division comparable to Collana, Taypi, and Callao Aymaraes (1964:81, 99). This error could easily have been avoided if Zuidema had used pp. 1073-4 of Guaman Poma's chronicle to interpret the passage on p. 154.

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ment written by such authorities as Matienzo (1967 [1567]: I, ch. 15) and Polo (1916 [1571]), which assume a tripartite division in pre-Columbian times between lands of the Inca, those of the Sun, and those of the local community (ayllu). Without actually stating or arguing the point, these accounts imply that under the Incas, state, cult, and community existed as formally distinct and autonomous institutions, each with the lands, rents, and incomes appro- priate to its existence as a juridically separate entity. But in fact Spanish common law and land tenure recognized state, church, and community as distinct corporate entities which thereby embodied secular principles. No such pattern is described by such chroniclers as Betanzos and Cieza, who wrote while the Spanish still practiced indirect rule through the curacas and were not yet contemplating the administrative reform of Andean society. Indeed, Moore (1958) and Rostworowski (1962) have shown that Andean land tenure had very little relation to this tripartite pattern. Rather, we must suspect that as the Spaniards prepared to directly impose their institutional forms on Andean society, some found it convenient or necessary to project the kind of social organization they wished to create back onto the Inca past.3 In any case, state, cult, and community were not separate institutions in the pre-Columbian Andes, nor do they appear to have been conceptually distinguished by Andean people after more than a century of Spanish colonialism.

A fascinating glimpse into seventeenth-century Andean land tenure can be found in the Cajatambo documents that Duviols recently published (1986). Here we find Noboa, an extirpator of idolatry, repeatedly accusing the natives of trying to hide cult lands from him on the pretext that they are nothing more than comunidades y sap,is. However, much of the evidence he provided suggests that the natives may not have operated with any clear distinction between cult, community, and curaca land. This becomes particularly clear with regard to a certain field called Vintin in the town of Mangas. One witness identifies the field as belonging to the curaca, another as mainly for the idols but sown in part by the curacas for their own benefit, and yet another as for the curaca but also for the idols when the curaca keeps them. A fourth identifies the field as community land administered by the curaca for paying tax (Duviols 1986: 373-9). Either we join Noboa in assuming that the natives were doing a bad job of lying here, or we must consider the possibility that he was forcing them to account for their land tenure system through social categories that did not apply. I suspect the latter. The Cajatambo documents show that the ayllus of the area were not only secular but also ceremonial communal institutions. Each ayllu performed its own confessions, purifica- tions, sacrifices and libations for its ancestral mummies during the two major rituals of the year, the first before planting (pocoimita) and the second after

3 Note that this observation does not apply to Sarmiento, an historiographer who did not attribute Spanish institutional morphology to Andean society despite his intimate involvement with the Toledo reforms.

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 487

the harvest (caruamita).4 Nearly all of the religious specialists who organized these events were recruited on the basis of an ayllu.5 In short, the ayllu was the dominant organizational form of the local cults, which is probably why Noboa's witnesses could not give a clear account of whether certain fields

belonged to the community, its leaders, or to the idols. Noboa's attempt to distinguish between the ayllu's political authorities

(curacas, principales, camachicos) and its so-called ministers of idolatry turned out to be equally illusory. No formal separation of political and reli- gious duties appears to have existed among them, and most appear to have carried out both of the functions that Noboa presumed to have been separate. For example, the camachicos were in charge of collecting sacrificial contribu- tions from the ayllu, just as they collected labor tribute.6 Some accountants (quipu camayocs), who accompanied the camachicos on their rounds and made note of the contributions they collected, also turned out to be the priests who presided over the sacrifices which followed (Duviols 1986: 374, 381). Although the camachicos regularly exhorted their people to obey the ministers of idolatry during important rituals,7 this does not mean that they did not have ritual duties themselves. They ordered the removal of cadavers from the sepulcher of the church to traditional cave burial sites (Duviols 1986: 62), designated children to serve the ancestral deities of their ayllu (Duviols 1986: 71, 74), and organized communal work on fields associated with ancestral mummies (Duviols 1986: 80). Finally, Herando Hacas Poma, the most pow- erful priest in the area, came from the ruling upper division, and had an understudy (segunda persona), as did important secular rulers (Duviols 1986: 141-2).

Even the dual political and territorial structures of the pre-Columbian An- des were fully integrated into local principles of community and religious organization. Throughout the Andean highlands, people commonly associ- ated the division between upper and lower groups with the distinction between rulers and ruled and the division of labor between herders and agriculturalists. In the Cajatambo documents, tillers were known as huari, after the tutelary ancestors in agriculture, and herders as llacuaz, after a preferred technique of sacrificing camelids (Duviols 1986: 500). The llacuaces were said to be foreign conquerors who arrived more recently from Lake Titicaca, but the huaris were represented as conquered indigenous people,8 skilled in the arts of

4 See Duviols (1986: 53, 55-6, 60, 79, 144-5, 156-7, 169, 179, 280, 344). 5 See Duviols (1986: 55, 146-7, 165, 175, 207, 209, 216, 275-6, 285, 341, 346, 487-8,

489, 490-1, 492, 493-4, 495, 496, 498). 6 See Duviols (1986: 232, 234, 240, 244-5, 466). 7 See Duviols (1986: 125-6, 178, 191, 199, 221, 226-8, 276-7). 8 See Arriaga (1968 [1621]: 24, 117-8) and Duviols (1986: 11, 52, 55, 59, 60, 94, 120).

There are cases, however, where huari mummies are described as "los primeros conquistadores y fundadores" of a certain locality (see Duviols 1986: 59, 224, 428), which suggests that conquest is not exclusively associated with llacuaz groups. The historical mutability of these distinctions is

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civilization, who settled their pastoral overlords into a more sedentary way of life (Duviols 1986: 120). The historical validity of these traditions, as well as the degree to which all members of each group actually engaged in their nominal occupation, may be dubious. Rather, the distinction between huari and llacuaz operated as a principle of segmentation in local ayllu systems, a more concrete variant of the distinction between upper and lower moieties. Sometimes the two moieties of a minimal ayllu segment were distinguished as both huari and llacuaz,9 whereas others, whole ayllu segments, might be labelled as one or the other.10 In every case, the distinction between these groups represented a principle of complementarity and balance in local social structure that was a key part of agrarian ritual" and could be extended to encompass dual organization at the maximal level of the ethnic polity.

In short, there was no clear institutional distinction among state, cult, and community at the local end of the administrative continuum upon which the Inca state rested. Seen from a local perspective, the Inca state had developed as much from the bottom up as it had from the top down. In the following section, I propose to show not only how ancestral shrines called huacas not only lay at the center of local community and religious organization but also how they defined the segmentary political organizations upon which perched the Inca state. Was this hierarchy of shrines distinct from, parallel to, or just another facet of the administrative structures discussed above? I will argue that the huacas defined the entire political culture from which these adminis- trative forms emerged.

THE HIERARCHY OF HUACAS

Santo Tomas gives the basic meaning of huaca as "temple of idols, or the idol itself" (1951 [1560]: 279). The deities that inhabited these shrines and their sacred relics were indeed localized but not identical to their primary embodi- ments as the Spanish notion of idolatry would suggest. Rather, the deities who lived and spoke through these shrines were considered to be ancestors who founded descent groups (ayllus) that in turn sustained the deities through sacrificial offerings. These huacas were described as runapcdmac (creator of

humanity) (Arriaga 1968 [1621]: 213). Young children were taken before the huacas of their ayllu and given ancestral names in return for sacrificial offer-

well demonstrated in Noboa's visita to the town of Mangas, where by 1662, the Incas were identified with the lower social group who were said to have come from the Pacific. Opposing the Incas in a mock battle were other men dressed as Spaniards (Duviols 1986: 349-50), who may well have been members of the upper or llacuaz ruling group. Here the duality of high and low, herder and tiller, ruler and ruled remains constant; but the particular historical identity of each group is variable.

9 See Duviols (1986: 202-3, 245, 486-7, 489-90). Note that Hernmndez Principe also de- scribes an ayllu that was founded by a llacuaz ancestor and a wari ancestress (Duviols 1986: 495).

10 See Duviols (1986: 52, 59, 89-90, 343, 479-81, 488, 491, 497). 1 See Duviols (1986: 60, 140, 161, 173, 202-3, 278-9, 486).

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 489

ings, a process that established or acknowledged these relations of descent.12

Typically these ancestors were dead rulers who in life had conquered new territories or expanded the agricultural frontier through terracing and irriga- tion (see Duviols 1978a, 1979a). These actions were considered so exemplary that the ruler who performed them would turn into stone and remain con- nected to his kingdom as an ancestor-deity who continued to provide his people with life, agrarian fertility, and oracular advice about the affairs of state. In short, the huacas were the focus of an ancestor cult that simul- taneously defined local community organization and an Andean notion of divine kingship.

As exemplary ex-rulers who represented the areas they had conquered or colonized, the huacas were nodes of political organization that could form larger networks. Not only did descent connect people to huacas, but it often provided the idiom in which these shrines themselves were ranked in hier- archies.13 The result was a segmentary hierarchy of the sort familiar to us from Evans-Pritchard's famous study of the Nuer (1940; cf. Platt 1986: 235- 6), in which each mythical ancestor defined a level of socio-political organi- zation that might be further subdivided or nested into groups of greater magni- tude according to the genealogical model. As Arriaga wrote, "every division and ayllu has a principal huaca" (1968 [1621]: 202). The more we examine these shrines, the clearer their contribution to political segmentation becomes. The ayllus that these deities defined were not only cultic jurisdictions but also quasi-administrative units. There was no Andean community separate from religion and political organization.

A particularly relevant aspect or sub-category of huaca (as a broad generic term for shrine or sacred object) was the dawning point (pacarina or pacarisca). This was a mythical site, from which the founding ancestors of any segmentary level of political organization were said to have emerged into this world from below ground: "and so they say that some came out of caves, others from mountains, others from springs, others from lakes, and others from the feet of trees."14 Exotic and fanciful as these ideas of origin may appear, they did much to define local settlement patterns and political organi- zation. Most towns of the pre-Columbian Andes were named after the princi- pal huaca of their inhabitants (Avila 1966 [1598]: 264). We know from such extirpators of idolatry as Arriaga (1969 [1621]: 202, 220) and Noboa (Duviols 1986: 423-4) that this multiplicity of origin points at the local level was a major obstacle to Viceroy Toledo's settlement consolidation plan. Further-

12 See Albomoz (1967: 24), and Duviols (1986: 62, 74, 93, 96, 164, 194, 202, 466, 499). 13 See Arriaga (1981 [1621]: 231), Avila (1966 [1598]: 141), Duviols (1986: 89, 142, 169,

210, 396-7, 406, 444, 464, 479-80, 486, 494-9), and Rostworowski (1977: 202-4). 14 See Molina (1916 [1571]: 6), also Albornoz (1967: 20), Betanzos (1987 [1551]: chs. 1-2),

Cobo (1956 [1653]: 151), Polo (1916 [1571]: 53-4), Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui (1927 [1613]: 145), and Sarmiento (1942 [1572]: 106-7).

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more, these origin points collectively formed a hierarchy that expressed politi- cal organization: "It must be understood that no division (parcialidad) of natives was without this guaca paqarisca, no matter how small or great the division" (Albornoz 1967: 20; cf. Arriaga 1968 [1621]: 219-20). As particu- lar geographic features related to local settlement, these origin points proba- bly were the most concrete markers of political organization at the local and regional level. Indeed, they were the only diacritical indicators of political organization at levels lower than the dual and tripartite divisions of the ethnic polity, although these and higher levels of organization would also have their corresponding origin points. This nesting structure of origin points seems to have extended down to a level as minute as a household and its sacred relics. 5

In short, the system of origin points is probably the most comprehensive expression that we have of political structure in the pre-Columbian Andes and is likely the one most accessible to the average person as well. For these reasons alone the origin points must be taken seriously as a fact of political life in the pre-Columbian Andes.

Because there was potentially an origin point or pacarina for every organi- zational level of the political structure, people could hold multiple and appar- ently contradictory notions of where their mythical origins lay (see Duviols 1973: 161-2), a result of their simultaneous membership in units of different magnitude. Andean origin myths recount how Viracocha created the founding ancestors of all highland polities from clay or stone at Lake Titicaca, painting in their various ethnic costumes, before sending them on their way via a network of underground canals and passageways to the regions and localities that they were to populate.16 During these subterranean journeys the ancestors might emerge above ground at several significant points, causing each to become a pacarina (Duviols 1978a: 363). Sometimes these journeys extended all the way through the segmentary hierarchy, so that it was appropriate to celebrate an ancestral voyage on the sea in an act as localized as rethatching a house (Duviols 1986: 336-7, 341-2). Political segmentation could be under- stood both in terms of these various ancestral outcroppings into the above- ground world of the living or through the bifurcation of the subterranean

passages and waterways that connected them. 17 Alternatively, some groups of llacuaz ruler-pastoralists were said to have been transported from Titicaca to the local scene by means of a lightning bolt, not an underground journey. Similarly, the ethnic groups on the western side of the continental divide often described Pachacamac as the creator of humanity and the Pacific as their

15 See Arriaga (1968 [1621]: 203), Avila (1966 [1598]: 255), and Duviols (1986: 487-8). '6See Betanzos (1987 [1551]: chs. 1-2), Cobo (1956 [1653]: 151), Duviols (1986: 210, 452),

Molina (1916 [1573]: 6), and Sarmiento (1942 [1572]: 106-7). 17 The conceptual importance ifpallqa, the bifurcation of flowing water in Andean culture has

been stressed by Earls and Silverblatt (1978: 311-3). Fock (1981: 318) and Zuidema (1986:183) relate it explicitly to political segmentation.

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 491

primal origin point, from whence the journeys of their ancestors led them onto the coastal plains and into the highlands by a series of stopovers that became politically significant points in the sacred geography.18

These origin myths explain an exotic feature of many ethnic polities in the pre-Columbian Andes: territorial discontiguity (cf. Rostworowski 1977: 204; Duviols 1978a: 363). The pioneering work of Murra (1975: ch. 3), showed that many of these polities did not consist of one continuous block of territory but formed an archipelago of widely scattered territories, often at different elevations. Nonetheless, one island in the archipelago was apparently always the core or true homeland of the polity and the rest, outliers. Murra gives a dubious explanation of this territorial pattern as the outgrowth of an "ideal" of maximizing access to products from different ecological zones (1975: 60). 9 If there was any ideal involving territorial discontiguity, it had to do with region- al expansionism and colonization, as is particularly clear in the Yauyos case (Avila 1966 [1598]: 61-3). A bellicose ethnic group could express its regional supremacy by passing through the territory of neighboring peoples and taking land it wanted elsewhere. The myths describe the same kind of appropriation when they recount how the ancestors journeyed underground to colonize new localities, in which they emerged, imposed themselves, and turned into stone. Imperialism thus pervaded the myths of origin, alliance, and conquest of the Andean polities, even those whose territories were contiguous.

The unification of political segments, not just their differentiation, could also be rationalized through these ancestral voyages. For example, sometimes the pacarinas on a mythical journey were collapsed, as in the Recuay pacarina of "Yaro Titicaca" (Duviols 1986: 494). Here Yaro refers to a lake called Cochacalla in the Upper Huallaga Valley, from which all of the llacuaces in the Cajatambo-Chinchaycocha region traced their origins (Duviols 1974-76: 288), and Titicaca refers to the lake from which their ancestors came before arriving at Yaro. Alternately, Titicaca and Yarocaca were invoked as a pair (Duviols 1986: 150, 154), in which the regional pacarina is clearly modeled on its maximal counterpart. This merging and juxtaposition of pacarinas could happen when a colonizing group transported a piece of its original pacarina into a new territory and enshrined it on their newly traditionalized point of

18 See Albornoz (1967: 34), Avila (1966 [1598]: 113-5), Cobo (1956 [1653]: 150), Duviols (1986: ch. 9), and Murua (1987 [1613]: 67).

19 Ecological maximization does not provide a sufficient explanation of the archipelago mod- el, since trade could have achieved the same effect. What we have to account for is the preference for colonization and direct control, which ecological maximization does not specify. Further- more, archipelago polities had outliers ecologically identical to the core territory and thus must have had other motives for territorial expansion. An example is ancient Aymaraes, which had colonists on the Pampas River in what is now Ayacucho (see Isbell 1985 [1978]: 63-5). Accord- ing to Silverblatt and Earls, they were not mitmaqkuna assigned to the area by the Inca state but appear instead to have been an intrusive ruling group associated with lightning (1977: 100-1). There are many possible explanations of this situation, but a conscious policy of maximizing access to different ecological zones is not among them.

492 PETER GOSE

emergence there (Alboroz 1967: 21). As a result, pacarinas at different levels of the segmentary structure could become rallying points in the constant tension between political confederation and fission that characterized the An- des between Tiwanaku-Wari and Inca times.

Origin points for the higher segmentary levels of political organization, typically from the confederation of ethnic polities upwards to the empire, repeatedly took the physical form of large bodies of water (Sherbondy 1982: 4-5,17). Choclococha (Corn-Cob Lake) served as the pacarina for the multi- tude of localized polities that formed the Chanca confederacy.20 Sherbondy cites many other cases (1982: 11-2), but undoubtedly the most important was Lake Titicaca, which the Incas identified as their pacarina in another cycle of myths concerning their origin. When the Incas claimed emergence from Lake Titicaca, they were also asserting their preeminence among the Colla peoples, whose unity had emerged in Tiwanaku times around the focus of this lake (Sherbondy 1982: 17, 1992: 56-7). We have already seen that in these myths Viracocha created humanity at Lake Titicaca, and then disappeared toward the north and into the Pacific. Now the Pacific is also mentioned as the pacarina of the coastal polities (Avila 1966 [1598]: 27-9); Duviols 1986: 349, 352, 405-6), and as such, seems to connote the Incas' unity against the highland polities, whose unity could be expressed through a notion of ultimate

origin from Lake Titicaca. In other words, Titicaca and the Pacific could be seen as the two maximal pacarinas in the Andean area, encompassing all others as dependent manifestations at lower segmentary levels (Millones 1971: 1/17, 1/36; Torero 1974: 110-1).

At the more localized levels of the political hierarchy, that is, from the ethnic polity down into its constituent units, pacarinas tended to be dry cave sites, natural points of communication between this world and that below. One example is the snow-capped mountain of Yaropaja in the Cajatambo region, from whose eight caves various huari groups originated (Duviols 1986: 55). Another is the cave of Sissim, named for the "head" of a group of

ayllus also called Sissim (Duviols 1986: 129-30). Perhaps the most famous

pacarina of this type was Tambo Toco (or Pacarictambo), the cave from which the four Ayar brothers emerged in an alternate cycle of Inca origin myths. Not

only did the Incas claim this cave as their parochial origin point, but they also saw it as the source of the seeds of domesticated plants (Betanzos 1987 [1551]: 20; Cobo 1968 [1653]: 62). The name ayar itself suggests a connec- tion between the emergence of human and agricultural life forms from these caves, as it refers not only to the four brothers of Inca myth but to wild quinua as well (Gonzalez Holguin 1952 [1608]: 39; cf. Avila 1966 [1598]: 137).

Just as pacarinas in dry caves were origin points for agricultural life and

20 See Alboroz (1967: 20), Cieza (1984 [1553]: 115, 187-8), Guaman Poma (1936 [1615]: 85), and Earls (1979: 58, 83).

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 493

localized political divisions, so the more important pacarinas in large bodies of water were the origin points of llamas and alpacas21 and represented higher levels of political organization. No doubt the fact that camelids are mobile, whereas plants are sedentary and rooted, also helped identify llacuaz herders with the distant and inclusive and huari tillers with the local. This suggests that the political hierarchy correlated with a hierarchy of life forms, in which pastoralism ranked higher than agriculture, as is true for the moder Andes (Gose 1986: ch. 7). By tracing their origins back to Lake Titicaca and identi- fying themselves with this more encompassing pacarina, pastoralists also laid claim to ascendancy in their local polities. Or conversely, because they ruled, the llacuaz pastoralists were seen as foreigners in the localities they inhabited and were obliged to trace their origins (and those of their animals) from pacarinas more distant and aquatic than those of their localized agricultural neighbors (Duviols 1986: 486, 495, 498). After all, we know that pastoralists who also had pacarinas in the snowy peaks of the local mountains because they were deposited at the local level by a lightning bolt (Duviols 1986: 52, 94, 349) still stressed their distant origins nonetheless.

The distinction between llacuaz and huari was hierarchical and not just complementary. This hierarchy becomes particularly clear when we return to the association between pastoralists and large sources of water. After all, this water was not a purely pastoral resource but was needed by the agriculturalists as well. Local agriculturists were thought to control this water up to a certain point under the tutelage of their huari forebearers, who are constantly de- scribed as creators of local springs and canal systems (Duviols 1986: 113, 121, 238, passim). But the water for these local springs always came from more distant sources. In one case, a huari was said to have taken water for a spring from a lake some twenty leagues distant through an underground canal (Duviols 1986: 121). In another, two huaris compete to see who can create the most springs by urinating, and the one who ascended from the coast most recently wins (Duviols 1986: 172). This suggests that contact with the Pacific Ocean underwrote their ability to create water locally. Thus the ultimate source of water lay beyond the scope of local political organization and control. In the highlands, the thunder and lightning god, Libiac, was said to distribute rainfall unevenly from one locality to the next, depending on the sacrifices he received.22 As the offspring of Libiac, the llacuaces had to make offerings for rainfall on behalf of their various localities (Duviols 1986: 245). The foreign origins of the llacuaces in distant bodies of water further con- firmed them in the role of aquatic intermediaries. Thus, the aquatic pacarinas of the pastoralists (especially Lake Titicaca) represented not only a distant and hierarchically superior level of organization to that achieved by the local

21 See Arriaga (1968 [1621]: 223), and Duviols (1974-76: 283, 1986: 488, 495, 498). 22 See Cobo (1956 [1653]: 161), Duviols (1986: 195), and Murua (1987 [1653]: 430-1).

494 PETER GOSE

polity but a resource upon which its agriculture was utterly dependent. Let us further explore this perceived dependence of local agriculture on distant sources of water by locating it in a more encompassing cycle of death and the regeneration of life that played a key role in the ideological synthesis of the pacarina system.

Localized pacarinas in caves were not just points from which life forms emerged into this world but were also human burial sites, points of return to the underworld. According to Huertas (1981: 61), Yaropaja, besides being the site of eight cave pacarinas, was considered to be an abode of the dead; and we also know that Sissim was a burial cave, as well as origin point, for its ayllu (Duviols 1986: 130). The extirpators of idolatry reported finding caves replete with mummies, in exceptional cases up to two thousand (Duviols 1986: 50); and the multiplicity of burial sites in caves that can still be found in Andean localities further attest to this connection. Agricultural fields also seem to have been commonly used as burial sites in pre-Columbian times (Cobo 1956 [1653]: 273). Modern Andean commoners often unearth evidence of such burials when cultivating pre-Columbian terraces with foot-ploughs. More formalized, stone-lined burial chambers (chullpas) also occur at the surface of agricultural fields in both terraced maize-growing lands and unter- raced fallow potato fields. In pre-Columbian times, the denizens of these graves were thought of as huaris, original inhabitants of the area who had pioneered its agricultural techniques and watched over the fields to safeguard their crops (Duviols 1973: 160). This connection between the dead and agri- culture is confirmed in the semantic field of the word mallqui in sixteenth- century Quechua, which meant mummy, planted thing, young plant ready for transplanting, sapling, and fruit tree (Santo Tomas 1951 [1560]: 314; Gonzalez Holguin 1952 [1608]: 224). These were not mere homonyms, since the Huarochiri manuscript tells us that the dead were resurrected five days after they die, just as seeds sprout five days after they are sown (Avila 1966 [1598]: 21). There was clearly some sense in which burial was seen as an act of planting and dried, mummified bodies as dormant, desiccated seeds (Val- carcel 1980: 81). Both were treated as life forms to be carefully retained and distributed across the local landscape as an important component of its agri- cultural fertility. But what made the dead dormant like seeds was the lack of water. The thirst of the dead is frequently mentioned (Duviols 1986: 198, 217, 230), and all dealings with them called for copious libations of corn beer. Thus the preservation of the dead at the local level implied a loss of water and vitality that had to return for a renewal of life to take place.

Closely related to these localized, dry pacarina sites were stone monoliths known as huancas, which have been particularly well studied by Pierre Du- viols (1979b). Huancas were thought to have been the petrified bodies of local ancestors (usually huaris) who were responsible for the construction of agri- cultural infrastructure at the local level, such as irrigation and terracing sys-

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 495

tems. They were also important sites in local agricultural cults, where sacri- fices and libations were made at various points during the annual cycle. This retention of exemplary ancestors in a petrified form at the local level was an extension and intensification of the ideas that connected mummification of the dead and agriculture. Transformation into stone was a more emphatic way of rendering an exemplary ancestor imperishable. Local fertility cults revolved around these huancas, which confirms the importance of conserving. and

distributing the dead across the local landscape in folk theories of agriculture in the pre-Columbian Andes. But again, the very way in which these ances- tors were preserved made them dependent upon outside sources of water that they themselves did not necessarily control.

Despite the impressive amount of energy that went into retaining the dead at the local level, there seems to have been a constant tendency for them to slip away to higher segmentary levels. Even local burial caves might refer to more distant points by bearing names like Yaro cocha (Duviols 1986: 119). Sometimes, this tendency to disperse could be arrested at the maximal pacarina of the ethnic polity, such as Yaropaja, Pariacaca, or the mountains of Suparaura and Supayco in Aymaraes,23 which were thought to be the site of the upaimarca, the ultimate resting place of the dead. But there seems to have been no exact location for this upaimarca. Like the origin points, we are dealing with a matter of segmentary degree. For example, Guaman Poma describes how each of the four quarters of the Inca empire had a site upon which its dead would converge (1936 [1615]: 278, 294). Other accounts identify Titicaca and the Pacific as the ultimate location of the upaimarca.24

Thus the highest-ranking pacarinas acted not only as points of mythical origin but also as major collecting points within their catchment areas for the dead, whose return enacted in reverse the mythical underground journeys of the founding ancestors (Santillan 1927 [1553]: 33). This equation of the abode of the dead (upaimarca) with the point of ancestral emergence from the earth (pacarina) is explicitly stated and reiterated throughout the Cajatambo docu- ments.25 Cieza describes how the Cavinas of Urcos believed that the souls of their dead returned to their mythical origin point, a lake associated with

23 See (Avila 1966 [1598]: 67, 155-7). Guaman Poma (1936 [1615]: 277) and Albornoz (1967:28) mention Suparaura and Supayco as important huacas which received many sacrifices. Today, they are still the highest ranking apus or mountain spirits in the modem Peruvian Prov- inces of Aymaraes and Antabamba (see Gose 1986: ch. 7). I surmise that both were identified with the upaymarca on linguistic grounds, since as Taylor notes, supa is cognate with upa (1980: 54-5), and both refer to the condition in which the dead are thought to exist in the afterlife, as we will see below.

24 See Arriaga (1968 [1621]: 220), Duviols (1986: 150, 200) and Sherbondy (1982: 8). 25 See Duviols (1986: 150, 171, 200, 227, 268-9), also Arriaga, who equates the notion of

zamana with both the point of ancestral emergence, and the place where the dead come to rest (1968 [1621]: 202, 216), The underground nature of the upaimarca is further suggested by an alternate title for the land of the dead: "interior world soul's abode" (ucu pacha supaypa uasin). See Guaman Poma (1936 [1615]: 70).

496 PETER GOSE

Auzancata, the highest mountain in the Cuzco region (1984 [1553]: 122). That the major aquatic pacarinas should exert an attraction on the dead is not entirely surprising, given their desiccated condition. Yet it is uncertain wheth- er this water was seen as an exogenous element capable of sustaining or even reconstituting the dead or as a byproduct of the drying process associated with death itself. In either case, as Sherbondy notes, the distant abode of the dead was always a source of water in ancient Andean thought (1982: 5). Thus at the local level, there was an emphasis on the desiccated conservation of the dead; whereas at the universal level, the production of water was stressed. There can be little doubt that these wet and dry poles of the hierarchy of pacarinas reflect each other, such that desiccation at the minimal pole corresponds to aquification at the maximal pole. Processions of desiccated mummies to stimulate rainfall further exemplify this functional relation between wet and dry (see Polo 1916 [1554]: 10). The agricultural connection is particularly obvious here. At the local level, seed-like life forms are conserved in a desiccated state, while water is lost to the maximal level, only to return and cause these seeds to germinate.

As with the mythical journeys of the ancestors, the return of the dead to their maximal pacarinas poses the initial problem of how they can be in two places at once, that is, both conserved at the local level and lost to the universal level. Several solutions to this problem are consistent with the evidence. First, the process of death may itself have involved a polarization of the person into a dry and localized element on the one hand and a wet, universal element on the other. Second, certain more exemplary and powerful dead may have remained at the local level (through mummification or petri- fication) to become poles of influence in their own right, while other, less influential, members of their group returned to more distant origin points. Finally, there may have been a process of recycling at work whereby most of the dead in a given locality would depart for the maximal pacarinas, only to return in a future reincarnation.26 Quite probably all three of these models were combined to differing degrees in different localities.

To pursue this question further, we must inquire into what might be loosely glossed as the soul concepts of the pre-Columbian Andes. Predictably, here we find one element, the camaquen, which was localized, and another, the upani, which was mobile and attracted to universal centers (Duviols 1978b: 136; Taylor 1980: 58). There is good reason to assume that the upaimarca, as ultimate abode of the dead, took its name from the various upanis that jour- neyed to it. But the nature of these two concepts is far from straightforward. Let us begin with the notion of camaquen.

As Taylor notes, camaquen was a complex concept with three main aspects, which derived from the root ka, to exist (1974-76: 233-5, 1980: 58, 62n).

26 On reincarnation see Avila (1966 [1598]: ch. 27), Cieza (1984 [1553]: 87, 122), Cobo (1956 [1653]: 154), and Santillan (1927 [1553]: 33).

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 497

First, camaquen designated an objectified spirit double, which was nothing other than the huaca that gave a person life. A camaquen could take the form of an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic image, an animal or even a huanca (Duviols 1973: 164) but most commonly a mummy.27 Always, the power residing in the camaquen was ancestral in nature, linked to the political authority of the curaca on the one hand and the well-being of the group on the other (Duviols 1978b: 133-4). Ayllus and its segments were each defined by a camaquen, which animated members of these groupings (Taylor 1980: 58). Because the camaquen was understood as a self-replicating source of life, it was occasionally equated with the concept of pacarina or dawning point discussed earlier (Duviols 1978b: 139). Conversely, pacarinas were some- times addressed as camac or creator of human beings (Arriaga 1968 [1621]: 220).

The second major aspect of the notion of camaquen was the influence or force that this double exercised over a person, who was then said to be camasca (animated or infused). The separatist sermons attributed to the minis- ters of idolatry in the Cajatambo documents consistently dwell on the idea that the life and prosperity of the various ayllus came from their mummies and camaquenes, not the Christian God. In particular, food, clothing, water, fields, human health and fertility, and oracular advice were attributed to the camaquenes.28 This confirms and broadens the idea of the camaquen as a source of animation, linking it to notions of fertility and even property. The influence of the camaquen was therefore binding and localizing, not just vitalizing; and its intensity probably ranged from simple animation, through possession (in the Andean oracle tradition), to outright command by the double. Since the camaquen commonly was a mummified political authority or curaca, its influence on people was apparently understood in terms of rule. Indeed, the very action of the camaquen invites such an analysis, as it was best rendered through the Quechua kamachiy: "to cause to exist" on strictly analytical grounds, but in actual usage, "to command" (cf. Taylor 1974-76: 236), as in camachico, a common synonym of curaca.29 Again, we see little distinction made between political authority and the metaphysical reproduc- tion of the ayllu.

27 In some cases the equation of mummy and camaquen is explicit (Duviols 1986: 68, 77, 280), but in many more it is implicit in how a mummy is described as the progenitor of an ayllu (Duviols 1986: 156, 174, 301, 396, 416, 480, 485). Here I assume that progenitor is understood not just in the genealogical sense of apical ancestor but as an ongoing force that manifests itself in each new generation.

28 See Duviols (1986: 69, 74, 76, 99, 100, 106, 145, 174, 282, 335, 343). By the same token, the camaquenes would send sickness to their ayllus, devour them, or at the very least withhold the bounty of the fields from them should they neglect their sacrificial obligations to the dead (see Duviols 1986: 76, 189, 196, 212, 221, 237, 275, 407).

29 See Arriaga (1968 [1621]: 243), Duviols (1986: 131, 178, 190-1, 199, 221, 226-7), and Guaman Poma (1936 [1615]: 313, 328). Camachico may have been synonymous with camayoq in the sense of lower-level administrator, e.g. quipu camachin (see Duviols 1986: 374). Nonethe- less,- other passages make it clear that camachico was associated with the Spanish category of manddn, one who gives orders (see Duviols 1986:190).

498 PETER GOSE

Third was the notion of the camaquen as the soul of an individual human being (Duviols 1986: 67). The individualized soul was more commonly thought to be embodied in the heart (sonqo), and the camaquen was primarily understood as the soul of the idol not of a person,30 it inhabited. However, because the soul of the idol animated and directed particular human lives, it necessarily received some degree of individuation. The heart was probably understood as the locus of the double's influence in the animated person and may even have been seen as an individualized or replicated version of the group's camaquen (Duviols 1986: 143-4). The heart of the person was also said to journey to the afterlife (Cieza 1984 [1553]: 149), where it would arrive at the origin point of its social group and merge with its camaquen. Thus, not only did the Incas claim to return to the Sun upon death, but when mummify- ing dead rulers, they actually removed their hearts and stored them in a drawer in the golden image of Punchau (Mid-Day Sun), their tutelary deity.31

Finally, the concept of upani, which denotes shadow or deaf and dumb being, refers to the existential condition of the dead during the afterlife (Du- viols 1978b: 143-4; Taylor 1980: 51-5). We have already encountered these notions in the designation of the land of the dead as the upaimarca (town of the shadows or town of the deaf and dumb). Although the notion of upani appears to have been invoked primarily to describe souls in the state of death, one account describes how a sorcerer summoned the upani of a living victim to pierce it with spines (Duviols 1986: 67-8). This suggests that upani might have referred to a soul somehow dissociated from the body and in a state of enfeeblement. The Incas also used the word opacuna (shadows) to designate ritual baths in a river after confession, which were supposed to wash sins

away to the sea (Polo 1916 [1554]: 14). Here the root upa apparently refers to sins sloughed off and swept away by water. Both as spent soul and as sin, an upani was shed from a more permanent source of activity: It lacked the fixity and regenerative capacities of a camaquen and therefore tended to wander (Duviols 1978b: 135-6). This notion may represent a transition from the heart (sonqo) of a living person, as the individualized or replicated aspect of a group's camaquen, to the upani as a spent remnant or shadow of a life (Taylor 1980: 58).

In summary, several dimensions of contrast distinguish the notion of cama- quen from that of upani. A camaquen was a strong, exemplary ancestor whose material remains were preserved in the locality, whereas an upani was a weak and insignificant shadow that drifted away. The camaquen was a repository of group life and a guarantor of its reproduction, whereas the upani was a remnant of an individual life lost to the group and its locality. A camaquen remained above ground in a desiccated form, whereas an upani journeyed

30 See Cieza (1984 [1553]: 115, 149) and Duviols (1986: 201, 219, 242, 271). 31 See Betanzos (1987 [1551]: 128, 137, 145), Cobo (1956 [1653]: 106), and Levillier (1924:

345).

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 499

underground into the aquatic interior of the earth. Finally, a camaquen never really died but continued to speak through oracular mediums. If a camaquen could not speak, it would be pronounced mute (opa mudo) or done (atisca), signaling the end of its career as a deity.32 By contrast, a defining trait of the upani was its inability to speak, a sign of its mortality.

On death, the binding and animating influence of the camaquen was bro- ken, leaving a decidedly defective entity, the shadowy deaf-mute upani, which would begin its journey to the aquatic apex of the pacarina system. At the local level, this represents a loss of control, not only over a replicated life form, but also over the fluid that vitalized it (Duviols 1978b: 134). While I doubt that Duviols is right in extending the concept of upani to cover this lost animation,33 such vitality would indeed be released as water by the conver- sion of a living person into an upani on death that it too would gravitate toward the maximal pacarinas. Some accounts suggest a reconstitution of the upani in such places as Lake Titicaca and a return to the same or different locality from which it had come (Santillan 1927 [1553]: 33; Cobo 1956 [1653]: 154). But other accounts suggest that despite its abundant'fields, the upaimarca was filling up with all the natives who died of epidemics in the early colonial period (Duviols 1986: 171). Clearly no cyclical process of reincarnation was expected here, although the possibility of a pachacuti or violent earthquake remained, during which the worlds of the living and the dead would be inverted. When the earth shook, people poured libations to prevent such a cataclysm (Cobo 1956 [1653]: 233). Abnormally heavy rainfall could also indicate the onset of a pachacuti (Murua 1987 [1613]: 313). Both of these sets of data suggest again that the production of fluids should be con- fined primarily to the land of the dead and not overwhelm the living, whose strength lay in their exemplary desiccated life forms. Even under stress, the segmentary system of pacarinas attempted to maintain a polarity between wet and dry, universal and local, weak (upani) and strong (camaquen), which was the basis of most ritual operations connected to it. Normally, the strong, like the Inca mummies mentioned above, remained at the local level and used their dryness to bring water back to it. The weak, however, could not resist the pull of large bodies of water and succumbed to the inverse attraction of dry by wet.

32 See Duviols (1986: 180), Albornoz (1967: 18, 37), and the analysis by Rostworowski (1983: 11-12, 63).

33 This is clearly based on the way Duviols equates upani with the moder Andean concept of dnimo, which along with its counter-concept of alma, clearly shows the imprint of the Spanish folk version of Aristotelian biology. What is at stake here is not just whether Duviols has correctly characterized the upani as the source of animation but whether the ancient Andean system can be understood in terms of an opposition between pure vitality and life form in the first place. In order to resolve the conflict of interpretation between Duviols (1978b: 136) on the one hand, and Taylor (1980: 58) and Rostworowski (1983: 10-1, 95) on the other, over whether it is upani or camaquen that embodies vital force, we will have to first work out how these concepts might function within the broader outlines of Andean thought, specifically the cycle of death and the regeneration of life within which they are situated.

500 PETER GOSE

Death thus involved a complex allocation of different parts of the person and different sorts of people to different hierarchical levels of the sacred geography, making the presence of the dead at both local and universal poles quite natural. The cycle of death and renewal began with a process of separa- tion, in which animation was removed from a life form. On the one hand, this was represented as desiccation in a way that prefigured the ultimate return of water in a specifically agricultural regeneration of life. On the other, this cycle was represented as a loss of political control, in which a ruling element, the camaquen, was deprived of the animation embodied in its subordinate repli- cas, comparable to the state losing control over the labor of its tributaries. It follows that there was a political dimension to the regenerative synthesis that surmounted the separation of death, a dimension that specifically concerned a renewed control over water as a source of vitality. The local levels of the hierarchy of pacarinas seemingly provided seed, while the maximal levels provided water, as part of a single, complete process, in which political segmentation was seen in terms of the metaphysics of agriculture.

These soul concepts demonstrate a close isomorphism and partial identity with the social division between huari and llacuaz. On the one hand, the

camaquen, like a huari social group, was thought to be tied to a given locality and was the guarantor of its agricultural prosperity. Indeed, the camaquen was often an ancestral mummy, who might himself have been a huari or founder of the local socio-cultural order. On the other hand, the upani, like llacuaz ruling groups, had a decided affinity for distant watery locations like Lake Titicaca, which sat atop the hierarchy of pacarinas. Moreover, some held that the llacuaces "were invisible and walked under the earth" (Duviols 1986: 119, 479), precisely the characteristics of the upani as a shade returning to its maximal origin point along the subterranean passages pioneered by its ances- tors. Apparently it was appropriate to depict the uprooted, migratory lifestyle of the Ilacuaces on the model of the upani's postmortem peregrinations. Thus there was a correspondence and interpenetration between these social and

spiritual distinctions. However there was also an important inversion when it came to the crucial issue of power. Socially, the llacuaces were dominant; but their spiritual counterpart, the upani, was weak. Although the huaris were

represented as subordinate agriculturalists, their ancestors not only had the

strength to establish local order but to remain within it as camaquenes, exem-

plary forms that directed the reproduction of group life. In the realm of death, the llacuaces went underground and ceded their upper position to the huaris, whose crops and stone monoliths reached upwards out of the earth. Because the cycle between life and death largely inverted the hierarchical relation between huari and llacuaz groups, we can appreciate more fully the perceived necessity for socio-political dualism, as only in this way could the entire

process be controlled. Initially, the llacuaces apparently controlled water from the perspectives of

both life and death. As the upper social group, they controlled rainfall; and, as

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 501

a weak telluric presence, they returned to large bodies of water through underground channels. Conversely, huari groups were identified with the hot lowlands and the sun (Avila 1966 [1598]: 57; Duviols 1986: 175, 349). Even when the huari groups assumed the upper position on death, they did so as desiccated ancestors. Thus the highland deities typically won their mythical battles of rain against fire with the lowland deities (Avila 1966 [1598]: ch. 8). In other accounts, lowland groups finding themselves without water after they were conquered by highland groups could only regain access by surrendering their most beautiful women (Avila 1966 [1598]: chs. 6, 30-31). The high- landers' control of water was so complete that even Pachacamac, a lowland deity with the power to destroy the universe by merely turning his body, had to send his people to implore highland deities for rain (Avila 1966 [1598]: 127-9).

Perhaps the most concrete representation of the highland herders' control over water was in their interpretation of the constellation of the llama, which presided over the December solstice and the rainy season in ancient Andean myth and ritual (Zuidema and Urton 1976: 67-8; Duviols 1974-76: 283). In the Huarochiri manuscript, this constellation was called Yacana and was identified as the double (cama quin) of the llama, which walked the night sky and travelled under the earth's rivers when it dipped below the horizon. At midnight when nobody was looking, the camaquen drank the sea dry, thus preventing the world from becoming inundated with water (Avila 1966 [1598]: 161, 31).34 This tradition explains why people saw llamas as the guardians of salt water springs in the highlands (Duviols 1974-76: 285). Camelids also regulated the distribution of water in a more general sense. In certain rain-making rituals, men impersonating lowlanders hunted wild cam- elids high in the alpine zone (Avila 1966 [1598]: 79, 247), as though rain could be induced by puncturing the bodies of these water-retaining beasts and forcing them to descend toward the coast.

The paradox behind this apparently unproblematic control of water by the highlands is namely, that the sea was represented as the ultimate source of water in this cosmological system,35 even in Lake Titicaca, its highland counterpart. Although some highland mediation (such as the llama) was necessary to obtain the sea's water, sometimes it was bypassed. For example, the people of Chamas and Nanis prayed directly to the sea goddess, Vrpai Vachac, for rain (Duviols 1986: 406). The carving of Pariacaca and his sons for mullu shells (Avila 1966 [1598]: 59, 135, passim) is another reminder of how the para- mount highland deities depended on the sea for the water they distributed. All highland peoples valued these shells as offerings, not just to major deities but primarily for local springs, to make them produce water (Murra 1975: ch. 10).

34 Comparable traditions had Thunder, tutelary deity of the pastoralists, drawing water from the Milky Way and distributing it on earth as rain (Cobo 1653: 160).

35 See Muria (1987 [1613]: 422), Cobo (1956 [1653]: 161, 204), Huertas (1981: 83), and Sherbondy (1982: 4, 1992: 61-2).

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Andean people spoke of mullu shells as "daughters of the sea" (Polo 1916 [1554]: 39) and clearly attributed to them the magical power to draw water up from the Pacific and into the highlands. En route, this water was thought to pass through a series of branching underground canals and a hierarchy of lakes on the surface of the landscape, a feature of Andean cosmology thor- oughly documented by Sherbondy (1982: 11, 1992: 57).36 Thus, the notion of the sea as the ultimate source of water was clearly embodied in a variety of ideas and practices in the pre-Columbian Andes. How can we reconcile all of this with the notion that pastoralists from Lake Titicaca controlled water?

The sun is an obvious place to begin. Thought to rise out of Titicaca in the east and set to the west in the Pacific, the sun thus united the two maximal pacarinas of highland and coastal peoples. By returning to Lake Titicaca from the Pacific at night, the sun might well have been thought to draw water up through the underground canals that connected the two, just as the constella- tion of the llama was supposed to descend to the sea for drink and climb back up into the highlands under the rivers of this world. In this way, highland control of water would be reconstituted every night, so that this water could be dispersed during the day, when it flowed downhill into the sea, still its ultimate collecting point. Alternatively, the moon would perform this noctur- nal task, which is why it was so commonly attributed control over water in ancient Andean thought (Carion Cachot 1955: 29). Such a diurnal cycle allowed both for the idea that the highlands controlled the distribution of water and that the Pacific Ocean was its ultimate source. Andean people perceived this duality of aquatic accumulation points positively, as it pro- moted a beneficial circulation of water. Thus, the same pattern was repeated in microcosm in many localities, where a pair of springs or lakes were said to control local rainfall.37

36 This implies that the distribution of water in highlands areas was based on a kind of pumping action which drew water from parts below (see Earls and Silverblatt 1978: Figures 1-3). A similar image of mountains riddled with vein-like underground canals through which water flows uphill emerges from the ethnographic work of Arguedas (1956: 242), Bastien (1978: 47, 171), and Fock (1981: 315). As Bastien (1978: 60) perceptively notes, just such a notion was present in an important motif of Tiwanaku iconography: the reservoir on the mountain peak, an archaeological feature that can be found in many areas of the southern Peruvian Andes. A slightly more abstract expression of the same notion can be found in the Andean concept of ushnu (see Zuidema 1978, 1980): a vertical tube connecting the base and the apex of a pyramidal shaft tomb, through which libations for the dead may be poured at the top, perhaps to prime the upward flow of water from below. As important reservoirs and distribution points for water in Andean thought (see Sherbondy 1982: 7), mountains may well have been thought to incorporate the essential features of the pyramidal shaft-tomb, especially the ushnu or tube.

37 See Duviols (1986: 193-4, 469). A similar duality was actively sought in water divinations performed at funerals, where an evenly divided flow of water in a bifurcated canal was taken as an auspicious sign (Guaman Poma 1936 [1615]: 297). By the same token, water was referred to alternately as yaku and unu in hymns to the moon imploring it to end drought (Guaman Poma 1936 [1615]: 285), as if the distribution of water could be facilitated by attributing a dual nature to it.

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 503

This scenario is interesting because it is able to incorporate the empirical facts of highland agriculture with a minimum of embarrassment and yet derive political conclusions from them which were not given on purely technical grounds. On the one hand, the notion of the huari as a mummified or petrified ancestor who developed and taught the arts of agriculture neatly speaks to the fact of local control and construction of irrigation facilities. On the other hand, the idea that the local level did not contain the ultimate source of water within its own boundaries is equally correct in meteorological terms, even if there is a poor fit between the latter and the Andean etiology of water in death. This awareness that they were dependent on larger processes for rainfall and irrigation water led the Andean people to efface their de facto technological control at the local level by developing an ideology that stressed the ultimate lack of the local polity: its inability to reproduce itself in an isolated form. Thus there arose a need for an empire that could overcome this lack through direct cosmological control.

Appropriately, the most important icon of this empire was the sun. By rising in the east out of Lake Titicaca and setting into the Pacific in the west, the sun united the dual hierarchy of pacarinas and the endless ethnic partic- ularities that they entailed. For this reason the Incas had ritual specialists from forty-two different Andean nations in residence on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, where they collectively formed the dominant upper division supported by the work of the lower indigenous population (MacCormack 1984: 45). The Incas also experimented with an image of the sun rising out of the fountain in the plaza of Cuzco (Betanzos 1987 [1551]: 53; Segovia 1968 [1553]: 75), instead of Lake Titicaca, or perhaps in addition to it. But the solar synthesis of regional cults of the pre-Columbian Andes remained firmly cen- tered on the axis of Lake Titicaca and Pachacamac and could therefore survive the decapitation of the Inca state with its imperial solar cult (Cock and Doyle 1979). The very notion of pacarina as a point of origin comes from the Quechua paqariy (to dawn) and therefore from the diurnal cycle of the sun. The trajectory of this cycle marked Titicaca as the point of emergence and renewal and the Pacific as the point of death and reentry into the earth (Huertas 1981: 70, 83). Indeed, there is evidence that the movement of the sun was thought to transport the dead to the abode of the afterlife (Cock and Doyle 1979: 70) and that in at least some parts of the Andes, the sun's movement was thought to lead to the dead's resurrection or reincarnation as well (Taylor 1980: 53; Bastien 1978: 47, 171). Inevitably this cycle defined by the movement of the sun partly relativized and even undermined the polarity of lower and upper, death and rebirth, since each was constantly transforming into its opposite in a unified system.

But this did not neutralize the fact water flows downhill, and therefore that the Pacific lowlands were still the dominant collecting point for water in this system. Clearly this continued to pose a political problem for highland groups

504 PETER GOSE

who wanted to predicate their rule on the cosmological control of water. However, they were saved by an important fact: The mullu or thorny oyster shells so key to this hydraulic cycle were not immediately available to subju- gated lowland peoples and could only be obtained from the island of Puna on the Pacific coast of Ecuador and points to the north, that is, on the northern margins of the Andean culture area (Marcos 1978). This meant that access to these shells was not simply a matter of lowness but also horizontal distance, a problematic concept for sedentary huari populations but not the ruling llacuaz groups, who specialized in overcoming through conquest. Such a horizontal expansion to bring the furthest reaches of the lowland sea under imperial administration was of keen interest to the Incas, who wanted to dispel any notion that they were dependent on lowland people for water. And once the Incas placed these areas under their control, restrictions on road travel would restore a monopoly on horizontal movement to the upper group.

At the height of Inca power, around the end of the fifteenth century, their

empire apparently began to impinge on the thorny oyster grounds of coastal Ecuador. Marcos reports the presence of Imperial Cuzco artifacts in burials on the island of La Plata and suggests that they represent the presence of special emissaries who were trying to procure these shells directly from those who dove for them (1978: 114). Rostworowski suggests that the desire to directly control the flow of shells to the south motivated the northern campaign into Ecuador and Colombia, which the Incas pursued at such cost immediately before the Spanish conquest (1977: 128). Perhaps the most striking evidence of this motive can be found in Tomebamba, the Incas' model city of the north, where they constructed an opulent shell-shaped shrine called Mullucancha

(Thorny Oyster Enclosure), the walls of which were inlaid with gold and mullu shells (Murua 1987 [1613]: 112). The Incas, notorious for their dislike of commerce, were anxious to convert what had previously been relations of trade into those of tribute. Thus they could finally end their dependence on the merchants of the Chinchay confederacy on the central Peruvian coast, who had long used their flotillas of reed and balsa wood rafts to act as intermedi- aries in the shell trade between the Ecuadorean coast and the southern Andean

highlands. Direct political control of the shell grounds would undercut the Chinchay merchants and turn a relation between autonomous polities into one within the scope of the empire.

As Torero (1974) has brilliantly demonstrated, the Chinchay wielded im- mense influence in the Andean area because they controlled the shell trade. Their principal huacas were considered to be a wife and son of Pachacamac (Rostworowski 1977: 106, 203), the paramount coastal deity, whose shrine was the hub of a vast commercial and pilgrimage network through which shells were distributed into the highlands. Some idea of Pachacamac's power can be gleaned from what he is alleged to have said following a request by the Inca for military help during the capacocha ritual:

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 505

Inca, Mid-Day Sun! As for me I didn't reply because I am a power who would shake you and the whole world around you. It wouldn't be those enemies alone whom I would destroy, but you as well. And the entire world would end with you. That is why I've sat silent. (Avila 1991: 114)

Pachacamac was a noteworthy shrine as far back as A.D. 100, and by Tiwamaku-Wari times (A.D. 600-800), it drew pilgrims from Chile to Ecu- dador. A constant flow of llama caravans connected it closely with the Tiwanaku center near Lake Titicaca (Browman 1978: 331). This trade be- tween Tiwanaku and Pachacamac probably created the duality between Tit- icaca and the Pacific as the maximal aquatic pacarinas of the Andean uni- verse. Yet the ideological basis of the shell trade conserved a fundamental asymmetry between these two centers expressed most profoundly in the spread of the Chinchay dialect of Quechua into the highlands as a lingua franca. Torero's narrowly commercial interpretation of the spread of Chinchay Quechua might well be supplemented by Rojas' emphasis on religion (1980). But his basic point-that long before the Inca's mission of civilization, Chin- chay Quechua had become a general language because of the shell trade, so that the Incas had little choice but to adapt it as their imperial language-still stands (Torero 1974: 98). Indeed, only the shell trade makes it possible to understand the presence of the Chinchay dialect of Quechua in Ecuador, as Torero rightly notes (1974: 127, 1985; see also Hartmann 1979).

It is worth taking a closer look at the notions of equivalence involved in the shell trade, given its massive culture-historical importance. Although the chroniclers maintain that mullu were more valuable to Andean people than gold, by Tiwanaku/Wari times, they were mainly trading copper to coastal peoples in return for shells.38 Some valleys on the northern coast did have copper deposits (Ramirez 1986: 227), but there was still great demand for this metal. Not only did coastal people regard copper as more valuable than gold or silver, they also used it to make miniature nonfunctional axes of several standardized sizes (Holm 1967), which circulated as far north as the Yucatan peninsula in Mesoamerica (Diaz 1956 [1632]: 28) and may well have func- tioned as a kind of currency. Thus the movement of shells into the Andean system from the outside signified an influx of fluid vitality, and the outflow of precious metals gave rise to a general equivalent of the more properly mercan- tile exchange system to the north of the Andean culture area. These two spheres of exchange, one commercial and the other essentially religious, complemented each other perfectly and thrived on the transformation of meanings that formed the boundary between them. Let us further explore this process by establishing the meaning that precious metals had to Andean

38 See Sarmiento (1942 [1572]: 249-50), Muria (1987 [1613]: 133), Paulsen (1974: 602-3), and Rostworowski (1977: 118-21).

506 PETER GOSE

people and then tracing the semiotic metamorphosis that these metals under- went on reaching the northern coast.

Copper was much more valuable on the coast than in the Andean highlands. Rostworowski suggests that copper was associated in the highlands with the inferior status of callao, whereas gold was associated with the preeminent, ruling status of collana, and silver with the intermediate status of payan (1983: 147). Nonetheless, Cobo mentions that when the Inca, Mayta Capac, married the daughter of the curaca of Collaguas, a highland province overlooking the Pacific, "the Indians of that province made, in service to those kings, a house all of copper in which to accommodate themselves when they came to visit the queen's relatives" (1956 [1653]: 70). While this echoes the prestige that copper had on the coast, the fact that it was used to make a house sits less well with the uses of copper that prevailed there and clearly connects with highland usages, as we will see below. Elsewhere, in a more clearly highland context, Cobo reports that the mummy of the Inca Sinchi Roca was discovered "be- tween copper bars and sowed with maguey fibre" (1956 [1653]: 68), which suggests that copper was closely associated with the mallqui complex, in which localized life forms emerge from underground. This accords very well with the much better documented uses of gold and silver in highland culture, all of which seem to revolve around the notion of an exemplary or prototypical life form (i.e., camaquen), of the sort worth preserving.

A conceptual affiliation between precious metals and the founding of local order in Andean culture arises from the famous myth in which Manco Capac throws a golden bar to determine where the Incas should settle, thus founding Cuzco. As Berthelot suggests, this act of flinging the golden bar connotes the solar and celestial origins of the Incas and their essentially downward trajec- tory onto the local scene (1986: 80). However, when we look closer into Andean ideas about the nature of gold and silver, they were clearly thought to take form underground and grow upwards toward the sky, very much on an agricultural model (Berthelot 1986: 82). This upward unfolding from an un- derground source locates us within the semantic field of mallqui and, more generally, the localized pole of the hierarchy of pacarinas. This is further developed by the notion that the bounty of the Inca's underground gallery mines was controlled by particularly large and unusual nuggets or conglome- rates of the metal found there, which were called mamas (mothers or sources) of the mine. Before going to work underground, miners offered libations and blood sacrifices to these mamas, suggesting that they were probably located at the dry, local end of the spectrum.39 More precisely, the value of the mama in Andean thought was as an exemplary form that, like a camaquen, could replicate, shape, and command its own substance. When we look into what

39 See Albornoz (1967: 18), Cobo (1956 [1653]: 166), Murua (1987 [1613]: 424), and Segovia (1968 [1553]: 76).

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 507

camaquenes or personal doubles were made of, for example those described by Cobo (1956 [1653]), stone and precious metals, particularly gold, are by far the most common substances mentioned. The case of a particular Cho- queguanca reported by Berthelot (1986: 84) even suggests a certain inter- changeability of the two substances, since choque refers to gold and guanca to the petrified ancestral monoliths discussed earlier. While we are not inclined to equate stone and precious metals, both seem to have been important expres- sions of telluric order and power for the Incas.

Nonetheless, the Incas do seem to have used gold and silver to mark themselves out from the run-of-the-mill ethnic polities and their deities and rulers. Helms describes the use of hammered sheets of gold as a kind of siding that covered the interior of important Inca palaces and temples, concluding that the nobility did not merely want to be surrounded by gold or associated with it but felt themselves to be intrinsically and essentially golden (1981: 219-20). Nowhere was this sensibility more clearly manifest than in the Temple of the Sun or Coricancha (Golden Enclosure), the epicenter of the Empire, whose flawlessly constructed stone walls defined an inner chamber that contained a comprehensive array of golden and silver replicas ranging from trees, wild plants, birds and animals, through agricultural products and camelids, to the members of the imperial pantheon.40 No doubt the efficacy of imperial ritual and its pretences of global control were predicated upon the possession of these commanding prototypes of gold and silver. Perhaps for this reason Atahualpa is said to have begged Pizarro not to break or melt down the gold and silver objects collected from the Temple of the Sun as his ransom (Betanzos 1987 [1551]: 283). Similarly, Cieza writes that gold and silver were not supposed to leave Cuzco once they entered that city (1984 [1553]: 117, 162).

In sum, gold and silver were a particularly elite expression of the complex and localized exemplary life forms associated with the notions of camaquen, mallqui, and huanca in ancient Andean thought. Guaman Poma assigns the discovery of native gold, native silver and copper to the bygone era of the purunruna in a manner that further emphasizes their ancestral nature (1936 [1615]: 60). These precious metals represented a sacred and imperishable ancestral substance which was entirely continuous with stone and dry mum- mified flesh and, like them, was intimately connected with regenerating and replicating life forms at the local level.41 Copper, a weaker and less valued

40 See Betanzos (1987 [1551]: 99), Cieza (1984 [1553]: 177), Muria (1987 [1613]: 154-5, 443), P. Pizarro (1978 [1572: 92, 100-1), and Segovia (1968 [1553]: 75). Note that several Inca queens were supposed to have kept a similar inventory of living things in private forests, gardens, and menageries (Murua 1987 [1613]: 65, 73, 155). Betanzos also reports that when the yungas were conquered, their seeds, fruit, and distinctive foods were brought to Cuzco in triumph (1987 [1551]: 123). Clearly the accumulation of diverse life forms was a major Inca preoccupation.

41 Similar ideas persist in moder Andean culture, in which there is a definite notion that all life forms contain gold and silver as an intrinsic part of their make-up (see Gose 1986: 188-9).

508 PETER GOSE

member of the same complex, played the same subordinate role in relation to gold and silver as did the upani in relation to the camaquen: that of a weak and derivative life form drawn out of the local level toward the ultimate source of water, the Pacific. However, in relation to ordinary mortals, copper was a powerful ancestral substance still able to exert a powerful attraction on the uprooted upanis of the dead. Thus, the copper traded out of the Andes to the Pacific acted as a low-grade camaquen, drawing the souls of dead commoners with it.

The thorny oyster shells that circulated against copper had a similarly ambivalent status as camaquenes. These "daughters of the sea" were clearly able to attract the waters of the Pacific into the alien highlands of the Andes, but their subordinate, replicated status was evident in the very fact that they could be traded so far away from their place of origin at the bottom of the sea. Just as thorny oyster shells represented a vitality foreign and intrusive into the dry ancestral landscape of the Andes, so copper was a scarce exogenous money to the north, an exotic standard of value in a region which did not produce its own metallicized ancestors.

From a highland perspective, the waters at the edge of the world could be enticed back in toward the center only if they were to lose a certain amount of metallic ancestral substance to the periphery of the system. This was a sacrifi- cial exchange of ancestral order for alien vitality, an attempt to overcome and regulate the fact of death itself. To the extent that rainfall and localized sources of water, such as springs, did not fail, this sacrificial integration of the dry and wet, the local and the distant, was perceived to actually work. When it did not, resulting in drought, the Inca state would resort to child sacrifices, or capacochas, which were often made directly to the sea, presumably to stimulate the production of rain (see Betanzos 1987 [1551]: 142). Alter- natively, children were interred locally in subterranean pots or cisterns, along with precious metals.42 In these sacrifices, the premature ending of a child's life was supposed to create a localized accumulation of water in the cistern, which would allow for the ritual control of rain (Duviols 1986: 59). By sacrificing a child and interring it with precious metals, the local group created something very much like a miniature upaimarca within its own domain, a subterranean enclosure which retained the souls of the weak and the water that they gave off. This manoeuvre displays one of the strategies engen- dered by structural relativity within the pacarina system: When a distant source of water failed, a new one could always be invented closer to home. The child sacrificed as a capacocha enjoyed the status of a deity with a cult but was not considered an ancestral source of group life (see Duviols 1986: 59)

42 See Cobo (1956 [1653]: 201) and Duviols (1986: 169-70, 248, 473, 491, 493). Note that the remains of Pachacuti Inca were also stored in a subterranean pottery vat capped with the ruler's golden statue (Betanzos 1987 [1551]: 149). This same emphasis on the containment of liquids and local order in the capacocha is also developed in the Justicia 413 document (Rost- worowski 1988).

SEGMENTARY STATE FORMATION, WATER CONTROL 509

because the drying required to become a camaquen would defeat the entire purpose of the sacrifice. Thus it was only possible to intervene in the hydrau- lic cycle between the highlands and the Pacific by giving up more precious metals and by further intensifying the sacrificial linkage between life and death.

CONCLUSION

Under the Incas, the administration of water was probably more developed as ritual than it was at a purely utilitarian level. Yet the evidence we have encountered here does not support the idea that Andean hydraulic ritual was a purely expressive practice. On the contrary, those who developed this elabo- rate ritual complex undoubtedly thought it was a practical way to manage a scarce resource. But like all judgments of utility, this one was mediated by a specific cultural understanding of the world. Although these rituals aimed to control the natural world, they unwittingly presupposed the social order in which they were enacted. Thus, the ability to attract water by ritual means was not separate from political power but apparently one of its central mani- festations. Finally, we must conclude that this hydraulic system was just as much an administrative as religious matter and broadens our concept of the political as a result.

From the details of the foregoing account, we have seen that the pre- Columbian political structure in the Andes was segmentary and that salient units within it were associated with and even defined by various sorts of shrines, particularly pacarinas or mythical origin points. Beyond expressing political structure, those shrines were involved in a complex agricultural cycle of death and the regeneration of life; and they ultimately fused the political order with agricultural metaphysics. The result of this fusion was a political preoccupation with control over the ultimate sources of water, which lay outside the boundaries of any regional political unit. Out of this preoccupa- tion, imperial projects such as that of the Inca were born. But since the ultimate source of water was thought to be the ocean, in which the Incas thought their world to be a mere island, albeit a central one (Guaman Poma 1936 [1615]: 933-4; Avila 1966 [1598]: 127), there was in principle no limit to the endless regress of the aquatic periphery to be controlled. Like all imperialist projects, this one was by definition impossible to accomplish definitively.

The irony of this situation was, as noted at the outset, that the coastal peoples, whom highlanders imagined to control the distribution of water, in fact lived on a desert and had to rely on water coming down out of the highlands for their own much more developed technology for irrigation. In strictly pragmatic terms, the coast was dependent on the highlands for water, a fact that this ritual complex both acknowledges and inverts. But the agri- cultural dimension of the process examined here was never anything more than a metaphorical vehicle of pre-Columbian politics. Before rehearsing the

510 PETER GOSE

received platitudes about the camera obscura effect of ideology, it would be well to review just what this agricultural vehicle added to the political process of the pre-Columbian Andes. By providing a powerful functional model for political segmentation, the agricultural process transcended the indifference of an accurate structural model and went on to provide something even more fundamental: a motive for unification, a political project, and a reason to act.

Above all, the agricultural model had the advantage of representing pre- Columbian political process in terms that were familiar and relevant to the agricultural peasantry, who composed the vast majority of the tributary popu- lation. To the extent that the peasantry subscribed to the agricultural cults mentioned here, they became inexorably involved in the wider political ram- ifications. Just as the Inca state, in a more restricted way, sought to ground labor tribute in local traditions of festive work (Murra 1980: 98), so in a more inclusive sense that state attempted to make its own existence appear as a necessary or at least desirable concomitant of agriculture. This brings us to a more intractable problem: To what extent did the ideology examined here precede and promote the formation of the Inca state and to what extent did the state shape this ideology? If we are justified in tracing the opposition between Titicaca and the Pacific as maximal pacarinas back to Tiwanaku times, then it is certainly much more plausible to treat the expansionist state of the Inca as an outgrowth of a pre-existing religious ideology. But since there are also reports that rebel groups felt obliged to oppose not only Inca government but also Inca religion (Cobo 1956 [1653]: 110), the culmination of the local agricultural cults in the imperial cult of the sun was not necessarily automatic. Nonetheless, the sun and its cult were reconstructed from their local ground- ing after the Inca state collapsed (Cock and Doyle 1979: 57, 65), even among such ethnic groups as the Chanca, who had little reason to regret the demise of the Inca. This demonstrates that the local level had become thoroughly im- bued with imperial cosmology and could reproduce it under even the most unfavorable conditions. The best conclusion is therefore that the Inca state was so remarkably influential in its short lifespan only because it drew deeply from the subterranean ideological currents of an Andean civilization that was much longer in the making and found in them not only a justification for its imperial project but the means and motivations for embarking on it in the first place.

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