What I found of particular interest was how Conrad and
Demarest discussed the evolution of religion and the role that it played during
the rise of the Inca Empire. By imperial times, the Inca had come to believe in
the divine being Inti, who protected their state and from which all rulers
descended (107). During the earliest days of the Incas’, there was yet a ruling
dynasty to be established, so there was no king and all leaders were elected sinchis. Due to this, Conrad and
Demarest argue that the rise of the Inti cult must have been to some extent a
conscious political manipulation (109). Placing an emphasis on Inti therefore
developed along with the emergence of kings and creation of an Inca dynasty.
As the seventeenth-century Jesuit scholar Cobo pointed out,
Inca religion changed as the realm developed because they realized that it
would not only strengthen their position but also give them tighter control.
The belief in Inti also benefited the Inca people, as it
gave them a sense of national identity, and provided them with the military and
political power to maintain themselves as a society in the southern highlands. The
entire society was involved in evolution of the religion and the importance of
the ancestor worship in the case of deceased Inca leaders. When an Inca leader
died, his cult would be maintained and all his wealth would be used to glorify
him. This left the next Inca leader searching to obtain their own wealth, which
created the empire’s economic basis of labor taxation. Therefore it can be seen
that the empire and religion grew together and became very intertwined.
I do agree with your interpretation and the examples you gave about the empire and religion. Politics and religion played a major role in the development of the Inca Empire. What I found very interesting was how Conrad and Demarest interpreted early Inca society and how it tied into religion. However, Conrad and Demarest also pointed out how all of the chronicles were written after the Spanish Conquest; therefore there were no eyewitness of descriptions of pre-imperial Inca society. All accounts of early Inca history and culture are transcriptions of oral tradition and contain a mixture of fact, myth, legend, Spanish misunderstandings of Inca culture (96). I think this is very important when understanding and analyzing the chronicles of the Incan Empire, but this is how information could be misunderstood, especially if these transcriptions were passed down orally. It is important to keep in mind that these chronicles only reveal a general outline of early Incan society and not the whole picture.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I do believe Conrad and Demarest did a great job justifying the characterization of the early Inca as a small-scale, rural society. If we simply focus on the Incan beliefs of their gods and how it ties into religion, it’s one example alone. The gods are described as an overreaching divine complex, a multi-faceted sky god composed of myriad individual aspects, which is unfolded into sub complexes (100). I think this is very essential in understanding how these complexities were analyzed and interpreted. There were gods such as, Gateway God of Tiahuanaco, Biracocha, the sun god Inti, and Illapa, the thunder or weather deity. What’s most intriguing is how these deities are similar to the gods of Mesoamerica we discussed in class. What interests me the most is how the identification and interpretation of these gods, for example, were established within researchers and archaeologists, especially if all the chronicles were written after the Spanish Conquest?