The State as a Chosen Woman: Brideservice and the Feeding of Tributaries in the Inka Empire

2000/03/01 by Peter Gose
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Latin American history and culture #Indigenous Cultures and History

paper · doi:10.1525/aa.2000.102.1.84

Abstract

The Inka state was gendered in complex and apparently contradictory ways. In military contexts, it became masculine, emphasizing conquest us the basis of men's individual matrimonial claims and the Inka sovereign's right to "give" them women. However, in its civilian tributary system, the Inka state assumed a female guise, providing food, drink, and clothing to dependent tributaries as an expression of its political‐economic power, according to the Andean idiom of mink a. By extending Collier and Rosaldo's notion of brideservice. this paper explores how these "opposed" genderings of the Inka state actually implied each other and formed a single complex, [gender, consumption, labor, state. Andes]

Related

• Inka Administration of the Far South Coast of Peru
• “In Spite of Her Sex”: The Cacica and the Politics of the Pueblo in Late Colonial Cusco
• Style, Technology, and State Production: Inka Pottery Manufacture in the Leche Valley, Peru
• Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman: Market Economy, Clothing, and Identities in the Colonial Andes, La Plata (Charcas), Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries
• The Southeastern Inka Frontier against the Chiriguanos: Structure and Dynamics of the Inka Imperial Borderlands