Storage in Ancient Complex Societies by Manzanilla Linda R.; Rothman Mitchell;

Author:Manzanilla, Linda R.; Rothman, Mitchell;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4525487
Publisher: Routledge

CHAPTER EIGHT

STOREHOUSE OF SEASONS AND MOTHER OF FOOD: AN ANDEAN RITUAL-ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM

Frank Salomon, Gino de las Casas, and Víctor Falcón-Huayta

Introduction1

Until the mid-twentieth century, the village of Rapaz (Peru) managed its communal sector (fields, canals, terraces, pastures, and herds) through a ritual-administrative complex seated in a walled precinct. One of the precinct’s two buildings is called Pasa Qulqa (‘Storehouse of Seasons’). The other is a still-used sacred building, the home of a collection of quipus, where traditional authorities govern the common sector. It is called Kaha Wayi, ‘Treasury House’ Ethnographic information clarifies the relationships among storage, governance, ritual, and communal economy. This chapter emphasizes harvest collection and disbursal through the storehouse, an administrative system with a marked feminine symbolic association.

Here we take a route that starts with architecture and ends with song. Rapaz is known for its singular ‘quipu house,’ an old structure containing a collection of cord records seemingly related to the Inka data medium (Ruiz Estrada 1981; Salomon, Brezine, and Falcon Huayta 2006: 59–92). The ‘quipu house,’ however, needs to be understood as part of a larger unit: a complex of storage and redistribution that it once served to control. We demonstrate how in Rapaz, administrative and political work was fused with ritual service to wakas (Andean deities, many of which are deified mountains). The ‘quipu house’ and the storehouse Pasa Qulqa are colonial to modern in chronology. Since the former still operates, and the latter operated within the lives of people still living, Rapaz offers ethnographic and ethnohistoric clues to the forms of ‘vertical’ political control, storage, and redistribution that ethnohistorians associate with Inka rule.

From a broadly anthropological viewpoint we attempt something more. The large literature deriving from the idea of vertical ecological diversity has told us much about the adaptive and technical agenda of productive zones (Mayer 2002) and their articulation, but it comes only part way toward showing how each zone’s particular cultural ethos—the range of feelings and questions that arise from behavior in it, and the symbols that express them—contributes to the articulated set of symbols we call Andean culture. The exceptions that do attempt this connection (Rivera Andía 2005: 129–156) suggest that a regular flow of expressive objects—songs, stories, emblems, recipes, to which one could add ledgers, quipus, tokens, and so on—constitutes the cultural counterpart of material ‘complementarity.’ The actual work of managing complementarity is often conducted by manipulating these emblems. The Rapaz precinct was a storage facility, but also a place for working symbols and information to organize the economy.

State storage is, of course, a classical topic in Inka and Middle Horizon archaeology (D’Altroy and Earle 1985: 187–206; Hyslop 1990: 377; Morris and Thompson 1985: 97–108; Sanders 1973: 379–428). Much less is known about community-level storage than about state storage. According to John V. Murra, the state warehousing that underpinned both armed Inka might and Inka ritual generosity redeveloped ‘an institution which had probably existed long before any state had appeared,’ and Murra thought it ‘possible that the [prehispanic] village did have some

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