Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Role Of Ritual Integration In Augmenting State Level Solidarity

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Carla Hernández Garavito, of Vanderbilt University, along with colleagues in Peru, will undertake research on how familiar sociocultural practices between local communities and expanding imperial political systems impacted the development of mutually legible socio-political orders in the 15th-16th century Inca Empire. The concept of legibility refers to a continuous political process, in which states use familiar idioms between them and their subjects to exert political and economic control over local populations. Legibility may serve the state as a tool of political subjugation, but it also may reinforce shared idioms in ways that were leveraged by local communities for their own interests. As with modern societies, past ones were subject to processes of global politics, yet the growing gap in the anthropological understanding of the inner workings of ancient and modern empires has rendered local/global relationships in the past into a simplified dichotomy of direct/indirect control. Through an interdisciplinary archaeological and historical approach, this research will investigate the critical period when the rules of imperial control were negotiated and established. This project significantly contributes and expands currently scholarship: 1. by using the concept of legibility to analyze the specific means through which subject groups shape political and economic processes of imperialism; 2. in characterizing a single imperial strategy as a diachronic process, from its local inception to negotiation between imperial and local practices; 3. by situating this research within global issues of state and local interaction. Mrs. Hernández and her research team will use archaeological excavation, mapping, archival research, and specialized material analyses, to investigate the role of public ritual and places as critical idioms of interaction between the Inka Empire and the local community in the Huarochirí region in the Peruvian Andes. Over the course of a hundred years, the Inka created the largest empire in the Americas, extending at its height over 906,000 km2 of western South America and weaving together a patchwork of ethnic diversity. Through targeted excavations in two sites containing both local and Inka standard public spaces and through an interdisciplinary methodology, this project will reveal a subtle means of hegemonic interaction that helped to shape Inka imperialism and the diverse material signatures of state imposition. This project will offer collaborative education and training opportunities for U.S. and Peruvian archaeology and history students, and will promote collaboration with local community members and Peruvian academic institutions. This research is of direct relevance to foster a critical understanding of how imperial policies created the conditions for incorporating and maintaining mutually legible local/state practices and how local forms helped to shape state politics.