. . . and "El Imperio Inca"

The Inca state apparatus was superimposed on these institutions. Ayllus and the larger nations of which they were part maintained their integrity and identity, but existing institutions had now to serve the needs of the dominant empire. The Huancas were one such group. They were predominantly agriculturalists, and their control over the higher zones varied between one ayllu and another. According to Espinosa, the Huanca had his own yanas who worked land near the capital, and they were held personally by him. He frequently made "gifts" to the jatuncuracas or senior curacas, who themselves had yanas and used them for the shepherding of their own llamas (cf., Murra 1980; Samaniego 1974). It is not clear what the extent of the physical might of the Huanca was, but it never appears to have been much more than symbolic and involved virtually no extraction from the ayllus or defense against larger groups. "Battles for the protection of lands were far more frequent between ayllus than ethnic groups" (Espinosa 1972:41).

Once the Huanca ethnic group was absorbed into Tahuantisuyu in the middle of the fifteenth century, the seat of the Huanca was abandoned and the three mitades were set up as Inca huamani or "provinces" with jatuncuracas at their heads (Espinosa 1969) and Cuzco as their center of authority. Besides the seats of the three major ayllus, now provinces within Tahuantinsuyu, there appeared two other quite different kinds of settlement groupings. The first of these were the famous Inca tambos , placed strategically along the Cuzco-Quito road (Morris 1967). There were four of these in the region: Julca, Jatunsausa, Maravilca, and Huancayo. These were both resting places for the officers of the Inca court and army and also storehouses for the grain and other goods produced by the corvee labor of the ayllus. The second of the two introduced settlements were the mitmaqs: certain Huancas were forcibly removed from the area and replaced by mitmaqs from other areas (Espinosa 1972:45).

The most striking feature of this system is the apparent continuity in the community institutions before and after the advent of the Incas. Surplus labor, rather than goods, continued to be the form of extraction from households. Communal work teams continued to take their customary form. Even the use of yanas predates the Incas, though the yanas' role was vastly less important. And while the implantation among conquered peoples of mitmaq colonies far removed from their home base may have been an innovation, there already

existed, as we have seen, relatively independent ayllu archipelagos at some remove from the seat of the ayllu.

It is, however, equally clear that this continuity was only on the surface disguising an underlying reality, and this process of disguise was not incidental to the Inca system but essential to it. The Inca state depended upon the productivity of the conquered communities by introducing into the equation of reciprocity a new element: the godlike unity of the Inca. The dominant position of kinship within the ayllu, as the owner of the means of production in its unity and the provider of labor power through its parts, was replaced by the apparent unity of the Inca godhead. The community institutions persisted but were made to serve modified functions. Hence the land of the ayllu was now divided into: Inca state land; Inca deity land; ayllu land; local deity land; and household land. The Inca lands probably did not constitute a very large part of the ayllu.

There is some difference of opinion about who now claimed ownership over land. Moore (1958) and Wachtel (1973, 1977) argue that all land now belonged to the Inca, and Wachtel suggests that this fact underlay the principle by which tribute was extracted through the continued ideal of reciprocity:

The ayllu . . . enjoyed rights of use of territory possessed in theory by the Emperor. In exchange for this favour, the members of the ayllu owed him tribute. The Inca's "gift" might well be considered fictitious of course, since before its conquest the territory already belonged to the communities. But the fiction was necessary to give to the tribute its character of reciprocal obligation. (1977:66)

Lumbreras, however, writes that, "The ayllu, the family clan, was the possessor and owner of the land. . . . The state was not the direct owner of land but through its access to the labour force of the ayllu, it expropriated the riches generated by the latter. . . . The Inca state was based on its ownership of the labour force" (1970:35). Hence ownership of the populace was the principle justifying surplus extraction.

Either way, the important point is that the ayllu members were called upon to acknowledge the legitimacy of repaying their debt to society through payments in direct labor, such that a Spanish chronicler wrote, "All they gave their kings were personal services. . . . No other obligation but work . . . [to the point where today] they resent it more when they have to give a peck of potatoes than when they work for fifteen days with the community at some task" (Murra 1958). If, as I have suggested above, the communal work team represented the payment of a kind of rent by households for their membership in the ayllu, then it now became a payment acknowledging membership in a far broader social world.

This change meant a transformation in the meaning of the "social responsibility" of each household head. Where before it had been based on the idea

of reciprocal obligations between neighbors and kin expressed in the form of labor, now the responsibility that superceded all others was not to the ayllu but to the state. This was still expressed in the form of labor, specifically in terms of the labor obligations on that land that had been ayllu common land but was now Inca land. Thus, as Murra (1958) points out, marriage and the setting up of a house was transformed from a rite of passage into the community, giving the adult a positive status with both rights as well as duties, into an onerous obligation to provide corvee labor to the Inca state. Subsequent institutions used for extracting surplus labor from Andean peasants cannot be properly understood without recognition of this particular heritage of "owing labor" to those with power through manipulating the meaning of social membership.

Tribute could only be extracted through the idiom of the exchange of equivalents by a process of mystification, a form nicely described in another context by Marc Bloch (1974:228) as "reciprocity in unequal obligations." Items offered in return for tribute had to be given a special "value," which was expressed through the increasing importance of a division between utility goods and luxury goods, part of the former being absorbed by the state, while the latter were redistributed in return. Utility goods, especially food, were not redistributed by the Incas from one ayllu to another but consumed in support of state activities (Morris 1967:174). Luxury goods, on the other hand, such as cloth, coca, and maize (for the production of beer) were strategically distributed as "gifts" from the Inca, especially to the jatuncuracas at the head of the nations and the curacas in the local ayllus. "And the reason they went to Cuzco was so that they could [be seen to] come from Cuzco" (Morris: 173). The "value" that made it possible for luxury goods to achieve equivalence with utility goods derived from the belief that they had been touched by the godhead, the earthly representative of the potent Sun. Even though the Incas used existing ayllu institutions, the process of surplus extraction could not fail to modify social relations within the ayllu. However small a proportion of land was put aside for the Incas and Inca deities, it had to be subtracted from the ayllu lands, as did the labor given over to the state. The richest and the poorest in the ayllus were most directly affected.

Despite the ideal of equality—expressed in the curaca's need to beg ayllu members to provide him with labor, for example—there had always been room for the assertion of power by particular families. But after the Inca conquest the basis of this power changed. Some of the ayllu land that had previously been administered by the curacas now became the land of the Inca and the possibility of the curaca using his control of the land to maintain his position through what Sahlins (1968) has called "the politics of generosity" was thus reduced. But the Inca was dependent upon the curacas for the local organization of production. Morris suggests that luxury gifts from the Inca served to provide the curacas with symbolic strength and that possibly a small

amount of subsistence goods was similarly made available to compensate the curacas and allow them to maintain their positions, "at a level similar to what they were before the Inca take-over channeled a major part of the area's surplus production into the central coffers" (Morris 1967:176). Inca support of the curacas thus rigidified the position of such households vis-à-vis the community and made them surrogate state representatives.

The reduction of ayllu common land also affected the ability of the community to provide for the welfare needs of the poorer ayllu members. But the growing demands of the state for its own labor force led to an increase in the number of yanas drawn from precisely this group within the ayllu. As huacchas had been used for both shepherding community flocks and working within the households of wealthier families, so yanas served both the state directly and the households of the "authorities." With the curacas themselves taking on some of the roles of state representatives, so the new relationships became but slight transformations of the previous ones.

The reduction of common land would also have reduced the incentive for pastoral colonies to maintain links to the seat of the ayllu and thus increased the tendency for them to become a class of their own. The mitmaq colonies through which the Inca rulers introduced "outsiders" into the ethnic nations, far removed from their kin, may therefore also have been but a variation on an existing pattern. It might also be proposed that the growth of a population loosened from the ties of an ecologically autonomous ayllu was an inevitable outcome of the growth of Inca state power and the loss of complete autonomy on the part of the ayllus.

By the time of the Spanish Conquest between 1531 and 1533, the Inca state had inserted itself into the ayllu economy while by no means entirely destroying the autonomy of the subjected groups. The practice of paying tribute in one form or another and to a variety of groups ranging from local curacas to Inca state officials had been established. While the more powerful ayllus and their curacas continued to be located at the intermediate ecological zones—and for the Huancas this meant the Mantaro Valley—the pastoral groups in the higher zones were developing independent interests of their own.

The arrival of the Spanish led to a massive mobilization of the Huanca population against the Incas and a number of battles were fought in the area between the Huancas and the Inca army quite independently of the Spanish. Over the hundred years following the conquest the powerful ex-curacas of the Mantaro made a series of requests to the Spanish crown for recognition of their role in the defeat of the Incas, and the Jatuncuraca of Ananhuanca, Apo Alaya, and his son Cristobal, were among these claimants. Their descendants managed to gain control of much of the highlands to the west and south of the valley in the subsequent period and made successive attempts to establish their influence over the area of present-day Huasicancha.