University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2019 Assembling States: Community Formation And The meE rgence Of The ncI a Empire Thomas John Hardy University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Recommended Citation Hardy, Thomas John, "Assembling States: Community Formation And The meE rgence Of The ncaI Empire" (2019). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3245. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3245 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3245 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Assembling States: Community Formation And The meE rgence Of The Inca Empire Abstract This dissertation investigates the processes through which the Inca state emerged in the south-central Andes, ca. 1400 CE in Cusco, Peru, an area that was to become the political center of the largest indigenous empire in the Western hemisphere. Many approaches to this topic over the past several decades have framed state formation in a social evolutionary framework, a perspective that has come under increasing critique in recent years. I argue that theoretical attempts to overcome these problems have been ultimately confounded, and in order to resolve these contradictions, an ontological shift is needed. I adopt a relational perspective towards approaching the emergence of the Inca state – in particular, that of assemblage theory. Treating states and other complex social entities as assemblages means understanding them as open-ended and historically individuated phenomena, emerging from centuries or millennia of sociopolitical, cultural, and material engagements with the human and non-human world, and constituted over the longue durée.