University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2012 Theaters of Power: Inka Imperial Performance Lawrence S. Coben 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, Latin American Languages and Societies Commons, Latin American Studies Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Coben, Lawrence S., "Theaters of Power: Inka Imperial Performance" (2012). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 499. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/499 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/499 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Theaters of Power: Inka Imperial Performance Abstract Military and police power has proven time and again to be necessary but not sufficient to create and maintain an empire. Empires must employ a multitude of strategies to expand and survive, one of the most important of which is state-sanctioned public spectacles, ceremonies, and rituals. This dissertation examines the roles of these large-scale non-quotidian performances that are organized and directed by political agents, occur generally at specified times and locations, and include elements of the spectacular, theatricality, cosmological invocation, and feasting. These, state-sanctioned public spectacles, ceremonies, and rituals, have received inadequate attention from archaeologists. Archaeologists traditionally focused on the development of administrative and economic systems, ignoring the roles of performances in imperial expansion, which have often been considered epiphenomenal. My own research has focused on one of these empires, the Inka, and how it grew from a small single valley in Peru to a powerful polity ranging north to Ecuador and Colombia, south to Chile and Argentina, and east to Bolivia and Paraguay.