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. This expansion occurred without many of the tools historically considered critical to such expansion, including a writing system, horses, and the wheel. I analyze religious and state constructions and spaces for their roles in and as the settings for spectacles and ceremonies. Utilizing a performance-based perspective and theories of semiotics and pragmatics drawn from semiotic anthropology, I focus on a particular set of Inka performance spaces and their role in imperial expansion and control: the capital Cuzco and certain replicas of that capital constructed in other parts of the empire. I suggest that these sites served as the settings for a calendar of ritual ceremonies and spectacles that referenced certain repeated physical attributes and were performed by and for an audience of the Inka themselves, and did not, like other performances in the empire, involve the meaningful participation of other social groups within the empire. I also suggest that these Cuzco replicas were strategically placed in areas of war and rebellion where the utilization of ritual performance to maintain, reinforce, inculcate and manipulate Inka ideology, identity, and power was a critical element of imperial strategy. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Anthropology First Advisor Clark L. Erickson Keywords Archaeology of Performance, empires, Inka, Political theater, Ritual, semiotics Subject Categories History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology | Latin American Languages and Societies | Latin American Studies | Theatre and Performance Studies This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/499 THEATERS OF POWER: INCA IMPERIAL PERFORMANCE Lawrence S. Coben A DISSERTATION in Anthropology Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2012 Supervisor of Dissertation Signature _____________________ Clark L. Erickson, Professor of Anthropology Graduate Group Chairperson Signature______________________ Deborah Thomas, Professor of Anthropology Dissertation Committee Asif Agha, Professor of Anthropology Robert Preucel, Professor of Anthropology THEATERS OF POWER: INKA IMPERIAL PERFORMANCE COPYRIGHT 2012 Lawrence S. Coben This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my late parents and my brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews, who have made me the fortunate person I am today. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS So many people have contributed to my research and my graduate school experience, I fear I will forget someone. First and foremost I thank Clark Erickson, my remarkable doctoral advisor, for his steadfast commitment, intellectual challenges, encouragement and support from the day I entered Penn. I cannot imagine someone doing a better job. My thanks also to the other members of my committee, Bob Preucel and Asif Agha. Bob was a constant source of knowledge both inside and outside the classroom and his guidance was and remains invaluable. Asif introduced me to the world of semiotics and spent innumerable hours with me as I sought to apply these concepts to archaeology and performance. I am also grateful for the support, wisdom and inspiration of Wendy Ashmore, Nancy Farriss and Greg Urban during my time at Penn. And I never would have finished graduate school without the remarkable cadre of anthropology administrators who helped me along the way, most particularly Larysa Carr as well as Zoe Beckerman, Mary Kate Hildebrandt, Jon Poblador and Linda Lee. My thanks also to Dr. Evelyn Weiner When I decided to return to graduate school, Yale’s Robert “Master T” Thompson and Mary Miller were instrumental in facilitating my return. Mary served as my mentor helping me to figure out academia as a returning student, for which I am eternally grateful. I was fortunate to study with Mary and T as well as Frank Hole, Richard and Lucy Burger, Takeshi Inomata, Rolena Adorno, Jerome Pollitt and Ned Cooke while there. My special thanks to Takeshi, who iv took me into the field for the first time and invited me to co-edit what became our Archaeology of Performance volume. Special thanks go to Chip Stanish and Paul Boulifard. Chip took me into the field in the Andes for the first time, collaborated with me on numerous projects, and provided great advice on a variety of subjects along the way. Paul was my collaborator on all of the digital aspects of the project, and did a remarkable job on reconstructing virtual Incallajta and creating the images, simulations and viewsheds found in this dissertation. He was always available, and digital Incallajta would not exist without him. My thanks to my college roommate and Autodesk executive Phil Bernstein for introducing me to Paul, as well to Phil and Autodesk for the donations of their software. My thanks also go to Joanne Pillsbury, who invited me to spend time at Dumbarton Oaks writing this dissertation, to Mary Pye, who invited me to return there to finish the writing, and to Emily Jacobs, who facilitated both my stays there. My time at Dumbarton Oaks was critical to the completion of this dissertation. My deepest gratitude to my many Bolivian colleagues who made my project at Incallajta possible, including though not limited to Javier Escalante, former director of the Unidad Nacional de Arqueologia de Bolivia (UNAR). José Tejeiro V., former director of UNAR, David M. Pereira Herrera, former director of El Museo Arqueológico de la Universidad Mayor de San Simón, Maria de los Angeles Muñoz, current director of that museum and co-director of my fieldwork, v the then Museum investigators Ramón Sanzetenea Rocha, Ricardo Céspedes Paz, Walter Sanchez Canedo, and in the field Mali Salas, Marcelo Ticona, Ruth Fontenla and Denisse Rodas. Thanks also to Ing. Carlos R Valenzuela, Igor Jaramillo and Pablo Montalvo of the Centro de Levantamientos Aeroespaciales y Aplicaciones for their work on the digital maps. I also thank the Peruvian archaeologist Eberth Serrudo and the Mexican archaeologist Juan Carlos Equihua for their work at the site. And my work would not have been possible without the enthusiastic participation of the people of the municipality of Pocona, particularly former mayors Eddy Morató, Jesús Gonzales Sánchez, and Armando Valdivia Méndez, and former municipal council member Vitaliano Córdova, as well as the subcentral of Incallajta, led during my fieldwork by Damián Ricaldez, and all of the projects’ daily workers. Lastly, my research has benefitted from my interactions with and assistance from numerous colleagues, all of whom have graciously shared their insight and their own data. I cannot list them all, but they include (in no particular order) Alan Covey, Brian Bauer, Frank Meddens, Colin McEwan, Gordon McEwan, Tamara Bray, Gary Urton, Alexei Vranich, the late Craig Morris, Tom Zuidema, Jerry Moore, Carol Mackey, Bill Sillar, Katherine Schreiber, Terry D’Altroy, Dennis Ogburn, Sam Connell, Chad Gifford, Helaine Silverman, Liz Arkush, Daniela Triadan, Stephen Houston, Richard Schechner, Diana Taylor, Susan Niles, Vince Lee, Jean Pierre Protzen and Sonia Alconini. vi Certain portions of this dissertation were previously published elsewhere. Much of Chapter 4 is reproduced or adapted from Overture: An Invitation to the Archaeological Theater, the introduction to Archaeology of