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A book in the series
latin america otherwise: languages, empires, nations
Series editors:
Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University
Irene Silverblatt, Duke University
Sonia Saldívar-Hull, University of Texas, San Antonio
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without
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Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru
Gonzalo Lamana
Duke University Press
Durham and London (cid:17)(cid:15)(cid:15)(cid:23)
© 2008 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ¥
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Monotype Dante by Achorn International
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting
against. Because the counter-stance stems from a problem with au-
thority . . . it’s a step towards liberation from cultural domination.
But it is not a way of life. . . . The possibilities are numerous once
we decide to act and not react.
—Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
You too are Peruvian, that is to say, Indian. You are only different
from me in your dress and education.
—Miguel Quispe, 1922, quoted in Marisol De la Cadena, Indigenous
Mestizos
[The old angel smeared the pongo with excrement; the young an-
gel covered the master with honey. Then,]
In the radiance of the heavens, the light of your body stood out,
as if made of gold, transparent. . . . And in the mist of the heavenly
light, I was ashamed, stinking.
—Just as it should be!—affirmed the master—Keep going! Or, is
that the end [of your dream]?
No, my little father, my lord. When once again . . . we were
together . . . before our great father Saint Francis, he took another
look at us . . . , once at you, once at me, for a long while. With
his eyes that saw everything in the heavens, I don’t know to what
depths he understood us, joining night and day, memory and obliv-
ion. Then he said, “Whatever the angels had to do with you is done.
Now, Lick each other! Slowly, for a long time.”
—José María Arguedas, El sueño del pongo
About the Series
Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations is a critical series.
It aims to explore the emergence and consequences of concepts used
to define “Latin America” while at the same time exploring the broad inter-
play of political, economic, and cultural practices that have shaped Latin
American worlds. Latin America, at the crossroads of competing imperial
designs and local responses, has been construed as a geocultural and geo-
political entity since the nineteenth century. This series provides a start-
ing point to redefine Latin America as a configuration of political, linguistic,
cultural, and economic intersections that demands a continuous reappraisal
of the role of the Americas in history, and of the ongoing process of glob-
alization and the relocation of people and cultures that have characterized
Latin America’s experience. Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires,
Nations is a forum that confronts established geocultural constructions, re-
thinks area studies and disciplinary boundaries, assesses convictions of the
academy and of public policy, and correspondingly demands that the prac-
tices through which we produce knowledge and understanding about and
from Latin America be subject to rigorous and critical scrutiny.
Gonzalo Lamana’s Domination without Dominance: Inca-Spanish En-
counters in Early Colonial Peru is a historical and theoretical tour de force.
Theoretically, it questions basic historiographic assumptions. By doing his-
tory in this way, he is also able to question the shortcoming of current theo-
retical debates in the social sciences and the humanities.
A careful, painstaking, and attentive reading of the moving “borders”
between Incas and Spaniards in the first two decades of the Spanish invasion
of Tawantinsuyu, Lamana’s book brings forward the disparity of accounts,
then and now, of one of the historical and foundational encounters of the
modern/colonial world. Lamana is not just making a claim: he shows how
the ideology of writing built on the superiority of Latin alphabet supported
an entire theological structure of knowledge that served the Spaniards well
(and later on the British and French imperial designs) in devaluing and bring-
ing down Inca’s ways of knowing and Indigenous humanity. Epistemology
and ontology worked hand in hand to build the foundations of epistemic
and ontological racism in which we are still living today.
Walking from the past to the present is one of Lamana’s main concerns.
Casting a wide eye through the spatial histories of imperial expansion and
modern/colonial encounters, he erodes the foundations of the ways of
knowing we take for granted in the humanities and the social sciences—
ways of knowing that are—willingly or not—complicitous with imperial de-
signs. Lamana realizes, at the end of his journey, that he was doing precisely
what Quechuas and Aymaras did in the first two decades of the encoun-
ter; and what Waman Puma de Ayala articulated in his decolonial political
philosophy, toward the end of the century. Lamana enrolls himself in the
genealogy that nowadays we find in the works of the Chicana intellectual
and activist Gloria Anzaldúa; the Afro-American radical sociologist W. E. B.
Dubois or the Afro-Caribbean critical theorist Frantz Fanon. “As it is clear,
the ultimate claim of both sixteenth-century and current, neocolonial proj-
ects is that Western subjects know reality as it is while their Others do not,”
Lamana states in the introduction. And he adds, “if rationality is the way
in which a Western subject finds convenient to imagine himself, Christian
rationality is the way in which a sixteenth-century Spanish subject found it
convenient to imagine himself (gender intended in both cases). Christianity
and Science guarantee, in each case, the self-convincing privilege of operat-
ing upon the real.”
viii about the series
Contents
about the series vii
acknowledgments xi
introduction
Situated Interventions: Colonial Imprints, Decolonial Moves 1
1. Beyond Exotization and Likeness:
Alterity and the Production of Sense in a Colonial Encounter 27
2. Christian Realism and Magicality during Atahualpa’s Imprisonment 65
3. Why Betting a Barrel of Preserves Can Be a Bad Thing To Do:
Civilizing Deeds and Snags 97
4. Illusions of Mastery: Manco Inca’s War and the Colonial Normal 125
5. The Emergence of a New Mestizo Consciousness:
An Unthinkable Inca 159
6. Power as Moves: A Mid-1540s Repertoire of Flipping the Coin 193
7. “The End” 227
basic political chronology of the spanish conquest 231
notes 233
glossary 249
references 251
index 275
