The Two Faces of Inca History: Dualism in the Narratives and Cosmology of Ancient Cuzco (The Early Americas: History and Culture, 3) - Hardcover

Yaya, Isabel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9004233857 ISBN 13: 9789004233850

Publisher: Brill, 2012

Synopsis

The historical narratives of the Inca dynasty, known to us through Spanish records, present several discrepancies that scholarship has long attributed to the biases and agendas of colonial actors. Drawing on a redefinition of royal descent and a comparative literary analysis of primary sources, this book restores the pre-Hispanic voices embedded in the chronicles. It identifies two distinctive bodies of Inca oral traditions, each of which encloses a mutually conflicting representation of the past that, considered together, reproduces patterns of Cuzco’s moiety division. Building on this new insight, the author revisits dual representations in the cosmology and ritual calendar of the ruling elite. The result is a fresh contribution to ethnohistorical works that have explored native ways of constructing history.

About this title

About the Author

Isabel Yaya, Ph.D. in History, is a Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her work focuses on the transmission and stabilisation of historical narratives in the Andes under Inca and Spanish rule. In parallel, she investigates Early Modern constructions of ancient Peru materialised in artefact collections and fictional literature. She has published in Ethnohistory, French History and the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research.

Edition details

• Publisher: Brill
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9004233857
• ISBN 13: 9789004233850
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 308