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The Emperor's New Body: Personhood, Ontology and the Inka Sovereign

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2013

Darryl Wilkinson*
Affiliation:
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, New Jersey

Abstract

This article engages with current debates in archaeology with respect to matters of ontological difference — particularly in terms of bodies, personhood and the much-contested category of the individual. Drawing on early Spanish historical accounts of the material and bodily practices through which the Inka sovereign was constituted, I argue that although he was certainly not a Cartesian individual, neither was he a kind of fractal or partible person. Contrary to the growing tendency to see non-Western modes of personhood as highly ‘relational’, the Inka emperor was in my view a bounded and tightly delineated entity, albeit one not contiguous with a biological body. In archaeological theory, a growing divide appears to be emerging between relational and individual species of personhood — with the former often ascribed to non-modern societies, and the latter frequently associated with the modern West. I present a critique of this trend and argue for the need to break beyond such binaries — interpreting the Inka emperor as a form of individual that stood outside a nature/society divide and thus still very much incommensurable with Western ontologies of the person.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2013 

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