Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T22:49:38.164Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)