me: >> Didn't the Incas also conquer other peoples? Louis P writes: > I really love the way that Jim asks "gotcha" questions. Really.
According to one web definition, that to say "gotcha" means to "indicate understanding or to signal the fact of having caught or defeated another." So a "gotcha question" would be an indication of its recipient being caught or defeated, since it's a question that is intended to be unanswerable by him (or her). I don't know why Louis thinks my question was a "gotcha" one. In fact, when I wrote it, I assumed he had an answer. After all, he's got the whole wide web in his hands for sources. How does Louis know that I asked a "gotcha question," i.e., a question asked in an antagonistic way to catch or defeat him? that is, how does he know my _intention_? does he have ESP? or is it a matter of arrogance or defensiveness? or something else I haven't thought of? Alas, I cannot know the answer, since I can't read minds. Whether or not it's a "gotcha," it's a _relevant_ question. Some people tell the story of the European conquest of most of the world as a simple morality play, in which perfidious Albion and other Europe-based empires conquer the good and innocent people of the rest of the world. I doubt that Louis believes in that simplistic story (and his passage on the Incas that I quoted below suggests that I'm right in this judgment), but that vision is suggested by his logical leap from "If, for example, the Incas had access to horses rather than the llama, they might have become major world powers" [summarizing Diamond's view in an excessively small nutshell] to saying that "the net effect of Diamond's grand narrative is to relieve the privileged men and women of the imperialist societies of any sense of responsibility for the suffering of the system's victims." That is, a geographical explanation of a phenomenon (the Spanish conquest of the Incas) is seen as a moral whitewash for it. (Maybe I'm weird, but I always have a hard time understanding why so many people jump to assert that a social-scientific explanation is an apology, to leap from an (alleged) fact to a value-judgment.) Were the Incas mere "victims," as in the one-dimensional story of European immorality sketched above? or is the world more complex than that? Rejecting the aforementioned one-dimensional story, Louis answers: > Yes, there was an Incan empire after a fashion: > ... Inca civilization was much more like that of the Spanish invaders. It > had a ruling class, a state, and an army. ... > World systems theorists have adopted the term "tributary" to describe the > mode of production in Inca civilization and others like it. It refers to the > need to pay "tribute" to the ruling classes. The use of this word is a bid > for a more general way of describing such societies instead of feudalism, > which has European [and Japanese --JD] connotations.[*] ... The terminology > should interest us less than the underlying historical reality. That reality > was that the Incan empire had more in common socially and economically with > European or Asian advanced societies of the 1400s than it did with, for > example, the Indians of the Great Plains. > Anthropologist John Murra's [my old prof! -- JD] article in the Peru Reader > titled "Cloth, Textile, and the Inca Empire" sets down the exact nature of > the tributary glue that held this civilization together. Subjects of the > Incas had to spend a portion of their year weaving fine cloth out of cotton. > The imperial army wore the clothing and when it conquered a new tribe, they > presented the victims with a new wardrobe! This helped to cement them > socially and soften the blow of defeat.[**] > Other tributary forms of labor included farming, soldiering, and mining, but > it was spinning and weaving that occupied a central place. ... The Inca state > used coercion to draft spinners, weavers, shepherds, soldiers and farmers > into its vast productive machine. It also made extensive use of census > takers, tax collectors, messengers and clerks. These skilled workers kept > track of what was being produced, who was producing it and how much was owed > in terms of the payee and the payer. Most importantly, there was a > professional army that kept everybody in line.< In sum, the Incas _did_ conquer other peoples, allowing them to collect tribute from them. The answer to my alleged "gotcha question" is thus "yes." But the key thing is that this whole gotcha business is a distraction from my _main_ questions, which I'll re-word and re-frame here: Why did the Inca empire lose to the Spanish one? If it's not geography which put them at a disadvantage, allowing Spanish to conquer the Incas, what was it? Did the Incas have a greater unwillingness to conquer other peoples that was based in their genes? (after all, their "imperial army wore the clothing and when it conquered a new tribe, they presented the victims with a new wardrobe!" I read this as saying that they were nice guys in some way!) Did the Incas have an inherently less expansionist culture than the Spaniards? or was it due to a combination of a bunch of causes? Or what? If I were to try to answer this question, I wouldn't rule out geography as one of the causes, along with the specifics of the Inca mode of production. The weakest explanation is genetics, of course. That's totally bogus. (BTW, David Shenk's _The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong_ is a great debunking of genetic determinism, though flawed by the author's individualistic mind-set.) -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. [*] In the ellipsis: >Jim Blaut argues in "Colonizer's Model of the World" that the terminology is unnecessary. "My view is that Eurocentric historians do not have a copyright on the term 'feudalism' and so it is not only valid but also in a sense just to use this term for the mode of production wherever we observe it, in any continent and any social formation." < Is Samir Amin, who advocates using this term, to be dubbed "Eurocentric"?? In any event, why shouldn't those who study history and society use different terms to describe different modes of production, just in case they might have different "laws of motion"? what honor is attached to being "feudal," so that the Inca empire deserves that term? Both "feudalism" and "tributary mode of production" refer to class societies (i.e., nasty ones). [**] It would be interesting to find out if the gift of the new wardrobe was like what the US Army does for its recruits. Did the Incas require buzz-cut haircuts? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
