Journal Article

Connections and disconnections

Allen, Catherine

2017

Overview

[...]we know that khipus were used to represent things and relationships in powerful ways that facilitated Inka administration of a highly centralized, expansive, oppressive (but not modern) state.1 My point was not to enter into a conversation about khipus, interesting as that may be, but to express reservations about what seems like over-hasty framing of the analysis within the postcolonial critique of representation. “Always-mutual-care” does not convey the inner dynamics of ayllu relationality as an often-brutal process of mutual consumption. [...]in spite of her disclaimer, it’s likely that non-Andeanist readers are left with exactly the idealized impression that de la Cadena wants to deny.2 Reading de la Cadena’s response along with Hornborg’s rejoinder was an ironic experience of partial connections. [...]Earth beings conveys an admirable and provocative message about the importance of learning to converse across radical difference. 1.Note that imperialist expansion was not, in the Inka case, driven by Western modes of objectification. 2.For example, a review of Earth beings by an anthropologist who works outside the Andes includes as its penultimate sentence, “To long for the purity of the prose of Mariano’s in-ayllu (in which there is no separation between event and its narration, signifier and sign) is to long for the impossibility of the perfect, stable translation” (Yates-Doerr 2016: 176).

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Subject: Anthropology / Environmentalism / Ethnicity / Ethnography / Fetishism / Nazi groups / Ontology / Paganism & animism / Postcolonialism / Sociology