| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Catherine Julien. Reading Inca History. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 338. $49.95.

Posed implicitly in the title and mutually dependent, the two major questions asked in this study are: is there such a thing as Inca history, and can it be known to or by us? The answers are affirmative in each case, persuasively so, thanks to new and well-managed scholarship and lucid exposition. 1

In announcing her purpose and method, Catherine Julien compares her work with that of such predecessors as John Howland Rowe, her long-time mentor, and R. Tom Zuidema, whose synchronic approach she generally eschews. She believes that the Inca can be shown to have had a historical consciousness of their own; that this consciousness informed a variety of records left by them; and that a sense of these Inca records can be had through careful comparison and analysis of narratives in Spanish into which they were incorporated. The comparisons between the Spanish texts in question are extensive and come to involve the reader intimately, set out as they are in double columns. Fundamental to the corresponding analysis is the literary notion of genre: that is, sequences of narrative that can be cross-located through presence or absence, chief among them being life-history and military campaigns. These last she relates to Inca models, notably the quipu or knotted-string device that served as writing for the Inca. (The Spaniards spoke of—and burned—whole "libraries" [bibliotecas] of quipus.) . . .

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