Inka Bird Idiom: Amazonian Feathers in the Andes

Birds and their feathers played an important role in the Inka empire, providing protection, communication with deities, and an imagined Inka past. Claudia Brosseder's book explores the many meanings that Inkas attached to these diverse fowl, revealing the deep intellectual ties between the Amazon, mountain forests, and Andean highlands.

Format: Hardback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 12 September 2023
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Birds and their feathers played a significant role in the Inka empire, from majestic Amazonian macaws and highland Andean hawks to tiny colorful tanagers and tall flamingos. Claudia Brosseder explores the various meanings that the Inkas attached to these diverse fowl across the Amazon, eastern Andean foothills, and highlands. She demonstrates how birds and feathers shaped Inka politics, launched wars, and initiated peace. Feathers provided protection against unpredictable enemies, facilitated communication with deities, and brought an imagined Inka past into the political present.

Richly textured contexts of feathered objects recovered from Late Horizon archaeological records and from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts written by Spanish interlocutors offer new insights into Inka visions of interspecies relationships, an Inka ontology, and Inka views of the human's place in their ecology. Inka Bird Idiom invites a reconsideration of the deep intellectual ties that connected the Amazon, mountain forests, and Andean highlands with the Pacific coast.

Weight: 1030g
Dimension: 211 x 212 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780822947592