The materiality of Inka domination: Landscape, spectacle, memory, and ancestors

Abstract

As Julian Thomas (1996, 1999) has claimed, modern western thought has tended to separate the world of social actions and relations from the world of objects. According to Thomas, since the Enlightenment material culture has been considered an inert or passive aspect in the constitution of social life. This perspective was also adopted in the social sciences. In some sense, the social sciences have analyzed social processes as disconnected from material culture, as if instruments, clothes and the buildings that people use in daily interactions do not participate significantly beyond their existence as functional and external devices of social actions. © 2005 Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York.