“HACIENDO RELACIÓN DE LAS COSAS TOCANTES A SU GOBIERNO”. THE INCA ORDER IN EARLY COLONIAL DOCUMENTATION (PERU, 1540-1570)

Abstract

During the forty years after the conquest of Peru, the positive allusions on Inca mechanisms and institutions were frequently and with a certain systematicity present in the colonial documents related to indigenous matters; taxation, labor and good government. These information -based on the experience in situ- in hands of clergymen and royal public servants, were dued to ethnographic and informative concerns, later on they became vital in order to propose to emulate the control mechanisms which had allowed the unrestricted obedience of the Andean communities to a regime considered tyrannical, but efficient on a governmental level. At the same time the early chronicle works -written as history and with an apologetic character- reports, memorials, informs acted as official writings at the service of colonialism, as they reaffirmed diachronically the necessity of restitution of a regime that had kept the Indians completely subject and on their highest working level. The objective of this contribution is to analyze this type of text as a general corpus which, on a comparative level, allows to weigh the circulation of a specific knowledge that was used and exploited progressively by clergymen, judges and viceroys, as much to report the bad colonial government as the progressive disappearance of the natives after the arrival of the Spanish armies in 1532.