Sovereign Bodies: Ancestor Cult andState Legitimacy among the IncasIsabel Yaya

The worship of dead Inca kings, because it aimed at preserving the deceased’s bodily integ-rity, reveals constituent aspects of royal personhood. Underpinning these practices was the conception that the dead’s agency was conveyed through corporeal substances, which there-fore required constant acts of sustenance. This paper examines the bodily practices and material substances that shaped the king’s physical person during his lifetime, as well as after his death. These data show that the royal body was made conspicuous through a series of ritual and symbolic actions devised to display the king’s faculty to infuse vital force to all living creatures under his rule. He thus stood as the source of prosperity for his subjects with which he was engaged in reciprocal obligations of life sustenance. I argue that these “embodied technologies of power” shaped a system of representations that legiti-mated the king’s appropriation of state resources.

Keywords: Incas; Sacred Kingship; Legitimacy; Ancestor Cult; Dynastic History

History to the Sakalava, like genealogy, is not merely an intellectual tool. It confers power,authority, legitimacy; it substantiates other important symbols. It represents ideal poli-tico-religious relations, even as it validates existing ones. Nor are the Sakalava uniquein their views concerning the power of history. (Feeley-Harnik 1978, 403)

Introduction

Thus far, scholarship has primarily discussed the political and economic apparatus ofthe Inca state system through a functionalist approach that aimed, on one hand, todefine the form of sovereignty it sustained and, on the other, to account for its

Correspondence to: Isabel Yaya, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, Paris, France. Email: isabel.yaya@college-de-france.fr

History and Anthropology, 2015Vol. 26, No. 5, 639–660, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2015.1055330

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

viability. Along these lines, many works have emphasized judiciously the combinedefficacy of the redistributive economy, the decimal administration, elite co-optationthrough the granting of prestige goods, and the flexibility of imperial controlranging from local autonomy to coercive politics. Such an infrastructural focus,however, has largely overlooked the issue of legitimacy, that is, the system of rep-resentations and material practices whereby the Inca state organization vindicatedits supreme authority to appropriate resources for the benefit of its ruling elite.This question is all the more fundamental that the king was said to be the primaryrecipient of the imperial labour tribute and the central personage upon whichrested the politico-religious ideology of Tawantinsuyu, the “empire of the fourparts”. It was he who received one-third of the agrarian production extracted fromalienated lands divided universally between royal service, state religion and local sub-sistence. It was he who took as secondary wives some of the most outstanding chosenwomen (aklla) and bestowed the others to allies and ancestors of his choosing; hewho was the beneficiary of the qhapaq hucha ritual when grand offerings, includinghuman victims, converged from all over the realm to the royal centre of Cuzcowith the stated aim to renew the king’s health and fertility. So what exceptional qual-ities were imputed to the Inca sovereign that warranted his precedence over theempire’s goods and subjects?In this paper, I propose an inquiry into the indigenous conceptions and practices

that legitimized the king’s prerogative over state resources and that furthermore under-pinned imperial expansion. In doing so, I elaborate on R. T. Zuidema’s and PeterGose’s separate proposals that the model of sacred kingship most aptly describes thepolitical regime of Tawantinsuyu. While the former highlighted the ruler’s ritualresponsibility towards collective prosperity (Zuidema 1989), the later identified oracu-lar possession and the control over water as technologies of power that upheld the ideo-logical foundations of sacred kingship in which political authority rests upon themaintenance of culturally specific understandings of growth and fertility (Gose 1993,1996). More recently, a remarkable contribution by Ramírez (2005) brought to thefore the question of Inca legitimacy through the comparative framework of local-level lordship in the Andes. The author contends that political authority in Tawantin-suyu proceeded from an “ideological superstructure” investing divinity to the king,which entitled him to intercede with the gods on behalf of his people. Prosperity inthe realm was the material evidence of his beneficial mediation in return of whichhis subjects supported his needs. I wish to expand on these arguments, but proposean alternative approach by investigating the Inca royal institution in its most pragmaticexpressions. More specifically, I shall examine the material practices that imparted aconcrete existence and thereby, a social efficacy, to the king’s extraordinaryindividuality.The point of entry for this demonstration will be the study of the symbolic and ritual

actions that made up the worship of dead Inca rulers. These post-mortem practices,because they aimed at preserving the kings’ bodily integrity through regenerativeacts, everyday care and proscriptions, reveal constituent aspects of royal personhood.They involved a great number of attendants who nourished and entertained the

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deceased daily, occasionally escorting them to leisure resorts and public festivals. Deadkings also played an active role in current affairs by means of oracular consultations.Each had several embodiments of his person dispersed throughout the realm and a per-sonal “double” composed of corporeal relics that benefited from its own retainers andland resources. This effigy, also called wawqe (brother), acted as the ruler’s stand-in onthe battlefield and on diplomatic missions. In this way, the dead’s agency was necess-arily conveyed through corporeal substances, which required constant acts of suste-nance. Only monarchs and some of their most commendable kin received thistreatment, and what set apart these exceptional individuals from ordinary people layvested in their body. To understand how and why royal corporeality was unique, Iwill discuss the gestures, proscriptions, material substances and bodily practices thatshaped the king’s physical person during his lifetime, as well as after his death.These data reveal the successive techniques of ancestralization to which his body wassubjected, starting at his installation and ending with his second funeral, one yearafter death. They show that the royal body was made conspicuous through a seriesof ritual and symbolic actions devised to display the king’s faculty to infuse vitalforce to all living creatures under his rule and protection. Through this ongoing pro-cedure, he stood as the source of prosperity for his subjects with which he was engagedin reciprocal obligations of life sustenance. I argue that these “embodied technologiesof power”1 shaped a system of representations that legitimated the king’s appropriationof wealth, women and human offerings.My study restricts its enquiry to the historically specific context of Inca Cuzco around

the time of the Spanish invasion. The written sources alone cannot provide us with a dia-chronic perspective on mortuary practices or on the transformation of the kingshipoffice, which call for a separate study. Throughout the argument, I mobilize a varietyof historical sources: chronicles of Inca history compiled in Castellan from indigenousoral traditions and dynastic narratives, second-hand descriptions of festivals held inthe royal centre of Cuzco, and first-hand testimonies of conquistadors who interactedwith Atahualpa—the victorious contender to Inca kingship at the time of the Iberianinvasion. It has long been emphasized that these colonial reports pose multiple historio-graphic problems not least because their respective renderings of royal succession differ,sometimes extensively, from one another. These disparities, however, were not exclu-sively outcomes of post-Conquest accommodations. Prior to being transcribed,Andean historical traditions had not been so much fixed records of past events as pro-ducts of the sociological framework in which they circulated. As such, they had beenliable to different variables including politics, speech format, audience composition, indi-vidual memory or narrative skills, which permeated written sources to varying degrees.The comparative textual analyses of their formal structures reveal evidence of competinginterests, discreet narrative genres and divergent modes of temporality that predatedcolonization (Niles 1999; Julien 2000; Yaya 2013). My argument sets in opposition thedepiction of Inca rulers in dynastic narratives with the descriptive data that Spaniards col-lected on the kingship office and its ritual obligations. This examination reveals conflict-ing pictures of royal praxis. In the first, the king is an active field agent of state prosperity,whereas in the second, he is a reclusive and passive object of ritual actions. As we shall see,

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neither of these descriptions is a misreport. They reflect separate aspects of the ancestra-lization process that affected the king’s body.

The ayllu: A Politico-Religious System

By the time Cuzco fell into Spanish hands in 1533, Andean society was organized intoancestor-focused corporate groups called ayllu whose members shared economic andritual obligations. Although historical records occasionally describe these groupings asunilineal units, evidence indicates that ayllu affiliation was not strictly predicted ondescent. Social conduct, including political support and cultic practice, would haveequally determined membership (Spalding 1984, 28–30; Salomon 1991, 21–23). Forits constituents, ancestry reckoning provided commonly held resources, usually landand water supply attributed to the forebear, as well as a frame of reference forranking according to distance from the apical founder (Isbell 1997, 98–99; Yaya2013). This stratification organized the subdivision of resources into nested clustersof varying sizes, also called ayllus, which formed a system of recursive segmentaryunits (Gose 1993) with a theoretical capacity for further inclusion and thus expansion.To this hierarchy of resource units corresponded a class structure of officials exemptfrom tribute who oversaw communal work, access to resources and ritual duties intheir respective section. Heading this executive elite was a paramount lord (kuraka)who assumed this position either by virtue of having descended from the ayllu forebearor by means of ancestral nomination involving ritual observance and divination. Owingto this supreme title, he enjoyed a number of privileges, including polygyny, ownershipof insignia of power and cult attendance of the founding ancestor (Gose 2008, 15–16).At the time of the European invasion, sovereignty in the Andes derived from this poli-tico-religious system focused on ancestor worship of which the cult of mummifiedforebears was one, pervasive, manifestation.2

The abiding bound that connected ayllu founders with their human congregationwas encapsulated in the notion of kamay, the act of infusing living creatures withvital energy (Salomon 1991, 16). In the Quechua traditions of the early colonialperiod, the lexeme kama- and its derivatives characterized the transfer of a vivifyingenergy from a powerful entity to a recipient that became animated by this life-sustaining strength (Taylor 1974). Each local category of animals and plants had itsown source of vital force in the form of a prototype, often a constellation (Polo deOndegardo [1559] 1916, 3–5; Cobo [1653] 1964, 159–160). In this universe, ayllufounders were the particular animating essence, or kamaq, of their self-defineddescent. Following the ayllu’s recursive principles, these extraordinary entities couldalso be kamaq to a broader array of living creatures. The most powerful amongthem could theoretically incorporate multiple prototypes and instil their vital forceto every being under their rule, animals as well as plants, so they may thrive andkeep free from ailment. In this way, they guaranteed the prosperity and health oftheir human progeny as well as the maturation of crops and the fertility of animalsthat were united together by a common link to the same paramount kamaq. This ani-mating capacity was also a fluctuating vital principle that could wither at its source and

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therefore imperil the vigour of all living beings associated with it. Critical to ensuring itscontinuous flow was the human responsibility of feeding ancestors, for commensalityand co-residence were, and are still, constitutive of kin relations in the Andes (Man-nheim and Salas Carreño 2015, 60–64). Misfortunes and diseases were seen as conse-quences of neglecting to feed ancestors who became weakened and upset by thiscarelessness. Conversely, an ayllu’s prosperity was the ostentatious sign of its life-sus-taining kamaq’s vitality, which is why the semantic field of kama- extends to notions ofauthority and commandment.Historical sources describe two major forms of ancestral embodiments in the Andes.

First, kamaq forebears manifested themselves in the natural features of the landscape,most notably in rock formations and carved stones that oral traditions often identifiedwith petrified beings (Duviols 1978, 1979; Salomon 1998; Dean 2010). A fundamentalcorrelate of this form of ancestral materiality was that kamaq beings owned as well adivisible corporeality whose embodiments hosted their animating energy, which iswhy they manifested themselves in landscape features that had been in contact withtheir body. Oral traditions associated these locations, designated as wak’a in colonialdocuments, with the deeds and significant events in the life story of ancestors, suchas the site of their emergence on earth, the scene of their victory against a potentrival, or their ultimate petrifaction into a peculiar landform. This multiplicity of ances-tral manifestations in the landscape was also united through bonds of affinity and con-sanguinity relayed in oral traditions. As Frank Salomon wrote:

There existed a tendency to interpret the focalized members of ego’s own social structure,and sacralized features of landscape or even cosmos, as nodes in a nested set of genealo-gically patterned and sometimes more broadly kin-like relationships extending in prin-ciple to the whole of the known world. (1995, 323)

In this way, memory and topography were interconnected and formed the sharedhistory of local ayllus (Dean 2010, 35–40). Such a process of embedding history inspace, akin to the Art of Memory, remains in various ways a current practice ofmany Andean communities (Molinié 1985; Allen 1993–94; Abercrombie 1998).Mummified corpses of ayllu founders were a second formof ancestral substantiality in

the Andes, but while topographical embodiments of kamaq entities were locallyanchored and fixed, preserved bodies were less stable forms of ancestral materiality.Drawing on the separate works of Duviols (1978) and Allen (1982), Salomon (1998)reminds us that Andean conceptions of personhood have long borrowed a vegetativemetaphor stressing corporeal changes from soft, wet, fleshy and dynamic beings todry, slow-changing and static ones. Post-mortem desiccation was only one aspect ofthis continuum, the most permanent embodiment being landmarks. Arguably, whatSpanish conquerors identified as a “universal” cult of the dead in the Andes was asingle facet of a transformational scheme towards perennial, life-sustaining ancestrality.As we shall now see, analysis of the material practices whereby the Inca royal body wasproduced substantiates this claim. It reveals that the processual operation throughwhichkings acquired life-sustaining force beganwell before his biological death. For the sake ofthe argument, I shall begin by discussing the cult of dead rulers.

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Corpse Politics

Chronicler Bernabé Cobo indicates that kin only were involved in the cult maintenanceof dead kings:

Not all of the living generally worshipped all of the dead bodies. Not even all of theirrelatives worshiped them. The dead were worshiped only by those who descendedfrom them in a direct line. Therefore, they took great care to worship their father,grandfather, and great-grandfather, and so on as far back as their information reached.But they were not concerned with the brother of their father, nor with the brotherof their grandfather, nor with anyone who had died without leaving descendants.([1653] 1990, 42)

Hence, the number of mummified Inca kings equalled that of the noble ayllus esti-mated to have been between ten and twelve, their exact number being still debated.3

Each noble ayllu considered itself as descending from one of the kings who hadruled since the foundation of the dynasty by Manco Capac. It was he who, accordingto royal narratives, settled more or less belligerently among the natives of the CuzcoValley following a long migration in search of fertile lands. He and his successorsclaimed to be sons of the Sun under whose aegis they gradually subdued rivalnations. Altogether, the different descent groups they initiated formed the royal clanor qhapaq ayllu (rich/potent ayllu), which had the Sun as its apical ancestor. Openstrife and armed conflicts were legion between these royal houses whose members rou-tinely competed against each other to access positions of authority. The death of a rulerin particular and the subsequent opening of the royal succession brought abouttroubled times during which the noble ayllus secured or undid alliances in attemptsto have their favourite invested with the highest authority. The stakes were highsince the newly appointed king had the prerogative to redistribute land resources forthe sustenance of every ayllu founders and their respective descent. Indeed, deadkings enjoyed a number of individual resting places in the Inca heartland. Eachowned a palace in Cuzco, occupied an individual sanctuary in the temple of the Sun(Qurikancha) and benefited from separate retreats in estates located for the mostpart in the Vilcanota-Urubamba Valley. Studies of the legal documents relative tothese land resources reveal that they were mainly exploited for farming (maize,tubers, ají), herding, and the extraction of raw materials used in construction and man-ufacturing (Rostworowski 1962; Niles 1993; Rowe 1997). The commodities generatedfrom royal estates fed the dead and members of his ayllu, provided the materials for hisattire and insignias, but also supplied the generous feasts that his descendants organizedin his name. Such a display of opulence and exertion of care prompted an early Spanishobserver, Pedro Pizarro, to write that “the greater part of the people, treasures, expensesand vices were under the control of the dead” ([1571] 1921, 203).On royal estates, stratified groups of retainers carried out domestic services, which

included administrative duties, daily care of the dead, farming, weaving, brewing ofmaize beer (aqha), as well as food preparation. The noblest responsibilities lay in thehands of yanakuna (foreign auxiliaries exempt from tribute) and mamakuna (high-status chosen women) while labour tasks were left primarily to the mitmaq (resettled

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communities). Niles (1993, 152–153) has put forward ample historical evidence thatyanakuna and mitmaq estate groups originated from the nations annexed by theking in his lifetime. Like the dead’s kin, they were exclusively attached to a specifichouse. Moreover, contrary to what the Spaniards claimed, yanakuna were not servilegroups per se. Some were attested sons of provincial headmen (kurakas) while manyheld central positions in the imperial administration. They were rewarded for theirgood services with aklla wives that the king only could grant and exceptionally receivedthe status of “Incas by privilege” (Villar Córdova 1966; Rostworowski 1973, 260–263).In sum, the production unit and cult attendants that busied themselves around thedead king consisted of his direct descent and of outsiders to the royal clan withwhom he had contracted various degrees of alliance. To complete this localizedreplica of the deceased’s political network, the ancestral effigies of the nations he hadsubjugated were held permanently beside the royal mummy (Polo de Ondegardo1990, 85–86). In this way, the social geography of the Cuzco region was composedof dispatched stratified political entities, spatially anchored around individual ancestorsand functioning as economic units. They surrounded the royal centre where the rulingking resided for the duration of his reign.Aside from providing for the dead and his descendants’ private maintenance, the

commodities produced on royal estates also sustained both the lavish festivities theroyal mummy was expected to put on for his guests and the rituals his noble ayllu offi-ciated regularly. Kings, dead or alive, hosted Inca and foreign lords—who may equallybe deceased—with their retinue of officials and attendants. These visitors came todiscuss politics, to request armed support or to strengthen their alliance through mar-riage. While in audience, an officiant posted at the dead’s side would interpret andexpose his decisions (Pizarro [1571] 1978, 52–54).Besides these private activities, dead kings participated collectively in a number of

yearly rituals. Pedro Pizarro witnessed one such occasion. He recounts that royalcorpses were first housed in their respective altars in Qurikancha where they werecared for by their own attendants and flanked with the ancestral effigies of thenations they had subdued. They were then transported for several consecutive daysfromQurikancha to the main plaza where they were placed “in line, each one accordingto his degree of seniority” to be fed (Pizarro [1571] 1978, 89). Dead kings also invari-ably attended the opening festival of harvest and the purification ritual of Sitwa. Theformer took place in April when, every morning for eight days, the royal mummies,several other ancestral effigies and the living ruler were placed beneath separatefeather canopies in the open square of Limaqpampa outside Cuzco. From dawn todusk, the living sang and burnt offerings to the gods on a large pyre, before theearth was finally broken to initiate the harvest (Segovia [1553] 1916, 81–83). As forSitwa, it was celebrated at a most dangerous time of the year for the vitality of allliving beings. It took place between August and September, when the food reserveswere draining away, altitude pasturelands were depleted and illnesses threatened tospread (Guaman Poma de Ayala [1613] 1980, 227). To evict the lurking evils, armedsquadrons ran out of the city towards exhorting illnesses and misfortunes to departfrom the land before the residents went bathing and everyone including the king, his

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principal spouse, the mummified ancestors and main gods were “warmed” with amaize mush (sanku) that was rubbed against their face. This procedure insured thattheir vitality continued to flow, keeping them safe from illnesses (Molina [1575]1989, 48–49).Finally, dead kings attended the celebrations in honour of the perpetuation of king-

ship, which included the initiation ritual of young males (warachiku), royal investitureand second funerals (purukaya) (Cieza de León [1554] 1996, 29; Molina [1575] 1989,100). On these occasions, specialists affiliated to each noble ayllu recited consecutivelythe epic chants recounting the deceased’s individual deeds. The novices and the newlyappointed king were then summoned to follow their ancestors’ exemplary lives.Altogether, these illustrious narratives promulgated the image of a prosperous and per-ennial dynasty in which ongoing sovereignty was innately linked to the ritual commem-oration of past achievements. In the other ritual contexts, dead kings appeared asresources for the vital energy of their living descent and were associated with the main-tenance of their productivity. It was by virtue of their animating power upon men, theiryields and livestock that they were reinvigorated periodically and called upon to infusetheir life-sustaining force. This relationship uniting founding ancestors with bountifulfertility and agriculture is extensively documented in the Andes. Ayllu forebears, in theform of either mummy bundles or stone relics, widely received propitiatory offeringswhen planting and harvesting because they were believed to regulate the agrariancycle, to protect cultivated lands and to rule over water supplies. They were themallki of their descent, a term which otherwise referred to a seedling, a sapling forplanting or fruit trees (Duviols 1978; Gose 1996, 404–408). In a classic relationshipthat Bloch and Parry (1982, 7–9) defined in anthropological terms, the dead’s regen-erative power in the Andes was formulated and displayed through a vegetativemetaphor.

The Inca Sacred Kingship

But death was not the defining event that invested the king with this life-sustainingfaculty. I argue that the proscriptions, bodily practices and ritual actions that madeup the Inca royal protocol were devised to establish that the living ruler was thekamaq and ultimate source of the life force sustaining his people. The acquisition ofthis kamaq power and the physical transformation it operated on the monarch’sbody began at the time of investiture. In accordance with the pervasive principle oflegitimacy in the Andes, the Inca king ruled by virtue of having descended from thefounder of the dynasty through either filiation or divine sanction. Following a strictfast and the successful completion of a sacrifice to the divine ancestor of the qhapaqayllu, the new ruler received the official title of “unique son of the Sun” (sapa intipchurin) (Sarmiento de Gamboa [1572] 1988, 116–118, 148–149). Divine endorsementconsecrated the newly appointed ruler as the individual who was genealogically closestto the royal ayllu’s kamaq and the direct heir of his vital force as Manco Capac hadbeen. In other words, the successor became the source of prosperity of his metaphoricaldescent and the supreme authority at the head of all royal ayllus. From thereon, his

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newly acquired ancestor status affected concretely his body, which became divisibleinto an infinity of replicas.First, a double of his person was fashioned from his nail clippings and hair mixed

with earthly matter. This aggregate was the receptacle of the king’s vital energy andwas known as his “brother” (wawqi). It was sheltered from view and ministered bydesignated retainers that fed him from the yields of croplands allocated to its personalsustenance (Betanzos [1551] 1987, 220; Polo de Ondegardo [1559] 1916, 2, 8; Sar-miento de Gamboa [1572] 1988, 63, 65, 127; Cobo [1653] 1964, 162–163). Carriedon a litter, the wawqi supplanted the king on diplomatic visits and on the battlefields.Atahualpa is said to have sent this effigy to his captains on campaign two months afterhis investiture,

so that the peoples of the subjugated provinces could render obedience to that statue inplace of his person. Thus this statue was carried and given to the captains, who received itand were very pleased with it. They performed many great sacrifices and served andrespected this statue as if the very person of Atahualpa were there. (Betanzos [1551]1996, 205)

This practice was commonplace among the Incas. The visitador Cristóbal de Albornoz,who claimed to have discovered many royal effigies in the Huamanga province, wrotethat “when the Incas conquered new territories they left certain nail clippings of theirs,or a piece of their clothing or weapon, or a falcon wing” ([1582] 1989, 165). HuaynaCapac is said to have had many bultos in different towns (Jerez [1534] 1853, 334). Latechroniclers also describe other kingly embodiments in the shapes of “statues”, “images”and “portraits”made of different materials (Cieza de León [1554] 1996, 29; Polo [1559]1916, 10; Acosta [1590] 1940, 363, 375). As Dean (2006) points out, these objects werenot figurative representations of the ruler, but rather “presentational forms” of his lifeforce and substance. Likewise, a particular manifestation of the solar deity had enclosedwithin it the personal sheddings of all deceased kings (Mateos [c. 1600] 1944, 8; Cobo[1653] 1964, 106). Being an incarnation of the royal clan’s apical ancestor, it embodiedtheir accumulated kamaq through their body fragments.

Moreover, access to the living king’s physical self was restricted in the same waymummified ancestors and other wak’as were out of bounds to commoners. Hence,he rarely granted an audience in person except to distinguished guests. If a visitorwas conceded a meeting, he was introduced barefooted to the Inca and was made tocarry a burden on his shoulders that ensured that he remained bent over (Cieza deLeón [1554] 1996, 35–36; Pizarro [1571] 1978, 37). With his back turned to theking, he began by paying his respects with a gesture of reverence calledmucha tradition-ally directed to ancestors. During the consultation that ensued, the king was concealedbehind a veil held bymamakuna and remained mute, his head lowered, while a mouth-piece expounded his words (Cieza de León [1554] 1996, 34–36). This protocol isunequivocally described, without being identified per se, in the records of the firstinteractions between Atahualpa and the conquistadors, which Lamana (2008, 49–53)cleverly discussed (Jerez [1534] 1853, 331; Mena [1534] 1937, 84; Estete [1535]1924, 292; Pizarro [1571] 1978, 32–33).

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In addition to the protocol that applied to visitors, the king’s body was attended asthat of an ancestral-like entity. He never set foot on the ground and was transportedeverywhere on a litter concealed behind a veil (Pizarro [1571] 1978, 67). Only the vir-ginal chosen women could attend his needs as “no men (indios) dared standing close tohim” (Mena [1534] 1937, 83). The sight of and the contact with his body were indeedbelieved to affect the orderly course of nature, causing earthquakes if it touched groundand disconcerting the masses that happened to catch a glimpse of him. Cieza providesan extravagant illustration of these effects, telling that the slightest glance at the kingparading on an open litter prompted commoners to “raise such a great roar that itmade the birds fall down from above” ([1554] 1996, 34). Likewise, everything thatcame into contact with the king’s body—his clothes, the mats on which he ate, the left-overs of his meals—were stored away to be ritually burnt for they would have beenaffected by his vital force. “All that was touched by the lords, who were sons of theSun, must be burnt, made into ashes and thrown into the air, for no one must beallowed to touch it” (Pizarro [1571] 1921, 225). For this reason, Atahualpa had beeninfuriated to learn that the conquistadors had touched the mats on which his fatherhad slept and threatened to punish them for the affront (Pizarro [1571] 1921, 33).Pedro Pizarro also reports an anecdote about Huayna Capac suggesting that the food

Inca kings ingested fed all the living beings they animated, which is why Huayna Capaccould eat without ever being replete and drink without ever being inebriated.

They say that he was wont to drink more than three Indians together, but that they neversaw him drunk, and that, when his captains and chiefs Indians asked him how, thoughdrinking so much, he never got intoxicated, they said that he replied that he drank forthe poor of whom he supported many.4 (Pizarro [1571] 1921, 198–99)

Finally, there is evidence that the important ritual of qhapaq hucha was dedicated pri-marily to the invigoration of the king’s life-sustaining force, which required to be reg-ularly revitalized like that of any ancestral-like entity. The name for this imperial-scalecelebration broadly meant “ritual obligation of qhapaq significance” (Taylor 1999,xxvi–xxvii, 283 n. 11). Harrison (1993) points out that early colonial sources employhucha to describe the liability resulting from individual wrong against the socialorder. The word assumed an initial transgression or a discord that required atonement.Accordingly, qhapaq hucha was performed periodically as well as in times of crisis, andmore specifically, when the ruler’s kamaq faculty required consecration or was deplet-ing, that is, at his investiture, if he was sick, had died, following a great victory, or whennatural disasters and pestilences had struck (Betanzos [1551] 1987, 141–143; Cieza deLeón [1554] 1996, 87–89; Sarmiento de Gamboa [1572] 1988, 59; Molina [1575] 1989,116–126; Guaman Poma de Ayala [1613] 1980, 247 [249], 262 [264]; Hernández Prín-cipe [1621] 1923). The offerings and human sacrifices carried out throughout Tawan-tinsuyu on qhapaq hucha (re)established the reciprocal obligations between the kingand the nations under his lordship in order to restore the integrity of the monarch’sbody and avoid peril upon the kingdom. It consisted first in the extraordinary conflu-ence to Cuzco of imperial goods and ritual victims, among which were young childrenselected from the local elite for their physical perfection. After several days of drinking

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and feasting, the libations were redistributed according to the Inca’s will to the localancestors. High-status wak’as and those that had provided the ruling power with out-standing support received the most prestigious offerings in the form of unblemishedchildren. The king both received libations as tokens of allegiance, which revitalizedhis kamaq potency, and dispensed through them his renewed life-sustaining force tohis extended relations. By means of this reciprocal exchange, qhapaq hucha clearlymanifested the assimilation of the king’s wellness with the prosperity of his people.In this regard, it is significant that it was the only Inca ritual involving the sacrificesof human victims whose vitality and purity were reckoned to restore the ruler’s strengthand, as a result of redistribution to the empire’s wak’as, the welfare of the entirekingdom.5

The Inca king’s ritual responsibility towards his subjects proceeded from pre-exist-ing conceptions of rulership in the Andes that invested ayllu paramount lords withkamaq ancestral qualities. Like him, kurakas guaranteed the prosperity of their aylluby means of ritual observances and received in return acts of devotion such as themucha reverence, transportation on litters and ancestral insignia (Martínez Cereceda1995, 198–201, 204–205; Ramírez 2005, 135–137). Accordingly, the worship of deadInca rulers was not qualitatively different from the post-mortem treatment of localheadmen whose corpses were preserved and venerated, nor was the protocol thatapplied to their living person. The difference was merely in degree. As the empiregrew, the symbolic and ritual practices directed to the Inca kings’ bodies wouldhave assumed ostentatious demonstrations proportionate to the extent of theirdomain. Similarly, their treatment as apical kamaq of Tawantinsuyu did notexclude the worship of other ancestralized figures throughout the realm. Historicalsources report that the central power often allowed and sometimes participated inthe perpetuation of local cults provided that the Sun—the Inca divine ancestor—and the king received the ritual considerations of paramount entities. Certainmothers and wives of Inca rulers, as well as the eldest son of King Pachacuti Yupan-qui, also had their corpses preserved and ministered, but their involvement in cuzque-ñan ritual life was more restricted (Betanzos [1551] 1987, 189; Molina [1575] 1989,118; Murúa [1590–1602] 2001, 114; Garcilaso [1609] 1959, 273; Cobo [1653] 1964,170). These ancestral figures coexisted as kamaq of their descent group, their lifestories were perpetuated and they retained important political authority. The Incaking, however, as the supreme embodiment of the vital energy animating all ayllusunder his rule, supervised them all. The protocol applying to the public treatmentof his person consecrated him conspicuously as the living kamaq ancestor of hisayllu, apathetic to the human eye but vector of life-sustaining energy. He held a divis-ible, transportable body that contained the entirety of the relations composing thedescent he animated. Following the ayllu’s recursive principles of organization, hewas the paramount kamaq being of all ayllu units under his rule, composed asmuch of the royal clan as of “the poor” he nourished when feeding himself. TheInca’s ancestralization during lifetime therefore required that his subjects, conceivedas his descent, maintained reciprocal relations of sustenance with him by providinghis food and by visiting regularly the royal centre to establish co-presence with the

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source of their vital energy. Moreover, the integrity of the king’s body was preservedthrough periodic acts of purification and protection from physical corruption such aswar injury or contact with ordinary men and women. For these reasons, his wawqewas usually his stand-in at war and virginal akllas exclusively attended his needs.Arguably, these provisions for the bodily preservation of kings were an ideal protocolthat individual actors may have chosen to accommodate, especially with respect toinvolvement on the battlefields. Character and particular views on leadership wouldhave variously shaped the rulers’ actions within this general framework of practice.It nevertheless remained that the king’s body was the ritual object upon whichrested the foundation of the Inca politico-religious authority. A comparative surveyof the anthropological literature reveals that this quality is a defining characteristicof sacred kingships in which the monarch, by virtue of embodying divinity, isexpected to sustain collective prosperity and world order through the observance ofritual prescriptions. In these institutions, governance does not necessarily entailexecutive power. Frazer (1890–1915) was the first to elaborate on the mutual depen-dence tying the physical health of sacred kings to their kingdom’s well-being. Theserulers, he argues, could not show any signs of affliction or decline that would other-wise imperil society. At once set apart from the mundane world and protected fromthe effects of mortal depletion, they are symbolically and ritually held in a consub-stantial relationship with their subjects: what kings suffer in the flesh impacts ontheir domain because the realm appears as an extension of the royal body. Sacredkings are therefore held responsible as much for their people’s good fortune andhealth as for the disasters and illnesses affecting their realm. In these politico-religioussystems, ritual actions and symbolic practices are directed to the maintenance of theking’s physical integrity and thereby ensure plenitude in the kingdom (Hocart 1936;Feeley-Harnik 1985; Adler 2000).

The Fabric of History

If the Inca ruler was ancestralized in his lifetime, his biological death and the ensuingdecomposition of his corporeal substance put in peril the vital force he supplied to hisdescent and extended relations. Corpse preservation appeared naturally as the mostingenious solution to avert the critical consequences of his mortal depletion. Theking’s death thus initiated a long transition period during which the transformationof his body into a perennial receptacle and, ultimately, his second funeral (purukaya)ensured dynastic continuity on the one hand, and the political prestige of his royal aylluon the other. The crux of this transformational apparatus lay in the elaboration of theking’s life story and in the ritual objectification of this memory in the loci of history thatshaped Cuzco’s landscape. Hence, he became an integrated part of the local ancestraland mnemonic network, thereby pursuing his processual ancestralization towards per-ennial and static kamaq embodiment. And this was when the making of history comesinto play. Indeed, a crucial attribute distinguished the ruling king from other ancestral-like entities: alive, he had not yet entered the realm of history. More specifically, it wasformally forbidden to recount the Inca’s doings during his lifetime. The events of his

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reign remained untold and no one dared uttering his name except in profound awebecause it was considered “sacred” (Garcilaso [1609] 1959, 53). It was during hisfirst funeral, immediately after his death, that members of his noble ayllu gatheredto decide of his fate:

If he had been valiant and a good governor of the realm, without having lost any provincesamong those his father had left him, without committing himself to vile deeds or small-ness or other inanities that demented princes have the insolence to carry out in theirkingdom, it was allowed and ordered that chants in honour of these same kings be com-posed in which they were praised and extoled in such a way that all the people should beastonished to hear of deeds so mighty (… ) and if among the kings, one had been neg-ligent, cowardly, or vicious, or preferred pleasure to the labour of extending the bounds ofthe empire, it was ordered that such a king should receive little or no mention. (Cieza deLeón [1554] 1996, 28, my translation)

If a king died a “bad death”,6 for example, violently and unexpectedly, he was alsodoomed to oblivion. Cieza provides one such example. He is the only chronicler toevoke the short reign of Inca Yupanqui, a king who was treacherously murderedshortly after taking office by a group of foreign captains of his own army. The offendersturned on him inside the royal precinct where the king was celebrating the launch of hisfirst military campaign. On hearing of the attack, the women “tore their hair, horrifiedat the death of the Inca through bloodshed as if he had been a vile person” (my empha-sis) (Cieza de León [1554] 1996, 110–111). Cieza concludes: “it is said to be certain thatInca Yupanqui did not receive the same funerary honours as were done to his ancestors,nor was his bulto (mummy bundle) set up and he left no son” ([1554] 1996, 110–111).In a society that tightly regulated the announcement of a king’s death to ensure unbro-ken succession, regicide was a disruption of the perennial order of dynastic stability.But most crucially, this act exposed Inca Yupanqui as an ordinary mortal made ofsoft and mundane substances, a “vile person” whose body had no ancestral-likequality. This assassination was all the more ominous that the king had expiredbefore proving his might or extending his domain, and before fathering a descentthat would have guaranteed the perpetuation of his cult.If the noble ayllu authorities decided that a king’s memory should be preserved, his

life story was created out of a selective appraisal of his achievements. His body wastherefore converted into a perennial object through natural dehydration and the aidof certain ointments (Garcilaso [1609] 1959, 274). During this phase, which wouldhave lasted up to a year, his successor assembled the necessary goods to organize thedead’s purukaya. The newly appointed king provided the necessary food for this festiv-ity, distributed new lands to the royal ancestors, and called on their residence to listento their individual life stories (Betanzos [1551] 1987, 181–183, 189). The secondfuneral opened at the end of this period with a pilgrimage. For fifteen days, the Incanoble men and women walked in Cuzco and its surroundings, their face painted inblack, and stopped amid the hills, plots, houses and streets that the dead had frequentedin his lifetime. Betanzos claims that they visited “the lands where the Inca planted andharvested”, “the places where he stood and the ones where he sat down when he wasalive and walked through there” ([1551] 1996, 134; Pizarro [1571] 1978, 70). The

History and Anthropology 651

pilgrims carried with them the clothes, weapons and agrarian tools that had belongedto the deceased. Each time they halted, they brandished one of these objects andcalled out to him: “Look here at the garment you used to wear”, “See here yourweapon with which you won and subjected such a province and so many caciqueswho were lords there” (Betanzos ([1551] 1996, 134). Once the pilgrimage was accom-plished, a dance and a ritual battle signifying the king’s past victories were performedon the main plaza.The famous report on the adoratorios of the Cuzco region describes a great number

of these sites or wak’as attached to significant events in the life story of Inca kings. Itlists the houses in which some of them had been born, had slept, lived, or died. Itincludes a hill pass where Viracocha Inca ordinarily rested on his ascent to thesummit, a spring where “the Inca customarily bathed”, the site where Huayna Capachad dreamt of an upcoming battle, a hunting lodge where Inca Yupanqui oftenspent leisure time, or the place where Mayta Capac had devised a battle plan tocrush a rival ayllu. The report indicates that each ancestor-king received periodic sacri-fices for his individual health and strength on the sites associated to his personal history(Cobo ([1653] 1964, 169–186). Along with these wak’as were other shrines that werethe embodiments of local ancestors and the abundant source of their life-sustainingessence. They too received propitiatory offerings while the most prominent ones dis-pensed their will through oracular officiants. Altogether, the wak’as of Cuzco formedan interconnected network of shrines subdivided into several segments called seqe,each of which was the ritual responsibility of a noble or common ayllu (Cobo([1653] 1964, 169–186). It formed not only a landscape of remembrance but also a car-tography of current affairs in which ayllus displayed their alliance networks in a spatialand temporal continuum actualized by periodic offerings and the recitation of theirancestors’ associations. It was during purukaya that the deeds of the last ruling kingwere first integrated into this landscape through the mediation of historical speechand the objects the dead had infused with his vital strength.These funerary practices and the life story elaborated on this occasion describe the

dead sovereign as an individual in action who fought in person and busied himselfwith agrarian works. Although his time as a ruler had been one of physical inertia,it is claimed that he moved around freely, walking, stopping by and sitting down.The participants appealed to him directly, thus defying the protocol for addressinghis living person. This reversal of the established codes manifested a change ofstatus activated by the recitation of his life story on the actual sites permeated withhis vital force. In the process, the narrative objectified the king’s kamaq ability byreporting the military successes of his armies as his own and by crediting the pro-ductivity of the lands to his life-sustaining energy. His reign thereby followed suitwith the triumphant models set by his predecessors. This posthumous glory,however, was not systematic. Royal epics therefore presented a selective appraisal ofthe political accomplishments attributed to individual kings so that altogether thesenarratives embodied a repetitive programme for dynastic success that legitimizedInca rule through the representation of its enduring prosperity. This form of histori-city was no less a reflexive discourse on past events. Its particularity was to impute

652 I. Yaya

causality not to the concrete actions of field actors, but to the king’s individual agencythrough his scattered effigies whether or not he had taken part personally in theactions described.Finally, in addition to ensuring the historical continuity of the dynasty, second fun-

erals re-established the political authority of the late king’s ayllu imperilled by theirleader’s death. Demise threatened his descent because the royal successor arrogatedfor himself the title of “unique son of the Sun”, thus depositing the deceased as headof the royal clan. The inauguration of the new Inca living ancestor inevitablybrought about the reorganization of all relations between members of the qhapaqayllu, which particularly impacted on the status of the former ruler’s ayllu. Thedead’s statutory loss therefore required that his descent positioned itself anew in thepolitical arena. It was once again the elaboration of the dead’s life story that achievedthis manoeuvre because it did not simply consist of a record of individual deeds. Thisepic narrative also, if not above all, detailed the innumerable political alliances that hadunited the king with foreign lords and other Inca ayllus. This historical genre pro-claimed that the success of royal endeavours rested upon political rapprochements.It showcased the king’s ability to assemble powerful allies and to maintain theseunions through bridal exchanges, the magnanimous granting of prestige titles andsumptuous feasts. In this way, the royal ayllus displayed their political viability inritual contexts as much during the recitation of their ancestor’s past grandeur, as inthe reproduction of their alliance network with the different wak’as of the cuzqueñanlandscape that they periodically fed with offerings.Inca history was an implement of politico-religious authority. Similar to that of the

Sakalava kingship (Western Madagascar), it was “a powerful embodiment of the royalancestors” that not everyone shared equally (Feeley-Harnik 1978, 402). Owing to itsexclusive association with the realm of life-sustaining ancestors, it was a record ofthe individual achievements carried out only by those who made up the success ofthe royal dynasty. But historical speech among the Incas was more than a discursivemedium. It was necessarily delivered in the presence of the relics of those who werebeing remembered, either their corpse, their personal effects or the sites of theirdeeds, which were all repositories of ancestral life-sustaining force. Enunciation, there-fore, was necessarily bound to materiality, which explains why the mummified bodiesof dead rulers were concrete targets of sabotages and political adjustments. Illustratingthis point is the tragic fate that fell upon the body of king Tupa Yupanqui after his aylluallied with Huascar against Atahualpa in the succession war that opposed the two half-brothers. Atahualpa’s generals had won key battles and taken hold of Cuzco when theirleader ordered them to punish Tupa Yupanqui’s house for siding with his opponent.Following orders, they slaughtered the leading members of this noble ayllu, burnt itsfounder’s mummy, executed all the specialists who owned the deceased’s life story (khi-pukamayuq) and destroyed their records (Sarmiento de Gamboa [1572] 1988, 162–64).This assault on memory, aside from the harrowing effect of its human cost, wasdesigned to put an effective end to his enemies’ political influence and annihilatetheir source of life-sustaining energy.

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Conclusion

In Tawantinsuyu, sacredness—understood as a generic term to qualify supernaturalagency and power—belonged to the realm of founding ancestors. These entities wereas much prototypes of living species as enduring sources of vital energy that animatedtheir descent, thus ensuring their health and fertility. In this respect, the Inca politico-religious system of governance was a sacred kingship whose foundations lay in therecursive principles of the ayllu organization. Its living monarch was paramount lordof an empire conceived as an encompassing maximal ayllu that contained a successionof nested communities, each one descending from a separate forebear and ruled by itsrespective kuraka. The Inca king, as the living kamaq being of this organization, wasengaged in reciprocal obligations of life sustenance with its members. He guaranteedtheir prosperity by providing for their ancestors’ vital strength, in return of which hewas nourished in quantities commensurate with the breadth of his realm. AsHuayna Capac’s legendary ability to remain sober suggests, Inca kings drank and atefor all the poor they supported. This ideology legitimized the alienation of resourcesby the central power and their partial redistribution during sumptuous state festivities.On these occasions, the king, or his executive official in the provinces, was seen toritually bestow wealth on his subjects.This politico-religious system rested upon the evidence of the king’s sacredness. To

render this quality conspicuous, the ruler’s body was affected via corporeal techniquesand a protocol that concretely set off his individuality against that of ordinary humans.The Incas were not unique in implementing these embodied technologies. As Heusch(1997) indicates, the king-to-be in a remarkable number of African kingdoms isexpected to carry out a dramatic gesture, often a kinship transgression or animmoral act (incest, murder of a consanguine) that separates him from society. Hisinvestiture ceremony turns him into a “body-fetish” repository of magico-religiouspower that is at once a potentially destructive and beneficial force. Similarly, inancient Egypt, the ceremonial journey that a new pharaoh undertook across thecountry during interregnum aimed at displaying the transformation of his physicalself. On this occasion, the masses glanced at him from far afield as he sat in stillnesson the royal barge. His impassive person was profusely censed like a cult statue“until it seemed that the scent exuded from the king’s very own pores like the poresof a god” (Morris 2010, 206). The ceremonial exhibited to the audience’s olfactoryand visual senses his transformation into a living deity. For Sahlins (2008), the elemen-tary form of estrangement in sacred kingships is foreignness whereby the ruler claims tobe stranger to the people he governs. This figure of alterity is endowed with superiorand destructive might that is eventually tamed through marriage with the daughterof the indigenous lord. From thereon, he becomes the benefactor of the land. “Stran-ger-kings” are omnipresent in Andean founding narratives. The Incas themselvesclaimed to be belligerent migrants who brought about prosperity to the Cuzcoregion after wedding daughters of local lords. As in other sacred kingships, they alsodevised bodily practices whereby kings appeared alienated from human society.During their reign, they displayed all the material qualities of life-sustaining ancestors

654 I. Yaya

and acted as impassive effigies that required careful manipulation when exposed to themundane world. Their bodies were painstakingly protected from physical corruptionand regularly re-invigorated through acts of nurture and sacrifice. Yet, ancestralizationin the pre-Hispanic Andes was not a one-time event. It followed a processual schemepredicted on the ongoing prosperity of the living. If misfortune struck on earth, kamaqbeings faced deposition, but if welfare was preserved through time, they acquired a per-ennial stature. Thereupon, their corporeality, as the memory of their deeds, assumed amore permanent quality in the geological landmark. Second funerals marked animportant stage in this process as it awakened Inca kings from inert figures todynamic ancestors whose actions had brought about fertility and victory. This trans-formation not only impacted on their physical aspects from fleshy bodies to desiccatedcorpses, it also effected their entry into history for it was the elaboration of the kings’memory that elevated them to perennial ancestors.Dynastic history, though, was not merely a discursive instrument. It was imprinted

in the community of individuals that perpetuated the cult of dead rulers on royalestates, in the effigies of foreign ancestors that escorted the royal mummies, and inthe fabric of Cuzco’s landscape where former kings ultimately turned into permanentfeatures. These repositories were not only tangible manifestations of the rulers’ kamaqability, they were literally the scattered corporeal substances of their ancestral powerthat, entangled together, shaped the dynamic contours of the Inca memorial topogra-phy. On the one hand, their revitalization through nurture and public narrationsupported the reproduction of collective individuals—the royal ayllus—and, on theother, it ensured dynastic continuity. But whereas individual memory was builtupon affinity and dispersed in a space outside Cuzco, dynastic memory upheld anideology of linear descent. It found its objectification in the punctual regrouping ofdead kings in the heart of the city, inside the temple dedicated to the royal clan’sdivine ancestor, which stood for the occasion as a collective memorial to the stabilityand longevity of the Inca descent line. The same ideology presided over the publiccongregation of royal mummies at certain celebrations, when they were placed ingenealogical order on the main plaza and stood as the qhapaq ayllu’s enduringsource of fertility.These two kinds of collective memory also conformed to separate historical formats.

As Julien (2000) was the first to identify, the Inca elite not only elaborated epic stories ofindividual rulers, they also held a genealogical account of Manco Capac’s descendants,which together perpetuated alternative representations of the past. The latter describedroyal descent as an undisrupted succession of firstborns that had married their biologi-cal sisters and had ruled to preserve the established order. It emphasized continuity andinternal cohesion. On the contrary, the epic life stories celebrated personal ability, pol-itical alliances with outsiders, marriage outside the royal clan and the disruption of pre-scribed rules as the strong poles of kingship success (Yaya 2013). The articulation ofthese two forms of collective memory allowed the Incas to conciliate an expansionistagenda relying on individual initiatives and outward alliances with the inward-looking representation of a stable and durable monarchy. Together, they formed amechanism of collective reproduction whose purpose was to legitimate the ongoing

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power structure in reference to the past. It is then hardly coincidental that local kurakaswere those most commonly liable for the maintenance and re-activation of ancestorworship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Itier 2004). Among Andean com-munities where memory was ingrained in the topography, not merely as evidence ofthings past but as an enduring agent of stability and prosperity, the preservation ofancestors’ bodily integrity and the continuing regulation of their life-sustaining forcewere evidential sources of authority.

Acknowledgements

The final product benefited greatly from exchanges with the members of the Labora-toire d’anthropologie sociale. My special thanks go to two anonymous reviewers forHistory and Anthropology for their critical insights into earlier drafts of this paper. Iam also grateful to the participants in the Maison Archéologie & Ethnologie (MAE)annual symposium at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre and the South AmericanArchaeology Seminar at University College London for their productive comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

Research for this article was conducted under a Fernand Braudel-International Fellowships forExperienced Researchers Fellowship sponsored by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme(FMSH) and Labex TransferS.

Notes

[1] Jean-Pierre Warnier (2007) developed this approach in his study of Mankon kingship.[2] For ethnohistorical and archaeological studies on Andean mortuary practices from a diachro-

nic perspective, see Salomon (1995), Isbell (1997), Kaulicke (1997), Lau (2008), Shimada andFitzsimmons (2015) and Eeckhout and Owens (2015).

[3] Recent works on this complex issue include Covey (2006), Ramírez (2006) and HernándezAstete (2008).

[4] Historical sources often refer to Inca rulers and their queens as “benefactors/custodians of thepoor” (wakcha kuyaq). In colonial Quechua dictionaries as in today’s use, the term for “poor”also describes the “orphan”. Billie Jean Isbell observed in Chuschi (Ayacucho) that wakcharefers to individuals who cannot participate satisfactorily in reciprocal exchanges becausethey lack a sufficiently extended kin network. Poverty resulted from their “inability to mobilizea network of mutual aid necessary for social survival in comunero society” (Isbell 1978, 76–78).Back in Inca times, wakcha also designated the king’s son with secondary wives (wakchaquncha), that is, men who did not belong to the royal qhapaq ayllu, or “rich ayllu”. GuamanPoma uses the term to refer to the ruling elite’s allies with whom the Incas had not contractedsignificant matrimonial exchanges. In this light, wakcha appears to have been a generic term for

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the king’s subjects, understood as members of his extended ayllu but with no actual royalancestry.

[5] For complementary analyses, see Duviols (1976) and Rostworowski (2003).[6] I borrow Bloch and Parry’s formulation “bad death” (1982, 15–18), which “represents the loss

of regenerative potential” or a threat to fertility and the social order, e.g. suicide, death at thewrong place or at the wrong time.

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