Historical Analysis of an Andean Artifact
Printable Essay Rubric | Printable Essay Prompt
Assignment
Select 1–2 primary sources created before 1800 and produced in the Andes during the Inca Empire or Spanish colonial period. Your source(s) should be drawn from the following categories: a) Inca clothing or objects, b) religious artwork, c) colonial oil portraiture, or d) colonial chronicles. From what you have learned about the dynamics of empire, how does the primary source reflect power differentials in the Andean context? Whose cultural perspectives are being represented in the source(s) and how do those perspectives differ? If your analysis of the primary source(s) indicates that change has happened over time, who or what is responsible for this change and how can it be characterized?
Your essay should situate and contextualize the primary source(s) using academic reference sources. You will also be required to integrate two scholarly, peer-reviewed articles or books into your essay. You need not conduct independent research for this assignment; please see the Historical Analysis Source Guide for an extensive annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
Your final paper will be between 5–6 pages in length (no more than 7) and will be worth 35% of your writing grade.
Learning Goals
- Reinforce and hone skills developed in fall quarter: to make specific, complex and arguable claims, produce cohesive paragraphs; present well-selected and well-contextualized evidence, develop strong warrants, develop organic transitions that show the progress of ideas over time, and write rhetorically persuasive introductions and conclusions
- Adopt the appropriate stance, style, and genre conventions of historical analysis
- Develop intermediate-level information literacy skills for locating contextual information, evaluating scholarly claims, identifying scholarly conversations, and integrating and complicating source material in writing
- Practice active revision such that the final draft demonstrates that the student has developed flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading drafts while also reflecting on the process of writing itself
Required Reading
Before you begin brainstorming for this assignment, make sure you have read the following:
- O’Toole, Rachel. “What Historians Do and Why We Do It.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 94–100.
- Zissos, Andrew. “Historical Evidence.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 62–65.
- Morse, Susan. “Paragraph Writing Strategies.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 51–61.
- Short, Gretchen. “Writing Transitions.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 79–86.
- Short, Gretchen. “Integrating Quotations and Citing Sources.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 108–18.
The Writing Process
This essay will be an exercise in historical analysis, a method that evaluates primary sources to understand change over time and the perspectives assumed by individuals and communities towards one another and events. In effect, historians are interested in the question of who did what to whom and why. Rachel O’Toole’s Writer’s Handbook chapter, “What Historians Do and Why We Do It,” demonstrates that primary sources are anything but one-sided. Rather, historians interpret primary sources in various ways, with some interpretations refining, extending, challenging, or contradicting others. History is not an objective, neutral summary of events. Rather, history is a perspectival practice of generating interpretations backed by evidence.
Selecting Primary Artifacts for Analysis and Posing Historical Research Questions
First, you must choose a primary source that interests you. O’Toole has assembled a selection of primary sources from this context and grouped them into four categories: a) Inca clothing or objects, b) religious artwork, c) colonial oil portraiture, or d) colonial chronicles. As you peruse the Historical Analysis Source Guide, think also about the topics from lecture and readings about the Andes that have captured your attention this quarter. If you decide to write about two primary sources, we suggest that you select sources of the same general type (e.g., two uncus, two oil portraits, etc.), but which each represent a different perspective, location, or period of time. It may be helpful to begin by asking research questions of one primary source and then explore a second primary source once you have begun exploring historians’ interpretations of the first.
You should begin by analyzing the form and intended purpose of the primary source you have chosen. If you are investigating an article of Inca clothing or an object, you should pose questions about its materiality, style, craftsmanship, utility, and intended function. If you are analyzing a religious artwork or oil portrait, you should pose questions of composition, iconography, and art historical context (e.g., to what school, movement, or style did the artist belong?). If you are examining a colonial chronicle, you should pose questions about rhetorical posture, use of diction and figurative language, and the intended audience and reception history of the text. Regardless of the medium of the primary source you have chosen, you will need to try to understand the perspective of the object’s maker, as well as his or her likely objectives in creating the artifact.
Take, for example, O’Toole’s explication of the two kero images in “What Historians Do and Why We Do It.”
The first kero (left) was produced prior to the Spanish conquest in 1530; the second kero (right) was made after 1550. While these two objects are of the same type of artifact, they exhibit clear formal differences: the first features geometric carving and the second painted representational images of an Incan victory. Some of these formal divergences might be attributable to the difference in time in which each kero was produced. As O’Toole argues, these cups can represent how Andeans adapted (or did not adapt) to Spanish colonialism, as attitudes towards the memory of the Inca empire shifted and came to signify the possibility of indigenous resistance. Using these two primary sources—along with other evidence—a historian could conjecture that “the continued use of the same type of ritual vessel with a narrative of Inca military victory suggests that the Inca political elite were still alive and kicking, even after the Spanish conquest” (O’Toole 121).
This example requires the contrast between two primary sources to demonstrate ideological change over time. The assignment, however, allows for you to focus on one or two primary sources for your essay. If you choose to focus on a single primary source, the following questions may be useful in articulating your claims:
- How does the creator’s identity or location shape the representation of power in this primary source?
- How does this primary source characterize power differences between inhabitants of the Andes during the period it was created?
- Does the source represent multiple perspectives on empire, or can it be interpreted in multiple ways?
- How might the primary source challenge set ideas about the dynamics of conquest and colonization?
If you select two primary sources (ideally of the same medium or type), the following questions may be useful in articulating your claims:
- How do differences between these primary sources reflect differences between their respective creators?
- What do these sources reveal about differences in perspective towards empire?
- How do differences between these primary sources indicate changes in Andean/Spanish colonial culture over time?
- Do these changes over time reflect shifts in the way that conquest or colonization was understood or negotiated by subjects of empire?
To answer these preliminary questions and to generate more nuanced questions about your specific primary source, you will need to locate relevant scholarly secondary sources that respond to the same, or similar, research questions.
Locating and Assessing Scholarly Secondary Sources
O’Toole has compiled a number of primary and secondary sources in the Historical Analysis Source Guide and has assigned invaluable secondary sources as a part of your course reading. Your task is to move beyond the arguments presented in lecture. For this assignment, you may rely on the Historical Analysis Source Guide or choose to expand your search to other scholarly sources. Either way, you will be required to integrate two scholarly secondary sources into your essay, one of which may be an assigned course reading. These texts will help you to situate your primary sources in context, as well as to elucidate the scholarly conversation among historians about your given topic. Suppose, for example, that you have chosen to write your essay about a colonial oil portrait, the Portrait of a Ñusta (1730-50) housed at the Museo Inka in Cusco, Peru (left).
As you know from course readings, one secondary source that helps contextualize this image is Thomas Cummins’s “We Are the Other: Peruvian Portraits of Colonial Kurakakuna.” Cummins argues that these kuraka portraits “permitted Peruvians to celebrate their ‘otherness’ as it were, their Indian heritage in such a way as to inculcate passive acquiescence to Spanish rule and relentless economic exploitation” (208). He doesn’t analyze this particular portrait or evaluate its formal features; but his essay is an excellent starting point through which to find other sources.
You can use Cummins’s essay in a number of ways. First, you can scan his bibliographical information to see what other essays he cites, some of which might be more in tune with your own questions. Second, you can refer to the Library of Congress terms on the copyright page of this book. These terms appear on the second page of the pdf and include the terms: “Indians of South America,” “Andes Region,” and “Peru-History-Conquest.” Using these, you can extend your search using Library Search, Academic Search Complete, Google Scholar, or the discipline-specific database Historical Abstracts. You will find other useful digital resources on the Winter Quarter page of the UCI Humanities Core Course Library Guide, as well as the UCI Library History Subject Guide.
Pick secondary sources that look most relevant to your formal explication of the primary source. If, for example, your visual explication of the portrait above focused on the size of the woman in relation to the other objects in the image, you might look at Ana Maria Presta’s “Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman: Market Economy, Clothing, and Identities in the Colonial Andes.” Why? Because the central figure’s dress clearly determines her relative size in the painting. A brief glimpse at Presta’s article shows you what that dress signifies: that a portion of the woman’s clothing is made of cloth “that only the Inka and his kin had the right to use”; and that the dress “expressed [the woman’s] identity and social status” (49-50). This contextual information could help you pose new research questions about power differentials in the Andes, for example: how might traditional Inca clothing relate to the central figure’s social status as a kuraka? What would her Inca clothing have signified to other Andeans? What would it have signified to Spanish inhabitants of the Andes?
Presta answers these question in the course of her essay; but you might not agree with all aspects of her argument. Part of the scholarly task is to extend and counter arguments that take up our research questions. By extending these arguments, we refine our research questions; and by refining these questions, we find additional secondary sources. This process creates the scholarly conversation in which we engage. As you read the articles you choose, make notes of other relevant secondary sources whose titles address your interests. Then return to your original notes on the primary source. How does each scholarly article contextualize your understanding of the primary source, or artifact, you have chosen? As you can see, as you explore more secondary sources, your research questions will become more nuanced and your resulting claims will become more complex.
