The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

56 Frank Salomon
schemes of Inka culture are understood as realized in the logic of practical
action. For example, the ceque system of Cusco, an Inka schema coordinating
kinship corporations to a ranked ensemble of shrines aligned on
lines from the sacred center, can now be partly understood in relation to
practical projects — historical facts in the usual sense — such as the
administration of Cusco's irrigation infrastructure.
The advancing debate about structuralism had the effect of undercutting
the original stage on which it began. The original ground for
skepticism about the chances for knowing native history was a seemingly
clear distinction between historical and unhistorical views of the past.
But the main casualty of debate was not the idea of "Indian history". It
was the myth/history antithesis itself.
In the overwhelming bulk of printed literature on South America,
most of what South Americans are reported as saying about the past is
said in what appears as a strongly mythic idiom. Especially where Amazonia
is concerned, for every native text about "history" in the sense of
human causation, one can easily find ten texts about miraculous origins
of institutions, landscape features, human inequalities, and so on. Yet by
the 1970s, for many reasons both theoretical and political, it was no
longer defensible to assume that native collectivities had arrived in modernity
by sleepwalking through history. It became incumbent to explain
how the cultures that produced these discourses had interpreted and
faced human transformations.
A 1988 collection of South Americanist comment on the debate, Rethinking
History and Myth, takes as its point of departure two assumptions:
that regardless of genre variation and the binding of memory into
idealized social patterns, changing contingency elicits and informs every
performance of tradition. None is in principle ahistoric. Second, the
common myth/history distinction in regard to genre analysis rests on
ethnocentric suppositions. The contributors generally retain an analytical
distinction between myth and history but do not purport to find the two
as separate facts in the real world. Myth is defined as discourse that gives
priority to structure, and which guarantees (in Hill's words) that "relations
of contrast and difference of major social importance will not be
forgotten." History "gives greater weighting to agency and social action
in the present, which is informed by knowledge of past times that are
qualitatively the same as the present. . . . Historical consciousness includes
a sense of the indeterminate and processual nature of one's own
social order." But the difference between the two modes is only "a
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