Bordering on Chaos: Order in the Inka Empire and the Virtues of Volatility

My paper discusses how the Inka empire, hemmed in by the Andes, conceptualized its border areas. As the Inka empire expanded throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, its newly conquered territories were often unyielding in both terrain and ethnic rivalries--how did the Inkas visualize the perimeters of their domain to institute an imperial order? I consider an Inka visual discourse of boundaries and ask how they expanded them, negotiated them, and marked them in perhaps (to our eyes) unconventional ways. I look at how they used the natural environment and material objects--particularly elite woven textiles-- to negotiate insider/outsider relations within an Andean sensibility that allowed for relationality, exchange, and even volatility within territorial boundary zones. Inka imperial visual discourse included the production and circulation of certain textiles whose formal and functional aspects give evidence to an Inka framework of 'border' or 'perimeter' that allowed for, and may have thrived on, movement and productive tension. They used certain textile formats as well as natural forms in the landscape to visualize power by highlighting interstitial spaces or ‘unfinished’ boundary zones as sites where Inka civilization was perpetually being enacted. In this analysis, I suggest the Inkas conceptualized borders as transformative and productive spaces rather than fixed and closed zones of demarcation and that this complicates certain notions of boundary.