Sling Braiding as a Masculine Ideal in the Late Horizon Andes (ca. 1400-1534)

Nearly all global cultures have chiefly employed fiber arts as an artistic venue to impose a strict delineation of gender ideologies and their associated labor. Yet, in the pre-contact Andes, fiber arts were not rigidly gendered as a form of sex-typed labor—works in fiber became gendered due to gender-specific techniques of production and object type. This paper explores this phenomenon in the Inca Empire by illuminating the role slings played to construct and display an idealized image of masculinity. I investigate a 700-foot rope that was viewed as an up-sized iteration of an emperor Huascar’s (ca. 1503-1534) ceremonial sling. When viewed as an enlarged sling, this rope visualized control over religious forces and embodied Inca sovereignty. Intriguingly, the textile in question was almost certainly produced by a collective of women, the accllacuna, who covertly authored fiber works for the Inca state. However, in public view the rope’s techniques were ideally practiced by men, a process-oriented gendering incorporated into the Inca empire’s highly regimented rites of initiation, whereby adolescents became acculturated in the imperial religion through the make of ancestral slings. These accoutrements identified the youth who made and wielded them as elite men descended from the progenitors of Cusco’s founding lineage. Through my study of this textile’s production, we may question to what extent gender was bound to artistic medium in the Andes, transcending materiality and was instead expressed by artistic techniques and the final objects they produced.