Inka Borders and the Power of Volatility: at the Fringes and Edges of

This paper will explore how Inka textiles–both of the precontact era and of the colonial period—are expressive or even metonymic of that greatest of resources, the Andean land and territory that the Inkas so identified with. The care and deliberateness of Inka cloth manufacture and circulation suggests textiles were full of “annotations” about the relationships between forms, about symmetry and asymmetry, about arrangements of balance and imbalance and about how insider versus outsider was conceived. In this scope, I discuss textiles as part of an Inka ordering system attentive to how internal versus external interests and entities were conceptualized with implications at various scales of experience. The embedded technical and design features as well as symbolic connotations of certain textiles may thus reveal something about how the Inkas conceptualized larger spaces such as their territorial space and, by extension, their territorial borders across time.

The Marilynn Thoma Fellowship has allowed me the time and resources to revise and add to my dissertation as I develop it for book publication. The funds have provided critical support, offering substantial encouragement as I completed my PhD in 2022 and have been navigating the teaching phase of my academic work. The Thoma Foundation's important role in advancing the work of scholars at different stages cannot be understated. Being the recipient of one of the Thoma fellowships validates how we work, amplifies how we see our work, and helps us share our work.