Reading Inca History
Catherine Julien
At the heart of this book is the controversy over whether Inca history  can and should be read as history. Did the Incas narrate a true  reflection of their past, and did the Spaniards capture these  narratives in a way that can be meaningfully reconstructed? In Reading  Inca History, Catherine Julien finds that the Incas did indeed create  detectable life histories.    The two historical genres that contributed most to sixteenth- and  seventeenth-century Spanish narratives about the Incas were an  official account of Inca dynastic genealogy and a series of life  histories of Inca rulers. Rather than take for granted that there was  an Inca historical consciousness, Julien begins by establishing an  Inca purpose for keeping this dynastic genealogy. She then compares  Spanish narratives of the Inca past to identify the structure of  underlying Inca genres and establish the dependency on oral  sources. Once the genealogical genre can be identified, the life  histories can also be detected.    By carefully studying the composition of Spanish narratives and their  underlying sources, Julien provides an informed and convincing reading  of these complex texts. By disentangling the sources of their meaning,  she reaches across time, language, and cultural barriers to achieve a  rewarding understanding of the dynamics of Inca and colonial political  history.