The Chicken in Andean History and Myth: The Quechua Concept of Wallpa

Abstract

The Quechua concept wallpa refers to the chicken, to the experience of the Spanish Conquest, and to prehispanic notions of power and authority. Ethnohistorical, lexical, and ethnographic evidence is used to decipher the puzzle of how a word for a European import can symbolize precolonial structures and concepts. This evidence indicates that concepts are juxtaposed in a process that transforms particular historical events into markers punctuating time. Events with similar consequences or analogous structure become telescoped and placed together side by side. Native people interpret their experiences of daily life and of unusual and dramatic events in terms of their received categories. The content of their categories and the relationships among them are shaped and transformed in the course of practical engagement. The intertwined processes of change and continuity occur simultaneously, resulting in a familiar yet new topography of cultural order. Thus, myth and history are not opposed to, but rather feed each other actively in the Andean world. Quechua concepts of time and linguistic categories continue to confound and bedevil scholars' attempts to sort out the autochthonous foundations of Andean social organization from post-conquest introductions. Final resolution of these problems is probably impossible, but we can use the vital oral traditions among contemporary Quechua speakers, travelogues, chronicles, and administrative documents from the colonial period, and the archaeological record to isolate possible definitions for particularly crucial or revealing categories of thought. Wallpa, the chicken, is one such category; it refers to an animal imported from Europe but is laden with multiple and complex connotations that evidently predate the arrival of the Spaniards. This paradox impelled early chroniclers, among them Acosta (I977 [I590]), Cobo (I956 [I653]), Garcilaso de la Vega (I960 [I609]) and Santacruz Pachacuti (I968 [I6I3]), to engage in convoluted arguments on how the Quechua word wallpa came to denote the chicken. I will show in this article that the QuechuaEthnohistory 34:2 (Spring I987). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-I80I/87/$I.50. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.58 on Sat, 17 Sep 2016 04:44:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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