Four parts together, or shaping shapelessness: The cultural poetics of Inka spatial practice
Item
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Title
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Four parts together, or shaping shapelessness: The cultural poetics of Inka spatial practice
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:ff29ff21d399:11543
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identifier
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12050
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Creator
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George, Jeremy James,
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Contributor
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Eloise Quinones Keber
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art history | Latin American studies | Cultural anthropology | Colonial | Contemporary | Pre-Columbian
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Abstract
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This dissertation investigates the shaping of highland Andean culture through spatial practice---the phrase that theorist Henri Lefebvre used to describe how a society produces, reproduces, and extends its own idea of space for its own ends. The inquiry focuses on four select paradigms of spatial practice: defining the cultural poetics of spatial practice as a structural and semiotic methodology; analyzing pre-Columbian Inka (Inca; ca. 13th-16th c.) architectonic (sculptural) stone forms; interpreting spatial paradigms in the seventeenth-century manuscript of Peruvian chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala; and re-defining the "active surface" of contemporary Cuzco (Cusco), Peru, the ancient capital of the Inka. By centralizing spatial practice in successive temporal thresholds and various material mediums, this project creates an interpretive model for diachronic cultural analysis as a social, historical, and representational concern.;After establishing that Inka spatial practice is rooted in a concept of replicating and transforming centers, the dissertation examines aspects of centeredness in Guaman Poma's manuscript, El primer nueva coronica y buen gobierno (ca. 1615) (The First New Chronicle and Good Government). The 398 line drawings of this key document codify colonial spatial practice as a socio-cultural mechanism of change, resistance, and imagination for its singular author-artist. Analysis of its thirty-eight city images underscores the role of architecture and urbanism in the flux of contestation, resistance, and subversive transformation.;By concluding with a survey of the active surface of today's Cuzco, identified by its veneering, performances, processions, and virtually constructed ideas of Inkaness, I argue that the reproduction of contemporary spatial practice is both a formal reflection and a critical aberration of historically established centering principles. As such, Cuzco is a distinct heterotopia, to borrow the language of Michel Foucault, meaning liminal, interstitial, simultaneously mythic and real, a web of relations manipulating manifestations of past, present, and future. The consequence, then, is that there is now no mythology of originality in the Inka heartland, and only the originality of mythology remains. This means that the cultural identity invested in the center-based spatial practice is now re-invested in a surface veneer, relegated there as a contingent, reconstructed, fantastical idea of Inkaness. .
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Art History
