The Problem of Inka Sibling Marriage

While differing in important details, most early Spanish accounts of Inka history agree that a king’s primary wife (coya), the mother of his legitimate successor, was his sister. How do we interpret this? Given the central importance of “incest” (including incestuous royal marriages) in the history of modern social science, the problem has received surprisingly little attention by modern scholars. While some have read the chronicles’ claims uncritically, others have largely dismissed them, skeptical that either Inka historical memory or kin relationships could be translated into terms European colonizers could understand. In an attempt to get beyond this epistemological impasse, this talk reopens the question from several angles, comparing and critiquing previous accounts alongside historians’ work on royal sibling marriage in Ptolemaic Egypt and eighteenth-century Hawai’i. Finally, it offers a new reading of the earliest colonial evidence on Inka marriages, in the light of recent research on preferential close-kin marriage and the anthropology of emotion in contemporary Tamil Nadu.