Qari had political and ritual precedence over Cusi. In northern Potosí, Bolivia,
this kind of mirror relationship between pairs (e.g., as in a pair of moieties) is
referred to as a relationship of yanantin, which relates to a principle of
complementary opposition between two elements, and is likened to the
relationship between a man and a woman. There is an echo here of Garcilaso’s
statement that Hanan Cuzco was related to the King and Hurin Cuzco to the
Queen.
In areas of the central Peruvian Andes, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
priests searching for native “idolatries” regularly reported that communities were
divided between groups referred to as Huari and those called Llacuaz. Other
Colonial historical documents note that the Huaris were commonly said to be
autochthonous inhabitants of a locality while Llacuazes, who were characterized
as foreigners, often were said to have migrated into the area from Lake Titicaca,
far to the south. As the owners of the land, Huaris were farmers, while the
Llacuazes were herders. Historians and anthropologists think that this kind of
division was another expression of dualism that takes its basic features from the
same principles that gave rise to the hanan and hurin division of Cuzco.
In the variety of formations and expressions noted above, Andean villages and
whole regions have, paradoxically, fashioned unity on the basis of fundamental
dual divisions of space, society, and political relations. This was as true for
dualism in the Inca Empire as for many villages in the Andes down to the
present day.
Further Reading
Duviols, Pierre. “Huari y Llacuaz, agricultores y pastores: Dualismo prehispánico de oposición y
complementariedad.” Revista del Museo Nacional 39:153–91, 1973.
Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca. Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, Part One.
Translated by Harold V. Livermore. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966 [1609].
Murra, John. “An Aymara Kingdom in 1567.” Ethnohistory 15, no. 2: 115–51, 1968.
Palomino, Salvador. El Sistema de oposiciones en la Comunidad de Sarhua. Lima: Pueblo Indio, 1984.
Platt, Tristan. “Mirrors and Maize: The Concept of Yanantin among the Macha of Bolivia.” In
Anthropological History of Andean Politics, edited by J. V. Murra, N. Wachtel, and J. Revel, 228–59.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Zuidema, R. T. “The Moieties of Cuzco.” In The Attraction of Opposites: Thought and Society in the
Dualistic Mode, edited by David Maybury-Lewis and U. Almagor, 255–76. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1989.
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