How to Make an Inca Mummy: Andean Embalming, Peruvian Science, and the Collection of Empire

摘要

As scientific objects, mummies were born of Europe's encounter with two ancient bodily knowledges. The first is well known: the embalmed Egyptian dead who were ground into a materia medica named mumia and later were collected as mummies themselves. Yet mummies owe their global possibilityof ancient sciences of embalming and environmental manipulation apprehensible worldwideto the sixteenth-century Spanish encounter with the Incas' preserved dead, the yllapa. This article argues that their confiscation and display desecrated their sacred affect, but their recategorization as embalmed bodies allowed Indigenous Peruvian writers to argue for the Incas' lost medical sophistication. European scholars then used that sophistication to establish mummies as a comparative category. The original yllapas decayed, blurring both Inca sovereignty and the colonial Latin American sciences that anatomized it, but their imagined resurrection in the preserved bodies of other ancient Peruvians turned the Inca mummy into a highly collectible scientific object, embodying a newly national past of ancient learning and anti-imperial indictment.