Mimesis and monumentalism in native Andean cities

The premodern city was frequently organized as a self-reflexive representation of universal order; the perceived design of the cosmos was inscribed in the ideal order of society, and from this ideal flowed moral authority and social stability (Townsend 1979; Wheatley 1971; Wright 1977). Certain pre-Hispanic Andean capitals, such as Inca Cusco, Chan Chan, the capital of the Kingdom of Chimor, and Tiwanaku are exemplars of this process of the metaphoric identification of nature with society objectified and instantiated in the built form of the urban environment (fig. 1 ). Nature and society (and more specifically the processes of social reproduction) were entangled in a mimetic relationship. The rulers of these Andean states assiduously attempted to perpetuate their legitimacy by reconfiguring social space both within their capitals and in the rural reaches of their domains. They created de novo or greatly modified preexisting centers to publicly proclaim, sanctify, and make tangible the sources of their right to rule. Andean kings and their elite cadre of kinsmen, retainers, and clients constructed and inhabited majestic centers accoutered with monumental representations of space and time that they themselves conceived. Such centers were embued with the signs and spatial framework of sacred authority: enormous plazas for public ritual, visually salient temples, palaces and thrones (the centrally located usnus, or "thrones," of the Inca are emblematic of this), and great urban gardens, all for the purpose of symbolically expressing their identification with the order of the natural world. The capitals of these kings were simultaneously cosmograms, architectonic representations of universal order, and what we might call sociograms, or idealized representations of human social order. At the same time, these artfully designed urban spaces were not merely inert stages for the pageantry of regal power. These kings were dwellers in cities of their own design, and from these cities they circulated into the countryside, in effect extending the ideological grounds of their created cosmopolitan culture into the rural interstices. As Henri Lefebvre (1991 :235) remarked: