| Abstract: | The worship of dead Inca kings, because it aimed at preserving the deceased's bodily integrity, reveals constituent aspects of royal personhood. Underpinning these practices was the conception that the dead's agency was conveyed through corporeal substances, which therefore required constant acts of sustenance. This paper examines the bodily practices and material substances that shaped the king's physical person during his lifetime, as well as after his death. These data show that the royal body was made conspicuous through a series of ritual and symbolic actions devised to display the king's faculty to infuse vital force to all living creatures under his rule he thus stood as the source of prosperity for his subjects with which he was engaged in reciprocal obligations of life sustenance. I argue that these “embodied technologies of power” shaped a system of representations that legitimated the king's appropriation of state resources. |
