The maximilist and minimalist bias in andean scholarship : 20 Century trends

Abstract

In a recent article (Antiquity: 66:250:1992) that hopefully most of you have read, I made a passing reference to the Minimalist; trend in Andean scholarship; and I identified one of the earliest forerunners of the minimalist school as Adolf Bandelier (applied to Native American research, but specifically Andean). His spirit has been revived in the midseventies. About one and one-half years ago I reviewed three examples of scholarship on the formation of the Inka state (books by Patterson, Bauer and Parssinnen) to illustrate how this trend toward Minimalist manifests ltself in the next two decades, using an article of mine (1978), entitled The Early State of the Inkas, which is admittedly written in a maximalist vein (in the sense of proposing a number of seminal hypotheses to explain how Inka lnstitutions functioned) as contrast. My presentation today will compare the Andean case history with trends in Judaic scholarship, which has followed a remarkably similar trajectory throughout .his century. I recently discovered rambling through recent numbers of the JBA, searching out comparative sources for the origin of ethnicity, that Biblical or (if you prefer) Judaic studies - presents a similar case history between maximalists and minimalists with much more polemics.