This essay centers on types of elite Inka male garments and the curious zigzag (q’inqu) lines embroidered along their edges. I suggest these embellishments were part of a broader Inka visual rhetoric regarding border areas, extending from the textile matrix to the larger inhabited space and bridging notions of Inka territoriality. Integrated into an expansive meaning-making system, Andean textiles have multifaceted value. Through discussion of a subset of elite textiles and their border treatments, I trace how the Inkas linked themselves to the landscape and to “others” in a relational way. Scholarship has not surfaced a clear meaning or purpose in the zigzag embroidery on Inka textiles; but using visual, ethnohistorical, and cultural analysis I argue it is an expression of how the Inkas conceptualized “edge” spaces. The Inkas saw these as spaces open to interaction, characterized by tension and volatility yet simultaneously productive and dynamic. Zigzag embroidery is state rhetoric at play—not just on fabric edges but also at the edges of larger Inka space(s). As an “aesthetics of border,” zigzags signaled an Inka territoriality that visualized domain over new lands and populations as an exercise of territoriality rather than a rigid framework. Borders were sites of productive encounter and engagement rather than areas of separation and enclosure. Furthermore, the inclusion of zigzag details in colonial-era representations of cloth suggests this detailing retained some kind of association with ideas of land and territory, perhaps also performing within a new discourse of territoriality in terms of Indigenous-Spanish interactions.
Gaby Greenlee (Wed,) studied this question.