Sinposis

Andrew James Hamilton's new book, Scale and the Incas, begins by situating scale_and assumptions concerning its interpretation_as not only inevitably relational but also socially constructed. This process is made more precarious by a move from the ancient past to the present, as in the case of the opening discussion, which ranges from the Andes to Harvard's Peabody Museum. Hamilton focuses in particular on the creation of reduced-scale objects as a persistent practice throughout the Andean world but notes that scale was not necessarily manipulated or understood in the same ways throughout that world. Scale was what he terms a "recursive mode of expression" (6), one that linked diverse objects, people, places, and practices. Hamilton opens with a detailed discussion of the challenges involved in characterizing the concept of scale among Andean cultures. For the Inca, the situation is made especially acute by the lack of any word for "scale".