All margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that, the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. [Mary Douglas]

Opposition is true friendship. [William Blake]

Since the renewed impulse to Andean studies given by the ethnohistorical work of Murra ([1955] 1980 et al.) and Zuidema (1964 et al.), the analysis of Andean systems of thought has entered a new stage. By insisting on the differing content of Andean institutions according to the scale and complexity of their social context, and by defining the specific ecological and social problems with which they were designed to cope, Murra revealed a unique perception and organization of Andean space consisting in the direct control of widely dispersed resources from the tropical forests to the Pacific coast by a single nucleus of power located at various levels in the highlands (1972). Zuidema, on the other hand, using an analysis of the social organization of the Inka capital, Cusco, suggested that the Andean ayllu was not susceptible of any unitary definition. He located such ambiguities within the general Inka quadripartite organization of their capital as the central focus of a homologously quadripartite empire. By the early 1970s other investigators were beginning to extend one or another of these approaches (see, e.g., Fonseca 1972; Mayer 1972; Wachtel 1971a; Palomino 1971).