Mit'a

This article is about the Inca practice. For other uses of the term Mita, see Mita (disambiguation).

Mit'a (Quechua pronunciation: [ˈmɪˌtʼa])[1][2] was mandatory service in the society of the Inca Empire. Its close relative, the regionally mandatory Minka is still in use in Quechua communities today and known as faena in Spanish.

Mit'a was effectively a form of tribute to the Inca government in the form of labor, i.e. a corvée. Tax labor accounted for much of the Inca state tax revenue;[3] beyond that, it was used for the construction of the road network, bridges, agricultural terraces, and fortifications in ancient Peru. Military service was also mandatory.

All citizens who could perform labor were required to do so for a set number of days out of a year (the basic meaning of the word mit'a is a regular turn or a season). The Inca Empire's wealth meant a family often needed only 65 days to farm; the rest of the year was devoted entirely to the mit'a. A relative of mit'a (federal work) is the modern Quechua system of Minka or faena, which is mostly applied in small-scale villages. The Minka was adopted during the 1960s on large-scale federal projects of Peru.

  1. ^ Teofilo Laime Ajacopa, Diccionario Bilingüe Iskay simipi yuyayk'ancha, La Paz, 2007 (Quechua-Spanish dictionary)
  2. ^ Diccionario Quechua – Español – Quechua, Academía Mayor de la Lengua Quechua, Gobierno Regional Cusco, Cusco 2005 (Quechua-Spanish dictionary)
  3. ^ Terence N. D'Altroy; et al. (April 1984). "Staple Finance, Wealth Finance, and Storage in the Inka Political Economy". Current Anthropology. 26 (2). The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research: 188. doi:10.1086/203249. ISSN 0011-3204. S2CID 153354787. Retrieved 15 August 2022. Much of the state's economic output was produced through a corvée labor tax