(112).
One of the documents Brokaw examines is the Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615) by Guamán Poma de Ayala (–1516). Contrary to almost all of the interpreters of Guamán Poma who have detected and commented on the European models operating in his work, Brokaw makes the case for a khipu-based historiographic genre as the guiding model in the first part of Guamán Poma’s extensive letter to the king (908 pages). Brokaw goes as far as hypothesizing that “much of the information about indigenous Andean history that appears in the Nueva coronica was collected either directly or indirectly from khipus” (116). In his study of khipu poetics Brokaw concludes that “undeniably the khipu employed a set of highly complex conventions capable of encoding semasiographic or even phonographic information that included highly stable genres of discourse” (141). He thus agrees, if not on the same grounds or with the same methodology, with the claims that Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, in his Comentarios reales of 1606, made for the khipu. This revalidation of Garcilaso as a reliable informant is important because the ethnohistorian María Rostworowski (1983) found some of her findings at variance with the Incas, and concluded from there that Garcilaso’s work was not to be trusted, especially when it came to cognitive and narrative claims for the khipu.
Frank Salomon, in his Cord Keepers (2005), tackles anew the question of the colonial and the ethnographic khipus. His book is the most comprehensive study of both archeological and ethnographic khipu to date. Salomon points out that the archeological or pre-Hispanic khipus that have thus far been examined with radiocarbon dating show that by 600 CE Andean peoples were making highly complex khipus (11). Thus the art of khipu-making is not only Pan-Andean, but also indicates a deeply rooted continuous use and development of an art that precedes the Incas by a millennium (11). In Inca times, Salomon asserts, the khipukamayuc or royal khipu masters used the cords for imperial censuses, the calendar, inventories of all kinds (food, clothing, tribute, arms, soldiers, gamekeeping,), chansons de geste, royal chronicles, sacrifices, genealogies, successions, postal messages, and even criminal trials (11). The khipu was thus not only versatile, but also demotic, as the information managed by the khipukamayuc originated in very small or even remote localities such as the household, the herder, the soldier, or the chasqui. Salomon writes that the khipu developed among peoples who spoke a multitude of languages and that the art of putting information on a string may be a branching tree of inventions (13). In view of the fact that we do not have a graphogenesis for the khipu as we do for writing and its origins, Salomon thinks that it makes better sense not to think of the khipu as a single code (13). Khipus may have been, at the state level, very conventional and capable of registering maximally comparable accounts proceeding from different parts of society. But at the local level, khipus may have been more actor-centered (17) and encoded with greater iconical dimensions.
Salomon is mainly interested in showing, based on his ethnographic work, that the “khipu’s double capability for simulating and documenting social action” works as the “hinge for the articulation between kinship organization and political organization” (7). He argues that his reconstruction is compatible with the structure of ancient khipu specimens (7). Salomon also shows that the supposed political demise of the cord in the early colony constitutes a misreading of the colonial life of the art of the cord. In the province of Huarochiri, for instance, the khipu was used alongside the lettered culture (21) that entered the Andes with the introduction of Spanish imperial linguistic policies. Finally, he argues that his ethnographic study of the Tupicocha khipu practices demonstrates a root relationship between inscription and Andean social complexity (7).
Salomon, Urton, and Brokaw are not the only scholars to approach the khipu from an Andean perspective. Thomas Abercrombie (1998) argues that the Andean ideal of knowledge is itself centered on the metaphor of pathways. The past was imagined as “chronotopography.” In this regard John Rowe had suggested earlier that the ceque system resembled a khipu spread out in the shape of a circle. For Abercrombie, khipu cords are paths guiding the hands, eyes, and mind to the trans-temporal, genealogical line of the sources of things. In this sense it is the spatial and not the verbal faculty that organizes recall (Salomon, 2005: 19).
In his Royal Commentaries, Garcilaso de la Vega Inca writes that the khipu also registered poems and narrative (Book 2, chapter 27). Scholars are still searching for the understanding that would allow cord structures to be matched to narrative structures. Gordon Brotherston, in Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americans through Their Literature (1992), argues that khipus could record and “therefore transcribe not just mathematics, but also discourse” (78), and he cites as an example the hymn that Garcilaso published in his Royal Commentaries. However, Brotherston’s best examples and support for his argument are drawn from the postcolonial Quechua alphabetic literary corpus that arises in the Andes after 1532. Brotherston speculates that the presence of khipus in burials suggests that they could tell the biographies of persons (78–9). The study of the chronicles by Martín de Murúa (1590) and Guamá Poma also lead Brotherston to think that the khipu recorded not only annals capable of reaching deep into the past, like the Mesoamerican teomoxtli (78), but also ceremonial cycles, calendars, hymns of worship, and kinship dramas (79). From this perspective, Guamán Poma’s corónica can be seen as “a complete account of empire based on native-script records and submitted to the Spanish authorities” (80) by the last of the khipukamayuc (Mendizábal Losack, 1961) who drew directly on the taxonomy and the ideology of the khipu (decimal system, reciprocity, oppositional duality, hanan/ hurin, chronotopography).
Brotherston’s detailed study of the play Apu Ollantay and its inescapable inscription into both Inca literary pastoralism and kinship drama shows convincingly how the story of the forbidden love between the princess Cusi Coyllor and the heroic commoner Ollantay is part of a khipu literary corpus performed in Cuzco by courtiers on public holidays (204). Much work is yet to be done on the considerable corpus of postcolonial Quechua drama, which ranges from the overtly pagan, as Apu Ollantay, to the Christian, manifesting deep roots in both the artistic legacy of the Inca and the Spanish secular and religious theater.
But if postcolonial Quechua language texts found conditions of possibility in both secular and religious drama as well as the lyric, alphabetic Quechua did not find its way in almost any other genre, be it precolonial or postcolonial. Scholars who lament the absence of court documents, letters, annals, or even personal life-stories in Quechua are equally astonished by the abundant production of visual representation in art and architecture. In the new space of violence, engagement, resistance, and negotiation that the conquest inaugurated for Andean peoples, the life of written Quechua or Aymara registers a puzzling silence. It is difficult to ascertain the shape and dynamics of the arts of communication and thought in the post-conquest Andes if one’s vision remains circumscribed to alphabetic scripted Amerindian languages. One must look beyond the alphabet to other means, modes, and conceptions of communication. A more ample sense of colonial semeiosis would allow for the idea of including iconographic signs into a system of communications in which the sign is not always linked to speech. By definition, this colonial cultural space also implies alternative and conflicting literacies and concepts of knowledge, as we have seen above in the case of the khipu.
Why did Andeans not engage writing in Quechua in order to memorialize the past or offer witness to their present? It is true that there were many prohibitions and obstacles, but despite these there appeared in the Andes a significant theater production. In tension with Spanish literary canons, Quechua lyrical traditions persisted through colonial times and reached up to the present. This absence of written texts appears in stark contrast with the wealth of images on paper, canvas, and other aesthetic or valuable objects such as keros, textiles, and aquillas (large silver bowls) that Andeans produced, exchanged, and used during and after the first hundred years after the fall of Cajamarca.
Inquiring into the issue of native Andean visual traditions, the art historian Tom Cummins in “Let Me See! Reading is for Them: Colonial Andean Images and Objects” (1998) advances the notion that alphabetic writing was a technology and mode of memorializing life too distant from
