the fact that Andean culture relates orality (speech acts) to objects (the book) in an entirely different way in which Europe conceives of writing and thus books as printed speech (142). Cummins thinks that the Spanish explanation of why Atahualpa rejected the book (the book did not speak when Atahualpa put it to his ear) is completely bogus. The Spanish interpretation of the scene at Cajamarca relies on the Talmudic tradition of close textual reading that scrutinizes the text in search of an interpretation that can reveal the meaning of history. In the Western textual tradition all relationships between the object and a sense of the past are ruptured (142). In contrast, objects in the Andean world had a greater place as sites of memory and knowledge. Textiles and keros functioned not only as testimony of the past but provided also a living link to history. They helped to keep the memory of the past alive and viable. These objects constituted a form of inalienable wealth, a material site for the continuation of history, and as such they were venerated and brought out into public view at the time of the performance of the highest rituals when communication with the Apukuna was in order (143).
The will to persist prompted native Andeans to engage with and contest colonial rule in a number of negotiations and exchanges. It is clear from the Huarochiri (1598?) manuscript and the documentation on the campaign to extirpate native Andean religion that the will to continue religious practices and social conduct led Andeans in search of representational spaces in which they could find room for their modes of perceiving and understanding the world. Cummins believes that the tactile and visual modes of representation in relation to oral discourse remained for Andeans the mode through which they preferred to “inscribe” their existence (95). While there appears to be a meeting ground of European and Andean symbolic representation, it is neither the province of “syncretism” nor the deployment documents and other sites of writing. The mutual entanglement that defines colonial situations can be ascertained in the Andes in the maintenance and circulation of costumes, images, and objects of tradition (140). The images found in keros, aquillas, and portraits do not appeal to the written word (134).
This space of entanglement presupposes the fragmentation of Inca iconography with a subsequent redeployment in a colonial space ruled by European visual and iconographic understandings. It is best illustrated by the frontispiece that Guamán Poma chooses for his El Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615). In this image Guamán Poma redeploys a number of iconographic signs in order to fabricate his “coat of arms.” He breaks up his name into a heraldic syntax in which the symbols of his “house” are the eagle (guamán) and the mountain cat (puma). These mark the two fields of his “coat of arms.” In a descending hierarchical line he places an image of himself below that of the Spanish king, and the two, in turn, under the pope. Dividing the two fields of the frontispiece, he lines up the three coats of arms with the pope’s at the top and his at the bottom, thus producing an integration, exchange, and circulation of meanings that speak of a single, if ambivalent, space of signification. In this intellectual feat Guamán Poma has unmoored a number of signs. He redeployed them, creating a space for the inscription of significations that could be decoded by both Europeans and Andeans. The insertion of the tiana – the traditional Andean seat of authority for kurakas – under the guamán on the left-hand side of his coat of arms underscores the Andean effort to resignify European spaces of representation with Andean objects and codes (101).
The study of objects and images produced around the first seventy years after the fall of Cajamarca shows a strong continuation of native Andean representational practices. Images and symbols taken from a fragmented Inca iconographic canon appear now conjoined to European images and symbols in a representational space now rendered bivalent by their very presence and articulation. The new representational space flows as the images, despite their radical differences, “speak” to one another. This mutual entanglement of Andean images and symbols with European values, signs, and spaces enables the Andean objects and images to express meaning within both sides of colonial society (94). This tactic for producing bivalent spaces and values of representation would remain in place throughout the colonial period and extends into the present.
References and Further Reading
1 Abercrombie, A. Thomas (1998). Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History among an Andean People. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
2 Boone, H. Elizabeth (1994). “Introduction: writing and recording knowledge.” In E. Boone and W. Mignolo, Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, pp. 3–26. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
3 Brokaw, Galen (2003). “The poetics of Khipu historiography: Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s Nueva Corónica and the Relación de los quipucamayoc,” Latin American Research Review, 38(3): 111–47.
4 ——— (2005). “Toward deciphering the Khipu,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 35(4): 571–89.
5 Brotherston, Gordon (1992). Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americans Through Their Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6 Coe, Michael D. (1992). Breaking the Maya Code. London: Thames & Hudson.
7 Cummins, Tom (1998). “Let me see! Reading is for them: colonial Andean images and objects ‘Como es costumbre tener los caciques Señores.’” In H. Boone and T. Cummins (eds), Native Traditions in the Postconquest World, pp. 91–148. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
8 Mendizábal Losack, Emilio (1961). “Don Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, señor y príncipe, último quellcakamayoc,” Journal of Latin American Lore, 5: 83–116
9 Mignolo, Walter (1994). “Signs and their transmission: the question of the book in the New World.” In E. Boone and W. Mignolo (eds), Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, pp. 220–70. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10 Niles, A. Susan (1999). The Shape of Inca History: Narrative and Architecture in an Andean Empire. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
11 Rostoworowski, María (1983). Estructuras andinas del poder: Ideología religiosa y política. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
12 Salomon, Frank (2005). The Cord Keepers: Khipus and the Cultural Life of a Peruvian Village. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
13 Urton, Gary (2003). Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records. Austin: University of Texas Press.
14 Zuidema, Tom R. (1990). Inca Civilization in Cuzco. Trans. Jean Jacques Decostes. Austin: University of Texas Press
6 Writing the Andes
Sara Castro–Klaren
From the perspective of the Amerindians, 1492 marks the inauguration of major, violent, and irreversible changes in their histories, ways of life, and situation in the world. That year inscribes the establishment of a potent and permanent machinery of war supported by devastating weapons (horses, gods, steel swords), fueled by a providential concept of history and the power of alphabetic writing. The conquest moved along the path of destruction created by ravaging epidemic diseases for which the Amerindians had no defenses. In less than thirty years the peoples of the Caribbean were nearly extinct, while Mexico and Central America began to experience the ravages of the destruction of their entire cultures by the military, the bureaucracy, and the evangelizing clergy. As the Spaniards moved South of El Darien (Panama) in search of El Dorado (a kingdom made of gold), smallpox, colds, measles and pneumonia preceded them. The death of Huayna Capac, the last Inca, the father of Huascar and Atahualpa, is attributed to one of these plagues. Much of this “glorious” march west and south is reported during the early stages of the conquest to His Majesty and crown officials in diaries,
