This chapter attempts to deal with a long century in which some of the major forces that shaped the discursive history of Latin America appeared and blossomed: the right of the Spanish crown, and by extension other European nations, to conquer other peoples, and the place in the power–knowledge grid of modernity, assigned to Amerindians and their cultures in the world that empire inaugurated. This century also saw the response and resistance that such discourse elicited in the Andes. Although long silenced by the standing historiography of the New World, the voice of the panacas – patrilineal descent groups in charge of preserving specific noble Inca houses – is now being repositioned in the “writing” of the Andes. Thus the encoding of information of the khipu system merits a full discussion along with chronicles and letters written by the letrados, the Spanish men of letters who wrote or gave shape to the events of the conquest and its aftermath.
The timeline that accounts for the events that characterize human activity in the territory that we call the Andes today has often been moved back and forth as modern historians and archeologists try to come to grips with the phenomenon of continuous human habitation and creation in the Andes. Recent archeological findings stretch the timeline for urban life back into the second or third millennia (2400 BCE) before the birth of Christ, making the Andean invention of irrigation, social organization, and urban life contemporary with the pharaohs of Egypt. The remains of various urban centers offer abundant evidence of large populations and complex social and religious life in the valley of Caral situated about 200 kilometers north of Lima.
This push into the ancient past not only underscores the antiquity and originality of Andean civilizations, but also makes the fabled Incas our very recent contemporaries. And yet there is no question that both modern and postmodern citizens of the world consider the distance between them and the Inca empire to be great, if not insurmountable, owing to the difference that marks the spread of European modernity and them. Much of this sense of difference is, of course, owed to the Spanish chroniclers, those soldiers, priests, and crown officials who first related the Spanish encounter with Inca civilization, for all that was written then was told from the intellectual and aesthetic conditions of possibility of warriors and sackers furiously engaged in the conquest of the unimaginably wealthy Inca empire. As the conquest of America constituted the inaugural act in the play of modernity, the ideological and epistemological legacy of these texts remained unchallenged for the better part of 500 years. It is only since the mid-twentieth century that scholars have begun to study, understand, and dismantle the epistemic complexity involved in the construction of the hierarchical difference (colonial difference) that is itself the result and the companion of conquest.
Perhaps the most important difference believed to have existed between Amerindian civilizations and Europe was what the Spanish reported and understood as the absence of writing. Among other things, this absence implied a diminished sense of selfconsciousness, a questionable memory of the past and poor conditions for the development and accumulation of knowledge. Despite the fact that the Maya priests of Yucatan showed the Friar Diego de Landa (1524–79) how the Yucatec phonetic syllabarian glyph system worked, he not only went on to burn every Maya book that he came across, but he also denied that the glyph system was “writing.” The Aztec books were quickly characterized as pictures only, and the khipu, the knotted cords used in the Andes, were found not to have the slightest similarity to writing, for they did not even resemble books or paper in their physical appearance.
Lately, however, great strides have been made in reversing this Eurocentric mistaken appreciation of the modes and techniques of memory and knowledge accumulation and transmission in Amerindian cultures. Semeioticians, anthropologists, linguists, literary theorists, and philosophers have shown that alphabetic writing is neither the only mode of developing and conserving knowledge nor is it the best, most accurate, or all-encompassing. A consensus has developed about the need for a more broadly based concept of “writing,” one that can go beyond the alphabet-bound phonetic sense of writing and can thus encompass other systems of visuality as well as tactile systems of recording information. The problem, as Elizabeth Hill Boone has pointed out, is how to speak about writing without tying it to language (1994: 6). In the introduction to Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (1994), Boone grapples with the key problems embedded in the longstanding, narrow definition of writing that thinks of writing as a graphic system that captures and makes speech visible. Boone opens the way for a more ample definition of writing, one capable of housing Aztec iconographic representations and Maya glyphs. Part of this discussion is supported by the fact that the final decoding of the Maya glyph system came about as scholars were able to overcome inherited ideas about the location of the invention of writing (only in the “Old World”) as well as convictions about the alphabetic necessity of any writing system.
The new thinking about the multiple invention of writing forced scholars to set aside the idea that “natives” did not understand their own cultural systems. Maya scholars first returned to the instructions given by the Maya priest to Landa in the sixteenth century (Coe, 1992: 145–66), and later to contemporary Maya speakers, for linguistic and ethnographic data and interpretation in order to finally decipher the Maya code. The riveting story of all the misconceptions and racist attitudes that impeded the recognition of the Maya glyphs as writing and the recent interdisciplinary findings that led to its deciphering have given scholars a new impetus for deciphering the codes in Aztec and Mixtec iconography, as well as the khipu.
Boone (1994) points out that the assumption that writing is visible speech has been fundamental to the construction of European ideas about writing. This assumption establishes an inextricable link between writing and the voice. It is further assumed that writing was invented only once in the course of human history, and that such an invention is constitutive to the singular position of Europe as the place where original cognitive events of the highest order take place. These assumptions normalize and universalize our received ideas about writing and, in doing so, they get in the way of conceiving of writing as other modalities of recording and communicating information (1994: 3). This notion informs, for instance, the Spanish claim that Atahualpa threw the Bible on the floor because he expected to hear the book speak. The Spanish friar who “reported” the event intended to convey the idea that the Inca was not sophisticated enough to know that writing enables one to see rather than hear speech. His reader, imbued with the same idea of writing, would of course come to the same conclusion without regard for any cultural and epistemological differences in play at the scene in Cajamarca. Contrary to the friar’s account of the scene with the Bible, Boone states that for Indigenous American cultures “visible speech” was not always the goal. In Mexico, for instance, what we call “art” and writing were one and the same thing. Aztecs used one single graphic system (3) which does not necessarily record language (5). This system conveys meaning without expressing language (6). In this sense, the Aztec system is not unlike music, mathematics, or visual ideas; systems which express meaning without falling back into language. Boone observes that in the West, the “notational systems of math and science were developed precisely because ordinary language could not express the full import of scientific relations” (9). In fact, structure is generally effectively depicted visually (diagrams), for the eye can take in at once a greater sense of relations that the serial linguistic form allows.
Thus Boone goes on to propose a new definition of writing: “the communication of relatively specific ideas in a conventional manner by means of permanent, visible marks” (15). Under this definition, the glottographic system of Maya writing, the Mixteca-Aztec semasiographic system (picture writing), finds a place as an effective means of communication and accumulation of knowledge. This definition also allows for the khipu to enter the hall of “writing,” for despite the fact that it has no phonetic counterpart, the khipu holds and conveys information, separate from language (20), in a system that has been lately compared to the way computerized programming works. Khipus, too, function semasiographically, for the elements – color, size, location, texture, complication of the knot, number – are conventional rather than iconographic.
Khipus, like other systems of recording memory and knowledge, indeed like “writing” itself, can be understood as a system of human semiotic interaction