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 Andean visual and tactile modes of communication (95). Cummins interprets the scene at Cajamarca as an example of 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