Читать книгу A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture - Группа авторов - Страница 49

Sara Castro-Klaren

How the past is understood marks indelibly our sense of the present and its possibilities. The idea of discussing memory and “writing” in the Andes during the first century after the Amerindians came into contact with Europeans allows for an all too necessary inclusion of semiotic systems that engage memory but do not engage “writing” in the restrictive sense in which the term has been used in European history. While “writing” sets the introduction of European alphabetic writing as the point of departure for the examination of historiography and all literacy in the Andes, memory opens up the possibility of considering other modes of encoding knowledge and memory, such as the khipu, keros (drinking vessels), the ceque system (Zuidema, 1990), dance, ritual, and even architecture. In The Shape of Inca History: Narrative and Architecture in an Andean Empire (1999), for instance, Susan Niles argues that “in royal architecture, no less than in their narratives, the Incas shaped historical events, giving material form to claims based on victories in battle, encounters with gods, and deeds carried out by their kings” (xvii). In fact it is the numeracy of the khipu and the relation of architecture to narrative poetics (2–84) that has recently made Inca history visible. It has been brought forth from the burial that the ideology of alphabetic writing had performed on it.

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 inasmuch as khipus are produced in “a community and within a body of knowledge in which: a) a person produces a visible sign with the purpose of conveying a message to somebody other than himself; b) a person perceives the visible sign and interprets it as a sign produced for the purposes of conveying a message; and c) the person attributes a meaning to the visible sign” (Mignolo, 1994). In this definition of writing or conception of the khipu as a semiotic system, there is no need to necessarily institute the representation of speech.

Lately scholars have made great strides in decoding the khipu system. The question under consideration is whether the khipu was a simply a mnemonic device that offered “cues” to the khipukamayuc, as the Spanish chroniclers claimed, or whether the system can be considered “writing.” New incursions have been characterized by a mathematical approach to the tactile–visual system of cords, knots, colors, and textures. Marcia and Robert Ascher in Code of the Quipu: A Study of Media, Mathematics and Culture (1997) have led the way. Scholars have also been keenly interested in the idea that khipus did not only encode mathematical knowledges, but were also capable of encoding narrative. Gary Urton, in Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records (2003), characterizes the khipu as a “powerful system of coding information that was at home in pre-Columbian South America, and which, like the coding system used in present-day computer language, was structured primarily as a binary code” (1). Urton has examined the largest number of archeological and colonial khipu thus far included in any study. His historical and theoretical study leads him to think that the khipu – the system of knotted strings – was used for recording both statistical and narrative information. With this claim, Urton’s understanding of the khipu moves beyond mathematical studies and explores the earlier claims made by the mestizo intellectuals like Garcilaso de Vega, Inca (1539–1616), and Blas Valera (1545–97) regarding the khipu’s capacity to encode and store narrative information. Urton thinks that the khipu were constructed with “conventionalized units of information that could be read by khipu masters throughout the empire” (3). So it seems that the type of information stored in the khipu was at least of two kinds: statistical and narrative. Thus the khipu allowed for accounting and recounting or telling.

Like other modern scholars, Urton draws on the system of conceptualization and organization that is peculiar to the Andes. In an effort to bring to bear the Andean modes of thinking Urton introduces a new analytical idea: binary coding. This enables him to propose a “separation between the recording code and the script, or the ‘readable’ message, in the khipu” (162). He can thus conclude that the binary coding of the khipu “constituted a means of encoding paired elements that were in relationships of binary opposition to each other, and that, at a semantic level, these relations were of a character known in the literature as markedness relations” (162). Urton states that he has “sketched out a theory of interpreting the hierarchical and asymmetrical signs” of non-decimal khipu as the “architecture for canonical literatures [e.g., poetry, historical narrative] whose essential components would have been noted by the khipukamayuc and used as the framework … for constructing narrative recitations” (164).

The guiding idea here is that binary coding was one of the principal mechanisms and strategies for thinking in the Andes. Thus Urton looks for features of cords that apparently mimic Andean logical structures rather than depart from the Indo-Arabic arithmetic as an a priori assumption. Urton privileges binarism because it is widely recognized as the primary category of Andean thought and social organization. He argues that fiber working requires binarism from the very initial stages of spinning to cord and textile making. In this sense, cord-making mimetizes the logical operations that generate Andean order. For Urton the sign that a cord contains is not the cord, but rather the aggregate of binary combinations (left/right, cotton/wool, single/ double, colored/neutral) that construct the cord and function as bits of information. Urton’s theory is not wedded to a mathematical model and as such leaves open the possibility that the khipu cord could encode segments of speech, words, or even syllables. In this way the khipu would be capable of registering “writing” in the usual sense of visible signs that correspond to segments of speech.

One of the most important aspects of Urton’s research is that his method and arguments might finally put to rest the notion originally put forth by José de Acosta (1540–1600) and Bernabé Cobo (1580–1657) in 1653, and repeated throughout the centuries with respect to the khipu. Both argued that the khipus were simply a mnemonic device – not a system – that was used as a memory aid by the khipukamayuc. Thus, the intellectual capacity of the khipu depended entirely on the interpreter’s own abilities. This notion may have been developed in view of the fact that the Inca empire was multilingual, and neither Cobo nor Acosta could imagine how a khipu knotted in one part of the empire could be “read” in another if the languages spoken were not the same. The conception of “writing” as visible speech impeded the cognitive imagination of both scholars. Despite the fact that neither Cobo nor Acosta managed to explain how the khipu was “read” across the many languages spoken in the Inca empire, a problem that would have called for positing the existence of a system rather than simple “cues,” nor how the khipu served as the primordial tool in the governance of a huge and efficient state, their ideas remained unchallenged through the centuries. In fact they served to manufacture and cement the epistemological violence that characterized the colonization of the Amerindian cultures by Europe.

While Signs of the Inka Khipu has been widely regarded as a major breakthrough in Andean studies, Galen Brokaw writes that, despite the fact that Urton presents compelling archeological evidence for the conventionality of the khipu system, he nevertheless does not present enough ethnographic evidence to support the argument about the conventionality of the binary features, nor about the computer-style binary code (Brokaw, 2005: 574). Further, Brokaw argues that Urton “conflates the referential and the poetics” or the structure of cultural interactions (577). For Brokaw it does not follow that “Andean Cultures organize the world into binary categories … a homologous structure characterized the operation of reference itself’ (578). This scholar also finds it hard to imagine how the khipu could support two readings, one numeric and one binary. Brokaw believes that the numeracy direction, as pursued by the Aschers, will eventually result in a better understanding of the khipu than the binary-code model proposed by Urton (2003: 586–7). However, in “The Poetics of Khipu Historiography” (2003), Brokaw also attempts to make the case for the khipu as a system capable of storing narrative information. By comparing two colonial documents that certifiably claim khipus as their immediate source and khipukamayuc as their “readers” in the Quechua oral rendition of the contents, Brokaw is able to establish that there existed a khipu biographical narrative genre (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 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 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.