Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes

333 Pages·1994·23.5 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Hill Boone

WRITING WITHOUT WORDS

Writing
without
Words
Alternative
Literacies in
Mesoamerica
and the
Andes
Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, Editors
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 1994
© 1994 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper '"
Typeset in Optima by Tseng Information Systems
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Writing without words: alternative literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes I
Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, editors.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8223-1377-4 (ci : acid-free paper).~ISBN 0-8223-1388-X (pa :
acid-free paper)
1 . Indians~Writing. 2. Indians of Mexico~Writing. 3. Indians~Art.
4. Writing~History. I. Boone, Elizabeth Hill.
II. Mignolo, Walter.
E59.W9W75 1993
497~dc20 93-4531 ClP
Preface and Acknowledgments vii Contents
Introduction: Writing and Recording Knowledge
Elizabeth Hill Boone 3
Literacy among the Pre-Columbian Maya: A Comparative
Perspective Stephen Houston 27
Aztec Pictorial Histories: Records without Words
Elizabeth Hill Boone 50
Voicing the Painted Image: A Suggestion for Reading the Reverse
of the Codex Cospi Peter L. van der loo 77
The Text in the Body, the Body in the Text: The Embodied Sign in
Mixtec Writing John Monaghan 87
Hearing the Echoes of Verbal Art in Mixtec Writing
Mark B. King 102
Mexican Codices, Maps, and Lienzos as Social Contracts
John M. D. Pohl 137
Primers for Memory: Cartographic Histories and Nahua Identity
Dana leibsohn 1 61
Representation in the Sixteenth Century and the Colonial Image
of the Inca Tom Cummins 188
Signs and Their Transmission: The Question of the Book in
the New World Walter D. Mignolo 220
Object and Alphabet: Andean Indians and Documents in the
Colonial Period Joanne Rappaport 271
Afterword: Writing and Recorded Knowledge in Colonial and
Postcolonial Situations Walter D. Mignolo 292
Index 313

~~Ihi, volume stems from a roundtable held on March 23-24, Preface
1991 at Dumbarton Oaks titled "Art and Writing: Record
·ng Knowledge in Pre-Columbian America." The roundtable and
brought together a group of twenty-six scholars who had been think
ing about and working on graphic systems of recordkeeping in the New
Acknowledgments
World, and it culminated a year's thought and discussion at Dumbarton
Oaks about the ways Pre-Columbian societies recorded and preserved
information. The meeting was intended not as a formal symposium but
as an informal discussion; we wanted simply to spend a few days con
sidering and talking about graphic systems of recordkeeping.
To give structure to the meeting, twelve of the participants agreed to
give relatively short presentations that were theoretical in nature and in
tended to open up areas for general consideration. We fully intended,
however, for the meat of the roundtable to be in the discussions that
followed each paper. The first day, our attention was devoted to the
iconic and pictorial systems of Mesoamerica: Elizabeth Boone, John
Pohl, and Peter van der Loo talked about the presentatitm of time, se
quence, and narrative in these systems; Mary Elizabeth Smith, Barbara
Mundy, and John Monahan spoke about the graphic presentation of
space and territory. Then Tom Cummins opened the question of con
ventional systems such as the Andean quipu, where meaning is encoded
without pictorial images; perhaps because he was alone in speaking
about the Andean system or perhaps because we knew less about it,
his comments sparked the greatest discussion. In the second day we
turned to the hieroglyphic systems and texts of Mesoamerica. George
Stuart, David Stuart, and Javier Urcid all explained the early inscriptions
from La Mojarra and Monte Alban, after which Stephen Houston looked
broadly at the Maya system. Walter Mignolo then carried the conver
sations into the colonial period and raised the fundamental question of
writing and "the book." The participants who fleshed out the discussion
were Anthony Aveni, Bruce Byland, Flora Clancy, Susan Evans, Heidi
Fogel, Jill Furst, Mark King, Tim Knab, James Langley, Dana Leibsohn,
Carlos Rincon, Jeanette Sherbondy, Barbara Tedlock, Dennis Tedlock,
Gary Urton, and David Webster. It was an intense two days of thinking
and talking about issues none of us had sufficiently considered before.
We all came away invigorated and stretched by it.
Although this volume grew from the roundtable, it does not reiterate
the presentations given there. Some of the talks addressed a specialized
Mesoamerican audience and are being published in other forms else
where; some of the speakers and participants were too pressed with other
commitments to prepare a contribution. Too, the focus of this volume is
less on hieroglyphic systems, such as those of the Maya and the Zapo
tec, and more on the pictorial and conventional systems that are further
from spoken language. We have added articles by Mark King and Dana
Leibsohn, discussants at the meeting, as well as a contribution by Joanne
Rappaport because they offer important complementary perspectives.
Although Rappaport was in Italy during the roundtable, she joined the
ongoing discussion of writing in postconquest Latin America upon her
return. Dennis Tedlock and Gary Urton commented insightfully on an
earlier version of this volume and gave us many valuable suggestions,
for which we are grateful. We also thank Tedlock for pushing us to con
front the issue of writing head-on and to change the title from "Records
without Words" to "Writing without Words."
Elizabeth H. Boone, Dumbarton Oaks
Walter Mignolo, Duke University
Preface and Acknowledgments
viii
WRITING WITHOUT WORDS