Colonial Mediascapes

The Andes and native North America present a cultural landscape that confounds notions of a “great divide” between oral and literate societies. In the absence of alphabetic and hieroglyphic writing systems, native peoples in these two regions developed communications systems that defied the oral-literate binary. For example, the khipu — the Andean knot record — and wampum — native North American beadwork — communicate without recording speech or words and are accompanied by oral performance, forcing scholars to move beyond the narrow confines of “literacy” to take on wider media panoramas.Colonial Mediascapes is an attempt to embrace that challenge by bringing together scholars — mainly literary scholars, with some exceptions — examining a range of media in the colonial period in the Andes and native North America. At first glance, the two regions could not be more different. For the most part, the Andeanists' point of departure are two by-now canonical indigenous texts — by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui — that Frank Salomon once termed “chronicles of the impossible,” owing to the incapability of their authors to reconcile Andean and European epistemologies. The North Americanists in the volume range much more broadly: from tall tales about scalping and communication among wolves to Christianity and its impact on intercultural communication. The former group of scholars explore indigenous media through the most lettered of native authors, while the latter set the alphabet aside to delve into sound, scent, and touch, disparate emphases arising out of the cultures that are their focus. In a sense, the two groups seem to be engaged in parallel conversations.Nonetheless, Andeanists and North Americanists come together at key points in the volume. A cluster of articles functions as the core of the collection, making sense of the intentions of its editors, who cogently argue in their introduction that the task is not to substantiate how native Andean and North American societies belong on the literate side of the “great divide,” as earlier scholars have contended. Instead, they maintain, we must move beyond the literate-oral binary to comprehend how numerous Native American media transcend the traditional definition of “literate” and, moreover, must be understood to be functioning as a bundle of interrelated practices and not as isolated systems of communication.This argument is vividly developed in two of the early essays in the collection. Andrew Newman's contribution dismantles the notion that khipus, wampum, and other media are forms of writing, while Heidi Bohaker's article uses Great Lakes ethnohistory to show us how, in the absence of archival documentation, scholars might probe as source materials a variety of visual media, ritual objects, and mnemonic practices that frequently operated in tandem as systems of communication and memory retrieval. Taken together, the two authors pose the daunting central challenge of this volume and provide thought-provoking courses of action for those who agree to abandon the conceptual straitjacket of literacy.Birgit Rasmussen and Ralph Bauer both attempt readings of native-authored colonial chronicles in interaction with khipus. Rasmussen creatively explores the ways in which Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala attempts to reconcile alphabetic writing with the nonalphabetic system of the khipu, the latter apparent in the decimal model he employs to structure his recounting of the organization of the Inca sociopolitical system. Ralph Bauer takes what looks to be a more European-style text, Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui's narrative of the conquest of the Incas, to convincingly illustrate how khipu-based genres of recollection might have influenced his writing. Richard Cullen Rath's fascinating deconstruction of the North American wampum tradition as a communicative technology whose meaning unfolded in the context of ritualized oral performance and memory production moves the reader away from alphabetic texts to a greater degree than do the Andeanist scholars. However, Galen Brokaw's thoughtful analysis of what the Quechua term quilca (“writing,” “painting,” “embroidery,” “sculpture”) might have meant for native Andeans also leads us away from literacy as narrowly construed. Brokaw surmises that this panoply of forms suggests that Incaic methods of recording were not codified or predetermined in the same way that alphabetic writing is, this lack of codification preserving a relationship between aesthetic and rational thought to a greater degree than occurs in modern society.Perhaps the Andeanists are more conservative than the North Americanists in this volume. Readings of the scents left by wolves to mark their territories and the use of performative puns to avoid scalping, two of the themes of other articles, lead us, perhaps, so far beyond the literate that the original intent of the volume becomes irretrievable, however captivating those contributions are. Is there a limit to how much we can fit into the category of media and still carry on a conversation about knowledge transmission? This is a question that Colonial Mediascapes poses, leaving the reader to discover the answer

Archaeology · Art · Aside · Colonialism · Indigenous · Literature · History · Latin American history and culture