The Lettered Mountain

Simply put, The Lettered Mountain is a beautifully written book and a must read for those interested in multiple literacies, historiography, and ethnography, as well as colonial and contemporary Latin America. Rich in descriptive detail and analytically meticulous, Frank Salomon and Mercedes Niño- Murcia tell the story of one group’s orientations and practices toward writing, describing how a municipality in the Peruvian highlands has used symbolic representations for centuries to record local events and to keep records of the important events of their community’s life.This ethnography takes place in San Andrés Tupicocha, a district in the center of the province of Huarochirí. At the beginning of the book, the authors explain that San Andrés Tupicocha is “a recognized Peasant Community . . . . [u]nder Peruvian law . . . a self- governing corporation endowed with control of ‘immemorial’ communal titles to land and water” (p. 21). Being a Peasant Community creates the social space where traditional forms of power dating back to pre- Hispanic times are preserved. Local villagers are organized into ayllus or parcialidades, defined by the authors as nonstate- based institutions created on patriarchal lines, each with its own elaborate internal hierarchy of office and seniority.The majority of villagers make their living from subsistence farming and raising livestock; they belong to a culture of comuneros, or community stakeholders. The community still depends on a shared system of terraces, canals, and clearly defined pastures built centuries ago and continuously undergoing maintenance and improvement. Although the comuneros are mutually dependent on each other, Salomon and Niño- Murcia are quick to point out that this is not equivalent to trusting each other. The comuneros recognize that sharing resources naturally creates tensions because “equal use rights in land and water are of unequal worth depending what private resources one brings to them” (p. 24). Given this cultural premise, even centuries before the Spanish invaded Peru the Tupicochans kept thorough records of townsmen’s participation in shared work, or faenas, through detailed accounting on knotted cords, or khipus, recording devices based on a positional system of knots made within a series of ropes arranged in a cape-like fashion. This annotation system was central to securing harmony among the ayllu’s members, as it provided a way of recording the fair distribution of work and benefits among Tupicochan community members.As a literacy researcher, for me the central argument of The Lettered Mountain is that the tradition of khipu record keeping provided fertile ground for the local appropriation of alphabetic writing once the Spanish arrived. The book illustrates how symbolic knot tying transformed gradually into a system of detailed written records that locals use to precisely register important community events and how the writing style found in locals’ vernacular texts responds to specific historical and social demands. As the local system of khipus gave way to written texts, careful consideration was given to formal and official uses of written language. The authors’ analysis shows that contemporary Tupicochan texts have characteristics of both bureaucratic discourse and khipus. They conclude that one system did not simply replace the other; they coexisted and blended.A historian or an anthropologist, however, might see different main themes in the text: from an ethnographic point of view, the authors’ description and analysis of communal life examine how the characteristics of comunero culture give meaning to keeping local history and records as part of a shared effort for the good of the community with roots in the past and relevance for everyday life now. A historian might see the main theme to be how changes from pre- Hispanic life, the colonial period, and the building of the republic are reflected in symbolic representational practices, writing styles, and genres. They would be interested in how these vernacular texts are part of the Tupicochans’ efforts to preserve their culture and customs against the advance of urban and centralized forces. From a historical point of view, the writing of minutes, resolutions, messages, invitations, and lists create a “little history” — “an obstinately particularist past- knowledge” of local events (p. 115) — tied to a more general history of Peru.The strength of this book lies in the authors’ clear writing style and their ability to intricately interweave and illustrate each of their scholarly arguments into one well- argued, cogently written, readable text. Given its multiple methods, approaches, cases, and examples, this book requires several readings. Like Julio Cortazar’s novel Rayuela, the chapters can be read in different orders, producing several reader experiences from the same text.Finally, this book is an important contribution to current discussions concerning multiple literacies and their ideological standings. The authors challenge normative prescriptions about what counts as literacy, how meaning is accomplished in texts, and the diverse forces at work when reading and writing social discourse. The Lettered Mountain looks at a specific example of vernacular literacy and gives us an eloquent portrait of its meaning, complexity, and power

Agriculture · Archaeology · Colonialism · Corporation · Ethnography · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Hierarchy · Historiography · Peasant · Political science · Power (physics) · Seniority · Sociology · Subsistence agriculture · History · Latin American history and culture · Law

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