Writing Without Words : Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes

The history of writing, or so the standard story goes, is an ascending process, evolving toward the alphabet and finally culminating in the "full writing" of recorded speech. __Writing without Words__ challenges this orthodoxy, and with it widespread notions of literacy and dominant views of art and literature, history and geography. Asking how knowledge was encoded and preserved in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Mesoamerican cultures, the authors focus on systems of writing that did not strive to represent speech. Their work reveals the complicity of ideology in the history of literacy, and offers new insight into the history of writing. The contributors--who include art historians, anthropologists, and literary theorists--examine the ways in which ancient Mesoamerican and Andean peoples conveyed meaning through hieroglyphic, pictorial, and coded systems, systems inseparable from the ideologies they were developed to serve. We see, then, how these systems changed with the European invasion, and how uniquely colonial writing systems came to embody the post-conquest American ideologies. The authors also explore the role of these early systems in religious discourse and their relation to later colonial writing. Bringing the insights from Mesoamerica and the Andes to bear on a fundamental exchange among art history, literary theory, semiotics, and anthropology, the volume reveals the power contained in the medium of writing.__Contributors.__ Elizabeth Hill Boone, Tom Cummins, Stephen Houston, Mark B. King, Dana Leibsohn, Walter D. Mignolo, John Monaghan, John M. D. Pohl, Joanne Rappaport, Peter van der Loo The history of writing, or so the standard story goes, is an ascending process, evolving toward the alphabet and finally culminating in the "full writing" of recorded speech. Writing without Words challenges this orthodoxy, and with it widespread notions of literacy and dominant views of art and literature, history and geography. Asking how knowledge was encoded and preserved in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Mesoamerican cultures, the authors focus on systems of writing that did not strive to represent speech. Their work reveals the complicity of ideology in the history of literacy, and offers new insight into the history of writing. The contributors--who include art historians, anthropologists, and literary theorists--examine the ways in which ancient Mesoamerican and Andean peoples conveyed meaning through hieroglyphic, pictorial, and coded systems, systems inseparable from the ideologies they were developed to serve. We see, then, how these systems changed with the European invasion, and how uniquely colonial writing systems came to embody the post-conquest American ideologies. The authors also explore the role of these early systems in religious discourse and their relation to later colonial writing. Bringing the insights from Mesoamerica and the Andes to bear on a fundamental exchange among art history, literary theory, semiotics, and anthropology, the volume reveals the power contained in the medium of writing. Contributors. Elizabeth Hill Boone, Tom Cummins, Stephen Houston, Mark B. King, Dana Leibsohn, Walter D. Mignolo, John Monaghan, John M. D. Pohl, Joanne Rappaport, Peter van der Loo Contents 6 Preface and Acknowledgments 8 Introduction: Writing and Recording Knowledge / Elizabeth Hill Boone 12 Literacy among the Pre-Columbian Maya: A Comparative Perspective / Stephen Houston 36 Aztec Pictorial Histories: Records without Words / Elizabeth Hill Boone 59 Voicing the Painted Image: A Suggestion for Reading the Reverse of the Codex Cospi / Peter L. van der Loo 86 The Text in the Body, the Body in the Text: The Embodied Sign in Mixtec Writing / John Monaghan 96 Hearing the Echoes of Verbal Art in Mixtec Writing / Mark B. King 111 Mexican Codices, Maps, and Lienzos as Social Contracts / John M. D. Pohl 146 Primers for Memory: Cartographic Histories and Nahua Identity / Dana Leibsohn 170 Representation in the Sixteenth Century and the Colonial Image of the Inca / Tom Cummins 197 Signs and Their Transmission: The Question of the Book in the New World / Walter D. Mignolo 229 Object and Alphabet: Andean Indians and Documents in the Colonial Period / Joanned Rappaport 280 Afterword: Writing and Recorded Knowledge in Colonial Postcolonial Situations / Walter D. Mignolo 302 Index 324 "This interdisciplinary collection of articles focuses on pictorial and iconic systems of the Maya, Mixtec, Aztec, and Inca, and the social contexts of writing during the colonial period, to challenge western conceptualizations of art, writing and literacy. The final papers offer stimulating discussions of interactions between European and indigenous writing systems"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.