Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes by Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins (review)

In this richly illustrated and conceptually challenging book, anthropologist Joanne Rappaport and art historian Tom Cummins confront a longstanding problem of Andean studies: how did native Andeans document their many versions of the colonial experience when so few adopted alphabetic literacy? Given that Andeans lacked Mesoamerican-style writing systems and rarely used representational images prior to the arrival of the Spanish, what traces of indigenous views of colonial life survive in largely Spanish-language manuscripts and published texts, religious paintings, line drawings, maps, town plans, buildings, drinking vessels, textiles, and other artifacts? More importantly, how do we interpret this dizzying ensemble of evidence? Beyond the Lettered City is part guide for the perplexed, part tour through examples of these challenging kinds of sources. The book is novel in another way in that much of the evidence comes from the Andes of the north (Colombia and Ecuador) rather than the old Inca core of the center and south (Peru and Bolivia). This helps explain the exclusion of khipus, which have been extensively studied by others.

It has been nearly thirty years since Ángel Rama coined the term “lettered city.” Like Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” the term took on a life of its own. La ciudad letrada elegantly combined two early modern Spanish obsessions: urbanism and writing, both handy “neo-Roman” instruments of colonialism, but as Rama pointed out, the grid plan and inscribed page were also means to local if not always subversive ends. Rama’s tension was basically creole/peninsular. It was a story about elites. Rappaport and Cummins are interested in the far more numerous and culturally diverse indigenous peoples who thrived and struggled both inside and outside Rama’s trazas. Understanding this world, they argue, requires casting a broad net into the countryside in search of evidence - that and exploding traditional notions of literacy.

Chapter one, “Imagining Colonial Culture,” uses the 1586 petition of a Muisca cacique, a 1599 painting by an indigenous Quito artist of three Afro-indigenous maroon chieftains, and a 1667 trial record of a cacique in northern Ecuador claiming Inca descent to explore hybrid cultural forms and means of expression that did not cleave to crown-prescribed legal identity markers (indio, mestizo, mulatto, etc.). The aim is to question the splitting of colonial Andean studies into “Spanish” and “indigenous” halves.

Chapter two, “Genre/Gender/Género: que no es uno ni otro, ni está claro,” starts with a focus on early modern Spanish typologies of sex, race, and religious imagery, then morphs into a discussion of novel colonial genre paintings (Andean archangels and even Mexican castas), then one on Muisca idolatry extirpation campaigns and painted caves, then another on some astonishing early seventeenth-century murals in the village of Sutatausa, near Bogotá. The authors then discuss the Cartagena Jesuit Pedro Claver’s alleged use of painted images in the conversion of African slaves, then indigenous commissions for religious images and objects, then feather paintings (from Mexico) and finally the use of Pasto varnish, or mopa mopa, on various wooden artifacts. All of this suggests a kind of tour through a curiosity cabinet, but readers need not despair; they are in the hands of superior guides. Rappaport and Cummins not only tie these objects and images together but also force us to expand the category of gender.

Chapter three, “The Indigenous Lettered City,” returns to archival materials, first describing how the native peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes reacted differently to the introduction of alphabetic writing, then sorting out documentary “genres” such as contracts, testaments, and titles. The authors take pains to show that native peoples embraced written documents, treating them almost as fetishes.

Chapter four, “Genres in Action,” borrows from Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s critique of archives and the construction of history to examine how some native Andeans generated their own narratives of legitimacy. The first cases are in the northern Ecuadorian highland town...