Indigenous Literary Heritage

The indigenous peoples of the Americas have produced an impressive and fascinating literary heritage, preserved in different forms of graphic, or otherwise codified, registers or through oral transmission. These precolonial texts and images have become a topic of special disciplinary interest, particularly in Mesoamerican studies, where the texts—in pictographic or hieroglyphic writing systems—constitute one of the principal sources of information about ancient cultures.

Four books exemplify scholarly progress in the interpretation of different forms of Mesoamerican and Andean writing. Only one of these books (Williams) was written by a single author; the other three are edited volumes by groups of experts. Editors’ introductions define the central themes and objectives of the collective works. All four books were published within the past three years by well-known academic houses. All four are well written, well structured, well illustrated, and well distributed, as one might expect. All have indexes that help to locate the various topics treated within the volume. Together they cover four fundamental aspects of this field of research: the different forms, scopes, and themes of ancient American writing systems (Boone and Urton); the narrative content of long precolonial texts (Williams); the social and historical contexts of the texts and their role in the construction of memory (Megged and Wood); and the literary aspects of these texts and the continuity of those aspects in contemporary indigenous society (Hull and Carrasco).

Indigenous cultures and languages are not a thing of the past, as indigenous peoples exist today and have an enormous impact on national societies. They may be marginalized and discriminated against, but they are certainly not marginal in terms of cultural value. The continuity aspect is made explicit throughout the volume Parallel Worlds, edited by Kerry M. Hull and Michael D. Carrasco, which deals, in chronological order, with hieroglyphic Maya texts in precolonial times, colonial alphabetic documents, and present-day oral tradition. The other works under review focus almost exclusively on the precolonial and colonial periods but, even so, pay occasional attention to the topic of continuity.

Though it is far from being a mainstream practice, there is an important tradition of exploring cultural continuity as a key to understanding the art and religion of indigenous civilizations in the Americas. One such exemplary and paradigmatic work is by the German zoologist, geographer, ethnographer, and linguist-philologist Leonhard Schultze Jena, which curiously is not even mentioned in Parallel Worlds. In order to prepare for translating the Popol Vuh (the sacred book of the K’iche’ Maya), Schultze Jena travelled through a series of Mesoamerican communities in 1929–1931. He studied the languages, wrote grammars and dictionaries, and registered oral traditions. Finally, staying for four months in the K’iche’ region, he documented there such important cultural elements as the ongoing use of the Mesoamerican calendar and its symbolism, all in the K’iche’ language of course. ¹In line with his research, several authors have emphasized the need to include the study of cultural continuity in approaching ancient American cultures. Such scholars include Karl Anton Nowotny, Ferdinand Anders, and Luis Reyes García in the field of codex studies, and Linda Schele and Nikolai Grube in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic texts. ²

Scripts, signs, and pictographs

Their Way of Writing, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Gary Urton, offers a series of in-depth case studies...