The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village’s Way with Writing

Six: Writing and the Rehearsal of the Past

six d Writing and the Rehearsal of the Past When a lettered yndio picked up his quill to write a preface for the great 1608 Quechua Manuscript of Huarochirí, he started by asking what difference it would have made ‘‘if the ancestors of the people called Indians had known writer[s]’’ (Salomon and Urioste 1991:41). Today (2010) in Tupicocha, the people who descend genealogically from the 1608 narrators have known writers, and some indeed have been writers, for over 400 years.∞ So they can affirm as roundly as anyone else that their ancestors did know writing. What difference has that made? This chapter ‘‘zooms out’’ from the microprocesses that generate the record whose details are studied in chapters 4–5, and asks how Andean villagers synthesize and interrogate their likeness of the past. What do all those constancias add up to? The chapter addresses ethnohistory in the sense of ethnohistoriography: given certain media, a folk theory of legibility, and vernacular habits of recordkeeping, what ways of handling the record constitute a usable representation of the past? What is it useful for? Ethnohistorians have studied vernacular ‘‘past-knowledge’’ in many peasant societies. The discussion, which Bernard Cohn started with his 1961 article ‘‘Pasts of an Indian Village,’’ snowballed so much that in 1995 his admirers made vernacular history the theme of his festschrift (Hughes and Trautmann 1995). This vast field has a thriving Andean component (Glave 1991; Mallon 2005; Rappaport 1990; Rivera Cusicanqui, Conde, and Santos 1992, for example). Within Andean literature, the relation among 222 | Chapter 6 writing, non-Western media such as khipus or local icons, and oral lore is by itself a substantial theme (Abercrombie 1998; Condori 1992; Rappaport and Ramos 2005). Ethnographer-historians who study what Raymond Fogelson (1974) called ‘‘ethno-ethnohistory,’’ meaning local theory and interpretation of the past, emphasize a few characteristic themes. One is the intimate relation between popular historical sensibility and political selfhood, that is, the ways in which recitals of pasts generate imagined collective subjects felt to transcend individual lifetimes and exert permanent group interests. (Combès and Saignes 1991 offer a telling South American example.) A second is the plural and disjointed nature of past-knowledges. A single collectivity ’s statements about the past are hardly ever unanimous; nor are all partiesinapeasantryequallyauthorizedtovoicethem.Rather,theytendto be distinguished horizontally as proprietary knowledge of social segments (i.e., paradigmatic sets of similar corporations, like the ten ayllus of Tupicocha; see Urton 1990), or vertically, as bound to strata in social hierarchy (such as the superordinated state sector, i.e., teachers, social classes, clergy). They may also be bound spatially to geographically separate populations (like neighboring groups anchored to different water sources). Narratives are no less varied in context. A particular version is ‘‘right’’ in one context even if it substantively contradicts one belonging to a different context. A third axis of discussion is the inexhaustible debate concerning the irreducibly different (or not) epistemological footings of ‘‘pastdiscourses :’’ do ‘‘other histories’’ imply ‘‘other’’ premises about time and change? Is practical reason a common ground among all? What is locally considered knowable about the past? (Bender and Welberry 1991; Bloch 1989; Friedman 1985; Hill 1988; Krech 2006; Munn 1992; Turner 1988). We will glance at some of these theoretical axes. But that is not the main objective. This chapter, rather, is guided by Stephen Gudeman’s and Alberto Rivera’s (1990:4–7) suggestion that anthropological fieldwork is done within a community of inquiry long before it is sent ‘‘home’’ to begin its rounds in academe. A fieldworker necessarily documents a society’s ongoing self-interrogation and its internal dialogues, ‘‘a long conversation in which folk, inscribers, readers, and listeners are all engaged’’ (1990:189). Gudeman and Rivera focus upon ‘‘models’’ which have been shaped and reshaped by centuries of discussion. By ‘‘model’’ they mean far-reaching metaphors, such as economy being like a house or a polity being like a body. While sharing their notion of conversation, we would Writing and the Rehearsal of the Past | 223 put at least as much emphasis on inquiry as on modeling. The record of the precise is accumulated in order to control certain social situations, and interrogated to answer questions about past situations. In using its fund of constancias and memory, a village is engaged in a sort of research. The ethnographer becomes a specialized listener-in on ‘‘conversations’’ from which his/her own account...