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

Conclusions

conclusions d Unheralded and uninvited, Native South Americans became a part of the worldwide literate sphere nearly half a millennium ago. Strangely, this bothers many intellectuals. Far from welcoming Amerindians as peers in the republic of letters, they like to pose Native South Americans as lamentable exemplars of humanity denatured or defrauded by letters. Three well-known examples illustrate the tendency. The first is the most famous single passage in the ethnography of writing: the ‘‘Writing Lesson’’ chapter of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. In a clearing of the Brazilian forest, where the ethnographer sat to write his notes, an ambitious Nambikwara chief began to imitate script with squiggles of his own. Soon he set about trying to intimidate his peers with feigned mastery of the graphic art. Lévi-Strauss reflected that this only vindicated Rousseau ’s conviction about the link between writing and slavery: [Writing] had been borrowed [by the Nambikwara] as a symbol, and for a sociological rather than an intellectual purpose, while its reality remained unknown. It had not been a question of acquiring knowledge, of remembering or understanding, but rather of increasing the authority and prestige of one individual —or function—at the expense of others. . . . The scribe is rarely a functionary or employee of the group: his knowledge is accompanied by power, with the result that the same individual is both scribe and money-lender; not just because he needs to be able to read and write to carry on his business, but because he 286 | Conclusions thus happens to be, on two different counts, someone who has a hold over others. The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires . . . and their grading into castes or classes . . . [writing] seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment. . . . The primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery. The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it may even be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying, or concealing the other. (1992 [1955]:298–99; emphasis in original) Lévi-Strauss’s disquiet is moral. It concerns writing’s inherent potential to ‘‘hold’’ people under control by fixing knowledge about them as a property, an instrumental thing that can trump their personal agency. In the Rousseauian view literacy becomes an original sin of civilization. This view merely inverts the equally ideological notion of literacy as a ‘‘state of grace,’’ which Sylvia Scribner (1984) exposed to ethnographic critique, and it is of no greater analytical use. It has played its part in the unfortunate stereotyping of South American ethnology and history as triste histoire. This mindset was unfortunately influential. Until the 1990s, the very fact that an ‘‘Indian’’ was a writer would disqualify her or him as a ‘‘real Indian ’’ in the eyes of most South Americanist ethnographers. The interesting question of what the Nambikwara and other peoples did with writing once they learned it was not broached by the author of Tristes Tropiques. (As of 2008, Ethnologue reported that about 10 percent of Nambikwara were literate in their own language.) It may be that anthropologists’ reluctance to engage with the role of writing in lowland societies has to do with repugnance toward missionaries. In much of South America, after 1767 and the expulsion of the Jesuits, the groups that promoted alphabetic text among ‘‘tribes’’ were Protestant Evangelicals, and the convert enclaves they organized were long seen as beneath ethnographic notice. In the cases of highland peoples, and others closer to the viceregal foci of alphabetic literacy than Amazonians were, this ethnological blind spot substantially deformed the image of native South American cultures. For the pre-Hispanic peoples were not without graphic resources. After 1532, the process of becoming ‘‘the people called Indians’’ was itself conducted through writing, and not unilaterally. The sixteenth-century insertion of Conclusions | 287 post-Inka societies into mercantilism, tribute administration, property law, and Christendom largely took the form of written transactions. As recent historiography shows, Andean parties learned early on to assert themselves in them. In some respects one can even say that post-1532 Andean society constituted itself through writing. Yet the stereotype of highlanders as an unlettered residue of ancient Amerindia lingers on in educational ideology and tourist mirages. Second and more recently...