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

Four: ‘‘Papelito Manda’’: The Power of Writing

four d ‘‘Papelito Manda’’ The Power of Writing The sun rises on a day of faena (‘task, assignment’), that is, a collective workday ordered by the Community authority. Everyone is getting ready to answer the call. While some workers ready cement, sand, lumber, shovels, and pickaxes, one member in every ayllu packs notebooks, pens, a big bag of coca leaf, tobacco, bottles , and rubber stamps. Not one of the innumerable ayllu or community tasks—canal cleaning, cattle branding, road mending, fence mending, building a reservoir, or even playing a game of soccer—is considered done unless it yields a document. In Tupicocha and in countless other Andean communities, the document is a coequal part of the social fact, no less than its ritual or its labor. Indeed one could define a faena, or any community action, as the union of three things: rite, work, and script. Scripts of work and ritual govern the building of a small world. But how does such power get into scripts in the first place? What is it about a text that makes it compelling? One may rightly point to the power structures that impose authorized signatures and audits, and so on. But at the actual moment of inscription, none of that avails if the right phrases are not used in the right formats. Tupicochans, like any letter-bound people, build up the overarching virtual entity called society in the putting together of words. The edifice of customary law is, irreducibly, a series of language events. The language event that transforms work and ceremony into script is one in which the words of familiar peasant 154 | Chapter 4 neighbors become transmuted into utterances of an impersonal collective power. This chapter clarifies the rules of such language events: ‘‘literary processes . . . behind the constitution of authority in texts’’ (Messick 1993:1). It explores the finest-grained manufacture of power. The path involves showing rules and reasons for choosing words as authoritative, and forms for deploying them in genres. Along this path we find that archaistic and legalistic forms are only one ingredient in the manufacture of authority. To be powerful, formulas of law and tradition must join with words that express experiences and feelings shared among ayllu mates in their ever-changing civil and political lives. For this reason we are concerned first of all with word choice, taking lexicon as a sensitive indicator of the encounter between continuity and experience. But we are also concerned with the more rigid genre vessels into which words are fitted. Old forms provide that ‘‘appearance of Again’’ which makes written records the visible embodiment of the enduring collective, but newer words recreate it for actuality. First, we will look into the pragmatic movement of verbal action from speech toward writing as it occurs within the invariant ritual-literate surround described in chapter 1 (see the section ‘‘Labor and Politics Sedimenting in Text’’). A particular kind of conversation, dialogically managed , distills ayllu or community talk toward a moment of inscriptive decision. At the signing, a document comes into existence as the writ of an author transcending all those present. Second, we take note of some theoretical contributions about the sociocultural nature of word choice and the reasons why, at the moment of inscription (however conservative its ideology), mutations and changes occur. Third, we document in detail a few case studies in the building of authority through choice of words, showing how and why certain key usages gain or lose power. Last, and more summarily, we turn to genre: the structuring devices which turn pragmatically novel literate events into instances of recurring types. The examples in question are routine and unexciting documents. We set them forth in a skimmable format, but conserve their texts exactly because one needs at least a compact corpus inscriptionum to demonstrate in detail how the power of writing is interminably regenerated. GENERATING PERFORMATIVE POWER IN THE RITUAL SURROUND Peruvians often quote a Latin American cliché about written authority: ‘‘papelito manda,’’ meaning ‘‘paper is boss,’’ or more literally, ‘‘little paper Power of Writing | 155 commands.’’ The diminutive ending -ito suggests ironic surprise that a scrap of cellulose can trump human agency. In almost any setting— whether academic, political, legal, or athletic—one mutters this remark as in wry acceptance of a perversely inevitable fact. The gist of papelito manda is close to J. L. Austin’s sense of performativity: the act of writing...