Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes

6. Reorienting the Colonial Body: Space and the Imposition of Literacy

Reorienting the Colonial Body SPace and the imPoSition oF literacy Literacy, whether alphabetic or visual, is an intimately physical practice that involves the human body in a series of learned, though largely unconscious, activities: the position in which the reader or writer sits, grasping the book or the pen; the distance at which one must stand toviewartwork; the act of crossing oneself when approaching certain images or when swearing as a signatory to a document “in the name of the cross.” The ideological edifice which the Spaniards sought to inculcate in Native Americans through the teaching of the Christian doctrine, alphabetic literacy, and the Castilian language, was built upon a complex of bodily habits which, as Bogotá archbishop Fray Luis Zapata de Cárdenas (1988 [1576], 28) admonished, “serve[d] as a ladder toward spirituality and [took] advantage of the ascent to another higher rung” (sirve de escalón para lo espiritual y aprovecha a la subida de otro grado mas alto). In the previous chapter, we saw how such bodily experience was enforced through the participation in or observation of the rituals surrounding literacy, how even nonliterates were implicated within the social formation that literacy helped to spawn. In this chapter, we will move more deeply into the bodily experience of literacy to inquire into how it constituted a fundamental facet of the physical world in which colonial native peoples lived. Archbishop Zapata of Bogotá advises that all natives should live in well-kept houses and towns, much as people did in Spain (Zapata de Cárdenas 1988 [1576], 31–33): 6 220 • • • chaPter 6 Item, because the cleanliness of the town is necessary so that they live healthy and with cleanliness, it is ordered that the priest take care over how clean the town is, each one cleaning his own property and weeding it, and the same with the houses, and they must be well organized, and they must have platforms and clean beds to sleep on, and the priest must make visits with the alcaldes and with the cacique, or with the captain of each capitanía [Muisca political division] to whom the given houses belong , to see if they have complied with the above . . . and he must order that the kitchens and pantries be [constructed] apart from where they live and sleep.1 Architectonic and urban space must be clean and ordered according to Archbishop Zapata’s strictures; moreover, the very bodies of the natives must be clothed, the men in shirts and breeches, the women in high blouses and mantles reaching down to their feet, all with their hair tied back in an orderly fashion (Zapata de Cárdenas 1988 [1576], 33). In short, this was a comprehensive reworking of the spatial order, beginning with the indigenous body and extending out to the home, the town, the administrative domain, and the spiritual universe, all traversed by the inscribed page and the painted canvas (Castañeda Vargas 2000; López Rodríguez 2001). The spatial order—be it the human body, topographic space, community organization, pictorial composition, or the surface of the written page—is a social creation and therefore never fixed. In the northern Andes, the colonial spatial order reworked Spanish and indigenous structures in new ways, by recasting civic space, producing a resonating chamber in which political ritual and organization of sacred precincts took on distinctly literary and pictorial tones. Nonalphabetic spaces, like the streets of an indigenous village or its main square were, simultaneously, reformulated on the written page in census documents, baptismal records, and legal papers. We will examine the intersection between these spatial genres, their social production, and their reconfiguration, in an effort to comprehend the interrelationships of visual and alphabetic literacy as they were inscribed upon indigenous bodies in the colonial era. Visuality and literacy were intimately connected to colonial bodily practice . As we noted in the previous chapter, graphic symbols were simultaneously inscribed and enacted ritually, the most simple example being the making of the sign of the cross at the moment the cross was written or drawn into a document. Such literate patterns were, moreover, superimposed in reorienting the colonial Body • • • 221 both sacred and secular contexts upon the architectonic and topographic space within which people walked, the kinship networks by which they traced descent, and the sacred precincts where they worshiped. That is, just as alphabetic and visual texts were ceremonially manipulated, the categories and...