Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes by Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins (review)

The title of this book harks back to Angel Rama's La Ciudad Letrada (Hanover, NH, 1984; English trans.,Durham,1996). A noted Uruguayan writer and literary critic, Rama likened Spain's New World empire to a baroque city, albeit one where citizenship was limited to letrados—that is, lettered individuals, nearly all of whom were males of either Spanish or creole extraction. The lettered city also conjured up a system of power predicated upon the written word in the guise of laws, notarial documents, and other legal instruments that enabled the empire's "lettered" minority to exercise dominion over the majority population of natives, mestizos, mulattos, and blacks.

Beyond the Lettered City revises Rama's theories to the extent that it posits an alternate indigenous lettered city inhabited by natives and other subalterns who, having acquired the rudiments of literacy, managed to gain access to instruments of power similar to those wielded by the elites. Tom Cummins, an art historian, and Joanne Rappaport, an anthropologist, also rightly extend literacy to encompass visual literacy and consequently devote several fascinating chapters to the handiwork of those natives who coupled the artistic techniques and representational forms of European art with such native materials as mopa-mopa to produce novel creations in various genres, including painting, textiles, and crafts.

What the authors refer to as the "spatialization" (p. 233) of the indigenous lettered city is another major concern. Although the book centers on the Andes, this "city" does not appear on any map. In chapter 6, however, it is seemingly coterminous with the "reducciones," the ordered villages where, starting in the mid-sixteenth century, Peru's Spanish viceroys required natives to live in an effort to hasten their conversion to Christianity and a more Spanish—read literate— way of life. But wherever its precise location, the indigenous lettered city occupied what is defined here as a porous "intercultural" or "transcultural" space (e.g., pp. 9, 20). The authors' discussion of the meanings attached to these terms is particularly lucid. So, too, is their analysis of colonial culture,hybridity, alterity, and other, now-popular terms drawn from the lexicon of postcolonial studies.

Specialists will find these discussions of particular interest, but from the perspective of a historian the study disappoints on several fronts. Absent, for example, is any discussion of schooling and the other mechanisms that facilitated the acquisition of literacy among natives. Nor is the question of exactly which natives—and, equally important, how many—entered into the lettered city, even though the evidence presented by the authors suggests this group consisted primarily of caciques—that is, those native chiefs who seemingly had accommodated themselves to Spanish power and profited from it. Moreover, the authors tend to ignore the important issue of change over time. Contextualization also is wanting, especially as it pertains to the northern Andes (part of modern Colombia) where the authors' archival research has yielded important new material relating to the Muisca and the Pastos, two indigenous peoples whose caciques seemingly entered the lettered city with relative ease. On the other hand, little is said about the history and evolution of these peoples during the colonial era or changes in the region's economy and system of governance that might have encouraged caciques to become literate, let alone about the clergy who presumably helped move the caciques along the path to "citizenship." Finally, given the book's concern with "spatialization," the absence of a map featuring the region inhabited by Muisca and Pastos is a lacuna that editors of the Duke University Press ought to have addressed.

These shortcomings aside, Beyond the Lettered City represents an important, innovative, and interdisciplinary study that should be mandatory reading for anyone seriously interested in the art, history, and culture of colonial Spanish America. More broadly, it deserves an audience among scholars of...