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

This is an erudite collection of essays centered on Ángel Rama’s (1984/1996) concept of the “lettered city.” Authors Rappaport and Cummins argue that alphabetic literacy is only one form of communication. To extend the concept of literacy, Andean ways of knowing (including the use of toponyms, which carry information on crops, geographical features, and architectonic forms; p. 232); quipus, knotted strings holding systematic knowledge, especially of quantitative data; and paintings and weavings should be included. Together these gave birth to “a distinctly colonial culture of communication,” (p. 22) born of intercultural negotiation and dialogue and employing heterogeneous cultural codes (p. 26). Combined, they contributed to the constitution and reconstitution of colonial institutions among the Muisca (Chibcha), Pasto, and Nasa (Páez) societies in the northern Andes.

Written documents, including wills, contracts, and titles, attract special attention from the authors, who highlight both the process by which these documents were created and the crucial roles of notaries, judges, interpreters, and other specialists, recalling Kathryn Burns’s recent book Into the Archives (2010). These officials and specialists “convert[ed] raw testimony into colonial legal truth” (p. 20). The authors show how native elites inserted toponyms, bringing to mind Keith Basso’s excellent anthropological work Wisdom Sits in Places (1996), and references to significant possessions of symbolic value (precious mantles, fine shirts, and other ritual paraphernalia) to communicate that value to their kin and community (for example, to substantiate their legitimacy). Such actions demonstrate native agency; the “art of being in-between,” as described by Yanna Yannakakis (2008); and, even more importantly, how colonial documentation became “mestizo-ized.” Native agents, in other words, used literacy to conform to imported European forms, but at the same time inserted content with an eye to communicating meaning to their own compatriots. These messages allowed natives who themselves might not have been lettered to capture and relate to their own history. Literacy, as considered here, is “more than simply the ability to reproduce or decipher writing” (p. 21).

A consideration of other manifestations of cultural literacy as demonstrated in painting, sculpture, architecture, and music and how performances transformed objects (for example, royal decrees such as the requerimiento, or uses of the king’s picture) into expressively authoritative and potent symbols of a converging hybridized colonial culture proves their role in promoting and sustaining ideologies and social hierarchies. In sum, native and Spaniard in learning to parley and accommodate each other were forced to create a shared symbolic language (p. 104).

The extent to which native concepts clashed with European legal ones led to “ambivalences … in these collaborative texts” (p. 21) that complicated both interpretations and consequences. The insertion by native elites of references recognized in their communities as signs and symbols into the heavy Spanish legalese of documents that conveyed legitimacy and other values to their followers led at times to misreadings by the Spanish. Thus, the written page became a “contact zone” (what Louise Pratt 1992 called a site of interactions in contested contexts of domination and dependencies, or the “middle ground” identified by Richard White 1991), where culture change operated in multiple directions (Fernando Ortiz, 1947). The downside of the process was a series of “creative misunderstandings” (p. 44) through which ideals and practices were reinterpreted and reinvented. Such conflicting imaginings extended to artifacts. For example, queros (drinking cups, beakers) became a symbol for native drunkenness in Spanish eyes; the same beaker was a highly valued emblem for hospitality in traditional native cultures. These contrasting ideas, akin to James Lockhart’s “double mistaken identity” (1985), gave rise to a mestizo culture through which members of various groups communicated, or miscommunicated. But, over time, the resulting interactions made of the theoretical conception of two republics overlapping cultural worlds (p. 49).

My only qualms are what seems to be an intermittent confusion...