Allies at Odds: The Andean Church and its Indigenous Agents, 1583-1671

3: Mediating with Cords

71 Tangled Confessions Traditional scholarship has understandably viewed written words as instruments of colonialism that supplanted native American ways of record keeping and communication. Accounts of the Europeans’ destruction of native holy objects and media reveal the indisputable role of books in the Spanish colonization of indigenous memory and symbolizing practices.1 The Archive, in this sense, notably undermined native sources of expression and forced Indians to play by new rules. But colonial-era writings that testify to the resiliency of native technologies pose new questions about the process by which this colonization took place and the true impact of alphabetic literacy in local native communities. In fact, archival documents show that native intermediaries drew on various media traditions when negotiating between the colonizers and indigenous peoples. One such tradition were Andean khipus: the knotted cords that the Inca used for accounting and historical record keeping, which indigenous assistants employed in colonial times to teach Christian doctrine and monitor sacred ritual. Native church personnel kept records of parish activities on paper as well as cords, yet little is known about these “indigenous archives” or how they functioned in Andean social contexts.2 The khipu is one of the most enigmatic historical objects of preColumbian origin. Early Spanish chroniclers of South America marveled at the complex variety of information that the Incas stored on knotted cords and the reliability of string devices for carrying out the business of imperial administration. But how the Incas were able to govern the vast empire of Tawantinsuyu without a European-style system of writing or accounting is a question that confounded Spanish observers of the colonial period and still Chapter 3 Mediating with Cords 72 Chapter 3 confounds students of Andean history today.3 Since the pioneering studies of L. Leland Locke (1923) and Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher (1981), which first explicated the material structure and computational function of string records, uncovering the types of information encoded in khipus has become a quest of vital interest to ethnographically minded scholars of Andean studies. In the past decade, historians and anthropologists have tried to advance previous theories of Inca practices of accounting and to determine whether the khipu contained more than statistical records. Some research in this vein posits that string registries also may have been capable of representing discursive modes or units of speech that could be “read” for meanings in ways similar to alphabetic writing systems (Urton 1998).4 Without prejudgment against such a possibility, the discussion that follows draws from approaches that investigate the conditions and practices of colonial Andean media traditions and the khipus’ capacity for recording social action in native parish settings.5 A privileged source in this regard is Guaman Poma’s chronicle, which includes several drawings that illustrate the “semiotic pluralism” (Salomon 2004, 8) of Andean cultural life. The work portrays native officials of figure 9. Inca khipu of the Early Nasca Period. Courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 32-30-30/55. Mediating with Cords 73 various types who fulfilled duties in the Spanish colonial administration. Two examples, the sayapayaq (messenger) and the regidor (chief accountant ), hold aloft the tools of their trade: European books and Andean khipus (Guaman Poma [c. 1615] 1980, 204, 814). It appears from these drawings that written culture did not immediately displace native forms, but was imposed gradually in a negotiated process undertaken by Spanish and Andean authorities alike. Less clear, however, are the relative meanings and power that native intermediaries assigned to these instruments of colonial rule and the diverse goals to which they were directed. What special powers did the keepers of indigenous archives hold? A first answer to this question begins with striking testimony on khipu specialists in the parish of Andahuaylillas, in the diocese of Cuzco, taken from a bilingual Spanish-Quechua book of rites, the Ritual formulario e institución de curas, published in Lima in 1631. The ritual’s author, the priest Juan Pérez Bocanegra, included in the work a caution to readers about the dangers of allowing parishioners to confess using strings. He explained that with these cords—or “tangles for their souls” (enredos para sus almas)—the parishioners of Andahuaylillas had turned confession into a collective, disorderly affair. They falsified khipu, exchanged them freely among themselves , confessed to sins they did not commit, and failed to declare others they did: As a...