The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village's Way with Writing
392
The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village's Way with Writing
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822394341 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/23/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Frank Salomon is the John V. Murra Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village, also published by Duke University Press.
Mercedes Niño-Murcia is Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Associate Director of the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Iowa. She is a co-editor of Bilingualism and Identity: Spanish at the Crossroads with Other Languages.
Read an Excerpt
THE LETTERED MOUNTAIN
A Peruvian Village's Way with WritingBy FRANK SALOMON MERCEDES NIÑO-MURCA
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5044-6
Chapter One
An Andean Community Writes Itself
This chapter concerns the physical presence of texts in a modern village, the local way of producing texts, and the way local archives work. Visitors to Peruvian villages do not routinely see any of this. Indeed, they experience a first impression that these are alphabetically impoverished places. This mistaken perception results largely from misunderstandings about the role of literacy in campesino society. Writing lies at the core of community life, but local writings rarely speak outward to a general public. Rather, most writing safeguards an internal fund of knowledge. Nearly all collective action above the level of household intimacy, and even some intrahousehold business, is structured in such a way that the scenario for action itself includes making a record of the action. In the realm of the collective, nothing is "done" until it is written up. This does not imply a monolithic corpus, because a segmented society creates an archive with many segments. The products of incessant self-documentation rest in archives dispersed through the village, usually in confidential locations.
The way archives work has become an ever-widening theme. In brief, theorists emphasize four facets of "archivism." First, archiving—the systematic depositing of cultural traces—produces data structures of its own, which interest archivists and programmers. Second, each archival document is deposited with an intention or purpose of its time, and necessarily bears a trace of the interpretation and importance attached to some fact. An archive is therefore an "archaeological" deposit revealing the range of the thinkable under a particular cultural regimen. Third, archiving is the banking of effectual knowledge: the archived message speaks to the future and constrains it. Archiving is an exercise of power, and so is controlling an archive. Fourth, every actor thinks from and about some personal or shared "archive," namely, his or her fund of evocative or explicit past objects. Tupicocha is nothing if not an intensely archivistic society, and each of these concepts is germane to some part of its practices. We will return to them at various points in exploring its lettered sphere.
WHERE IS THE ALPHABET IN TUPICOCHA?
When it comes to well-known print media, rural Peruvians tend to be readers with not much to read. It is not that they lack interest. Among campesinos one never fails to meet a few people with avidly studious leanings: an all-night trucker who explains his readings on ego psychology while wresting a 1962 Dodge cattle truck around the hairpin turns of a cliff-edge road, or a peasant who trudges up the hill from his fruit trees, stinking of urea, telling what he has read about the diplomatic history of the First World War. Of course degrees of readership vary hugely, from the many who can only figure out items in simple formats (lists, headlines) to people who can expound dense legal prose or archaistic religious language. But in general villagers enjoy reading or being read to. They wholeheartedly second the internationally dominant ideology of literacy. Men who cannot write "well" (i.e., close to the metropolitan norm) are considered poor marriage prospects, because they cannot defend the household with tenable paperwork. Literacy for females is still somewhat controversial. Some men are not embarrassed to be heard scoffing that if women learn to write, they will just write adulterous love notes. Nonetheless in the younger generation of householders, who increasingly see urban employment as an option for daughters, female literacy is gaining support.
Yet the alphabet is not much on display. No neon signs with cheerful curlicues glow to greet the urbanite. Painted store signs are scarce. Hardly any commercial print can be found on sale, except required grade-school texts. Even missionary or NGO pamphlets are less than common. Tabloid papers that truckers bring from Lima pass from hand to hand for weeks until finally recycled as insulation for adobe houses. When travelers get off the bus, villagers often ask if they have brought anything to read. No less than fruit or bread, newsprint is considered a good visiting gift. Some mothers hope their compadres will bring their children books to strengthen them for school. Printed media are, however, counted as luxuries. They are in fact rather expensive relative to other products, partly because the Peruvian state does not provide subsidies such as media rate postage.
Where, then, is writing in this village? Over each door a careful glance allows one to see the faded trace of a census taker's chalk marks. Peering into the schoolhouse window, one sees shelves of government-approved texts under lock and key. The state puts its stamp on the most prominent buildings, namely, shields bearing patriotic insignia. Children have their say in scratched stucco: "The fourth graders are miserable dogs hungry dogs." Adolescents publicize who "is with" whom. Other graffiti announce a horse for sale or an opinion about an ex-lover. At the public health station a small sign announces the legal rates for medical help. "It's your obligation to vaccinate your child. Do it now," says the largest headline. A list tacked outside the irrigation office advises water users of their turns. Commercial container labels dot the village scene: Pilsen Beer, Inca Kola, Porky rendered lard, Full Speed cigarettes, Llama matches (see figure 4). Window grilles on the better-off houses bear ironworked initials of the couples that built them. Clippings of local interest or colorful calendars suitable for adorning walls are saved indefinitely. On adobe walls, each day's sunlight bleaches another infinitesimal shade from the palimpsest of political and election slogans (see figure 5).
The sphere of officialdom does send a lot of print to villages, but officialdom locks it away. The lion's share of Tupicocha village's total print assets have become concentrated, in two locations: the public school (the largest single building complex in this as in most villages), and the municipal building. Until 1998 the municipal collection consisted entirely of law codes, maps, and policy directives sent by ministries. The mayor, an ambitious champion of the village's claim to development, procured book donations by the National Library, the Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos (a cultural affiliate of the French embassy), and certain banks which subsidize "cultural" publishing. Scholarly visitors including Gerald Taylor, a linguist distinguished for work on Huarochirí's colonial Quechua, have donated books too. This budding library grew to perhaps 500 volumes (see figure 6). By 2010, it had been relocated to a rented reading room on the main street.
The public school has a reading room in its main building, stocked mostly with works distributed by the Ministry of Education (see figure 7 and chapter 3). The majority are grade-school texts in various editions and numerous copies.
Small municipal libraries exist in some other villages, but public access is hindered by the lack of salaries for staff to attend them. Libraries arise either by local initiative or by political patronage. Julio C. Tello, Peru's pioneer archaeologist, used his political connections to endow his hometown of Huarochirí (the capital of Huarochirí Province) with a library. In the 1990s it had about 44 meters (144 feet) of mostly full shelves. It holds many donations from Limeños who cherish Tello's memory, as well as from various NGOS, religious groups, and political parties. (Works of the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung occupied almost a whole shelf.)
The appearance of alphabetic deficit and urbanites' perceptions of campesinos as semiliterate come partly from the mistaken supposition that circulation of print is a true measure of literacy. The scripts that actually convey information vital to the community, and which comuneros consider vital, are not in print. Most are manuscripts, and some are typewritten pages. Letters that matter often appear as art: as epigraphy, as embroidery, and as carvings. Reading and writing are far from marginal to being a solid comunero. Ancestors who could barely afford schoolbooks rest in the cemetery under profusely engraved stones, and the wooden crosses that mark the graves of the poor are incomplete without at least their initials.
Tupicocha mounts an intricate cycle of fiestas and "customary" (i.e., distinctively Andean and local) dances, organized by voluntary societies who donate the proceeds to public works. On such occasions the society's members put their name and dates upon the monuments they create. When festival sponsors invested their proceeds in an iron gate for the Collca, or ritual plaza, they inscribed the inside (the part legible during sacred contexts):
work Of the sponsors of Corpus Cristi of the year 1990 Help by the comuneros and the Council and the master artisan Marcelino Antiporta C. And his fore—man Agapito R.R. helper SPONSORS F[unda]dor fortunato 1st VICTORINO 2d DARIO 3d VICTORINO 4th MILTON 5th ALEJANDRO 6th VASILIO 7th EDILIO 8th MARCELO
Likewise, those who help in a roofing bee leave their initials on rafters, and donors of altar cloths have words of devotion embroidered with their names. Inscriptions on natural mineral surfaces are usually mementos of sentiment. Amused bus riders occasionally see cliffs and boulders oil-painted with fresh amorous spectacles:
LOVE LIKE MINE ISN'T SOMETHING YOU FIND LYING IN THE ROAD.
These examples emphasize the in-group character of most local inscription. At the same time, public writing sometimes calls out to the cosmopolitan life which the electronic media glorify. One commercial sign in San Damián (1994) said SASTRERIA MISTER. At least one Tupicocha merchant cast his symbolic net across the Pacific, with a beer sign written partly in Japanese (see figures 8–9). And writing from afar that refers to the village is hoarded (see figure 10).
Diaspora and the deterritorializing way of life have increased communicative reliance on writing, especially during the almost twenty recent years when Tupicocha lacked a telephone. (Wires were stolen during the Shining Path conflict.) One particularly notices writings at the grimy storefront bus depots in Lima which serve, among other ways, as post offices and bulletin boards for villagers coming to market or city-dwelling "children of the village." These spaces function like airlocks between two very different social atmospheres. One of these hidden "airlocks"—there are hundreds in the maze of working-class Lima neighborhoods—is the Expreso Pérez terminal serving central Huarochirí, a remodeled barbecue joint on the raffish fringes of the wholesale fruit market. Dance posters and bullfight posters in Day-Glo pink and green, proclaim hometown functions that, villagers hope, will stimulate urbanites to come home, spend money, and bestow donations.
AN AFTERNOON OF BULLFIGHTS IN SUNICANCHA, HUAROCHIRI ORGANIZED BY THE BROTHERHOOD OF OUR LORD OF MIRACLES HOMERO MACHUCA AND HIS CREW Bulls from San Damián will fight Represented by [the Brotherhood's] President Ruly Durán and its Secretary Oscar Anchelía Janavilca
Inside the bus terminal, over the benches where passengers nod, posters proclaim a regional conference sponsored by an NGO and a community mass in Lima for the deceased of the hometown. There are also calendars with fading panoramas of villages nestled in the skirts of mountains and flyers announcing "folkloric" dances in Lima's dance-and-stage show halls. The Virgin, or a polychrome saint, pronounces a written blessing on dangerous journeys.
Such bus lines function as rural society's post office (see figure 11). (The official post office only connects with large towns.) Villagers line up at the ticket window with letters for the drivers to deliver at different stops. As the bus trundles countryward through a maze of ramshackle factories and rough-built homes, "children of the village" flag down the driver, waving envelopes. Would-be letter senders hang from the doorway stanchion and yell, "Who's going to Pacota?" "Who's from Characuayqui?" hoping to find a passenger willing to carry messages on foot to relatives in the outer hamlets. In highland towns, especially those containing the headquarters of more than one recognized Peasant Community, competitive monumentalism spawns elaborate hand-painted signs. These form a neat sampling of cultural capital's local verbal and visual currencies: modernism, Hispanism, indigenism, and nationalism. Such spectacular writing stands out in Huarochirí's provincial capital, the small city of the same name.
Llambilla (Yampilla Ayllu in the mythology from the 1608 Quechua Manuscript of Huarochirí) decorated its Community hall with a vast, gaily colored modernist-cubist mural, while Huarochirí Community preferred the bullfighting motif. Suni displayed the wiphala, or "neo-Indian" rainbow flag, and a Quechua cliché, "AMA SUA"? ('Don't steal'), which public school books canonize from Inka Garcilaso's 1609 Royal Commentaries. Lupo squares off with military-style iconography and a Latin motto, "SI VIS PACEN [sic] PARA BELLUM" ('If you want peace, prepare for war'). Public works such as bullrings and cemetery gates also bear large, ornate legends. Catholic churches usually have no legends visible from the street but Pentecostal and Evangelical chapels, with their mystique of sanctity through scripture reading, almost always do.
One of the most important functions of rural writing is to performatively enact, and continually reenact, the birth of a new corporate entity. Graduating classes form significant durable age sets. Each year at graduation time the new cohort names itself after a canonized hero. (An example is the 1994 class of the San Damián high school, which hoped to be known forever as "The José Carlos Mariátegui Class.") The new cohort takes a long journey together, and as it goes, paints its name on public surfaces. This custom, encouraged by public school teachers, is a troublesome source of vandalism at archaeological sites, where school youths hold parties (see figure 12). Much as villagers prize inscriptions that performatively create and reproduce society, they equally prize inscriptions that attest its ancient legitimacy and antiquity. They regard inscriptions on church woodwork, church bells (Sunicancha has one dated 1675), and the huge retables of altars (Tupicocha's bears the signature of its maker dated 1762) as proofs of immemorial sanctity. Peañas (step pyramids built as sockets for the cross) that mark building entrances sometimes allude to ancient foundations, citing dates. Recent dates are no less revered, notably the dates of recognition of Peasant Communities, which are sometimes announced on costly brass plaques. Innumerable formulaic inscriptions appear on display objects, such as cajuelas, or glass-walled religious show boxes; altar clothes; embroidered pillows for display of patrimonial khipus, among other uses; and the scarlet banderolas, or giant, hand-held parade banners which organizations carry as public regalia.
In Roman Jakobson's division of the functions of language, most of the inscriptions mentioned so far are "phatic," "emotive," or "conative": they exist to catch attention, to express feelings, or to make a reader do what the writer wishes (1960:357). All this could occur without writing's actually forming the spinal cord of an information system. How far does rural writing go as a rural order of information? The answer, as we will see below, is that it is far reaching and fundamental. But this can only be addressed empirically once one has looked further into writing as an institutional vehicle of action.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE LETTERED MOUNTAIN by FRANK SALOMON MERCEDES NIÑO-MURCA Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Illustrations xiTables xv
Preface xvii
Introduction. Peru and the Ethnography of Writing 1
1. An Andean Community Writes Itself 31
2. From Khipu to Narrative 71
3. A Tale of Two Lettered Cities: Schooling from Ayllu to State 125
4. "Papelito Manda": The Power of Writing 153
5. Power over Writing: Academy and Ayllu 182
6. Writing and the Rehearsal of the Past 221
7. Village and Diaspora as Deterritorialized Library 261
Conclusions 285
Appendix. Examples of Document Genres 297
Notes 301
References 311
Index 351