Subaltern use of writing is a topic that has gained an increasing amount of attention in academia. Much of this literature is formulated against an underlying assumption, rooted in what can be best understood as a Rousseauian notion of a noble savage, that writing is a form of power. Moving from an oral to a written society creates a ‘great divide’ between simple, primitive societies and complex, modern ones. From this perspective, writing makes traditional societies less authentic, with some ethnic militants defending the perceived superior value of oral cultures.
Anthropologist Frank Salomon, Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and sociolinguist Mercedes Niño-Murcia, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa, challenge us to rethink how we conceptualise these notions of literacy. Based on extensive ethnographic research in the Andean village of Tupicocha in the central Peruvian province of Huarochirí and building on Salomon's previous book The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village (Duke University Press, 2004), this study presents a probing examination of what literacy means for a rural village. The authors examine literacy as a social practice that defines social interactions.
Salomon and Niño-Murcia identify Tupicocha as a decidedly non-oral society. In contrast to what many observers assume is the case throughout the Andes, literacy is not a recent mid-twentieth-century import. Rather, the authors date the region's engagement with the written word to 1608 and the famed Huarochirí manuscript, an early colonial depiction of Indigenous rituals that more than two decades ago Salomon translated into English and published with the University of Texas Press. Without the strong presence of haciendas and their opposition to education, schooling gained an earlier presence and a stronger foothold in Tupicocha than in many other places in the Andes. Already in the 1880s in the aftermath of the War of the Pacific, widespread literacy was commonplace, long before public rural schools became ubiquitous in rural communities.
Rather than present the people of Tupicocha as the passive subjects of alphabetic writing, Salomon and Niño-Murcia present the villagers as active agents who made writing systems their own. Rather than simply being clients of intermediaries who monopolised the power of literacy, they argue that rural communities developed their own distinctive ways of writing. Furthermore, they used writing to govern themselves, as a form of cultural expression, and to share historic memories. The image that emerges from this volume is one of peasants not only as consumers of the written word but also as producers of it.
In the process, Salomon and Niño-Murcia challenge concepts of the Andean world as a non-Western culture. The people of Tupicocha no longer speak an Indigenous language, neither their aboriginal vernacular variant of Aymara nor the imperial Quechua that invading powers subsequently imposed. For the contemporary monolingual Spanish-speaking community members, ‘Indigenous’ is something that belongs to a previous era. Nevertheless, Salomon and Niño-Murcia portray the community as ‘strikingly Andean in its social organization, mythology, and expressive culture’ (p. 2). As a result, its use of literacy is also strikingly Andean.
Building on his earlier work on khipus, Salomon draws parallels between the social uses of khipus and the printed word. He argues that khipus had a vernacular presence in Andean society. They were not a specialised art, nor did they only serve imperial interests. He draws an intriguing picture of a period during which khipus and paper existed simultaneously, and notes that the latter began to supplant the former when Spanish literacy rates began to rise. Books came to emulate khipus, not so much in their mechanical purpose of recording data but in their ethnographic role in defining societal relationships. Alphabetic writing is a ritual, a process that gives meaning to society, and in this way it plays a similar function to that which khipus did in an earlier period.
Niño-Murcia assumed lead authorship for the middle chapters of this book on sociolinguistics, and they are packaged around chapters that are framed with Salomon's ethnographic discussions. The two perspectives work well together, and present a consistent image of Andean society. An extensive comparison of regional linguistic variations, particularly between urban Lima and rural Andean Spanish, makes what at first glance appears to be a substandard use of language much more understandable. Niño-Murcia approaches the subject from a respectful and sensitive position that does not present one linguistic variant as more accurate or superior to the other, but explains how the differences are rooted in contrasting reference points. She convincingly argues that what outsiders might interpret as a rustic writing style is instead rooted in anachronistic usage that is a historical legacy of how literacy made its way into Tupicocha.
Salomon and Niño-Murcia draw what will strike some as an exaggerated and fanciful picture of peasant interest in literacy, and they romanticise writing in Tupicocha to the point where a reader begins to ponder whether they read too much into the community's engagement with alphabetic writing. The authors examine in detail the power of writing and power over writing, but throughout the entire book they resist examining writing as a form of power. In large part, this is due to a studied anthropological interest in analysing the ritualistic and ethnographic aspects of a rural community. But an unfortunate side effect is a lack of political examination of what sectors of society most commonly employ writing, and how they advance their economic interests through this skill. Scrutinising the relationship between literacy and economic inequality could open up useful new avenues of investigation that will help us better understand rural Andean cultures. Nevertheless, this masterful study challenges our stereotypes and presents us with a new understanding of the role of literacy in rural communities. In the process, it provides a model for future study in the field.
