The Cord Keepersкнига
Аннотация: I n 1994, a fluke of ethnographic luck brought me face to face with the officers of Tupicocha village, Peru, as they draped themselves in skeins of knotted cords which constitute the most sacred of their community's many traditional regalia.Villagers call these quipocamayos, a cognate of the ancient Quechua word for a khipu master, khipukamayuq.The core Quechua sense of khipu is 'knot.'They also call the cords equipos, or caytus (the latter deriving from a Quechua term meaning ''wool thread, spool of wool, ball of wool, piece of cloth, string, cord, etc.'' according to Jorge Lira (1982Lira ( [1941]]:127).Khipus are usually associated with Inka archaeology.Although ''ethnographic'' khipus for herding or confessing are known, historians treat the political role of khipus as a chapter that closed early in the colonial era.Tupicocha's cords represented an unsuspected continuity and, with it, an unexpected chance to see how this pristine graphic tradition functioned in political context.That lucky encounter provides an entry into a central problem of Andean studies: the management of complex information in a state-level society lacking ''writing'' as usually understood.Tupicocha provides no Rosetta stone.But it does open an ethnographic and ethnohistorical window on how the cord system articulated political life as organized by corporate kinship groups.It also provides some clues about specific details of the code.In following them up, I will suggest how an ''ethnography of writing''-Keith Basso's term (1974)-must be extended to put systems grossly different from alphabetic ''writing'' onto an even heuristic footing with more familiar ones.
Год издания: 2004
Авторы: Frank Salomon
Издательство: Duke University Press
Источник: Duke University Press eBooks
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