The Cord Keepers

The Cord Keepers PDF Author: Frank L. Salomon
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
None of the world’s “lost writings” have proven more perplexing than the mysterious script in which the Inka Empire kept its records. Ancient Andean peoples encoded knowledge in knotted cords of cotton or wool called khipus. In The Cord Keepers, the distinguished anthropologist Frank Salomon breaks new ground with a close ethnography of one Andean village where villagers, surprisingly, have conserved a set of these enigmatic cords to the present day. The “quipocamayos,” as the villagers call them, form a sacred patrimony. Keying his reading to the internal life of the ancient kin groups that own the khipus, Salomon suggests that the multicolored cords, with their knots and lavishly woven ornaments, did not mimic speech as most systems of writing do, but instead were anchored in nonverbal codes. The Cord Keepers makes a compelling argument for a close intrinsic link between rituals and visual-sign systems. It indicates that, while Andean graphic representation may differ radically from familiar ideas of writing, it may not lie beyond the reach of scholarly interpretation. In 1994, Salomon witnessed the use of khipus as civic regalia on the heights of Tupicocha, in Peru’s central Huarochirí region. By observing the rich ritual surrounding them, studying the village’s written records from past centuries, and analyzing the khipus themselves, Salomon opens a fresh chapter in the quest for khipu decipherment. He draws on a decade’s field research, early colonial records, and radiocarbon and fiber analysis. Challenging the prevailing idea that the use of khipus ended under early Spanish colonial rule, Salomon reveals that these beautiful objects served, apparently as late as the early twentieth century, to document households’ contribution to their kin groups and these kin groups’ contribution to their village. The Cord Keepers is a major contribution to Andean history and, more broadly, to understandings of writing and literacy.

The Cord Keepers

The Cord Keepers PDF Author: Frank L. Salomon
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
None of the world’s “lost writings” have proven more perplexing than the mysterious script in which the Inka Empire kept its records. Ancient Andean peoples encoded knowledge in knotted cords of cotton or wool called khipus. In The Cord Keepers, the distinguished anthropologist Frank Salomon breaks new ground with a close ethnography of one Andean village where villagers, surprisingly, have conserved a set of these enigmatic cords to the present day. The “quipocamayos,” as the villagers call them, form a sacred patrimony. Keying his reading to the internal life of the ancient kin groups that own the khipus, Salomon suggests that the multicolored cords, with their knots and lavishly woven ornaments, did not mimic speech as most systems of writing do, but instead were anchored in nonverbal codes. The Cord Keepers makes a compelling argument for a close intrinsic link between rituals and visual-sign systems. It indicates that, while Andean graphic representation may differ radically from familiar ideas of writing, it may not lie beyond the reach of scholarly interpretation. In 1994, Salomon witnessed the use of khipus as civic regalia on the heights of Tupicocha, in Peru’s central Huarochirí region. By observing the rich ritual surrounding them, studying the village’s written records from past centuries, and analyzing the khipus themselves, Salomon opens a fresh chapter in the quest for khipu decipherment. He draws on a decade’s field research, early colonial records, and radiocarbon and fiber analysis. Challenging the prevailing idea that the use of khipus ended under early Spanish colonial rule, Salomon reveals that these beautiful objects served, apparently as late as the early twentieth century, to document households’ contribution to their kin groups and these kin groups’ contribution to their village. The Cord Keepers is a major contribution to Andean history and, more broadly, to understandings of writing and literacy.

Reseña de "The Cord Keepers. Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village" de Frank Salomon

Reseña de Author: Tristan Platt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Cord Keepers

The Cord Keepers PDF Author: Frank Salomon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Huarochiri (Peru : Province)
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description


The Cord Keepers

The Cord Keepers PDF Author: Frank Salomon
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Breaks new ground with a close ethnography of one Andean village where villagers, surprisingly, have conserved a set of ancient, knowledge-encoded cords to the present day.

On the Wings of Time

On the Wings of Time PDF Author: Sabine MacCormack
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691126746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Universals and particulars : themes and persons -- Writing and the pursuit of origins -- Conquest, civil war, and political life -- The emergence of patria : cities and the law -- Works of nature and works of free will -- "The discourse of my life" : what language can do -- The Incas, Rome, and Peru -- Epilogue: Ancient texts : prophecies and predictions, causes and judgments.

Reading the Illegible

Reading the Illegible PDF Author: Laura Leon Llerena
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 081654753X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Reading the Illegible examines the history of alphabetic writing in early colonial Peru, deconstructing the conventional notion of literacy as a weapon of the colonizer. This book develops the concept of legibility, which allows for an in-depth analysis of coexisting Andean and non-Native media. The book discusses the stories surrounding the creation of the Huarochirí Manuscript (c. 1598–1608), the only surviving book-length text written by Indigenous people in Quechua in the early colonial period. The manuscript has been deemed “untranslatable in all the usual senses,” but scholar Laura Leon Llerena argues that it offers an important window into the meaning of legibility. The concept of legibility allows us to reconsider this unique manuscript within the intertwined histories of literacy, knowledge, and colonialism. Reading the Illegible shows that the anonymous author(s) of the Huarochirí Manuscript, along with two contemporaneous Andean-authored texts by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, rewrote the history of writing and the notion of Christianity by deploying the colonizers’ technology of alphabetic writing. Reading the Illegible weaves together the story of the peoples, places, objects, and media that surrounded the creation of the anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript to demonstrate how Andean people endowed the European technology of writing with a new social role in the context of a multimedia society.

The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History

The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History PDF Author: Jose C. Moya
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195166205
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 551

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Book Description
This Oxford Handbook comprehensively examines the field of Latin American history.

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898)

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898) PDF Author: Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351606344
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898) brings together an international team of scholars to explore new interdisciplinary and comparative approaches for the study of colonialism. Using four overarching themes, the volume examines a wide array of critical issues, key texts, and figures that demonstrate the significance of Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean across national and regional traditions and historical periods. This invaluable resource will be of interest to students and scholars of Spanish and Latin American studies examining colonial Caribbean and Latin America at the intersection of cultural and historical studies; transatlantic, postcolonial and decolonial studies; and critical approaches to archives and materiality. This timely volume assesses the impact and legacy of colonialism and coloniality.

Into the Archive

Into the Archive PDF Author: Kathryn Burns
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082239345X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Writing has long been linked to power. For early modern people on both sides of the Atlantic, writing was also the province of notaries, men trained to cast other people’s words in official forms and make them legally true. Thus the first thing Columbus did on American shores in October 1492 was have a notary record his claim of territorial possession. It was the written, notarial word—backed by all the power of Castilian enforcement—that first constituted Spanish American empire. Even so, the Spaniards who invaded America in 1492 were not fond of their notaries, who had a dismal reputation for falsehood and greed. Yet Spaniards could not do without these men. Contemporary scholars also rely on the vast paper trail left by notaries to make sense of the Latin American past. How then to approach the question of notarial truth? Kathryn Burns argues that the archive itself must be historicized. Using the case of colonial Cuzco, she examines the practices that shaped document-making. Notaries were businessmen, selling clients a product that conformed to local “custom” as well as Spanish templates. Clients, for their part, were knowledgeable consumers, with strategies of their own for getting what they wanted. In this inside story of the early modern archive, Burns offers a wealth of possibilities for seeing sources in fresh perspective.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics PDF Author: Eleanor Robson
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199213127
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 927

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Book Description
This handbook explores the history of mathematics, addressing what mathematics has been and what it has meant to practise it. 36 self-contained chapters provide a fascinating overview of 5000 years of mathematics and its key cultures for academics in mathematics, historians of science, and general historians.