Description
Book SynopsisThe Inkan empire did not have writing as it is usually understood. The Inkas kept track of information - including their social and political organization - on khipus, knotted cords of cotton or wool. This book offers a reading of the khipus of one Andean village, where villagers have conserved a set of these enigmatic cords to the present day.
Trade Review“
The Cord Keepers is a brilliant and pathbreaking book. It forces us to reconceptualize what writing is or can be, what it encodes, and whether we should even think of writing as something that records, rather than as a performative practice that engages more actively with the world.”—Joanne Rappaport, author of
The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes“Strokes of good fortune brought Frank Salomon to villages and archives with extraordinary potential for research. Imagination, erudition, and perseverance permitted him to retrieve insights of great importance from these sources. The world seems subtly yet significantly different after reading
The Cord Keepers, since Salomon convinces his readers that the human capacities to record meanings and to transmit cultural forms are deeper and broader than they had thought.”—Benjamin Orlove, author of
Lines in the Water: Nature and Culture at Lake Titicaca“This is without doubt the most important work ever produced on the khipu. It is extraordinarily bold and inventive in its suggestions for how these ‘texts’ may have been produced and interpreted. The hypothetical reading of the khipu is an absolutely astonishing accomplishment.”—Gary Urton, author of
Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records Table of ContentsList of Illustrations and Maps ix
List of Tables xiii
About the Series xv
Preface xvii
The Unread Legacy: An Introduction to Tupicocha’s Khipu Problem, and Anthropology’s 3
1. Universes of the Legible and Theories of Writing 23
2. A Flowery Script: The Social and Documentary Order of Modern Tupicocha Village 41
3. Living by the “Book of the Thousand”: Community, Ayllu, and Customary Governance 55
4. The Tupicochan Staff Code 77
5. The Khipu Art after the Inkas 109
6. The Patrimonial Quipocamayos of Tupicocha 137
7. Ayllu Cords and Ayllu Books 185
8. The Half-Life and Afterlife of an Andean Medium: How Modern Villagers Interpret Quipocamayos 209
9. Toward Synthetic Interpretation 237
Conclusions 267
Notes 283
Glossary 295
References 299
Index 317
