Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Here are writing systems that are visual to their very core, free from the march of linguistic sounds. In showing us how to read such writing, these authors lead us across the boundaries of archaeology, linguistics, ethnology, history, and art history, and treat us to novel experiments along the way. Anyone who enjoys challenges to ordinary modes of textual interpretation and ordinary ideas about the nature of writing itself is in for quite a treat."—Dennis Tedlock, State University of New York, Buffalo
"This is an exceptionally comprehensive and informative work on Pre-Columbian and early colonial recording systems in Mesoamerica and the Andes. The various contributions focus on a range of hieroglyphic, logographic, and mnemonic recording systems, and there are also excellent discussions of the effects of the introduction of European writing on native recording systems. The articles touching on this latter topic all make clear the complexity of links, and the subtle interplay of changes, between record-keeping and ideology. An important and challenging book."—Gary Urton, Colgate University
Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Writing and Recording Knowledge / Elizabeth Hill Boone 3
Literacy among the Pre-Columbian Maya: A Comparative / Stephen Houston 27
Aztec Pictorial Histories: Records without Words / Elizabeth Hill Boone 50
Voicing the Painted Image: A Suggestion for Reading the Reverse of the Codez Cospi / Peter L. van der Loo 77
The Text in the Body, the Body in the Text: The Embodied Sign in Mixtec Writing / John Monaghan 87
Hearing the Echoes of Verbal Art in Mixtec Writing / Mark B. King 102
Mexican Codices, Maps and Lienzos as Social Contracts / John M. D. Pohl 137
Primers for Memory: Cartographic Histories and Nahua Identity / Dana Leibsohn 161
Representation in the Sixteenth Century and the Colonial Image of the Inca / Tom Cummins 188
Signs and Their Transmission: The Question of the Book in the New World / Walter D. Mignolo 220
Object and Alphabet: Andean Indians and Documents in the Colonial Period / Joanne Rappaport 271
Afterword: Writing and Recorded Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Situations / Walter D. Mignolo 292
Index 313
