La función social de la oralidadL actos de habla e historia indígena en las obras de escritores andinos

• In Event: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals: Writing, Voices, and Networks

Abstract

The place of the oral word in transmitting and recording knowledge in Western societies devalued with the spread of the written word over the centuries. This devaluation of the oral word as a reliable medium to inform, store, and organize information became more rampant with the writing of vernacular languages (like Castilian and Portuguese) derived from Latin. The European fixation with the written word spread in the Americas alongside its exploration, conquest and colonization while confronting Indigenous languages with different ways of organizing and recording knowledge. Among these ways, the rhetoric of the oral word and the social roles ascribed to its keepers and performers was deemed, in the best case-scenario, inaccurate or the devil’s work in the worst. However, European and Indigenous oral and written practices to organize the world and transmit its knowledge made contact and established an often-tense dialogue. This paper approaches this dialogic tension and pays special attention to the role of oral performances and their participants (amautas/poets, quipucamayos/cord keepers, informants, translators, scribes) in early colonial Spanish Perú. I depart from a brief reflection about the place of the oral word in official communications that has been recorded in early colonial accounts and chronicles of Spanish America (Fray Ramón Pané, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, Father José de Acosta, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Guamán Poma de Ayala) to frame my discussion of Indigenous systems of graphic communication and the importance of the oral word in their production, transmission and validation. The interaction of both, the official speech act and the tangible artifact that records information (writing, quipu) was crucial to construct historical narratives as well as to maintain high levels of administrative structure within Andean complex states.

Author

• Rocio Quispe-Agnoli, Michigan State University