Review: Knot-Words or Not WordsAuthor(s): Catherine J. AllenReviewed work(s):

The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village by Frank SalomonSource: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 981-996Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4150969Accessed: 16/03/2010 23:29

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BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

Knot-Words or Not Words

Catherine J. Allen George Washington University

Frank Salomon, The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village. Duke University Press, 2004, 331 pp.

The Khipu Enigma Ifelt a pang the other day when I read about multi-spectral imaging tech-

niques that are recovering inscriptions on papyrus fragments over two thousand years old. Rescued from an ancient trash heap south of Cairo, this collection of 400,000 bits of trash has sat in Oxford for over a century, painstakingly curated, and yet the vast majority burned and discolored beyond legibility. With the new technique, a by-product of satellite technolo-

gy, words from the distant past are coming into focus-seventy lines of a lost

play by Sophocles, thirty lines from a seventh century B.C. poet named Antilochos. We can look forward to new (to us) poems by Pindar, Sappho and

Euripides, writings by early Christians-and of course the detritus of everyday Greek-Egyptian life, like tax returns and horoscopes.

So why should this interesting news send a pang through my heart? Because I study the Andes, home to a great civilization whose trash heaps and tombs yield up no ancient words. As far as words are concerned, we have to make do with Spanish accounts of post-Conquest Inka society, and with the very rare colonial era documents written by native Andeans in their own

languages, like the Quechua manuscript written by an anonymous author in

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Knot-Words or Not Words

Huarochirif around 1608. Pre-Columbian Andean inscribed no words on paper, stone or wood. We can cull no words from the artifacts they left behind them.

What they did leave behind is amazing quantities of marvelous cloth. Fiber arts have great time depth ( at least five millennia) in Andean civilization and must have been deeply meaningful, as they still are in parts of the rural Andes today. Not surprisingly, fiber was the medium in which Andeans developed techniques for recording information. By the Middle Horizon (c.1000AD) they were keeping records on complex sets of knotted strings. When Spaniards arrived in the early sixteenth century the Inkas were using these string devices to administer an extremely far-flung empire, stretching from southern Colombia to northern Chile. Spanish chroniclers were impressed with the amount, complexity, variety and reliability of information stored in these khi- pus (the word means "knot" in Quechua). Early-on the colonial regime allowed evidence from khipus (though not the khipus themselves) to be entered in court records and even required that native authorities keep tribute accounts on khipus. By late sixteenth century, however, Spanish inquisitors had caught on to another aspect of these string devices: A very un-Christian type of sacredness inhered in them; khipus recorded a complex system of shrines

housing ancestral mummies, and some were even interred with them. Thus, khipus were outlawed as idolatrous; and khipu-users, if they persisted, did so at great risk. Standard histories assume that khipu-use died out at this point, and that by early seventeenth century khipus were a things of the past.

Unfortunately the colonizing Spanish never figured out how the khipus actually worked; apparently the system was too foreign to learn. The Inka and pre-Inka khipus left to us-mostly looted and totally without provenance- are silent in our hands. No one has ever turned up a Rosetta Stone equivalent (as, for example, a khipu attached to a written account of its contents).

Thus the Andean khipu remains a enigma. In its knotted strings we find a

sophisticated communication device, developed in relative isolation from the rest of the world and apparently premised on principles radically different from those used in other forms of writing. Inka khipus are of a mind-boggling size and complexity that clearly goes beyond a "knot-on-the-finger" type of mnemonic device. "Decoding" them would not only to transform our under- standing of one of the world's great (and least understood) empires, but could

provide new perspectives on human intelligence as well. A new book by Frank

Salomon, The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village, takes a giant leap forward in this endeavor.

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Khipu Studies to Date The Cord Keepers brings ethnographic data and theoretical sophistication to build upon decades of khipu scholarship. Early in the twentieth century, L. Leland Locke (1912, 1923, 1928) recognized that many khipus contain num- bers: ones, ten and multiples of ten are indicated by different types of knots on different locations of the strings. This decimal system is consistent with descriptions of some khipus as accounting devices, but it reveals nothing about what particular khipus were counting, much less explains how they functioned (as some chroniclers asserted) to record songs and narratives.

During the past two decades scholarly research on these questions has accel- erated (Ascher and Ascher 1997[1981]; Conklin 1982, 2002; Mackey 1970, 2002; Mackey et al, eds. 1990; Murra 1975; Pereyra 1996, 2001; Quilter and Urton eds. 2002; Radicati di Primeglio 1964, 1979; Ruiz Estrada 1981, 1998; Zuidema 1989, among many others). Among the most notable undertakings is the meticulous, computerized description garnered from Inka khipus in museums worldwide by a team from Harvard University headed by Gary Urton (Urton 2005; Urtan and Brezine 2005). Urton's book, The Social Life of Numbers (1997), a study of Quechua mathematical categories, laid important groundwork for khipu stud- ies. Contemporary Andeans, like their Inkas predecessors, find numbers deeply significant. Numbers, and operations performed with numbers, carry moral and spiritual meaning. The cultural importance of number is part and parcel of the pervasiveness of fiber technology in Andean cultures; weaving, for example, entails highly focused counting, particularly in terms of binary operations. Urton's study emphasizes the importance of rectification as the overarching value in Andean arithmetic processes, a value grounded in the notion that all things ought to be in equilibrium. Arithmetic operations are "...corrective actions aimed...at achieving rectification in a circumstance of imbalance, dise- quilibrium and disharmony." (Urton 1997:145)

In his more recent book, Signs of the Khipu (2003), Urton suggests that the khipu "code" operated in accordance with a well-documented binarism perva- sive in Andean cultural structures. He identifies seven different binary decisions inherent in khipu-making, including directionality of the spinning and plying of the cords. Unlike writing paper, cord is not the "ground" on which a sign is inscribed, it is the sign itself, a seven-bit aggregate of the choices that went into making it. Urton's work advances a more detailed, sophisticated and culturally informed account of khipus than ever before-yet the "final frontier" remains before us. We still can't "read" khipus. We don't know how to associate khipus with meanings. What kind of semiosis worked through these objects? How did

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Knot-Words or Not Words

they interact with human thought, memory and action? In The Cord Keepers, Frank Salomon comes at these questions from a different angle.

A Serendipitous Find Salomon stumbled on an amazing collection of ethnographic khipus in the early 1990s, after completing a translation and extensive annotation of the Huarochiri manuscript of 1608 (Salomon and Urioiste 1991). The story of this discovery is quite remarkable. Following up his translation project, Salomon found himself in a village called Tupicocha in the Huarochiri highlands, where he was invited to view the local equipos (in Spanish, teams). He politely accepted, fully expect- ing to witness yet another soccer game. Instead he was led to a small store.

...Feet scuffed on a creaky stair and the door opened. In the store it was deep twilight.... The brass of a balance showed through the murk with a Rembrandtesque burnished gleam. Sebastian's cousin pulled a plastic bag from a locked chest and upended it on the counter. Out flopped a multi-colored tangle of heavy yarn. A few wine-red and yellow orna- ments glowed amid a mound of tawny, dark and mottled cordage.

Sebastian lifted the skein... As the cords began to hang parallel it became clear that this was nothing like the eccentric "ethnographic" khipus documented elsewhere. It was a khipu in the mainstream of the canonical Inka design tradition. In fact, it looked a lot like some of the grander museum specimens...(6).

This multi-colored skein was but one of eleven khipus owned by the ayllus (kinship corporations) of Tupicocha. Although Tupicochans no longer under- stand them, they remain treasured symbols of communal identity, worn like sashes by village officers at the New Year celebration. According to Salomon's reckoning, the Tupicocha khipus functioned as communal records until about 1920, when indigenous communities were legally recognized by the Peruvian state. At this time khipus were replaced by detailed and ceremonially impor- tant audit books in use today. This in itself makes a significant point. It shows that, far from dying out in the early seventeenth century, khipus co-existed with writing at the local level well into the twentieth century. In fact, it seems that Tupicochans knowledgeable about khipus were still alive as late as 1980.

(Talk about a pang in the heart!)

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Writing Without Words? So here we are again, up against the semiotic wall. Salomon makes no pre- tense of breeching it. His introduction sets an apparently modest goal:

"I hope the results will add something-much less than a decipher- ment, but more than a speculation-to the perennially baffling task of recapturing a code different from all other 'lost scripts"' (xviii).

The Cord Keepers does succeed in adding a genuinely new theoretical framework for khipu research by seriously exploring the possibility that khipus are a kind of "writing" that does not correspond to speech. Our longing to find in the khipus a kind of "fossil discourse" is, Salomon reminds us, "...an attribute of our vocation, not an inherent function of literacy"(175). Instead he develops a pragmatic, oper- ational approach by investigating the ethnographic context in which khipus functioned, comparing them with the written records that replaced them, and exploring villagers' own interpretations of this fiber patrimony.

There are good reasons for thinking that the khipus did not encode units of speech. The intractability of decipherment itself points to this conclusion. The Incas, moreover, were a multilingual empire containing highly diverse language communities. Speakers of different languages lived in close proxim- ity, as communities were dispersed over the mountainous landscape to exploit resources at different altitudes (Mannheim 1991). In this context it would have been useful to employ a system that (1) did not rely on the speech sounds of any particular language, and (2) was nevertheless usable across ethnic groups as a tool of state administration. Salomon also observes that a communica- tion system would need to employ something more sophisticated than elabo- rate mnemonic devices, dependent on the maker's memory.

[S]uch a system would have been useless to Inka administration...A visit to the main museum collections...quickly convinces anyone that despite regional tendencies in prehistory, certain far-flung conventions did prevail throughout huge and culturally heterogeneous spaces (16).

Nevertheless, Salomon adds,

...it is hard to avoid the impression that in the khipu art, standardiza- tion stands in dialectical relationship to some other principle of anchor-

ing in the particular" (16).

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Knot-Words or Not Words

With the Tupicocha khipus, Salomon is in a good position to explore how this "hooking into the particular" worked in the context of face-to-face com- munity where contexts are mutually understood and ambiguities easily resolved. We should keep in mind, however, that state khipus, which had to be comparable over diverse segments of Inka society, must have been less actor-centered than khipus that operated at the local level.

Theoretical Groundwork In the theoretical chapter that anchors his book, Salomon approaches the khipu as semasiography rather than logography. In logography, signs stand for speech sounds, while semasiographies (like musical notation, mathematical scripts, chemical formulas, and circuit diagrams) are primary codes in which signs stand for things, not for words. Logographies employ secondary codes, in which signs stand for words which are themselves signs of things.

Salomon emphasizes that semasiography need not be considered primitive precursors of logography.

The crux of the matter seems to be that semasiographs are superior where different users have a substantial domain of culture in common, but little spoken language in common (e.g., musicians), or where for other reasons the verbal detour is undesirable (27).

Moving toward an expanded ethnography of literacies, Salomon aims "...to develop an analytic common ground wide enough to cover the gamut of ethnographically known ways in which acts other than words are rendered writable"(30-31). In this endeavor he draws particularly on semiotician Roy Harris (e.g., 1995), philosopher Nelson Goodman (e.g., 1976), and linguist Emile Benveniste (e.g., 1985).

Harris's "integrationalism" is particularly apt when it comes to understanding the Tupicocha khipus, because it approaches communication not as transference of messages between individuals (a la Saussure) but as the "contextualized inte- gration of human activities by means of signs." (Harris 1995:4; quoted on p.31) Meaning inheres in the particular execution of a sign. "One knows something is a sign if people's activities come into a relationship by virtue of it" (31).

Salomon uses Goodman to approach the problem of reference in different media. The way a code carries meaning depends on the relationship between the formal properties of the sign system and the formal properties of the cul-

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tural schema that forms the set of referents. A sign denotes a "compliance class" (the culturally defined things it stands for). In natural language, refer- ence in verbal description is uni-directional.

For example, the usage of the sign, "Dr. Nelson Goodman, philosopher" is determinate in the character-to-referent direction; everything in the universe either is or is not what the sign refers to. But if we reverse the arrow of reference to point from referents back to characters, we are faced with choices that undo any determinacy. The particular entity I am thinking of is a compliant to the characters mammal, professor, English-speaker, and so on ad infinitum (33).

On the other hand, one can achieve bidirectional determinacy by sacrificing the freedom of natural language and using notational description. "This is the point where Goodman's schema sheds fresh light on 'writing without words"' (33).

For reversibility to work, no two characters can have a compliant in com- mon, and any two referents must contrast, not grade into each other. This "semantic finite differentiation" requires that the domain in question be treated as atomic even if it is continuous.

"If one is devising a notation for weight, it is not enough for the signs to be discrete. It is also necessary to pretend that weight is a discrete vari- able, even though, of course, it is not" (33).

Then the ethnographic question becomes, what domains does a population treat as discontinuous? As it happens,

...Andean people seem to have treated a very large range of their own practice as antecedently atomized.... Urton's emphasis on the succes- sion of dual choices involved in spinning, plying and weaving makes it plain how fiber work readily supplied a "sign" end to match the "refer- ent" end in a bidirectional notational system (34).

Benveniste, on the other hand, explores the way sign systems co-exist and take their meanings from each other. His semiology of language "...opens the way to a pragmatics-oriented attack on the problem of decipherment" (35) Co-existing semiotic systems (like speech and written words; or speech

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and khipus) need to be non-redundant and only partially equivalent. This, comments Salomon,

...is a caution to expectations of a Rosetta-stone approach. (How invit- ing it is to forget that the Rosetta stone collated script with script, not script with a dissimilar signing system!)" (35).

He suggests that khipus conformed to a non-verbal syntax of social perform- ance, that they were "concretions of nonverbal action which, once made, were susceptible to verbalization by a method superficially like logography" (37). The remaining nine chapters of the book aim to demonstrate this assertion.

The Village as "Intimate Bureaucracy" Chapters Two and Three provide ethnographic background for understanding Tupicocha. A key aspect of this high altitude agro-pastoral community is the

complexity of "production zones" (Mayer 2002). Land at different altitudes is used for different purposes, each with its own cycle of production, thus requir- ing a whole variety of different resources and infrastructures. In this context

"scheduling is of the essence." Household schedules, furthermore, have to be intercalated with those of the community as a whole. Communal work and communal ritual go together, and ritual contributions also have to be record- ed. Keeping track of all this is a formidable task. Salomon carefully reviews the cycles and schedules of redistribution of agricultural work, water manage- ment, and labor control, noting contexts in which khipus may have been used.

The situation is complicated by what Salomon calls the "Janus-faced folk con- stitution" of Tupicocha. The community consists of ten non-localized patrilineal kinship corporations called ayllus.1 These ayllus are "sibling" corporations, each headed by a president, and standing in fixed order of precedence. The commu- nity is both emergent from the ayllus and sovereign over the them. These com- ponent corporate segments define themselves differently according to whether one's gaze is turned inward into the local group, or outward to the Peruvian state. Relative to the outside, the corporate segments are not properly ayllus, but political units called parcialidades; they are governed as a group by an over-

arching community board of directors and by appointed representatives of the Peruvian state. Kinship does not overtly come into play in this context. Kinship, on the other hand, is what defines the ayllu. As a corporate group of related

households, the ayllu organizes itself so as to function effectively as a parciali-

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dad in the political arena. Through the Janus-faced ayllu/parcialidad linkage, kinship is connected to political organization." Salomon suggests that khipus were "the material apparatus establishing this connection" (57).

The ayllu, in Salomon's words, is an "intimate bureaucracy." One mecha- nism for maintaining order in this intimate (and thus emotionally charged) context is a reverence for record-keeping. Whenever any group gathers to per- form a task it documents the event, and this official record is treated with rev- erence, garlanded with flowers and sacred plants-

It would be incomplete, then, to think of a book as being neutrally "about" the action done in its presence. It is felt to condense in itself the

things done; it is the legible precipitate of goodwill and good conduct .

S.Records are felt to contain not just the data but the moral value of what they record... .The conviction that the record is the concretion of achieved solidarity is felt to apply supremely to the now illegible [khi- pus] (67-68).

The New Year celebration, called Huayrona, brings the corporate segments together and articulates them as parcialidades. This is the occasion on which the elected officers wear the khipus as ceremonial regalia.

At this moment, it is necessary to show that the segments are in a work- able political relationship with each other, have successfully reproduced their internal hierarchies, and have satisfied their duties to the total

community. In doing so they "make its year" (74).

Community accounting is thus a ritualized "total event" with social, econom- ic, political and aesthetic dimensions. It is, moreover, a particular kind of audit that "targets zero" (206). What one owes should be balanced by what one is owed, consistent with Urton's understanding of Quechua arithmetic as an "art of rectification" (Urton 1997). Later in the book (Chapter Six), Salomon describes in meticulous detail how this accounting is done in contemporary Tupicocha, but two more chapters intervene before we get to this point.

An Eloquent Silence

Chapter Four, one of the longer and more difficult chapters, concerns a living semiotic system, the staffs of office carried by some members of the political

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hierarchy. As a system, staffs are far simpler than the khipus, but like khipus they seem to operate independently of spoken language. Each official carves for his successor a staff bearing geometric signs; at the Huayrona ceremony these staffs are judged and the collective array is arranged and rearranged wordless- ly in "a striking exception to the usual meetinghouse loquacity." An official "reg- ulator" accepts or rejects the staffs and is responsible for placing them into a "correct" array corresponding to political contingencies of the moment.

This is an eloquent silence if ever there was one. It begs the question of whether there is a metalanguage for discussing staff code as there is for discussing alphabetic writing (90).

Salomon did figure out a general syntax for the staff code: the order of three component signs varies according to the staff officer's relationship to the fol- lowing: (1) village center, (2) rural periphery, (3) non-communal state author- ity. In different years, he observed, the syntax shifted, apparently reflecting the community's changing relationship to state authority. But trying to get people to verbalize the system "proved a faux pas:"

The staff is not an analogue for words as the alphabet is. Instead, it reg- isters social knowledge that one does not put into words in the first place. It is an alternative to words. The metacommunication of words is words about words...The metacommunication of staffs is handover, alteration and acceptance or rejection of "initials." It is carving about carving (91).

The most detailed and subtly argued parts of Chapter Four concern this con- text-sensitive sorting which, Salomon claims, is productive of unpredictable, non-predetermined statements, a kind of "writing without words." Staff "utterances" are, he suggests (with due respect to Urton) more math-like than speech-like in their properties, indicating that "inscriptions formulated thus

might belong to a semiosis that has calculus-like forms, yet operates in areas which local people do not think about mathematically" (105). This insight has implications for the khipu:

Formulaic and relational expressions of activity that the actors saw as

non-quantitative may be just as important to khipus' "numerical"

aspect as the accountancy which so impressed the chroniclers (106).

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Khipus and Account Books Chapter Five's fascinating and straight-forward exposition of the khipu's colo- nial history comes as a welcome change of pace after the demanding chap- ter on the staff code. Through a close reading of documentary evidence, Salomon shows that cords continued to function "as a vehicle of inner

process in the peasants' own polities" (126). Gradually they became separat- ed from official record keeping, persisting as a separate but parallel system beneath of radars of history.

Chapters Six and Seven return to the patrimonial khipus of Tupicocha, and their current ritual uses, offering meticulous description of the khipus' physi- cal characteristics and including the native classification of colors and knots. They are beautifully illustrated with both color and black-and-white photos. An important point that emerges here is the way Tupicochan khipus suggest operability; they show evidences of revision over time as knots were done and undone and additional markers were added or removed. Salomon suggests that a khipu was "an assembly of moving parts, and that the moving of parts was a simulacrum or mimetic device used to represent changing properties and problems of ayllu and community"(168). It was, he argues, both operable semasiograph and legible record. The cords operated as a simulation tool, a "deck" of intellectual tokens by which to "play" possible representations of the future or to mimic past performance. But unlike a board game (and like

language) the cords can produce an unlimited number of combinations (178). Chapter Seven is a detailed discussion of the community record books and

their implications for reconstructing khipu use. It includes a particularly inter- esting description of auditing procedures that illuminates why accounting records present such a powerful image of communal identity. Among the most important aspects of auditing are the social (as opposed to monetary) nature of the audit, the targeting of zero (which stress mutual reciprocity among villagers), and the collective nature of the procedure. "There is no such role as authoritative accountant. Calculation continues for as long as it takes for all to agree." (202) It is, truly, a collective representation.

Old Semiographs Never Die; They Just Fade Away? Chapter Eight, entitled "Half-Life and Afterlife of an Andean Medium," is most-

ly about how villagers interpret khipus. "Half-Life" is Salomon's metaphorical way of expressing the idea that the "end of the cord-inscribing age should be

imagined not as death but as a fading half-life, like radioactive decay..." (212)

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Dreary metaphor notwithstanding, this is an exciting chapter. It centers on a boy named Nery Rojas who, at age 7, learned the basics of khipu use from his great grandfather. Nery cannot read the old patrimonial khipus, but his

rudimentary understanding is very illuminating nevertheless. He understands the subtleties of knot construction, and is able to articulate meaningful vari- ables (type of fiber, color, diameter of cordage, types and numbers of knots, tightness of twist, and deliberate unraveling of plies). Several (though not all) of these variables correspond to the binary choices in Urton's "seven-bit" model. Furthermore, he remember's his great-grandfather's description of the

khipus' substantive contents: collective property, attendance at collective workdays, usage of cultivated fields.

Chapter Eight moves on to a divinatory practice Salomon calls khipumancy. Here, the khipu is dropped on a surface and the resulting configuration of cords is "interrogated" for the answers to a pressing questions (like, "Who is the thief who stole my cow?"). Khipumancy operates by interpreting knots and twists in the cord as homologous with the local landscape and with particular people and things in that landscape. Salomon calls this a lingering "afterlife" phenom- enon, persisting after productive competence in khipu art had died out.

Although modern-day "khipumancers" obviously are no longer knowledge- able about ancient the khipu system, I see no reason to think this khipu-divina- tion is an "afterlife" phenomenon. As a general practice it is quite consistent with other types of Andean divination, both past and present (it is strikingly sim- ilar to divination with coca leaves, for example). In Pre-Columbian times, prac- tical everyday khipu use could well have co-existed with another, divinatory level of interpretation in which the falling cords were understood not as acci- dental tangles but as revelations of some hidden state of affairs.

Broadening our Perspectives: Some Suggestions Among young Nery's remembered khipu usages is the knotted cord as a map of an irrigated field, a move that diagrammatically condenses a rectangular area into a linear representation. This suggests a kind of iconicity in the khi- pus which, I think, may be a key to understanding how they worked. Khipu cords, as mentioned earlier, were not the ground on which signs were inscribed; they were themselves tangible signs containing many inter-related dimensions (color, directionality, knot configuration, etc). The signs of this "data writing" (a term Salomon introduces in his conclusion) were thus little

diagrams, iconic miniatures of a sort. As we look ahead, I think that the role

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of iconicity in khipu semiotics is a particularly promising avenue to pursue. This iconic quality, I suggest, imbued them with a special authority and gave them special ritual status.

Salomon remarks that "it is a common ground between "half-life" and "afterlife" interpretive styles that both interpret some cords as icons about the distribution of space or geographic features" (236). He does not elaborate much on this point, perhaps because it could be the subject of a whole book in itself. He knows very well that defining space and geographic features is not a simple matter in an Andean context. It was the storied landscape that drew him to explore Huarochiri in the first place, and he has written about contem- porary ritual observances to deities that still are thought to animate the region (e.g., Salomon 1998).

Is it perhaps the problem of Andean animism that leads him to side-step the issue? An animistic mentality attributes soul to all bodies, including those we would call inanimate. It's hard to talk about animism without sounding like a nineteenth century holdover or a New Ager (or worse, like a Star Wars

character), yet I think at some point khipu studies will have to face this prob- lem head-on. We might takes some cues in this endeavor from Nurit Bird- David's (1999) reformulation of the old Tylorean concept of animism as "rela- tional epistemology." She considers this epistemology to be characteristic of hunter-gather societies, and argues that it operates in the context of localized social practice and the construction of a relational personhood.

Interestingly, in Andean South America the relational mentality2 was not confined to hunter-gatherers but featured in the development of complex state-level societies. A relational, or interactive, stance toward the nonhuman as well as the human environment is characteristic of the Andean "road less taken" that produced the Inka empire and the khipu. It led Andean peoples to develop technological styles and management strategies quite different from the "classic" empire of Europe and the Near East (e.g., Lechtman 1996). Our unwillingness to take "animism" seriously has considerably constrained our understanding of these styles and strategies as they existed in the Andean past and continue somewhat to operate in the present.

Salomon quite rightly emphasizes the Andean propensity to semantic dif- ferentiation, that is, to treat a wide range of domains as discontinuous, but this "atomic" tendency is balanced (rectified) by an Andean insistence on con- substantiality, that is, on the continuous interrelationship of all existing things. In a relational mentality, there are no individuals, the world is a con- tinuous process of mutual definition.3 This point that has implications for

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understanding khipu semiosis. While khipu cords were representations of social processes they were also continuous with these processes and in this sense, consubstantial with them. This is the crux of khipu iconicity and gives it force. Collective process and collective representation are in a dialectical relationship of mutual mimesis.

All this makes it seem less and less likely that khipus recorded speech sounds, for the kind of iconicity and indeed synecdoche at work in these miniatures-that were both whole and part of what they represented-is not amenable to words. Nor, if this approach is correct, are Inka khipus likely to have encoded information independent of their original context. After all, in a relational epistemology there is nothing but context.

And so it seems probable that the ancient Andean counterparts to

Sophocles and Sappho, if such there were, are silenced forever. What seems to be opening instead is a better view of a different kind of human potential, fol-

lowing a road not taken by Old World cultures, in which "codes that are not

necessarily keyed to language became a key technology of the intellect" (175). The work goes on and we can follow its progress easily, using another technol-

ogy based on binary coding. Check out the Harvard khipu project at

http://khipukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu/. Frank Salomon has begun collabora- tive research with the members of another village with a huge patrimonial khipu, and that just went up on the web as well: www.khipurapaz.org.

ENDNOTES

1Salomon's defines ayllu as a "non-localized patrilineal kinship corporation." This is, how- ever, only one of many manifestations of ayllu that occur throughout the Andes. For exam- ple, some ayllus are localized bilateral kindreds. For some reason he makes no reference to an extensive literature on this subject. 21 prefer relational mentality to relational epistemology; since we are referring to a way of knowing, not to a conscious theory of knowledge.

3See, for example, M. Strathern 1988. Alfred Gell's notion of "distributed personhood," developed in Art and Agency, seems especially suggestive in an Andean context.

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