Salomon 2001

1C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001q 2001 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2001/4201-0001$3.00

How an AndeanWriting WithoutWords Works1

by Frank Salomon

Recent writings on khipus (Andean knotted-cord records) invokewriting without words, a near-synonym of Gelbs semasiogra-phy, to argue that some American media refer directly to cul-tural things without functioning as a secondary code forspeech. Sampson suggests that in principle such a system couldconstitute a nonverbal parallel language. However, no ethnog-raphy actually shows whether Andean codes do so, much less re-constructs lost ones. This study concerns a Peruvian villagewhich inscribes its staffs of office in a code without words.Fine-grained ethnography over several inscriptive cycles showsthat staff code does function as a parallel language. In doingso, however, it deviates interestingly from Sampsons model, forit functions not to provide speech with a direct reference com-plement but to detach some areas of practice from the realm ofdiscourse altogether. Considered politically, this seemingly exoticmethod makes sense. Whether one calls it writing depends ontheoretical commitments in grammatology. Highly inclusivisttheories bear further development toward a more omnidirec-tional ethnography of inscription.

f r a n k s a l o m o n is Professor of Anthropology at the Univer-sity of WisconsinMadison (Madison, Wis. 53706-1393, U.S.A.[[email protected]]). Born in 1946, he was educated atColumbia University (B.A., 1968) and Cornell University (M.A.,1974; Ph.D., 1978). He has been a visiting assistant professor atthe University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (197882), held aFulbright Professorship at the University of Gothenburg (1985),and served as associate director of studies at the Ecole des Hau-tes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1986 and 1998). Hispublications include Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the In-cas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), (with GeorgeUrioste) The Huarochir Manuscript (Austin: University of TexasPress, 1991), and Patrimonial Khipus in a Modern Peruvian Vil-lage, in Narrative Threads: Explorations of Narrativity in An-dean Khipus, edited by Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton (Austin:University of Texas Press, 2001). The present paper was acceptedfor publication 7 vii 00.

1. I am grateful for support from many sources: the Instituto deEstudios Peruanos, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foun-dation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the NationalScience Foundation, the School of American Research, the Grad-uate School of the University of WisconsinMadison, and the Wen-ner-Gren Foundation. The presidents and officers of the ComunidadCampesina de San Andres de Tupicocha have been unfailingly gen-erous, as have the vara officers of 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999,and 2000. I feel particularly thankful to Hilda Araujo and her stu-dents Milagros Silva and Karen Eckhart, for it was a late-nightdiscussion with them which helped fire up the present train ofthought. Among many persons who helped at various stages areMarcelo Alberco, Kildo Choi, William Hanks, Regis B. Miller, Mer-cedes Nino-Murcia, Leon Modesto Rojas Alberco, and Justo Rueda.Robert U. Bryson and Luz Ramirez de Bryson produced the graphics.

The apparent exception that the Inka state and its pred-ecessors present to V. Gordon Childes famous judgmentof writing as fundamental to civilization (1951[1936]:18081) is usually treated as a curious loose end. But thequestion of how a state could redistribute goods and serv-ices among millions of people over thousands of kilo-meters without writing as usually defined is a loose endlong enough to trip up commonsense ideas about howrecording relates to complexity. The fact that some hugestates got along without writing should invite searchingquestions about whether grammatological and anthro-pological understandings of writing are really up to thetask of explaining relations among language, inscription,social practice, and sociopolitical integration.

The Andean crux of this issue is, of course, the khipu,a knotted-cord medium in use since at least the MiddleHorizon (ca. 6001000 c.e.) and widespread in Inkatimes. The formerly slow-moving field of khipu studyhas regained striking vitality, showcased in compendiaby Mackey et al. (1990) and Quilter and Urton (2001).But the code of the quipu, as Ascher and Ascher termedit (1981), is not the only Andean code. This essay ana-lyzes a lesser Andean code which looks very simple incomparison with khipus. Its simplicity is a virtue foranalytical purposes. Here we can avoid some methodo-logical puzzles such as the fact that, where khipu codeis concerned, we do not know where the threshold ofsignificance lies (Conklin n.d., Elkins 1996) or how cordsrefer to nonnumerical significata (Parssinen 1992:3150;Urton 1998). It also has another advantage for study: itis a living practice.

The code consists of signs carved upon the staffs ofminor political office in the Central Peruvian village ofTupicocha (Province of Huarochir, Department ofLima). I will call it Tupicochan staff code or (using thelocal word for a staff of office) vara code. It is probablyno accident that this code exists in a village that, ap-parently alone at the turn of the 21st century, also pre-serves a set of patrimonial khipus constituting the re-galia of its traditional folk-legal descent groups. (Theseare ayllus or parcialidades; I will translate both termsas kinship corporation [Salomon 1997, 2001].) Staffsare sometimes deployed together with the patrimonialkhipus. Nonetheless, the argument about staff code ispresented with an emphatic caveat that it is not to betaken as a direct model for khipu interpretation. Whilestaff code alerts us to semiological processes that mayhave figured in the genesis of khipus, it probably rep-resents a different branch in an as yet unknown multil-inear history of Andean inscriptive invention.

For theoretical purposes, should we put inscriptions ofsocial practice via insignia, icons, tallies, and otherthings into a common frame together with writingproper? Several nonphilological, nonanthropologicaltheorists say yes: the philosopher Nelson Goodman,with his 1976 exploration of likenesses and distinctionsamong visual media, the semiologist Roy Harris, withhis anti-Saussurean approach to signs as the visible pre-cipitate of social action (1995), and the literary theoristJacques Derrida, with his argument that the properties

2 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001

of writing in the common sense are only special casesof far more general writing-like processes in the produc-tion of meaning (1974[1967]). This essay proposes to puttheir concerns onto ethnographic wheels. It suggests thattheir very broad notions of writingor, less conten-tiously, of inscriptionserve to alert ethnographers tounfamiliar dimensions of what signs achieve in cultureand practice. Staff code appears to be working in almostthe opposite direction from writing proper: rather thanusing signs to freeze and preserve spoken discourse, ituses signs to marginalize speech and to create a modeof interaction maximally distanced from it.

Exploring such a case may broaden our notion of anethnography of writing (Basso 1974) and help it inter-pret systems which fail the common tests of writing-ness. Admittedly, such a change would entail a sacrificeof clarity about what grammatology and the ethnographyof writing must cover. But it would also equip us to dealwith what is, after all, a large share of the human racesinscriptive inventionsthat rich accumulation of un-wanted gifts with which ethnographers have been peltinggrammatologists since long before Gelb invented theterm (most famously Mallery 1972[1893]). These splen-did data now languish in oubliette categories such asproto writings, partial writings, and subgraphem-ics. They ought to be rescued.

If Not Writing, What?

Specialists in what I will call philological grammatology(by contrast to the Derridean countertheory, which, con-fusingly, tends in loose parlance also to be called gram-matology) generally reserve the term writing for sys-tems of signs which represent speech sounds, that is,systems which employ glottography or phonogra-phy. This position centers upon an argument descend-ing from Aristotle through Saussure and Bloomfield,namely, the notion of writing as a secondary code thatreencodes the primary code through which people referto things, speech (Olson 1994:3). Just about all im-portant breakthroughs in decipherment from Champol-lion to Knorosov have resulted from steadfastly follow-ing the likelihood that inscriptions, no matter how muchthey may look like icons for cultural archetypes (ideo-grams), actually encode speech. Even signs without de-terminate reference to words may be assembled by rulespatterned on those of speech (Marcus 1992:17). Signsearly in the evolution of a given script sometimes doindeed begin as icons for things (usually concrete things,not archetypes), but in practice such inscriptions aretaken to encode the sound of the things name. Signsthen become subject to the rebus mutation, in whicha sign stands for a sound as such. Once a sign may beused to represent a sound, irrespective of any icono-graphic value, it becomes a glottograph (or phonograph).One or more glottographs encode an utterance. It is thisutterance, not its visual likeness in a secondary code,that completes reference to whatever the speech act wasabout.

Many inscriptions, however, are not glottographic.Gelb (1952) launched and Sampson (1985:2645) has re-suscitated the term semasiographs to cover them. Theterm embraces the generally ill-theorized area of mne-motechnologies, pictography, notations, and to-kens. Semasiographs stand not for the sounds of thename of a referent but rather for the referent itself. Theyare therefore said not to be in any particular language.In Sampsons example, whether one verbalizes the se-masiograph 1,000 as mil or one thousand dependsonly on local habits about how to translate semasio-graphs into words. Lest anyone think this simple systemof reference implies global simplicity, it is worth bearingin mind that sheet music, chemical formulae, mathe-matical notation, choreographic labanotation, and ma-chine-readable waybills are semasiographs.

Because in any pure semasiography, speech soundsneed not be retrieved for a message to be grasped, sometake the concept as a heuristic for writing withoutwords (Boone 1994). Grammatologists do not agreeamong themselves on whether this is an acceptable ex-tension of the word writing. Daniels and Brights(1996) compendium The Worlds Writing Systems, by farthe best conspectus of script research, does cover somesemasiographies. But in his theoretical keynote essayDaniels enshrines as the real graphic McCoy only whatthe countergrammatologist Derrida calls a certain kindof writing. He demands a system of more or less per-manent marks used to represent an utterance in such away that it can be recovered more or less exactly withoutthe intervention of the utterer (Daniels 1996:3; see alsoDeFrancis 1989:21147).

Archaeology and ethnography report uncountable ex-amples of apparent semasiographies, from MarshacksLate Paleolithic lunar-cycle bones (1972; dErrico 1989)through the partly pictorial Yukaghir love letter whichproved such an interesting bone of contention betweenSampson (1985:2829) and DeFrancis (1989:2635) to theemergent worldwide conventions of computer languagesand icons. There is obvious doubt whether a term thatlumps iconological signs (which tend toward the logicof visual cognition) with other, highly abstract signs cancohere for long. But as a point of departure semasiog-raphy will serve to focalize attributes of inscription thatspecialists in real writing push aside.

Philological grammatologists tend to reject the pos-sibility of general-purpose semasiography. They use thecategory for special cases like sheet music, where writersshare competences separable from any given language,or mathematics, where the logic of grammar obscuresthe logic of the significata. Sampson (1985:30) is less surethat general-purpose semasiography is impossible. Heimagines a limiting extreme:

There would appear in principle to be no reason whya society could not have expanded a semasiographicsystem by adding further graphic conventions, untilit was fully as complex and rich in expressive poten-tial as their spoken language. At that point theywould possess two fully-fledged languages having

salomon Writing Without Words F 3

no relationship with one anotherone of them aspoken language without a script, and the other alanguage tied intrinsically to the visual medium.

In fact no such language has been found, perhaps becauseit would be unmanageably prolific of signs.

Staff code is surely not a general-purpose system. Theimportant part of Sampsons words for staff code analysisis the argument about its functioning as a separate lan-guage within the society that uses it.

Where is the entry into this language? Semasiographsnotoriously resist deciphermentthe more so when theylack an iconographic dimension, as many Andean onesapparently do. If one chooses semasiographics as a gate-way, one gains theoretical versatility at the expense ofoperational guidance. To get from this theoretical open-ing to actual interpretation of signs, then, requires anethnography not of decipherment but of encipher-mentof wordless semiosis in practice. By tracking thecreation of a series of inscriptions in three cycles of thestaff codes use and collecting retrospective evidence onearlier cycles, it is possible to document an Andean se-miosis: a process by which meaning is categorically con-densed from social practice and lodged in visible marks.

Staff Offices, Investiture, and theBootstrapping of the Civic Year

Engraved staffs of authority rank among the deepest-rooted of Andean symbols. Pre-Hispanic deities were pic-tured with staffs from the Initial period (ca. 1000 b.c.e.[Moseley 1992:53]) through the Chavn or Early Horizonperiod with its far-flung Staff God and Goddess (ca.900200 b.c.e. [Burger 1992:19699]) into the Middle Ho-rizon (6001000 c.e. [Bruhns 1994:24549; Isbell 1988:180; Castelli 1978; Thomas 1983]). The Central Peruviancoast yields Middle Horizon mummies whose staffs arewound with cord so as to form emblems much like thosedescribed below (Herrmann and Meyer 1993: cover). Afamous mummy ca. 1607 bore [a] staff named quillcascaxo [engraved rod] (Huarochir 1992:120). In colonialtimes the meaning of staffs shifted toward secular au-thority (Espinoza Soriano 1960, Salomon 1980). Mishkin,who took a close interest in staff hierarchies of the 1930sand 40s, judged them to derive both from rural Iberianforms and from pre-Hispanic precedents (1946:443; seealso Ordonez 1919). Unfortunately, ethnographers im-pressed with the elegance of silver-clad batons scornedthe roughly cut sticks which could also embody au-thority (Mishkin 1946:445) and therefore failed to catchcodes like the one discussed below.

Virtually all Andean communities formerly had hier-archies of political officers called varayuq (staff holders)in Quechua or varayo in Spanish, as Tupicocha still does.The staff makes its bearer an executor of folk legality,just as badges empower police officers with official le-gality. In Tupicocha, in contrast to some Cuzco-areacommunities, staffs are not patrimonial objects. They do

not pass through generations of officeholders, nor doesthe mystique of the heirloom cling to them. On the con-trary, each staff is replaced each year, as part of the ritualreminding everyone that civic order must be continuallycreated anew. One receives a staff in the act of acceptingoffice. A staff is a stick of huarirumo or huarumo (Alnus,alder).2 When an alguacil or minor staff holder (deputyof a major staff holder) is about halfway through his yearof tenure he must select wood and start preparing staffsfor both his own successor and his immediate superiors.Outgoing officers may keep their own staffs, but I neversaw them displayed in homes. I think they are oftengiven to newly staff-holding friends for scraping and rein-scription, though this is considered less than ideal prac-tice. The actual act of incising the symbols of office ontothe staff is assumed to be a shared competence of menwith membership in the community rather than a re-stricted literacy (Goody and Watt 1968:1120). If staffmakers consult mutually about design, this is a back-stage, unofficial act relative to the regimen of officialstaff use detailed below. None of the people interviewedsaid that such consultation did or should take place, butit may happen in reality. One factor bearing on the co-ordination of staff designs is the option of hiring an ar-tisanhimself generally a past staff officerto relieveone or more outgoing deputies of the actual task.

All this is expected to be finished by December 24,when the community directorate meets to choose three-man slates of eligibles to become the coming years staffholders. By that date the new staffs should have beenfinished and shown to the regulator (regidor, a high staffholder) to make sure they are correctly inscribed. Theyare not, however, collected and therefore cannot be col-lated as a set. As we will see below, this matters for theoverall functioning of their signs.

Plurality of governments is the key to the inductionscenario and to much else about Tupicochas staff com-plex. Two of Tupicochas governments use staffs. Thefirst is the peasant community (comunidad campesina).It came into being when, in 1935, the national state ju-rally recognized the villages folk-legal constitution as atraditional polity sharing land and water rights of pre-Inka, Inka, and colonial derivation. From the folk-legalviewpoint, the community is an emergent entity formedby the union of the pre-Hispanic kinship corporations.The other is the district government (gobernacion), abranch office of the national state. Tupicocha acquiredit by breaking from a neighboring district a few yearsafter recognition and thereby incurring responsibility forexecuting national law (for example, military conscrip-tion, census, and criminal justice).

Six staff holders who serve the community embodythe folk-legal supremacy of the village center, radiatingoutward. Four staff holders who serve the district gov-ernment embody the constitutional supremacy of Peru,radiating inward. These contrasting perspectives on gov-ernance imply discrepant rules of hierarchy depending

2. I thank Regis Miller of the University of Wisconsin Forest Prod-ucts Laboratory for this identification.


Fig. 1. Community secretary Margarito Romeroscraping an incorrectly incised staff of office with apiece of bottle glass so that it can be reinscribed andconferred on the incoming staff holder. (Photo qFrank Salomon)

on which government one is observing, but the samepolitico-ritual process must generate both. To under-stand this will help in understanding not only what isinscribed on the ten staffs but why it is inscribed in noother way.

To create new staff holders, these two governmentsassemble on New Years Eve at their respective seats: thepeasant community meeting hall and the district gov-ernment building diagonally across the plaza. (Thechurch and the municipality, which complete the quar-tet of public authorities, occupy the other two sides.)

Just before midnight, chimes from the belltower callthe dignitaries to their halls. While others keep to theirbeds, officers hurry down murky streets, hunched againstthe cold mist. The ritual atmosphere evoked is that offragments gradually assembling, building toward a so-cially critical mass that will emerge at dawn as thetender political organism of the newborn year.

The reason the investiture of staff officers, who areactually the lowest part of the villages intricate politicalhierarchy, must be the first order of business is that theyare the mechanism for bootstrapping all the rest. It isthey who will, on New Years Day, clean and mark outthe sacred civic space (collca) for the two-day civic sum-mit meeting (huayrona) that kick-starts the years publicbusiness. Without staff officers in place on January 1,there would be no way to begin.

Where the inscription is concerned, carvers proposeand the community disposes. Its outgoing regulatorjudges staffs. The secretary of the community also has,or in any case exercises, authority to correct those judgedwrong before investing new staff holders (fig. 1). Theauthority to ratify staffs changes hands with every com-munity election. As a result, this authority responds sen-sitively to changing political and folk-legal currents.Through them the creation of signs is politicallymediated.

In the first stage, which starts before midnight, thepresidents (camachicos) of the ten kinship corporationsgather at the community hall with the communitysboard of elected officers (junta directiva).

Meanwhile, at the district government, the state-sal-aried governorfor many years a curly-haired coastalcreole of conspicuously nonlocal habitswaits to re-ceive outgoing staff holders. One by one, the outgoingstaff officers arrive carrying the staffs for their replace-ments. Each places the new staff on the district gover-nors desk (fig. 2). As the staffs accumulate, the regulatoranxiously inspects them by candle- or lantern light. Thedistrict governor, an institutionalized outsider, ostenta-tiously ignores them but toys with his whip of office. Itis important to note that at this inchoate stage, that ofaccumulation, the staffs are not arrayed in determinateorder.

Stage 2 begins around 12:45 a.m., when the outgoingstaff holders walk in procession to the community hall.The board greets them with drinks and, in some years,hot chocolate with panettone and authorizes them to endtheir year of office.

In stage 3, around 1:15 a.m., the outgoing staff holders

troop back to the district government to verify thestaffs. The regulator places them in array on the boardsdesk. (Orders of array are discussed below.) He inspectsthem carefully, since this is the last chance to correcterrors. This is done in virtual silence. Other staff holdersalso anxiously study the array and occasionally pick upor point to one, butand this becomes important be-lowthis is not an occasion for discussion. It is all butsilent, with at most a brief comment such as Its OK(Esta bien) or Check this one (Mire esta). Staff holdersdo look closely at each others submitted staffs. Theycount insignia elements, moving their lips but not speak-ing, or they run a thumbnail down the incisions to besure of the count. In 2000, for the first time, the newstaffs were submitted with paper labels around them tosay which incoming officer was to receive each. If the


Fig. 2. Staffs (not in order) awaiting distribution on a table in the community hall after midnight on January1, 1997. (Photo q Frank Salomon)

regulator decides that any staff has an error, he word-lessly reserves it for correction before reassignment.

In stage 4, about 2:20 a.m., the outgoing staff holdersgo back to the community hall, this time in a more for-mal procession, with all the staffs wrapped together intheir mantle or, in other years, carried by outgoing hold-ers. The regulator arrays them on the boards desk andformally surrenders them.

In the name of all the outgoing staff holders the reg-ulator makes a speech of resignation, and the communitypresident replies with a speech of thanks. (Meanwhilethe district governor locks up his office and goes home.)The president carefully studies the new staffs (fig. 3).Now is the time for any residual business, such as judg-ing an outgoing staff holder who has failed in his duties.Sometimes this part becomes long and contentious.Then, at last, each outgoing staff holder in turn is askedto walk out, call upon the three men named in the nom-ination roster, and bring one back for investiture.

This is the political heart of the night. It takes placeamid fatigue and tension, because all but a very few mentry to evade staff office. Into the wee hours and beyond,the board browbeats disheveled citizens torn from much-needed rest, each determined to keep the burden off hisshoulders. Some recite complicated hard-luck stories or

protest that peers have owed staff service longer. Othersbecome enraged about intrusion on their careers (under-standably, since village-bound staff service sabotages thecombined urban-rural strategies on which a young mansprosperity depends). Still others mumble weak protests,too sleepy to fight. A few rise to the occasion or at leastknow when they are beaten. These accept office grace-fully and get a warm round of applause. Invested withstaffs, they make their curtsies to the shrine of authorityand shuffle home. When dawn dilutes the night, all ofthe offices should be filled. Usually some remain vacant.By 6:00 a.m. the board has usually run out of nomineesand therefore takes note of failures in a closing acta orminute. These cases must be dealt with, often with em-barrassing acrimony, at the civic summit later on (fig.4).

The Ambiguous Hierarchy of Staff Holders

Borrowing a metaphor from Ayacucho villagers, the eth-nographer Hilda Araujo (personal communication, 1997)aptly spoke of the community board and its staff holdersas respectively the head and the hands of traditionallegality. The job of staff holders is to carry out the de-


Fig. 3. President Miguel Chumbipoma inspecting theincoming staffs for 2000. (Photo q Frank Salomon)

Fig. 4. A staff holder making obeisance to the shrine(peana) of the meeting space at the huayrona or civicsummit meeting of 2000. (Photo q Frank Salomon)

cisions of the head. They notify and remind peopleabout policies, detect infractions, and bring noncooper-ators to justice.3

How are the ten staffs organized? The system employsthree major contrasts. The first is the above-mentionedcontrast between governments. The staff offices belongoriginally to the folk-legal internal hierarchy of the com-munity, but the community, when it became state-rec-ognized, conferred legitimacy on the states agency inTupicocha by lending it four staff holders as hands (fig.5). The two governments have quite different styles andassociations. Hands loaned to the district governmentuncomfortably serve two mastersthe community thatthey represent and the state that they obey.

The second contrast is that between the each majorstaff officer and his deputy (alguacil). These form higherand lower members of a pair. The deputy does jobs suchas corralling stray animals and carrying messages. Everymale member of the community is expected to fill oneassistant or deputy post and one major one, in that order,preferably in his youth.

The third contrast is that among spatial jurisdictionsthat I will call orbits. Community authority employs a

3. Tupicochans are justifably proud of the fact that their village hasno state-sponsored police officer and needs none.

threefold division of segregated concentric spaces. I willrefer to them as central, peripheral, and national:

1. Central. The community rules its center. The reg-ulator (regidor), also called plaza boss (jefe de plaza),symbolizes it. He maintains in-town law and order. Hisdeputy is called the chief deputy (alguacil mayor) or reg-ulators deputy (alguacil del regidor).

2. Peripheral. The community rules the periphery, thecountryside. Two rural constables (alcaldes de campo orsimply campos) enforce folk-legal use of water, pasture,and fields, each with his own deputy (Guillet and Mitch-ell 1993:11).

3. National. The community rules in partnership withthe national whole beyond its own space. The commu-nity and the district government articulate with eachother through special staff holders at the district gov-ernors beck and call: the first and second lieutenant gov-ernors (tenientes de gobernador). The district governoris a salaried national official, but his two staff-bearinglieutenants, as community hands executing extracom-munity policy, are hybrid officers. Each lieutenant gov-ernor has a deputy of his own.

In sum, the staff corps as a whole is somewhat at oddswith itself. It must at once cohere as a single formationfor civic ritual, uphold the supremacy of endogenous tra-dition, and enforce subordination to the national state.As we will see, this and other political binds help explainits semiological practice.

What Was Inscribed on the 1995 Staffs?

To understand any inscription one must know the graph-emes that make up the signary of sign set and their basicsyntax. There are just three graphemes (fig. 6), sometimescalled the iniciales:


Fig. 5. Civil government in Tupicocha.

Fig. 6. The staff signary.

The first is raya (stripe), a bar cut transverse to theaxis of the staff. In the annotations that follow it is sig-naled R. It is sometimes also called tallarn (noodle).

The second is aspa (X). It will be annotated as A. Incommon usage, to make an aspa means to mark withan X or a check mark or even a thumbprint. An aspa isspecifically not a member of the glottographic (alpha-betic) set but simply material proof of personal attentionto the text (even by one who cannot read). This last detailsounds small, but it is actually a first clue to the waystaff code works. An aspa is neither a specific sign (i.e.,mark) nor a sign for any referent but an indication thata specific social relation has been achieved.4 This is ourfirst good lead: staffs work with signs that do not signifyreferents but rather are contextually determined, perfor-mative concretions of achieved relationships.

The third is peana, a pervasive symbol in Huarochirregional culture. It is an image of a two-step pyramidsurmounted by a cross.5 Peanas mark sacralized bound-aries. A physically constructed peana is found in everykinship corporation chapel, and others are used to markdivisions between central and peripheral space or be-tween communities. The spot where a work cross andother insignia are planted to establish sacred space isspoken of as the peana. A drawing of a peana on paper

4. The term aspa is unrelated to the alphabet. Its literal sense isthe crossing of two beams or threads crisscrossing on a spool.5. In physical reality, the cross is always detachable from its pyr-amid. Detachment-and-return is a vital ritual module on severaloccasions. The word peana strictly refers only to the pyramid. Itmay be a replacement for the pre-Hispanic term usnu (Zorrilla1979), and in strictest formality the term for such a pyramid ispeana de la cruz. But the fact that the assembled whole is usuallycalled peana shows that the pyramid is the less marked, more gen-eral element of the set.

is posted over the door of a house in mourning. This signis the only icon used on staffs and also the only signimplying reference to divinity.

As for basic syntax, a complete script statementthatis, a whole staff in the sets documented in 1995, 1997,and 2000consists of a P or nothing in first position andvarying numbers of Rs and As in second and third. Theannotation P, 2R, 3A would mean, in vertical order, apeana, two rayas, and three aspas.

How do the pragmatics of social articulation affectstaff-code semiosis? We have already noted that the tenstaffs serve two governments that are incommensurableand stand in an inorganic relationship to each other. Ev-idence for slippage and unease between them includes atendency for villagers to forget the district governmentstaffs when asked to list staffs, unwillingness to acceptthis office, uncertainty about where the district govern-ment staff holders should stand when they stand in arraytogether with those of the community, and friction about


Fig. 7. The staffs of 1995.

their responsibilities. Despite much questioning I couldnot get a clear or consistent explanation of how the twosubsets of staffs relate to each other.

The dawning realization that in asking for a context-free exegesis I was asking for the impossible gave a sec-ond clue to the way in which staff signs work. By 1997it was becoming clear that marks upon the staffs encodethe overall relationship among staff offices and that thisrelationship, though structurally important, is not ex-pressed in any other way.

Staff signs, it seemed, constitute a writing withoutwords in a different and stronger sense than the onecontemplated by Boone and Mignolo (1994) in the bookof that title. It is not that they record information whichcould be expressed in words but is not. It is rather thatthey encode information which Tupicochanos organizethrough means other than speech. The graphic act in-volved is not a translation from language but an act ofunspeaking inscription: the direct condensation of socialaction into visible objects without engaging in anexchange of words about them. Nobody can decomposeand read the staff signs as words, though Tupicochansreadily read and analyze many kinds of alphabetic arti-facts. Nobody spontaneously or under questioning cangive a gloss such as one aspa means second-ranking

deputy. Why? First, no such gloss is correct. The systemworks not with unitary equivalences but with context-sensitive sortings. Second, no social context exists inwhich staff marks are verbalized.

When the outgoing community officers of 1994 metin session from the wee hours to dawn to prepare for therites of succession, they displayed the staffs to be heldin 1995 (fig. 7). What is communicated in these staffs?The most obvious feature is the binary distinction be-tween peana-bearing staffs and those that lack them. Allbut four lack not only sign P but a space in which itwould fit. P was evidently irrelevant to these offices. Thestaffs that bore P were two rural constables. Their re-spective deputies staffs bore blank spaces, as if to alludeto their superiors insignia, in places where P would fit.From this we conclude that (1) in the distinction P/0P,P means rural or peripheral and 0P means village orcentral; (2) of these P is the marked (more special, lessfrequent, less dominant) case; and (3) the symbol P isiconic of the important ritual division between villageand rural space, meaning that these officers authoritybegins with the landmarka physical peanawhere thecountryside begins.

A second feature, the distribution of aspas, is as fol-lows:


4A First and second lieu-tenant governor

District government

3A Regulator Community [Center]2A First and second rural

constableCommunity

[Periphery]1A The five deputies of

all the aboveDistrict government

and community

This distribution corresponds to stratification amongagencies of government. The national state commandsposts with high numbers of As, the community two mid-dling but unequal A ranks (village center and communityperiphery), and both jurisdictions some low ones. Aspadistribution reflects, in other words, a recognition inprinciple of the supremacy of the national government:while both national and local governments are entitledto have ground-level delegates and enforcers, the formerstands supreme and the second subordinate.

A third feature, the distribution of rayas, registers aquite different hierarchy, one among officers as opposedto the jurisdictions that control the offices:

6R First lieutenant governor5R Second lieutenant governor, regulator, first

rural constable, second rural constable2R Regulators deputy1R Deputy of first/second lieutenant governor,

deputy of first/second rural constable

It comes much closer to representing public sentimentabout the importance of each office by placing the com-munity staff holders, who actually do the work of main-taining politico-ritual order and protecting communalinterests in both town and country, as high as the pres-tigious but usually otiose staffs commanded by the na-tional state. It puts a wide space between the higher staffsand the deputies who wear out shoe leather on theirbehalf, thus building up the former, and it splits levelsof prestige among deputies, reflecting the communityview that the regulators deputy is chief (mayor) ratherthan lumping him, as does the jurisdictional bracketing,with mere messengers.

A fourth feature is registered in syntactic practice. Theformula for a staff is emblem (Pvalues present, la-tent, absent) followed by two token-iterative signs,x Rs and y As, but it has an interesting wrinkle. Thetoken-iterative elements in those brackets which havepaired (first and second) offices are lined up as fol-lows:

First lieutenant governor R ASecond lieutenant governor R AFirst rural constable A RSecond rural constable R ADeputy of first lieutenant governor R ADeputy of second lieutenant governor A RDeputy of first rural constable A RDeputy of second rural constable R A

The schema shows the following regularities:1. For all community offices that govern the village

center, R before A signifies the higher or first status witha pair and A before R the reverse. This applies to both

the communitys in-town functions and the nationalgovernment office. Both of the nonpaired offices, thoseof the regulator and the regulators deputy, regulate thecenter and are marked with R before A.

2. Conversely, for all community offices that governthe periphery or countryside (that is, the rural constablesand their deputies), A before R signals first status and Rbefore A the reverse.

3. The district government offices, however, show, asone would expect of an in-town authority, R before A inthe first-status position, but rather than reversing toshow second status they retain R before A and diminishthe quantitative value of R.

The inorganic members of the setthe staffs attachedto a noncommunal authorityare marked by an irreg-ular syntax. It is as if they were unaffected by the A/Rordering rule because their jurisdiction is not divided ascenter and periphery.

In short, the insignia coexist with a verbally labeledhierarchy of titles, but that is not what they encode. Thisset, on close reading, embodies at least three separatetakes on the relations among the staff authorities andregisters the dissonance among takes.

For the purposes of semiology, the interesting point isthat none of these analyses is expressed in words or inany code external to staffs. The characters form an or-derly notation of social relations, but the variables andsome of the relationships which they notate do not haveverbal names. When I discussed them with a highly in-telligent consultant who has himself directed staff work,we were able to reach common conclusions, but onlyafter an awkward discussion in which he found himselfforced to invent circumlocutions as abnormal as myown.

Does Staff Code Possess Its OwnMetalanguage?

In observing the New Years Day political cycle, it wasnoted that there is next to no scope for verbal discussionof the proceedings. What talk does take place is sociablechitchat, ostentatiously off the point. This makes an ob-vious exception to the usual meeting-house loquacity.Taciturnity is even more surprising when one takes notethat this is the first occasion on which the new set ofstaffs comes together. Since they have been produced infive separate pairs and preinspected and precorrected aspairs, the risk of disharmony or error is far from negli-gible, and this is the source of tension that chitchat mustcover over. As noted above, any suspected anomaly willbe pointed out at most with barely audible murmur oronly a gesture. It then devolves on the regulator and/orthe secretary to decide whether to set the problematicstaff aside.

This is an eloquent silence if ever there was one. Asdid my difficulties in interviewing about staff signs, itraises the question whether there is a metalanguage fordiscussing staff code as there is for discussing alphabetic


Fig. 8. Justo Ruedas method of reading staffs.

writing. There appears to be strong variation among cul-tures in metalinguistic disposition even apart from lit-eracies and genres (Mannheim 1986). In order to learnmore about any possible verbal metalanguage concerningthe staff code and about its variation over time, detailedinterviews were undertaken in 1997 with three men whohad been active in the hierarchy and who are regardedas costumbreros, experts and loyalists of customary law.The findings highlight two striking functional differ-ences from the written word.

The first is that the verbal muteness of the staffsextends also to their metalanguage. As noted above, thereare only two intervals when authoritychiefly the reg-ulator and the community secretarycan impose cor-rect signs on a submitted stick: during preinspectionbetween December 24 and New Years and, as a last re-sort, during the interval from New Years morning to theJanuary 23 civic summit. On none of these occasionsas observedadmittedly, less than the total of 18 rele-vant encounters6did the regulator or secretary say any-thing like It has one aspa too few. Rather, if they sawa fault, they simply confiscated the stick and made thecorrection themselves. It is in these intervals of reservedaction, not particularly secret but not public either, thatinscriptions are corrected to match the model of har-mony that constitutes their envisioned suite of powerfor the incoming year.

By exploiting the privilege of the expert and out-sider I was able to elicit such remarks, but no otherethnographic moment gave me such a clear feeling ofpulling teeth. The officers clearly felt uncomfortable.Their replies were untypically curt. I was apparently em-barrassing them, even when we were in private, by ask-ing them to do something inappropriate, and yet I hadtoo high a rank to be flatly refused. At first I thoughtthey were mistakenly taking my question as a challengeto their expertise in custom (this being a commonsource of anxiety), but it later proved that the difficultywas more intellectual and more fundamental than that.I had naively assumed that verbalizing the ordering ofincisions on a staff was analogous to spelling out awordthat is, a neutral, technical metacommunicationin which the contrast between sound signs and visiblesigns was not in and of itself significant. However, thisproved a faux pas. The staff set is not an analogue forwords as the alphabet is. Instead it registers social knowl-edge that one does not put into words in the first place.It is an alternative to words. The metacommunicationof words is words about words (e.g., spelling out, whetherin sound or on paper). The metacommunication of staffsis handover, alteration, and acceptance or rejection ofinitials: carving about carving.

The proof that verbal metalanguage is not the crucialmechanism is that there is no standard way of verbal-izing staff incisions and yet this does not compromisethe viability of the staff as collective product. Havingflopped at a discursive method, I interviewed by asking

6. That is, five paired submissions in three iterations plus threeNew Years cycles.

men to sketch staffs (on paper, in dirt, or with chalk ona shovel handle), without simultaneous questioning.This worked much better, but no amount of ex post factodialogue yielded a uniform metalanguage.

When Justo Rueda drew staff inscriptions, he regis-tered figure 8 (left) as the sign for first lieutenant gov-ernor. In other words, he drew what my and Leon Mo-desto Rojass notation calls 6R 4A. When I asked himwhat design he had just drawn, he replied, Five degrees(grados) and five aspas. Disconcerted, I asked him topoint them out for me. The result was the clarificationof figure 8 (right). Justo Rueda reverses Leon ModestoRojass notion of the relation between character and de-limiter or figure and ground. In other words, he readsspaces as characters and incisions as delimiters. To hima degree or grado is a space separated by lines and anaspa is a space adjacent to an X. The two agree on theutterance, but since they had no occasion to analyzeit together in terms of a code exterior to itself, they didnot have any shared terminology for doing so.

The third consultant was Marcelo Alberco Espritu.He also agreed that the first lieutenant governor shouldhave four signs that are neither rayas nor peanas. Hecalled these signs puntos (points) rather than aspas. Forstaffs that had only one point, he drew the same X thatothers call aspa, but for staffs with multiple points heused another convention. In order to indicate the fourpoints of the first lieutenant governor, he drew the upperpart of fig. 9. There was a clear space between the two


Fig. 9. Marcelo Alberco Espritus method of readingaspas as puntos.

horizontally deployed lines of zigzag. I was puzzled be-cause I did not see any aspas. Points appeared to meto number 7 or 14 (if one took them to mean peaks,vertices) or 18 (if puntos meant loci). In response tomy question where the 4 points were, Marcelo drew thelower part of figure 9.

The interesting inferences here are (1) the absence ofconsensual analyses of the sign, (2) the poverty of con-sensual verbal metalanguage for analyzing the sign, and(3) the fact that these deficits do not impede the func-tioning of the sign as a vehicle to integrate social action.Indeed, as we have seen, to verbalize norms about in-signia is only to foment confusion.

This schema recalls Sampsons assertion that to thedegree that a society develops semasiography, it movestoward a situation of two fully-fledged languages hav-ing no relationship with one anotherone of them aspoken language without a script, and the other a lan-guage tied intrinsically to the visual medium (1985:30). Sampson acknowledges that to think of the latter asa general-purpose language is to contemplate an unreal-izable extreme. But within the confines of a special-pur-pose code, the staff incisions realize his theory in thestrongest possible form: unlike well-known insignia,which have precise verbal equivalents and are easilytransferred to the verbal medium, these occupy a func-tional space all their own.

Variable Array: Contextual Meaning and theProductiveness of Staff Code

In the early stages of this research, I asked intervieweesto set, or sketch, the staffs in rank order (segun susrangos respectivos). Each pondered at length, treating thequestion (to my surprise) as a hard one, and then providedan array. But their arrays did not match. Moreover, elic-ited arrays deviated conspicuously from the naturalarrays visible in actual staff use, and this natural classseemed to vary widely within itself.

My premise that staffs stood in fixed rank order to eachother was to prove false, but the poverty of verbal me-talanguage for discussing what staffs say preventedstaff experts from telling me so. Still less could they statewhat turned out to be the key to arrays: the correctarray depends on the folk-legal structure of the encoun-ter, inflected by the political contingencies of themoment.

For example, after the stroke of New Years 2000, whenthe incoming staffs had been accumulated on the deskof the district governor, the regulator, with the intenseconcentration of someone doing a puzzle, arranged themin the following order:

First lieutenant governorSecond lieutenant governorDeputy of first lieutenant governorDeputy of second lieutenant governorFirst rural constableSecond rural constableDeputy of first rural constable

Deputy of second rural constableDeputy of regulator or chief deputyRegulator or plaza boss

(Note that the use of first and second removes doubtabout the proper direction of reading.)

This array looks completely wrong in comparisonwith the array used at the community hall, but it snapsinto clarity once one notices that it embodies the systemas seen by the district governor in his own building. Thedistrict governors own two staff-bearing lieutenants topthe list, and their respective deputies follow. The tworural constables in charge of land and water use form themiddle of the list, followed by their deputies. The endof the list is the most interesting part, because in it amaster structural polarity trumps the common orderingthat puts a main officer above his deputy. The last twopositions show the deputy for village-center affairs, fol-lowed and not led by his boss the regulator. The senseof this is that the regulator and the district governor are,in the context of this nights events, polar opposites, sothey need to be maximally distanced. As we saw above,the ritual of the night shuttles back and forth betweentheir respective seats. The regulator rules (as his titleregidor proclaims) the innermost domain of the politicalsystem, with his seat of office being the inner chamberof the community hall. It is he who regulates the internalaffairs of the staff-holder corps, for example, by approvinginscriptions. The district governor rules the outermostorbit, and his seat of office is the mini-Lima lodged inthe district government. He sits so far from the innerethos that it is his custom to pretend ignorance of it.(Although I first took this for racially tinged disrespect,I later came to view it as part of the modus vivendi thatmakes an awkward relationship livable.) To manifestthis polarity is the overriding logic of this particular ar-


ray. To reconcile two contextually appropriate rules ofranking that yielded contradictory arrays was the puz-zle involved.

By contrast, when staffs are displayed inside the com-munity hall, which is the regulators own seat, the reg-ulator leads the array. Order in the community hallplaces officers of the central orbit first and those of theperipheral orbit last. Those of the national orbit do notreport to the community, so they are not present. Thetotalizing view as seen from the community becomesmore visible on one occasion when the community isforced to deal with it, namely, in nominations. It is re-vealed in the nomination list of eligibles prepared onDecember 24, 1999. On that occasion, the regulator andthe board dealt with nominations in the same order thathad been shown them in the distribution of As and Rson inspected staffs:

Regulator 3A 5RFirst rural constable 2A 5RSecond rural constable 2A 4RRegulators deputy 1A 3RDeputy of first lieutenant governor 1A 2RDeputy of second lieutenant governor 1A 2RDeputy of first rural constable 1A 2RDeputy of second rural constable 2A 3R

(The anomalously high A and R count of the last officeis commented on below.) The two missing offices, thelieutenant governors, were nominated from the districtgovernment.) The community board set the order ofnomination not by the district governmentcommunitypolarity but by the consideration that was probably up-permost on their mindsthe relative weight of theseoffices as assertions of the communitys interest.

A third logical possibility arises where the peripheralor rural (campo) orbit becomes paramount. This in factoccurs on the many occasions when the community as-sembles at its fields, pastures, or high canals for collec-tive labor or gathers to conduct the annual boundaryinspection. At such outdoor meetings, the planting ofstaffs and work crosses establishes the ritual and socialcontext. In these arrays, as one would expect, the staffsof the rural constables precede the rest, and their re-spective deputies precede other deputies.

It should at this point be clear that no single hierarchyranks these offices or the signs that stand for them. Thatis why I only created confusion by asking consultants torank them in order. The hierarchy of staffs is contex-tually determined. The actual determination is quitecomplex. It is grossly framed by the relation among ju-risdictions in respect to a given event, but the personwho places staffs (highest member of the hosting orbit)must also take into account all the realpolitik factorswhich are actually on the minds of those present.

At this point, silent inscriptionthe public concreti-zation of a reckoning of the roles and problems at is-sueemerges as a subtle art. The person who executesit sometimes fidgets with uncertainty or tries out mul-tiple arrangements before settling on one. Onlookers, ifthey feel politically uncomfortable with a solution,

sometimes express themselves audibly but not verbally,with scoffing grunts or mumbles of discontent. Theymean that the person in charge should think about re-arranging. Once in a while somebody will go as far asindicating a staff he considers misplaced and sayingover there (allacito, pointing with the chin). Such ver-bal-gestural interventions usually seem more likewould-be-helpful kibbitzing than like challenges. On thewhole, however, participants stubbornly, consistently,and (I think) unconsciously keep the whole process quiet.

And yet it is at this point, in the midst of verbal in-hibition, that one can begin to use the term writingin a weightier way than merely alluding to inscription.The crucial fact is that staff process is productive. Thearray of a given set of staffs in different situations yieldswordless but unpredictable, nonpredetermined state-ments about those situations. They therefore approachthe properties of utterance. And since they do this word-lessly, they also approach, as Sampson suggested, theproductivity of a parallel system of utterancesa lan-guagedisconnected from speech.

Indeed, in the abstract, one could say that the year-long, politically choreographed movement of the staffsthrough space, time, and society inscribes upon Tup-icocha the unpredictable event history of 365 days.Whereas the ensemble considered simply as an ensembleand in synchrony might be considered to deliver a con-stant message we could coarsely sum up as There areten minor offices arranged in pairs (etc.), the ensemblein diachrony might be considered as delivering a seriesof messages about its deployment in practice. But itwould not be sensible to call the utterances of staffsin action a historiography, because the removal of thestaffs after each function maintains a continually cleanslate.

The Staff Code: Reinvention in Practice

So much for the synchronic langue and the everydayparole of incised sticks. What about staff code over longerperiods of time? How does staff diachrony compare withthat of writing proper? The answer is that staff codeproceeds through time in a manner radically differentfrom normal writing. Table 1 compares six versions ofthe staff hierarchy: the observed ones of 1995, 1997, and2000 and the ones recalled by men who directed thesystem in the 1950s1980s. What diachronic comparisonreveals is a second major functional difference fromwriting proper as important as its distance from words.As a code, staff inscription is strikingly inconsistent overtime. Writing as we know it goes through time by pro-ducing varied messages in a constant code; the staff cor-pus produces a constant primary message in a varyingcode.

The code itself is an emergent of each years socialreproduction. It is, in other words, an integrative productof the relations in process. There is no guarantee, andapparently no need or expectation, that this will takeplace in the same way every year. Participants create its


table 1Staff Code Inscriptions as Recalled (1950s1980s) and Observed (19952000)

StaffRecalled,

JRRecalled,

MAERecalled,

LMRA 1-1-95 1-1-97 1-2-97 2-26-97 3-29-97 1-1-00

1LG 6R, 4A 4 puntos 0P, 6A, 7R 0P, 6R, 4A 0P, 6R, 4A 6R, 4AD of 1LG 1R, 1A 1A, 2R 0P, 4R 0P, 1R, 1A 0P, 1R, 1A blank 2R, 1A2LG 5R, 3A 3 puntos? 0P, 5A, 6R 0P, 5R, 4A P-space,

5R, 2AP-space,5R, 4A

5R, 4A

D of 2LG 1R, 1A 1A, 2R 0P, 3R 0P, 1A, 1R 0P, 1R, 1A P-space,5R, 2A

2R, 1A

RpPB 5R, 3A 3 puntos 0P, 4A, 5R 0P, 5R, 3A P-space,5R, 2A

0P, 5R, 3A 0P, 5R, 2A 5R, 3A

D of RpCD 2R, 1A 1A, 2puntos

0P, 1A, 2R 0P, 2R, 1A P-space,3R, 1A

P-space,3R, 1A

P-space,3R, 1A

P-space,3R, 1A

3R, 1A

1RC 1P, 4R, 3A 1P, 1R 1P, 3A, 4R 1P, 2A, 5R 1P, 2A, 5R 1P, 2A, 5R 1P, 2A, 5R 1P, 2A, 5RD of 1RC 1R, 1A 1A, 2R 1P, 2R P-space,

1A, 1R1P, 1R,1A, 1R

1P, 1R,1A, 1R

1P, 1R,1A, 1R

1P, 1R,1A, 1R

2RC 1P, 4R, 2A 1P, 2R 1P, 2A, 3R 1P, 5R, 2A 1P, 1R,1A, 1R

1P, 3R, 2A 1P, 2R, 1A,1R, 1A, 1R

D of 2RC 1R, 1A 1A, 2R 1P, 1R P-space,1R, 1A

1P, 3R, 2A 1P, 1R, 2A 1P, 3R, 2A

note: Abbreviations of offices: 1LG, first lieutenant governor; D of 1LG, deputy of first lieutenant governor; 2LG, second lieutenantgovernor; D of 2LG, deputy of second lieutenant governor; RpPB, regulator, also called plaza boss; D of RpCD, deputy of regulator,also called chief deputy; 1RC, first rural constable; D of 1RC, deputy of first rural constable; 2RC, second rural constable; D of 2RC,deputy of second rural constable. Abbreviations of signs: A, aspa or X; R, raya or bar; P, peana or stepped pyramid with cross; punto,conjoined aspas in the reckoning of Marcelo Alberco Espritu. Abbreviations of consultants: JR, Justo Rueda; MAE, Marcelo AlbercoEspritu; LMRA, Leon Modesto Rojas Alberco.

symbolism as they go. Thus successive iterations yieldnot varied messages in a constant code but varying codethat reflects the political constitution as inflected by theemerging political constellation of the new year. Sincethe referent of the staff inscriptions as a set is a groupof simultaneous relationships, their mutual synchronicfit and not their longitudinal consistency over time isthe prime concern. Their historicity takes the form ofcode variation and not message variation.

Staff Code and the Pace of Change

This variation is not drift but the silent registry of socialreasoning. For historical depth, let us consider differ-ences among the three systems that the veteran staff-holder directors recall.

In the staff set remembered by Leon Modesto RojasAlberco from ca. the 1970searly 1980s, two character-istics stand out. First, with regard to distribution of A,he differentiates two discrete classes of officers. Thosewho give commands to a subordinate have As and theothers lack them. At the same time, this bipolarizingtendency goes with a countervailing tendency towardcontinuum in the distribution of rayas. In R terms, staffsdisplay an uninterrupted continuum of importance, fromfirst lieutenant governor (7R) down to deputy of the sec-ond rural constable (1R). In sum, Rojass array hyperdif-ferentiates. It does this dually: it maximizes the distinct-ness of each office from all others, and it makes a sharpbreak between two sorts of rank that somewhat resem-

bles the break between warrant officers and noncoms inthe military. It may be relevant that Rojas, while a majorpromoter of community self-government, also belongsto the generation whose politically formative years co-incided with the Velasco Alvarado military regime.

The code recalled by a man 16 years older than Rojas,Marcelo Alberco Espritu, emphasizes a different set ofnorms, presumably an idealized version of the systemhe helped carry out in the 1950s60s. Table 1 containshis scheme as translated from his distinctive pointsverbalization to the notation I devised with Rojas. UnlikeRojass scheme, which goes to an extreme of splittingand graduating (there are no overall equationsno twomatching staffsin his system) Alberco inclines towardbracketing or lumping. (Two point staffs look alike,with 3 puntos, and four deputy staffs look alike, with1A, 2R.) In other words, he and his peers, when theyintegrated this system, interlocked themselves with eachother mostly by establishing correspondences that clar-ified who was peer to whom.

Third, in working with Justo Rueda we get a viewpointa decade or so older than Albercos. His distinctive wayof explaining staff incisions as white figures separatedby black divisors has been described above. Thisscheme makes R (delimiter of grado) and A, in that order,necessary constituents of all valid signs. Aside from hisradically different verbal treatment, the most strikingthing about Ruedas scheme is that it maximizes syn-tactical simplicity and regularity by focalizing this in-stantly noticeable gestalt-level vareme. The shapeformed by a bar-topped X is the common denominator


among all office symbols. In substancethat is, theorganization of inequalityRuedas system does not dif-fer much from Albercos or the 1995 array, but it differsin the rhetoric (so to speak) of presenting thathierarchy.

Whereas Rojass scheme emphasizes gradation and Al-bercos emphasizes bracketing, Ruedas emphasizes har-monization. His set of staffs comes closest to being auniform. It might correspond to a round of integrativepractice in which the staff holders tended to cohere as acorps more than they do now.

Staff Code in Ongoing Transformation,19952000

The recalled sets given by older experts may be distortedby idealization (chiefly in the direction of enhanced reg-ularity according to the individuals notion of the rules).But this idealization itself serves as a heuristic guide tounderstanding the not-so-ideal practice of staff use, sinceit has shown us how a synchronic set coheres when itcoheres perfectlyas perhaps occurs mostly inimagination.

This helps to clarify how the sets actually did varyover time. In other words, the varied ways in which thesame message was inscribed over three observed cy-cles1995, 1997, and 2000reveal through their signlogic a pattern which actually does match identifiablechanges in social practice.

This interpretation may be taken as a deciphermentin a special sensea sense appropriate to the idiosyn-crasy of mute inscription. Decipherment in this case can-not be the recapture of a verbal artifact by reading asample of a known code, for there never was a verbalartifact. Nor can it be the recapture of a lost code-readingskill, for there never was a skill of reading in the senseof reading-out. Rather, deciphering mute inscription is amatter of recapturing past operations of social interac-tion-through-signs.

Comparing the 1995, 1997, and 2000 observed datasets, one can trace the following tendencies:

First, an intelligible trend emerges in the relation be-tween major staffs as a set and their deputy staffs as aset. Irrespective of the specific number of As awardedthe staffs, in successive years the number of Rs attributedto deputies of any given major staff holder rose. In 2000the rise was universal and striking. It will be rememberedthat Rs correspond not to the dignity of the jurisdictionthat the officer enforces but the esteem in which hisindividual office is held. In recent years, migration toLima and declining enrollment in the community haveshrunk the pool of eligibles more and more, with theresult that it becomes necessary to call on younger andyounger men. Young men in their teens perceive deputyposts as almost servile. The upgrading of their dignityof office is a response to pressure from below. It will beborne in mind that deputies are the ones who actuallymanufacture staffs. There is a certain democratic un-

dercurrent in their being well placed to bid tacitly forpolitical relief through the staffs they submit. Faced withthe demographic facts the community boards of 1997 and2000 allowed these offices more dignified R-ratings vis-a`-vis the rest of the set. The change is particularly no-ticeable in the staff for the deputy of the second ruralconstable, which is often the point of entry for young-sters doing their first service.

Second, in the national orbit represented by the districtgovernor and his four staff holders, a shift in syntacticalusage has occurred. It was noted above that in 1995 thetwo orbits that unambiguously belong to the communityused a reversal of syntax (A before R, R before A) tosignal, respectively, first and second of a pair. This ap-plied to the deputies whom the community lent to thenational orbit, the first and second lieutenant governorsdeputies; the first and second lieutenant governors them-selves were set a bit apart from the intracommunity hi-erarchy by not using this distinction. It will also be re-called that the deputy posts of the first and secondlieutenant governors are unpopular offices because theyput their incumbents in a serving two masters bind.In 1997 the insignia for the deputies of the first and sec-ond lieutenant governors were in disarray. (Erroneouscases may not be disallowed under the present meth-odology, since disarray no less than array is the imprintof integrationor its failure.) By 2000, these two dep-uty posts had absorbed a new pattern: they followed thesame rule as their masters, the lieutenant governors. Putinto words (as no one ever would), the gesture signalsthat the villagers cede a bit of the communitys authorityover its staff holders in order to relieve the incumbentsof the two masters dilemma and let them simply obeythe district governors agenda. It remains to be seenwhether this will relieve the chronic problem of fillingthese roles.

The third, fourth, and fifth tendencies all share onepolitical import but take place in semiologically differentways. All three register the increasing distinctiveness ofthe peripheral or rural orbit from the other two orbits.

The third tendency is syntactic, like the second, butmore fundamental and puzzling. Through 1995, a uni-versal rule, never contravened in sets as remembered byolder men, required that As and Rs form separate groupsand not be intermingled. On New Years Day 1997thelast possible moment for correctionsthe communitysecretary noticed that someone had marked an incomingsecond rural constable staff with P, 1R, 1A, 1R. Thisinterspersed pattern, which looked like FXF, was si-lently set aside and scraped off. Nonetheless, the sameFXF appeared again in February and March 1997 onthe first rural constables deputys staff, and it stayedthere. Not only was this repeated in 2000, but this timeFXF was also carved onto the second rural constablesstaff and stayed there. FXF has great naked-eye sali-ence. Its increasing popularity in the peripheral or ruralorbit would seem to mark an emerging sentiment that,although of the same substance as other staff authorities,the peripheral orbit, like the district government, par-takes of a distinctive order. The 2000 community board


tacitly agreed to let this formulation show by not cor-recting the staffs.

One may take this as a subtle move in a political con-flict which has troubled the village of late: the increasingassertiveness of the municipality in affairs outside itsspatial jurisdiction, for example, in rural canal construc-tion. (The municipality, it will be recalled, does not itselfcommand any staff holders.) Because the mayor wholeads this expansionism is a powerful, able, and faction-ally strong man, one rarely hears the community assertflat opposition. But this split is actually the main polit-ical event since 1995. Innovation in the 19972000 staffsworks almost as if to say The rural sector speaks adifferent languagea claim to authoritative discoursein its own orbit, as the national orbits own syntacticpeculiarity implies for a different one. However, the newvareme also has a conservative dimension: if one tal-lies numbers of As and Rs without regard to this novelsyntax, their respective numbers come out as conven-tional rankings by the older system.

The fourth tendency is the disappearance of the char-acter P-space (i.e., the leaving of an unincised area at thetops of some staffs in the location that P would fill wereit present). P-space was used in 1995 on staffs of deputiesserving rural constables; it was, then, a sort of impliedpeana. (Unfortunately, the notational system I used ininterviewing elders does not reveal whether they re-membered P-space as an older norm, because at the timeI had not yet perceived the issueand, as usual, verbalhelp was unavailable.) P-space has a structural vulner-ability: since staffs are carved at separate times andplaces, each carver must guess how much blank spaceto leave at the top. In 1997 a number of staffs outsidethe peripheral or rural orbit appeared to have P-spaces.The community board seemed a bit puzzled about thisat the New Years morning inspection. They slid thestaffs along each other as if measuring (but neither ac-tually measured nor discussed them). In the event theydid not recall any of these for correction. The result wasthat when the staffs were arrayed, P-space could nolonger be visually associated with the peripheral or ruralorbit. In 2000, nobody made P-spaces. Some staffs hadmore than a P-space of blank wood, others less. Nonewere corrected on this score.

The fifth tendency is probably a compensation for thefourth: The staffs that would have had P-spaces in 1995now had Ps, that is, explicit peanas. P is the most naked-eye salient of all signs, so this change more than restoredthe visual distinctiveness of the peripheral orbit whenstaffs are arrayed or when a single staff is planted at awork site to show under which orbit the work falls. Onemight argue that this is simply a determined allomorphicshift, not an instance of the new code for a new yearargument.

But the gain in explicitness and conspicuousness is soemphatic that it makes sense to attribute it greater im-portance: at the time of writing (March 2000), as neverbefore, there is no longer any shading of the peanausage to make the peripheral orbit quartet of staffs over-lap the rest. That is, one can no longer say that any

member of the peripheral orbit resembles a member ofthe other orbits by lacking peana. Today, as a set, theperipheral orbit looks just plain different.

I suspect that this is an imprint, in wordless inscrip-tion, of public resistance to what people see as the an-ticommunal policies of the 1990s Fujimori regime. Theperipheral orbit enjoys great public legitimacy as thequintessentially campesino orbit, as opposed to the twoorbits which, respectively, enforce duties common to alltownsfolk and to all Peruvian citizens. For example, itis the peana-carrying officers who take the lead whenthe village approaches the grandparents (abuelos, i.e.pre-Christian deities) who own their irrigation water.This is the most sacred of all identity-marking cere-monies and the least similar to national or urbannorms. To make its champions more distinctive is tounderline a feeling of we, the campesinos. The staffchange is a bit like orally overstressing the first word ofthe phrase peasant community. This is, in my opinion,a sign of resistance to the undeclared direction of Fuji-mori-era agricultural policy, which is to neglect the juralpeasant communities in favor of private agroindustry.(The community, for example, can at best get temporaryproject grants, while the other government agencies havepermanent budget lines.)

The five changes reviewed above are, in a sense, onlyone change: a broad effort to improve an always-difficultintegration of roles in a complex and partly inorganicsystem, in the face of additional neoliberal politicalstresses, by marking its parts as more functionally spe-cialized, more different from each other, and moredignified.

Why Write Wordlessly?

In his lucid, underappreciated summary of the writingwithout words problem, W. C. Brice, who made im-pressive advances with Linear A of Crete, sums up thestrictly scriptural pluses of nonphonetic script: (1) Itis independent of any language, therefore international.(2) It can be brief and instantly perceptible. (3) Lig-atured combinations and differences of relative size andposition among signs make possible a wide range ofsubtle distinctions of meaning, more economically thanin scriptio plena. (4) One need only learn a small numberof signs (1976:43). All these comments apply to staffcode. But the Linear A samples in question are recordsof transactions and are subject to pressure for explicit-ness rather than for implicitness as in Tupicocha.

The work of this essentially wordless code is (in RoyHarriss terms) integrational and not telementational.That is, it serves not to get ideas across but to coordinateactions, as the positions of pieces in a chess game do.Indeed, this game is specifically a wordless one for rea-sons related to the reasons that chess players talk onlythrough their pieces.

One may well ask why Tupicocha chooses to arrangepart of its polity using a set of signs even more isolatedfrom language than chess pieces are. After all, a staff


bearing initials like 1RC for the post first rural con-stable would seem to do the job. Indeed, in AyacuchoDepartment, whose staff customs otherwise resembleTupicochas, staffs are incised with combinations of al-phabetic messages and icons. Moreover, to explain Tup-icochan usage it is not enough to speak of carryover froman age when literacy was uncommon, because on thewhole the village has enthusiastically alphabetized itsinternal process. One must look for a positive reason itwas better in this case to use a set of signs without al-phabetic value or verbal counterparts.

It is worth noting that the discussion up to this pointhas been thoroughly political. The actual task of inte-grating a staff corps was explained with emphasis on itsfractiousness. The inorganic and uncomfortable articu-lation between centralist state and self-governing com-munity produces a two masters dilemma. Giving staffsto young men creates the uncomfortable situation of ask-ing junior members to coerce senior ones. These are justsome of the infinite crosscutting conflicts of interest thatmake a little town a big hell in the Spanish cliche. Itis helpful, therefore, that when a new rural constable,for example, sets about cooperating with a new lieuten-ant governor they take as common badges highly abstractsigns referring to nothing but the fact that they haveembarked on a joint task.

These signs are partly insulated from political elec-tricity by being nontranslatable and empty of proposi-tions and even of connotations. In all states, function-aries go to extremes in seeking colorless, repetitive,connotation-poor signsboring signsto articulate boththeir mutual and their external relations. The staff sys-tem carries this logic to its extreme. The reason for ex-tremism might be sought in the dilemma that ariseswhen the hands which execute the gritty work of co-ercion are in other contexts close neighbors, kin, busi-ness contacts, affines, friends, or enemies. The wholematter suggests the need for a counterweight to the Geer-tzian and Turnerian emphasis on symbolic polyvalenceand richness. Sometimes poor symbols are the best.

The fact that noniconic, nonverbal signs grow in thevery guts of community politics also helps one under-stand the surprising finding that staff code is at the sametime highly integrated (synchronically) and extremelyunstable (diachronically). The pattern that emerges in-scribed in each new staff set is the direct reflection of acurrent political interaction, influenced by speculationsabout the kind of integration among government organswhich might be useful in the coming year (bracketed,hyperdifferentiated, solidary . . .). Options are not (so faras I know) overtly negotiated. Nonetheless, it is literallyimpossible to articulate the staffs as a set without mak-ing implicit statements of this sort. The act of makingthem is, in effect, the crystallization of prudently re-served ideas about how the community directorate willmanage its agents. Not speaking of these ideas creates asegregated domain from which many disruptions areexcluded.

By this route, a purportedly unvarying message(There are ten offices, arranged in pairs, in three juris-

dictional orbits, and so forth) is expressed in a code thatvaries. To the surprise of any researcher beguiled by thenotion of tradition, it varies much faster than the insti-tution it represents, much faster than alphabetic norms,and even much faster than oral language. The ability tovary on the formal level has apparently helped the bare-bones institutional message remain the same. Had thestaff hierarchys emblematic frame (a term from Har-ris) allowed less flexibility, political friction might havedemolished the staff system in Tupicocha, as it alreadyhas done in many Andean villages (Isbell 1972). Perhapsit is more than coincidence that Tupicocha, with its ex-travagant-seeming semiological pluralism and politicalcomplexity, has proven more stable in constitution thanconspicuously traditional villages.

The ambience within which this symbolic system con-nects the logic of writing and the organization of so-ciety (Goody 1986) could hardly be more different fromthe restricted elite ambience from which, according toMarcus, Mesoamerican scripts emanated.

Andean villages create annually rotating, specializedpolitical hierarchies among peasants who otherwise arejealous of their status as equals. According to ideology,differences in authority are steep but change handsquickly. Every political actor eventually sends code mes-sages. Their symbols are few and easy to learn, meansof inscription cheap, and competence evenly spread, andtherefore messages do not mystify or exclude. By refrain-ing from metalanguage, participants leave each other nomeans to get a critical wedge into staffs except actuallymodifying them. Since their physical control is strict,this is (theoretically) not an entropic factor. Such a mech-anism has functional value in a would-be egalitarian set-ting in which the right to criticize, normally respected,would impede the crucial bootstrapping of politicalreproduction.

Like every ideology, this one is a mixture of self-insightand self-deception. In fact, differences of wealth dostrongly affect political process, including staff recruit-ment. What staff code propagandizes for is not thepolitical ambitions of a person, lineage, or polity, as inMesoamerica (Marcus 1992:11), but the ideological prop-osition of an order that claims to be intricately hierar-chical in synchrony and yet egalitarian in diachrony.

A second issue about the logic of writing and the or-ganization of society arises when one remembers thatstaff code forms part of a mostly alphabetic system ofpolitical signs and records. Is staff articulation in someway derived from alphabetic process? Does it feed backin? In other words, do staffs and books form an integratedlegible whole as, for example, prose and numerical tablesdo in monographs? The answer is that conventions seg-regate them more markedly than texts and numbers. Thenearest thing to an alphabetic congener for staffs is theact recording nomination rosters and investitures. How-ever, the Tupicocha community treats this as an unvar-ying list of role assignments. Books hold no descriptionor image of staffs themselves and no recognition of theimplicit variance teased from staff signs above. Staffholders deliver written documents but do not sign them


and are not responsible for producing any. Nor are theirerrands as such recordeda striking exception in a com-munity always meticulous about recording other citizenduties.

Lodging staff-holder functions below the documentarythreshold perhaps has to do with the fact that staff hold-ers conduct the minimal, lowest-level encounter be-tween instituted authority and real individuals. Keepingthis bottom tier of political signs insoluble in the al-phabetic medium which otherwise saturates relationsfrom low to high suggests a tacit substory to the explicitsocial contracta set of prior communal understandingsnot reducible to and not expressible in the system ofintegration which the community accepted by being ju-rally recognized.

Theorizing Silent Inscription

Writing without words at first seemed to mean a wayof conveying things that could be said in words but arenot. Then it appeared to be a matter of saying things thatcannot be said in words because there are reasons not togive certain properties of relationships verbal names.Even this was not enough, for staffs do not exactly havecontent in the sense of ideas to communicate. I haveabstracted above what an aspa may be said to have stoodfor in 1995a relational increment of jurisdictional pres-tigebut my gloss is by no means the verbal token ofan idea in the mind of participants.

Rather, staff signs in their grouped inscriptions are theactual index (in the strictest Peircean sense) of rationalsolutions guarded by their own abstractness and impli-citude. Staff signs distill, coordinate, concretize, and dis-play the ongoing thinking of the collectivity, but theyare not meant to be squeezed ex post facto for thought.You could say that they impress the social process ratherthan expressing it.

Such inscription comes to bury discourse, not to praiseitwith all the ambiguity this famous praeteritio sug-gests. The reasoning that went into organizing a givenyears staff holders is, so to speak, entombed in the thingsthat it has become. This gives those things authority. Bythe very fact that they exist and can be seen anywhere,Tupicochans know that the authoritative process is nowembodied beyond argumenteven beyond expression.Yes, staffs analytically mean the processes and theideas involvedthat is, these can be partially extractedworking backward through context-based exegesis, ashas been done abovebut that is a side effect. It is notwhat they are for. And yet staffs do praise discoursein the sense that this special-purpose discourse renewsthe possibility for difficult and necessary civic discourse.Burying Caesar made Caesarism possible, as Hocart(1969) first noted.

In the end, does it make sense to put such an un-writing-like system into one theoretical frame withwriting proper? How theorists respond depends onwhat they think inscriptions really inscribe: discourse,interaction, or processes of cognition. Let us sketch the-

oretical alternatives in this order, with a view to choos-ing ethnographically powerful approaches.

Philology is interested in inscription of discourse.From the strictly philological viewpoint of which De-Francis seems the most determined champion, there islittle reason to call staff code writing. Not only does itfail to do what his true or general writing systemsdo, namely, transmit an unrestricted variety of verbalutterances, but it fulfills a specifically contrary function.

Some philological grammatologists, such as Pulgram(1976) and Hill (1967), expand definitions of writing sys-tems to include those whose signs purportedly encodeaggregates of discourse above the logographic level. (Forexample, they see the few signs on a wampum belt as amaximally elliptical record of a many-symbol discoursesuch as a treaty.) But the model does not work ethno-graphically for Tupicocha, where the actual productionof signs follows anything but a discourse-recordingprotocol.

Ignace Gelb (1952) and later Wayne Senner (1989:6) leftphilologists a margin to stray farther by defining writ-ing minimalistically as a system of human intercom-munication by means of conventional visible marks.We have taken note of Sampson, a writing-centered lin-guist who explores this margin. Staff code looks at firstglance like a semasiographic writing by Sampsons cri-terion. The idea proved powerful in spotlighting visiblesigns as parallel language. But on second look, staff codewould fit Sampsons view of how such language worksonly if that view were expanded perhaps beyond his in-tentions. His usage depends crucially upon the idea ofdirect reference: a note of sheet music refers, nonver-bally, to a culturally stereotyped sound, and so on. Butsigns on staffs do not refer directly to semantically iso-lated and named things. The semasiography modelprovides the exit route from a theoretical trap but thenbrings us to an unforeseen hazard.

Three theorists outside the philological (and anthro-pological) traditions think the paramount task is to over-come such hazards by establishing comparability withina vast family of sign systems. Do their widely divergingsemiological field theories help?

The first theory is Roy Harriss argument that writ-ings are symbol sets which come into being by virtueof their employment to integrate action, regardless oftheir relationship to speech. For him, signs inscribe in-teractions. Even if the likeness of speech becomes theprimary integrative property, the social event integratedinevitably leaves its trace in attributes outside the reachof Saussurean code modeling, such as the instantiationof the event in a given typography or on a meaningfulsurface. The sign does not exist outside of the contextwhich gives rise to it; there is no abstract invariant whichremains the same from one context to the next. Nor, afortiori, is there any overarching Saussurean system toguarantee that invariance (Harris 1995:22). Harriss ap-proach could deal squarely with the wordlessness of staffcode. For him, signs of writing are normal precipitatesof many activities to which speech is marginal. The pos-sibility that a habitual disjuncture from language might


form part of the habitus shaping a specific semiologicalpractice fits well within his vision. Integrated actionmight well leave visible tokens which are not keyed tosemantic isolates with names. This opening leavesspaceethnographic spacefor finding out when andwhy silence becomes a systematically exploited prop-erty.

A second attempt to locate glottography in a wide fieldof commensurable systems is that of Nelson Goodman.Goodman, however, sees inscriptive methods as ways toorganize and convey cognition, summing up their varietyas languages of art.7 One of his languages accommo-dates properties of Tupicochan staff code very well, butit does not do so under the rubric of writing. Rather,Goodman defines a range of inscriptions called notationsin a special sense of the word. Typical members are sheetmusic, ID numbers, or knitting instruction codes. Good-mans subtle exploration emphasizes the fact that no-tational signs, unlike speech-mimicking written signs,function by referring bidirectionally to unique compli-ance classes. Alphabetic writing and speech fail this testbecause they create unique compliance only unidirec-tionally. The phrase Nelson Goodman, philosophercomplies to a single entity, but if one starts by contem-plating this entity one finds that speech/writing providesno single phrase corresponding to the entity. One couldjust as well say man in loafers. This difficulty doesnot occur under a true notation, such as Goodmans so-cial security number (1976:12773).

For Goodman, one precondition of making experiencenotationally inscribable is anterior atomization, a con-vention that the field of signifieds consists of discreteranges on identified variables. Any given instantiationof the Tupicochan staff code in synchrony could be con-strued along notational lines, thanks to the fact thatit implicitly segments the phenomena at stakepairedoffice, orbit, jurisdictional prestige, prestige of officeasanteriorly atomic.

A Goodmanesque reading therefore has formal powerand points to anthropologically interesting possibilities.It suggests that the realm of the legible is constituteddifferently in different cultures not just by what class ofacts (speech, ritual gesture, etc.) receives a sign in a cor-responding mimetic code but also by the prior formalconceptualization (conscious or not, spoken or silent) ofthe properties of that class. Whether the significata areconsciously held semantic isolates need not be crucialas long as they have the right formal properties, such asdiscreteness. Perhaps in order to be inscribable in a cer-tain way, life has to be lived in a certain way. The viceversa of this proposition provides an interesting func-tional circle.

The third and most sweeping attempt at a theory ofwriting overarching particular methods of inscription isof course the Derridean challenge to philological gram-matology. As does Goodman, Derrida finds the roots ofinscriptivity in the problem of organizing cognition, but

7. I thank William Hanks for pointing out the relevance of thisbook.

he approaches this problem at a far more general level.He does so by a corrosively negative method. Derrideandeconstruction of reference into aporias

Documents

Salomon 2001