Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins, "Between Images and Writing: The Ritual of the King's Quillca"
Anthropologist Joanne Rappaport and art historian Tom Cummins analyze the ideological entanglement of alphabetic and visual literacy in the civil and religious administration of native peoples in colonial Spanish America. The encounter of Andean and Spanish technological and ideological systems under conditions of European domination produced a colonial culture of communication. Rappaport and Cummins focus specifically on the native population of northern Ecuador and southern Colombia to characterize the spread of literacy as “an ideological system and a constellation of administrative and didactic practices” that served to cement European institutions in the area (8).
In order to study the roles alphabetic and visual literacy played in the civil and religious administration of northern Andean society, the authors analyze colonial administrative documents. They focus not on the textual content but instead on the “nonliterary aspect” of these documents “as objects and as visual images”(9). Treating the documents as objects, the authors turn their attention toward signatures, watermarks, seals, marks, and the layout of the page. These physical symbols and markers found on legal documents carried complex meanings of authority and legitimacy. Because the pre-Columbian peoples of the northern Andes had no alphabetic or hieroglyphic literacy, nor did their pictorial representation take a narrative form, under Spanish colonial rule, they were exposed to European conceptions of literacy and had to“learn to recognize the surface-ground relationship between paper and graphic mark as a concrete manifestation of language”(9). As a result of the contrasting and contradictory cultural understandings of topographic space, symbolic representation, and writing practices, Andean peoples were resistant to accepting European constructions of meaning through written language.
At the center of Rappaport and Cummins article is a case study of the ceremonial acceptance of documents containing the king’s seal and the signature of his royal court by colonial officials. The authors argue that witnessing the rituals surrounding the acceptance of administrative documents and obeying the royal decree were two of the few encounters natives had with alphabetic and visual literacy and its relation to ultimate authority. For Rappaport and Cummins, to think of a signature or the king’s seal as a relic suggests that much more is at stake than simply written text on a page. Such engagements with image and writing imparted the system of values attached to literacy and language, which was a foundation of the Spanish administrative apparatus.
This article provides unique insights on interpreting colonial print and manuscript documents beyond simply analyzing their written contents. It urges scholars to move away from solely studying textual aspects of print culture and to consider these historical documents as objects on which meaning is imposed in more abstract ways. Within the field of book history, the nonliterary, material aspects of texts are just as important as the literary content. This article not only helps to bridge the divide between these two approaches to textual study but also reinforces how written text was a form of asserting European domination over Amerindian societies.
