Unreliable Confessions:Khipusin the Colonial Parish

Abstract

The historiography of the book in the age of Spanish imperial expansionism has traditionally viewed printed works as repressive instruments of colonial domination that forcefully supplanted the native Americans' non-alphabetic vehicles of memory and communication. Accounts of the Europeans' wholesale destruction of native holy objects and material forms of expression bespeak the undisputable role of books in the Spanish colonization of indigenous memory and symbolizing practices. But the existence of colonial-era writings that testify to the resiliency of native technologies poses still-unanswered questions about the mechanisms by which this colonization took place and the ultimate reach of print culture in local native communities removed from the urban centers where, as Ángel Rama has suggested, written documents held sway. To what extent did native methods of communication endure under Spanish rule? What might the documentary traces of their use reveal about how they were transformed as a result of European contact? Can we tie their survival to concrete means by which native peoples withstood or adjusted to the Europeans' written culture and colonizing institutions? I would like to attempt to answer these questions by focusing on missionary uses of Andeankhipus:the knotted cords used by the Inca for the purposes of accounting and historical record keeping, which native parishioners employed in colonial times for learning Christian doctrine and recalling sins prior to confession.