Frank Salomon

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of Anthropology

Introduction to the edited volume A Return to the Village: Community Ethnographies and the Study of Andean Culture in Retrospective, edited by Francisco Ferreira with Billie Jean Isbell (Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 2017). The book explores the role of community ethnographies in the study of Andean culture.

Compiled by Dr. Francisco Ferreira and eminent anthropologist Professor Billie Jean Isbell, this edited volume brings together the work of several ground-breaking scholars who have produced outstanding ethnographies of Andean communities between the 1970s and 2000s. Contributors review their original works, reassessing key aspects of them - such as...

The ability to accumulate and store large amounts of goods is a key feature of complex societies in ancient times. Storage strategies reflect the broader economic and political organization of a society and changes in the development of control mechanisms in both administrative and non-administrative—often kinship based— sectors. This is the first...

Khipu, the cord-and knot-based Andean information medium, underwent a long, varied evolution before and after its one-century heyday (14??–1532 CE) as the script of the Inka empire. Inka-era khipus' physical characteristics as substrate for meaning have been the object of intense study, partly because other avenues to decipherment remain scarce. (T...

Andean peoples joined the world of alphabetic literacy nearly 500 years ago, yet the history of their literacy has remained hidden until now. In The Lettered Mountain, Frank Salomon and Mercedes Niño-Murcia expand notions of literacy and challenge stereotypes of Andean "orality" by analyzing the writings of mountain villagers from Inka times to the...

Often, our sources for languages of the past are mythic and prescriptive rather than empirical and descriptive ones: narratives of gods, laws, and so on. As much as we treasure them for linguistic and cultural reasons, for historical and archaeological purposes we would also like to know whether practice actually matched ideals. This chapter presen...

Since about 2000, several converging debates have put Native Ameri-can ways of writing (in the broadest sense: communicating by inscribed marks) onto the scholarly front burner. A sensible ethnohistorian might ask, whatever took so long? Isn’t it evident that systems like pictography, petroglyphs, genealogical drawings, models of terrain, emblemati...

GosePeter, Invaders as Ancestors: On the Intercultural Making and Unmaking of Spanish Colonialism in the Andes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. xviii+380, $80,00, $35.00 pb; £50.00, £22.50 pb. - Volume 42 Issue 1 - FRANK SALOMON

In the village of Rapaz, high in the Andes Mountains of Peru, villagers have preserved a unique walled precinct containing the only known functioning Andean temple. Inside it is a remarkable collection of khipu or "cord records" (Ruý́ z Estrada 1981; Salomon et al. 2006). There is also a disused communal storehouse, whose contents were controlled b...

Khipu, cord objects used for recordinginformation, are associated with the Incas; however, in two known cases, khipu survive in Peru as communal patrimony, still in ritual use. This article describes the khipu of San Cristóbal de Rapaz and a project of in situ conservation, conducted in collaboration with the local community. It was necessary to de...

Ethnographic "New Literacy Studies" question the idea that literacy as such has any uniform effects, arguing instead that effects of literacy inhere in the social practices that impart it. What change, then, does literacy produce where it arrived from two opposed sets of practices? In Quechua- and Aymara-speaking villages on the high plains of Lake...

Réponse au compte rendu de Claude Lévi-Strauss dans L’Homme, 2001, 158-159: 439-442. Traduite de l’anglais (États-Unis) par Guillaume Boccara.

The extensive "Second lawsuit between Antonio Guamanyanac and Geronimo Caxayauri 1588" (AGN / Buenos Aires 9-45-5-15), studied by Espinoza Soriano (1983-84), throws light on friction between two kurakazgos of the Rímac River basin before, during, and after the Spanish invasion. This essay proposes that two brothers who figure in the lawsuit, both o...

Deux notes critiques de The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas , vol. III, South America [CHNPA] ont été publiées dans les Annales :l’une, de Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, relative à l’histoire des peuples natifs du Brésil; l’autre, de Carmen Bernand, portant sur les hautes terres d’Amérique du Sud et le Rio de la Plata. Nous ne d...

This article is an exercise in relocating academic ethnohistory vis-à-vis vernacular ethnohistorical thinking in two respects. First, it questions whether the metahistorical native versus white opposition, which forms an all-but-unquestioned premise of most ethnohistorical paradigms, at all matches local paradigms. Second, it compares academia's “o...

“¡HUAYRA HUAYRA PICHCAMANTA!” : AUGURE, RIRES ET RÉGÉNÉRATION DANS LA POLITIQUE TRADITIONNELLE (PACOTA, HUAROCHIRÍ) Une variante du jeu d’oracle pichca, différente de celles décrites par Gentile Lafaille (1998), procure une augure annuelle pour l’agropastoralisme dans la région centrale de Huarochirí (département de Lima, Pérou). L’aspect ludique p...

Recent writings on khipus (Andean knotted-cord records) invoke "writing without words," a near-synonym of Gelb's "semasiography," to argue that some American media refer directly to cultural "things" without functioning as a secondary code for speech. Sampson suggests that in principle such a system could constitute a nonverbal "parallel language."...

This paper is an exercising in relocating academic ethnohistory vis-à-vis vernacular ethnohistorical thinking in two respects: first, by questioning whether the transhistorical native vs. white opposition, which forms an all-but-unquestioned premise of most ethnohistoric paradigms, at all matches local paradigms; and second, by comparing academias...

This paper is an exercising in relocating academic ethnohistory vis-à-vis vernacular ethnohistorical thinking in two respects: first, by questioning whether the transhistorical native vs. white opposition, which forms an all-but-unquestioned premise of most ethnohistoric paradigms, at all matches local paradigms; and second, by comparing academias...

Draws on previously unstudied sources to reconstruct the political and economic institutions of the people of Ecuador's tropical highlands, who succeeded in fighting off the overwhelming might of the Inca state until about 1500. The small but remarkably complex and interlinked political societies provide important insights into rank inequality cent...

By the turn of the seventeenth century a generation of Andean natives, both Inca and aboriginal, had made lifelong homes within the strongholds of the European invaders. As they entered old age they inhabited an urban landscape whose “Indian” sector had become very diverse. In Quito and other colonial cities some of them dwelled in old pre-hispanic...

In the northernmost peripheries of the Inka Empire (northern Ecuador and Nariño Province, Colombia), an aboriginal status-trading complex resembling Mexican pochteca survived through and after Inka rule. Politically sponsored traders called mindaláes supplied aboriginal lords with sumptuary goods, and sometimes redistributed wealth so as to build p...

When analyzed statistically, the distribution of verbal elements in some written sources, like that of objects in archeological sites, yields culture-historical data independent of artifacts' intended meaning. A 1559 case study from highland Ecuador uses personal names and their parts to detect cultural differences in aboriginal society and their c...

In a 400 year encounter with Quechua- and Aymara-speaking peoples Euro-American thought has, until recently, has achieved ever-deepening ignorance about the Andean majority populations. The recent flourishing of Andean ethnology is the greatest such movement since the 1570s; it can be traced both to highland movements of regional self-assertion aft...

Study of 18th-century “witchcraft” trials from the Audiencia de Quito indicates that many acts of magical aggression and defense belonged to the South American tradition of shamanic combat but that the conflicts provoking them derived from specifically colonial stresses. Due in part to the poor fit between jurally mandated institutions of colonial...

Que s'est-il passé dans les sociétés andines après leur soumission au Tawantinsuyu ? Les chroniques ne nous ont transmis que les versions incaïques et insistent sur la générosité de l'État et sur son influence civilisatrice, sur la diffusion de ses cultes et sur l'établissement de structures politiques idéales, à l'image de celles de Cuzco. Or ces...

El documento presenta un conjunto de diecisiete artículos que, desde la geografía, la pedagogía, las relaciones interétnicas, la economía, la arquitectura y sobre todo la historia, presentan una nueva imagen del Perú y de los peruanos. El documento está dirigido a profesores de secundaria. Agencia de Cooperación Técnica Alemana - GTZ