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The Poetics of Khipu Historiography: Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala's Nueva corónica and the Relación de los quipucamayos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Galen Brokaw
Galen Brokaw*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Buffalo
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Abstract

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The Andean khipu was a medium of colored knotted cords used to record different types of information in the pre-Columbian and colonial periods. Although currently there is no way to read the khipu that have survived, numerous texts written in the colonial period claim to have relied on khipu as sources of information. A comparison between two khipu transcriptions of Inca biographies on the one hand and the European biographical genre on the other reveal a distinctly Andean poetics—in the sense of a structural format—with very suggestive links to semiotic conventions of the khipu.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , 2003 , pp. 111 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

The research for this essay was funded in part by a grant from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. I would like to thank Gordon Brotherston, Kathleen Myers, Gary Urton, Jongsoo Lee, David E. Johnson, and LARR's anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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