Khipus

Any given written work is a marriage of cultural modes of thought and linguistic, literary, and other textual conventions that come together to create an intelligible product in a recognizable form. The representational success of a written text obtains from a culturally logical relationship between formal conventions and conceptual content established over time: culture and its authentic representation develop together dialogically. Systems and conventions of representation are custom made and culture speci c, and any attempt to employ them in the representation of something foreign to the culture that developed them results in the distortion of the represented culture, the system of representation, or both. The conventions that characterize a text may be categorized in two ways: those that the text consciously employs to produce a desired effect relating to the informative content; and those that are imposed or in uenced by cultural practices and modes of thought that shape the production and reception of mental as well as material commodities. We might call the rst type of convention textual and the second paratextual and/or metatextual. Gérard Genette de nes the paratext as a group of heterogeneous practices and discourses that surround and extend the text (Genette 1997, 1-2). The paratext includes titles, prefaces, tables of content, etc. I would argue that the features of a text also derive from what we might call metatextual principles that make the text possible and re ect the cultural modes of thought that produce it. The left to right, top to bottom direction of Western alphabetic script, for example, or the top to bottom, right to left of Chinese writing exemplify conventions founded upon metatextual principles, and contribute, therefore, to unique textual ontologies. Most often, these conventions are taken for granted because they form a part of the system of textual production and reception employed by a given society. The semiotic nature of these conventions lies within the cultural paradigms of which they form part. The signi cance that they hold is not an informative message, but rather a system of cultural logic shared by members of a society and through which the formation of disembodied discourse and the transmission of information are made possible.

Indigenous American societies pose serious problems for traditional theories of orality, literacy, and writing. This article attempts to deconstruct the orality-literacy dichotomy that has traditionally informed anthropological thought (whether it be of anthropologists, historians, literary critics, or others). Using indigenous American media such as the Andean khipu, Moche fine-line painting, and Mesoamerican iconography as a starting and ending point, it proposes a dialogic model of literacy and subsequently a dialogic model of media that constitutes a revision of the traditional anthropological and historical theory relating to the role of writing/media, its relationship to the development of socioeconomic and political complexity, and its cognitive effects.

By these knots they counted the successions of the times and when each Inca ruled, the children he had, if he was good or bad, valiant or cowardly, with whom he was married, what lands he conquered, the buildings he constructed, the service and riches he received, how many years he lived, where he died, what he was fond of; in sum, everything that books teach and show us was got from there. 1 Martín de Murúa

Societies of the late prehispanic Andes-the Inkas principal among them-have long figured as "exceptions to the rule" in social evolutionary schemata, in large measure because they seemingly lacked key technological hallmarks of complex societies found in other world regions, despite their observed large scale and complex, hierarchical political and economic formations. Such presumed absences are encoded in the Seshat Global History Databank, a large global comparative diachronic database recording many dimensions of human societies. Analyses derived from the current version of the Seshat database necessarily reproduce these supposed absences, as they inhere in its data ontology, structure, and registry. Nonetheless, patterns observed in the dataset provide a means for identifying processes acting on and through Andean peoples and the complex political formations they elaborated. Specifically, this paper evaluates a proposed information processing threshold model of social evolution, which suggests that social dynamics are driven first by processes related to social scale, and then by a phase of dynamics in which further scalar increases are only possible through innovations in information processing. The Andean region appears to violate this model because the Seshat database records writing and other information processing technologies as absent in the case of the Inka empire. The author argues that the dynamics of the Andean region are actually consistent with the information threshold model, but the data as constituted do not capture the relevant variables. The Inkas elaborated sophisticated information processing on par with counterparts in other world regions, but through radically distinct forms and pathways, including the Andean khipu (knotted string registries), decimal administration, and a colossal logistical and administrative infrastructural apparatus. This interwoven bundle of technologies and institutions constituted an information revolution that surpassed the information threshold and enabled explosive Inka imperial expansion, even as it produced certain vulnerabilities and fragile sovereignty.