Writing Without Words-P

$25.95

ISBN: 9780822313885
Dewey: 497
LCC Number: E59.W9
Author: Elizabeth Hill Boone
Illustrator:
Pages: 336
Age Group:

“This is an exceptionally comprehensive and informative work on Pre-Columbian and early colonial recording systems in Mesoamerica and the Andes. The various contributions focus on a range of hieroglyphic, logographic, and mnemonic recording systems, and there are also excellent discussions of the effects of the introduction of European writing on native recording systems. The articles touching on this latter topic all make clear the complexity of links, and the subtle interplay of changes, between record-keeping and ideology. An important and challenging book.”–Gary Urton, Colgate University

Description

The history of writing, or so the standard story goes, is an ascending process, evolving toward the alphabet and finally culminating in the “full writing” of recorded speech. “Writing without Words” challenges this orthodoxy, and with it widespread notions of literacy and dominant views of art and literature, history and geography. Asking how knowledge was encoded and preserved in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Mesoamerican cultures, the authors focus on systems of writing that did not strive to represent speech. Their work reveals the complicity of ideology in the history of literacy, and offers new insight into the history of writing.
The contributors–who include art historians, anthropologists, and literary theorists–examine the ways in which ancient Mesoamerican and Andean peoples conveyed meaning through hieroglyphic, pictorial, and coded systems, systems inseparable from the ideologies they were developed to serve. We see, then, how these systems changed with the European invasion, and how uniquely colonial writing systems came to embody the post-conquest American ideologies. The authors also explore the role of these early systems in religious discourse and their relation to later colonial writing.
Bringing the insights from Mesoamerica and the Andes to bear on a fundamental exchange among art history, literary theory, semiotics, and anthropology, the volume reveals the power contained in the medium of writing.

“Contributors.” Elizabeth Hill Boone, Tom Cummins, Stephen Houston, Mark B. King, Dana Leibsohn, Walter D. Mignolo, John Monaghan, John M. D. Pohl, Joanne Rappaport, Peter van der Loo

Additional information

Weight 1.35 lbs
Dimensions 9.26 × 6.62 × 0.86 in
Binding Type

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