SOURCES AND INTERPRETATION

During the last half-century accounts of indigenous America have pointed to a deeper and wider coherence, and a greater resilience, than was formerly recognized in academic and official discourse, notably in mainstream Anglo-American social anthropology. As early as the 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss celebrated not just the coherence of American culture but its prime role in the ‘cumulative history’ of the planet, pointing to its distinctive achievement in such endeavours as plant genetics, medicine (anaesthetics, poisons) and mathematics. Since then scholarship has abundantly vindicated this view while drawing in further areas of common reference, like cosmogony and visual language.

In the matter of script, analysis has revealed characteristics common to the recording systems used in the two principal urban societies of the continent, Tahuantinsuyu or the Inca empire of the Andes, and Mesoamerica. Both the quipu of Tahuantinsuyu, whose logic and codes have been adequately described only in the last few decades, and the books of Mesoamerica are notable for their numeracy and their reliance on such principles as place-value notation. Mesoamerican script conventions have generally become more comprehensible thanks in part to high-quality reproductions of inscribed texts and superb facsimiles of the screenfold books and codices. The hieroglyphic script peculiar to the lowland Maya is now being successfully read according to phonetic principles (advocated by the Soviet scholar Yuri Knorosoz), which effectively link living Maya speech with signs shaped 1700 years ago.

sources and interpretation

During the last half-century accounts of indigenous America have pointed to a deeper and wider coherence, and a greater resilience, than was for merly recognized in academic and official discourse, notably in mainstream Anglo-American social anthropology. As early as the 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss celebrated not just the coherence of American culture but its prime role in the ‘cumulative history’ of the planet, pointing to its distinctive achievement in such endeavours as plant genetics, medicine (anaesthetics, poisons) and mathematics. Since then scholarship has abundantly vindicated this view while drawing in further areas of common reference, like cosmogony and visual language.

In the matter of script, analysis has revealed characteristics common to the recording systems used in the two principal urban societies of the continent, Tahuantinsuyu or the Inca empire of the Andes, and Mesoamerica. Both the quipu of Tahuantinsuyu, whose logic and codes have been adequately described only in the last few decades, and the books of Mesoamerica are notable for their numeracy and their reliance on such principles as place-value notation. Mesoamerican script conventions have generally become more comprehensible thanks in part to high-quality reproductions of inscribed texts and superb facsimiles of the screenfold books and codices. The hieroglyphic script peculiar to the lowland Maya is now being successfully read according to phonetic principles (advocated by the Soviet scholar Yuri Knorosoz), which effectively link living Maya speech with signs shaped 1700 years ago.

sources and interpretation

As a succinct introduction to American culture and its place in the world, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s essay, ‘Race et histoire’ (1952), published in translation in Structural Anthropology, vol. 2 (Harmondsworth, 1978), remains unsurpassed; it has the historical underpinning lacking in the four structuralist volumes of his Mythologiques (Paris 1964–71). Joseph H. Greenberg, Language in the Americas (Stanford, Calif., 1987) has now laid the foundation for defining American culture in the joint terms of linguistics and genetics. Michael Closs, Native American Mathematics (Austin, Tex., 1985) is the first continental account of this subject. In recent years, América Indígena, the journal of the Instituto Indigenista Interamericano (Mexico), has increasingly accepted native languages and literatures as a key element in culture and education; see issue 50 (1990). A soundly researched though theoretically naive account of script in Mesoamerica is Joyce Marcus, Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth and History in Four Ancient Civilizations (Princeton, N.J., 1992). See also, ‘Epigraphy’, ed. V. Bricker, Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 5 (Austin, Tex., 1992); and Elizabeth Boone and Walter Mignolo (eds.), Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham, N.C., 1994). Facsimiles of nearly all the major codices have been published by the Akademische Druck-und Verlags Anstalt (ADEVA) in Graz. The recent spate of decipherments of Maya hieroglyphic script is reported in Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (New York, 1992), and touched on in Miguel León-Portilla, Time and Reality in the Thought of the Maya (Norman, Okla., 1987).