OT: quipus

I dont think this has anything to do with tuning, but when I read it I
thought some here might find it interesting.

Dante

----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Farmer <saf@SAFARMER.COM>
To: <INDOLOGY@listserv.liv.ac.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 10:59 PM
Subject: Re: Studies of Vedic mnemonics

> George Thompson writes:
>
> > I am curious about such things as the Incan quipus which have been much
> > discussed in the literature on mnemonics. Would you be willing to
comment
> > on this device for us? I have never been able to understand exactly how
> > these rope things work.
>
> A fine scholarly overview on quipu is found in Elizabeth Hill Boone
> and Walter D. Mignolo, eds., _Writing without Words: Alternative
> Literacies in Mesoamerica & the Andes_ (Durham and London, 1994). On
> quipu, see esp. pp. 192-96 and 234-9. A more thorough examination is
> found in Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher, _Mathematics of the Incas:
> Code of the Quipu_ (Dover Publications, 1997). Earlier studies of
> Marcia and Robert Ascher are also useful. I've posted a greyscale
> photo of a quipu (I unfortunately don't have a colored one on file,
> and the color is critical) at http://www.safarmer.com/pico/quipu.html.
> What we know about quipus is partly conjectural, since we are
> dependent on the descriptions of Spanish writers from the 16th
> century, who didn't fully understand what they were describing.
> The art of reading quipus was lost pretty quickly by the late 16th
> century, thanks to Spanish repression.
>
> It isn't totally clear whether we should classify quipus as mnemonic
> systems or writing systems. One of the first books to describe them,
> Acosta's _Historia natural y moral de las Indias_ (1590), claimed
> that everything that could be recorded in Western books could be
> described as well using the colors, knots, and spatial relations on
> the different strings that make up quipus (see the illustration via
> the link I've provided above). Acosta wrote:
>
> And in every bundle of these, so many greater and lesser knots,
> and tied strings; some red, others green, others blue, others
> white, in short, as many differences as we have with our
> twenty-four letters, arranging them in different ways to draw
> forth an infinity of words: so did they, with their knots and
> colors, draw forth innumerable meanings of things.
>
> Apparently there was a tactile element to them as well. Ascher
> and Ascher (1981) write:
>
> ...the quipu maker's way of recording -- direct construction --
> required tactile sensitivity to a much greater degree. In fact,
> the overall aesthetic of the quipu is related to the tactile: the
> manner of recording and the recording itself are decidedly
> rhythmic; the first in the activity, the second in the effect. We
> seldom realize the potential of our sense of touch, and we are
> usually unaware of its association with rhythm.... In fact,
> tactile sensitivity begins in the rhythmic pulsating environment
> of the unborn child far in advance of the development of other senses.
>
> And some of this is strikingly reminiscent of Frits Staal's
> discussion of rhythmicity in Vedic mnemonics in _Nambudiri Veda
> Recitation_ (1961), esp. when he compares Nambudiri Veda recitation
> with Aiyar Veda recitation (pp. 37-39). The difference here, of
> course, is that in recitations using quipu, the 'rhythmicity'
> was tactile and not oral. (Or was it both? See my final comments
> below.)
>
> It is interesting to note that the early Spaniards who encountered
> quipus didn't understand that they were mnemonic devices. This saved
> quipus from the inquisitional fires until near the end of the
> sixteenth century. (Maya codices weren't so lucky, unfortunately: only
> four remain.) Part of the reason they didn't recognize them as
> memory devices worthy of destruction (since the best tool of
> the conqueror is to destroy social memory) was linked to the fact that
> the memory devices of the Inca were so *unlike* ordinary writing
> systems or the Spaniards' own 'memory palaces' and 'memory theaters,'
> which were used extensively in the New World.
>
> With a little simplification, one could argue that there were at least
> *three* basic types of mnemonic devices used in premodern times: the
> orally interwoven devices associated with Vedic traditions; the visual
> 'memory palaces' and the like developed in the West from Greco-Roman
> times on; and the tactile types used by the Incas (with similar
> variants used elsewhere). That covers three of the five senses.
> Someone could probably come up with a good argument that smells (e.g.,
> in incense) and taste (in holy meals) served mnemonic functions as well.
>
> My Sinologist friends uniformly deny that any mnemonic devices were
> used in historical times by the Chinese, although there was a lot of
> rote memorization of texts. Since the Chinese classics are relatively
> short, and since there was no ban on them being written (indeed,
> canonical sources were often 'fixed' in late antiquity in chiseled
> stone) the same *need* for formal mnemonics didn't exist that
> existed in India. Matteo Ricci's attempts to introduce 'memory
> palaces' into China at the end of the 16th century were, by his own
> admission, rather a failure.
>
> I should point out finally that quipu was 'read' by a group of
> specialists, the quipucamayocs, who served in a sense as 'scribes.'
> The knowledge represented by the distributed knots, colors, textures,
> etc., of each of the strings on the quipu could be quite extensive.
> There is, for example, a long Spanish text describing the history of
> the Incas, the _Relaci�n de la Descendencia, Gobierno y Conquista de
> Los Incas_, that is derived from the testimony in 1542 of seven
> quipucamayocs, whose words were recorded by Spanish scribes. How
> reproducible in *words* different recitations of a quipucamayoc
> were is unknown, so far as I know. It would be interesting to know if
> there was any link between the tactile 'rhythmicity' that Ascher and
> Ascher note on the strings of quipus and 'rhythmicity' in the
> recitations of the quipucamayocs. I don't know the answer, but I
> certainly wouldn't be surprised if there were. If such a link existed,
> it would suggest that parallels with Vedic mnemonics might not be
> empty ones.
>
> Steve Farmer
>