Posted: September 16th, 2017
The depictions resemble dynastic leaders. Europeanman
ners and customs
history,
meticulous detailwith which knowledge in Inca society
was stored on
description,
reproduce
the
Guaman PomasNew Chronicle isan instance ofwhat I have proposed to call an autoethnographic which I text, by mean a textin which people undertake todescribe them
selves
quipusznd
in the oral memories
of elders.
munity. Their reception is thus highly indeterminate. a Such texts oftenconstitute marginalizedgroups point of into the dominant circuits of print culture. It is entry dimensions,which in
biography in itsautoethnographic
some respects interesting to think, for example, of American slave auto
metropolitan
the speakers
own
com
are those havemade of them. Thus ifethnographictexts
in which
in ways
that engage
with
representations
others
The conceptmight help explain graphical tradition. why some of the earliestpublished took Chicanas writing by the form of folkloricmanners and customs sketches written inEnglish and
published in English-language newspapers or folklore magazines (seeTreviiio). Auto
ethnographic collaborations representation between people, often involves concrete literate ex as between
distinguish
it from Euramerican
autobio
themselvestheir others (usually theirconquered others), toor indialoguewith definedothersconstructin response
texts are not, then, what Autoethnographic are as autochthonous of forms of expres usually thought sion or the Andean (as self-representation quipus were). those of idioms of the metropolis to
create or the con texts. autoethnographic texts are representations that the so
European
metropolitan
subjects
represent
to
or betweenGuaman slavesand abolitionist intellectuals,
Poma Often, and the Inca elders who Poma, were his informants. than one as in Guaman it involves more
Rather they involve a selective collaboration with and tovarying These aremerged or infiltrated queror. degrees
with idioms indigenous to intervene in intended self-representations modes of under metropolitan to works are often addressed appropriation
language. and resistance temporary account
In recent decades have
creation
critique, autoethnography, in a con with reconnected writing of the contact zone, the testimonio.
Guaman PomasNew Chronicleendswith a revisionist
of the
standing. Autoethnographic
shouldhave been a peaceful encounterof equalswith the mindless greed both, but for the potential forbenefiting of the Spanish. He parodies Spanish history.Following
contact with the Incas, he writes,
Spanish
conquest,
which,
heargues,was a great commotion. All day and at night in their dreams the
“In all Castille,
there kite plata, oro, platadel Piru’” (“Indies, Indies, gold, silver, gold, silverfromPeru”) (fig.2). The Spanish, he writes, brought nothing of value to sharewith theAndeans,
nothing Spaniards were saying ‘Yndias,yndias,
oro y plata, yndias, a lasYndias, Piru” (“with the lustfor gold, silver,gold and silver, Indies, the Indies, Peru”) words as an example of a conquered (372). I quote these
subject using the conquerors oppositional to construct language of the conquerors representation a
“but armor and guns con la codicia
de oro, plata,own speech.Guaman Poma mirrorsback to the Spanish (in their language,which is alien to him) an image of
surely recognize. ing, and Such are the dynamics of language, writ in contact zones.
parodic,themselves that theyoften suppress and will therefore representation
Fig. 2. Conquista. Meeting of Spaniard and Inca. The Inca says inQuechua, “You eat this gold?” Spaniard replies in Spanish, “We eat this gold.”
the Andean regionwith a passionate denunciation of Spanish exploitation and abuse. (These, at the timehe was writing, were decimating thepopulation of the j^ndes at a genocidal rate. In
fact,the potential lossof the labor
force became a main cause for reform
The second halfof the epistlecontinues thecritique. It is titled Buen gobierno y justicia ‘Good Government and a descriptionof colonial society in and combines Justice’
Guaman Pomas most implacablehostility is invokedby
of the system.)
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