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This study concerns a village which inscribes its staffs of office in a code "without words" it deviates from Sampson's model, for it functions not to provide speech with a "direct reference" frank rank s alomon is Professor of Anthropology at the university of Wisconsin-Madison.
This study concerns a village which inscribes its staffs of office in a code "without words" it deviates from Sampson's model, for it functions not to provide speech with a "direct reference" frank rank s alomon is Professor of Anthropology at the university of Wisconsin-Madison.
This study concerns a village which inscribes its staffs of office in a code "without words" it deviates from Sampson's model, for it functions not to provide speech with a "direct reference" frank rank s alomon is Professor of Anthropology at the university of Wisconsin-Madison.
Current Anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001
2001 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2001/4201-0001$3.00 How an Andean Writing Without Words Works 1 by Frank Salomon Recent writings on khipus (Andean knotted-cord records) invoke writing without words, a near-synonym of Gelbs semasiogra- phy, to argue that some American media refer directly to cul- tural things without functioning as a secondary code for speech. Sampson suggests that in principle such a system could constitute a nonverbal parallel language. However, no ethnog- raphy actually shows whether Andean codes do so, much less re- constructs lost ones. This study concerns a Peruvian village which inscribes its staffs of ofce in a code without words. Fine-grained ethnography over several inscriptive cycles shows that staff code does function as a parallel language. In doing so, however, it deviates interestingly from Sampsons model, for it functions not to provide speech with a direct reference com- plement but to detach some areas of practice from the realm of discourse altogether. Considered politically, this seemingly exotic method makes sense. Whether one calls it writing depends on theoretical commitments in grammatology. Highly inclusivist theories bear further development toward a more omnidirec- tional ethnography of inscription. f rank s alomon is Professor of Anthropology at the Univer- sity of WisconsinMadison (Madison, Wis. 53706-1393, U.S.A. [fsalomon@facstaff.wisc.edu]). Born in 1946, he was educated at Columbia University (B.A., 1968) and Cornell University (M.A., 1974; Ph.D., 1978). He has been a visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (197882), held a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Gothenburg (1985), and served as associate director of studies at the Ecole des Hau- tes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1986 and 1998). His publications include Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the In- cas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), (with George Urioste) The Huarochir Manuscript (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), and Patrimonial Khipus in a Modern Peruvian Vil- lage, in Narrative Threads: Explorations of Narrativity in An- dean Khipus, edited by Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). The present paper was accepted for publication 7 vii 00. 1. I am grateful for support from many sources: the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foun- dation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the School of American Research, the Grad- uate School of the University of WisconsinMadison, and the Wen- ner-Gren Foundation. The presidents and ofcers of the Comunidad Campesina de San Andre s de Tupicocha have been unfailingly gen- erous, as have the vara ofcers of 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, and 2000. I feel particularly thankful to Hilda Araujo and her stu- dents Milagros Silva and Karen Eckhart, for it was a late-night discussion with them which helped re up the present train of thought. Among many persons who helped at various stages are Marcelo Alberco, Kildo Choi, William Hanks, Regis B. Miller, Mer- cedes Nin o-Murcia, Leo n Modesto Rojas Alberco, and Justo Rueda. Robert U. Bryson and Luz Ramirez de Bryson produced the graphics. The apparent exception that the Inka state and its pred- ecessors present to V. Gordon Childes famous judgment of writing as fundamental to civilization (1951[1936]: 18081) is usually treated as a curious loose end. But the question of howa state could redistribute goods and serv- ices among millions of people over thousands of kilo- meters without writing as usually dened is a loose end long enough to trip up commonsense ideas about how recording relates to complexity. The fact that some huge states got along without writing should invite searching questions about whether grammatological and anthro- pological understandings of writing are really up to the task of explaining relations among language, inscription, social practice, and sociopolitical integration. The Andean crux of this issue is, of course, the khipu, a knotted-cord medium in use since at least the Middle Horizon (ca. 6001000 c.e.) and widespread in Inka times. The formerly slow-moving eld of khipu study has regained striking vitality, showcased in compendia by Mackey et al. (1990) and Quilter and Urton (2001). But the code of the quipu, as Ascher and Ascher termed it (1981), is not the only Andean code. This essay ana- lyzes a lesser Andean code which looks very simple in comparison with khipus. Its simplicity is a virtue for analytical purposes. Here we can avoid some methodo- logical puzzles such as the fact that, where khipu code is concerned, we do not know where the threshold of signicance lies (Conklin n.d., Elkins 1996) or howcords refer to nonnumerical signicata (Pa rssinen 1992:3150; Urton 1998). It also has another advantage for study: it is a living practice. The code consists of signs carved upon the staffs of minor political ofce in the Central Peruvian village of Tupicocha (Province of Huarochir, Department of Lima). I will call it Tupicochan staff code or (using the local word for a staff of ofce) vara code. It is probably no accident that this code exists in a village that, ap- parently alone at the turn of the 21st century, also pre- serves a set of patrimonial khipus constituting the re- galia of its traditional folk-legal descent groups. (These are ayllus or parcialidades; I will translate both terms as kinship corporation [Salomon 1997, 2001].) Staffs are sometimes deployed together with the patrimonial khipus. Nonetheless, the argument about staff code is presented with an emphatic caveat that it is not to be taken as a direct model for khipu interpretation. While staff code alerts us to semiological processes that may have gured in the genesis of khipus, it probably rep- resents a different branch in an as yet unknown multil- inear history of Andean inscriptive invention. For theoretical purposes, should we put inscriptions of social practice via insignia, icons, tallies, and other things into a common frame together with writing proper? Several nonphilological, nonanthropological theorists say yes: the philosopher Nelson Goodman, with his 1976 exploration of likenesses and distinctions among visual media, the semiologist Roy Harris, with his anti-Saussurean approach to signs as the visible pre- cipitate of social action (1995), and the literary theorist Jacques Derrida, with his argument that the properties 2 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001 of writing in the common sense are only special cases of far more general writing-like processes in the produc- tion of meaning (1974[1967]). This essay proposes to put their concerns onto ethnographic wheels. It suggests that their very broad notions of writingor, less conten- tiously, of inscriptionserve to alert ethnographers to unfamiliar dimensions of what signs achieve in culture and practice. Staff code appears to be working in almost the opposite direction fromwriting proper: rather than using signs to freeze and preserve spoken discourse, it uses signs to marginalize speech and to create a mode of interaction maximally distanced from it. Exploring such a case may broaden our notion of an ethnography of writing (Basso 1974) and help it inter- pret systems which fail the common tests of writing- ness. Admittedly, such a change would entail a sacrice of clarity about what grammatology and the ethnography of writing must cover. But it would also equip us to deal with what is, after all, a large share of the human races inscriptive inventionsthat rich accumulation of un- wanted gifts with which ethnographers have beenpelting grammatologists since long before Gelb invented the term (most famously Mallery 1972[1893]). These splen- did data now languish in oubliette categories such as proto writings, partial writings, and subgraphem- ics. They ought to be rescued. If Not Writing, What? Specialists in what I will call philological grammatology (by contrast to the Derridean countertheory, which, con- fusingly, tends in loose parlance also to be called gram- matology) generally reserve the term writing for sys- tems of signs which represent speech sounds, that is, systems which employ glottography or phonogra- phy. This position centers upon an argument descend- ing from Aristotle through Saussure and Bloomeld, namely, the notion of writing as a secondary code that reencodes the primary code through which people refer to things, speech (Olson 1994:3). Just about all im- portant breakthroughs in decipherment from Champol- lion to Knorosov have resulted from steadfastly follow- ing the likelihood that inscriptions, no matter howmuch they may look like icons for cultural archetypes (ideo- grams), actually encode speech. Even signs without de- terminate reference to words may be assembled by rules patterned on those of speech (Marcus 1992:17). Signs early in the evolution of a given script sometimes do indeed begin as icons for things (usually concrete things, not archetypes), but in practice such inscriptions are taken to encode the sound of the things name. Signs then become subject to the rebus mutation, in which a sign stands for a sound as such. Once a sign may be used to represent a sound, irrespective of any icono- graphic value, it becomes a glottograph (or phonograph). One or more glottographs encode an utterance. It is this utterance, not its visual likeness in a secondary code, that completes reference to whatever the speech act was about. Many inscriptions, however, are not glottographic. Gelb (1952) launched and Sampson (1985:2645) has re- suscitated the term semasiographs to cover them. The term embraces the generally ill-theorized area of mne- motechnologies, pictography, notations, and to- kens. Semasiographs stand not for the sounds of the name of a referent but rather for the referent itself. They are therefore said not to be in any particular language. In Sampsons example, whether one verbalizes the se- masiograph 1,000 as mil or one thousand depends only on local habits about how to translate semasio- graphs into words. Lest anyone think this simple system of reference implies global simplicity, it is worth bearing in mind that sheet music, chemical formulae, mathe- matical notation, choreographic labanotation, and ma- chine-readable waybills are semasiographs. Because in any pure semasiography, speech sounds need not be retrieved for a message to be grasped, some take the concept as a heuristic for writing without words (Boone 1994). Grammatologists do not agree among themselves on whether this is an acceptable ex- tension of the word writing. Daniels and Brights (1996) compendium The Worlds Writing Systems, by far the best conspectus of script research, does cover some semasiographies. But in his theoretical keynote essay Daniels enshrines as the real graphic McCoy only what the countergrammatologist Derrida calls a certain kind of writing. He demands a system of more or less per- manent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more or less exactly without the intervention of the utterer (Daniels 1996:3; see also DeFrancis 1989:21147). Archaeology and ethnography report uncountable ex- amples of apparent semasiographies, from Marshacks Late Paleolithic lunar-cycle bones (1972; dErrico 1989) through the partly pictorial Yukaghir love letter which proved such an interesting bone of contention between Sampson (1985:2829) and DeFrancis (1989:2635) to the emergent worldwide conventions of computer languages and icons. There is obvious doubt whether a term that lumps iconological signs (which tend toward the logic of visual cognition) with other, highly abstract signs can cohere for long. But as a point of departure semasiog- raphy will serve to focalize attributes of inscriptionthat specialists in real writing push aside. Philological grammatologists tend to reject the pos- sibility of general-purpose semasiography. They use the category for special cases like sheet music, where writers share competences separable from any given language, or mathematics, where the logic of grammar obscures the logic of the signicata. Sampson (1985:30) is less sure that general-purpose semasiography is impossible. He imagines a limiting extreme: There would appear in principle to be no reason why a society could not have expanded a semasiographic system by adding further graphic conventions, until it was fully as complex and rich in expressive poten- tial as their spoken language. At that point they would possess two fully-edged languages having salomon Writing Without Words F 3 no relationship with one anotherone of them a spoken language without a script, and the other a language tied intrinsically to the visual medium. In fact no such language has been found, perhaps because it would be unmanageably prolic of signs. Staff code is surely not a general-purpose system. The important part of Sampsons words for staff code analysis is the argument about its functioning as a separate lan- guage within the society that uses it. Where is the entry into this language? Semasiographs notoriously resist deciphermentthe more so when they lack an iconographic dimension, as many Andean ones apparently do. If one chooses semasiographics as a gate- way, one gains theoretical versatility at the expense of operational guidance. To get from this theoretical open- ing to actual interpretation of signs, then, requires an ethnography not of decipherment but of encipher- mentof wordless semiosis in practice. By tracking the creation of a series of inscriptions in three cycles of the staff codes use and collecting retrospective evidence on earlier cycles, it is possible to document an Andean se- miosis: a process by which meaning is categorically con- densed from social practice and lodged in visible marks. Staff Ofces, Investiture, and the Bootstrapping of the Civic Year Engraved staffs of authority rank among the deepest- rooted of Andean symbols. Pre-Hispanic deities were pic- tured with staffs from the Initial period (ca. 1000 b.c.e. [Moseley 1992:53]) through the Chavn or Early Horizon period with its far-ung Staff God and Goddess (ca. 900200 b.c.e. [Burger 1992:19699]) into the Middle Ho- rizon (6001000 c.e. [Bruhns 1994:24549; Isbell 1988: 180; Castelli 1978; Thomas 1983]). The Central Peruvian coast yields Middle Horizon mummies whose staffs are wound with cord so as to form emblems much like those described below (Herrmann and Meyer 1993: cover). A famous mummy ca. 1607 bore [a] staff named quillcas caxo [engraved rod] (Huarochir 1992:120). In colonial times the meaning of staffs shifted toward secular au- thority (Espinoza Soriano 1960, Salomon 1980). Mishkin, who took a close interest in staff hierarchies of the 1930s and 40s, judged them to derive both from rural Iberian forms and from pre-Hispanic precedents (1946:443; see also Ordo n ez 1919). Unfortunately, ethnographers im- pressed with the elegance of silver-clad batons scorned the roughly cut sticks which could also embody au- thority (Mishkin 1946:445) and therefore failed to catch codes like the one discussed below. Virtually all Andean communities formerly had hier- archies of political ofcers called varayuq (staff holders) in Quechua or varayo in Spanish, as Tupicocha still does. The staff makes its bearer an executor of folk legality, just as badges empower police ofcers with ofcial le- gality. In Tupicocha, in contrast to some Cuzco-area communities, staffs are not patrimonial objects. They do not pass through generations of ofceholders, nor does the mystique of the heirloom cling to them. On the con- trary, each staff is replaced each year, as part of the ritual reminding everyone that civic order must be continually created anew. One receives a staff in the act of accepting ofce. A staff is a stick of huarirumo or huarumo (Alnus, alder). 2 When an alguacil or minor staff holder (deputy of a major staff holder) is about halfway through his year of tenure he must select wood and start preparing staffs for both his own successor and his immediate superiors. Outgoing ofcers may keep their own staffs, but I never saw them displayed in homes. I think they are often given to newly staff-holding friends for scraping and rein- scription, though this is considered less than ideal prac- tice. The actual act of incising the symbols of ofce onto the staff is assumed to be a shared competence of men with membership in the community rather than a re- stricted literacy (Goody and Watt 1968:1120). If staff makers consult mutually about design, this is a back- stage, unofcial act relative to the regimen of ofcial staff use detailed below. None of the people interviewed said that such consultation did or should take place, but it may happen in reality. One factor bearing on the co- ordination of staff designs is the option of hiring an ar- tisanhimself generally a past staff ofcerto relieve one or more outgoing deputies of the actual task. All this is expected to be nished by December 24, when the community directorate meets to choose three- man slates of eligibles to become the coming years staff holders. By that date the new staffs should have been nished and shown to the regulator (regidor, a high staff holder) to make sure they are correctly inscribed. They are not, however, collected and therefore cannot be col- lated as a set. As we will see below, this matters for the overall functioning of their signs. Plurality of governments is the key to the induction scenario and to much else about Tupicochas staff com- plex. Two of Tupicochas governments use staffs. The rst is the peasant community (comunidad campesina). It came into being when, in 1935, the national state ju- rally recognized the villages folk-legal constitution as a traditional polity sharing land and water rights of pre- Inka, Inka, and colonial derivation. From the folk-legal viewpoint, the community is an emergent entity formed by the union of the pre-Hispanic kinship corporations. The other is the district government (gobernacio n), a branch ofce of the national state. Tupicocha acquired it by breaking from a neighboring district a few years after recognition and thereby incurring responsibility for executing national law (for example, military conscrip- tion, census, and criminal justice). Six staff holders who serve the community embody the folk-legal supremacy of the village center, radiating outward. Four staff holders who serve the district gov- ernment embody the constitutional supremacy of Peru, radiating inward. These contrasting perspectives on gov- ernance imply discrepant rules of hierarchy depending 2. I thank Regis Miller of the University of Wisconsin Forest Prod- ucts Laboratory for this identication. 4 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001 Fig. 1. Community secretary Margarito Romero scraping an incorrectly incised staff of ofce with a piece of bottle glass so that it can be reinscribed and conferred on the incoming staff holder. (Photo Frank Salomon) on which government one is observing, but the same politico-ritual process must generate both. To under- stand this will help in understanding not only what is inscribed on the ten staffs but why it is inscribed in no other way. To create new staff holders, these two governments assemble on New Years Eve at their respective seats: the peasant community meeting hall and the district gov- ernment building diagonally across the plaza. (The church and the municipality, which complete the quar- tet of public authorities, occupy the other two sides.) Just before midnight, chimes from the belltower call the dignitaries to their halls. While others keep to their beds, ofcers hurry down murky streets, hunched against the cold mist. The ritual atmosphere evoked is that of fragments gradually assembling, building toward a so- cially critical mass that will emerge at dawn as the tender political organism of the newborn year. The reason the investiture of staff ofcers, who are actually the lowest part of the villages intricate political hierarchy, must be the rst order of business is that they are the mechanism for bootstrapping all the rest. It is they who will, on New Years Day, clean and mark out the sacred civic space (collca) for the two-day civic sum- mit meeting (huayrona) that kick-starts the years public business. Without staff ofcers in place on January 1, there would be no way to begin. Where the inscription is concerned, carvers propose and the community disposes. Its outgoing regulator judges staffs. The secretary of the community also has, or in any case exercises, authority to correct those judged wrong before investing new staff holders (g. 1). The authority to ratify staffs changes hands with every com- munity election. As a result, this authority responds sen- sitively to changing political and folk-legal currents. Through them the creation of signs is politically mediated. In the rst stage, which starts before midnight, the presidents (camachicos) of the ten kinship corporations gather at the community hall with the communitys board of elected ofcers (junta directiva). Meanwhile, at the district government, the state-sal- aried governorfor many years a curly-haired coastal creole of conspicuously nonlocal habitswaits to re- ceive outgoing staff holders. One by one, the outgoing staff ofcers arrive carrying the staffs for their replace- ments. Each places the new staff on the district gover- nors desk (g. 2). As the staffs accumulate, the regulator anxiously inspects them by candle- or lantern light. The district governor, an institutionalized outsider, ostenta- tiously ignores them but toys with his whip of ofce. It is important to note that at this inchoate stage, that of accumulation, the staffs are not arrayed in determinate order. Stage 2 begins around 12:45 a.m., when the outgoing staff holders walk in procession to the community hall. The board greets them with drinks and, in some years, hot chocolate with panettone and authorizes themto end their year of ofce. In stage 3, around 1:15 a.m., the outgoing staff holders troop back to the district government to verify the staffs. The regulator places them in array on the boards desk. (Orders of array are discussed below.) He inspects them carefully, since this is the last chance to correct errors. This is done in virtual silence. Other staff holders also anxiously study the array and occasionally pick up or point to one, butand this becomes important be- lowthis is not an occasion for discussion. It is all but silent, with at most a brief comment such as Its OK (Esta bien) or Check this one (Mire e sta). Staff holders do look closely at each others submitted staffs. They count insignia elements, moving their lips but not speak- ing, or they run a thumbnail down the incisions to be sure of the count. In 2000, for the rst time, the new staffs were submitted with paper labels around them to say which incoming ofcer was to receive each. If the salomon Writing Without Words F 5 Fig. 2. Staffs (not in order) awaiting distribution on a table in the community hall after midnight on January 1, 1997. (Photo Frank Salomon) regulator decides that any staff has an error, he word- lessly reserves it for correction before reassignment. In stage 4, about 2:20 a.m., the outgoing staff holders go back to the community hall, this time in a more for- mal procession, with all the staffs wrapped together in their mantle or, in other years, carried by outgoing hold- ers. The regulator arrays them on the boards desk and formally surrenders them. In the name of all the outgoing staff holders the reg- ulator makes a speech of resignation, and the community president replies with a speech of thanks. (Meanwhile the district governor locks up his ofce and goes home.) The president carefully studies the new staffs (g. 3). Now is the time for any residual business, such as judg- ing an outgoing staff holder who has failed in his duties. Sometimes this part becomes long and contentious. Then, at last, each outgoing staff holder in turn is asked to walk out, call upon the three men named in the nom- ination roster, and bring one back for investiture. This is the political heart of the night. It takes place amid fatigue and tension, because all but a very few men try to evade staff ofce. Into the wee hours and beyond, the board browbeats disheveled citizens torn frommuch- needed rest, each determined to keep the burden off his shoulders. Some recite complicated hard-luck stories or protest that peers have owed staff service longer. Others become enraged about intrusion on their careers (under- standably, since village-bound staff service sabotages the combined urban-rural strategies on which a young mans prosperity depends). Still others mumble weak protests, too sleepy to ght. A few rise to the occasion or at least know when they are beaten. These accept ofce grace- fully and get a warm round of applause. Invested with staffs, they make their curtsies to the shrine of authority and shufe home. When dawn dilutes the night, all of the ofces should be lled. Usually some remain vacant. By 6:00 a.m. the board has usually run out of nominees and therefore takes note of failures in a closing acta or minute. These cases must be dealt with, often with em- barrassing acrimony, at the civic summit later on (g. 4). The Ambiguous Hierarchy of Staff Holders Borrowing a metaphor from Ayacucho villagers, the eth- nographer Hilda Araujo (personal communication, 1997) aptly spoke of the community board and its staff holders as respectively the head and the hands of traditional legality. The job of staff holders is to carry out the de- 6 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001 Fig. 3. President Miguel Chumbipoma inspecting the incoming staffs for 2000. (Photo Frank Salomon) Fig. 4. A staff holder making obeisance to the shrine (pean a) of the meeting space at the huayrona or civic summit meeting of 2000. (Photo Frank Salomon) cisions of the head. They notify and remind people about policies, detect infractions, and bring noncooper- ators to justice. 3 How are the ten staffs organized? The system employs three major contrasts. The rst is the above-mentioned contrast between governments. The staff ofces belong originally to the folk-legal internal hierarchy of the com- munity, but the community, when it became state-rec- ognized, conferred legitimacy on the states agency in Tupicocha by lending it four staff holders as hands (g. 5). The two governments have quite different styles and associations. Hands loaned to the district government uncomfortably serve two mastersthe community that they represent and the state that they obey. The second contrast is that between the each major staff ofcer and his deputy (alguacil). These form higher and lower members of a pair. The deputy does jobs such as corralling stray animals and carrying messages. Every male member of the community is expected to ll one assistant or deputy post and one major one, in that order, preferably in his youth. The third contrast is that among spatial jurisdictions that I will call orbits. Community authority employs a 3. Tupicochans are justifably proud of the fact that their village has no state-sponsored police ofcer and needs none. threefold division of segregated concentric spaces. I will refer to them as central, peripheral, and national: 1. Central. The community rules its center. The reg- ulator (regidor), also called plaza boss (jefe de plaza), symbolizes it. He maintains in-town law and order. His deputy is called the chief deputy (alguacil mayor) or reg- ulators deputy (alguacil del regidor). 2. Peripheral. The community rules the periphery, the countryside. Two rural constables (alcaldes de campo or simply campos) enforce folk-legal use of water, pasture, and elds, each with his own deputy (Guillet and Mitch- ell 1993:11). 3. National. The community rules in partnership with the national whole beyond its own space. The commu- nity and the district government articulate with each other through special staff holders at the district gov- ernors beck and call: the rst and second lieutenant gov- ernors (tenientes de gobernador). The district governor is a salaried national ofcial, but his two staff-bearing lieutenants, as community hands executing extracom- munity policy, are hybrid ofcers. Each lieutenant gov- ernor has a deputy of his own. In sum, the staff corps as a whole is somewhat at odds with itself. It must at once cohere as a single formation for civic ritual, uphold the supremacy of endogenous tra- dition, and enforce subordination to the national state. As we will see, this and other political binds help explain its semiological practice. What Was Inscribed on the 1995 Staffs? To understand any inscription one must knowthe graph- emes that make up the signary of sign set and their basic syntax. There are just three graphemes (g. 6), sometimes called the iniciales: salomon Writing Without Words F 7 Fig. 5. Civil government in Tupicocha. Fig. 6. The staff signary. The rst is raya (stripe), a bar cut transverse to the axis of the staff. In the annotations that follow it is sig- naled R. It is sometimes also called tallarn (noodle). The second is aspa (X). It will be annotated as A. In common usage, to make an aspa means to mark with an X or a check mark or even a thumbprint. An aspa is specically not a member of the glottographic (alpha- betic) set but simply material proof of personal attention to the text (even by one who cannot read). This last detail sounds small, but it is actually a rst clue to the way staff code works. An aspa is neither a specic sign (i.e., mark) nor a sign for any referent but an indication that a specic social relation has been achieved. 4 This is our rst good lead: staffs work with signs that do not signify referents but rather are contextually determined, perfor- mative concretions of achieved relationships. The third is pean a, a pervasive symbol in Huarochir regional culture. It is an image of a two-step pyramid surmounted by a cross. 5 Pean as mark sacralized bound- aries. A physically constructed pean a is found in every kinship corporation chapel, and others are used to mark divisions between central and peripheral space or be- tween communities. The spot where a work cross and other insignia are planted to establish sacred space is spoken of as the pean a. A drawing of a pean a on paper 4. The term aspa is unrelated to the alphabet. Its literal sense is the crossing of two beams or threads crisscrossing on a spool. 5. In physical reality, the cross is always detachable from its pyr- amid. Detachment-and-return is a vital ritual module on several occasions. The word pean a strictly refers only to the pyramid. It may be a replacement for the pre-Hispanic term usnu (Zorrilla 1979), and in strictest formality the term for such a pyramid is pean a de la cruz. But the fact that the assembled whole is usually called pean a shows that the pyramid is the less marked, more gen- eral element of the set. is posted over the door of a house in mourning. This sign is the only icon used on staffs and also the only sign implying reference to divinity. As for basic syntax, a complete script statementthat is, a whole staff in the sets documented in 1995, 1997, and 2000consists of a P or nothing in rst position and varying numbers of Rs and As in second and third. The annotation P, 2R, 3A would mean, in vertical order, a pean a, two rayas, and three aspas. How do the pragmatics of social articulation affect staff-code semiosis? We have already noted that the ten staffs serve two governments that are incommensurable and stand in an inorganic relationship to each other. Ev- idence for slippage and unease between them includes a tendency for villagers to forget the district government staffs when asked to list staffs, unwillingness to accept this ofce, uncertainty about where the district govern- ment staff holders should stand when they stand in array together with those of the community, and frictionabout 8 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001 Fig. 7. The staffs of 1995. their responsibilities. Despite much questioning I could not get a clear or consistent explanation of how the two subsets of staffs relate to each other. The dawning realization that in asking for a context- free exegesis I was asking for the impossible gave a sec- ond clue to the way in which staff signs work. By 1997 it was becoming clear that marks upon the staffs encode the overall relationship among staff ofces and that this relationship, though structurally important, is not ex- pressed in any other way. Staff signs, it seemed, constitute a writing without words in a different and stronger sense than the one contemplated by Boone and Mignolo (1994) in the book of that title. It is not that they record information which could be expressed in words but is not. It is rather that they encode information which Tupicochanos organize through means other than speech. The graphic act in- volved is not a translation from language but an act of unspeaking inscription: the direct condensation of social action into visible objects without engaging in an exchange of words about them. Nobody can decompose and read the staff signs as words, though Tupicochans readily read and analyze many kinds of alphabetic arti- facts. Nobody spontaneously or under questioning can give a gloss such as one aspa means second-ranking deputy. Why? First, no such gloss is correct. The system works not with unitary equivalences but with context- sensitive sortings. Second, no social context exists in which staff marks are verbalized. When the outgoing community ofcers of 1994 met in session from the wee hours to dawn to prepare for the rites of succession, they displayed the staffs to be held in 1995 (g. 7). What is communicated in these staffs? The most obvious feature is the binary distinction be- tween pean a-bearing staffs and those that lack them. All but four lack not only sign P but a space in which it would t. P was evidently irrelevant to these ofces. The staffs that bore P were two rural constables. Their re- spective deputies staffs bore blank spaces, as if to allude to their superiors insignia, in places where P would t. From this we conclude that (1) in the distinction P/0P, P means rural or peripheral and 0P means village or central; (2) of these P is the marked (more special, less frequent, less dominant) case; and (3) the symbol P is iconic of the important ritual division between village and rural space, meaning that these ofcers authority begins with the landmarka physical pean awhere the countryside begins. A second feature, the distribution of aspas, is as fol- lows: salomon Writing Without Words F 9 4A First and second lieu- tenant governor District government 3A Regulator Community [Center] 2A First and second rural constable Community [Periphery] 1A The ve deputies of all the above District government and community This distribution corresponds to stratication among agencies of government. The national state commands posts with high numbers of As, the community two mid- dling but unequal Aranks (village center and community periphery), and both jurisdictions some low ones. Aspa distribution reects, in other words, a recognition in principle of the supremacy of the national government: while both national and local governments are entitled to have ground-level delegates and enforcers, the former stands supreme and the second subordinate. A third feature, the distribution of rayas, registers a quite different hierarchy, one among ofcers as opposed to the jurisdictions that control the ofces: 6R First lieutenant governor 5R Second lieutenant governor, regulator, rst rural constable, second rural constable 2R Regulators deputy 1R Deputy of rst/second lieutenant governor, deputy of rst/second rural constable It comes much closer to representing public sentiment about the importance of each ofce by placing the com- munity staff holders, who actually do the work of main- taining politico-ritual order and protecting communal interests in both town and country, as high as the pres- tigious but usually otiose staffs commanded by the na- tional state. It puts a wide space between the higher staffs and the deputies who wear out shoe leather on their behalf, thus building up the former, and it splits levels of prestige among deputies, reecting the community view that the regulators deputy is chief (mayor) rather than lumping him, as does the jurisdictional bracketing, with mere messengers. A fourth feature is registered in syntactic practice. The formula for a staff is emblem (Pvalues present, la- tent, absent) followed by two token-iterative signs, x Rs and y As, but it has an interesting wrinkle. The token-iterative elements in those brackets which have paired (rst and second) ofces are lined up as fol- lows: First lieutenant governor R A Second lieutenant governor R A First rural constable A R Second rural constable R A Deputy of rst lieutenant governor R A Deputy of second lieutenant governor A R Deputy of rst rural constable A R Deputy of second rural constable R A The schema shows the following regularities: 1. For all community ofces that govern the village center, R before A signies the higher or rst status with a pair and A before R the reverse. This applies to both the communitys in-town functions and the national government ofce. Both of the nonpaired ofces, those of the regulator and the regulators deputy, regulate the center and are marked with R before A. 2. Conversely, for all community ofces that govern the periphery or countryside (that is, the rural constables and their deputies), A before R signals rst status and R before A the reverse. 3. The district government ofces, however, show, as one would expect of an in-town authority, R before A in the rst-status position, but rather than reversing to show second status they retain R before A and diminish the quantitative value of R. The inorganic members of the setthe staffs attached to a noncommunal authorityare marked by an irreg- ular syntax. It is as if they were unaffected by the A/R ordering rule because their jurisdiction is not divided as center and periphery. In short, the insignia coexist with a verbally labeled hierarchy of titles, but that is not what they encode. This set, on close reading, embodies at least three separate takes on the relations among the staff authorities and registers the dissonance among takes. For the purposes of semiology, the interesting point is that none of these analyses is expressed in words or in any code external to staffs. The characters form an or- derly notation of social relations, but the variables and some of the relationships which they notate do not have verbal names. When I discussed them with a highly in- telligent consultant who has himself directed staff work, we were able to reach common conclusions, but only after an awkward discussion in which he found himself forced to invent circumlocutions as abnormal as my own. Does Staff Code Possess Its Own Metalanguage? In observing the New Years Day political cycle, it was noted that there is next to no scope for verbal discussion of the proceedings. What talk does take place is sociable chitchat, ostentatiously off the point. This makes an ob- vious exception to the usual meeting-house loquacity. Taciturnity is even more surprising when one takes note that this is the rst occasion on which the new set of staffs comes together. Since they have been produced in ve separate pairs and preinspected and precorrected as pairs, the risk of disharmony or error is far from negli- gible, and this is the source of tension that chitchat must cover over. As noted above, any suspected anomaly will be pointed out at most with barely audible murmur or only a gesture. It then devolves on the regulator and/or the secretary to decide whether to set the problematic staff aside. This is an eloquent silence if ever there was one. As did my difculties in interviewing about staff signs, it raises the question whether there is a metalanguage for discussing staff code as there is for discussing alphabetic 10 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001 Fig. 8. Justo Ruedas method of reading staffs. writing. There appears to be strong variation among cul- tures in metalinguistic disposition even apart from lit- eracies and genres (Mannheim 1986). In order to learn more about any possible verbal metalanguage concerning the staff code and about its variation over time, detailed interviews were undertaken in 1997 with three men who had been active in the hierarchy and who are regarded as costumbreros, experts and loyalists of customary law. The ndings highlight two striking functional differ- ences from the written word. The rst is that the verbal muteness of the staffs extends also to their metalanguage. As noted above, there are only two intervals when authoritychiey the reg- ulator and the community secretarycan impose cor- rect signs on a submitted stick: during preinspection between December 24 and New Years and, as a last re- sort, during the interval from New Years morning to the January 23 civic summit. On none of these occasions as observedadmittedly, less than the total of 18 rele- vant encounters 6 did the regulator or secretary say any- thing like It has one aspa too few. Rather, if they saw a fault, they simply conscated the stick and made the correction themselves. It is in these intervals of reserved action, not particularly secret but not public either, that inscriptions are corrected to match the model of har- mony that constitutes their envisioned suite of power for the incoming year. By exploiting the privilege of the expert and out- sider I was able to elicit such remarks, but no other ethnographic moment gave me such a clear feeling of pulling teeth. The ofcers clearly felt uncomfortable. Their replies were untypically curt. I was apparently em- barrassing them, even when we were in private, by ask- ing them to do something inappropriate, and yet I had too high a rank to be atly refused. At rst I thought they were mistakenly taking my question as a challenge to their expertise in custom (this being a common source of anxiety), but it later proved that the difculty was more intellectual and more fundamental than that. I had naively assumed that verbalizing the ordering of incisions on a staff was analogous to spelling out a wordthat is, a neutral, technical metacommunication in which the contrast between sound signs and visible signs was not in and of itself signicant. However, this proved a faux pas. The staff set is not an analogue for words as the alphabet is. Instead it registers social knowl- edge that one does not put into words in the rst place. It is an alternative to words. The metacommunication of words is words about words (e.g., spelling out, whether in sound or on paper). The metacommunication of staffs is handover, alteration, and acceptance or rejection of initials: carving about carving. The proof that verbal metalanguage is not the crucial mechanism is that there is no standard way of verbal- izing staff incisions and yet this does not compromise the viability of the staff as collective product. Having opped at a discursive method, I interviewed by asking 6. That is, ve paired submissions in three iterations plus three New Years cycles. men to sketch staffs (on paper, in dirt, or with chalk on a shovel handle), without simultaneous questioning. This worked much better, but no amount of ex post facto dialogue yielded a uniform metalanguage. When Justo Rueda drew staff inscriptions, he regis- tered gure 8 (left) as the sign for rst lieutenant gov- ernor. In other words, he drew what my and Leo n Mo- desto Rojass notation calls 6R 4A. When I asked him what design he had just drawn, he replied, Five degrees (grados) and ve aspas. Disconcerted, I asked him to point them out for me. The result was the clarication of gure 8 (right). Justo Rueda reverses Leo n Modesto Rojass notion of the relation between character and de- limiter or gure and ground. In other words, he reads spaces as characters and incisions as delimiters. To him a degree or grado is a space separated by lines and an aspa is a space adjacent to an X. The two agree on the utterance, but since they had no occasion to analyze it together in terms of a code exterior to itself, they did not have any shared terminology for doing so. The third consultant was Marcelo Alberco Espritu. He also agreed that the rst lieutenant governor should have four signs that are neither rayas nor pean as. He called these signs puntos (points) rather than aspas. For staffs that had only one point, he drew the same X that others call aspa, but for staffs with multiple points he used another convention. In order to indicate the four points of the rst lieutenant governor, he drew the upper part of g. 9. There was a clear space between the two salomon Writing Without Words F 11 Fig. 9. Marcelo Alberco Espritus method of reading aspas as puntos. horizontally deployed lines of zigzag. I was puzzled be- cause I did not see any aspas. Points appeared to me to number 7 or 14 (if one took them to mean peaks, vertices) or 18 (if puntos meant loci). In response to my question where the 4 points were, Marcelo drew the lower part of gure 9. The interesting inferences here are (1) the absence of consensual analyses of the sign, (2) the poverty of con- sensual verbal metalanguage for analyzing the sign, and (3) the fact that these decits do not impede the func- tioning of the sign as a vehicle to integrate social action. Indeed, as we have seen, to verbalize norms about in- signia is only to foment confusion. This schema recalls Sampsons assertion that to the degree that a society develops semasiography, it moves toward a situation of two fully-edged languages hav- ing no relationship with one anotherone of them a spoken language without a script, and the other a lan- guage tied intrinsically to the visual medium (1985: 30). Sampson acknowledges that to think of the latter as a general-purpose language is to contemplate an unreal- izable extreme. But within the connes of a special-pur- pose code, the staff incisions realize his theory in the strongest possible form: unlike well-known insignia, which have precise verbal equivalents and are easily transferred to the verbal medium, these occupy a func- tional space all their own. Variable Array: Contextual Meaning and the Productiveness of Staff Code In the early stages of this research, I asked interviewees to set, or sketch, the staffs in rank order (segu n sus rangos respectivos). Each pondered at length, treating the question (to my surprise) as a hard one, and then provided an array. But their arrays did not match. Moreover, elic- ited arrays deviated conspicuously from the natural arrays visible in actual staff use, and this natural class seemed to vary widely within itself. My premise that staffs stood in xed rank order to each other was to prove false, but the poverty of verbal me- talanguage for discussing what staffs say prevented staff experts fromtelling me so. Still less could they state what turned out to be the key to arrays: the correct array depends on the folk-legal structure of the encoun- ter, inected by the political contingencies of the moment. For example, after the stroke of NewYears 2000, when the incoming staffs had been accumulated on the desk of the district governor, the regulator, with the intense concentration of someone doing a puzzle, arranged them in the following order: First lieutenant governor Second lieutenant governor Deputy of rst lieutenant governor Deputy of second lieutenant governor First rural constable Second rural constable Deputy of rst rural constable Deputy of second rural constable Deputy of regulator or chief deputy Regulator or plaza boss (Note that the use of rst and second removes doubt about the proper direction of reading.) This array looks completely wrong in comparison with the array used at the community hall, but it snaps into clarity once one notices that it embodies the system as seen by the district governor in his own building. The district governors own two staff-bearing lieutenants top the list, and their respective deputies follow. The two rural constables in charge of land and water use formthe middle of the list, followed by their deputies. The end of the list is the most interesting part, because in it a master structural polarity trumps the common ordering that puts a main ofcer above his deputy. The last two positions show the deputy for village-center affairs, fol- lowed and not led by his boss the regulator. The sense of this is that the regulator and the district governor are, in the context of this nights events, polar opposites, so they need to be maximally distanced. As we saw above, the ritual of the night shuttles back and forth between their respective seats. The regulator rules (as his title regidor proclaims) the innermost domain of the political system, with his seat of ofce being the inner chamber of the community hall. It is he who regulates the internal affairs of the staff-holder corps, for example, by approving inscriptions. The district governor rules the outermost orbit, and his seat of ofce is the mini-Lima lodged in the district government. He sits so far from the inner ethos that it is his custom to pretend ignorance of it. (Although I rst took this for racially tinged disrespect, I later came to view it as part of the modus vivendi that makes an awkward relationship livable.) To manifest this polarity is the overriding logic of this particular ar- 12 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001 ray. To reconcile two contextually appropriate rules of ranking that yielded contradictory arrays was the puz- zle involved. By contrast, when staffs are displayed inside the com- munity hall, which is the regulators own seat, the reg- ulator leads the array. Order in the community hall places ofcers of the central orbit rst and those of the peripheral orbit last. Those of the national orbit do not report to the community, so they are not present. The totalizing view as seen from the community becomes more visible on one occasion when the community is forced to deal with it, namely, in nominations. It is re- vealed in the nomination list of eligibles prepared on December 24, 1999. On that occasion, the regulator and the board dealt with nominations in the same order that had been shown them in the distribution of As and Rs on inspected staffs: Regulator 3A 5R First rural constable 2A 5R Second rural constable 2A 4R Regulators deputy 1A 3R Deputy of rst lieutenant governor 1A 2R Deputy of second lieutenant governor 1A 2R Deputy of rst rural constable 1A 2R Deputy of second rural constable 2A 3R (The anomalously high A and R count of the last ofce is commented on below.) The two missing ofces, the lieutenant governors, were nominated from the district government.) The community board set the order of nomination not by the district governmentcommunity polarity but by the consideration that was probably up- permost on their mindsthe relative weight of these ofces as assertions of the communitys interest. A third logical possibility arises where the peripheral or rural (campo) orbit becomes paramount. This in fact occurs on the many occasions when the community as- sembles at its elds, pastures, or high canals for collec- tive labor or gathers to conduct the annual boundary inspection. At such outdoor meetings, the planting of staffs and work crosses establishes the ritual and social context. In these arrays, as one would expect, the staffs of the rural constables precede the rest, and their re- spective deputies precede other deputies. It should at this point be clear that no single hierarchy ranks these ofces or the signs that stand for them. That is why I only created confusion by asking consultants to rank them in order. The hierarchy of staffs is contex- tually determined. The actual determination is quite complex. It is grossly framed by the relation among ju- risdictions in respect to a given event, but the person who places staffs (highest member of the hosting orbit) must also take into account all the realpolitik factors which are actually on the minds of those present. At this point, silent inscriptionthe public concreti- zation of a reckoning of the roles and problems at is- sueemerges as a subtle art. The person who executes it sometimes dgets with uncertainty or tries out mul- tiple arrangements before settling on one. Onlookers, if they feel politically uncomfortable with a solution, sometimes express themselves audibly but not verbally, with scofng grunts or mumbles of discontent. They mean that the person in charge should think about re- arranging. Once in a while somebody will go as far as indicating a staff he considers misplaced and saying over there (allacito, pointing with the chin). Such ver- bal-gestural interventions usually seem more like would-be-helpful kibbitzing than like challenges. On the whole, however, participants stubbornly, consistently, and (I think) unconsciously keep the whole process quiet. And yet it is at this point, in the midst of verbal in- hibition, that one can begin to use the term writing in a weightier way than merely alluding to inscription. The crucial fact is that staff process is productive. The array of a given set of staffs in different situations yields wordless but unpredictable, nonpredetermined state- ments about those situations. They therefore approach the properties of utterance. And since they do this word- lessly, they also approach, as Sampson suggested, the productivity of a parallel system of utterancesa lan- guagedisconnected from speech. Indeed, in the abstract, one could say that the year- long, politically choreographed movement of the staffs through space, time, and society inscribes upon Tup- icocha the unpredictable event history of 365 days. Whereas the ensemble considered simply as an ensemble and in synchrony might be considered to deliver a con- stant message we could coarsely sum up as There are ten minor ofces arranged in pairs (etc.), the ensemble in diachrony might be considered as delivering a series of messages about its deployment in practice. But it would not be sensible to call the utterances of staffs in action a historiography, because the removal of the staffs after each function maintains a continually clean slate. The Staff Code: Reinvention in Practice So much for the synchronic langue and the everyday parole of incised sticks. What about staff code over longer periods of time? How does staff diachrony compare with that of writing proper? The answer is that staff code proceeds through time in a manner radically different from normal writing. Table 1 compares six versions of the staff hierarchy: the observed ones of 1995, 1997, and 2000 and the ones recalled by men who directed the system in the 1950s1980s. What diachronic comparison reveals is a second major functional difference from writing proper as important as its distance fromwords. As a code, staff inscription is strikingly inconsistent over time. Writing as we know it goes through time by pro- ducing varied messages in a constant code; the staff cor- pus produces a constant primary message in a varying code. The code itself is an emergent of each years social reproduction. It is, in other words, an integrative product of the relations in process. There is no guarantee, and apparently no need or expectation, that this will take place in the same way every year. Participants create its salomon Writing Without Words F 13 table 1 Staff Code Inscriptions as Recalled (1950s1980s) and Observed (19952000) Staff Recalled, JR Recalled, MAE Recalled, LMRA 1-1-95 1-1-97 1-2-97 2-26-97 3-29-97 1-1-00 1LG 6R, 4A 4 puntos 0P, 6A, 7R 0P, 6R, 4A 0P, 6R, 4A 6R, 4A D of 1LG 1R, 1A 1A, 2R 0P, 4R 0P, 1R, 1A 0P, 1R, 1A blank 2R, 1A 2LG 5R, 3A 3 puntos? 0P, 5A, 6R 0P, 5R, 4A P-space, 5R, 2A P-space, 5R, 4A 5R, 4A D of 2LG 1R, 1A 1A, 2R 0P, 3R 0P, 1A, 1R 0P, 1R, 1A P-space, 5R, 2A 2R, 1A RpPB 5R, 3A 3 puntos 0P, 4A, 5R 0P, 5R, 3A P-space, 5R, 2A 0P, 5R, 3A 0P, 5R, 2A 5R, 3A D of RpCD 2R, 1A 1A, 2 puntos 0P, 1A, 2R 0P, 2R, 1A P-space, 3R, 1A P-space, 3R, 1A P-space, 3R, 1A P-space, 3R, 1A 3R, 1A 1RC 1P, 4R, 3A 1P, 1R 1P, 3A, 4R 1P, 2A, 5R 1P, 2A, 5R 1P, 2A, 5R 1P, 2A, 5R 1P, 2A, 5R D of 1RC 1R, 1A 1A, 2R 1P, 2R P-space, 1A, 1R 1P, 1R, 1A, 1R 1P, 1R, 1A, 1R 1P, 1R, 1A, 1R 1P, 1R, 1A, 1R 2RC 1P, 4R, 2A 1P, 2R 1P, 2A, 3R 1P, 5R, 2A 1P, 1R, 1A, 1R 1P, 3R, 2A 1P, 2R, 1A, 1R, 1A, 1R D of 2RC 1R, 1A 1A, 2R 1P, 1R P-space, 1R, 1A 1P, 3R, 2A 1P, 1R, 2A 1P, 3R, 2A note: Abbreviations of ofces: 1LG, rst lieutenant governor; D of 1LG, deputy of rst lieutenant governor; 2LG, second lieutenant governor; D of 2LG, deputy of second lieutenant governor; RpPB, regulator, also called plaza boss; D of RpCD, deputy of regulator, also called chief deputy; 1RC, rst rural constable; D of 1RC, deputy of rst rural constable; 2RC, second rural constable; D of 2RC, deputy of second rural constable. Abbreviations of signs: A, aspa or X; R, raya or bar; P, pean a or stepped pyramid with cross; punto, conjoined aspas in the reckoning of Marcelo Alberco Espritu. Abbreviations of consultants: JR, Justo Rueda; MAE, Marcelo Alberco Espritu; LMRA, Le on Modesto Rojas Alberco. symbolism as they go. Thus successive iterations yield not varied messages in a constant code but varying code that reects the political constitution as inected by the emerging political constellation of the new year. Since the referent of the staff inscriptions as a set is a group of simultaneous relationships, their mutual synchronic t and not their longitudinal consistency over time is the prime concern. Their historicity takes the form of code variation and not message variation. Staff Code and the Pace of Change This variation is not drift but the silent registry of social reasoning. For historical depth, let us consider differ- ences among the three systems that the veteran staff- holder directors recall. In the staff set remembered by Leo n Modesto Rojas Alberco from ca. the 1970searly 1980s, two character- istics stand out. First, with regard to distribution of A, he differentiates two discrete classes of ofcers. Those who give commands to a subordinate have As and the others lack them. At the same time, this bipolarizing tendency goes with a countervailing tendency toward continuum in the distribution of rayas. In R terms, staffs display an uninterrupted continuumof importance, from rst lieutenant governor (7R) down to deputy of the sec- ond rural constable (1R). In sum, Rojass array hyperdif- ferentiates. It does this dually: it maximizes the distinct- ness of each ofce from all others, and it makes a sharp break between two sorts of rank that somewhat resem- bles the break between warrant ofcers and noncoms in the military. It may be relevant that Rojas, while a major promoter of community self-government, also belongs to the generation whose politically formative years co- incided with the Velasco Alvarado military regime. The code recalled by a man 16 years older than Rojas, Marcelo Alberco Espritu, emphasizes a different set of norms, presumably an idealized version of the system he helped carry out in the 1950s60s. Table 1 contains his scheme as translated from his distinctive points verbalization to the notation I devised with Rojas. Unlike Rojass scheme, which goes to an extreme of splitting and graduating (there are no overall equationsno two matching staffsin his system) Alberco inclines toward bracketing or lumping. (Two point staffs look alike, with 3 puntos, and four deputy staffs look alike, with 1A, 2R.) In other words, he and his peers, when they integrated this system, interlocked themselves witheach other mostly by establishing correspondences that clar- ied who was peer to whom. Third, in working with Justo Rueda we get a viewpoint a decade or so older than Albercos. His distinctive way of explaining staff incisions as white gures separated by black divisors has been described above. This scheme makes R (delimiter of grado) and A, in that order, necessary constituents of all valid signs. Aside from his radically different verbal treatment, the most striking thing about Ruedas scheme is that it maximizes syn- tactical simplicity and regularity by focalizing this in- stantly noticeable gestalt-level vareme. The shape formed by a bar-topped X is the common denominator 14 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001 among all ofce symbols. In substancethat is, the organization of inequalityRuedas system does not dif- fer much from Albercos or the 1995 array, but it differs in the rhetoric (so to speak) of presenting that hierarchy. Whereas Rojass scheme emphasizes gradation and Al- bercos emphasizes bracketing, Ruedas emphasizes har- monization. His set of staffs comes closest to being a uniform. It might correspond to a round of integrative practice in which the staff holders tended to cohere as a corps more than they do now. Staff Code in Ongoing Transformation, 19952000 The recalled sets given by older experts may be distorted by idealization (chiey in the direction of enhanced reg- ularity according to the individuals notion of the rules). But this idealization itself serves as a heuristic guide to understanding the not-so-ideal practice of staff use, since it has shown us how a synchronic set coheres when it coheres perfectlyas perhaps occurs mostly in imagination. This helps to clarify how the sets actually did vary over time. In other words, the varied ways in which the same message was inscribed over three observed cy- cles1995, 1997, and 2000reveal through their sign logic a pattern which actually does match identiable changes in social practice. This interpretation may be taken as a decipherment in a special sensea sense appropriate to the idiosyn- crasy of mute inscription. Decipherment in this case can- not be the recapture of a verbal artifact by reading a sample of a known code, for there never was a verbal artifact. Nor can it be the recapture of a lost code-reading skill, for there never was a skill of reading in the sense of reading-out. Rather, deciphering mute inscription is a matter of recapturing past operations of social interac- tion-through-signs. Comparing the 1995, 1997, and 2000 observed data sets, one can trace the following tendencies: First, an intelligible trend emerges in the relation be- tween major staffs as a set and their deputy staffs as a set. Irrespective of the specic number of As awarded the staffs, in successive years the number of Rs attributed to deputies of any given major staff holder rose. In 2000 the rise was universal and striking. It will be remembered that Rs correspond not to the dignity of the jurisdiction that the ofcer enforces but the esteem in which his individual ofce is held. In recent years, migration to Lima and declining enrollment in the community have shrunk the pool of eligibles more and more, with the result that it becomes necessary to call on younger and younger men. Young men in their teens perceive deputy posts as almost servile. The upgrading of their dignity of ofce is a response to pressure from below. It will be borne in mind that deputies are the ones who actually manufacture staffs. There is a certain democratic un- dercurrent in their being well placed to bid tacitly for political relief through the staffs they submit. Faced with the demographic facts the community boards of 1997 and 2000 allowed these ofces more dignied R-ratings vis- a` -vis the rest of the set. The change is particularly no- ticeable in the staff for the deputy of the second rural constable, which is often the point of entry for young- sters doing their rst service. Second, in the national orbit represented by the district governor and his four staff holders, a shift in syntactical usage has occurred. It was noted above that in 1995 the two orbits that unambiguously belong to the community used a reversal of syntax (A before R, R before A) to signal, respectively, rst and second of a pair. This ap- plied to the deputies whom the community lent to the national orbit, the rst and second lieutenant governors deputies; the rst and second lieutenant governors them- selves were set a bit apart from the intracommunity hi- erarchy by not using this distinction. It will also be re- called that the deputy posts of the rst and second lieutenant governors are unpopular ofces because they put their incumbents in a serving two masters bind. In 1997 the insignia for the deputies of the rst and sec- ond lieutenant governors were in disarray. (Erroneous cases may not be disallowed under the present meth- odology, since disarray no less than array is the imprint of integrationor its failure.) By 2000, these two dep- uty posts had absorbed a new pattern: they followed the same rule as their masters, the lieutenant governors. Put into words (as no one ever would), the gesture signals that the villagers cede a bit of the communitys authority over its staff holders in order to relieve the incumbents of the two masters dilemma and let them simply obey the district governors agenda. It remains to be seen whether this will relieve the chronic problem of lling these roles. The third, fourth, and fth tendencies all share one political import but take place in semiologically different ways. All three register the increasing distinctiveness of the peripheral or rural orbit from the other two orbits. The third tendency is syntactic, like the second, but more fundamental and puzzling. Through 1995, a uni- versal rule, never contravened in sets as remembered by older men, required that As and Rs form separate groups and not be intermingled. On New Years Day 1997the last possible moment for correctionsthe community secretary noticed that someone had marked an incoming second rural constable staff with P, 1R, 1A, 1R. This interspersed pattern, which looked like FXF, was si- lently set aside and scraped off. Nonetheless, the same FXF appeared again in February and March 1997 on the rst rural constables deputys staff, and it stayed there. Not only was this repeated in 2000, but this time FXF was also carved onto the second rural constables staff and stayed there. FXF has great naked-eye sali- ence. Its increasing popularity in the peripheral or rural orbit would seem to mark an emerging sentiment that, although of the same substance as other staff authorities, the peripheral orbit, like the district government, par- takes of a distinctive order. The 2000 community board salomon Writing Without Words F 15 tacitly agreed to let this formulation show by not cor- recting the staffs. One may take this as a subtle move in a political con- ict which has troubled the village of late: the increasing assertiveness of the municipality in affairs outside its spatial jurisdiction, for example, in rural canal construc- tion. (The municipality, it will be recalled, does not itself command any staff holders.) Because the mayor who leads this expansionism is a powerful, able, and faction- ally strong man, one rarely hears the community assert at opposition. But this split is actually the main polit- ical event since 1995. Innovation in the 19972000 staffs works almost as if to say The rural sector speaks a different languagea claim to authoritative discourse in its own orbit, as the national orbits own syntactic peculiarity implies for a different one. However, the new vareme also has a conservative dimension: if one tal- lies numbers of As and Rs without regard to this novel syntax, their respective numbers come out as conven- tional rankings by the older system. The fourth tendency is the disappearance of the char- acter P-space (i.e., the leaving of an unincised area at the tops of some staffs in the location that P would ll were it present). P-space was used in 1995 on staffs of deputies serving rural constables; it was, then, a sort of implied pean a. (Unfortunately, the notational system I used in interviewing elders does not reveal whether they re- membered P-space as an older norm, because at the time I had not yet perceived the issueand, as usual, verbal help was unavailable.) P-space has a structural vulner- ability: since staffs are carved at separate times and places, each carver must guess how much blank space to leave at the top. In 1997 a number of staffs outside the peripheral or rural orbit appeared to have P-spaces. The community board seemed a bit puzzled about this at the New Years morning inspection. They slid the staffs along each other as if measuring (but neither ac- tually measured nor discussed them). In the event they did not recall any of these for correction. The result was that when the staffs were arrayed, P-space could no longer be visually associated with the peripheral or rural orbit. In 2000, nobody made P-spaces. Some staffs had more than a P-space of blank wood, others less. None were corrected on this score. The fth tendency is probably a compensation for the fourth: The staffs that would have had P-spaces in 1995 nowhad Ps, that is, explicit pean as. P is the most naked- eye salient of all signs, so this change more than restored the visual distinctiveness of the peripheral orbit when staffs are arrayed or when a single staff is planted at a work site to show under which orbit the work falls. One might argue that this is simply a determined allomorphic shift, not an instance of the new code for a new year argument. But the gain in explicitness and conspicuousness is so emphatic that it makes sense to attribute it greater im- portance: at the time of writing (March 2000), as never before, there is no longer any shading of the pean a usage to make the peripheral orbit quartet of staffs over- lap the rest. That is, one can no longer say that any member of the peripheral orbit resembles a member of the other orbits by lacking pean a. Today, as a set, the peripheral orbit looks just plain different. I suspect that this is an imprint, in wordless inscrip- tion, of public resistance to what people see as the an- ticommunal policies of the 1990s Fujimori regime. The peripheral orbit enjoys great public legitimacy as the quintessentially campesino orbit, as opposed to the two orbits which, respectively, enforce duties common to all townsfolk and to all Peruvian citizens. For example, it is the pean a-carrying ofcers who take the lead when the village approaches the grandparents (abuelos, i.e. pre-Christian deities) who own their irrigation water. This is the most sacred of all identity-marking cere- monies and the least similar to national or urban norms. To make its champions more distinctive is to underline a feeling of we, the campesinos. The staff change is a bit like orally overstressing the rst word of the phrase peasant community. This is, in my opinion, a sign of resistance to the undeclared direction of Fuji- mori-era agricultural policy, which is to neglect the jural peasant communities in favor of private agroindustry. (The community, for example, can at best get temporary project grants, while the other government agencies have permanent budget lines.) The ve changes reviewed above are, in a sense, only one change: a broad effort to improve an always-difcult integration of roles in a complex and partly inorganic system, in the face of additional neoliberal political stresses, by marking its parts as more functionally spe- cialized, more different from each other, and more dignied. Why Write Wordlessly? In his lucid, underappreciated summary of the writing without words problem, W. C. Brice, who made im- pressive advances with Linear A of Crete, sums up the strictly scriptural pluses of nonphonetic script: (1) It is independent of any language, therefore international. (2) It can be brief and instantly perceptible. (3) Lig- atured combinations and differences of relative size and position among signs make possible a wide range of subtle distinctions of meaning, more economically than in scriptio plena. (4) One need only learn a small number of signs (1976:43). All these comments apply to staff code. But the Linear A samples in question are records of transactions and are subject to pressure for explicit- ness rather than for implicitness as in Tupicocha. The work of this essentially wordless code is (in Roy Harriss terms) integrational and not telementational. That is, it serves not to get ideas across but to coordinate actions, as the positions of pieces in a chess game do. Indeed, this game is specically a wordless one for rea- sons related to the reasons that chess players talk only through their pieces. One may well ask why Tupicocha chooses to arrange part of its polity using a set of signs even more isolated from language than chess pieces are. After all, a staff 16 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001 bearing initials like 1RC for the post rst rural con- stable would seem to do the job. Indeed, in Ayacucho Department, whose staff customs otherwise resemble Tupicochas, staffs are incised with combinations of al- phabetic messages and icons. Moreover, to explain Tup- icochan usage it is not enough to speak of carryover from an age when literacy was uncommon, because on the whole the village has enthusiastically alphabetized its internal process. One must look for a positive reason it was better in this case to use a set of signs without al- phabetic value or verbal counterparts. It is worth noting that the discussion up to this point has been thoroughly political. The actual task of inte- grating a staff corps was explained with emphasis on its fractiousness. The inorganic and uncomfortable articu- lation between centralist state and self-governing com- munity produces a two masters dilemma. Giving staffs to young men creates the uncomfortable situation of ask- ing junior members to coerce senior ones. These are just some of the innite crosscutting conicts of interest that make a little town a big hell in the Spanish cliche . It is helpful, therefore, that when a new rural constable, for example, sets about cooperating with a new lieuten- ant governor they take as common badges highly abstract signs referring to nothing but the fact that they have embarked on a joint task. These signs are partly insulated from political elec- tricity by being nontranslatable and empty of proposi- tions and even of connotations. In all states, function- aries go to extremes in seeking colorless, repetitive, connotation-poor signsboring signsto articulate both their mutual and their external relations. The staff sys- tem carries this logic to its extreme. The reason for ex- tremism might be sought in the dilemma that arises when the hands which execute the gritty work of co- ercion are in other contexts close neighbors, kin, busi- ness contacts, afnes, friends, or enemies. The whole matter suggests the need for a counterweight to the Geer- tzian and Turnerian emphasis on symbolic polyvalence and richness. Sometimes poor symbols are the best. The fact that noniconic, nonverbal signs grow in the very guts of community politics also helps one under- stand the surprising nding that staff code is at the same time highly integrated (synchronically) and extremely unstable (diachronically). The pattern that emerges in- scribed in each new staff set is the direct reection of a current political interaction, inuenced by speculations about the kind of integration among government organs which might be useful in the coming year (bracketed, hyperdifferentiated, solidary . . .). Options are not (so far as I know) overtly negotiated. Nonetheless, it is literally impossible to articulate the staffs as a set without mak- ing implicit statements of this sort. The act of making them is, in effect, the crystallization of prudently re- served ideas about how the community directorate will manage its agents. Not speaking of these ideas creates a segregated domain from which many disruptions are excluded. By this route, a purportedly unvarying message (There are ten ofces, arranged in pairs, in three juris- dictional orbits, and so forth) is expressed in a code that varies. To the surprise of any researcher beguiled by the notion of tradition, it varies much faster than the insti- tution it represents, much faster than alphabetic norms, and even much faster than oral language. The ability to vary on the formal level has apparently helped the bare- bones institutional message remain the same. Had the staff hierarchys emblematic frame (a term from Har- ris) allowed less exibility, political friction might have demolished the staff system in Tupicocha, as it already has done in many Andean villages (Isbell 1972). Perhaps it is more than coincidence that Tupicocha, with its ex- travagant-seeming semiological pluralism and political complexity, has proven more stable in constitution than conspicuously traditional villages. The ambience within which this symbolic systemcon- nects the logic of writing and the organization of so- ciety (Goody 1986) could hardly be more different from the restricted elite ambience from which, according to Marcus, Mesoamerican scripts emanated. Andean villages create annually rotating, specialized political hierarchies among peasants who otherwise are jealous of their status as equals. According to ideology, differences in authority are steep but change hands quickly. Every political actor eventually sends code mes- sages. Their symbols are few and easy to learn, means of inscription cheap, and competence evenly spread, and therefore messages do not mystify or exclude. By refrain- ing from metalanguage, participants leave each other no means to get a critical wedge into staffs except actually modifying them. Since their physical control is strict, this is (theoretically) not an entropic factor. Such a mech- anism has functional value in a would-be egalitarian set- ting in which the right to criticize, normally respected, would impede the crucial bootstrapping of political reproduction. Like every ideology, this one is a mixture of self-insight and self-deception. In fact, differences of wealth do strongly affect political process, including staff recruit- ment. What staff code propagandizes for is not the political ambitions of a person, lineage, or polity, as in Mesoamerica (Marcus 1992:11), but the ideological prop- osition of an order that claims to be intricately hierar- chical in synchrony and yet egalitarian in diachrony. A second issue about the logic of writing and the or- ganization of society arises when one remembers that staff code forms part of a mostly alphabetic system of political signs and records. Is staff articulation in some way derived from alphabetic process? Does it feed back in? In other words, do staffs and books forman integrated legible whole as, for example, prose and numerical tables do in monographs? The answer is that conventions seg- regate themmore markedly than texts and numbers. The nearest thing to an alphabetic congener for staffs is the act recording nomination rosters and investitures. How- ever, the Tupicocha community treats this as an unvar- ying list of role assignments. Books hold no description or image of staffs themselves and no recognition of the implicit variance teased from staff signs above. Staff holders deliver written documents but do not sign them salomon Writing Without Words F 17 and are not responsible for producing any. Nor are their errands as such recordeda striking exception in a com- munity always meticulous about recording other citizen duties. Lodging staff-holder functions below the documentary threshold perhaps has to do with the fact that staff hold- ers conduct the minimal, lowest-level encounter be- tween instituted authority and real individuals. Keeping this bottom tier of political signs insoluble in the al- phabetic medium which otherwise saturates relations from low to high suggests a tacit substory to the explicit social contracta set of prior communal understandings not reducible to and not expressible in the system of integration which the community accepted by being ju- rally recognized. Theorizing Silent Inscription Writing without words at rst seemed to mean a way of conveying things that could be said in words but are not. Then it appeared to be a matter of saying things that cannot be said in words because there are reasons not to give certain properties of relationships verbal names. Even this was not enough, for staffs do not exactly have content in the sense of ideas to communicate. I have abstracted above what an aspa may be said to have stood for in 1995a relational increment of jurisdictional pres- tigebut my gloss is by no means the verbal token of an idea in the mind of participants. Rather, staff signs in their grouped inscriptions are the actual index (in the strictest Peircean sense) of rational solutions guarded by their own abstractness and impli- citude. Staff signs distill, coordinate, concretize, and dis- play the ongoing thinking of the collectivity, but they are not meant to be squeezed ex post facto for thought. You could say that they impress the social process rather than expressing it. Such inscription comes to bury discourse, not to praise itwith all the ambiguity this famous praeteritio sug- gests. The reasoning that went into organizing a given years staff holders is, so to speak, entombed in the things that it has become. This gives those things authority. By the very fact that they exist and can be seen anywhere, Tupicochans know that the authoritative process is now embodied beyond argumenteven beyond expression. Yes, staffs analytically mean the processes and the ideas involvedthat is, these can be partially extracted working backward through context-based exegesis, as has been done abovebut that is a side effect. It is not what they are for. And yet staffs do praise discourse in the sense that this special-purpose discourse renews the possibility for difcult and necessary civic discourse. Burying Caesar made Caesarism possible, as Hocart (1969) rst noted. In the end, does it make sense to put such an un- writing-like system into one theoretical frame with writing proper? How theorists respond depends on what they think inscriptions really inscribe: discourse, interaction, or processes of cognition. Let us sketch the- oretical alternatives in this order, with a view to choos- ing ethnographically powerful approaches. Philology is interested in inscription of discourse. From the strictly philological viewpoint of which De- Francis seems the most determined champion, there is little reason to call staff code writing. Not only does it fail to do what his true or general writing systems do, namely, transmit an unrestricted variety of verbal utterances, but it fullls a specically contrary function. Some philological grammatologists, such as Pulgram (1976) and Hill (1967), expand denitions of writing sys- tems to include those whose signs purportedly encode aggregates of discourse above the logographic level. (For example, they see the few signs on a wampum belt as a maximally elliptical record of a many-symbol discourse such as a treaty.) But the model does not work ethno- graphically for Tupicocha, where the actual production of signs follows anything but a discourse-recording protocol. Ignace Gelb (1952) and later Wayne Senner (1989:6) left philologists a margin to stray farther by dening writ- ing minimalistically as a system of human intercom- munication by means of conventional visible marks. We have taken note of Sampson, a writing-centered lin- guist who explores this margin. Staff code looks at rst glance like a semasiographic writing by Sampsons cri- terion. The idea proved powerful in spotlighting visible signs as parallel language. But on second look, staff code would t Sampsons view of how such language works only if that view were expanded perhaps beyond his in- tentions. His usage depends crucially upon the idea of direct reference: a note of sheet music refers, nonver- bally, to a culturally stereotyped sound, and so on. But signs on staffs do not refer directly to semantically iso- lated and named things. The semasiography model provides the exit route from a theoretical trap but then brings us to an unforeseen hazard. Three theorists outside the philological (and anthro- pological) traditions think the paramount task is to over- come such hazards by establishing comparability within a vast family of sign systems. Do their widely diverging semiological eld theories help? The rst theory is Roy Harriss argument that writ- ings are symbol sets which come into being by virtue of their employment to integrate action, regardless of their relationship to speech. For him, signs inscribe in- teractions. Even if the likeness of speech becomes the primary integrative property, the social event integrated inevitably leaves its trace in attributes outside the reach of Saussurean code modeling, such as the instantiation of the event in a given typography or on a meaningful surface. The sign does not exist outside of the context which gives rise to it; there is no abstract invariant which remains the same from one context to the next. Nor, a fortiori, is there any overarching Saussurean system to guarantee that invariance (Harris 1995:22). Harriss ap- proach could deal squarely with the wordlessness of staff code. For him, signs of writing are normal precipitates of many activities to which speech is marginal. The pos- sibility that a habitual disjuncture from language might 18 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001 form part of the habitus shaping a specic semiological practice ts well within his vision. Integrated action might well leave visible tokens which are not keyed to semantic isolates with names. This opening leaves spaceethnographic spacefor nding out when and why silence becomes a systematically exploited prop- erty. A second attempt to locate glottography in a wide eld of commensurable systems is that of Nelson Goodman. Goodman, however, sees inscriptive methods as ways to organize and convey cognition, summing up their variety as languages of art. 7 One of his languages accommo- dates properties of Tupicochan staff code very well, but it does not do so under the rubric of writing. Rather, Goodman denes a range of inscriptions called notations in a special sense of the word. Typical members are sheet music, ID numbers, or knitting instruction codes. Good- mans subtle exploration emphasizes the fact that no- tational signs, unlike speech-mimicking written signs, function by referring bidirectionally to unique compli- ance classes. Alphabetic writing and speech fail this test because they create unique compliance only unidirec- tionally. The phrase Nelson Goodman, philosopher complies to a single entity, but if one starts by contem- plating this entity one nds that speech/writing provides no single phrase corresponding to the entity. One could just as well say man in loafers. This difculty does not occur under a true notation, such as Goodmans so- cial security number (1976:12773). For Goodman, one precondition of making experience notationally inscribable is anterior atomization, a con- vention that the eld of signieds consists of discrete ranges on identied variables. Any given instantiation of the Tupicochan staff code in synchrony could be con- strued along notational lines, thanks to the fact that it implicitly segments the phenomena at stakepaired ofce, orbit, jurisdictional prestige, prestige of ofceas anteriorly atomic. A Goodmanesque reading therefore has formal power and points to anthropologically interesting possibilities. It suggests that the realm of the legible is constituted differently in different cultures not just by what class of acts (speech, ritual gesture, etc.) receives a sign in a cor- responding mimetic code but also by the prior formal conceptualization (conscious or not, spoken or silent) of the properties of that class. Whether the signicata are consciously held semantic isolates need not be crucial as long as they have the right formal properties, such as discreteness. Perhaps in order to be inscribable in a cer- tain way, life has to be lived in a certain way. The vice versa of this proposition provides an interesting func- tional circle. The third and most sweeping attempt at a theory of writing overarching particular methods of inscription is of course the Derridean challenge to philological gram- matology. As does Goodman, Derrida nds the roots of inscriptivity in the problem of organizing cognition, but 7. I thank William Hanks for pointing out the relevance of this book. he approaches this problem at a far more general level. He does so by a corrosively negative method. Derridean deconstruction of reference into aporias (undecidable is- sues or puzzles), diffe rance, absence, and misunder- standing (Bennington and Derrida 1993:2442, 7084; Culler 1982:103) may serve to demolish false certainties about familiar systems, but it discourages ethnographers from seeking a toehold in unfamiliar ones. How could one ever distinguish our aporias from theirs? How- ever, a selectively Derridean approach need not become a counsel of despair (Culler 1982:102): If writing means inscription and especially the du- rable instituting of signs (and this is the only irre- ducible kernel of the concept of writing), then writing in general covers the entire domain of lin- guistic signs . . . the very idea of institution, hence of the arbitrariness of the sign, is unthinkable prior to or outside the horizon of writing (De la gram- matologie p. 65/44). Writing-in-general is an archi- e criture, an archi-writing or protowriting which is the condition of both speech and writing in the nar- row sense. Cullers exegesis of the path onward from this turn of the Derridean argument, namely, the path showing how archi-writing is not a technology but a general attrib- ute of engagement with experience, has a usefulness comparable with Goodmans. Whereas Goodman sees experience dissected into code by multiple more or less conscious analytical conventions within a given culture, Derrida sees subjective experience itself as graspable only insofar as archi-writing gives it form. By archi- writing he means an unconscious cognitive process of sorting sense impressions into mentally manipulable and expressible parts. This process inherently lags be- hind the sensorium. Speech no less than writing there- fore yields an array of symbolic doublets for the unreach- able presence of things which was already lost during cognition. Writing is a supplement to speech, but speech is already a supplement to real presences that are graspable only ex post facto, in their absence, through ordered play with their uncertainly anchored semiolog- ical tokens (Culler 1982:104). The Derridean view seems less helpful than Harriss or Sampsons in explaining why specic codes work as they do, since it emphasizes only their commonality, but it has an advantage: unlike theirs, it answers the question Why inscribe at all? Everyone knows which person holds which ofce anyway. If staffs signal that the holder is acting in his ofcer role, why not just use blank staffs? In Tupicocha, the fact that the system of instituted contrasts among ofcerstheir tacit mutual political contract prior to in- scriptionvaries subtly fromyear to year creates the sort of situation which Derrideans recognize as demanding supplementation. We gain a sensation of catching things ungraspable presence (illusorily, according to ad- herents) by separating them from all other things and salomon Writing Without Words F 19 Fig. 1. Jurisdictional orbits in Tupicocha. T1, Tupicocha when it was only a community with its center (C) and periphery (countryside) (P); T2, the district, with new villages forming within the periphery of a community; T3, Tupicocha today, with its new villages recognized as anexos. exteriorizing contrasts within the web of instituted contrasts. Tupicocha catches and holds the new social thing eetingly present in the New Years political process by inscribing a visual supplement to the political process that, in becoming complete, is already becoming absent and available only through its symbolic supplement. Such an approach would put all of a cultures varied means to evoke effects of presence and of historical reality on a seamless common ground. ADerridean eth- nography would open the way to a notion of culture as an array of kinds of writing which, together, form not so much one endless chain of supplements as multiple inscriptions for differing ranges of instituted con- trasts, mutually insulated or connected by translata- bility for local reasons. If we could relate the demand for different kinds of presence and . . . reality to more down-to-earth aspects of social practice (such as the need to segregate particular single-stranded relationships), the ethnography of writing could rise from a specialist to a generalist role. What such maximalist theories of inscription promise to anthropologists is an increase in our power to interpret the human range of inscriptive practices. Whether we want to use the word writing to totalize themas Harris and Derrida do is less important than providing an even heuristic footing for the study of inscriptive modes in all their unfamiliar propertiesincluding, for example, the power to produce closure and silence. Comments hi lda arauj o Departamento de Ciencias Humanas, Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina, Lima, Peru. 16 ix 00 Wherever staff holders operate they appear as an insti- tutional group subordinate to the authorities created by the state for the Andean communities. However, in Tup- icocha a systemic reelaboration has been carried out to ensure that at each level of the authority hierarchy there is a decision-making administrative unit (AU) and an effective operative unit (OU). At every level of executive authority there must exist a head (AU) and one or more hands (OU), depending on the scope of their jurisdic- tion. The creation by the state of the district government was seen by Tupecos as the creation of a head without hands: How can he exercise his authority in the whole district? So the community has endowed him with two levels of hands (rst and second lieutenant governors, deputy rst and second lieutenant governors). By the same principle a hand is assigned to the mu- nicipal government. Nevertheless, the existing older hands supporting the water management authorities created by the state are maintained, a hand is given to the community president, and so on. My gure 1 helps visualize the jurisdictional orbits. T1 corresponds to Tupicocha when it was only a com- munity with its center (C) and its periphery (P). Adistrict is formed when new villages emerge within the periph- ery of a community (T2). The present situation of Tup- icocha is that of T3. When they comply with certain requirements, new villages petition the original com- munity to be recognized as anexosthe political units below the district capital. This becomes complicated be- cause the anexos have different degrees of political au- tonomy and resource administration with respect to the mother community. The jurisdictional orbit of the gov- ernor is the entire district: the mother community and its anexos. The reelaboration of the political authorities of the community and the district of Tupicocha was carried out as follows: The state created the salaried post of district governor but without hands. The community en- dowed himwith two major hands (rst lieutenant gov- ernor and second lieutenant governor), and these were then endowed with their corresponding hands (deputy rst lieutenant governor and deputy second lieutenant governor). The rst and second lieutenant governors have the highest rank, since their jurisdiction covers the 20 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001 Fig. 2. Hierarchical relations. G, governor; TG, lieu- tenant governor; R, regulator; AC, rural constable; A, deputy. Aspa numbers at right. Fig. 3. Dynamics of the system. UO, operative unit; UA, administrative unit; G, governor; TG, lieutenant governor; R, regulator; AC, rural constable; AM, chief deputy; A, deputy. Raya numbers at right. entire district (mother community and anexos). Because the countryside (mother community) is much larger than the town, the rst and second rural constables would seemingly follow next in rank order, but since in the center/periphery opposition center (town) is of higher rank than periphery (countryside), the regulator is placed immediately below the rst and second lieutenant gov- ernors and followed by the rst and second rural con- stables, who manage the countryside. All the deputies occupy the lowest rank; they are hands of hands (g. 2). Given the Huarochiri custom of expressing hierarchi- cal relations in terms of sibling age-ranking, I have used a kinship diagram here, but it should be understood as a representation of the levels of the hands (operative units) on the basis of the extent of the district and com- munal jurisdictions and of the social rank assigned by the community to these orbits: higher to center, lower to periphery. The aspa numbers (g. 2, right) account for the hierarchical order following the reelaboration, with no necessity for words by those who share this cultural schema. The aspa distribution on the staffs is a mapping of the reelaborated hierarchy of Tupicocha political authorities. How, then, does the system work? How are authority, control, and supervision exercised? What is the dynamic of the political system? The governor organizes all the major ofcers with a head, the rst lieutenant governor. In the same way, he organizes all the minor ofcers with a head, the deputy regulator, also called the chief deputy (g. 3). The rst lieutenant governor, as the major hand of the governor, operates through the second lieutenant governor in the anexos, through the regulator in the cen- ter (mother community), and through the rst and sec- ond rural constables in the countryside. The chief deputy coordinates the work of the deputies in the three jurisdictions (anexos, center, and periphery). He reports to the regulator, and the regulator reports to the rst lieutenant governor. In cases of emergency the governor calls the rst lieutenant governor and the reg- ulator for information on what is going on at the two levelsto call the deputy regulator would be an offense to the regulator. The placement of the rayas on the staffs of 1995 is a mapping of the dynamics of the system of political au- thorities. These act as the major hands under the gov- ernors control, forming the operative unit of the rst lieutenant governor, their administrative unit, who op- erates through them in their respective orbits of control: in the center through the regulator, in the periphery through the rural constables, and in the anexos through the second lieutenant governor. The deputy regulator is the administrative unit for the minor ofcers (deputies) and receives a special designation (chief deputy). He is the operative unit for the regulator, his administrative unit, and the regulator is the operative unit for the rst lieutenant governor. With two heads (administrative units) at each of the two levels of ofcers, the control dynamics of the system become very effective. At left in gure 3 I have indicated the system dynamics, show- salomon Writing Without Words F 21 ing that there is no absolute distinction between admin- istrative and operative units except at the extremes. Each ofcer is the operative unit of his immediate superior and the administrative unit for the ofcers of the next- lower level. Why do the staffs of 1995 present the structure of the political authority system and its dynamics? And why do Tupecos want their staffs to memorialize the public order? After more than 25,000 deaths, 1995 marked the end of the rst period of the Fujimori presidency. All Peruvians felt a deep need to reelaborate the sociopoli- tical order. The terrorist leaders were imprisoned, and Fujimori was reelected. In the Andean communities young people began to return for their community estas without fear of being arrested as terrorists; refugees from the violence returned to their communities. Andean traditions once again ourished in rural Peru. In Tupi- cocha the staff inscriptions expressed the deep need for order experienced by the whole country. The staff in- scriptions express community members memory of how order is created in the world of the community and the district. I agree with Salomon that the pean a in the context of the staffs establishes the identity of the staff holders of the periphery and also with the explanation he gives for the staff arrays in 1997 and 2000. roy harri s Department of Modern Languages, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2JD, U.K. 20 ix 00 Salomons paper on the engraved staffs of Tupicocha seems to me an excellent example of the insights af- forded by adopting an integrational approach to all forms of human communication that operate by means of tra- ditional marks or artifacts. Salomon refers in this con- nexion to my book Signs of Writing (1995), but the basis of integrational theory is set out more comprehensively in Signs, Language, and Communication (1996) and In- troduction of Integrational Linguistics (1998). For me, whether particular forms of communication are to be called writing is in the end a relatively trivial matter except in one respect: to agree without demur that signs of the kind Salomon describes are not writing proper (a phrase which he rightly puts in scare quotes) is already to reinforce the ethnocentric view of writing that has dominated Western thinking on the subject for centuries. Salomon refers to Childe (1951[1936]) for the treatment of writing as diagnostic of civilization. This is com- mon among 19th-century anthropologists. Tylor, Ox- fords rst professor of anthropology, unhesitatingly adopted the (Western) concept of writing as drawing the line between barbarian and civilized peoples, but the idea itself, along with the notion that people with alphabets are culturally superior to people with non-al- phabetic writing, goes back to Rousseau and beyond (for discussion, see my Rethinking Writing [2000]). Lack of rst-hand acquaintance with the Tupicocha situation prevents me from passing any judgment on the detail of Salomons interpretation, but if what he says is roughly right, the signs he describes would be classied in integrationist typology as (1) non-glottic (as opposed to glottic) writing and (2) script (as opposed to chart). Again, the labels are not important in themselves, but the semiological criteria on which they are based cer- tainly are. And these criteria simply are not recognized in the traditional Western account of writing proper. So the issue is not whether, by kind consent of the tra- ditionalists, we are allowed to extend the termwriting to cover forms of writing without words (thus accepted as second-class citizens in the alphabetic state) but whether, when due account is taken of the whole range of human graphic practices that we now know to exist, the traditionalists have any viable theory of writing at all. As far as I know, the integrationist account is the only serious competitor to the modern version of traditional thinking incorporated into Gelbs grammatology. Sampson (1985) presents semasiology as a hypotheti- cal possibility for writing but does not explore it any further: in other respects his analysis of writing is just as traditional as Gelbs. Integrationists tend to avoid the term grammatology, precisely because it is associated with Gelbs approach and, more recently, with Derridas. From an integrationist point of view both Gelb and Der- rida, far from solving any theoretical problems about writing, add their own mythology to the traditional ac- count. That is one reason I am far from happy with being bracketed by Salomon as a theorist who, like Derrida, uses the term writing to totalize the whole range of inscriptive practices. That seems to put the emphasis in quite the wrong place. I am not clear what Salomon means by inscription, but as far as integrationists are concerned not all inscribed marks are written signs and not all written signs are inscribed marks. Thus writing and inscription are by no means coextensive, but for reasons quite different fromDerridas. Derrida stands the traditional wisdom on its head by treating speech as a form of (invisible) writing instead of writing as a form of visible speech. But, although arresting, this inversion is far less radical than it initially appears, for Derrida offers no alternative account of human communication, whereas integrationism does. If, as a semiologist (Salomons description of my ac- ademic trade), I had to pick out one observation fromhis paper as summarizing what it is more important for pre- sent-day anthropologists to understand about writing, it would be the following: Participants create its sym- bolism as they go. But I would add: And that applies not just to the Tupicocha staff signs but to alphabetic writing as well. walter d. mi gnolo Literature Program, Duke University, Box 90257, Durham, N.C. 27708, U.S.A. 26 ix 00 Salomons article is a rich and complex piece in which the argument unfolds in three interrelated lines. The rst 22 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001 is the description and demonstration of how the staff works and worked in the past as a solid surface for sign inscription in Tupicocha. The second, less well devel- oped, is a hint at an explanation of staff inscriptions and social roles as a statement made by indigenous com- munities seeking to maintain their autonomy vis-a` -vis the Peruvian state and, more particularly, the Fujimori state. The third questions the concept of writing from the perspective of the material inscriptions on Tupicocha staffs, an argument that involves staff and social roles. Salomons report presents a case of material sign in- scription on solid surfaces that are not commonly con- sidered appropriate for writing, even writing without words. Solid surfaces for writing have been identied in their neutrality in relation to social functions. For ex- ample, stones, bark, and hides, unlike staffs, are not as- sociated with social roles or endowed with a social func- tion (e.g., meaning). It is an open question whether the community considers the inscriptions on the staff a supplement to the function already attributed to it or constitutive of its function (that is to say, whether the staff would have any social function without the sign inscriptions), whether or not inscriptions would be con- sidered writing. Salomon here offers a timid Derridean explanation: Everyone knows which person holds which ofce anyway. If staffs signal that the holder is acting in his ofcer role, why not just use blank staffs? In Tupicocha, the fact that the system of instituted contrasts among ofcerstheir tacit mutual politi- cal contract prior to inscriptionvaries subtly from year to year creates the sort of situation which Der- rideans recognize as demanding supplementation. From this conclusion Salomon can emend Harris and Goodman and at the same time offer a new perspective on writing without words. He concludes, indeed, by stating that whether we want to use the word writing to totalize them [i.e., theories of inscriptions] as Harris and Derrida do is less important than providing an even heuristic footing for the study of inscriptive modes in all their unfamiliar propertiesincluding, for example, the power to produce closure and silence. Here he is missing an opportunity to make a stronger and more radical claim. What he is not clearly saying but pointing to in his account of Tupicocha staff inscrip- tions is, rst, the matching of, on the one hand, mouth- sounds-ears and, on the other, handsgraphic-signseyes and, second, the fact that either set can be and is used to coordinate human (lets accept that for simplicitys sake) interactions. Looking at things in this way may allowus to circumvent the concept of language, whose paradigmatic example in all Western and modern debates (from linguistics to semasiology to grammatology) has been alphabetic writing in the Greco-Roman tradition (Mignolo 1994, Leibsohn 1994, Boone 2000). If we follow this road, then we can at once get out of Western met- aphysics, a set of assumptions that underlies Harriss critique of writing and the more radical Derridean de- construction of Western metaphysics by pounding, pre- cisely, on the presuppositions that sustain the Western philosophy of language. We could move in two complementary directions that would take Salomons argument beyond his own explicit claims. The rst would be to start from a concept of a sign without supplement. A green sign hanging from a frame that bridges the highway instructs drivers that there is some information regarding directions and exits. What directions to follow and what exits to take are not included in the rectangular green sign, and it cannot be read from one-quarter of a mile away. Drivers can know at that point only that a rectangular green sign contains instructions regarding directions and road exits. As they approach it they can read the instructions. The instruc- tions in alphabetic writing function similarly to the icons of food, lodging, and gas on the blue signs that precede road exits. The crossed-fork-and-knife icon is not alphabetic writing, but its function is similar to Mich- igan Street, Exit, 34 miles (Prieto 1968:91105). I see the words on the green sign and the icons on the blue signs not as supplements but as constitutive elements of the signs. Now, if we consider that one of the functions of human-made signs is to provide instructions and to regulate a domain of interactions among human agents (Maturana and Varela 1987:20550), we can suspend the idea that signs stand for things, and therefore it is possible to replace theories of inscriptions based on the ideas that language is denotation and writing represents speech with theories that explain them as instructions in human interactions. The second direction is indicated when Salomon sit- uates Tupicocha in the context of Peru and, more spe- cically, in relation to its president, Alberto Fujimori. After describing the changes registered in staff inscrip- tions in the past ve years (19952000), Salomon con- cludes that at least one of them (the fth tendency) could be interpreted as an imprint . . . of public resis- tance to what people see as the anticommunal policies of the 1990s Fujimori regime. . . . a sign of resistance to the undeclared direction of Fujimori-era agricultural pol- icy, which is to neglect the jural peasant communities in favor of private agroindustry. However, the ve changes (or tendencies) that Salomon describes, when taken together, could be interpreted also as a broad ef- fort to improve an always-difcult integration of roles in a complex and partly inorganic system, in the face of additional neoliberal political stresses, by making its parts more functionally specialized, more different from each other, and more dignied. Fine, but lets take a step back. Writing without words, or whatever we agree to label it, in Tupicocha is a kind of writing within the ofcial writing of the Peruvian statethat is, alphabetic writing and the Span- ish language. Spanish is at best a second language for Tupicocha speakers. It is curious that Salomon pays no attention to this fact, since it brings us to the very front yard of Peruvian colonial history and present forms of global coloniality (neoliberalism, the Fujimori regime). salomon Writing Without Words F 23 And once we enter the terrain of coloniality, Western metaphysics and its Derridean deconstruction are also on slippery ground. The effort to correct previous the- ories of inscription from Derridas deconstruction of Western metaphysics seems wrongheaded, since, in fact, the corpus that Salomon describes shows precisely the regional limits of Western metaphysics and its universal ambitions. This is what I mean by saying that Salomon is missing an opportunity to radicalize his argument. His shortcomings in this respect are consistent with his blindness to coloniality. It is as if he had forgotten his own radical statement about the impossibility of writing history in the colonial Andes (Salomon 1982) and jumped on the bandwagon of reading Andean history from West- ern metaphysics instead of moving in the opposite direction. gary urton Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Colgate University, Hamilton, N.Y. 13346-1398, U.S.A. 10 ix 00 Salomon has produced an exceptionally informative and stimulating ethnographic description and a rich and deep analysis of a set of communicative practices in the An- dean community of Tupicocha. We have long known of the general importance of staffs of ofce in Andean sys- tems of political-ritual ofce holders (varayuqkuna), but we have never (to my knowledge) had access to a study containing this level of ethnographic detail or this depth of analysis concerning their creation and manipulation and especially the annual inscribing of signs on the staffs themselves. Salomons study should send ethnographers of the region back to their eldnotesif not back to the eld!to attempt to recover unrecorded instances of the highly complex system of signing elaborated so carefully and thoroughly in this article. I have one major question that I would like to raise regarding Salomons interpretation of the data he pres- ents. This concerns the characterization of the kind of signing system that is represented by the three-sign vara code. I would ask whether the data presented warrant the characterization of this signing systemas a writing system (with or without words) or whether, instead, the vara code and its manipulations might be said more prop- erly to constitute the signs and formulas of a local (po- litical) calculus. I recently, quite coincidentally, had the experience of asking one of my Colgate colleagues, a mathematician, what his research was about. He replied with some con- sternation that he could not, in fact, explain his research to me in ordinary words. Upon reection, and as I re- called Salomons comments about his difculties in elic- iting explanations of the vara code from his friends and informants in Tupicocha, it struck me that perhaps the reasons for the inexpressibility of these two bodies of knowledge and practicemathematics and the vara codemight in fact be identical; that is, the coding/sign- ing systems used in each case were not designed to pro- duce narrative-discursive types of accounts but, rather, are the calculi of forces and relationships at play, and as arrayed, in the respective domainsone in the abstract space of pure mathematics, the other in the complex interactions and relations among political forces in a contemporary Andean community. In my reading of this article, Salomon makes clear that the signs of the vara code are inscribed in ordered sets fromyear to year in accordance with some fairly complex and precise calculations of shifting power vectors (e.g., the community center, its periphery, and the national government) and their changing relations over time. The inscribed varas represent and reect these changing re- lationships in the local calculus of power; in short, the vara code seems to exhibit the traits of the signs of al- gebraic formulas more than the sentence-level construc- tions of narrative writing. Thus, Tupicochans, like most mathematicians, resist stating in ordinary language the meanings of the formulas they produce precisely because those sign sets and arrays are not about the ordinary matters discussed or the normal types of discourse units employed in everyday conversations. When Salomon asked his informants both to explain the meanings of the signs produced in the vara code and to rank-order the arrays of signs, this would be equivalent to asking mathematicians to rank-order and explain the number-letter ligatures (e.g., 2a, 3x, 5y) used in algebraic formulas. Mathematicians would be unable to comply with this request (as were the Tupicochans) not because they did not know the meanings of the individual signs or how the two parts of these sign ligatures were rank- ordered in nonalgebraic contexts (i.e., 1, 2, 3 . . .; a, b, c . . .) but rather because the ligatures themselves were expressive of standardized units for expressing vectors of power(s), relationships among magnitudes and/or sets, and other such interactions of forces at play within a local environment. These latter seem, from Salomons ethnographic account, to be precisely what the separate signs, as well as the ligatures of these signs (i.e., the iterated sign arrays), of the vara code express. Thus my question is whether the manipulations of this particular very small (three-sign) signary constitute a part of the history of writing or, instead, represent an extraordinary case study in the history and contem- porary practice of a local (Andean) system of calculus. If the latter is the case, then we should not expect that the vara code and its analysis will have any specic rele- vance for the study of literacy and writing (with or with- out words). Reply frank salomon Madison, Wis., U.S.A. 13 x 00 First of all, I want to thank those who offered their thoughts. I will respond in ascending order of generality, from ethnographic to theoretical issues. 24 F current anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001 The ethnographer Hilda Araujo has extensive eld knowledge of the area concerned. Her comment consists primarily of an alternative description of the staff-holder hierarchy in the Tupicocha polity, based in part on a structural model of pre-Hispanic derivation which she sees as underlyingly persistent and in part on an alter- native functional account based on relations of com- mand as observed by her. Her account differs from mine most importantly in asserting that a single overall rank- ing hierarchizes the staffs rather than the historically and contextually variable ranking I described. Araujo sees political rank as built upon a pervasive notion of ascending paternal generations as increments of authority and of senior-to-junior sibling relations as comparably ranked. Sons are hands of paternal heads. When Araujo writes about the Huarochir cus- tom of expressing hierarchical relations in terms of sib- ling age-ranking she is alluding to the 1608 Quechua source (Huarochir 1991). In origin myths, corporate de- scent groups at all levels are contrasted by their respec- tive birth order from putative ancestors whose miracu- lous nature increases with the sociological width and genealogical depth of the social grouping they symbolize (B. Isbell 1997). Within this paradigm, the seeming par- adox in Araujos gure 2, namely, that metaphorically brother ofcers can be of metaphorically equal sen- iority (rst with second and fourth with fth), is an au- thentic paradox of the original; the apical human ances- tors were born of a clutch of eggs. Eggs do not have knowable birth order. An implication of equality re- mains even when fraternity is a metaphor for precedence. Thus, in terms of pure structure, Araujos gure 2 is an acceptable and ingenious alternative account of the way aspas were deployed for 1995. Indeed, to some degree I accepted such an argument by noting that one reason for the verbal reserve of staff operations is the un-natural- ness of junior mens being asked to coerce seniors. But two points remain to debate. First, I did not observe in visible or audible form any rhetoric of parental or sibling ranking among staff ofcers. If this purportedly abiding structure is the template for the insignia, one would expect a rhetoric of paternity or generational sen- iority to cling to the head-hands relation and one of sibling seniority to the staff peer relation. Although hijos (children or descendants) and hermanos (brothers or sib- lings) are acceptable vocatives in some ritual contexts, I did not hear commanders of staffs address staff holders so. Second and more important, there remains the ques- tion of mutability. Under Araujos analysis, why do staffs of different years differ? If she is indeed adducing an un- derlying invariant structural model, it will not satisfy the data until one knows how its redeployment in dif- ferent years could yield the observed variation in sign patterns over time. Araujos gure 3 offers an alternative explanation of the disposition of rayas in 1995 based on operational relations of command rather than structural attributes of statuses. Her observation that ofces are administra- tive or operational depending on the direction one looks from is useful. I did not see operations that conrm all the specic links she draws; for example, I did not see actions showing that the rst but not the second lieu- tenant governor operates through the rural constables. Nonetheless, Araujos high standards of observation and subtle native grasp of Peruvian Spanish warrant taking this argument seriously and regarding it as clarifying the way staff ofces are actually used. Figure 3 does not lead to a different conclusion from mine about what rayas effectively encode, namely, public sentiment about the importance of each ofceif anything, it reinforces it by clarifying what importance means operationally. Turning fromstructural toward political analysis, Wal- ter Mignolo and Hilda Araujo both want to go farther in emphasizing the political implication of staffs as insignia of the local order and especially as responses to stresses that the Fujimori regime (1990) has created. Araujos emphasis on staff process as a proud assertion of a self- created order which the grindstones of terrorismand mil- itarism failed to crush is well taken. However, applaud- ing indigenous . . . autonomy vis-a` -vis the Peruvian state (as Mignolo puts it) overshoots the mark. Even Fujimoris local opponents concede that most villagers, at least up to July 28, 2000 (the date on which the pres- ident took ofce for a constitutionally and electorally dubious third term), saw his regime as a bulwark against chaos despite its unfairness to some local interests in- cluding those of the jural peasant community. The local spirit of resistance is better rendered as loyal opposition and a demand for morality than as indigenous repudia- tion of the state, for indeed Tupicochans do not consider themselves indigenous as opposed to generically Peru- vian (Salomon 2001). The fame of the Quechua manu- script which their ancestors helped create (Huarochir 1991) has misled Mignolo into supposing that Tupico- chans are Quechua-speakers, but in fact, like all modern Huarochiranos, they are monolingual Spanish-speakers. Two clusters of theoretical issues arise in the com- ments. The rst is an area of approximately common concern between Mignolo and Harris. Both want to pro- mote a theory of signs more radically opposed to phil- ological grammatology than the Derridean one as they see it. Mignolos emerging theory seems to converge with Harriss published one more than Mignolo con- cedes. They differ chiey in that Mignolo sees wordless signs and verbal ones as being exteriorizations of prospective orientations and addresses to a worldinstructions is Mignolos termrather than precipitates sedimenting ex post facto from interactions in it and to this degree supplementing in the Derridean sense. Mignolo seems as attracted to a semiology of will or assertion as Harris is to one of integration. It seems that Mignolo fears that construing nonphonetic signs on lines that partake of a Western metaphysics of inter- pretation (whose premises are not identied) puts one on a short slide toward servile membership in Ramas (1996) colonial lettered city. Pending clarication of the metaphysics argument, it seems a misreading to take the analysis of staffs as a linear extension of textual criticism. On the contrary, the rendering of staff code offered here retains and implements the emphasis on salomon Writing Without Words F 25 incommensurability which my (1982) Literature of the Impossible essay proposed. The ensemble of staff signs is a product of at least 400 years practice in developing useful combinations of sign systems wherein some com- ponents specically eschew verbal translation or sys- tems of reference easily transposable to literacy. It is for this reason that I used the word insoluble in char- acterizing the way staff code establishes a substorey of civic symbolism in which writing is irrelevant to the communal bond. Recent researches on meaningful tex- tiles, such as Zorns (1988) caution about reading fab- rics and Arnolds (1997) thoughtful paper on how fabrics concretize culture, can be taken as additional cautions about treating material condensates of Andean categories as soluble in ordinary reading. The second area of theoretical debate has to do with reasons for the verbal silence of the staff code. It is a brilliant insight on Gary Urtons part that the small sig- nary of staffs may be small for reasons similar to those for the small number of signs used in equations. His characterization of staff signs as resembling ligatured ex- pressions of calculus like 2a, 3x, or 5y provides a par- simonious tool for making formal sense of the code. On this view a given set of staffs is like a set of equations or inequations among roles, each role having as its sym- bol an algebra-like formula for its relative standing. As a mode of formally describing the makeup of staff signs, this makes excellent sense and is a real improvement. It has an ethnographic payoff, too, in helping us envision the coherent suite character of a staff ensemble. Urton holds that this mode of formulation casts doubt on whether staff inscriptions are closely enough related to normal types of discourse to be relevant to literacy and writing. For an object to be relevant to literacy and writing, he judges that it should include a visible ana- logue to the sentence-level construction of narrative writing. But is sentence-like construction a reliable touchstone for relevance to a broadly conceived study of writing (whether phonographic or without words)? Even if one wants to retain the denition of writing as, essentially, visible language, one needs at a minimum to leave room for the fact that not all language artifacts are sentences. If the archaeology of writing is going to inform our exploration of unfamiliar inscription sys- tems, insistence on sententiality may be presentistic and heuristically unhelpful. In the remote past, as in the pre- sent, the particular syntax of signiers called a sentence is only one of various syntactic frames. It may not be the most relevant one. Goody (1986:55) sums up his vast reading of studies about early writings in the Middle East and Egypt by noting that lists, tables, and other nonsen- tential frames developed a different kind of language, introducing extensive formulae and omitting verbs, be- fore narrative writing took shape. Had they chosen sen- tence-level construction as a threshold for relevance to writing, researchers would have had to class these forms, which do have undisputed phylogenetic relevance to true writing, as irrelevant. I am among those who, like Ehlich (1983), think that the establishment of [inscriptive] convention is a kind of social problem solving . . . and that is what the in- vention of writing amounts to (Coulmas 1989:9). Goody considers it evident that the problem solutions concre- tized as sign sequences could yield sentential readouts from early phases. Olson (1994:65114) persuasively ar- gues that it was as a result of such operations, at a rel- atively late stage of grammatogenesis, that such struc- ture-types as sentence became conceptually available and hence available as models for complete inscrip- tions such as narratives. Daniels (1996:3), a strong par- tisan of the philological model, goes so far as to say that the sending of messages, and the writing of books for posterity, are happily accidental byproducts. The earliest uses of writing seem to be to communicate things that really dont have oral equivalents. In archaeological cases the absence of oral equiva- lents for at least some early information arrays did not stop rich elaboration of correspondences between verbal and visual signs, eventually including sentential ones. Not so with Tupicochan staffs. They seem to point in a different direction. I agree with Urton that no elaboration of the staff systemwould yield writing in the usual sense, but I disagree about why. If some nonsentential forms like those contemplated by the Near East experts, per- haps expressible in ligatured-formula syntaxes, link up with and feed back on speech while others, as in the staffs or other reserved and verbally taboo signs, are seg- regated as parallel language, the reason cannot be just the distinction between calculus and sentence. Goody (1986:54) cites from Baines (1983:575) an Egyptian text, ca. 1200 b.c.e., in which a cowherd is made to speak in calculi of form Nx, namely, Emmer: 3 sacks; Barley: 2 sacks, etc. Whoever created this text either thought cal- culus-like nonsentential syntax a believable speech pat- tern or thought the transition from such syntax to sen- tences transparent. Whether one thinks like a Tupicochan or like this Egyptian is likely to be a question inseparable from attributes ones culture attaches to the signicata in question. In math, those attributes may be relationships which the logic of grammar tends to ob- scure. With staffs, I have suggested, the attributes may be social relationships which the interminability of dis- course tends to subvert. In either case, as we stand at the outset of a more open- ended study of inscriptive practice, it seems a reasonable initial hypothesis that inscriptive solutions have taken shape around the problems they address, just as scripts have taken shapes inuenced by the properties of their inventors respective languages. If one chooses to bifur- cate the study of inscriptions between cases relevant to literacy and writing because, seen in retrospect, they increasingly approximated speech and cases irrelevant to it because they created areas of graphic practice con- strained by rules other than those of speech, one may gain an advantage in zeroing in on speechlike properties in objects. That leaves a big agenda for studying the other branch. It might be an important component of the re- lation among inscription, complexity, and cultural con- sciousness. 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