Peru, in theyear 1613, some forty yearsafterthefinal fall of the Inca empire to the Spanish and signedwith an Andean indigenousname: Felipe Guaman unmistakably Poma de Ayala. Written in a

mixture ofQuechua and
ungrammatical, expressive Spanish, the manuscript was a

manuscript.

amestizowhose Spanish father his halfbrother, had given
him access to

to theking is Guaman Pomas letter written in two lan two and and The firstis guages (Spanish parts. Quechua) Nueva coronica ‘New Chronicle/ The title is called the which the Spanish

representedtheir apparatus through
American the main conquests to themselves. In It constituted one of official discourses. writing a new chronicle, to construct a new important. The chronicle of course was the main writing

religious

education.

addressed by an unknown but apparently literate letter Andean to King Philip III of Spain. What stunned
Pietschmann was that the letterwas twelve hundred

New Chronicleand Good Government. No titledThe First one knew (or knows) how themanuscript got to the or how in No library Copenhagen long ithad been there. one, itappeared, had

everbothered to read itor figured
out how. Quechua guage was not thought culture of as a written lan in 1908, nor Andean as a literate culture.

There were almost eighthundred pages ofwritten long. textand fourhundred of captioned linedrawings. It was

pages

Guaman Poma tookover theofficial Spanish genreforhis
own ends. Those ends were,

world, a pictureof a Christianworld with picture of the
Andean it?Cuzco, rather at the center of than European peoples not Jerusalem. In theNew Chronicle Guaman

roughly,

Pietschmann prepared a paper on his find,which he presented inLondon in 1912, a year afterthe rediscovery of Machu Picchu byHiram Bingham. Reception, by an
international

Poma begins by rewritingtheChristian history of the Adam and Eve (fig. 1), incorporating the world from Amerindians into it as offspringof one of the sons of Noah. He identifies fiveages

ofChristian historythathe links in parallelwith the fiveages of canonical Andean

confused. It took twenty-five years fora facsimileedition to of thework appear, in Paris. Itwas not till the late habitsgaveway to interpretive 1970s, as positivistreading studiesand colonial

elitisms to postcolonial pluralisms, Western scholars foundways of readingGuaman that Pomas New Chronicle and Good Government as the
extraordinary letter got terrible intercultural tour de force that itwas. years too late, a miracle The and a there, only 350

congress

of Americanists,

was

apparently

with thatdiverge history  separate but equal trajectories notwith Columbus butwith Saint Noah and reintersect Bartholomew,claimed tohave precededColumbus in the Americas. In a couple of

hundred pages,Guaman Poma
constructs a veritable encyclopedia of Inca and pre-Inca

EtPPiMERMWOO

–

tragedy. to say a few more I propose text, in order to

WEVA
this erstwhile thoughts about

words lay out

about some

unreadable

zones. in what I like to call the contact writingand literacy
I use meet, this term to refer to social clash, and grapple with spaces where other, often cultures in con each

textsof highly asymmetricalrelationsof power, such as
colonialism,

out in world today.Eventually Iwill many parts of the
use many under the term to reconsider of us rely on challenge in the models and of community and that teaching theorizing a little more today. But first is known about that are

slavery,

or their aftermaths

as

they

are lived

about Gua

man Pomas giant letter to Philip III.
Insofar as anything

him at all, Guaman

Poma exemplified the sociocultural complexities pro
duced

Andean who claimed noble Inca descent and who had adopted (at least in some sense) Christianity.He may as an haveworked in theSpanish colonial administration
or assistant to a tax collector? interpreter, scribe, Spanish as a mediator, to write from in short. He he learned says

by conquest

and

empire.

He

was

an

indigenous

I–^-J

Fig. 1.Adam

and Eve.

Mary customs, laws, social forms, public but also offices, and both audiences and

Louise Pratt