Writing Without Words – Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes

Writing Without WordsAlternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes\nAuthor(s): Elizabeth Hill Boone, Walter D. Mignolo\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Duke University Press, United States\nImprint: Duke University Press\nISBN-13: 9780822313779, 978-0822313779\nSynopsis\nThe history of writing, or so the standard story goes, is an ascending process, evolving toward the alphabet and finally culminating in the \""full writing\"" of recorded speech. Writing without Words challenges this orthodoxy, and with it widespread notions of literacy and dominant views of art and literature, history and geography. Asking how knowledge was encoded and preserved in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Mesoamerican cultures, the authors focus on systems of writing that did not strive to represent speech. Their work reveals the complicity of ideology in the history of literacy, and offers new insight into the history of writing. \nThe contributors--who include art historians, anthropologists, and literaro