Indigenous Andean Voices at the Interface between the Oral and the Written: The Peruvian Quechua Traditions from Colonial Huarochirí (ca. 1608)*

Abstract

In colonial Peru, at the beginning of the 17th century, an anonymous author wrote down in Quechua what has become known as the Huarochirí Traditions. This author made use of his knowledge of writing which he had acquired in the missionary context (in ancient Peru writing was not known). In order to document the traditions of his people from the highlands of Central Peru within the framework of the dominant culture of the Spanish colonial empire, he re-formulated and wrote down myths and descriptions of rituals in their own language, Quechua, but following Spanish conventions of composing a book, and adding comments from a Christian point of view. The objective was the conservation of traditions (stated in the manuscript’s preface) (sections 1.1 and 1.2.) As the person responsible for composing this work has remained anonymous and the characteristics of the writer and the texts are complex, I will refer to him as an author-redactor-compiler (ARC) (section 1.3). I will study how the texts change from (hypothetical) oral discourse to the written form and how far this results in textual re-creation, re-shaping or transmutation. Combining the pragmatics of writing and oral-to-written discussions (section 2) shows how the texts draw on both modes of expression (sections 3.1 and 3.2), and I will consider how these features are evident in the text layers which I identify (section 3.3.1). These are indigenous narrators’ core voices (3.3.2), discourse and syntax in the enveloping texts which create the framework of a book (3.3.3), the close intertwinement of core and enveloping text layers, especially in the description of rituals and ceremonies (3.3.4) and the marginal notes (3.3.5). My analysis shows that content, discourse and language use in the Huarochirí Traditions is multivocal and characteristic of texts which are situated between the oral and the written sphere and which can be seen as transitional texts, at the interface between the two modes of expression (section 4).