Writing Without Words

visual systems of recording and/or communicating information in Pre-Columbian America have always been diffi-It to categorize.Equally, the topic has been difficult to articulate in a single word or phrase, because the Pre-Columbian situation seems to defy the usual meaning of words such as "art" and "writing."In organizing the roundtable, "Art and Writing: Recording Knowledge in Pre-Columbian America," the first part of the title, "Art and Writing," was constantly a problem.Because there is that tendency to think of writing as visible speech and an evolutionary goal, the word "writing" when it pertains to Pre-Columbian America begs to have quotation marks around it.In indigenous America, visibie speech was not often the goal.The word "art," too, carries with it modern Western notions of art as something visual to be appreciated and enjoyed but something separate from communication.Thus, the word combination "Art and Writing" seems to polarize the two and set up an either/or situation, where a visual system is either "art" at one end or it is "writing" at the other.The intention, of course, was the opposite.What I wanted to convey is that art and writing in Pre-Columbian America are largely the same thing.For example, the Nahuatl word tlacuiloliztli means both "to write" and "to paint" (Molina 1970: second pagination 120).They compose a graphic system that keeps and conveys knowledge, or, to put it another way, that presents ideas.And it is this view of Amerindian recordkeeping systems that should replace the old, limited notions that have previously been advanced.In this essay I mean to focus on systems of writing-one could say the structure and technology of writing-rather than the meanings of writing, social or otherwise.Writing is much discussed these days particularly by semioticians, literary theorists, and anthropologists who are interested in issues of sign and meaning, hermeneutics, "I iteracy" and orality, and writing and power, to name but a few topics. 1 There are rich paths to be followed here with respect to Pre-Columbian America, but they would take the discussion in other directions and diffuse my purpose, and they are premature in this introduction.Walter Mignolo profitably walks some of these roads in his closing essay.My own purpose here is more fundamental.Most of the scholars who think and write about writing consider writing to be alphabetic writing, normally referring to one of the modern alphabetic scripts; this tends to rest as a basic assumption from which their arguments grow.My intent is to confront this common definition of "writing" and our notions of what constitute writing systems, to explode these assumptions.We have to think more Elizabeth Hill Boone