Re: [xmca] Rote, Role, Rule

["Mike Cole" <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Peter sent this link re quipu to me but not, I believe to XMCA. In any
event,
it should be of interest with respect to this discussion.
mike

http://www.jstor.org/pss/483319

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 10:03 PM, Paul Dillon <phd_crit_think@yahoo.com>wrote:

> David,
>
> Very little was known about the Andean quipu in Vygotsky's time.  This idea
> of a mnemonic device carried by runners to remember things can only be
> apocryphal and not based on any real ethnohistorical research.  The runners
> (chaski) had as much to do with what they carried as did the pony express
> riders with what was in their saddle bags.   Andean ethnohistorical research
> simply didn't exist during Vygotsky's time.
>    The quipu interestingly enough, and the role of cloth/weavings in
> pre-conquest Andean society in general fits marvelously with the metaphor of
> culture as weaving ...  We now know that quipus were used for all kinds of
> purposes: censuses, historical records of various kinds, as well as systems
> for modeling.  So they were most likely not just a transition between stages
> 3 and 4 but examples of stage 4 itself.  But these non-phonological,
> non-iconic systems were never considered "writing" (spectres of Derrida).
>  With few exceptions (e.g., Polo de Ondegardo) the colonizing Spaniards
> treated all of the Andean cultural developments as irrelevant to what they
> considered important (gold and silver) or simply as works of the devil.  !So
> they never bothered to try to understand them or conserve them. A real goose
> story!!   And unlike the meso-American codices and their glyphs, which were
> close enough to recognize as some kind of writing and conserved or were
>  carved into stone and resisted the passage of centuries, Andean systems
> for preserving and transmitting information only existed on cloth or string,
> which doesn't really last.
>
>    In the current reappropriation of Andean cosmovision, many communities
> which continued the use of quipu have become centers for their revival,
> plenty of websites to visit if of interest.
>
> Paul
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> To: Paul Dillon <phd_crit_think@yahoo.com>; xmca <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 2:07:57 PM
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Rote, Role, Rule
>
>
> Paul:
>
> Amazing! I knew we were missing something with your long absence.
>
> Actually, I didn't mean the mathematical quipu. As I understand it, the
> quipu was used to send messages the same way as a notched stick or a knotted
> handkerchief or a string around the finger. (My unreadable marginal notes in
> "Thinking and Speech" function in teh same way.)
>
> With a quipu, the runner has a mnemonic, but only the runner really knew
> what the knots were supposed to signify. It wasn't so much a means of
> communication as an "aide de memoire", a form of self-directed speech which
> was used to stimulate other-directed speech.
>
> But what you say makes sense. LSV remarks that the first writing systems
> (think of Mike's Sumerian classrooms) were really numerical systems. These
> might have been "exapted" as forms of self-directed speech by treating them
> as having elided arguments (e.g. "iiii" is treated as meaning "four
> papyri").  These abbreviated forms could then have been elaborated by adding
> explicit predications (e.g. "I have four rolls of papyrus") and so to the
> invention of writing.
>
> I think what I find really useful in Mescharykov's contribution is that it
> manages to reverse engineer LSV's argument into a rather elided form in
> precisely this way, as four genetic "laws" (sic), which are nevertheless
> clearly linked:
>
> 1) nature-->culture: the differentiation of cultural functions from
> naturally given ones, e.g. counting from quantity.
>
> 2) social-->individual: the differentiation of cultural functions into
> socially given and then individual functions, e.g. counting by yourself from
> counting in a classroom.
>
> 3) extramental-->intramental: the differentiation of individual functions
> into externally self-directed and internally self-directed, e.g. verbal
> memory from self-directed speech (the quipu).
>
> 4) spontaneous-->scientific: the differentiation of intramental functions
> into every-day conceptions based on contextually bound, syntagmatically
> analyzeable experience and scientific concepts based on universal,
> paradigmatically analyzed abstract meanings, e.g. foreign languages from
> native languages.
>
> If what you say is true, then the quipu is just what LSV was looking for: a
> mediational means that represents a transitional form between the third
> genetic law and the fourth one!
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
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