IWA #2.

To grasp the import of Guaman Poma’s project, one needs to keep in mind that the Incas had no system of writing. Their huge empire is said to be the only known instance of a full-blown bureaucratic state society built and administered without writing. Guaman Poma constructs his text by appropriating and adapting pieces of the representational repertoire of the invaders. He does not simply imitate or reproduce it; he selects and adapts it along Andean lines to express (bilingually, mind you) Andean interests and aspirations. Ethnographers have used the term transculturation to describe processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture. The term, originally coined by Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s, aimed to replace overly reductive concepts of acculturation and assimilation used to characterize culture under conquest. While subordinate peoples do not usually control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what gets absorbed into their own and what it gets used for. Transculturation, like autoethnography, is a phenomenon of the contact zone.

As scholars have realized only relatively recently, the transcultural character of Guaman Poma’s text is intricately apparent in its visual as well as its written component. The genre of the four hundred line drawings is European--there seems to have been no tradition of representational drawing among the Incas--but in their execution they deploy specifically Andean systems of spatial symbolism that express Andean values and aspirations. (Pages 2, 3).

In these two paragraphs Pratt is really using Poma’s paper as evidence and proof to support her claim of the Contact Zone. She’s making a claim about how in Poma’s writing is really a huge example of the contact zone because it brings this idea that the culture that we had assumed to know, was actually wrong thus bringing two cultures together clashing. “Their huge empire is said to be the only known instance of a full-blown bureaucratic state society built and administered without writing.” (Mary Louise Pratt 2). She is describing how by having this written piece of evidence, Poma introduces a new idea into the culture really showing that writing was something that was used. Pratt talks really about how key this piece of evidence was because it changed the perspectives people had on this culture and how much influence other cultures actually had on this culture and it is something that once again ties back into her theme of the “contact zone”.