Reading Images: Scripts and Icons in Native American Graphic Systems
It is now clear to many scholars that the logic of Native American Indian mnemonics cannot be understood starting from the ethnocentric question of the comparison with western writing systems, but requires a truly comparative anthropology of the many “ways of memorizing” that have been invented in these cultures. In this lecture I would try to get further on this line of research, posing the question of the relationship between Native American graphisms and their relationship to oral traditions. Scholars working on the Mesoamerican Writing Systems (and on other forms of picture-writing among Native Americans) always assume that «glyphs» «meet» with some kind of « oral » transmission of knowledge. To my knowledge, no one has been able to state how this relationship was established. In this lecture, I would like to outline a solution to this problem. I will argue that, even in systems where the representation of the sounds of a language is absent (or partial), we can build a bridge between visual parallelism and verbal parallelism. I’ll try to show how this is doable, first within a single tradition, and then in a more general comparative perspective, including Hopi, Navaho and Nahuatl material.
