Prof. Terence D’Altroy
Department of Anthropology, Columbia University

Khipu, Mountains, and their Friends

Friday April 17th, 4.10pm on Zoom – details below

Since the European invasions of the Americas, people on both sides of that divide have been aware of fundamental divergences in the ways that they envision, learn about, and interact with the world.  Two of the main axes of difference lie in the ways that people think about human-stuff-place relationships, and in reliance on propositional/logical vs. performative/moral ways of getting at truth or knowledge. In this salon, I would like to draw on the Inka ways of knowing the world to raise some questions and suggest some answers about where those different kinds of thinking might lead us in archaeological practice. For example, what happens when we shift from a predominantly human (egocentric) frame of reference to one that grants equal status to an object or place-based (allocentric) frame? Or how do we study the built landscape in a land where both human and non-human order arose from the same principles and were perpetually being reconstituted in the moment? I will use recent work on the khipu knot-registers and earth-beings, among other things, to explore some hopeful lines of inquiry.

To participate please email archaeology@columbia.edu with your full name, phone number and email address by the 9th April. We will send you the Zoom meeting ID and password 30 minutes before the presentation. If you already have login details from last week’s salon, they may also be used for this one.