ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role played by alphabetic literacy and the narrative pictorial image in the process of domination of native Andean peoples during the colonial period: how the power of European institutions was constituted and maintained through the spread of different forms of literacy in indigenous communities. In many ways, colonial-era Spanish writing was fundamentally oral in nature, replicating in space the temporal dimension of oral communication through a refusal to appropriate the economy of expression that characterizes written communication. Colonial-era legal documents codify in the political arena ritual acts that themselves encode political, social and religious referents through the use of geographic and temporal space, experienced through bodily movement. Literacy cannot be understood as a neutral technology, but operates as an instrument of power which impacts native communities differently in relation to specific historical and cultural forms.
