Silence's practices in the colonial Andes area.

Silence's speeches with political-philosophical

contents (1570-1615)

Alejandro Viveros
University of Chile / CONICYT

This research seeks to address the political-philosophical contents of the silences strategies and
practices made by Indians in early colonial times. We will focus on a corpus centered on two
historical chronicles written by colonial Indians: Titu Cusi Yupanquis Instruccin del Inca (1570)
and Felipe Guamn Poma de Ayalas Nueva Cornica y Buen Gobierno (1615). Both cultural texts
will be contrasted as two different examples in which the description of several silences practices
could be pointed out and examined as a cultural translations towards the explanation and
understanding of a bigger problem: the Indians meaning and identity. Therefore, we will build a
methodology based on demonstrate how the idea of the Indian encrypts in silences practices
important political-philosophical implications and boundaries. Certainly, the existence of silences
practices referred to the Indian meaning and identity could be engaged to the idea of an agency
made by a politics of silence as well as a protest by the silence, in which the lack of voice is a
trap for colonial order particularly when it tries to establish the Indian as a mere political issue. This
proposal recognizes that those Indians who realize the political-philosophical implications of their
silences behaviors and practices also understood the potential of their silence as an exercise for a
specific political-philosophical speechs reconstruction. In this sense, the reflections of Titu Cusi
Yupanqui and Felipe Guamn Poma de Ayala work as questioning horizons for the strength of
silences practices and its political-philosophical contents.