The Effects of Writing on the Cuna Political System

Abstract

Writing would seem to be one of the great transformers in history. Generations of social theorists have asserted or assumed a fundamental contrast between literate and preliterate cultures; and in describing and analyzing the evolution of society, they have assigned writing a place of honor alongside population growth, the neolithic revolution, irrigation, trade, warfare, plagues, and industrialism. Among such theorists, McLuhan has in recent decades gathered the most attention to himself with his extreme and largely unsubstaneiated claims for the power of various communication media to transform perception and thought. We also find, however, some very careful and solid social scientists coming to similar, if somewhat less exaggerated, conclusions. Goody and Watt (I968) for instance, give writing eredit for promoting the separation of myth and history, of divine attributes from the natural world, and of symbolic classi cations from social morphology, in other words, for putting an end to la pensee sauvage. The problem with such generalizations is that we in fact know very little about what writing actually does, and in particular about what happens when a preliterate society first begins to use writing. We have only a hantlful of focused descriptions of the place of writing among contemporary non-industrial societies (most of them in Goody I968), and materials from the ancient world tend to be fragmentar) and one-dimensional. Researchers in the field of communications have analyzed the printed media in some depth, and others have investigated the economic and political effects of modern education and mass literacy (e.g., Cipolla I969); but most empirical studies of writing itself have taken its social and cultural importance for granted, paying almost exclusive attention to the formal and logical characteristics of alphabets and other writing systems, the origin, spread, and evolution of such forms, and the deciphering of ancient writing ('e.g., Diringer I948; Gelb I952; Ullman I969). Thus, as Basso (I974) has forcefully argued, we badly need ethnographies of writing. This paper describes the effects of writing on a traditional political system, one in which writing was adopted in the last few decades. It has often been noted that the organization of states and empires depends on writing (or on some substitute such as the Inca quipu), both for storing information and for