The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village's Way with Writing . By Frank Salomon and Mercedes Niño-Murcia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. xix, 392. $94.95 cloth; $25.95 paper.
The Lettered Mountain explores the “way with writing” of the people of Tupicocha, a village located about 100 km (a full day’s bus ride) east of Lima, in the storied highland province of Huarochirı́. Its title is a homage to Ángel Rama’s hugely influential The Lettered City, which argued that hierarchical practices of alphabetic writing shaped the colonial origins of Latin American societies. A number of recent books have built on Rama’s emphasis on writing as a constitutive social practice while challenging his assumptions that it was restricted to Hispanic bastions (the lettered cities) and that it operated in a vacuum. This The Lettered Mountain also does, but it is unique in a number of respects.