Abstract

It is proposed that there is an iconographic and epistemological relationship between some drawings in Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's Nueva coronica y buen gobierno and the images recorded in several colonial wood vessels (qeros) which circulated widely during the time that Guaman Poma was writing his letter to the King of Spain. This connection shows that the work of Guaman Poma was not an isolated or singular act in the colonial context and that both communicative and creative processes, that of the Nueva coronica and that of the qeros, formed part of a process of shared colonial semiosis through which Andean societies maintained a certain autonomy in the production and circulation of their own discourses. Secondly, the article discusses the epistemological tension that results from the coexistence of different narratives (European and Andean) that used their own temporal and spatial categories to account for new colonial conditions.