Relationality and Multivocality
The bestiary and chronicle as medieval genres share certain structural qualities and interpretive practices with traditional Peruvian forms of sharing knowledge, among them relationality and multivocality. In both geographical and temporal milieux, storytellers related established knowledge about the present and past by recounting expected and familiar stories, and by connecting new audiences to established epistemological frameworks. In a medieval context, news and stories were told by town criers and juglares who used the spoken word. Versions of the latest news or a cherished story spread orally, and we see this in the period’s textual culture as well – many bestiaries told the same Biblical stories with some having or emphasizing certain details over others. Multivocality empowers all voices; it destabilizes the notion of the author as having individual authority. It also decenters the “yo” of the early modern historical voice that by the sixteenth century was increasingly interested in asserting first-hand and “true” accounts. When everybody tells a story in their own way, layers of similarity alongside rich variations emerge from which the listener gains important insight into the past and present.
This way of seeking knowledge helps to overcome structural biases that may silence certain demographics, such as Andean peoples, over others – and in the case of historical and literary texts, traditionally, white men have been the only authorities over the past. Many Indigenous approaches to knowledge transfer make use of some form of multivocality (Stolze Lima 601–46). The multivocality undergirding the bestiary and chronicle genres fundamentally informs Guamán Poma’s Corónica as well, and he explicitly refers to the multivocality of the knowledge that he shares in the chronicle. Beyond Andean quipus, being knotted strings used for mnemonically recalling and then transmitting information, Guamán Poma also relied upon knowledge that he refers to as “unwritten histories” comprised of the “memories and stories from ancient Indian men and women, wise witnesses of their time” (8). This knowledge has been passed through the generations, making the chorus of storytellers intergenerational in ways that include and give voice to their ancestors. The author insists that he only included knowledge that reflected “the most common opinion,” and he also depicts the elders sharing their stories in an illustration that visualizes this form of multivocal knowledge transfer (10).