The Entablo Manuscript

Water Rituals and Khipu Boards of San Pedro de Casta, Peru

By Sarah Bennison

University of Texas Press

A unique study of an Andean community’s water rituals and the extraordinary document describing how they should be performed

In the dry season in the Andes, water from springs, lakes, reservoirs, and melting glaciers feeds irrigation canals that have sustained communities for thousands of years. Managing and maintaining these water infrastructures is essential, and in 1921, in the village of San Pedro de Casta, Peru, local authorities recorded their ritual canal-cleaning duties in a Spanish-language document called the Entablo. It is only the second book (along with the Huarochirí Manuscript) ever seen by scholars in which an Andean community explains its customs and ritual laws in its own words.

Sarah Bennison offers a critical introduction to the Entablo, a Spanish transcription of the document, and an English translation. Among its other revelations, the Entablo delves into the use of khipu boards, devices that meld the traditional knotted strings known as khipus with a written alphabet. Only in the Entablo do we learn that there were multiple khipu boards associated with a single canal-cleaning ritual, or that there were separate khipu records for men and women. The Entablo manuscript furnishes unparalleled insights into Andean rituals, religion, and community history at a historical moment when rural highland communities were changing rapidly.

With The Entablo Manuscript, Sarah Bennison has rescued a remarkable document from obscurity. In 1921, elders of San Pedro de Casta, in the Huarochirí region of Peru, set down their ‘ancestral laws’ as a set of instructions for the ceremonial distribution of water rights. The resulting 'entablo' exhibits striking parallels with the famous Quechua-language Huarochirí manuscript, written over four hundred years earlier. It reveals a complex interpenetration of orality and literacy, with customary law flourishing and adapting on its own terms within a state-imposed legal framework. Bennison’s painstaking transcription and translation of this fragile document are contextualized by copious annotations and a fine ethnographically informed introduction. Beyond the obvious fascination it holds for Andeanists, The Entablo Manuscript has wide significance in fields ranging from literacy studies to environmental management. Catherine J. Allen, George Washington University, author of Foxboy: Intimacy and Aesthetics in Andean Stories

Sarah Bennison’s careful edition of the Entablo brings the words of the water ritual specialists of an iconic highland community in the modern Andes vividly to life. Thanks to Bennison’s patient historical and ethnographic reconstruction, the manuscript emerges from the communal archive in which it was first deposited a hundred years ago to shine as an important milestone in the process of codification of customary norms and ritual obligations. Part heir to khipu accountancy traditions, part heir to the intertwined oral and written traditions that shaped the famous Huarochirí manuscript, the Entablo is a brilliant addition to a growing corpus of communally oriented native Andean texts. José Carlos de la Puente Luna, Texas State University, author of Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court

Sarah Bennison’s The Entablo Manuscript is a major contribution to Andean studies and to the study of Indigenous peasant communities in Latin America more generally. The author contextualizes the one-hundred-year-old Entablo manuscript through a review of the historical and ethnographic research in the Andes. This book is sure to provoke much discussion and future research. Paul H. Gelles, Midland School, author of Water and Power in Highland Peru: The Cultural Politics of Irrigation and Development

Sarah Bennison is an interdisciplinary postdoctoral research fellow and an honorary research fellow in social anthropology at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.