Description: An ethnography of Andean knot writing, where media convey information without an alphabet or any other visual likeness of speech, examining the ways that such "mute inscription" communicates social experience.
Review Quotes: "The Cord Keepers is a brilliant and pathbreaking book. It forces us to reconceptualize what writing is or can be, what it encodes, and whether we should even think of writing as something that records, rather than as a performative practice that engages more actively with the world."--Joanne Rappaport, author of The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes