Inventing Writing

Prophets, Shamans, and the Transmission of Ritual Discourse in North American Indigenous Cultures, 1600–1900

By Pierre Déléage

Translated by Mathew H. Evans and Victoria Bergstrom

Why is it that, throughout their history, humans have repeatedly taken on the task of developing writing systems? Inventing Writing offers an array of conceptual tools for answering this question. In it, Pierre Déléage explores a series of cases involving the invention and use of writing systems by indigenous North American societies. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of prophetic and shamanic movements developed original inscription techniques to ensure the transmission of ceremonial discourses. Examining these sources, the author formulates an innovative hypothesis: All of these invented writing systems can be defined as intended to transcribe specific ritual discourses within the institutional frameworks that governed their transmission and recitation. By focusing on the pragmatic functions of these North American scripts in their ritual contexts, Déléage allows us to rethink the problem of the invention of writing beyond the confines of evolutionary approaches that have classically focused on the great phonographic scripts of human history (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Maya) and have never been able deal with selective writing systems on their own terms. Déléage’s approach offers a novel and promising argument for uncoupling the origin of writing from the genesis of the state, an association that many specialists in the field have long made.