Avaliação: Beyond writing and iconography: coding – Communicating Through Encoded Arrows – The Graphic Communication System in Yukpa Material Culture (Colombia)

By means of weaving, dying, painting and wrapping, people in the Yukpa territories in Northern Colombia and Venezulea inscribe signs into their arrows, bags, headbands and pipes. They refer to these signs as yiminorh or tumenu, a term that can be translated as ‚its pattern/writing‘. These writings in Yukpa material culture must be understood as part of a complex graphic communication system in which not only human but also other-than-human beings participate.
In my paper, I focus on the encoded arrows in the Yukpa-Resguardo Sokorhpa as means of communication and analyse, besides their graphic features, their semiotic, intersemiotic and pragmatic dimensions. Considering the writing of the arrows and the encoded arrows themselves as units, it becomes clear that they are figurations of different types of snakes based on analogies between the arrows’ and the snakes’ shape and pattern. Yet the encoded meaning of these figurations goes far beyond the graphic level. It requires the consideration of the arrows’ bearers and their characteristics, as well as the qualities of the snake to which they refer and which they partially appropriate by wearing a particular encoded arrow. Users of the graphic communication system in Yukpa material culture are familiar with these qualities from the narrative about the origin of the snakes, which is simultaneously the origin of the writing on the arrows.

• Yukpa
• Colombia
• graphic communication
• arrows