Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's keynote address : Sociología de la imagen : una visión desde la historia andina = Sociology of the image : a view from Andean history.

Video documentation of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's keynote address, 'Sociología de la imagen: Una visión desde la historia andina, ' presented as a part of the 7th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, held in August of 2009, in Bogotá, Colombia, under the title 'Staging Citizenship: Cultural Rights in the Americas.' This 10-day event brought together activism, scholarship, and art around the themes of legacies, memories, struggles, and frontiers of citizenship. With an introduction by Fabio López de la Roche (read by Luisa Piedrahita), Silvia Rivera Cuscanqui's keynote offers a reading of Guamán Poma de Ayala and Melchor María Mercado as theorists of Andean reality in colonial and republican times. Their images constitute a hidden text that reveals aspects not directly addressed in their writings. Building on these reflections, the speaker argues the need to consider non-alphabetic forms of Andean discourse as a path toward understanding colonial and postcolonial experience in the Andes. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is a Bolivian sociologist and activist of Aymara descent. In 1983 she joined other indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in founding the Andean Oral History Workshop, an independent group devoted to issues of orality, identity, and popular and indigenous social movements, primarily in the Aymara region. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics