Metadata Beyond the Eurocentric: Recovering Digital Cultural Memory

Introduction

A vast digitization is underway, with expansive potential for cultural memory, exchange, and recovery. Libraries, archives, and museums are licensing their cultural heritage objects through Creative Commons and posting them en masse on their websites. This flood of cultural content literally opens up worlds of possibilities for open education and beyond. But it also risks reproducing mistakes or omissions in the materials’ descriptions. One particular bias that circulates unless checked is Eurocentricism, or the tendency to impose European frames of references and value as universal.

To illustrate how Eurocentric classifications circulate, let’s turn to the case study of the urpu.

What Is Lost When an Urpu Is Called an Aryballos?

Urpu is a Quechua word for a distinctively Incan vessel from the Peruvian Andes. These extraordinarily crafted vessels were used for making, carrying, and storing chicha, a fermented corn drink used in ceremonies and festivities. Characterized by a full body, low handles, long, slender neck, and flaring rim, urpus also have a distinctive pointed bottom to help balance the vessel in the earth, even on a slanted surface typical of the steep slopes of the Andean mountain landscape. Artisans decorated urpus with patterns and symbols of agrarian, geographic, and cosmological significance.

Meanwhile, across two continents, an ocean and a sea, the aryballos was a small spherical or globular terracotta flask with a narrow neck used in Ancient Greece. Aryballoi contained perfume or oil, and often depicted dancers, athletes, or bathing.

But, in museum collections around the world, the standard inherited metadata for an Incan urpu defaults to the title aryballos. Why? And why is this important?

The Denver Museum, for instance, adds descriptive text to contextualize the Andean and Incan origins, use, and significance of the urpus in their collection—but they maintain the Greek title. They do note that Inca vessels “of this shape are called aryballos because of their resemblance to similarly shaped ancient Greek ceramics.”

Here, a seemingly technical clarification opens up a window into how Eurocentric modes of classification persist. Titling urpus as aryballoi tells us more about the classifiers than the classified. It helps demonstrate the ways cultural objects deemed “Western classics” become the standards or references for Indigenous and nonwestern cultural heritage, and how the vast diversity of the latter gets subsumed myopically within Eurocentric referents.

All of a sudden, the other descriptors need investigation. For instance, the term “Incan Empire” does convey the political rule of the Incas over the Andean region, but it also conflates and obscures the multifaceted, diverse Andean cultural heritages underway in the vast precolonial regions now known as Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. This description also reduces the Incan regime to a military bureaucratic state of “local lords” and “imperial” agents that, according to some scholars, actually reflects the Spanish colonizers more than the colonized Andeans.¹

Meanwhile, the agrarian or cosmological dimensions of urpus as vessels of chica go unmentioned, as do the agricultural calendar or healing ceremonies they celebrated, and the agro-ecological motifs on the urpus themselves.

What Knowledge Do These Containers Contain?

The description of an object held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art gives important, but limited, information about “Small urpu (Jar)”:

“One of the most distinctive Inca ceramic forms developed in the Cuzco area is the so-called Cuzco bottle, also known as an aryballo because of its similarity to the Greek form . . . aryballos (or urpus in Quechua) are embellished with polychrome geometric slip designs . . . representational motifs are rare. On this example, the front half of the chamber is divided into several vertical bands featuring double crosses and zigzag designs on the center panel framed by wider bands of so-called khipu designs. Smaller Cuzco bottles like the present one were probably used to serve liquids, but they may also have fulfilled a votive purpose since a number of them, including miniature ones, were found in burials in distant parts of the Inca empire, from northern coastal Ecuador to the high mountain peaks of central Chile.”

Digital descriptions offer key information on the pragmatic structure of the containers and their impressive ceramic artisanship. Here, the imposed imperial focus mercifully recedes, but the broader cultural context remains missing.

This urpu’s designs in fact expressly represent khipus, the Andean knot-string system that served as an intricate, binary-code-based mobile record-keeping device.² More than mere geometry, the khipu images were painted stylistically on this and other urpus, and thus convey an ancient epistemology of how cultural memory was recorded at the time. Khipus served as cumulative archives of quantitative and qualitative data on agricultural, ecological, economic, political, and social activities across thousands of miles and hundreds of years. Accordingly, they also worked as proto-computational metadata.

One of the great tragedies of colonialism was epistemic: that the conquistadors and missionaries recognized the great knowledge-power of the khipus and singled them out for deliberate destruction and so severed the interpretive capacity to decode and learn from them. Those that remain—most in museums in the Global North—remain as precious vestiges of precolonial (and perhaps decolonial) Indigenous knowledge transmission and recovery. Artisans crafted the urpus for ceremonial and agrarian festivities, but they also painted them in homage of and in service to methods of cultural memory. In short, these vessels are vessels of knowledge.

Beyond Empire

Moving forward, the Quechua term “urpu” could replace the Greek term “aryballos” as the metadata title for these evocative containers of cultural knowledge. (While the metadata for the urpu discussed above has been corrected to reflect its origins, The Met still houses other Incan urpus erroneously called aryballoi.) Seemingly semantic, this edit would at least approach these meaningful vessels on their own terms, literally. From there, Andean scholars and chicha-makers could offer layers of knowledge; chicha-making continues, and it continues to express a proud Indigenous identity and even resistance across the Andes. Quechua-speaking scholars, elders, and knowledge-holders could offer more cultural contexts of urpus, as objects held in such spiritual regard as to be included in burials, across the length of the entire Andes.

Yet changing the inherited metadata presents technical obstacles: it would sever crucial search lines. Discoverability requires interoperable and easily mapped metadata. This allows inaccurate or misleading information to reproduce exponentially, thereby miseducating a whole new global generation of online learners. As the world wide web expands and students, teachers, artists, and researchers seek and find important digital cultural heritage objects, they may already be searching with the erroneous Greek term to connect with this Andean ceramic. Wouldn’t it serve researchers better to have a distinct term, so they aren’t getting Greek oil flasks in their searches for Incan chicha vessels? As more Quechua speakers or Andean-based communities and museums seek information online about Incan and pre-Incan digital cultural heritage, the Greek standard lexicon grows more dated, illogical, and insulting. Accordingly, in the meantime, perhaps a digital addendum could be added to the aryballos title, with the real name urpu. Perhaps the old title could be kept as illustrative of Indigenous erasure in action (and to maintain discoverability in the meantime), while being layered alongside the accurate term. Frankly, such metadata layering offers a lesson in itself on colonialism, its structural limitations—and epistemic erasures: Eurocentrism 101.

That most remaining urpus (and khipus) live in museums far from their Andean origin begs questions of repatriation. In the meantime, the urpus’ erroneous metadata remain an obstacle to cultural recovery—yet perhaps also an opportunity. These ancient liquid containers contain so much invaluable culturally specific knowledge. They also carry key lessons on why and how to move beyond Eurocentric referents altogether. Let’s drink deep!

——
The Metadata Learning and Unlearning series was originally published on Medium.com and edited by Sharon Mizota, Virginia Poundstone, and Garrett Graddy-Lovelace. This series raises questions and makes proposals for what metadata can do to advance a broader dialogue about diverse worldviews within open education and openGLAM realms.