Drinking on the Pre-mises: The K’ulta “Poem”

Abstract

In the Bolivian settlement of K’ulta (pronounced with a short k, like a guillotine softly lopping off the tongue), the distinctions between reading and writing, between writing and orality, and even between a book and a drinking bender, while not totally blurred, are unstable and, at times, impossible to pin down. So the North American anthropologist Thomas Abercrombie suggests, testing these limits (if not the guillotine) in “Pathways of Memory in a Colonized Cosmos: Poetics of the Drink and Historical Consciousness in K’ulta.”¹