“Formas de historiar”: The Areíto between the repertoire and the archive of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés

This study considers the representation and interaction of the written archive and the sonic repertoire in Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’s General and Natural History of the Indies (1535). Focusing on Oviedo’s well-known descriptions of the Indigenous areíto, I show how the corrections in one of his extant manuscripts attest to the limits of the “archive” and the superiority of the “repertoire” as, in his words, “formas de historiar” [ways of telling history]. Oviedo also shows how the Spanish interpreted the sounds of Indigenous performance in the Caribbean with suspicion, even as they used their own performative practices as a ruse to achieve violent ends. Ultimately, this essay finds Spanish writing about sonic encounters in the New World to be not entirely successful in the effort to build distinctions and hierarchies between European and Indigenous cultures, as well as between an enduring archive and an ephemeral repertoire.