The Nahua NewsletterWith support from the Department of Anthropology
Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne
Alan R. Sandstrom, Editor
A Publication of the Indiana University
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
February 1994, Number 17
The Nahua Newsletter
With support from the Department
of Anthropology
Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne
Alan R.
Sandstrom, Editor
A Publication of the Indiana
University
Center for Latin American
and Caribbean Studies
Welcome to the spring 1994 issue of the Nahua Newsletter, now in its ninth year of publication. The newsletter is designed to facilitate communication and cooperation among the world's scholars and students who are interested in the culture, language, and history of Nahuatl-speaking peoples. In this issue we have an addendum to the list of dissertations on Nahua-related subjects published in the last issue, news items, book reviews, and a directory update. In the fall issue we will reprint the entire directory with current addresses of all subscribers.
As loyal readers of the Nahua Newsletter well know, we publish on a shoestring and so member contributions are of critical importance to our continuance. The newsletter is sent without charge to nearly 350 individual and institutional subscribers in 15 countries. This is a service that we would like to preserve if at all possible. If you have been meaning to send along a contribution but have put it off, please consider doing so now. Every donation is applied to the costs of producing the newsletter. Any amount is welcomed and all contributions are tax deductible. It is the generosity of readers of past issues that makes the current one possible.
In order to increase efficiency and reduce costs, we have moved operations for printing and mailing the newsletter from Bloomington, Indiana, home of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, to Fort Wayne, Indiana, academic home of the editor. The Center will continue to sponsor and partially finance the newsletter but like all entities in the state system of higher education, it is facing funding limitations. Therefore, we must rely increasingly on readers to take up the slack.
We have taken several cost-cutting measures that will help ease the crisis. University printing services are substantially less expensive in Fort Wayne. We are also instituting bar-coded zip codes for domestic U.S. mailings, which reduces bulk mailing costs. In addition, we are taking advantage of a new lower-cost service offered by the U.S. Post Office for foreign mailings. The new rates cut postage expenses for overseas mailings by over two-thirds. The only drawback is that foreign subscribers will have to wait about a week longer than before to receive their newsletters. In all, we have managed to reduce costs without reducing quality or quantity. If anybody has additional suggestions for helping with our financial situation we would be very happy to hear them.
We continue to offer a complete run of back issues of the newsletter for those who wish to complete their collection. The cost is a modest $20 for issues one through 16 and all revenue supports future issues.
Please send correspondence, checks, news items, or suggestions to:
Alan R. Sandstrom, Editor
Nahua Newsletter
Department of Anthropology
Indiana-Purdue University Fort Wayne
2101 Coliseum Blvd. East
Fort Wayne, Indiana 46805
If the material you wish to appear in the Nahua Newsletter exceeds a few lines, please send it on a 3.5-inch disk saved in WordPerfect, or as an ASCII text file. This saves the editor the task of retyping and helps insure the accuracy of your communication.
(1) William O. Autry writes that the American Society for Ethnohistory will hold its 1994 annual meeting in the Radisson Tempe Mission Palms Hotel in Tempe, Arizona. He has issued a call for papers, organized sessions, special events, and speakers that treat any world area. Abstracts of 50 to 100 words on appropriate submission forms and preregistration fees of $45 (non-members), $35 (members), and $15 (students/retired) are due by June 1, 1994. For submission forms, write to ASE Program Chair, Dr. Peter Iverson, Department of History, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-2501; telephone: (602) 965-5778; fax: (602) 965-0310. Limited travel funds will be available on a competitive basis for students presenting papers. Lengthier abstracts will be required. Please write to the program chair for further details.
In another note, the 1993 Awards Committee of the American Society for Ethnohistory is pleased to announce the recipients of the Society's Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin and Robert F. Heizer awards. For the best book length work in ethnohistory, the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize was awarded to James Lockhart (Department of History, UCLA) for his book The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. The book was published in 1992 by Stanford University Press. Members of the 1993 selection committee were Kathleen Bragdon, chair (College of William and Mary), Michael D. Green (University of Kentucky), and Jennifer S.H. Brown (University of Winnipeg).
For the best article in the field of ethnohistory, the Robert F. Heizer Prize was awarded to John Steckley (Native American Studies, University of Sudbury) for his article "The Warrior and the Lineage: Jesuit Use of Iroquoian Images to Communicate Christianity." The article was published in Ethnohistory 39(4):478-509 (Fall 1992). Members of the 1993 selection committee were Mary Druke Becker, chair (Newberry Library), Robert M. Hill II (University of Texas, San Antonio), and John F.S. Phinney (Southern Methodist University).
For any additional information on these matters, please contact William O. Autry, Secretary/Treasurer, American Society for Ethnohistory, P.O. Box 917, Goshen, IN 46527-0917.
(2) Sarah Cline (Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara) has recently published The Book of Tributes: Early Sixteenth-Century Censuses from Morelos as part of the UCLA Latin American Center Nahua Studies Series. The publication is a transcription, translation, and extensive analysis of a volume of the oldest known larger corpus of written Nahuatl. The Morelos censuses, done ca. 1540, provide rich material on the social, economic, political, and cultural situation of two Nahua communities.
The Book of Tributes, is the earliest major collection in Nahuatl of person-by-person, field-by-field household counts. The texts provide a unique statistical base, multiple examples of early Nahuatl sociopolitical terms, an illustration of the Nahuatl language still hardly touched by Spanish, and much human flavor in a time less than a generation after first contact. The significance of the Morelos censuses is widely recognized by ethnohistorians and anthropologists. Parts of the material have been made available, but until now none of it had appeared in an English edition. The present work contains the transcription and translation of one whole volume of the originals, plus an extensive analysis. It is the first complete volume to be published. The analysis includes thorough examination of household structures, tribute items and categories, as well as baptismal information -- a topic of broad significance previously left untouched.
Nahuatl Studies Series, Number 4. Series Editor: James Lockhart; Associate Editor: Rebecca Horn. 1993, 328 pp. ISBN 0-87903-082-8. $18.95 paper. Phone, fax, credit card, and mail orders accepted.
Order from: UCLA Latin American Center
10343 Bunche Hall
405 Hilgard Avenue
University of California
Los Angeles, CA 90024-1447
Telephone: (310) 825-6634; fax: (310) 206-6859
E-mail: trujill@others.sscnet.ucla.edu
Simultaneously, Cline has published "The Spiritual Conquest Reexamined: Baptism and Christian Marriage in Early Sixteenth-Century Mexico," Hispanic American Historical Review 73(3):454-82 (1993), which analyzes the baptismal and Christian marriage data from all three volumes of the Morelos censuses.
(3) Peter Tschol writes from Germany, "I have recently published "13 Rohr [1479 A.D.] Es setzte sich auf den Thron Calizto, der nur 80 Tage regierte" in Mexicon XV(6):115-18 (December 1993). The theme is the known anomaly in the "Anales de Cuautitlan" regarding a precolonial ruler of Cuitlahuac with the Spanish name Calizto. The most prominent and far-reaching explanation of this anomaly introduced by Kirchhoff and elaborated by Davies involved a different correlation "Cuitlahuac A" with the equation 13 acatl = 1519. There are internal conflicts with this interpretation and an inspection of the data reveals that a whole group of entries on the sequence of rulers of Cuitlahuac based on the reign of Calizto is misplaced. The problem results in Ixotomahuatzin dying 25 years before ascending to the throne! Thus, what Kirchhoff reported as the cornerstone of his multicorrelational model is misplaced by one circle: 13 acatl = 1479 + 52 years. The moral once again is that we need theory for understanding, but it will never replace the data."
(4) John Bierhorst writes, "Elsa Ziehm, linguist and ethnomusicologist, died October 15, 1993, at the age of 82. She had been living in Berlin. As the last in a long line of Berlin Nahua scholars that began with Eduard Seler and continued through Walter Lehmann and Gerdt Kutscher, she was best known for her three-volume edition entitled Nahua-texte aus San Pedro Jícora in Durango (1968-76) based largely on texts that had been collected earlier by Konrad T. Preuss. In her later years, Ziehm taught Nahuatl at the Latin American Institute of the Free University of Berlin. Her hand-corrected copy of the Nahua-Texte and a copy of her unfinished manuscript "Grammatik und Vokabular der Nahua-Sprache von San Pedro Jícora in Durango" are in the possession of John Bierhorst."
(5) Doctoral Dissertations on the Nahuas and Related Subjects: Take II
John M. Weeks writes, "Publication of 97 dissertation titles relating to the Nahua-speakers in the Nahua Newsletter (No. 16, November 1993) prompted several letters from readers. Two comments brought to my attention the omission of eleven dissertations from the University of Pittsburgh. Further search of existing electronic and other data bases revealed additional dissertations as well as theses omitted from the first list. There are probably many other titles that have not yet been identified. Some graduate institutions do not submit dissertation information to University Microfilms International, and geographical or ethnic subject tracings are often inadequate to identify some titles, while bibliographic information for non-United States dissertations is usually difficult to obtain. However, future lists of Nahua-related dissertations and theses will be submitted to the Nahua Newsletter as these titles are identified. I would appreciate any omissions being brought to my attention."
Please communicate further additions to John M. Weeks, Subject Bibliography Unit, 5 Wilson Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455; telephone: (612) 624-5860; fax: (612) 626-9353; Internet: j-week@vml.spcs.umn.edu.
Arnold, Philip P. 1992. The matter of understanding: ritual ecology and the Aztec Tlalocan landscape. University of Chicago Divinity School. 263 p. Bell, Karen E. 1992. Kingmakers: the royal women of ancient Mexico. University of Michigan. 244 p. Chick, Garry E. 1980. Concept and behavior in a Tlaxcalan religious officeholding system. University of Pittsburgh. 260 p. Custodio Lopez, Gerardo. 1991. The event of Guadalupe as a model of acculturation. M.A., Catholic Theological Union at Chicago. 214 p. Dvorak, Trisha R. 1974. Encounter with the gods: Mexican mythology and the Spanish language student. M.A., University of Texas at Austin. 79 p.
Elzey, Wayne. 1974. The mythology of the ages of the world: the significance of cosmic cycles among the Aztecs. University of Chicago Divinity School. 252 p. Erdman, Harley M. 1991. Nahuatl performances and performers: theatrical activity in pre-Columbian Mexico. M.F.A., University of Texas at Austin. 119 p. Hicks, Elizabeth E. 1979. Nahuatl-Spanish bilingualism and ethnic attitudes in different communities: a comparison. M.A., University of Texas. Hoffman, Harold M. 1983. Primary schooling in rural Tlaxcala, Mexico. University of Pittsburgh. 425 p. Kellogg, Susan M. 1979. Social organization in early colonial Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco: an ethnohistorical study. University of Rochester. 282 p. Kosuda, Kathleen L. 1993. Selected art forms used in the conversion of a sixteenth century Mesoamerican indigenous population to Catholicism. M.L.A., University of South Florida. 87 p. Luckenbach, A. 1979. The implications of Nahua lexical diversity for Mesoamerican culture-history. M.A., University of Kentucky. 108 p. McGeorge, Susan. 1991. Ambivalence toward twins: an ethnography of twinning in Tlaxcala, Mexico. University of Pittsburgh. Markov, Gretchen K. 1983. The legal status of Indians under Spanish rule. University of Rochester. 581 p. Mouille, David R. 1972. The Aztec priesthood: priesthood as the cause of social unification. S.T.M., General Theological Seminary, New York. 98 p. Mulhare, Eileen M. 1986. Occupation and choice: the women of Totimehuacan, Mexico. University of Pittsburgh. 736 p. Murphy, Timothy D. 1984. San Miguel Canoa: the structure of marriage, family, and kinship. University of Pittsburgh. 341 p. Pohman, Lenora K. 1993. The rise of the hummingbird: explaining the Mexica's political expansion and dominance of the Valley of Mexico. B.A., Knox College. 66 p. Rothstein, Frances. 1974. Factions in a rural community in Mexico. University of Pittsburgh. 252 p. Slade, Doren L. 1973. The mayordomos of San Mateo: political economy of a religious system. University of Pittsburgh. 648 p. Stuart, James W. 1978. Subsistence ecology of the Isthmus Nahuat Indians of southern Veracruz, Mexico. University of California, Riverside. 408 p. Thiem, Paula M. 1992. The Aztec concept of the life and death cycles as represented in the visual arts, architecture and religion. M.L.A., University of South Florida. 126 p. Torres-Trueba, Henry E. 1970. Religious and economic implications of factionalism in Xalacapan: a study of some expressions of factionalism in a Mestizo-Indian community of Zacapoaxtla, Sierra Norte of Puebla, Mexico. University of Pittsburgh. 231 p. Vexler, Mona J. 1981. Chachahuantla, a blouse-making village in Mexico: a study of the socio-economic roles of women. University of California, Los Angeles. 446 p. Wilk, Stanley T. 1970. Salvador del Monte: a study of political economy. University of Pittsburgh. 313 p.
Agriculture, 21
Apparitions, 4
Architecture, 11, 22
Art, 11, 22
Bilingualism, 8
Christianity, 4, 11
Class, 20
Conflict, 19
Conversion, 11
Cosmology, 6, 22
Deities, 1, 4
Drama, 7
Ecology, 21
Economic organization, 16, 20, 23, 24
Education, 9
Ethnicity, 8
Factionalism, 23
Family, 17
Glottochronology, 12
Guadalupe, Our Lady of, 4
Enculturation, 4
Kinship, 10, 17
Land tenure, 14
Law, 14
Leadership, 19
Linguistics, 5, 8, 12
Marriage, 17
Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint, 4
Miracles, 4
Mythology, 5, 6, 11, 15, 22
Nican mopohua, 4
Peasants, 25
Political organization, 2, 3, 14, 18, 20, 25
Priesthood, 15
Religion, 1, 3, 4, 5, 11, 15, 20, 22, 23
Ritual, 1
Schools, 9
Social organization, 10, 17, 24
Textiles, 24
Texts, 4
Theater, 7
Tlaloc, 1
Twins, 13
Valeriano, Antonio, 4
Women, 2, 16, 24
Chachahuantla, 24
Chalma, 8
Chignautla, 20
Los Parajes, 8
Mazatecocho, 19
Salvador del Monte, 25
San Miguel Canoa, 17
Tenochtitlan, 10
Tlatelolco, 10
Tlaxcala, 3, 9, 13
Totimehuacan, 16
Veracruz, 21
Zacapoaxtla, 23
Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 4
General Theological Seminary, New York, 15
Knox College, 18
Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 24
Univ. of California, Riverside, 21
Univ. of Chicago, Divinity School, 1, 6
Univ. of Kentucky, 14
Univ. of Michigan, 2
Univ. of Pittsburgh, 3, 9, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 25
Univ. of Rochester, 10, 14
Univ. of South Florida, 11, 22
Univ. of Texas at Austin, 5, 7, 8
Blood Ties: Life and Violence in Rural Mexico. By James B. Greenberg. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989. Pp. viii+282. $14.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8165-1379-1.
Violence in rural Mexico is a topic that has received considerable attention during the past generation, but never with the insight and sophistication that James B. Greenberg demonstrates in his description and analysis of this phenomenon among the Chatino Indians and Mestizo population of the district of Juquila in the state of Oaxaca. Greenberg's account is not only analytically stimulating but descriptively engaging and pleasurable to read, the kind of ethnography, rare nowadays, that is properly committed without sacrificing objectivity. One of the things that impresses me most about this book is that although Greenberg identifies himself -- as all good ethnographers do -- with his subjects, he remains scrupulously objective in presenting a fair assessment of violence in the region and the causes that entail it.
The book is divided into two parts. Part One records the life and tribulations of Don Fortino, one of those rare informants with which ethnographers are occasionally blessed: sophisticated, insightful, articulate, and desirous to make his culture understood to an outsider. Of mixed Chatino and Mestizo parentage, Don Fortino's life history is a gripping account of the confrontation of traditional Indian culture and society and the outside capitalist world. It provides Greenberg with a diachronic body of data extending from the turn of the century to 1986, which chronicles not only the most important events and experiences of Don Fortino's life, but also a vivid panorama of the anatomy of violence as the region's reaction to outside forces unleashed by the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. The account may also be regarded as the testimony of many Chatino lives and how they react and adapt to and cope with an encroaching foreign world. Part One, in a nutshell, presents the basic human elements and predicaments that configurates the matrix of violence and its antecedents positioned for analysis with maximal effect.
Part Two constitutes the analysis of violence: its explanation, the forms it takes, its historical antecedents, and the ideology that underlies it. One of the most valuable chapters of the book is concerned with the various explanations of violence that have been formulated by anthropologists, as well as Don Fortino's own. With respect to the latter, the contexts of conflict and violence and the main variables (land, class and ethnicity, guns, alcohol, machismo, personal character, and ideology) involved are ably interdigitated and the explanations that emerged are equitably assessed. In interpreting these folk explanations, Greenberg is admirably aware that conflict and violence are not exclusively triggered and perpetuated by external forces to the region, but they also reflect the values and ideology of local culture and society. With respect to the former, Greenberg assesses the various theories that have been employed in Mesoamerica to explain violence (stemming from the psychological, structural, and cultural idealist positions) and rightly finds them wanting or inadequate. He settles for the historical approach as the most likely to generate adequate explanations of the upsurge of violence in the region during recent generations.
Beginning with pre-Hispanic forms of domination, Greenberg describes and analyses Colonial, Republican, and contemporary forms of exploitation that have affected the region. In this historical analysis he makes several important points that should be heeded by anthropological ethnohistorians working in Mesoamerica, which may be summarized as follows. First, and most encompassing, the several transformations undergone by regional culture and society for more than 450 years have not been passive. Rather, every confrontation between the Chatino and outside world has produced actions and reactions, as economic, social, religious, and political inputs from the outside have been differentially internalized and reinterpreted. Second, the effects of centuries of domination and exploitation have perpetuate a local communal, egalitarian ideology and imago mundi in sharp contrast to the contemporary individualistic and stratified world view of the Mestizo world centered on capitalism. Third, it is in the interplay of these conflicting ideologies that the roots of conflict and violence are to be sought. Moreover, the adaptations that the folk society has made vis-à-vis the external world has also been conditioned by the conflicting ideologies, whose main functions are to protect a traditional way of life and to fend against undue interference. Finally, Greenberg is well aware, particularly envisaged in the Afterward of the book, that the ultimate transformation is on its way, as Chatino society is slowly being incorporated into a Oaxacan version of the national culture. Or, as I would put it, the traditional Indian-Mestizo dichotomy of the district of Juquila, like Tlaxcala at the turn of the century, is being transformed into the modern Indian-Mestizo continuum.
The last two chapters of the book deal respectively with the ideology of violence and forms of conflict. Here again Greenberg makes a number of significant points. On the one hand, he analyzes conflict and violence as the entailment of contradictions between the Chatino moral order and Mestizo capitalism, and he highlights the high toll violence exacts from the people in terms of loss of life and property, anxiety, and suffering. On the other hand, he specifies the domains of conflict that lead to violence in the manifold contexts of family life, the social structure, political concerns, and economic interests. The analysis illustrates both the traditional imago mundi, as a force for preserving the cultural integrity of the Chatino, and the insidious effect of Mestizo capitalism, as a force that is accelerating the process of integration into the national culture.
In summary, this is an outstanding, very rewarding book to read. It makes one reflect on old problems and think of new ways of looking at the painful transition that Mesoamerican Indians have been undergoing in the XX century. For example, it has made me reflect and ask why Tlaxcala, since before 1900, has been transformed from a traditional Indian society into a kind of rural proletariat without the conflict and violence that is still so prevalent in the district of Juquila. And it has made me think of alternate ways of conceptualizing the transition from situations in which the Indian-Mestizo dichotomy obtains to the modernized-secularized context of the Indian-Mestizo continuum. It should elicit similar reactions from anthropologists and other social scientists working in Latin America. I most strongly recommended Greenberg's book to students of violence, change, and modernization everywhere.
Hugo G. Nutini
University of Pittsburgh
La Psalmodia Christiana editada hoy por Arthur J. O. Anderson es un libro importante de Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. Sabemos que el famoso franciscano, nacido en 1499 o 1500 en España pasó a la Nueva España en 1529. A partir de 1547, en Tepepulco, región tezcocana, empezó a reunir la materia que iba a formar la "Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España." Entre 1558 y 1561, mientras seguía trabajando en la "Historia General," redactó varias obras en náhuatl destinadas a la evangelización de los indios: la Postilla, que contiene evangelios del año, y la Psalmodia Christiana, que ofrece cantares o cánticos para los indios en las fiestas del año. Más tarde, Sahagún acompletó su obra evangelizadora con los Coloquios y Doctrina cristiana y varios sermones.
De todas estas obras de Sahagún, la Psalmodia Christiana fue la única publicada antes de nuestros días. Desde 1564, empezó a circular en forma de manuscrito con la licencia del virrey, y Pedro Ocharte la sacó a luz en 1583. De esa fecha en adelante, el libro siguió en uso hasta el siglo XVIII y sobrevivió después en forma de copias en unas cuantas bibliotecas de Estados Unidos, México, y Madrid.
Si la Psalmodia Christiana, por haber sido el único manuscrito del gran franciscano publicado durante su vida, ocupa un lugar muy especial para los estudiosos de la obra de Sahagún, también presenta gran importancia por su contenido. En efecto, es conocido el interés de los primeros evangelizadores por el canto y el baile prehispánicos, cuyos temas nos han llegado bajo los títulos de Cantares Mexicanos y Romances de los Señores. Con su Psalmodia, Sahagún quiso aprovechar una parte de la poesía antigua y ponerla al servicio de la evangelización. Así es como el lector encontrará en los días de Navidad, de la Resurrección y de las estigmas de San Francisco unos cánticos detallando listas de flores, pájaros y turquesas, al estilo prehispánico.
Otro interés de la Psalmodia es ofrecer una de las primeras sino la primera traducción al náhuatl de vidas de santos. En efecto, el libro, empezando en enero y terminando en diciembre, proporciona cánticos para las fiestas de cierto número de santos del año (tres a nueve por més), en total 54 fiestas del año. Aquí se encuentran resumenes de las vidas de los santos más importantes en la tradición franciscana.
La edición de Arthur J. O. Anderson ofrece el texto original con una traducción excelente, y notas discretas y acertadas. La Psalmodia está precedida por un prefacio, una introducción y una bibliografía establecidas por Anderson. Aunque que no parezca muy clara la razón por la cual el editor sintió la necesidad de redactar un prefacio aparte de la introducción, ambas logran plantear el cuadro histórico y general. En efecto, se presentan la lista de las copias de la Psalmodia existentes en las bibliotecas del mundo, las circunstancias de su redacción, datos sobre las danzas prehispánicas y su representación en las primeras decadas después de la conquista, la poesía náhuatl y el lenguaje de la Psalmodia. La importancia del texto para un estudio general de la aculturación de la población indígena está útilmente subrayada y vías para la investigación futura están señaladas.
Por mi parte, pienso que, por ser cronológicamente uno de los primeros ensayos de traducción de vidas de santos, el libro proporciona una base para el estudio de sermones más tardíos. Traté una comparación con unos sermones anónimos del siglo XVII contenidos en el Manuscrito 58 de la Bancroft Library. En la página 1 de dicho manuscrito, se encuentra una vida de Santa Catarina, virgen y mártir, que se puede comparar con la vida de Santa Catarina contenida en las páginas 335-39 de la Psalmodia. En primer lugar, esa comparación pone de manifiesto que los cánticos de Sahagún no contienen un relato detallado de la vida de la santa, sino más bien un resumen y alabanzas. Al contrario, el manuscrito Bancroft 58 proporciona un relato detallado de la vida de la santa. Sin embargo, las dificultades de traducción han sido resueltas del mismo modo. Por ejemplo, el suplicio reservado a Santa Catarina por el emperador es estar molida entre cuatro ruedas cubiertas de clavos agudos, dos encima y dos abajo, dando vuelta en sentido contrario. Sahagún traduce tepuz-quauh-te-malacatl (ruedas de madera con hierro). Te-malacatl (literalmente, "huso de piedra") representaba antes de la conquista una rueda de piedra en la que se sacrificaban hombres a Xipe Totec. Quauh-te-malacatl se volvió después de la conquista la palabra designando una rueda de madera, sea de carreta o de molino. Por consecuencia, una rueda cubierta de puntas de hierro fue traducida por medio de la palabra tepuz-quauh-te-malacatl. El Ms Bancroft 58 proporciona una descripción más detallada, pero se apoya en la misma base: qui-chiua-s-que nauh-tetl quauh-te-malacatl tepoz-tlaxichti-ca (van a hacer cuatro ruedas de madera con clavos de hierro). Sigue una descripción del modo en que las ruedas giran (momalacachoa, término ya usado por Sahagún). Este es un ejemplo de los estudios sobre las traducciones, que se pueden hacer en base a la Psalmodia de Sahagún.
De modo general, el libro editado por Anderson es indispensable tanto para los estudiosos de la obra de Sahagún como para los nahuatlatos y todos los que preocupa la evangelización y la aculturación.
Danièle Dehouve
CNRS, Université Paris X
Tariacuri's Legacy: The Prehispanic Tarascan State is the result of many years of work by Helen Perlstein Pollard on the protohistoric and early historic Tarascans of the Patzcuaro basin in western Mexico. The results of her research have appeared steadily since the late 1970s and have been consistently excellent. The book, essentially a chronicle of the expansion of the Tarascan kingdom from less than 1,000 sq. km to an empire of more than 75,000 sq. km, is organized in eight chapters, plus an introductory essay and a series of descriptive appendices.
An introductory essay by Shirley Gorenstein, chairperson of Pollard's dissertation committee at Columbia University, offers the reader an excellent review of the development of archaeological and ethnohistorical research pertaining to the Tarascan region.
Chapter 1 considers the Tarascan kingdom in its temporal and spatial context, reviews the historical linguistics, available ethnohistorical and archaeological data available for the Tarascans, environmental setting, and modern ethnography.
Chapter 2 summarizes archaeological research conducted by Pollard and others at Tzintzuntzan, the Tarascan focal settlement situated on the edge of Lake Patzcuaro. Topics covered include settlement size and population, urban land use, identification of residential zones, manufacturing zones, and public zones. More sociological features rely less on archaeological remains but are extracted primarily from the Relación de Michoacan, and includes a discussion of kinship, family and lineage, internal spatial differentiation into wards and districts, and social classes.
Chapter 3 offers ecological description of the Late Patzcuaro basin and inserts a settlement study based on field investigations by Gorenstein and Pollard, other archaeological surveys, and ethnohistorical documentation. The chapter considers settlement location, size, and function, estimates population size and density, and reconstructs the protohistoric regional organization of the basin through an analysis of central-place functions.
Using primarily ethnohistorical information, Chapters 4 through 7 present a rather basic but static historical ethnography of the Tarascans. Chapter 4 outlines the spatial expansion of the Tarascan state from the Lake Patzcuaro basin to the frontier of the Aztec empire. The next chapter discusses the economic organization of the Tarascan state as a necessary precondition to support increased population size and density. Chapter 6 presents the political organization of the state, including territorial divisions, political power, class, and ethnicity. Finally, Chapter 7 explores the relationship of state religion and Tarascan intellectual tradition, including state level cults and deities, cosmology, calendrics, sacred geography, religious architecture, and art.
Chapter 8 places the Tarascan kingdom within the context of Mesoamerican prehistory and attempts an integration of the preceding sections of the volume. Pollard reviews Tarascan-Aztec political and economic relations, construction of Tarascan ethnicity, and the emergence of West Mexican civilization. The author acknowledges that a number of cultural features make the Tarascans an anomaly within Mesoamerica and, although as she herself admits, "The precise means by which Michoacan was transformed from a Mesoamerican periphery into a Mesoamerican core has yet to be understood."
The narrative is followed by a series of descriptive appendices. The first appendix summarizes results of an archaeological survey conducted by the author during the early 1970s. Many of the 120 site descriptions give little information beyond the existence of surface scatters and are referenced to a map too small to be useful. Appendices 2 and 3 include a type-variety analysis of pottery and lithic artifacts recovered from the settlement survey.
Helen Perlstein Pollard has produced another in a group of encyclopedic syntheses by presenting an extensive summary of available ethnohistorical and archaeological information pertaining to the Tarascans. Other examples of this genre include work on the Mixtec by Ronald Spores, Quiche by Robert Carmack, Tzutuhil by Sandra Orellana, and Pipil by William Fowler. Helen Perlstein Pollard's book offers a provocative challenge to archaeologists and ethnohistorians writing on Mesoamerican peoples. It calls for us to incorporate more fully ethnohistorical insights into archaeological reconstructions.
A vast and thorough piece of scholarship, the book is at the same time an accessible work for the nonspecialist. There is room for criticism: little attention is paid to the impact of political and economic changes outside the Tarascan area, and more might have been said in a traditional anthropological vein on processes of change in language, religion, and social organization. Historical sources available for the region are few when compared to other areas of Mesoamerica, such as central Mexico or the Maya region. The author relies almost exclusively on Fray Jeronimo de Alcala's Relación de las ceremonias y ritos y población y gobierno de los indios de la provincia de Michoacan. More discussion of the other historical sources would have been useful and appropriate. Despite these quibbles, Pollard's Tariacuri's Legacy is a welcome addition to the archaeological and ethnohistorical literature of late-prehispanic Mesoamerica.
John M. Weeks
University of Minnesota
This collection of essays on the encounter of European and native American civilizations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries presents serious attempts to use the techniques of literary analysis on historical events. All of these essays were previously published in the journal Representations. Following in the traditions of deconstruction and discourse analysis these authors have brought critical theories to bear on the writings of the participants in the European colonization of the Americas. The scope of the collection is large, ranging from Christopher Columbus' first comments on the newly discovered lands, to the conquest of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, to Raleigh, Camoes, and Jean de Lery. Of specific interest to scholars of Nahuatl are the essays by Inga Clendinnen, Rolena Adorno, Anthony Pagden, and David Damrosch.
In her work, "Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty: Cortes and the Conquest of Mexico," Inga Clendinnen studies the differing interpretations of the conquest of the Nahuas by the Spaniards. In particular she focuses on the characterization of Fernando Cortes by as disparate authors as William Hickling Prescott and Tzvetan Todorov. She explains that Prescott saw in Cortes "[t]he model of European man: ruthless, pragmatic, single-minded and...superbly rational...." On the other hand, Todorov characterized the Spanish commander as "practicing the art of adaptation and improvisation....A specialist in communication...." By comparison, Prescott's Aztecs and especially Moctezoma are "despotic, effete, and rendered fatally indecisive by the 'withering trait' of an irrational religion." For Todorov, the Aztecs represent the "other" but specifically their flaw was that "[d]ominated by a cyclical understanding of time, omen-haunted, they are incapable of improvisation in the face of the unprecedented Spanish challenge" (all p. 13).
Thus Prescott, in Clendinnen's analysis, suffered from a racial and cultural myopia which sympathized in the extreme with the Spaniards while Todorov, although thoughtful and "intellectually sophisticated," saw the defeat of the Aztecs as the result of a failure to communicate. Two quite differing visions indeed.
Clendinnen gives an admirable overview of the Conquest, synthesizing the numerous accounts. She goes on to note that most analyses of the Conquest have tended to focus on the first phase of the effort, that is up until the "Noche Triste" when Cortes and the Spanish were driven from Tenochtitlan. Clendinnen accepts this, but goes on to focus on the basic differences in warfare between the Spanish and Aztecs. As we know, Aztec warfare by the time of the arrival of the Spaniards had become largely stylized. Battles took place between largely equal parties. There was no honor in defeating a weaker opponent. Warriors would appear before a city and defenders come out to meet them. Should the attackers prove victorious they would then enter the city and set fire to the principal temple, capture and carry off the local deity, and plunder the city and its inhabitants. Eventually the defeated leaders would sue for peace, and a tribute relationship would be developed. Ambush was unthinkable. The Aztecs prepared physically and spiritually for battle and in general avoided killing the enemy on the field of battle, preferring to weaken an opponent until he could be carried away. Moreover the native weapons cut cleanly, usually allowing for a recovery.
By contrast the Spaniards used weapons that struck from a distance with little or no warning. They went about always prepared for battle. There was a preference for killing the opponent. Only in the plunder of the conquered city and destruction of the temple and deity did the Spaniards exhibit any similarity.
These differences resulted in an "endgame" which appealed to neither side. The Aztecs suffered a siege, which was unheard of in their rules of warfare. Cortes was forced to destroy the city in order to win it. The Tlaxcalans who were bound by the same cultural traditions as the Aztecs proceeded to slaughter the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan because they had lost their own cultural inhibitions in the war of conquest. What results for Clendinnen was just the consequence of an odd conversation in which neither side fully understood the other, and then reacted.
Rolena Adorno studies the narrative of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca in her essay "The Negotiation of Fear in Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios." The main thrust of the essays is that Cabeza de Vaca, as a result of his odyssey through the American southwest and northern Mexican frontier, came to a similar conclusion about the conversion of the natives as did Las Casas. Cabeza de Vaca through experience had seen that peaceful contacts with the natives usually rendered successful results -- in his case, he stayed alive. Also through eye-witness experience he saw the devastation and destruction wrought by Nuño de Guzman. Most interesting in Adorno's study was the means whereby Cabeza de Vaca and his companions at first were subject to the whims of the local natives but later became partners with one group, and finally became an independent entity themselves. Critical in this process was the Spaniards' ability to effect cures. On the whole this is an excellent and fascinating essay. One inaccuracy however is rather glaring. Adorno in comparing Cabeza de Vaca with Las Casas states that the latter "was a layman when he undertook his 1521 peaceful conversion experiment in Cumana" (p. 71). Las Casas was a priest even before his spiritual conversion and entrance into the Dominican order.
In dealing with Las Casas, Anthony Pagden, in his essay "Ius et Factum: Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolome de las Casas" takes a look at the vocabulary of cultural conquest. In the writings of Las Casas, Pagden sees two essential tenets: "that the Indians were 'men like us,' and that only those 'who had been there' could possibly have any significant understanding of American and its inhabitants" (p. 89). He therefore sought to establish his voice as the true authority on conditions in the New World and his texts as the definitive writings. Those texts were in turn based on the established authorities of the Church and on his own first-hand experience. All of this then sought to establish once and for all that the natives enjoyed true humanity and all the rights and privileges thereunto appertaining.
David Damrosch in "The Aesthetics of Conquest: Aztec Poetry Before and After Cortes" treads ground that has already been examined by the likes of Angel María Garibay, Miguel León-Portilla, John Bierhorst, and others. Damrosch posits that Aztec poetics should not be seen as a contrast or "a respite from the harsh realities of Aztec political life" but rather "that Aztec aestheticism was in fact deeply implicated in the carrying through of Aztec imperial policy" (p. 139). In his analysis, Damrosch assumes that the major sources of Aztec poetry, the Cantares mexicanos and the Romances de los señores de la Nueva España, are products not purely of the period before 1520, but also of the period after. He holds that the poetry should be read bivalently as products of an oral tradition, subject to changes inherent in the Conquest, and then recorded later. Consequently the poetry manifests an image repertoire which is essentially pre-Conquest in nature. Given these assumptions, Damrosch then focuses on the displacement of the old Aztec pantheon by the Christian religion within the poetry.
What Damrosch finds is often the mere substitution of the old deities for the new Christian God, Mary, or parts of the Trinity. In other instances poems have been edited to note that references to the old deity should be read as references to God. In some cases the poetry seems to have been recast for the new religion, but in none as completely as Sahagún in his Psalmodia Cristiana. If the poems in the pre-Conquest era were used to maintain the imperial regime and the brutality it institutionalized, in the post-Conquest era the poems helped "to strengthen the resolve of a conquered people to resist their total destruction" (p. 154). At the same time the poems suffered from and reported on the destruction of the Aztec polity. The poems must then be read as multiple perspectives on past triumphs and present struggles.
The remaining essays deal with highland Peru, Brazil, and the British possessions in the Americas, and so are outside of the realm of the Nahuas. In general this is an excellent collection of essays. The authors are to be commended for bringing the skills of literary analysis to historical issues. They offer some important insights into the real issues of the conquest of the Americas, its effect on individuals, and how those effects changed the lives of people.
John Frederick Schwaller
Academy of American Franciscan History
Mexico, D.F.
The illustrations that appear in this issue were taken from The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico by Louise M. Burkhart (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989).
New Addresses
Walden Browne
8011 N. 7th St., Apt. 2067
Phoenix, AZ 85020
Cristina Boilès
4803 Papineau
Montreal, Quebec
H24 1Z7
CANADA
Esther Kimmel
Steindamm 28
20099 Hamburg
GERMANY
I am currently a student of Mesoamerican Studies at the University of Hamburg. My research interests include ethnohistorical studies on methods of conversion carried out by mendicant orders in Mexico (16th-17th centuries). My special interest lies in pictographic catechisms and I would appreciate hearing from other researchers with similar interests.
Kerstin Ladewig
Hertha-Feiner-Asmus-Steig 5
22303 Hamburg
GERMANY
I am a student of Mesoamerican studies at the University of Hamburg and I am trying to find out something about pre Hispanic measurements of soil qualities of Aztec fields. I hope to be able to draw conclusions about crop yields. I would like to know how many people could live on the different types of fields. I am especially interested in the chinampas of Tenochtitlan and would appreciate hearing from other persons with similar interests.
Bertha Ibarra Parle
North Harris College
2700 W.W. Thorne Drive
Houston, TX 77073
Ian G. Robertson
Department of Anthropology
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-2402
I am interested in the Nahuatl language an am currently involved in a Nahuatl study group at ASU led by John Chance and Walden Browne.
Douglas Smith
Department of Anthropology
Arizona State University
5237 E. Windsor
Phoenix, AZ 85008
Raoul Zamponi
Via Roma, n. 94
62100 Macerata
(0733) 30115 ITALY
I am a student of anthropology and very interested in the native languages and cultures of Mesoamerica and in particular Nahuatl linguistics. I would appreciate hearing from other researchers with similar interests.
Amos Segala
Directeur de recherche CNRS
Université de Paris X
Avenue de la République
92001 Nanterre FRANCE
Last updated: 11/29/07