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 1997, Number 23
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 February 1997 issue of the Nahua Newsletter. In these pages you will find announcements, book reviews, and an essay by Hugo Nutini that will be of interest to students and scholars with a focus on the Mesoamerican culture area. The NN continues to attract new subscribers and positive responses from its loyal readers. The sole purpose of the newsletter is to facilitate communication among people interested in the history, language, and culture of Nahuatl-speaking peoples and other groups in Mesoamerica. In the last issue, we published a complete directory of subscribers, which resulted in a number of people sending in address updates or corrections. These changes are listed at the end of the newsletter under Directory Updates.
Long-time readers know that the NN comes out twice a year, in November and February. We publish announcements of coming events, calls for information or cooperation, accounts of current research findings, and brief summaries of research projects. Please take a moment and write to the address listed below and inform your colleagues of your activities. The NN is an excellent way to get your name out to the people who count. We have a targeted audience of over 370 subscribers who live in 15 countries. If your statement is longer that a few words, please send it on a 3.5-inch diskette using WordPerfect software or saved as an ASCII text file. This both saves the labor of retyping and insures the accuracy of your communication.
In appreciation of their service to Nahua scholarship, we acknowledge the following individuals who have published reviews in the NN, from issue Number 21, February 1996, to the present issue. Thank you all.
Norman W. Bradley
Richard Bradley
Gordon Brotherston
Louise M. Burkhart
George M. Foster
Yolotl González Torres
Michel Graulich
Byron E. Hamann
Cindy Vandenbergh Hull
John M. Ingham Barry L. Isaac
Cecelia F. Klein
Luis Leal
Eileen M. Mulhare
Frances A. Rothstein
Doren L. Slade
Russell Salmon
Alan R. Sandstrom
David Shaul
Gregory F. Truex
Thanks to the generous donations of our readers we have sufficient funds in the NN account to cover this and part of next November's issue. The NN is sent free of charge to interested parties and we must rely on donations to cover the expenses of printing and mailing. About one third of our subscribers live outside of the U.S., and it is the cost of mailing the NN abroad that takes up most of the annual budget. We want to keep the NN truly international and so reaching these subscribers is crucially important to our mission. If you can afford it, please send a check to help preserve the sense of community felt among scholars and students interested in Mesoamerica. Send checks made out to "Nahua Newsletter" to the address below. All funds are used to offset the expense of printing and mailing the newsletter - there are no administrative costs.
Please forward all communications or donations to:
Alan R. Sandstrom, NN Editor
Department of Anthropology
Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne
2101 Coliseum Blvd. East
Fort Wayne, IN 46805
(1) GRANT AWARDED: Alan Sandstrom would like to announce that he will be on sabbatical next year and has received an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Research Fellowship for 1997-1998. He will return with his wife, Pamela Effrein Sandstrom, and their 14-year-old son, Michael, to Mexico to continue long-term ethnographic field work in a Nahua community in the municipio of Ixhuatlán de Madero, northern Veracruz. The title of the project is "Milpa Horticulture and the Transformation of the Mexican Economy." The research will focus on the changing place of the milpa in Nahua culture in response to the recent amendment of Mexican agrarian law. The next issue of the Nahua Newsletter will be sent to you from the field. Please continue to mail all correspondence to the editor's university address, and mail will be forwarded to Mexico.
(2) CALL FOR PAPERS: 14th International symposium on Latin American Indian Literatures, July 14-18, 1997, Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, Lima, Peru.
Topics may be drawn from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art, astronomy, architecture, bibliography, codices, history, indigenista literature, linguistics, literary studies, medicine, religion, rock art, etc., and must be clearly related to indigenous literatures. Delivery time will be 30 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion.
To be considered for participation, please send a 150-200 word abstract in Spanish or English. To make your paper more accessible to students and colleagues in Peru, please deliver your presentation in Spanish, if possible. Send abstracts to: Monica Barnes, Program Chair, 377 Rector Place 11J, New York, New York 10280, U.S.A. E-mail to 103225.12@compuserve.com. The deadline for the receipt of abstracts was February 28, 1997 [write for further information about late receipts]. Each abstract will be evaluated as it as received and notification will be sent as soon as possible.
Include your name, complete address, phone number, fax, and e-mail address. Dues for 1997 of US $25.00 ($5.00 for students or retirees) must accompany the abstract, plus the symposium fee of US $100.00 ($40.00 for students or retirees). If this presents difficulties, contact the Program Chair. Make a single check payable to LAILA/ALILA.
Papers will be evaluated by three referees and if quality warrants, chosen for inclusion in our series of published symposia papers. Instructions for submission will be distributed at the meeting.
The conference will include a half-day excursion to the site of Pachacamac, south of Lima. Two optional excursions are planned, one to Chiclayo on Peru's North Coast (Sipan and Tucume archaeological sites, site museums, Rock art site, Brunning Museum, towns of Chiclayo and Lambeyeque, Brujería market, traditional music and food (July 19-21) and to Chachapoyas where the U.P.C.A. is conducting research (July 23-25). Prices and detailed itineraries will be sent with acceptance letters. Information about lodging, meals, and transportation will be sent with acceptance notices.
(3) CALL FOR PAPERS - NOTICE OF MEETING DATES. The NN received the following notice from Frederic W. Gleach, Secretary-Treasurer of the American Society for Ethnohistory:
The American Society for Ethnohistory will hold its 1997 Annual Meeting in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, November 13-16, 1997. Papers, organized sessions, special events, or speakers treating any world area are encouraged. Abstracts of 50-100 words on appropriate submission forms and pre-registration fees of US $40 (for regular participants), US $20 (for student or retired participants), or N $40 (for Mexican participants) are due by June 6, 1997. Write for submission forms and return to either of the organizers:
William O. Autry, 1997 ASE Program Co-Chair, P.O. Box 917,
Goshen, IN 46527-0917
e-mail:billoa@goshen.edu / voice: 219-535-7402 / fax: 219-535-7660;
or
Jesús Monjarás, Director de Ethnohistoria,
INAH, Paseo de la Reforma y Calz. Gandhi, Col. Polanco, CP 11560,
México D.F., México.
Limited travel funds will be available on a competitive basis for students presenting papers. More detailed abstracts will be required. Please write to William O. Autry at the above address for application forms and further details.
(4) MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT: The 20th Annual Midwest Conference on Mesoamerican Archaeology and Ethnohistory will be held Saturday, March 15, 1997, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, West Conference Room, 4th Floor, Rackham Building. This year's conference is sponsored by the International Institute, Rackham School of Graduate Studies. This informal meeting is well worth attending if you would like to hear high-quality papers on a wide variety of topics and rub shoulders with fellow Midwestern Mesoamericanists. For more information, contact Laura Villamil by e-mail at villamil@umich.edu.
(5) NEW PUBLICATION: The University of California Press announces publication of The Public Historian special issue on "Representing Native American History," Volume 18, Number 4.
This special issue is edited by Clara Sue Kidwell, Director of the Native American Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma, and Ann Marie Plaine, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Gathering voices from a range of academic disciplines and nonacademic professions, this impressive 218-page volume responds to one of the most important issues facing historians of the United States: creating complex histories of intercultural contact.
Six essays consider how museums, monuments, and public parks must address their historical role in glorifying Euro-American civilization, including the conquest of indigenous peoples, and presenting artifacts of Native Americans as devoid of history. Grassroots American Indian activists in the 1960s and 1970s worked to reclaim national shrines and holidays. Their efforts have challenged public historians to re-present American Indian histories for audiences unaware of new interpretations of past events. Although the essays focus on American Indians, the authors raise issues that public historians face every day - the reconciling of a plethora of diverse public mythologies and ideologies in the presentation of history.
Published by the University of California Press for the National Council on Public History, Representing Native American History follows in The Public Historian's eighteen-year tradition of bringing readers a range of perspectives on public history sectors, including museums, archives, cultural resources management, corporate biography, historic preservation, public policy, and federal, state, and local history.
This issue of TPH includes over ten book reviews, review essays, and reviews of museum exhibits. Review copies are available upon request. Address single issue orders and subscription orders to: The Public Historian, University of California Press, 2120, #5812, Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720-5812. You can reach us by e-mail: journal@garnet.berkeley.edu, or for more information, visit our Website at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu:8080/ucalpress/journals. Please address editorial correspondence to Lindsey Reed, Managing Editor, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410 / e-mail:LREED@descartes.ucsb.edu. Visit the National Council for Public History Website at http://www.iupui.edu/it/ncph/ncph.html.
In writing Healing with Plants, Margarita Kay has a dual goal in mind, the first applied, and the second scholarly. The applied goal is in the early medical anthropology tradition, exemplified by Benjamin Paul"s 1955 Health, Culture and Community and Lyle Saunders 1954 Cultural Difference and Medical Care. That goal is to make available cultural information that enables health-care personnel working in cross-cultural settings better to understand the medical beliefs and behavior of their clients. Thus she writes, "Health-care providers need to appreciate how culture affects what their patients do about health-care problems. They should become acquainted with the alternative therapies that are sought.... and should have facts that can help them decide whether to incorporate such therapies or advise against them.... This book is addressed particularly to those who see themselves as medical cultural brokers, facilitating and clarifying communication between.... physicians, pharmacists, therapists, and especially nurses - and their patients" (p. 5). However, the author cautions readers that Healing with Plants should not be used as a guide to treatment: "first, the information is insufficient to allow the health-care provider to prescribe any of the plant medicines as treatment, and second, in no way is the material suitable for the lay person to initiate self-treatment" (p. 11).
Kay's scholarly goal is to identify the 100 genera of plant remedies she feels are - or were in the past - most commonly used in the American and Mexican West, and to provide basic information such as scientific names, species used, their place of origin, present and past medical uses, the known activity of plant constituents, and their toxicity. This section (Part 2 of the book) takes up nearly two-thirds of the text (pp. 79-272). For most anthropologists these pages will be of particular interest since they deal with long-standing concerns such as the place of origin (Spanish or indigenous New World?) of many traits in Mexico, as well as the acculturative processes whereby classical humoral beliefs and practices and native New World counterparts were melded into a single medical system.
Part l of Healing with Plants is comprised of four relatively brief chapters that provide the context for the plant data proper. Chapter l, "Ethnohistory," identifies the region Kay calls the "American and Mexican West," roughly, the area south of the Gila River, west of the Rio Grande, north of the Rio Sinaloa, and east of the Pacific Ocean. The peoples concerned include, in addition to Mexican-Americans in the United States, and Spanish-speaking Mexicans in Mexico, native peoples whose languages are Piman, Tepehuan, Yaqui, Mayo, Tarahumara, Warijio, Ópata, Seri and Paipai.
In Chapter 2, "Plants, Their Names, and Their Actions," the author lists the 100 plant genera in tabular form, their presence among the above-mentioned groups, as well as pre Columbian occurrence in the Old or New World, and whether or not they were noted by 18th century writers. She discusses the difficulties in providing botanical names of Aztec plants, a task complicated by the fact that many genera are, and were, found both in the New and Old Worlds, with recorded medical uses.
In Chapter 3, "Illnesses Treated with Plants," Kay summarizes the ways in which plants are prepared and used as medicine, and the kinds of ailments for which they are used. Chapter 4, "Healing the Illnesses of Women and Children," covers much the same material, as applied to childbirth, fertility, abortion, menstrual problems, and the like.
Finally, to be noted is a short "Bibliographic Essay," which in conjunction with an admirably comprehensive bibliography, makes it possible to avoid endless footnoting in the text proper. This, in fact, is one of the joys of reading Healing with Plants. The author does not feel it necessary to cite every source on every occasion that data are drawn from it. The result is an uncluttered text that permits the reader to keep his or her mind on the main points being made. Would that more anthropologists would follow Margarita Kay's lead!
Most anthropologists will want to read all of Part l as well as the bibliographical essay. Part 2 is fascinating but not light reading; it lends itself to browsing rather than intensive scrutiny. But for the serious student of ethnohistory, it is a mine of information unparalleled in other readily available sources. Is a particular herb Old World or New World in origin? Or does the genus have both Old and New World representatives used medicinally? What humoral qualities were assigned to these remedies? Here one finds the answers.
I find much to praise in Healing with Plants and little to criticize. I do feel, however, that Kay might have gone a bit farther in explaining the logic underlying humoral theory. Whatever the origin of the "hot-cold" concept in the New World, it is the basic unifying theme inherent in popular Mexican ethnomedical theory, including Kay's data. As such, it deserves more than the short explanatory paragraph found on page 20. A page or two of description, including both historical data and contemporary ethnographic accounts, would go a long way in making clear the logic lying behind many beliefs and customs Kay mentions. For example (p. 67), we read that during their first menstruation girls must steer clear of "wrong diet" (i.e., "cold" foods) to avoid subsequent menstrual difficulties. Further, fear of "the potentially chilling effects of immersion in water [bathing, swimming, and washing of hair] were considered dangerous" to menstruating women. But the reader is given no hints as to why "cold" foods constitute wrong diet, nor why chilling effects of water are considered dangerous.
Yet when we realize that in all humoral systems blood is thought to be thermally and/or humorally hot, the logic becomes apparent. A normal quantity of blood in the body keeps one's temperature at the correct level. Loss of blood, through childbirth and menstruation, lowers a women's temperature to a point where she is particularly "at risk" from additional chilling insults in the form of "cold" foods as well as water, normally considered to be a cooling substance. By the same token, the popular perception that blood normally lost during menstruation is retained in the body during pregnancy, thus raising a woman's temperature to an "at-risk" point, explains many Mexican and Mexican American pregnancy beliefs.
Against the strong points in the book this is a minor criticism. Overall, Healing with Plants is extremely well researched, and full of fascination to the "medical cultural brokers" Kay sees as her major audience. And every anthropologist concerned with Mexican and Mexican American ethnomedicine will find much in this work that is of relevance to his or her studies.
George M. Foster
University of California, Berkeley
All ethnographies are stories we tell about the people we engage in the field. As such, they are also stories about our experience. Timothy Knab has offered us a complex and rewarding book, compellingly written in narrative form about his fieldwork, what these experiences meant to him, and how he came to understand Sierra Nahuat cosmology. With A War of Witches, Knab makes his first contribution to narrative anthropology (p. 224). Yet, this book is rather like the perennial elephant encountered by blind men on the road: some readers feel the trunk and some feel the tail but each believes that she or he has comprehended the entire beast. For this reader, an anthropologist and practicing psychoanalyst who has spent over twenty years doing research in the same region, the tale recounted by Knab is carefully crafted around a particular set of evocative experiences. These experiences center upon Knab's relationship with three main characters from a small community near Cuetzalan in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, disguised by the name "San Martín."
The two main protagonists are locally famous curanderos, healers who are also witches. The third is the tonal (soul) of a victim of witchcraft whose interactions with Knab occur in Knab's dreams. The curanderos, whom he calls Doña Rubia and Don Inocente, served as Knab's primary informants as they had for anthropologists preceding him. Knab's command of Nahuat facilitated his shrewd and willing instructors' task of teaching him to become a curandero and follow the "path of the ancestors." Doña Rubia and Don Inocente represented to Knab repositories of mysterious knowledge that seemed at times out of the reach of understanding even for the anthropologist-apprentice. At once an anthropological tale, a murder mystery, and a personal narrative, Knab has succeeded in writing an ethnographic novel that should be read by Nahuat specialists and will certainly entice anyone interested in witchcraft, fieldwork memoirs, or those curious about ancient and present-day Aztec peoples, especially those believing in the persistence of pre-Hispanic cosmology in the lives of Nahuat-speakers today. But this book is far more complex than that.
Seemingly an easy read, one must sift carefully through involuted layers of experience and hinted-at meanings as the reader is guided through images so vivid that one familiar with the Sierra Norte and its people is transported through the mist, back into the very mountains in which Knab's narrative unfolds. Although the story told is located in time during the 1970s and, as Knab informs us, involves fictionalized events aimed at enhancing the power of the narrative, the richness of ethnographic detail rests squarely upon Knab's twenty years of fieldwork in the Sierra. This account (written we only learn at the end of the book with Peter Shotwell, a professional writer and editor) narrates Knab's journey of discovery through which the reader can glimpse Knab's struggle with his own ethnocentrism. Knab chronicles his encounter with the "Ethnographic Other" by combining dialogue, narrating private musings and outright frightening experiences, and by recounting captivating dream sequences in which that encounter is epitomized. In Knab's choice of the narrative voice, his own vision of his existence falls neatly into perspective with his recounting of his story so that the reader, in turn, becomes immersed in the lived experience of the story being told.
Knab acts as our guide on dream journeys to Talocan, the underworld of the ancient Aztecs and a place very much alive for the people of San Martín. Through these dreams, Knab is challenged to question his assumptions about the nature of things. In dreaming of Talocan, the truths of Knab, Doña Rubia, and Don Inocente converge until Knab is inescapably confronted, in spite of himself, with questioning the absolute conviction of his own beliefs and the "validity" of the beliefs of others. Thus, implicit in the narrative is the juxtaposition of what one could call an empiricist reality (Thomas Jefferson's "true facts"), and subjective truth, that is, what is true in the reality (read experience) of the believer. In this way Knab's book is a portrait of the struggle facing all fieldworkers to reach beyond themselves and grasp the lives of those encountered.
Told in the first person and without introduction of any sort, we are immediately transported to the Sierra and find ourselves with Knab under the eaves of Don Inocente's house in the middle of a plot to murder a woman's son-in-law with candles dipped in herbs that will paralyze the young man's lungs. Don Inocente's agreement to perform this service reveals to Knab his identity as a witch, a secret kept from Knab during some seven years while Knab studied storytelling in San Martín. Almost immediately, Sanmartino cosmology comes alive to the reader.
A premise of justice is central in the organization of the Sanmartino world view and justifies to Sanmartinos, the place and efficacy of witchcraft in their lives. Justice is maintained through a form of reciprocal vengeance that ties the Lords of Talocan and those living on the Earth to each other: "When nobody likes someone, and there is much envy, the Lords can be tricked. They might help a man who seeks something that is not just.... He asks the Lords to take his victim's tonal. So if we help the Lords with something 'a bit evil,' something savage, the Lords do not object. If something a bit evil should befall someone who is unjust, or who is not living well, it just brings them more food there in the earth . . . . But if the witch has fooled the Lords, the one who was witched will later seek his own justice" (p. 155).
Doña Rubia has chosen to teach Knab to be a curer for reasons we discover as the plot unfolds. In his apprenticeship, Knab learns that his dreams can have significance. Dreaming is used in curing to enter and navigate the underworld in search of souls. He discovers that every witch is a curer but not every curer is a witch. He learns there are witches that are evil and seek personal gain, and witches who serve the collective good by following "the path" (respecting the cultural ideal) by aiding the Lords of Talocan in maintaining justice even through murder. Vengeance and justice are clearly inseparable ideological elements in the beliefs of Sanmartinos and recall the key cosmological premises of respect, reciprocity, balance, and harmony that intertwine to organize the beliefs and ritual practices I describe for Chignautla, a community not far away (Slade 1992).
When Doña Rubia suddenly falls gravely ill, Knab is summoned to the Sierra from Mexico City where he is teaching. Although Knab immediately searches for the "real" cause of her physical condition, which he suspects is bat disease, Rubia implores Knab to help search for the cause of her illness in the underworld. And because Rubia needs Knab to travel to Talocan she confronts him with his resistance to becoming a true believer, that is, with his interest in their beliefs rather than the fact of his believing: "You know only my words! You say them just the way I say the prayers, but you do not really pray; there is no reason that you pray" (p. 27). Sadly, he shies away from the difficulty of being even-handed in juggling multiple realities or truths, if you will. In curing a young girl who is believed to be suffering from soul loss, Knab initially attempts to and succeeds in identifying a physical explanation for her symptoms. In the narrative it is clear that soul loss is relegated to a secondary position in his mind. The curing rituals that Knab performs benefit only the Sanmartinos since their beliefs do not reflect reality for him. It appears that whenever an element of the story cannot be grounded empirically, the author begs the question of the story's believability. Knab offers us his position and then gives us his doubts: "These cloudy connections between the 'real' and the 'unreal' confused and amazed me. For the second time in the Sierra, but for different reasons, I was finding it hard to use 'metaphor' in my usual anthropological way" (p. 31).
Thus, a reluctant Knab is emotionally blackmailed into making sacrifices in a cave and running for his life from witches who chase him, even though for Knab, they exist only in his mind, while he tries to serve both Rubia, himself and the Lords of the underworld: "I wondered about the dark places in peoples' psyches where witches worked" (p. 107). Knab's immersion in healing practices and his desperate quest to save Rubia enhances his appreciation of the power of the specialized knowledge that witches control. He ponders how he has arrived at dreaming in the culturally stipulated manner for a curandero since he does not "believe in" such things: "It is strange to be told you would see certain things in a dream state and then see them. I had always thought of dreaming as a will-less state if I had thought about it at all" (p. 85).
Knab's investigations ultimately lead him to discover a more complete picture of witchcraft practices in spite of the reluctance of Sanmartinos to speak of such matters. Knab is horrified to discover that witches comprise a large segment of the population. He stumbles upon tales of multiple murders involving witchcraft, a war between factions of witches that spanned the 1920s into the 1930s and culminated with the crucifixion of a witch in front of the village church. Knab is driven to uncover the historical facts of these strange events. All the while, he is propelled by his struggle to provide a believable explanation for his experiences which he himself barely comprehends since he remains a nonbeliever in the very events that enticed and engulfed him. We learn that warring witches were an integral part of Sanmartino social life. In effect, witches always served to balance the tensions occurring between the haves and have-nots in Sanmartino society.
Knab neither directly interprets nor analyzes these happenings for the reader. His narrative does not wander far from the safety of the classic views of Evans-Pritchard (1937), and Kluckhohn (1944). After all that is said and done, witchcraft for Knab invariably boils down to something empirically knowable, which includes psychological states and sociological consequences. Knab skillfully portrays the disruptive force of witchcraft that allows individuals to manipulate each other to gain power. Armed with this academic truth about the nature of these practices and his knowledge of botany, Knab questions whether or not supernatural acts can indeed produce natural outcomes but never shares his thoughts on the matter with the reader. Instead, in his attempt to persuade, he falls back on literary devices such as "quizzical interrogatives," repeated declarations of intellectual innocence and deliberately naive questions that lend greater believability to his tale. We are left with a sense that these complex phenomena will be abandoned to Knab's greater existential quandary as to the nature of truth and believability. Apparently, Knab's dilemma does not escape his informants either, as we can see from the statement of Don Inocente on the last page of the book: "A witch is only a witch for one who does not understand the way of the Most Holy Earth" (p. 204). How Knab places believers and nonbelievers in opposition to each other within the narrative is most provocative.
In the last chapter, Knab supplies a history of San Martín set against a backdrop of Mexican history that provides a context for the narrative and adds credibility to his tale. Knab unravels the political and social forces that shaped life in the community. With the arrival of a powerful cacique complete with small army, San Martín was swept into the revolution and suffered the fate of many indigenous communities of the Sierra. The cacique established himself at a large coffee plantation near Cuetzalan and began a process of intimidation that would lead the villagers into poverty and a war of witches after an initial period of affluence. Sanmartinos fell prey to a typical form of profiteering. Purchase of goods from a "company store" resulted in debts that were to be repaid by indentured labor or transfer of land titles to the cacique. In this manner, corn production was replaced by the cash cropping of coffee, which necessitated the purchase of corn. Knab captures the corruption of local-level politics and the way individual Sanmartinos formed alliances and struggled to improve their lot. The events portrayed and characters drawn are recognizable. Knab portrays justice, communal harmony, and witchcraft as inextricably tied together in practice as they are in Sanmartino cosmology. Thus, the tale within a tale within a tale that weaves throughout the narrative provides either enjoyment or frustration for the reader as layers of meaning are obscured or unfold for those who allow themselves to be transported by the story.
If one asks of A War of Witches "Is it true?", then it is likely that Knab's contribution will be lost in a sea of rhetoric concerning the nature of scientific truth and the validity of subjectivity in generating knowledge. Part of the power of Knab's book rests on what it does not say, in the questions it generates in the reader but refuses to consider. Knab teases us by raising a cluster of issues he does not address. Has he or hasn't he gone native? Does he really believe that he has become a curandero whose powers exist beyond the context of the Sierra Nahuat of San Martín? Was Knab on a personal quest or was he "doing anthropology" and how was such a text created? What did his relationships to Sanmartinos mean to him and particularly his relationship with Doña Rubia? What premises remain latent in his vision of the world that intruded upon how he experienced the Ethnographic Other, and does this become more problematic because the author is both spectator and actor in a personal narrative? I suspect that Knab's choice not to make explicit his operating assumptions will create doubt in some readers and, as a consequence, the credibility (i.e., authority) of the narrative will be taken less seriously than it should. Knab offers few opinions and readers may be encouraged to conclude that his ethnocentrism is more unconscious than it perhaps may be. In effect, we are left to wonder what exactly does Knab believe he is believing, which crystallizes his dilemma with authorship and authority, that is, his concern with the narrative presented and the credibility of the data used to construct the narrative.
It is not the ontological nature of belief that Knab grapples with but rather the experience of believing. Reading A War of Witches brings to mind continuing dialogues that fill anthropological journals these days - far too many to mention here. Knab's issue with believing carries us into debates over the nature of cultural constructions, the construction of "truth" and "reality" and the intersubjective contexts in which these constructs matter most and, simply put, the role of beliefs in experience. We become trapped in Knab's dilemma of causality. Taking the liberty of putting words in his mouth, I believe it would go something like this: "I never thought Sanmartinos were really doing things to each other, only that they thought they were doing things to each other, only to discover that they were really doing things to each other and could even do them to me, or have me do them to others." I agree with Ewing when she writes: "To rule out the possibility of belief in another's reality is to encapsulate that reality and, thus, to impose implicitly the hegemony of one's own view of the world" (1994:572). In anthropology, the struggle to articulate the nature of the field encounter continues. What I have learned from reading A War of Witches is that in order to not use our beliefs to keep our distance, and thereby truncate our understanding, we must grant that cultural relativism is a justification for not taking seriously the beliefs of those we intend to understand. Knab never fully transcends his preoccupation with "how you know what you know" in other than empirical terms, and he relies heavily upon the credibility naturally granted any eyewitness account in our society.
"Being there," as Geertz (1988) puts it, creates a certain authority in the text that is directly dependent upon the believability of the author's personal experience. As the eyewitness, Knab seems compelled to depict the events of the narrative as either objective facts or cultural constructions thereby placing himself equivocally in between. This may be a ploy to enhance tension in the story or to intensify the alien nature of the events portrayed, but in the end, Knab has written a book dedicated to the meaning of his experiences in the field and we close the book without truly grasping what these experiences actually meant to him. Thus, A War of Witches at times seems too precious a document. It is an unself-conscious text in which the reader remains uncertain as to whose truths are revealed, whose truths are challenged, and whose truths are believable.
References Cited
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ewing, Katherine P. 1994. "Dreams from a Saint: Anthropological Atheism and the Temptation to Believe." American Anthropologist 96:571-83. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kluckholn, Clyde. 1944. Navaho Witchcraft. Cambridge: Peabody Museum Papers, No.22. Slade, Doren L. 1992. Making the World Safe for Existence: Celebration of the Saints Among the Sierra Nahuat of Chignautla, Mexico. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Doren L. Slade
New York City
This book is aimed at a sympathetic audience, and repeats truisms that are worth repeating here: (1) there needs to be local community involvement and control in language renewal/retention policies and planning; (2) parenting is ideally done in the native language; (3) there is always a need for basic research (grammar, dictionaries) and relevant teaching materials; and (4) every program depends on local conditions - there is no cure-all method or tactic that will work everywhere.
The book in the initial chapters provides bibliographic coverage (from 1980 to 1996) and policy background (the Native American Language Acts of 1990 and 1992 and related documents). These early chapters provide a focus for the book.
Governmental Indian policies of forced assimilation did not work because of social and economic isolation and cultivated resistance; language shift depends on factors internal to the community. After World War II, connection to a money economy, plus the education and material goods connected with it, caused the initial erosion of Native American languages, with television and sister media nearly completing the process since the 1970s.
Minority language retention depends on a positive attitude toward the native language, and the creation of a language loyalty that fosters the local language while accepting the language of the dominant culture in appropriate contexts, thus making a balanced linguistic economy (ecology would be a better term) that linguists call "diglossia." The main focus of linguistic economy that the book presents is education.
Fishman's chapter on methods of stabilizing a minority language (pp. 80-91) and James Crawford's chapter on language loss (pp. 51-68) are the core of the book. Revival methods include: using practical, every-day areas of vocabulary (with necessary grammar) to start off with; and teaching materials grounded in the daily reality of the learner/users. Where there are fluent and older speakers, suggestions include early literacy, starting schools where the local language is fostered and where contact with older persons in the community can be maintained.
Early education is the basic recommendation of the book, and this is echoed elsewhere in reports of successful programs: the Two-Way program for teaching Navajo (p. 125) that mixes fluent children with passive and non-fluent children, and family-run preschools in Hawaiian (p. 153). Both of these strategies, of course, take advantage of the fact that preadolescents learn languages with relative ease - with the added bonus of avoiding labeling children.
While the need for local community control over education and language policy is obvious, the books fails to address two other factors that follow from a local language renewal program/policy. First, the need for local language professionals who can teach, translate, and create/edit materials in a variety of media. And second, consistent funding for these efforts. The ideal program seems clear: day care conducted in the language with regular visits by elders; graded videotapes, audio tapes, story books, and computer games; follow-up of language arts in the local language in charter schools or home schooling - if these are the only feasible choice.
Local communities will probably need help in basic research (because most existing grammars and dictionaries are esoteric to non-linguists), and in training of local language professionals to get started in teaching, curriculum development, mentoring, and media skills. Academic units and tribal consortiums can help, but consistent local funding is needed over a decade to produce a new generation of fluent bilinguals.
This sort of radical program is hinted at in the book but not boldly articulated in one single policy statement. Indian tribes have the legal right to determine their own education instead of depending on states for teacher certification and policy control. Funding at the local level is the key to linguistic renewal and stabilization. The methodology and resources, and presumably the motivation, are all there. It is the issue of how to attract and maintain funding that must be addressed in the next book.
This book is a good state-of-the-art handbook, for the reasons given. Of special interest to the readers of this journal are the chapters on Nahuatl in central Mexico (pp. 163-73) and Tarahumara, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in the north of Mexico (pp. 174-81).
David L. Shaul
University of Arizona
According to the editor Louise Burkhart, this Nahuatl version of Miércoles santo is the earliest extant script of a play in an American language. Based on a Spanish original written in the 1580s by a Valencian playwright named Izquierdo, the 18-page manuscript was recently acquired by Princeton University Library and here receives a very thorough introduction and commentary. It belongs to the devotional literature characteristic of Holy Week and deals specifically with Christ's Passion and his harrowing of Hell. In editing this work, Burkhart finds an opportunity to amplify and detail the theses she set out in her excellent The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (1989).
The Nahuatl play, by unknown hands, most likely dates to within ten years of the original. It lacks a title and has as its first line: "In titlacen panohuica çihuapilli . . . . " In general, it follows the Spanish text quite closely, finding equivalents for doctrinal terms or occasionally leaving them untranslated. At certain points, however, it makes some changes, which though small, strongly affect the overall argument and meaning of the piece, and secure the notion that the translator or translators were Nahua rather than Spanish.
Contemplating these changes, Burkhart enters into a brief yet extremely lucid discussion of translation itself, as it is defined respectively in the Spanish and the Nahuatl languages. Rather than a carrying across of meaning, she says, the Nahuatl word cuepa suggests a turning around and giving back, a response or change. The Nahua therefore "avoid the fallacious assumption that translation can be a mere conveyance. And they leave space within the practice of translation for the translator to respond to the text, to change it, to turn it to his or her own ends, to return it to earlier discourses that inform its interpretation" (p. 101). This kind of shift is certainly evident in such other major cases of 16th-century translation into Nahuatl as Sahagún's Psalmodia and the Tlauculcuicatl lament (previously analyzed by Burkhart), or the version of Aesop's Fables produced by an anonymous but certainly native rather than Spanish scholar.
In the play Miércoles santo, Christ the Savior is left with an option in the Spanish original and may decide whether or not he will choose actually to suffer and die, to effect the redemption he in principle is capable of anyway. The Nahua text leaves him no choice ‹ only by self annihilation can he hope to achieve his purpose. That is, he must emulate the pagan gods of Mexico who hurled themselves to destruction in order to set the sun and time in motion. Then, in the Spanish, those he goes to save when harrowing hell are closely defined as Old Testament patriarchs who foretold his victory. In the Nahuatl, the category is broadened so as not to exclude ancestors of Mexican rather than purely Old World origin: "my precious ones and a great many others" (the Spanish refers only to "these my beloved children"). Hence, as generic pre-Christian ancestors liberated from the underworld, these "others," in Burkhart's words, "may attain pardon for their errors and merit escape from their torments" (p. 95). This translation is significant evidence of a strategy to adapt Christian cosmogony and history to American needs.
As Burkhart makes clear, these modifications are the more striking in view of the fact that we are dealing with a performed text, words and dialogues played out directly before the citizens of the New World. Drawing deeply on custom and inherited resources of rhetoric and oratory, the Nahua Christ and his mother address each other more delicately, with greater apparent respect and tenderness, and as a result come to seem more akin to the native audience that surrounds them physically: "When Christ and Mary were played by Nahua actors, spoke proper Nahuatl, and behaved toward one another according to Nahua codes of politesse, their non Spanishness in itself added a subtext to their script" (p. 98). At the same time, in the wake of the bloody military invasion led by Cortes, Christ's Roman oppressors could not but evoke the Spaniards themselves.
The same kind of logic may be seen at work in other dramas of the period that share a missionary intent with In titlacen, as José Juan Arrom shows us in his fundamental Teatro hispanoamericano: época colonial (a work that Burkhart curiously omits to mention). The lesson of Adam and Eve's Fall was, for example, similarly modified, in a Nahuatl version lavishly staged in Tlaxcala in 1538. Every skill went into highlighting Eden as the place that American agriculture had actually made possible, into a testimony in maize and other plants to native achievement in this world age, so that the mere verbal message about human misery and helplessness could only acquire a certain irony. Again, in the Eecaliztli or Challenge issued to the recently converted Tepoztecatl by his still-pagan neighbors, this figure is taunted for having betrayed the old gods and gone over to the Christians. He counters them by invoking, not God, but the "eleven cliffs and ravines," each with its pagan name and shrine, which have always shielded him and given him strength and the power to resist, a message that is heard very clearly today in the annual performances in Nahuatl that take place in Tepoztlan each September. Along with In titlacen, these are all examples of the larger phenomenon of naturalization that imported texts and creeds have undergone in America and that is no less evident in the Quechua tradition of the Andes.
Highly productive, Burkhart's approach to In titlacen can lead to further recognition of major shifts in the Nahuatl, which perhaps for lack of space go uncommented upon. A striking case comes in the confession that Adam issues from Hell, concerning his sin of gluttony (rather than pride). In the Nahuatl, this leads to a notable reference to Eden that is entirely absent in the original: "I ate the fruit, the produce of the tree of life, which our lord God, the sovereign, prohibited to me, there in terrestrial Paradise, so that I would not eat it." Given the Tlaxcalan precedent, there seems to be no reason not to see in this added detail an allusion to the very different American tradition of genesis, where it is the effort of human agriculturalists that brings about the terrestrial paradise of "fruit and produce."
Unfortunately, it is hard for the reader to judge the matter better because of what stands out as the major flaw of this otherwise welcome and expert edition. For we are able to know the play only in English translation, and neither the Spanish nor the Nahuatl text is given. True, in Burkhart's detailed commentary, a whole series of cases are discussed in which words and phrases from the Nahuatl are thoroughly analysed, sometimes with apt further reference to the visual language of Mexican codices and mural painting. Yet clearly this can never be enough in itself (there is nothing about the "tree of life" or "terrestrial paradise," for example), and the editorial decision to omit the original text serves not at all the reader who is anxious to feel the cadence and flow of the Nahuatl, or to judge its difference from the Spanish in precisely the terms of oratory and argument that the editor herself recognizes to be of key significance. This is a crippling limitation, for which no reasons are given.
The absence of the Nahuatl text in turn makes it harder for the reader to engage in the larger and topical question of adaptation versus continuity raised by the play, which deserves detailed comment. In showing how Miércoles santo becomes a Nahua play, the editor uses the approach of linguisticians like William Hanks who, with reference to post-Hispanic discourse, has shown the great degree to which the terminology of Spanish government and law, through translation into Maya, was made to serve local argument. In countering received notions of "purity" versus "acculturation," both lamentable terms, this approach is welcome and illuminating. Yet there appears to be a danger of the concept of adaptation being over-applied at the expense of (quite compatible) concepts of continuity. In Hanks's case, there is all the difference between the Chilam Balam books, strongly rooted in the hieroglyphic corpus yet little discussed by him, and the kind of collaborator statements he has focused most on. Similarly, Burkhart too readily equates her play as a Nahuatl text with contemporary works in that language which in fact stem from very different sources and have very different aims.
One of these works is the Cuautitlan Annals, written down in 1570 by (according to Burkhart) a "Christian Nahua." Referring to the story of One Reed Quetzalcoatl told in this text, she notes how this character, having fled from highland Tula, is put in a tepetlacalli ("stone coffer" in Burkhart's translation), before he descends to the underworld and rises again. She attributes this detail to the influence of the story of Christ entombed. The implication is that Christ's three-day journey to Hell had become so significant for the Nahua as a paradigm that the need was felt to make One Reed's story somehow reflect and conform to it: "A similar desire for accommodation between the old myths and the new affected the story of Quetzalcoatl's descent to the underworld and transformation into the morning star" (p. 95).
First, whether or not the Cuauhtitlan authors (for they were more than one) were Christian hardly impinges on the overall argument they present, in seeking to root that town's political authority in the Chichimec expansion of the seventh century. (Specified in other highland sources, this early foundation date is incidentally now corroborated by the Nahuatl glosses on the Itzcuintepec Roll and related texts from Cuextlan.) Second, the version of One Reed's end referred to by Burkhart is not the only one noted and evaluated by the Cuauhtitlan historians. And they present it as the version which adheres most closely to the thoroughly Mesoamerican (and for that matter North American) paradigm of the planetary passage through the underworld and ascent into the eastern sky over nine nights or four plus four days. Through this paradigm, the earthly ninth-century ruler One Reed is subsumed into the ritual Venus figure Quetzalcoatl. As for the tepetlacalli, this is one of a number of toponymic references in the Cuauhtitlan text which is firmly vouchsafed in the corpus of pre-Hispanic place-glyphs.
So that even if (for the sake of argument) the tepetlacalli is deemed to be deference to the Bible, that cannot affect the fact that One Reed's story as a whole, just like the Chilam Balam books of the Maya, overwhelmingly represents the principle of continuity rather than adaptation of foreign elements. After all, the Cuauhtitlan text is explicitly said to be not just a continuation but a transcription of earlier texts in native writing that belonged to the same genre as itself, the xiuhtlapoualli or annals genre. In any case, in no circumstances can we accept Burkhart's accompanying claim, regarding the days of the underworld journey: "the Christian sacred number three is changed into the Nahua sacred number four" (pp. 95-96). Amongst a host of pre-Hispanic sources, the Dresden Codex and the Twenty Sacred Hymns leave no doubt whatsoever that the four-day paradigm proper to this epic passage through the underworld was of considerable antiquity in Mesoamerica and could have had nothing to do with the modifying of a supposedly Christian source.
To treat native histories like the Cuauhtitlan Annals and translations from foreign originals like In titlacen as if there were the same sort of text is tantamount to taking a good idea too far. Keeping the right balance between ideas of continuity and adaptation is a prerequisite for a fair reading of the post-Hispanic corpus and becomes quite critical in cases like that of the Cantares mexicanos, where, as John Bierhorst's edition makes plain, the Nahuatl authors weave between historical memory and current predicament in the wiliest and wittiest fashion (notably in the "invasion" sequence, Songs 69-72).
Finally, while in the case of In titlacen the notion of adaptation is of course the more relevant since the work is a translation, even here it can help to bear continuity in mind. The historical precedent implied by the existence of pagan Mexican forefathers was still being expressed in the late-sixteenth century, in the writing down of native annals that as a corpus formally cover thousands of years. And the fruit "produced" on the tree of life in the terrestrial paradise evokes powerful differences between the Biblical Genesis and the cosmogony of world ages and agriculture narrated in early American literature.
Gordon Brotherston
Indiana University
The editor invites short essays of a controversial nature to stimulate thought and creativity and to begin a dialogue among interested scholars. Following is such an essay on "cultural fatigue" among the peoples of Mesoamerica at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards. It is contributed by the well-known Mesoamericanist Hugo Nutini and we thank him for choosing the NN to publish his thoughts on this matter. We welcome comments on the essay and will print whatever response is forthcoming so long as it is germane to the topic and of general interest to the readership. Kindly send your reactions to the address on the front page.
Hugo G. Nutini
Department of Anthropology
University of Pittsburgh
One of the most imaginative anthropologists of the second half of the twentieth century was John M. Roberts. His seminal ideas ranged from the nature of expression and the organization of culture to the configuration of games and social stratification. Virtually every conversation with him yielded some descriptive, methodological or theoretical insight. This creative genius made Roberts the consummate collaborator.
From 1971 to 1989, when Roberts and I were colleagues in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, we worked together on several projects, most notably witchcraft and sorcery in rural Tlaxcala, on social change in the Tlaxcala-Pueblan Valley, and a study of the expressive and structural components of the Mexican aristocracy. During the summers of 1979 and 1985, Roberts spent about six weeks with me in several of my field sites (the Tlaxcala-Pueblan Valley, the Cordoba-Orizaba region, and Mexico City). At the end of his visit in 1979, Roberts verbalized the intriguing and profound idea that the Spanish conversions of Mesoamerican Indians to Catholicism was probably a case of cultural fatigue.
Roberts habitually made provocative statements that challenged established theories and conventional wisdom. Just as often, he exposed a new way of looking at a problem or showed unsuspected connections in well-known bodies of information. Whatever the nature and form of his ideas, Roberts made you think about their plausibility and the possibility of testing them. This was an intellectual game that he played very skillfully, and in many cases it led to collaborations that constituted some of Roberts' most significant contributions to the discipline. Unfortunately, he died before he and I could map a strategy for testing the connection between conversion and cultural fatigue. In sharing Roberts' idea with fellow Mesoamericanists, I hope that some enterprising young anthropologist would be aroused to undertake the task that Roberts and I did not implement.
How Roberts came to see the Indians' conversion to Catholicism in the 16th century as a case of cultural fatigue is not entirely clear. As far as I am able to reconstruct, his intuition (based on what he knew about Mesoamerica, but undoubtedly colored by my knowledge of this culture area), drew on four main components: (1) the bloody configuration of Mesoamerican polytheism; (2) the rapidity of the processes of conversion and catechization, albeit somewhat superficial; (3) the passion and intensity with which the Indians turned to the new religion; and (4) the thoroughness of the process of syncretism that characterized the emerging Indian religion by the beginning of the 17th century. Evidently, Roberts drew on Kroeber's (1952:403-405) account of cultural fatigue in Hawaii as a promising analytical model for re examining the Indians' conversion. The following consideration of Robert's proposal will be centered on the Nahua Orbit, the area that I know best.
Three of the main characteristic attributes of Mesoamerican polytheism included a tremendous emphasis on human sacrifices to the gods, a pronounced concern with bloodshed and the dead, and a significant degree of ritual cannibalism. These characteristics had probably been present since the pre-Classic period but apparently reached a peak of intensity in the late post Classic period (from perhaps 1200 A.D. to the arrival of the Spaniards), and nowhere were they more evident than among the Mexica-Tenochca of the Valley of Mexico. Although there were differences of intensity, this generalization applies to all Central Mexican and probably most of the indigenous societies from Oaxaca to the northernmost frontier of Mesoamerica.
The information available on human sacrifices is uneven and not always entirely reliable, but no serious scholar (except Eulalia Guzmán) has ever denied that the ancient Mesoamericans practiced human sacrifices. The best information is probably on the Triple Alliance (the confederation of the city states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tacuba), particularly Tenochtitlan. In this city alone, as many as 20,000 men, women, and children are estimated to have been annually sacrificed. Even considering the probably biased reporting of mendicant friars in charge of the conversion (Sahagún 1956; Motolinía 1969, 1903; Durán 1967; Mendieta 1945) and other interested parties (Muñoz Camargo 1948; Teozomoc 1943; Chilmalpahin 1965), there is no doubt that human sacrifice was an onerous burden for the population of Central Mexico. The information is scanty for Oaxaca, Guerrero, Tlaxcala, the Gulf Coast, Michoacan, and northwestern Mesoamerica, where human sacrifice was definitely practiced albeit not as intensely as among the people of the Triple Alliance. Spanish reports made immediately after the Conquest say that it was a great honor to be sacrificed to the gods, and that individuals, families, and groups willingly offered sacrificial victims as a means of acquiring esteem and prestige. Intuitively, however, it seems unlikely that the majority of sacrificial victims (slaves, prisoners taken in battle, and assorted victims provided by merchants and other institutionalized segments of the Triple Alliance as a conquest state) willingly went to their death or felt honored to be an offering to the gods. The case of the Tlaxcalan Confederacy is illuminating.
Sahagún (1956:IV, 23-24) reports that from 10 years before the Spaniards arrived several strange, supernatural, and portentous events took place in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Triple Alliance. These included inexplicable fires, and wind storms, the mysterious destruction of temples, and the apparition of monsters in human form. After repeating what Sahagún had said earlier, Muñoz Camargo (1948:187), the mestizo son of a Spanish captain and a local Indian princess, confirms Sahagún's reports and adds that similar extraordinary events had taken place in Tlaxcala shortly before Cortés and his men arrived there en route to Tenochtitlan. These ominous signs have been interpreted by several scholars (Desiderio H. Xochitiotzin, personal communication) and by me as presaging the destruction of the Triple Alliance. More significant for the aim of this essay, the post hoc interpretations related to Sahagún and reported by Muñoz Camargo are pregnant with the underlying sentiment that the gods were no longer effective and had forsaken their people.
As the pre-Hispanic polity centered exclusively on the supernatural, the post-Conquest emic explanations for the otherwise inexplicable and mysterious phenomena is the most telling and direct evidence that at least some societies in Mesoamerica were experiencing a case of religious cultural fatigue, that the old religion had fared poorly and become increasingly difficult to bear. Thus, above and beyond the pressures and constraints of forced conversion and catechization, the Indians wholeheartedly embraced Catholicism as offering a less demanding price for relating to the supernatural.
The conversion of the Indians to Catholicism was rapidly achieved. By the mid-1560s, roughly 50 years after the initiation of systematic religious indoctrination, most of the native Central Mexicans were ideologically Christian albeit full of theological impurities. It should be noted that Indian religion retained several aspects of polytheism until the present, occasionally rendering contemporary Indian and mestizo Catholicism more pagan than Christian. This is the case, for example, with the singular lack of ethical content that characterizes folk Catholicism today. Also the Indians never clearly understood the difference between God and the saints, and behaviorally regard the latter as lesser deities; i.e., they never internalized the theological difference between latria and dulia.
In several respects, the conversion of the Indians in the 16th century was more rapid, and no less impure (at least into the early Middle Ages), than the conversion in the 8th century of the pagan Germanic tribes that had not been romanized. One may think that the Indians were converted far more rapidly than the Germans because Spanish domination was greater than that of the Romans, but historical evidence favors the view that the dominance of the Germanic monarchies was equal to that held by the Spaniards over the Indians. The significant difference in this comparison of Indian and Germanic conversions lies not in the power of the conqueror but with the Indians' greater willingness to discard their ancient gods out of endogenous disgust. This, I intuit, constitutes the most telling argument for adducing religious cultural fatigue as the critical variable.
While the evidence in support of this proposition is not as clear-cut as the bloodiness of pre-Hispanic rituals, it nonetheless can be mustered. The intensity and depth with which the Indians embraced the new religion is occasionally vividly reported by those in charge of conversion and catechization. Again, with due caution to taking at face value the statements of the mendicant friars, who very likely wanted to magnify their success at converting the Indians, there is independent (if indirect) evidence that many Indians embraced Catholicism with a passion and fervor that can not be explained by the Colonial oppression that underscored the contexts of conversion and catechization. The Indians strong attraction and proclivity for the new faith are manifested in several ways.
First, open-chapel and church building. Thirty years after the onset of missionization, Central Mexico had witnessed the construction of hundreds of open chapels (the earliest religious structures built by the mendicant friars, mainly for the purpose of mass conversion and catechization), visiting churches, and monastic establishments. Some of these structures are outstanding examples of 16th-century religious architecture, which the Indians built under the direction of the friars. In many of these, Indian craftsmen expressed a depth of religious feeling and artistic excellence that are unintelligible unless one assumes that the Indians genuinely welcomed the new religion and did their utmost to construct an appropriate physical receptacle for its realization.
Second, less than a generation after being presented with the basic tenets of Catholicism, the Indians were exhibiting a strong inclination for expansion and innovation of Catholic ritual and ceremony. This is nowhere better exemplified than in the festivities celebrated in Tlaxcala in connection with Holy Week, Corpus Christi, and Saint John the Baptist in 1536, 1538, and 1539 (Motolinía 1969:57-74). Motolinía's description shows the sophistication, ritual, and ceremonial knowledge of Catholicism that the Indians had acquired in barely a dozen years of concerted indoctrination. Again, no amount of compulsion would have forced the Indians to pour their hearts into celebrating some of the key events of the new religion.
Third, and more generally, despite the fact that the Indians had no option but to become Catholic, conversion and catechization, at least in the Nahua Orbit, has an ambiance that lends credence to the view that they did it willingly, without fear, and with full conviction. This is the way that I, at least, interpret the contemporary sources and much of what has been written about them historically (Sahagún 1956; Motolinía 1969, 1903; Durán 1967; Mendieta 1945; Muñoz Camargo 1948; Torquemada 1969; Tezozomoc 1943; Chilmalphin 1965; Ixtlixochitl 1891; Códice Franciscano 1941; Garcés 1914; Suárez de Peredo 1823; Quirós y Gutierrés 1941; Ornelas 1907; Zapata 1960; Ricard 1947, 1973).
The fourth piece of evidence for religious cultural fatigue is not so much a body of facts as a matrix in which factors in both Spanish Catholicism and Mesoamerican polytheism are played out to indicate a deep dissatisfaction with some aspects of pre-Hispanic polytheism. Although there was some religious acculturation, the basic process that permanently shaped the nature and form of Indian Catholicism is syncretism, which has three main components. One is the monolatrous aspects of Catholicism that effortlessly enabled the Indians to identify their gods with the saints (God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost; the Virgin Mary; and male and female saints). Second, there is the role of the mendicant friars in fostering syncretic identifications and the organization of local congregations in the fashion of early, primitive Christian communities. The members of these congregations held considerable power in religious decision making. Finally, there is the readiness, perhaps eagerness, of the Indians to embrace the syncretic manipulations of the friars (guided syncretism) and to innovate on their own (spontaneous syncretism) in the identification of elements and events in Catholicism and their polytheism.
The first two components of syncretism have been accepted by anthropologists working in Mesoamerica for at least 50 years (Ricard 1947; Carrasco 1952; Madsen 1957; Nutini 1976). The third component, on the other hand, is fundamental to my argument that Mesoamerican Indians were experiencing cultural fatigue at the time of the Spanish Conquest, and this idea has not yet been tested properly. Any systematic testing of this idea should begin by assessing the literature on the state of Mesoamerican polytheism and the attitudes and changing perceptions of the Indian masses toward their religion at the time of the Spanish Conquest, for there is no question that things were changing then.
Finally, let me examine the concept of religious cultural fatigue itself, by comparing the Hawaiian and Mesoamerican cases. In his analysis of culture change, Kroeber (1952:403 405) vividly describes the abolition of Hawaiian religion, strongly centered on an oppressive taboo system, as a pristine case of cultural fatigue. At one stroke, as Kroeber puts it, the Hawaiians got rid of much of their religion shortly before the first missionaries landed on the islands. It was a voluntary change, led by the enlightened King Kamehameha I, but it was unquestionably influenced by European contact since Captain Cook had discovered the islands some 40 years earlier.
Hawaiians were aware of Christian beliefs. More significantly, they had seen Europeans repeatedly violate their taboos with impunity. Be this as it may, the taboo system, which permeated all domains of daily life, had become extremely burdensome, creating hardships and impeding normal relations among the diverse sectors of society. Kroeber, of course, cannot explain the psychological ambiance that led to the drastic change, but he assumes that it would have been extremely difficult for the king to have coalesced the will of apparently a large segment of the population without the European antecedents that had affected Hawaiian society for 40 years. In sum, breaking the taboo system was possible because of a powerful and respected autocrat, and because there was enough latent discontent among a large segment of the population.
Point by point, what are the differences and similarities of breaking the taboo system in Hawaii and the rapid conversion of Mesoamerican Indians to Catholicism? First, the scale of the latter is much larger in terms both of the native population involved and the European presence, but in principle, cultural fatigue may affect even larger sociocultural units, even without the presence of an impinging component. (Kroeber's examples for this include the French Revolution, defeatism in France in 1940, and, in the United States, the popularity of the New Deal in response to the depression.) Second, the factors of domination and compulsion are very significant for establishing whether a case can be constructed as cultural fatigue. The voluntary motivation of Hawaiians indicates a clear-cut case of cultural fatigue, whereas in the case of Mesoamerica one has to demonstrate that the Indians were indeed tired of the old religion and were beginning to question several of its tenets. But domination and compulsion do not in themselves preclude cultural fatigue. Third, the most significant difference between the Hawaiian and Mesoamerican cases of religious cultural fatigue is the rapid (over a period of months), overt, and public nature of the religious transformation in the former, and the drawn out (but still comparatively rapid), covert, and subliminal (not publicly manifested at the time) nature of conversion in the latter. Despite these differences, both cases emanate from basically similar causes and entail similar effects.
To conclude, following Kroeber, cultural fatigue is defined here as a form of rapid culture change caused by intolerable conditions in the body politic that demand the kind of action that departs radically from traditional forms, generally transforming large cultural domains which must be regarded as revolutionary changes. Usually large or significant segments of the body politic feel betrayed by the old system. People become disillusioned, and a sense of tiredness and desperation sets in. This is the social and psychological ambiance in which the taboo system of Hawaii was broken and the rapid conversion of Mesoamerican Indians to Catholicism took place. In the case of the latter, the single most significant factors were human sacrifices and the bloody configuration of pre-Hispanic polytheism. In cases of religious cultural fatigue, the precipitating factors are usually external influences that create downright disillusionment with part of or the entire religious system, but the catalyst may either be internal (a strong and respected King Kamehameha I in Hawaii) or external (the mendicant friars in Mesoamerica). This model of cultural fatigue has variants, of course, but the outcome is basically the same, as exemplified above.
The conversion of Mesoamerican Indians to Catholicism in the 16th century as a case of cultural fatigue is a proposition worth testing. Nearing the end of my active career as an anthropologist, my final commitments do not permit me to undertake this major project. But I do hope that some young, enterprising Mesoamericanist will, particularly now that funds for field research have become so scarce. To interest such a person is the main aim of this communication.
References Cited
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The illustrations found in this issue are taken from The Essential Codex Mendoza. Edited by Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 1 vol. (various pagings). Pp. xiii+268; 16 unnumbered color folios; Pictorial Parallel Image Replicas of Codex Mendoza with Transcriptions and Translations of the Spanish Commentaries and Translations of the Spanish Glosses, Pp. 148. $39.95 (paper). ISBN 0-520-20454-9.
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