Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World
Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World

Author: Justyna Olko

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2014-06-15

Total Pages: 517

ISBN-13: 1607322412

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This significant work reconstructs the repertory of insignia of rank and the contexts and symbolic meanings of their use, along with their original terminology, among the Nahuatl-speaking communities of Mesoamerica from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Attributes of rank carried profound symbolic meaning, encoding subtle messages about political and social status, ethnic and gender identity, regional origin, individual and community history, and claims to privilege. Olko engages with and builds upon extensive worldwide scholarship and skillfully illuminates this complex topic, creating a vital contribution to the fields of pre-Columbian and colonial Mexican studies. It is the first book to integrate pre- and post-contact perspectives, uniting concepts and epochs usually studied separately. A wealth of illustrations accompanies the contextual analysis and provides essential depth to this critical work. Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World substantially expands and elaborates on the themes of Olko's Turquoise Diadems and Staffs of Office, originally published in Poland and never released in North America.

Words and Worlds Turned Around
Words and Worlds Turned Around

Author: David Tavárez

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2017-12-14

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1607326841

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A sophisticated, state-of-the-art study of the remaking of Christianity by indigenous societies, Words and Worlds Turned Around reveals the manifold transformations of Christian discourses in the colonial Americas. The book surveys how Christian messages were rendered in indigenous languages; explores what was added, transformed, or glossed over; and ends with an epilogue about contemporary Nahuatl Christianities. In eleven case studies drawn from eight Amerindian languages—Nahuatl, Northern and Valley Zapotec, Quechua, Yucatec Maya, K'iche' Maya, Q'eqchi' Maya, and Tupi—the authors address Christian texts and traditions that were repeatedly changed through translation—a process of “turning around” as conveyed in Classical Nahuatl. Through an examination of how Christian terms and practices were made, remade, and negotiated by both missionaries and native authors and audiences, the volume shows the conversion of indigenous peoples as an ongoing process influenced by what native societies sought, understood, or accepted. The volume features a rapprochement of methodologies and assumptions employed in history, anthropology, and religion and combines the acuity of of methodologies drawn from philology and historical linguistics with the contextualizing force of the ethnohistory and social history of Spanish and Portuguese America. Contributors: Claudia Brosseder, Louise M. Burkhart, Mark Christensen, John F. Chuchiak IV, Abelardo de la Cruz, Gregory Haimovich, Kittiya Lee, Ben Leeming, Julia Madajczak, Justyna Olko, Frauke Sachse, Garry Sparks

The Florentine Codex
The Florentine Codex

Author: Jeanette Favrot Peterson

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2019-09-10

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1477318402

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In the sixteenth century, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a team of indigenous grammarians, scribes, and painters completed decades of work on an extraordinary encyclopedic project titled General History of the Things of New Spain, known as the Florentine Codex (1575–1577). Now housed in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence and bound in three lavishly illustrated volumes, the codex is a remarkable product of cultural exchange in the early Americas. In this edited volume, experts from multiple disciplines analyze the manuscript’s bilingual texts and more than 2,000 painted images and offer fascinating, new insights on its twelve books. The contributors examine the “three texts” of the codex—the original Nahuatl, its translation into Spanish, and its painted images. Together, these constitute complementary, as well as conflicting, voices of an extended dialogue that occurred in and around Mexico City. The volume chapters address a range of subjects, from Nahua sacred beliefs, moral discourse, and natural history to the Florentine artists’ models and the manuscript’s reception in Europe. The Florentine Codex ultimately yields new perspectives on the Nahua world several decades after the fall of the Aztec empire.

Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past
Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past

Author: Justyna Olko

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2018-11-30

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1607328348

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Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past is a critical, annotated anthology of indigenous-authored texts, including the Nahua, Quechua, and Spanish originals, through which native peoples and Spaniards were able to convey their own perspectives on Spanish colonial order. It is the first volume to bring together native testimonies from two different areas of Spanish expansion in the Americas to examine comparatively these geographically and culturally distant realities of indigenous elites in the colonial period. In each chapter a particular document is transcribed exactly as it appears in the original manuscript or colonial printed document, with the editor placing it in historical context and considering the degree of European influence. These texts show the nobility through documents they themselves produced or caused to be produced—such as wills, land deeds, and petitions—and prioritize indigenous ways of expression, perspectives, and concepts. Together, the chapters demonstrate that native elites were independent actors as well as agents of social change and indigenous sustainability in colonial society. Additionally, the volume diversifies the commonly homogenous term “cacique” and recognizes the differences in elites throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes. Showcasing important and varied colonial genres of indigenous writing, Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past reveals some of the realities, needs, strategies, behaviors, and attitudes associated with the lives of the elites. Each document and its accompanying commentary provide additional insight into how the nobility negotiated everyday life. The book will be of great interest to students and researchers of Mesoamerican and Andean history, as well as those interested in indigenous colonial societies in the Spanish Empire. Contributors: Agnieszka Brylak, Maria Castañeda de la Paz, Katarzyna Granicka, Gregory Haimovich, Anastasia Kalyuta, Julia Madajczak, Patrycja Prządka-Giersz

Universal Empire
Universal Empire

Author: Peter Fibiger Bang

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-16

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1107022673

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This book explores the aspiration to universal, imperial rule across Eurasian history from antiquity to the eighteenth century.

Translating Nature
Translating Nature

Author: Jaime Marroquin Arredondo

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2019-03-26

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 081229601X

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Translating Nature recasts the era of early modern science as an age not of discovery but of translation. As Iberian and Protestant empires expanded across the Americas, colonial travelers encountered, translated, and reinterpreted Amerindian traditions of knowledge—knowledge that was later translated by the British, reading from Spanish and Portuguese texts. Translations of natural and ethnographic knowledge therefore took place across multiple boundaries—linguistic, cultural, and geographical—and produced, through their transmissions, the discoveries that characterize the early modern era. In the process, however, the identities of many of the original bearers of knowledge were lost or hidden in translation. The essays in Translating Nature explore the crucial role that the translation of philosophical and epistemological ideas played in European scientific exchanges with American Indians; the ethnographic practices and methods that facilitated appropriation of Amerindian knowledge; the ideas and practices used to record, organize, translate, and conceptualize Amerindian naturalist knowledge; and the persistent presence and influence of Amerindian and Iberian naturalist and medical knowledge in the development of early modern natural history. Contributors highlight the global nature of the history of science, the mobility of knowledge in the early modern era, and the foundational roles that Native Americans, Africans, and European Catholics played in this age of translation. Contributors: Ralph Bauer, Daniela Bleichmar, William Eamon, Ruth Hill, Jaime Marroquín Arredondo, Sara Miglietti, Luis Millones Figueroa, Marcy Norton, Christopher Parsons, Juan Pimentel, Sarah Rivett, John Slater.

Tlacaelel Remembered
Tlacaelel Remembered

Author: Susan Schroeder

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2016-11-16

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0806157658

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The enigmatic and powerful Tlacaelel (1398–1487), wrote annalist Chimalpahin, was “the beginning and origin” of the Mexica monarchy in fifteenth-century Mesoamerica. Brother of the first Moteuczoma, Tlacaelel would become “the most powerful, feared, and esteemed man of all that the world had seen up to that time.” But this outsize figure of Aztec history has also long been shrouded in mystery. In Tlacaelel Remembered, the first biography of the Mexica nobleman, Susan Schroeder searches out the truth about his life and legacy. A century after Tlacaelel’s death, in the wake of the conquistadors, Spaniards and natives recorded the customs, histories, and language of the Nahua, or Aztec, people. Three of these chroniclers—fray Diego Durán, don Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, and especially don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin—wrote of Tlacaelel. But the inaccessibility of Chimalpahin’s annals has meant that for centuries of Aztec history, Tlacaelel has appeared, if at all, as a myth. Working from Chimalpahin’s newly available writings and exploring connections and variances in other source materials, Schroeder draws the clearest possible portrait of Tlacaelel, revealing him as the architect of the Aztec empire’s political power and its military might—a politician on par with Machiavelli. As the advisor to five Mexica rulers, Tlacaelel shaped the organization of the Mexica state and broadened the reach of its empire—feats typically accomplished with the spread of warfare, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. In the annals, he is considered the “second king” to the rulers who built the empire, and is given the title “Cihuacoatl,” used for the office of president and judge. As Schroeder traces Tlacaelel through the annals, she also examines how his story was transmitted and transformed in later histories. The resulting work is the most complete and comprehensive account ever given of this significant figure in Mesoamerican history.

American Contact
American Contact

Author:

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 151282576X

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A Hawai’ian quilt stitched with anti-imperial messages; a Jesuit report that captures the last words of a Wendat leader; an invitation to a ball, repurposed by enslaved people in colonial Antigua; a book of poetry printed in a Peruvian penitentiary. Countless material texts—legible artifacts—resulted from the diverse intercultural encounters that characterize the history of the Americas. American Contact explores the dynamics of intercultural encounters through the medium of material texts. The forty-eight short chapters present biographies about objects that range in size from four miles long to seven by ten centimeters; date from millennia in the past to the 2000s; and originate from South America, North America, the Caribbean, and other parts of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Each essay demonstrates how particular ways of reading can render the complex meanings of the objects legible—or explains why and how the meanings remain illegible. In its diversity and breadth, this volume shows how the field of book history can be more inclusive and expansive. Taken together, the essays shed new light on the material practices of communicating power and resistance, subjection and survivance, in contact zones of America. Contributors: Carlos Aguirre, Ahmed Idrissi Alami, Chadwick Allen, Rhae Lynn Barnes, Molly H. Bassett, Brian Bockelman, George Aaron Broadwell, Rachel Linnea Brown, Nancy Caronia, Raúl Coronado, Marlena Petra Cravens, Agnieszka Czeblakow, Lori Boornazian Diel, Elizabeth A. Dolan, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Cecily Duffie, Devin Fitzgerald, Glenda Goodman, Rachel B. Gross, David D. Hall, Sonia Hazard, Rachel B. Herrmann, Alex Hidalgo, Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis, Alexandra Kaloyanides, Rachael Scarborough King, Danielle Knox, Bishop Lawton, Jessica C. Linker, Don James McLaughlin, John Henry Merritt, Gabriell Montgomery, Emily L. Moore, Isadora Moura Mota, Barbara E. Mundy, Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, Marissa Nicosia, Diane Oliva, Megan E. O’Neil, Sergio Ospina Romero, John H. Pollack, Shari Rabin, Daniel Radus, Nathan Rees, Anne Ricculli, Maria Ryan, Maria Carolina Sintura, Cristina Soriano, Chelsea Stieber, Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman, Chris Suh, Mathew R. Swiatlowski, Marie Balsley Taylor, Martin A. Tsang, Germaine Warkentin, Adrian Chastain Weimer, Bethany Wiggin, Xine Yao, Corinna Zeltsman.

Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

Author: Matthew Restall

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0197537316

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An update of a popular work that takes on the myths of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, featuring a new afterword. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest reveals how the Spanish invasions in the Americas have been conceived and presented, misrepresented and misunderstood, in the five centuries since Columbus first crossed the Atlantic. This book is a unique and provocative synthesis of ideas and themes that were for generations debated or perpetuated without question in academic and popular circles. The 2003 edition became the foundation stone of a scholarly turn since called The New Conquest History. Each of the book's seven chapters describes one "myth," or one aspect of the Conquest that has been distorted or misrepresented, examines its roots, and explodes its fallacies and misconceptions. Using a wide array of primary and secondary sources, written in a scholarly but readable style, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest explains why Columbus did not set out to prove the world was round, the conquistadors were not soldiers, the native Americans did not take them for gods, Cortés did not have a unique vision of conquest procedure, and handfuls of vastly outnumbered Spaniards did not bring down great empires with stunning rapidity. Conquest realities were more complex--and far more fascinating--than conventional histories have related, and they featured a more diverse cast of protagonists-Spanish, Native American, and African. This updated edition of a key event in the history of the Americas critically examines the book's arguments, how they have held up, and why they prompted the rise of a New Conquest History.

Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain
Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain

Author: Alan R. Sandstrom

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2023-01-20

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 1646423305

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An ethnographic study based on decades of field research, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain explores five sacred journeys to the peaks of venerated mountains undertaken by Nahua people living in northern Veracruz, Mexico. Punctuated with elaborate ritual offerings dedicated to the forces responsible for rain, seeds, crop fertility, and the well-being of all people, these pilgrimages are the highest and most elaborate form of Nahua devotion and reveal a sophisticated religious philosophy that places human beings in intimate contact with what Westerners call the forces of nature. Alan and Pamela Sandstrom document them for the younger Nahua generation, who live in a world where many are lured away from their communities by wage labor in urban Mexico and the United States. Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain contains richly detailed descriptions and analyses of ritual procedures as well as translations from the Nahuatl of core myths, chants performed before decorated altars, and statements from participants. Particular emphasis is placed on analyzing the role of sacred paper figures that are produced by the thousands for each pilgrimage. The work contains drawings of these cuttings of spirit entities along with hundreds of color photographs illustrating how they are used throughout the pilgrimages. The analysis reveals the monist philosophy that underlies Nahua religious practice in which altars, dancing, chanting, and the paper figures themselves provide direct access to the sacred. In the context of their pilgrimage traditions, the ritual practices of Nahua religion show one way that people interact effectively with the forces responsible for not only their own prosperity but also the very survival of humanity. A magnum opus with respect to Nahua religion and religious practice, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain is a significant contribution to several fields, including but not limited to Indigenous literatures of Mesoamerica, Nahuatl studies, Latinx and Chicanx studies, and religious studies.