Showing papers in "Ethnohistory in 2019"

Mexican Manuscripts and the First Images of Africans in the Americas

Abstract: Africans in the Americas were first visually recorded by tlacuiloque, or indigenous artist-scribes, in mid-sixteenth-century Central Mexican manuscripts such as Diego Durán’s History, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and the Codex Azcatitlan. These figures, while often peripheral to the central narrative and never mentioned specifically by name, are nevertheless rendered as active agents in the shaping of a new colonial society. The article examines these images of Africans to reveal their ethnographic complexity and the development of concepts of alterity in the early contact period.

Testing the Limits of Colonial Parenting: Navajo Domestic Workers, the Intermountain Indian School, and the Urban Relocation Program, 1950–1962

Abstract: Closely examining the experiences of mostly female Navajo students, this article demonstrates that the Intermountain Indian School played a pivotal role in carrying out postwar Indian Policy. Like Progressive Era Indian boarding schools, its gendered curriculum prepared students to assimilate as low-status workers into American society and move away from their reservation communities. However, beginning with the first graduating class, Navajo students took advantage of the training but did not necessarily conform to policy makers’ expectations.

“As if His Heart Died”: A Reinterpretation of Moteuczoma’s Cowardice in the Conquest History of the Florentine Codex

Abstract: The first encounters between Nahuas and Spaniards from 1519 to 1521 resulted in widespread deaths in the indigenous communities of central Mexico. Although the first recorded disease epidemic is often acknowledged as a factor in the loss of rule to the invaders, Moteuczoma receives much of the blame. Historians contend that Moteuczoma’s cowardice facilitated the defeat of his people. Instead, this article argues that descriptions of the pain and fright that afflicted Moteuczoma and his people in Book XII of the Florentine Codex are references to long-standing cultural concepts of illness. This article uses colonial and modern ethnographic sources to illuminate enduring Mesoamerican concepts of health and sickness. The chaos and loss of life connected to the first epidemic in 1520 contributed significantly to the fall of Tenochtitlan. This article reveals how Nahuas remembered and understood the startling arrival of the Spaniards and the first terrifying disease epidemic during the invasion.

Calendars in Knotted Cords: New Evidence on How Khipus Captured Time in Nineteenth-Century Cuzco and Beyond

Abstract: Despite the critical advances toward khipu decipherment, the specific ways in which Andean khipu masters captured and organized the course of time in their cords, in the form of ages, dates, chronologies, and calendric intervals and cycles, remains obscure. This essay contributes to this central problem of knot making and reading traditions by enlisting the aid of an unlikely source: the memoirs of a mid-nineteenth-century gentleman who was given a striking account of how khipu masters in Cuzco’s countryside recorded specific events of a twelve-month calendar in their khipus and made accurate calculations based on them. The analysis and reconstruction of Cuzco’s calendar-demographic khipus is framed into the history of Catholic catechesis, which included early efforts at colonizing indigenous ways of thinking and experiencing time through tactile, visual, and sonic strategies. This process, rather than marginalizing knotted cords all together, as it is sometimes assumed, turned khipukamayuq into important, yet often overlooked agents for the gradual establishment of the Roman Catholic calendar in Andean rural parishes. Unraveling the basic principles for the accounting of time in these modern khipus by placing them in their historical context is a firm, and to our knowledge unprecedented, step toward future efforts at deciphering both quantitative and qualitative cords with a temporal component.

Presidential Address: A Rainbow of Spanish Illusions: Research Frontiers in Colonial Guatemala

Abstract: Compared still to what we know about Mexico and Peru, the historiography of colonial Guatemala, despite notable advances, continues to lag behind, registering minimally in the Latin American scholarly imagination. The field is surveyed by examining some of the issues that have intrigued the author over the course of his career. Personal reflections are offered of research activities that engage indigenous resistance to Spanish intrusion, demographic collapse in the wake of conquest, the link between disease outbreaks and Maya demise, and the role played by Pedro de Alvarado (1485–1541) in attaining imperial objectives. Scrutiny of the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, a sixteenth-century source the contents of which have been incisively reappraised, affords fuller appreciation of strategic Indian involvement in the act of subjugation. Alvarado, a key protagonist in the conquest of Mexico, also harbored ambitions to muscle in on the conquest of Peru, a little-known episode that awaits further investigation. The conqueror’s own life, like Central America itself, may indeed have been a rainbow of Spanish illusions, pots of gold dreamed of, lost and found at native expense.

Hurtling off a Precipice, Falling into a River: A Nahuatl Metaphor and the Christian Concept of Sin

Abstract: This article centers on a contextual analysis of the Nahuatl metaphor atoyatl tepexitl as attested in the colonial sources belonging to different genres: from devotional literature, like doctrinal treatises and religious plays, to sacred narratives on pre-Hispanic gods (e.g., the mockeries of Tezcatlipoca in Tula). Due to its compatibility with the Christian negative valuation of falling and the existence of similar expressions in Spanish, this couplet was adopted by friars to render the concept of sin. The article points to possible ambiguities and confusions that establishing such equivalency must have caused early after the conquest, and attempts to unravel the possible pre-Hispanic ramifications of the metaphor.

The Personal Politics of Action and Applied Anthropology

Abstract: Action anthropology came to the fore during the 1950s and 1960s, in part as a critical response to applied anthropology’s colonial and governmental entanglements, seeking to learn from communities by collaboratively pursuing solutions to practical problems. While critical assessments of theory, method, and efficacy abound, the everyday human bonds fostered through these approaches seldom receive mention. This essay focuses on the personal and intellectual relationships Robert K. Thomas and Murray L. Wax formed with Ponca activist Clyde Warrior via the Workshop on American Indian Affairs, Carnegie Corporation Cross-Cultural Education Project, and Kansas Indian Education Research Project during the 1960s. It illuminates some of the interior dimensions of these two expressions of public-facing engaged scholarship.1

The Serpent Within: Birth Rituals and Midwifery Practices in Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Mesoamerican Cultures

Abstract: This article focuses on female-gendered activities in Mesoamerican culture and reveals a strong link between conception, pregnancy, and childbirth on the one hand and weaving and other activities that produce cloth on the other. Supporting evidence from sources such as codices painted during the Postclassic period (13th to 15th centuries) in the northern Maya area indicates that these associations have a longtime depth, spanning at least a millennium. Ethnohistoric sources from highland Guatemala, paired with contemporary practices in that region, provide further insights into beliefs and rituals associated with childbirth and midwifery among prehispanic Maya populations. A review of colonial-period Nahuatl sources provides a comparative perspective for framing the Maya data within the broader context of pre-Conquest Mesoamerica. Despite the events that have transpired during the past five hundred years in this region, this study finds that many of the elements that were key to this conceptual framework during the Pre-Hispanic period continue to be important today, although their range is more restricted now than it was during the Postclassic and colonial periods. Striking commonalities, as noted, are those that link weaving activities with pregnancy and childbirth. Additionally, objects and iconography related to women and birth—in the form of serpents, umbilical cords, and ropes—tie the act of birth to primordial creation events and highlight the association between midwife and creator grandmother.

Indigenous Technologies in the 1577 Relaciones geográficas of New Spain: Collective Land Memory, Natural Resources, and Herbal Medicine

Abstract: This essay applies the analytic category of technologies proposed by historian Marcy Norton as complex systems of knowledges, practices, and products generated in specific social contexts to a study of the sixteenth-century bureaucratic surveys known as the Relaciones geográficas (RG) manuscripts. As a methodological intervention, the principal aim is to draw out the relatively understudied Indigenous knowledges and practices found throughout the corpus. The first section of the essay outlines the conceptual framework of technologies and contextualizes the RG survey and response processes. The remainder of the essay discusses Indigenous technologies including collective land memory, natural resources, and herbal medicines recorded in the Archdiocese of Mexico corpus of RGs (appendix), thirty-one manuscripts in total.

Ossified and Materialized Selves in Three Manuscripts of Colonial Guatemala: Connections with the Sacred Instrumentality of Bone

Abstract: Guatemalan colonial-period documents have proven valuable for revealing Maya thinking about bone, especially how Mayas imbued bones with personal identity. At key moments in the narratives of three Guatemalan manuscripts, the Rabinal Achi, Xpantzay Cartulary, and Pop Wuj, Mayas materialized the self of important individuals through their bones, treating the bones at times like captives. By doing this, colonial-era Mayas were revealing their ideational linkages with Mayas from the Classic and Postclassic periods who practiced ancestor veneration using bones. In this network of practices, Classic-, Postclassic-, and colonial-era Mayas linked human bones to enduring personal forces and used bones to support claims of ancestry to specific people. This study explores this feature of Maya life, and then analyzes how Mayas of the last hundred years now value bone more for other, non-ancestral ritual utilities. They have shifted from treating certain bones as a materialization of self to viewing bones in terms of the practical potentialities the bones encase, employing a mode of engagement exemplified by Tz’utujiil Maya bonesetters who treat broken bones with sacralized bones and bone surrogates. This work examines how bone use has oscillated between these two modes, contrasting how Mayas of the Classic, Postclassic, and colonial periods treated certain bones as a materialization of self against how Mayas of more recent decades have come to emphasize the sacred instrumentality of bone and put it to active use.

Archival Epistemology: Honor, Sodomy, and Indians in Eighteenth-Century New Mexico

Abstract: This article analyzes three eighteenth-century sodomy cases in New Mexico to highlight the ways in which colonial authorities passed judgment on their subjects and the landscapes that they inhabited. Examining how ethnocentric outlooks shaped the ways in which Spanish colonizers interlinked sin and physical space illuminates the process by which colonial authorities made biased value judgments, deeming native peoples and indigenous spaces as sinful. The first case (1728) examines the denunciation and subsequent exoneration of a Spanish resident accused of sodomy. The second case (1731) highlights the tensions between spaces regarded as civilized and other areas removed from the purview of the Spanish state that colonizers viewed as morally suspect. The third case (1775) reveals how colonial authorities attempted to normalize local denizens’ sexual comportment in locations deemed asexual. By analyzing gender and sexuality alongside the environment, this essay problematizes descriptions of seemingly natural landscapes and elucidates the cultural construction behind pejorative tropes used to justify conquest.