NATIVE TRADITIONS IN THE POST-CONQUEST WORLD
A SYMPOSIUM IN DUMBARTON OAKS
October 2nd to 4th, 1992
Elizabeth Hill Boone e Tom Cummins Editores
Dumbarton Oaks Washington, D.C. Research and Collection Library
Copyright © 1998 by Dumbarton Oaks Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Native Traditions in the Post-Conquest World: A Symposium in Dumbarton Oaks, October 2-4, 1992 / Elizabeth Hill Boone and Tom Cummins, editors p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88402-239-0 1.Aztecs—Social Conditions—Congresses. 2.Aztecs — Cultural Assimilation — Congresses. 3. Incas—Social Conditions—Congresses. 4. Incas – Cultural assimilation – Congresses. I. Boone, Elizabeth Hill. II. Cumins, Tom. F1219.76.S63N37 1997 972'.018—dc20 96-11704 CIP
Content introduction
1
ELIZABETH HILL BOONE
COLONIZATION AND CULTURAL CHANGE The many faces of medieval colonization
13
ANGELIKI E. LAIOU
Three cultural contact experiences: Nahua, Maya and Quechua
31
JAMES LOCKHART
Clash of Values Disputes for the Rights of “Natural Masters” in Early Colonial Courts in the Andes
55
JUAN V. MURRA
Family values in 17th century Peru
63
IRENE SILVERBLATT
SELF-IMAGE PRESENTATIONS IN OBJECTS, IMAGES AND ALPHABETICAL TEXTS Let me see! Reading is for them: Andean colonial images and objects "as it is customary to have the lords caciques"
91
TOM CUMMINS
v
Contents
Pictorial Documents and Visual Thought in Post-Conquest Mexico
149
ELIZABETH HILL BOONE
The social context vs. Legal titles in Nahuatl
201
STEPHANIE MADERA
INTERPRETING THE PAST INTO THE PRESENT The Aztec Triple Alliance: A Post-Conquest Tradition
233
SUSAN D. GILESPIE
The Collquiri dam: the colonial reinterpretation of an appeal to the archaic
265
FRANK SALOMON
Time, space and ritual action: the Inca and Christian calendars in early colonial Peru
295
SABINE MACCORMACK
RELIGIOUS COMPETITION, NEGOTIATION AND CONVERGENCE Pachacamac and El Señor de los Milagros
345
MARIA ROSTWOROWSKI
Pious Spectacles: Christian Pomp and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico
361
LOUISE M. BURKHART
LANGUAGE AS IDENTITY ARMOR A nation surrounded
383
BRUCE MANNHEIM
Indigenous writing as a vehicle for post-conquest continuity and change in Mesoamerica FRANCES KARTTUNEN
vi
421
Contents
SYNTHETIC COMMENTARY Indigenous Traditions in the Post-Conquest World: Commentary
449
TOM CUMMINS
INDEX
463
viii
Introduction
Introduction ELIZABETH HILL BOONE TULANE UNIVERSITY
T
THE GREAT WAVE OF THE QUINCENTENNIAL, of
From the time it began to grow in the late 1980s until it finally reached the shores in 1992, it has brought unprecedented attention to the Americas and the Americas' place in the rest of the world. It spurred a wide variety of individuals, private companies, and non-profit institutions to develop projects to celebrate, commemorate, or condemn the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Americas, and it certainly generated as much madness as it did thoughtful analysis and debate. . But the Quincentennial events, exhibitions, speeches, films and writings have touched large sectors of the population who had never given much thought to the indigenous cultures of this hemisphere and never considered the impact that this particular cultural and biological exchange has had on the world. After 1992, people think differently about ethnicity, cultural change, and power than they did before 1992. The remarkable thing about the Quincentennial is that it brought these issues to a wide audience. Looking back over the range of Quincentennial projects, one sees a subtle but important shift in attitude and rhetoric. Early in the planning process, there was great enthusiasm for Columbus, the props of exploration and discovery, and the soon to become tedious question about the landing: where exactly did Columbus land? However, in 1992, the meticulously recreated caravels, Columbus films and all the Columbus Jubilee commissions finally failed to generate the popular interest that their organizers had hoped. Clearly, Columbus was not the problem. At issue, according to some institutions, were the conquests of the West and the Age of Exploration. Exhibitions such as the National Gallery of Art's Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Discovery (Levenson 1991) and books such as Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991) have focused extensively on culture and knowledge in the late 15th century. . , especially as these expanded outside Europe. But, however universal these projects thought 1
Elizabeth Hill Boone, still saw the world through the eyes of Europe, seeing everything else as the timeless Other. In contrast, many other institutions saw the "New World" itself as the problem. They eschewed European and Western notions of universality, focusing instead on the richness and diversity of indigenous America. In Europe, for example, the Quincentennial Commission in Madrid developed an Aztec exhibition, while the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin and the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire in Brussels mounted separate exhibitions focusing on pre-Columbian America. In the United States, the Denver Museum of Natural History organized its own large Aztec exhibition, while the Art Institute of Chicago visited a large pre-Columbian exhibition. The rhetoric that came to dominate the Quincentennial in popular and intellectual circles was not that of Discovery but that of a Meeting of Two Sides, and, given the meeting's ultimate destructiveness to American cultures, its tone was celebratory rather than festive. Instead of highlighting discoveries, historians and anthropologists have asked what "discovery" meant to whom. The projects tried to explain, and the public began to understand, some of the changes initiated by this linking of the eastern and western hemispheres. Thus, the Smithsonian's Seeds of Change exhibit focused on five elements whose interchange forever altered the lives of people in both hemispheres: disease, corn, potatoes, sugar, and the horse (Viola and Margolis 1991). The Library of Congress exhibition 1492: An Ongoing Voyage (Hebert 1992) also maintained this more neutral stance of examining the impact of the encounter, as did other exhibitions, a large number of scholarly symposia, and many books; the 1992 meeting of the College Art Association, for example, was entirely devoted to considering the meeting of cultures. In this way, the Quincentennial attracted individuals and institutions beyond their usual thematic scopes and spurred them to think expansively. Taken separately, the results were mixed, for certainly not all Quincentennial efforts were successful, but the combined strength of so many projects had a profound effect on humanist thought. By late 1992, the rhetoric of multiculturalism and encounter, considered progressive in the 1980s, had become almost dominant in academic circles. Today, nobody seriously thinks about a New World waiting to be "discovered", "inhabited" and "civilized". When Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks began in the 1980s in anticipation of the Quincentennial, we shared the feeling that additional efforts were needed. One hundred years earlier, archaeologist Zelia Nuttall wrote to Frederick Putnam about her plans to publish the newly discovered Codex Magliabechiano, formerly
2
Introduction pressing his conviction that the 400th anniversary was a time "when all Americanists should reach for something extra" (Boone 1983: 13). In 1992, that warning seemed even more appropriate. The Quincentennial has given us both the opportunity and the challenge to do something special, to broaden our thinking and go beyond our usual efforts and emphasis to mark, not celebrate, the bond of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. For those museums and cultural institutions with a traditionally European or Western emphasis, the challenge was to extend their reach into indigenous America. For us at Dumbarton Oaks, with our traditionally pre-Columbian program, the challenge was to follow history in the opposite direction. Since our founding in the pre-contact period, we have seen opportunities for greater understanding if we break away from the traditional “division” of invasion and conquest and look to the post-Columbian world. The focus would remain on indigenous cultures, but would be directed towards them. cultures in their newly altered post-conquest environments. By turning our attention to the indigenous response to the Spanish invasion, the cultural adjustment and necessary negotiation, we hope to better understand some of the cultural characteristics that made these societies so resilient. We thus hoped to reveal essential traditions, ways of thinking and ways of doing and thinking that might stand out more clearly after the conquest than before. I brought Aztec studies experience to the company, and when he agreed to join the project as co-organizer and co-chair, Tom Cummins brought his complementary Andean experience. Early in the planning phase, we explored the idea of looking across Latin America. The comparative range would have been great, but it would run the risk of going too far: then we would be buttering the hemisphere, achieving only superficial coverage. After considering the state of scholarship in postconquest Latin America and seeking depth, we felt that the symposium would be more cohesive and successful if it focused on two areas: Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru. These are the two points in the hemisphere where indigenous cultures reached the highest degree of cultural complexity shortly before the arrival of Europeans. As the Aztecs and Incas dominated their continents culturally and economically, they were the main peoples the Europeans had to conquer in order to gain control. They subsequently became the main focus of the Spanish colonial administration, which replaced the indigenous Aztec and Inca governments with their own viceroyalties. The indigenous/Spanish interface was thus concentrated on these points. These were places, to borrow George Kubler's conception of 'rapid events', where change was faster than anywhere else (Kubler 1962: 84-96). 3
Elizabeth Hill Boone In addition, we are fortunate to have abundant documentary resources for both Peru and Mexico. Early colonial life is understood primarily through the documentary record: through the conscious stories and accounts of indigenous, mestizo, and Spanish chroniclers and the mundane administrative records required and still preserved within Spanish and colonial administrative systems. Almost no evidence comes from archaeology, that great resource for pre-Conquest America, because traditionally there has been little excavation of colonial sites, except as an overlay on a pre-Columbian site. Fortunately this is starting to change; we hope, one day, an archaeological complement to the written record. Furthermore, in Peru and Mexico, historical studies on the colonial period are profound and, in both areas, are marked by a new vigor in the last two decades. Scholars from disciplines other than history (anthropologists, art historians, literary theorists, linguists) have also drawn on the early colonial period, bringing their different perspectives to their studies. The specific theme of the 1992 symposium, and this resulting volume, is indigenous traditions as they operated in the new post-conquest world. We are not attempting an overview of colonial culture as such, and certainly the reader will not find much treatment of economics, demography and disease or politics on a grand scale. Instead, we are seeing how Amerindian peoples (specifically the Nahua and Quechua) used many of their pre-conquest mental traditions – their systems of symbols, structures, ideas and ways of doing things – to their advantage, adapting, resisting. and, in general, adapt to changing conditions caused by the Spanish presence. It addresses the internal cultural and intellectual life of native peoples, not only to verify passive continuities, but also to focus on the active one that goes back or clings to pre-Columbian elements and structures, as well as conscious archaisms. The volume discusses this process of maintaining the traditional past not just because it occurred, but because it was and is essential for the ethnic and cultural survival of colonized peoples. Many traditions persisted with minimal change in the post-conquest period because they continued to respond to cultural needs. They were practical or useful ideas or standards, or they were so fundamental to the native mindset that they could not easily be destroyed or changed. Other native traditions atrophied and died, however, because there was no longer a place for them; in these situations we can see strong connections between utility and survival. Many other traditions have been functionally or formally transformed, enduring in new situations or in new forms. The old purposes they served changed, or their functions remained, but their forms were modified or adapted to new conditions. In this way, traditional values or ideas
4
The introduction of European forms continued through the media, and traditional forms changed their context to convey what were essentially European ideas and values. We asked authors to write about the permutations that occurred in native traditions due to colonial pressure and asked them to consider the structural contexts within which indigenous traditions and new elements became integrated into unique colonial systems. This volume is the result of a relatively new and dynamic turn in research on colonial Latin America that addresses factors of native resilience. Like many current analyzes, it is in complementary contrast to earlier studies that have approached colonial life from the Spanish perspective and focused on Spanish attempts to govern. I am thinking here of Charles Gibson's classic monograph, The Inca Concept of Sovereignty and the Spanish Administration in Peru (1948), his Spain in America (1966) and Peggy Liss' Mexico under Spain, 1521-1556: Society and the Origins of Nationality (1975). Likewise, this analysis defends a position opposed to those who have emphasized an almost systematic replacement of native indigenous systems by Spanish introductions, such as George Kubler's excellent article "On the Colonial Extinction of Pre-Columbian Art Motifs" (1961) and the Still by Roberto Ricardo. - seminal book La “Conquête spirituelle” du Mexique (1933).1 These essays continue to inform us in an intelligent and important way about the European side of the post-conquest situation and the imposition of European traditions on native cultural systems. In this volume, however, we consciously focus on native forms and traditions that have continued to be effective. Rather than viewing indigenous populations as relatively inactive participants in or recipients of Spanish institutions, almost all of the articles here draw on the perspective of indigenous peoples themselves as they moved and responded to the cultural and intellectual climate of the period. . . Thus, the volume focuses more on the internal cultural life of indigenous peoples and less on their corporate communities' formal relationships with the outside world. In that sense, it is a shift in perspective from Charles Gibson's great books Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (1952) and Aztecs under Spanish Rule (1964). Although Gibson was largely concerned with indigenous institutions, seen largely through Spanish sources, most of the authors in this volume draw on indigenous documents and sources as much as possible to find patterns and explanations of indigenous mentalities. , or what Frank Salomon (1984 ): 91), speaking of the Andes, called the “emergent history of indigenous ideas”. This current approach follows nearly two decades of publishing and reviewing indigenous documents at the local level, such as wills, land sales, municipal records, 1
Published in Spanish in 1947 and in English in 1966. 5
Petitions and letters from Elizabeth Hill Boone, written in Nahuatl, Zapotec, Maya or Quechua and revealing specifically indigenous concerns. Lockhart (1991: 178; 1992a: 7) refers to the work being done on mundane Nahuatl documents (mainly by himself, his collaborators and his students) as a new philology, which is helping to develop Nahuatl social history. 2 In this sense, Lockhart, María Rostworowski and John Murra play multiple roles here. They contributed articles to the present volume and also trained some of the other scholars whose work is represented here; moreover, his work set the stage for the new focus on indigenous culture in the colonial era. Scholars from a variety of perspectives, many grounded in contemporary cultural theory and seeking new modes of analysis, are delving into apparently much more banal administrative documents and texts, once considered minor than before. In the Andes, the corpus of indigenous documentation is much smaller than in Mexico, but despite the scarcity of documents in native languages, a diverse group of scholars – historians, sociocultural anthropologists, literary historians, art historians and linguists – have worked with these sources in search of threads of indigenous thought. Perhaps because indigenous Andean texts are so scarce, recent Andean scholarship has been especially creative in bringing the widest range of analytical tools to bear on texts. Post-conquest scholarship and thinking has changed due to the nature of this recent research. There was a shift in academic attention from large-scale formal colonial institutions to the day-to-day affairs of the Indian community; this volume reflects this change. It also intersects with the growing field of textual analysis of colonial documents, perhaps best identified under the term Colonial Discourse or what Walter Mignolo (1989) called Colonial Semiosis: literary critics and theorists, semioticians and sociocultural anthropologists are looking again at the discursive structures . and practices that underpinned European and indigenous interaction, and their insights are making an important contribution to postconquest dialogue.3 As Joanne Rappaport (personal communication, 1994) has noted, many of the articles in this volume introduce relatively new forms of interpretation. reported by contemporaries. culture theory. They acknowledge the “ambiguities inherent in early colonial written and pictorial texts, as well as other representative genres,” and consider the “multiple agendas within indigenous and Spanish fields” that are embodied in these texts. 2 See Lockhart (1991: 159–200; 1992a: 2–9; 1992b: 323–326) and Cline (1990) for reviews of postconquest Nahua historiography, focusing primarily on social history. 3 See, for example, the special issues of two journals edited by Adorno and Mignolo (1989) and Jara and Spadaccini (1989).
6
Introduction The authors who contributed to this volume were chosen because they work from an indigenous perspective and because they are working on issues of ideology, or what I call intellectual culture. They met in Dumbarton Oaks in October 1992 to discuss and stimulate thinking about concepts of history, religion, social status and political position (not structure) and communication (including documentation, visual presentation and language). These, it seemed to Tom and me, were exactly the characteristics that kept native communities resilient despite the overwhelming catastrophe of invasion, conquest and population collapse. Here, in highlighting the vitality and resilience of Nahua and Quechua culture in the post-conquest period, we must be careful not to overlook the essential fact that the Spanish/Native encounter was a cataclysm for indigenous peoples. We must bear in mind that indigenous peoples did not have nearly the same rights, status, health and general well-being after the conquest as before. The Spaniards were not simply latter-day Aztecs and Incas conquering territories that had been conquered before, and the Reunion so often mentioned in Quincentennial literature did not result in equality for either side. Our task is to discover the mental strategies that allowed the Nahuas and Quechuas to survive so well. This volume addresses the inner life of the Indians by first looking at the postconquest American situation from two broad and complementary perspectives. Angeliki Laiou, director of Dumbarton Oaks and a Byzantine economic historian who has observed our field with considerable interest and reflection, offers a thoughtful view of colonization as a process. Speaking from the point of view of medieval Europe, he comments on the different forms that colonization took, noting that there was clearly no one type of colonial experience. James Lockhart then takes this argument to the Americas and reinforces many of Laiou's points about the wide variety of conquest/colonial situations. Lockhart speaks in general synthetic terms about the process of change that followed the Spanish conquest, extending his examination beyond central Mexico into a preliminary view of the Maya and Quechua worlds. Both Laiou and Lockhart find a dialectical relationship between colonizers and native populations and point out that the nature of the interaction, whether assimilation, separation or annihilation, depended not only on the ideology and experience of the colonizers, but also on the nature of the colonizers of the community. local population: its numerical strength, its resemblance to the invaders and the facts of the conquest. These two articles discuss the extent of colonial interaction, setting the stage for subsequent articles, which deal with individual facets of the Nahua and Quechua situation in more detail. 7
Elizabeth Hill Boone John Murra brings the issue of cultural similarity to the local and individual level in her discussion of how Andean “native lords” tried to maintain power and prestige by working within the Spanish legal and administrative system. Ultimately, they failed because, as Murra points out, the Spaniards used this very system to strip “native lords” of those very rights they had so briefly won. Irene Silverblatt continues Murra's focus on confrontation and the uneasy submission of Andean systems and values by the Spaniards. In his essay on family values, he explores the conflicts and ironies in indigenous and Spanish conceptions of morality. A group of articles looks at issues directly related to visual imagery, self-presentation, and the continuing power of documents. All of this refers to how (by which I mean the mechanisms by which) native peoples presented themselves, to each other and to the outside world. The articles by Tom Cummins, Stephanie Wood and myself are not the only ones to do this, but these three are the essays that most explicitly deal with the successful role of artistic objects and registers in the construction of native self-image. Cummins describes the power and meaning that objects themselves possess; I note the resistance of pictorial writing and visual thinking among sixteenth-century Nahuas; and Wood takes the analysis back to the 18th century, showing how and why indigenous communities created titles to be ancient documents. The next six articles shift the focus from the records themselves to indigenous ideology and structures of thought. Susan Gillespie, Frank Salomon and Sabine MacCormack are concerned with indigenous reinventions or self-interpretations of the past. They analyze how postconquest peoples constructed narratives of the past and used these narratives to explain past and contemporary social relations. Gillespie sees the so-called Mexican Triple Alliance as a colonial invention that was codified to legitimize subsequent Spanish rule. Salomon goes to the heart of the matter when he examines how and in what contexts pre-Columbian Andean memory was reformulated to adapt to the new expectations and needs that developed after the conquest; It does so through two texts from the 17th century —a myth and a judicial record— and a performance from the 20th century that talks about the right to land and water. MacCormack opens up Guaman Poma's cognitive framework to show us how he explained features of Inka ritual and Inka time in terms of the Christian frameworks in which he lived. These three articles point out that the needs of the post-conquest “present” shaped the way the past was thought and presented. Louise Burkhart and Maria Rostworowski focus on elements of indigenous religious life in the post-conquest world, noting some of the convergences
8
Introduction between the indigenous and Spanish systems. As their works show, these convergences became the main forums for negotiation and religious dispute on the part of the Spanish and indigenous populations. Burkhart shows how the Nahuas took the Spanish understanding of the importance of ritual in Christianity, greatly expanded its definition, and used it to shape their own distinctive Christianity. Rostworowski then explains how Andean mental constructions about fatherhood and duality, and the Andean emphasis on pilgrimage, endured through the cult of Cristo de los Milagros in Pachacamac. It is clear from these articles that indigenous Christianity was profoundly altered by pre-existing indigenous structures, which strengthened the introduced religion, transforming it into a locally recognizable constellation of beliefs and practices. The two articles that deal more directly with language begin in the 16th century, but take the discussion to the end of the 20th century. Bruce Mannheim and Frances Karttunen show the extent to which language continues to be an armor for Indian identity from the 16th century to the present. Mannheim traces the process of Quechua "national" formation as reflected in Quechua texts, explaining how specific rhetorical strategies were successfully based on Spanish and Quechua cultural forms. Karttunen also notes dual sources (European and indigenous) on which indigenous writing was based after the conquest. Focusing on Mesoamerica, he sees two traditions taking shape, one overt and one covert, and continuing as vehicles of identity: the postconquest Maya and Nahua produced works that presented indigenous issues abroad and therefore were specifically aimed at scrutiny of strangers; they also wrote for themselves, creating works exclusively for indigenous communities. Like Salomon at the beginning of the volume, both Mannheim and Karttunen focus on the rhetorical and cultural practices through which indigenous peoples continue to maintain a distinct sense of identity. Finally, Tom Cummins briefly comments on previous articles, pointing out lines of thought that run through them. One of the questions he raises is the fundamentality of the texts in this volume. The texts, in the form of documentary sources, are essential to the kinds of studies of continuity and change that this volume contains. The texts were also important for post-conquest peoples themselves, who used them as tools to maintain their own identity. From Guaman Poma in Lima to Toluqueño officials who commissioned “ancient” titles for their cities, indigenous peoples saw value in texts that spoke of their native traditions.
9
Elizabeth Colina Boone
BIBLIOGRAPHY ADORNO, ROLENA AND WALTER D. MIGNOLO (EDS.) 1989 Colonial Discourse. Special issue of Dispositio 14 (36–38). BOONE, ELIZABETH HILL 1983 The Magliabechian Codex and the Lost Prototype of the Magliabechian Group. University of California Press, Berkeley. CLINE, S. L. 1990 Ethnohistory: Mesoamerica. Handbook of Latin American Studies 50 (Humanities): 81–89. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. GIBSON, CHARLES 1948 The Inca Concept of Sovereignty and Spanish Administration in Peru. University of Texas Press, Austin. 1952 Tlaxcala in the 16th century. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. 1964 The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 1966 Spain in America. Harper and Row, New York. GREENBLATT, STEPHEN 1991 Wonderful Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. HEBERT, JOHN R., Ed. 1992 1492: A journey in progress. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. JARA, RENÉ AND NICHOLAS SPADACCINI (EDS.) 1989 1492 –1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing. Special Edition Hispanic Issues 4. The Prisma Institute, Minneapolis, Minn. KUBLER, GEORGE 1961 On the colonial extinction of pre-Columbian artistic motifs. In Essays in Pre-Colombian Art and Archeology (Samuel K. Lothrop et al.): 14–34, 450–452, 485–486. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1962 The Shape of Time: Commentaries on the History of Things. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. LEVENSON, JAY A. (ED.) 1991 Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Discovery. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. LISS, PEGGY 1975 Mexico under Spain, 1521–1556: Society and the Origins of Nationality. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. LOCKHART, JAMES 1991 Nahuas and Spaniards: History and Philology of Post-Conquest Central Mexico. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, and UCLA Latin American Center Publications, University of California, Los Angeles. 1992a The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, 16th to 18th Centuries. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 1992b The postconquest period of Mexican history. The Americas 48(3): 323–330. 10
Introduction MIGNOLO, WALTER D. 1989 Epilogue: From colonial discourse to colonial semiosis. Provision 14 (36–38): 333–337. RICARD, ROBERT 1933 The "Spiritual Conquest" of Mexico. Works and Memoirs of the Institute of Ethnology 20. University of Paris 1, Paris. SALOMON, FRANK 1984 Ethnohistory: South America. Handbook of Latin American Studies 46 (Humanities): 90–113. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. VIOLA, HERMAN J. AND CAROLYN MARGOLIS (EDS.) 1991 Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial Commemoration. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC
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The many faces of medieval colonization
The Many Faces of Medieval Colonization ANGELIKI E. LAIOU HARVARD UNIVERSITY/DUMBARTON OAKS
T
THE THEME OF THIS YEAR'S SYMPOSIUM
is of great interest, attracting the attention of historians outside the field. Indeed, the interaction of cultures and peoples who, in one way or another, are in close contact is a perennial historical problem and an important issue in modern historiography. It is the permutations of interaction that make such investigations interesting to historians in all fields. More specifically, sixteenth-century developments depend in many ways on institutions and ideologies that were deeply rooted in the practices and minds of colonizers; therefore, it is useful to look back and examine what the previous historical experience was like, and that necessarily takes us back to the Middle Ages. The developments of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are seen by medievalists as in many respects the continuation of earlier trends: for us they are Phase Two of Europe's expansion, the first phase having begun in the late eleventh century, when Western Europeans, for the first time in centuries, crossed old geographic and cultural boundaries. Perhaps we are more aware of these connections at this time, precisely because of the anniversary of Columbus' voyage. But this is far from a new view of medievalists, who have occasionally made bizarre claims regarding continuity. It is not necessary to agree fully with extreme statements to assert that the explorers, soldiers and settlers who sailed to the Americas had behind them a collective experience of several hundred years of contact with other peoples, and of various kinds as well. expansion and colonization. In the initial period of the first phase of European expansion there were two main impulses, two main forms of expansionist movement, which intersected at important points and supported each other. One is economic expansion, focused on the Mediterranean and eventually the Baltic, fueled by trade and then facilitated by the development of manufacturing and banking 13
Institutions Angeliki E. Laiou. Hesitant at first, confident in the course of time, merchants from the Italian seafaring cities and eventually from southern France and Spain left the confines of Western Europe, bringing their wares and small capital to the ports of the eastern Mediterranean, both Christian and Christian. as Muslims. This expansion first took the form of trading stations: small settlements with a few houses, a church, weighing stations, and a floating population that traded in local produce and collected long-distance trade goods from Central Asia and the Far East. silks. In terms of institutions, this outward expansion was largely based on the medieval concept of privilege. In the corporate culture of the Middle Ages, the concept of universal freedoms or rights was barely developed. Rather, the functional mode of operation involved special "freedoms," that is, privileges, accorded to members of a group, social class, or corporation. As for Western merchants, their activities in Eastern Mediterranean countries were regulated by special trading privileges. The most obvious and far-reaching were the privileges that Venetian merchants received from the Byzantine emperors in 992, 1082, and then throughout the rest of the Middle Ages. Over other foreign merchants, whose activities were restricted, the Venetians had the advantage of being free to trade and reside in the various cities and ports of the Byzantine Empire; They had the advantage over native traders of trading without paying taxes, which automatically gave them an economic advantage of about 10% of the value of the merchandise. Conceptually, commercial privileges created within the Byzantine Empire a group of foreigners who not only worked in advantageous circumstances, but were also cut off from the authority of the imperial state because they received special exemptions, i.e. extraterritorial concessions: mainly tax and judicial exemptions. privileges that removed them from the jurisdiction of host country courts. Similar privileges were acquired in other eastern Mediterranean states and would eventually have adverse structural effects on native economies. Thus, we have an expansion driven by trade and carried out mainly by merchants and sailors. Outside the commercial season, a somewhat passive institution dependent on the good will of the native rulers, in some areas, exploitative colonies emerged in full development, demanding new ways of dealing with the native populations. The other impetus of early European expansion came from religion and was contemporary with the first phase of economic expansion. I am referring, of course, to the Crusades, that Holy War which was an invention of medieval Western Europe and which left a lasting ideological and cultural mark on European societies.
14
The many faces of medieval settlement stories are perhaps not of interest here. Of much wider importance is the institutionalization of a particular way of looking at the enemy and a particular concept of how to deal with those who did not wish to be part of the Christian community. There is no doubt that these questions were capable of and received different answers. Thus, on the central issue of whether infidel or generally non-Christian rulers were entitled to exercise jurisdiction, rule, and property rights, leading canonists could have wildly divergent views (Brundage 1976: especially 121ff). But legalistic ideas and definitions only emerged after the practice and a crude ideology had already been developed. This crude ideology, very evident in the late eleventh century, can be seen in art, literature, papal speeches (at least so we are told), chroniclers' accounts of the First Crusade, and crusader actions. The notion of the “Other” that was forged at that time was intransigent: the “Other” was bad, perverse and vile. It soon became clear how scalable this concept was. In a conscious act, the papacy tried to replace internal, European, and destructive wars with wars against "the Other." The “Other” came to be described as vile, almost off limits, and this element of Holy War ideology was so powerful that it began to spread immediately: Rhineland Jews, many of them burned in their synagogues, were the first. victims of the First Crusade; in the holy city of Jerusalem, when it was captured, the Muslim population was executed by the crusaders who happily recounted that “the men rode with blood up to their knees and the reins of the reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that the place was filled with the blood of unbelievers. . . .”1 More than a generation later, as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was preaching a crusade against the Slavs, who were pagans, he wrote, “either they or their religion must be exterminated,” and his words found a willing audience. Certainly this attitude carried over into the 13th century, especially in the Baltic areas, where the people they faced were pagan and technologically and politically weak. The European expansion movement, insofar as it was driven by religion and Holy War ideas, had a deep strain of intolerance and a concept of Virtue versus Vice. This was contested by many voices raised against the Crusade, which failed to reconcile the use of force, so present in Western European tradition, with the theoretical imperative that adherence to Christianity must be done freely.2 On the other hand, there is also a missionary line, going back to an older tradition, revived after the Crusades lost their 1
motto 2
Peters (1971: 214), here quoting Raymond d'Aguiliers on the siege and capture of Jerusalem-Kedar (1984: 159ff). Cf. Constable 1953 and Siberry 1985. 15
Strength Angeliki E. Laiou. This tradition looks to conversion rather than extermination as the way to reach the ultimate goal, which in both cases is the extension of the Christian community to include as many peoples as possible (Kedar 1984: 97ff). Already in the fourteenth century, the crusades and missionary activities were seen as two complementary ways to reach the universality of the Christian religion, and a man like the Mallorcan Ramón Lull could propose both solutions, opting in the first place for conversion, but, if it were not achieved, suggesting that Muslims be told that there would be a perpetual war in which they would be torn to pieces and killed.3 In a variation on these attitudes, Pope Innocent IV had declared, in the mid-13th century, that forced Christianization was not necessary. . to wage, but that, on the other hand, Christians were justified in waging war against Muslim rulers who prohibited Christian preachers from preaching in their lands (Kedar 1984: 159ff). Medievalists have pointed out that their approach was later used to justify the subjugation of New World inhabitants (Kedar 1984: 203). Medieval exploration is more related to the missionary and mercantile tradition than to the crusade, although there are also undoubted links with the latter. One thinks in this sense of familiar names: on the one hand, there is Marco Polo as a representative of the commercial interest in exploration. The exploitation of merchants certainly neither began nor ended with him, but his account has the advantage of being written and the only one of its kind to have survived. That is, at least it is the only surviving geographical exploration of a merchant, because there are other types of exploitation: I am thinking mainly of recording economic diversity – different markets, coinage systems, weights and measures, prices – that they are incorporated into the manuals of traders. merchants.4 The data collected in these texts are different from those of geographic exploration, but the mentality of the writers is the same. On the other hand, there are the writings related to missionary hopes: those of Western ambassadors to the Mongols, Juan de Plano Carpini and especially William of Rubruck, who produced the first major ethnographic account of Central Asia and its peoples.5 These travelers were interested in recording the social structure, beliefs and customs of Mongolian and Tartar pagans with a view to their eventual conversion or at least alliance with Christians. Merchants, deeply pious as they no doubt were, were more Kedar (1984: 196): “scindens et interficiens”: Liber de Fine, 1305. The best known of these is Francesco Balducci Pegolotti's manual La Pratica della Mercatura (1936) . 5 Christopher Dawson (1955) includes accounts by Juan de Plano Carpini (1245-1247) and William of Rubruck (in the 1250s). 3. 4
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The Many Faces of Medieval Colonization interested in profit rather than conversion, and certainly more interested in profit than war in the propagation of Christianity. Without attributing them benevolence, which would be unrealistic, it is clear, however, that, among Western Europeans, they were the most capable of what we might call tolerance, even if they did not recognize it as such: the acceptance of other peoples, their customs and your faith; and the acceptance of war when necessary, but a much more constant aversion to war, Holy War or crusade, as beyond a certain point it interfered with the success of trade. One example is the reaction of merchants to the papal embargo on trade with Egypt, instituted after the fall of Acre, the last Christian outpost in the Holy Land, in 1291. Merchants in Italy and Spain strongly opposed the embargo. , and they found different ways to get around it, although breaking it openly was dangerous and therefore should be avoided. Such an attitude of tolerance is understandable, as it was, after all, the merchants who had to deal with the diversity of weights, measures, currencies, products, peoples and their customs, and deal with them successfully if they wanted to be good. businessmen. For them, as for some other western Europeans in the Middle Ages, diversity was not something to subdue uniqueness, but something to profit from, as it is done in the market, taking advantage of differential prices, short-term and long-term loans. and exchange rates. This is how merchants were the main bearers of this other aspect of European expansion and colonization, that is, accommodation and openness to other peoples and cultures. It was not, for example, crusaders or missionaries who produced the first dictionary of foreign languages, but the Genoese—those intrepid and determined merchants—who, in the mid-14th century, compiled the Codex Cumanicus, a Latin-Persian dictionary. Cuman dictionary. In terms of colonization patterns, there are three different types that I would like to discuss. The first was adopted by Italian merchants in the Middle Ages, mainly those from Venice and Genoa. These two trading cities differed significantly from each other, especially in the organization of their economic and political life. The Genoese had a weak state and its expansion took place through the action of individuals or groups organized in private or semi-private companies. In Venice, by contrast, much economic activity, certainly much mercantile activity, was organized, directed or controlled by the state. a basically similar pattern with many common elements. Philip Curtin isolated an important 6
On some of these differences, see López (1975: 35-42). 17
Angeliki E. Laiou differentiates between the commercial practices of these traders and those of other western Europeans, who created less organized commercial diasporas, that is, small communities in the midst of larger ones, typically closed in on themselves (Curtin 1984: 115–119). . On the other hand, Venice and Genoa created, throughout the 13th century, empires of trading posts, that is, they established military control over important trading posts, used mainly for long-distance trade. It's the kind of pattern that earned Venice the designation of the "Landless Empire." Sometimes these trading posts became full-fledged exploration colonies. This is the case for some of the largest and most productive islands in the eastern Mediterranean: Chios, Cyprus and Crete. Tied into a larger, Italian-dominated trading system spanning the entire Mediterranean, their economies became satellites of the economic interests of the colonizing power. This had a great impact on the economic activities of the native populations, as well as on the organization of production: there were also changes in farming patterns, the introduction of sugar cultivation in Cyprus, for example. On all these islands there were a certain number of Italian settlers, landowners and traders, which generated interesting phenomena in terms of internal development. Crete is the island where the effects of contact between settlers and native populations in this form of colonization can best be observed. Officially, Western settlers formed an upper class that was supposed to be isolated from the rest of the population. They were certainly the ruling class, holding a monopoly on political power until at least the mid-14th century (Jacoby 1976). Official policy enforced segregation, for example by placing legal restrictions against intermarriage. In the countryside, the peasant population working under a newly introduced feudal regime remained Greek-speaking and Orthodox in religion. But one of the effects of the Venetian conquest of the island was the increase in urbanization, and in the cities a process of assimilation and acculturation of the foreign elite in terms of language and culture can be observed from a very early age.7 Here, marriages Mixed relations occurred early and often between members of the trading group, and also between artisans and the rest of the urban population. Typically, unsurprisingly, marriages were between male colonists and native women, so the female lineage in a mixed marriage tended to be Greek, but the reverse could also be true. Bilingualism developed equally early. Although the absence of sources does not allow a detailed investigation of the phenomenon until the first half of the fourteenth century, we know that in two generations 7
18
For what follows, see Laiou (1992: 29-43). McKee (n.d.) examines such phenomena.
The many faces of medieval conquest colonization included Westerners who had formally learned Greek. The fact that some of them are children of mixed marriages is neither unexpected nor curious; indeed, bilingualism may have developed much earlier than our sources indicate, and initially within the informal setting of the home. Many wet nurses, for example, were Greek. Be that as it may, in addition to the colonists' unequivocal claims that they learned Greek, there is also other evidence that suggests a certain "contamination" of Latin (and presumably Venetian as well) by Greek. Inserted in wills written in Latin or Venetian, we find Greek words, which presumably exist for everyone to understand, that is, because they were in common use by Greek speakers and Venetians alike. On the other hand, we also know that there were Greeks who learned Italian, above all as a language of high culture, and that, very early on, the island's Greek was influenced by Italian and Venetian. The future, however, lay unequivocally in the linguistic assimilation not of the Greek, but of the Venetian element: although bilingualism continued to exist, in the sixteenth century the dominant language everywhere was Greek, and this was certainly the language of literature. This phenomenon of assimilation and acculturation of the settlers was still incipient two generations after the conquest, but it was already visible. It marked a society that was not only urban, but rather commercial. Under Venetian rule, produce was traded on Crete, the island became an important trading center in the eastern Mediterranean and the colony flourished as did the native population. From very early on, strong economic ties developed between the two elements of the population and, in fact, multiple aspects of assimilation are often observed taking place simultaneously and within the same family group: two families, united by economic ties , also forge marriage bonds, and their children share cultures and languages. All of this took place mainly in the cities, and was no doubt facilitated by the fact that both the settlers and the native population were Christians. On the other hand, it must be remembered that in the eyes of the Catholic Church, the natives were schismatic Christians; in fact, the native church lost its hierarchy and was placed in a position of inferiority in relation to the Catholic Church. It would have been perfectly possible for there to have been a situation like that of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, where Christians of different denominations, natives and settlers, did not have much contact. Here, however, although religious separation was maintained, especially at the official level, there was also a certain religious “bilingualism” among the urban inhabitants. The solution adopted in Crete, of considerable integration and accommodation of the indigenous population, undoubtedly resulted from a combination of factors:
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Angeliki E. Laiou the relatively small number of immigrants, the relative proximity of the two religions and the strength of the existing social structures. However, many of the same factors existed in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, where different solutions were eventually adopted, as we shall see. For my part, I would assign an important role to the requirements of a market economy that depends on exchange and collaboration and thus creates both the objective conditions and the attitudes that lead to the final assimilation of the settlers. At the same time, the native population has shown itself to be resilient and capable of absorbing the foreign ruling elite. Patterns of colonization were different where the colonizers were states, or feudal lords, or where the church played a greater role and where the colonized peoples were non-Christian, i.e. outside the bounds of Christianity and the protection afforded within those bounds. . A second type of colonization is characterized, by the colonizers, by a mixture of economic exploitation and religious intolerance, which calls for the conversion or extermination of the pagan native population; and on the part of the native population, it is characterized by an initial phase of resistance followed by conversion and assimilation or extinction. This is the case of German expansion in the Baltic lands, mainly in the area between the Elbe and Vistula rivers, where we find the other extreme of the Cretan situation.8 During the 12th century, following the movement of the Crusaders, these lands were conquered and colonized by the German nobility. , merchants and peasants. Native Slavic populations were farmers, hunters and fishermen, with a simple politico-military organization and a dualistic religion. They had relations and connections with the Germans for a long time: in the 10th century they paid tithes to German bishops, but later got rid of their dependency. Saxon missionaries also had a fairly long presence in these territories, sometimes, as in the early 12th century, supported by a native Christian prince. German expansion was driven by economic forces, originally taking the form of tribute extraction and then, in the early twelfth century, a period of population growth, taking the form of land famine and therefore conquest. Religion functioned as an ideological justification for the conquest and would eventually dictate the terms of conquest and colonization. The link between the effort to acquire more land and the Christianisation of the Slavs is evident in a proclamation by the leading bishops.8 The main source is Helmold of Bosau (1935); for bibliography and interpretation, see Thompson (1928) and Christianssen (1980). See also, now, Bartlett (1993), published after I wrote this essay.
20
The many faces of the medieval settlement of Saxony in 1108: “[The Slavs] are an abominable people, but their land is very rich in meat, honey, grain, birds, and abundant in all the products of the land's fertility, when cultivated. , so that no one can compare to him. So say those who know. Therefore, O Saxons, Franks, Lotharingians, most famous Flanders, here you can save your souls and, if you like, acquire the best lands to live on” (Thompson 1928: 497). Here, especially in the Wendish territories, there was little accommodation with the native Slavic population, who must either convert to Christianity or perish. The Second Crusade, preached against both Slavs and Muslims in the Holy Land, produced an unequivocal and powerful ideological conceptualization, precisely that of conversion or annihilation. The interests and ideology of the crusaders and colonizers were favored by their undoubted technological superiority. It was "the glare of their weapons" that native populations feared most. The native society's response began with resistance: “we will not abandon the laws that we inherited from our fathers; we are content with the religion we have. . . .”9 The war was followed by the rebellion of the defeated Slavic leaders, a rebellion against economic dependency and religious subjugation. As a Slavic leader said: “You all know that great calamities and oppressions have befallen our people through the violent power wielded by the Duke of Saxony. He had taken away our father's inheritance and settled foreigners in all his terms. . . . No one but me thinks of our nation's gods or wants to build its ruins. Take courage again, O men who are the remnants of the Slavic race, and resume your bold spirit." and the absorption of those who survived. In the late 1170s, we are told that "the whole country of the Slavs now, with the help of of God, became, as it were, a colony of Saxons. And cities and towns were built, and the number of Christ's ministers multiplied."11 The Slavic population dwindled in number, for some were killed, others were taken to different areas and others were sold into slavery Those who survived were assimilated and their culture was supplanted by the Western European culture brought by the German church New German principalities appeared in the areas between the Elbe and the Vistula 9 Pomeranias for Otto, Bishop of Bamberg , in 1127, in Thompson (1928: 431), here quoting the monk Herbord. 10 Helmold (1935: 256), here quoting a speech by Pribislav to the Slavs. 11 Thompson (1928: 513), quoting Helmold. For full text , see Helmold (1 935: 252-282).
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Angeliki E. Laiou Ríos: Holstein, Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Pomerania. Similar phenomena occurred in the conquest and colonization of Prussia, more particularly in East Prussia, which was heavily Germanized in the late 13th and 14th centuries, with the influx of settlers, the extermination or expulsion of some Prussian tribes, and the assimilation of others. . In all these cases, the relevant variables included technological and military superiority on the part of the colonizers, heavy immigration, and an uncompromising religious focus (Christianssen 1980: 100-104; Johnson 1975: 545-585). On the part of the native population, there is a sequence of resistance, rebellion, conversion and eventual assimilation. In the end, the conquistadors supplanted native society. A third pattern of medieval colonization is exemplified by the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, which was established in the late eleventh century and lasted until 1291. Here, too, a foreign group (military and later also commercial) established itself as a conqueror, amidst a population. which included Jews, Muslims and native Christians of different sects. Western Europe's first approach was the extermination of at least a part of the native population, namely the Muslims. In fact, this approach was short-lived, only being put into practice at the time of the conquest of Jerusalem, when the city's Muslim population was massacred. But Jerusalem, as the site of Christian and especially Crusader fanaticism, was a special case; and the moment was also special, for the First Crusade had been fueled by depictions of Muslims as inhuman, half-human, apocalyptic enemies. As European settlements developed, extermination of the enemy was not an option tried. Nor was there massive immigration of Western Europeans into the conquered lands of Syria and Palestine. Indeed, the relative scarcity of European settlers was one of the defining characteristics of this state and society. What was established here was an exploitative regime, with an important separation between rulers and ruled: the rulers maintained their culture and their language and institutions and, what is more important, the monopoly of political power. Contact with the indigenous rural population, Muslim or Christian, was mainly fiscal in nature: the settlers were not even resident landowners. Native pueblo communities, at the same time, maintained their structure, with their own native courts and judges, and their own chiefs responsible for security and tax collection. Nor have the farming or settlement systems of the local population changed. There was increased contact between natives and settlers in the cities, but this had very little impact on the native population. They were, then, two separate and unequal societies, with undoubted points of contact that, however, were not of an essential character. It is true that the settlers acquired some oriental habits in terms of food and housing; your
22
The Many Faces of Medieval Colonization Military architecture benefited greatly from the experience of native masons; and ideologically, they have become, as a group, more tolerant of different cultures than their Western European counterparts. But they maintained their language, their high culture and, above all, their administrative and political separation, creating a superstructure to which the native population did not have access. The two societies found themselves at peace on an economic level and hostility on a war level, but there was no real assimilation on either side. As for the native population, it is interesting that in this crusader state there was not even a concerted effort to convert the native Muslims or Christians, who were heretics in the eyes of Western conquerors.12 The impact of colonizers on the natives Society was important primarily in the as native agriculture was forced to focus on specific cash crops for which there was a market in Europe.13 But this was less the result of the colonization of Syria and Palestine and more the result of the creation of a Mediterranean exchange system. , driven by the needs of Italian trade. The type of colonial state and society introduced by Western Europeans into the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was particularly fragile. Its continued existence depended on the tolerance of the native population, which, in turn, was directly and negatively correlated with the degree of unity and strength of the surrounding Muslim populations.14 When Muslims united under charismatic leaders, the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem entered into collapse. . What were the factors that led to the adoption of this fragile system? On the one hand, the mechanics of conquest: it occurred very quickly, and its very speed meant that it was neither dependent on the native population nor accompanied by assimilation, even partial and fragmented. Second, the absence of mass settlement was undoubtedly an important factor and had the obvious effect that the conquistadors remained a small minority. This may have led them to opt for assimilation with the native population. However, this theoretical choice – which, historically, was made, for example, by the Franks in the region that is now France, or by the Normans in England – was made unfeasible by the constituent ideology of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. 12 This interpretation adopts and is derived from the views most eloquently expounded by Joshua Prawer (1975). There are other views, which underline the assimilation aspects of the conquistadors. For an example, see LaMonte (1940-1941). 13 On this, see Ashtor (1983: 24, 173ff; 1976: 240ff). On the subject, see also Kedar (1992). Ashtor also discussed the negative impact of European trade on Near and Middle East manufacturing. 14 For an interesting study on the organization of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, its internal contradictions and international demands, see Ben-Ami (1969).
23
Angeliki E. Laiou was the very creation of the religion, and its continued existence depended on waves of crusades from Europe. Therefore, a rapid assimilation with the native population was impossible, despite the fact that part of this population was Christian (albeit heretical) and therefore had many points of resemblance to the conquerors. A long-term assimilation process was precluded by a third important factor: unlike the situation in the Baltic Slavic lands, the colonizers did not have technological superiority over the native population, quite the contrary. the hostility cultivated by the colonizers and the effect of conquest on the large Muslim populations outside the kingdom, who were galvanized into action, brought about the end of the kingdom before long-term factors could take effect. Thus Westerners could not supplant or eradicate native society, and could not, by circumstances and their own ideology, make the historical choice of assimilation. What is the relevance of all this to the problem at hand? Other scholars have eloquently made a range of connections, superficial or profound. I will not stop at easy and well-known connections. It is still an impressive, but now unsurprising, fact that Columbus sailed with a well-annotated copy of Marco Polo and found earthly paradise at the mouth of the Orinoco River. Years ago, Eileen Power commented that this is Marco Polo's most important miracle: alive, in the 13th century, he discovered China; died, in the fifteenth century he discovered America (Power 1926: 124-158). Nor is it necessary to insist on the cliché that Infante D. Henrique, the first person responsible for creating the conditions for Portuguese expansion, went in search of spices, infidels to convert and Prester John to discover. At a more complex level, scholars have traced the transfer of techniques and personnel from the Mediterranean to Atlantic states, especially Spain and Portugal, in the 15th century (Heers 1961; Fernández Armesto 1987: 96–148, 203–222). They rightly insisted on the versatility of the Genoese, who redirected their commercial activities where necessary from luxury items to bulk goods, and built a commercial complex that relied heavily on the Atlantic border states; they emigrated to the Iberian Peninsula and behaved like merchants in the past: they settled, became bilingual, married the local population, even became civil servants (Fernández-Armesto 1987: 113). They brought with them techniques acquired in the Mediterranean for trading and liquidating companies, banks, contracts, and revitalized the economy of the Iberian Peninsula. The same scholars have also pointed to the transfer of production of some products from the eastern Mediterranean to Madeira and
24
The many faces of the medieval colonization of the Canary Islands and, finally, of the Americas: this is the most evident case of the sugar cane culture, which flourished in Cyprus with slave labor and was later introduced by the Genoese in Sicily, Portugal, Madeira, Canary Islands, Cape Verde, until he was taken to Haiti. All these lines of descent have been established and there is no reason for me to dwell on them. Historians have also made the connection between the Crusader movement and the discovery and colonization of the Americas: thus, Friedrich Heer suggests that “the discovery of America was . . . itself a unique product of the last days of the European cross movement, whose fervor so rapidly waned but flared up again and again with consequences no one could have foreseen” (Heer 1962: 122). In the face of all these connections, now well established, what strikes me when I look at the medieval legacy of the late fifteenth century are certain general traits. Mainly, I suppose, thinking about this topic made me realize the great diversity of the medieval experience of expansion and colonization. Western European thought and practice run a gamut of possibilities from separation to assimilation. The conversion and extinction of the populations with which they had contact were contemplated, discussed and, sometimes, put into practice. Whether they were put into practice depended considerably on the numerical and political strength of the native peoples involved. Both sets of attitudes are also part of a particular way of approaching the "Other": the "Other" has to change, renounce its distinctive characteristics in order to survive. Much of the expansion and colonization of Western Europe is based on this profound intolerance, which was formalized and institutionalized in the Middle Ages, mainly in connection with the crusading movement. The idea of the perpetual crusade as a way of unifying the world under Western European rule is one of the greatest legacies of medieval Western Europe, all the more dangerous because it was promoted and defended by the bearers of the ideology - the church. and by a series of medieval kings. However, it was the same society that produced divergent views, liable to different ramifications. It was the same society that said that infidel rulers had no right to rightfully own land (thus the canonist Hostiensis), and which produced individuals who argued that they could, and therefore Christians could not, dispossess it (thus the Pope Innocent IV). The debate was far from irrelevant to the debates that followed Spanish expansion in America (Elliott 1964: 45-50). It was also the same society that produced various patterns of colonization: from the failed and unsustainable closed system of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem to the porous system of merchant colonies, where contact
25
Angeliki E. Laiou between European traders and native populations was a constant, and where native societies (in some cases, but not all) adapted to new conditions by participating in them, though never fully. It seems to me that, in terms of contact with Western Europeans and other peoples in the Middle Ages, we have a variety of responses to European invasion: from a largely unchanged fabric of native societies (the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem) to economic adaptation, the a certain degree of cultural integration, to finally annihilation. And it also seems to me that symbiosis was easier in the merchant colonies and that, for the same reason, the adaptations of native society were more considerable, although restricted to certain types of activity. The question then arises as to whether the constitutive factors of each of these different colonial experiences can be more accurately isolated. Let me say right away that I don't think it's possible to establish a predictive model, that is, one that establishes categories capable of predicting what would happen in other situations. Predictability and inevitability are made impossible by the fact that every situation is the result of the interaction of many factors on both sides; permutations allow similarities between historical experiences, but hardly for model building. That said, it is possible and useful to identify the factors that eventually determine colonial attitudes and native response; In general, there is a dialectical relationship between colonizers and native populations, in which each factor can have a different effect, depending on the other factors operating at the same time. On the side of the relationship with the settlers, ideology seems to play an extremely important role in creating a predisposition towards assimilation, annihilation or separation. However, the translation of the ideological position into action is determined by other factors, so the same aggressive Christianity acted differently on the pagan populations of the Baltic and the Muslim populations of Syria and Palestine. Economic factors play an important role, differently depending on whether the colonizer participates in an extractive system (agriculture, mining) or an exchange system. The numerical strength of the colonizers is undoubtedly important, but, again, its effects vary: the small number of settlers in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem created a closed and exclusive defensive system, while the small number of Venetian settlers in Crete were finally assimilated. . Finally, the conditions of the conquest—the speed of the conquest, the settlement patterns that followed—can help determine the outcome. With regard to native populations, their participation in the relationship is conditioned by a variety and combination of factors. Numerical strength is important, but perhaps more important is the degree of social complexity. A complex society on Crete was able to easily assimilate the colonizers, while
26
The Many Faces of Medieval Colonization The simpler social structures of some of the Baltic populations gave way to the technological and institutional superiority of the German crusaders. Active resistance, a form of reaction by the native population, also becomes an influential factor in the colonial experience, as it plays a dynamic role in the relationship between colonizers and native populations. Finally, there is an external component that is also important: the connection of settlers and/or native populations with external populations, cultures, institutions or states. Crusader ties with Western Europe, on the one hand, and the fact that Muslim leaders outside the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, on the other, saw themselves as protectors of the kingdom's Muslims and Muslim holy sites, were of paramount importance. importance in determining the fate of that state and society. In the same way, but with a different effect, the native population of Crete maintained its resistance for about one hundred and fifty years, in part because there was an orthodox Christian state, the Byzantine Empire, to which Crete belonged and which from time to time gave the population, a somber support. The various factors I have identified here were important, if not crucial, in shaping colonial experiences; but the exercise of identification is valuable primarily because it shows the complexity and variety of historical situations rather than because it allows for clear categorizations. All these experiences, and this varied ideological baggage, were bequeathed by the medieval expansion phase until the end of the 15th century. I do not know which aspects were dominant in the attitudes and practices of the colonizers of the Americas, nor is it the focus of this symposium as I understand it. However, I was interested to see in several articles that diversity of attitudes was recognized as playing an important role in the colonizing experience (eg Burkhart, this volume). Certain questions that were on my mind prior to the symposium remain open, although the conference documents provided partial answers. First, it asks what aspect of the Spaniards' varied ideological background was the response of native societies directed at, and whether Guaman Poma de Ayala's appeal to the colonists' social and political constructions (discussed by MacCormack in this volume) is of the same nature. same kind of response as the compilation of titles and ceremonies of the Nahuas (discussed by Wood and Burkhart). Second, it is quite clear that in the colonial period the native societies of the Americas were resilient and kept basic structures and ideas alive, albeit expressed in a new vocabulary. The intriguing question in my mind is the extent to which the colonists' attitude was also influenced by this response, and therefore the depth of the dialectical relationship. The answer, or more precisely, the
27
Angeliki E. Laiou sponsors, from the Christianization of the Spaniards to the Nahuas is a case in which this dialogue between attitudes and responses is evident; I wonder how widespread such phenomena were. Third, I was interested in finding out whether patterns of change in native traditions and the structural contexts within which indigenous traditions and new elements became integrated into unique colonial systems have structural similarities in the response patterns of colonized societies in the Middle Ages. I can't say that I've found an answer to this question, or even that I'm that much further along in finding an answer. This is to be expected, since a real answer would tend to have in considering the varieties of the New World experience, as well as those of the Viejo Mundo, and for that reason it is an overly overwhelming task, perhaps more interesting in the search than in The conquest.
28
The many faces of medieval colonization
BIBLIOGRAPHY ASHTOR, ELIYAHU 1976 Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages. Collins, London. 1983 Raise Trade in the Late Middle Ages. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. BARTLETT, ROBERT 1993 The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. BEN-AMI, AHARON 1969 Social Change in a Hostile Environment: The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. BRUNDAGE, JAMES A. 1976 Holy War and Medieval Lawyers. In The Holy War (Thomas Murphy, ed.): 99–140. Ohio State University Press, Columbus. CHRISTIANSSEN, ERIC 1980 The Northern Crusades: The Baltic and Catholic Frontiers, 1100–1525. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. CONSTABLE, GILES 1953 The Second Crusade Seen by Contemporaries. Tradition 9: 213–279. CURTIN, PHILIP D. 1984 Intercultural Trade in World History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. DAWSON, CHRISTOPHER 1955 The Mongolian Mission: Narratives and Letters of Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the 13th and 14th Centuries. Sheed and Ward, New York. Mission to Asia, 1980 (Dawson's 1955 reprint). Medieval Academy of America, Toronto. ELLIOTT, JOHN H. 1964 The Old World and the New, 1492-1650. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO, FELIPE 1987 Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492. Macmillan Education, Basingstoke, England. HEER, FRIEDRICH 1962 The Medieval World: Europe, 1100–1350. World Publishing Co., Cleveland and New York. HEERS, JACQUES 1961 Genes au XV e siècle: Activité économique et problemes sociaux. S.E.V.P.E.N., Paris. HELMOLD OF BOSAU 1935 The Chronicle of the Slavs (Francis Tschan, trans.). Columbia University Press, New York.
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Angeliki E. Laiou JACOBY, DAVID 1976 The Latin States in Romania: Social and Economic Phenomena (1204 – 1350 ca.). At the XVth International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Reports. Athens. JOHNSON, EDGAR B. 1975 The German Crusade in the Baltic. In History of the Crusades, vol. 3 (Kenneth Setton, editor): 545–585. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. KEDAR, BENJAMIN Z. 1984 Crusade and Mission. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. 1992 The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: The First European Colonial Society? A Symposium. In The Horns of Hattin (B.Z. Kedar, ed.): 341–366. Variorum, London and Jerusalem. LAIOU, ANGELIKI E. 1992 Venetians and Byzantines: Investigations into the forms of contact in the fourteenth century. Thesaurismata 22: 29–43. LAMONTE, JOHN L. 1940–41 The importance of the Crusader states in medieval history. Byzantium 15:300–315. LOPEZ, ROBERTO S. 1975 Venice and Genoa: two styles, one conquest. In this section, Sue presents the history of Genoa: 35–4 University of Genoa, Genoa. MCKEE, SALLY n.d. Unusual domain: the Latins and Greeks of Venetian Crete in the 14th century. Doctor. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1992. PEGOLOTTI, FRANCESCO BALDUCCI 1936 The Practice of Marketing (Allan Evans, ed.). Medieval Academy of America, Cambridge, Mass. PETERS, EDWARD 1971 The First Crusade. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. POWER, EILEEN 1926 The Opening of Land Routes to Cathay. In Travels and Travelers in the Middle Ages (Arthur Newton, ed.): 124–158. A.A. Knopf, New York. PRAWER, JOSHUA 1975 History of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. 2 vol. CNRS, Paris. SIBERRY, ELIZABETH 1985 The Critique of the Crusades, 1095-1274. Clarendon Press, Oxford. THOMPSON, JAMES WESTFALL 1928 Feudal Germany. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
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Three cultural contact experiences: Nahua, Maya and Quechua
Three Cultural Touch Experiences: Nahua, Maya, and Quechua JAMES LOCKHART UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
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Western Hemisphere and Europeans, the nature and pace of cultural change on the indigenous side (change that generally does not impede survival and continuity) seems to depend mainly on two things: first, the degree of similarity, that is, convergence, between the two cultures involved; second, the type and degree of contact between the carriers of the two cultures, since cultures can only be found through living, breathing individuals. This second element is actually partially dependent on the first. Without strong enough convergence, there can be little normal, peaceful, mutually meaningful contact between members of two separate societies. Cultural convergence is also an element of attraction for outsiders, attracting a greater number of Europeans and intensifying contacts. Europeans could build societies structured somewhat similar to their own and thus derive greater economic benefit from them. Economic benefit, above all leverage in Europe's economy, was the driving force behind Iberian emigration, so the characteristics of indigenous populations were by no means the only factor that made Europeans flock to some regions and avoid others. It turned out that the silver and the image matched reasonably well; Until the end of the 18th century, the vast majority of Spanish immigration (which was also the majority of total European immigration) went to Mexico and the central Andes. It is the experience of this nucleus, the core areas themselves, where most Europeans encountered the largest indigenous populations and where the elements of convergence were strongest, that worries me. N EPISODES OF CONTACT BETWEEN PEOPLE
An earlier, undated version of this article appeared in Mester, the student magazine of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles. I wish to express my gratitude to Kimberly Gauderman, who has joined me in studying Quechua and has been instrumental in acquiring and copying dictionaries and grammar books. 31
James Lockhart I am, of course, neither the first nor the last with such an interest, which has long dominated and continues to dominate more or less Latin American ethnohistorical literature, including the articles in the present volume. My particular angle has to do with identifying, analyzing and following the evolution of a people's basic concepts and structures across a broad spectrum, not so much in their conscious statements on such matters, but through their many types of records. , often mundane, in which they use their vocabulary and reveal their thoughts more naturally. Such work naturally requires written records in the languages of the people involved at the time and place of interest. I have been working with the Nahuas for years less because of their centrality than because they have left us a large corpus of alphabetical texts in Nahuatl, written by themselves, in all corners of central Mexico from around 1540 until the end of the eighteenth century. In the search for cases that can serve as a comparison with the Nahuas - and this is what I am gradually moving toward - I must once again follow the trail of language; this time, for practical reasons, paying more attention to the existence of interns who can guide me. Yucatán and the Yucatecan Maya jump out of the crowd of non-Nahua Mesoamerican peoples and languages. All Mesoamerican groups shared the region's pre-conquest writing traditions, and all adopted post-conquest alphabetic writing to a greater or lesser extent; Kevin Terraciano has located and is working with a large number of documents in Mixtec, for example. Yucatán apparently as densely documented through indigenous texts as the Nahua world – but without the philological and linguistic tradition that stretches from Ralph Roys (1939) to Victoria Bricker (1981) to Frances Karttunen (1985). The third most accessible language of sedentary peoples, by far, is Quechua. George Urioste (1983), now joined by Frank Salomon (Salomon and Urioste 1991), edited the Huarochirí legends and made Quechua accessible in the chronicle of Guaman Poma (Guaman Poma 1980); Bruce Mannheim (1991) discussed the entire available corpus, drawing many linguistic and other conclusions. What is absent from known writings in Quechua is the large number of mundane documents in Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya written by native speakers for other native speakers and not performed by 1 Terraciano, a doctoral student in history at UCLA, is well advanced in a dissertation amounting to a general cultural and social history of the Mixtec region over the centuries after the conquest, based primarily on the Mixtec language sources he discovered. Terratian is extensively examining the phenomena of language contact; soon we will be able to add the Mixtec example to the others.
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Three experiences of cultural contact: auspices of the Spaniards Nahua, Maya and Quechua. None of the material studied so far has this character, and without it many things that are an open book in Mesoamerica could never be known. The situation can change, however, and in a sense it has already begun. Jorge Urioste has in his possession photocopies of about twenty pages of mundane Quechua of unknown archival provenance, but of undoubted authenticity, registered by a notary in the indigenous city of Chuschi, in the Peruvian central highlands, in 1679, consisting of complaints about the parish priest and extracts from municipal or local church records. The handwriting, tone and language are very comparable to Mesoamerican records of the same genre and period. I cannot analyze here these documents with the necessary detail, not only because of my small competence in Quechua, but also because, although Urioste gave me a copy of the materials a few years ago, I do not feel that I have the right to make extensive public use from them. I will only mention one or two interesting details and make some general comparisons with better known, if more rarefied, Quechua writings. The implications of the existence of the Chuschi documents, however, are enormous. Documents are written by experts and follow mature conventions; the only conclusion that can be drawn is that this indigenous writer had long been in the habit of translating municipal and other records into Quechua and, moreover, could not have been operating in a vacuum. There must have been others, in other places and times. We have every reason to believe that there was a great deal of mundane Quechua documentation in the 17th century and perhaps before and after. What happened is another matter, and the fact that so little has been discovered after so much searching is not cause for optimism. Although chosen for pragmatic reasons of linguistic accessibility, Yucatán and the central Andes make an excellent counterweight to central Mexico for other reasons as well, not just because they have been widely and well studied on the basis of Spanish materials, but because Yucatan can legitimately represent southern Mexico. ; it is culturally distinct from the center in many ways and was less directly influenced by the Spanish than central Mexico or Peru, while the Andes, on the other hand, represent an entirely different cultural area: the other half of the world's upper western hemisphere. civilizations THE NAHUA CASE
I won't go into detail here, because, on the one hand, I've been exposing the evolution of the nahuas for some years now, and I've done so extensively in some books I've published recently (Lockhart 1991, 1992). , for what
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James Lockhart, the essence of the matter may already have reached the reader's ears; and, on the other hand, a complete analysis would take too long. In short, Nahua reactions or adaptations to the Spanish presence have the character of a broad, semi-autonomous and largely subconscious process, in which the Nahua component is as important as the Hispanic one – it is not a simple imposition, and in no way imposed by decree. The process proceeds across the cultural spectrum in parallel, often reinforcing each other. Over the centuries after the conquest, three phases emerge most markedly: Phase 1, a generation of little cultural change; Stage 2, about one hundred years, from about 1545–50 to 1640–50, a time when change predominantly affected guilds and Hispanic elements entered Nahua structures as discrete elements; and Stage 3, after 1650 to today, a time of personal interpenetration of the two societies and more intimate changes that alter the structure. of the phenomenon Language was crucial both for the investigation of the process and for its internal development. It was in the language of texts written by the Nahua that the stages were first presented, and perhaps that is where they can be seen most clearly. Structural changes in various domains of life have largely manifested themselves in changed concepts incorporated into new or adjusted vocabulary. So my comparative enterprise must begin with language; I will briefly characterize the linguistic aspect of the steps. Stage 1 involved describing introduced phenomena with native vocabulary resources and naming mechanisms, resulting in extensions and neologisms rather than borrowings (in addition to borrowing proper names). Stage 2 involved massive borrowing of Spanish vocabulary in the areas of new species and elements, definitions of roles, economic, political and religious concepts and procedures, and measures of all kinds. But virtually all borrowings were grammatically nouns. Loan words have been naturalized phonologically and to some extent semantically; It could hardly be said that the grammar and syntax have changed. In stage 3, as a result of large-scale bilingualism, Spanish verbs and particles were borrowed; idioms were translated, with some Nahuatl words becoming automatic equivalents of Spanish words in the process; Spanish sounds were acquired; New types of nouns were borrowed, including words for blood relatives and terms for which close equivalents already existed. As already mentioned, over the centuries, adjustments in a wide variety of cultural spheres paralleled those of language. Let's take an example, of special interest because the phenomenon is projected in part to the Hispanic world and can be detected even in situations where we do not have access to the indigenous language.
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Three experiences of cultural contact: Nahua, Maya and Quechua sources: Hiring Spanish temporary indigenous labor. In Stage 1, the central Mexican encomienda (granting tribute and labor from an indigenous group to a Spaniard) was in a monopoly position, diverting indigenous coatequitl, or rotating labor, for encomendero purposes through the authority of the ruler of the local ethnicity. state, the altepetl. At the start of stage 2, the encomienda lost its labor rights, and in a system called repartimiento, indigenous workers channeled through the coatequitl were assigned ad hoc for short periods to any Spaniard who needed them. By the time of Stage 3, the repartimiento itself had collapsed, and Spanish employers and indigenous temporary workers negotiated as individuals, outside the corporate structure. The complementary nature of language and work developments will be readily seen. For example, Stage 2 Nahuas, who understood many common Spanish terms, were more willing to contact a wider range of Spanish employers in smaller groups with less elaborate indigenous supervision; on the contrary, the change in the type of contact involved in repartimiento meant that more Nahuas heard Spanish in everyday life, reinforcing the linguistic developments of Stage 2 and pointing towards Stage 3. Thus, a dense network of mutually reinforcing phenomena helped the process at any point. . THE LOGIC OF THE STAGES
The three stages among the Nahua have sufficient clarity, breadth of spectrum, and cross-regional uniformity to suggest that they may represent a universal aspect of cultural contact, at least on the indigenous side of large-scale conquests or invasions, as with the Gauls and the Nahuas. Romans or the Anglo-Saxons and the French Normans. If so, why was such a thing not often observed? One possible reason is that the vast majority of cases of cultural contact occur between peoples who already know each other, or at least know similar peoples, and who have already made adjustments and even belong to a single global cultural framework, depriving the process of its starting point. distinct feeling and sharp focus that comes with meeting two peoples who have been completely out of touch, directly or indirectly, for many millennia. (Certainly many of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Europe were strangers to one another, even strangers to one another, but they shared such basics as iron, horses, and disease microbes—and, however far apart they were, a continuum of social relationships. and cultural contact across the vast expanse of the Old World has existed uninterruptedly since prehistoric times).
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James Lockhart was one of the Nahuas. Based on dictionary work, historian James Axtell (in a lecture given at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, June 1992) reports a difference in the linguistic reaction of the Iroquois and more coastal peoples, despite all belonging to the same language family . The Iroquois dealt with European introductions through descriptions using native vocabulary, while the others borrowed many English words (often phonologically and morphologically assimilated). That is, at the time the dictionaries were made, the isolated Iroquois were still in Stage 1, while the coastal peoples, who had much more extensive contact with the English, were in Stage 2 (presumably having been in Stage 1 earlier). Let us, then, examine the logic of the Nahua stages to see if there is anything in them that differentiates the process in principle from a continuous continuum. If we take the steps corresponding to the degrees of contact (contact is defined as a peaceful and routine personal interaction), we can say that, in addition to a general increase during the whole process of centuries, stage 1 essentially corresponds to the absence of Contact. 2 for contact through formal corporate groups and Stage 3 for contact through individuals. The same distinctions can be made in terms of language: in stage 1, the Nahuas, even when playing alongside the Spaniards, only saw them or perhaps heard the sounds of their mouths, but did not understand what they were saying; in Stage 2, they understood largely through intermediaries and translators; in Stage 3, they understood directly. Stage 3 is the moment of substantial bilingualism. In cultural phenomena in general, Stage 1 does not represent any change (that is, no mental/cultural structural adjustment, however great the transformation of the external facts of the total system). Phase 2 is all about corporate change, with political, religious, and economic institutions reconciling with Hispanic culture; during this period, indigenous guilds generally flourished. Typically, Hispanic elements were placed within an indigenous framework with little change. Stage 3 represents change primarily at the level of the individual; indigenous corporations experienced stress and fragmentation, and newly incorporated Hispanic elements began to alter the indigenous cultural structure itself. Clearly, the whole process can be thought of as a continuous or unbroken progression, and even in the Nahua case there are many long transitions from one phase to another, as well as different times in different spheres of life. But the three stages have a sufficient basis in logical and expected distinctions that one is at least impelled to look elsewhere. One might expect, as indeed I continue to do, that its variants would reappear in various situations, accelerated by the presence of large numbers of Europeans and otherwise decelerated, more or less different depending on local factors such as the
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Three experiences of cultural contact: Nahua, Maya and Quechua Geographical distribution of the two parts in the area and their relative cultural constitution. THE MAYA OF YUCATAN
Many of the linguistic facts relevant to Yucatán have already been elaborated by Frances Karttunen in her Nahuatl and Maya in Contact with Spanish (1985). I myself have pored over Roys' Ebtun Titles (1939) intermittently over the years and have benefited from the document collection, transcription and borrowing study undertaken recently by Matthew Restall in his doctoral thesis (s.f.). What we could expect, at least to the point of proving it, is that the Yucatec Maya would undergo a process very similar to that seen in Nahuatl, but later or more slowly, in view of the relatively smaller presence of the Spaniards. For the most part, this expectation is met. The significant body of loanwords that entered Maya from the 16th to 18th centuries was constituted much like the stage 2 loanwords in Nahuatl and included a large number of the same words (Karttunen 1985: 51-58). Borrowings were phonologically assimilated in exactly the same way as in Nahuatl (Karttunen 1985: 57-58). Particles and verbs were borrowed only later, as in Nahuatl, and are apparently not found until the 18th century, a few hundred years after the Nahuatl texts (Karttunen 1985: 59-61). Among the particles, hasta stood out, "as far as, as far as", as in Nahuatl (Karttunen 1985: 65). normal inflectional endings, again, the same as in Nahuatl (Karttunen 1985: 59). Also in Maya, Spanish sounds were gradually acquired in the late period. (For many of the above points, see also Restall s.d.: 410–421, 505–512.) If we look for differences in process, there are no shortages, in some cases perhaps only apparent, attributable to the nature of the evidence. , but in others certainly involving substance. So far, there are few signs of a distinct Stage 1. The earliest known documents in Maya are already at the stage 2 equivalent. It is true that a word like tzimin, "tapir", for "horse", reminds us of the Nahuatl maçatl, "deer", for the same animal, a prominent phase feature 1 among the Nahua (Lockhart 1992: 270-272). The retention of tzimin over the centuries (see Restall s.d.: 419) can be seen as consonant with a generally slower movement in the Maya sphere, but I would not attach too much weight to this notion, as Nahuatl retained various Stage 1 expressions indefinitely. . European animals. although it soon became a loan word for horse. From the first documents
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James Lockhart Although lexical work and lexical work are scarcer for Maya than for Nahuatl, it may be that a fully developed Stage 1 in Maya simply goes unnoticed. However, we must pause to note that, although not very numerous, Mayan alphabetic documents have been preserved from the third quarter of the 16th century, polished in calligraphy, conventions and vocabulary, with all the diagnostic features of stage 2. Nahuatl. . Thus, the Maya seem to have reached a crucial phase immediately after the Nahuatl and, relatively speaking, even earlier, as the whole Yucatecan experience with the Spaniards started significantly later. In fact, there would be very little time left for a Nahuatl Stage 1. Here we see the first of several indications that while there was a progression and sequence over centuries in Mayan language contact phenomena, and the impetus and content of that progression were the same as in Nahuatl, the stages weren't that different. In view of the relative sparseness of sixteenth-century Maya writing and, at the same time, its advanced and polished nature, one is almost forced to imagine that the Stage 2 culture reflected therein initially affected only a few people in some places. , leaving others on something. perhaps as Stage 1 for an unknown length of time.2 If so, the two stages would be largely concurrent, lacking the remarkably uniform sequence across the Nahua world region, where developments varied only slightly by region. decade, and the relatively humble folk in remote corners were quite up to date. Indeed, under hypothetical conditions among the Maya, it would be artificial to speak of stages. Extant Maya documents from the 16th and 17th centuries, much of the 18th century, and even much of the early 19th century are, however, fully describable by Nahuatl stage 2 features (see Restall nd:411–418 and examples from text on pp. 448–464; Roys 1939). At the same time, this remarkable stability represents another important difference between the two evolutions. Nahua documents can be dated very well - not that there is usually a need to - by stylistic and linguistic criteria, even in Stage 2, which is barely a hundred years old. Mayan documents tend to have a striking similarity in vocabulary and document conventions over a very long period of time. The main trend noted is a certain evolution in calligraphy and spelling (less, however, than among the Nahuas). If there was a change during that time, it must have been more diffusion than progression. Essen2 Nancy Farriss has revealingly suggested that climatic conditions probably explain the relative lack of sixteenth-century texts; most of those known are preserved in Spain. Therefore, the corpus could have been much larger. Restall (n.d.: 414) speculates that almost all legal, religious, and political terminology was adopted before 1600.
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Three Experiences of Cultural Contact: Nahua, Maya and Quechua Essentially, the long and stable period, except for its early onset, tends to confirm the expectation of slower movement and further development in Yucatán. Eventually, as I mentioned earlier, the symptoms of stage 3 Nahuatl—borrowed verbs and particles and phonological change—appear; the new loans appear around the middle of the eighteenth century, as I understood Karttunen. The timing, a few hundred years after Nahuatl, fits well with the notion of a similar process in both cultural areas, hopefully delayed in the case of Yucatán. But the way in which the change took place is very different. Although Nahuatl's transition from Stage 2 to Stage 3 can be seen as a span of thirty or forty years in the mid-17th century, by the end of that period the language was heavily affected in all dimensions across the macro-region. . Among the Maya, on the other hand, phenomena of the new type are scattered here and there in relative isolation, temporally and spatially, with most texts little changed since the long and stable period. Even the numerous texts from the first decade of the 19th century can hardly be attributed to the equivalent of Stage 3. Matthew Restall, who has compiled a borrowing list of what is arguably the most extensive exploration of mundane post-conquest Maya documents to date. date, reports in all texts covered no particles at all, and one or two borrowed verbs only in the infinitive, used nominally (this quite early; s.f.: 414). The Cruzob texts of the late 19th century have more of a Stage 3 feel (Bricker 1981: appendix), and today the Maya fully meets the Stage 3 requirements. This phase again increases the likelihood that several people will be at a different point in the process simultaneously, over a long period of time, and again highlights the clear differences between the stages of experience for the Nahuas and the Maya. Earlier I said that Maya shows close equivalents to stage 3 Nahua phenomena, and indeed it does, but our evidence on one important aspect, the calques by which the Nahua translated Spanish idioms, is so weak as to make one wonder. they were missing. , at least until recently. There are some clues, such as the phrase calle chumuc, equivalent to calle en medio, “across the street” (some examples in Restall s.f.: 333). Perhaps closer scrutiny will find a more idiomatic translation of what is immediately obvious. But even today, Maya seems to indicate possession in traditional forms, leaving no full equivalent for Spanish tener, "to have", while Nahuatl, starting in stage 2, developed its verb pia, "to keep, to have custody, to keep." ”, first to simply mean possession, and then, in Stage 3, to take on all other meanings and uses of having.
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James Lockhart I will say just a few words about the broader cultural landscape; some of the relevant developments are just beginning to be studied, and at this point I am not fully familiar with all the studies that have been done (a gap that I hope to close in time). Given that the Maya documentary corpus tends to show the language in a state very similar to stage 2 Nahuatl from the second half of the 16th to the 18th century, a similar longevity could be sought for other characteristics associated with stage 2. . in central Mexico. Both Nancy Farriss (1984) and Marta Hunt (n.d., 1976) have noted Yucatan's tendency to retain certain features longer than central Mexico. The encomienda lasted as a significant institution until the late 18th century in Yucatán, much longer than it had in central Mexico, where it dwindled dramatically long before the onset of Stage 3 in the mid-17th century. me. The Yucatecan encomienda lost its workforce, but I have not been able to determine when this actually happened (see Farriss 1984: 47-56). For most of the time period involved, a labor system comparable to the repartimiento in central Mexico persisted, as might be expected in Stage 2. But labor for the Spaniards was much less basic than in central Mexico, and production of tax assets much more. Given the different nature of the two economies, the long-term tax obligation is perhaps the true parallel with the stage 2 allocation among the Nahua. Maya townships did not visibly fragment in our time period like their Stage 3 Nahuatl counterparts, nor did personal names evolve into a complex system involving elements of Spanish origin (instead of remaining as Stage 3 Nahuatl names). 1) . Some Spanish kinship terms were borrowed, but the transformation of same-generation terms found in Nahuatl sources is not seen. More or less historical writing in Maya remained in close touch with the pre-conquest legacy; in that it was like the nahua annals of stage 2, not stage 3, and the songs were written in the 18th century, a practice that ceased among the nahuas in the middle of stage 2. plethora of subparochial churches as in Nahua Stage 3. No Virgin of Guadalupe seems to have appeared on the horizon (if the Cruzob movement has any parallels, it came later, in the 19th century). We have, then, a fair amount of close parallels with Stage 2 Nahua over the long period that the language continued to exhibit Stage 2 traits, suggesting the same interrelationship and congruence in all respects as Nahua. However, some of these characteristics have little or nothing to do with any cultural progression or sequence; they stem from the nature of Mayan socio-culture.
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Three experiences of cultural contact: Nahua, Maya and Quechua cultural organization. The Mayan states of Yucatecan failed to break up not just because the conditions for a Stage 3 were not met, but because the cah, the equivalent of the altepetl, lacked the clearly organized territorial and ethnic subunits that made the altepetl a cluster bomb waiting to explode. . exploded. (The safety valve of the border region of Yucatan, which was not under Spanish rule, no doubt also had its effect.) The same aspect of the cah's structure explains the lack of momentum for additional small churches within the unit. The emphasis among the Maya on named lineages, absent among the Nahua, made it virtually impossible for them to renounce indigenous surnames, regardless of the general cultural context. Even so, the general outlines of a Stage 2 Nahua family photo can be discerned; if we can trace the probably gradual movement towards something more or less equivalent to a Stage 3 in the 19th and 20th centuries, we will be better able to judge what may be sequential, what persistent internal Mayan pattern. THE QUECHUA SPEECH
The central Andes had the same combination of a large sedentary population and vast deposits of silver as the Mexican region, so a very similar European influx occurred. As we have seen, the process was very uneven in Mesoamerica, varying markedly between central and southern Mexico, and the impact varied in the Andean region as well. Communication difficulties and other difficulties (for the Europeans) encountered in the Andean highlands meant that the Spanish occupation, contrary to the Mexican experience, was much more intense on the coast than in the interior. As the Quechua world had been oriented towards the highlands from the beginning, and the coastal peoples, like others in such places, declined rapidly and drastically after contact, Greater Peru began to take on the appearance of a Spanish/African coast and a indigenous interior. It is true that an important Spanish presence was needed in the silver mines of Charcas, in the area of the mercury mines of Huancavelica, on the routes to these places and in a mountainous center as important as Cuzco. However, the centers and general distribution patterns of the two populations were different, unlike the case of central Mexico, where in macro-regional terms the patterns were identical, as the Spaniards simply stuck to the Nahua settlement pattern. In Peru the two populations lived in relative isolation from each other, as much as in southern Mesoamerica and, one might impressionistically judge, even more so. As contact drives the process of cultural change, my original expectation was that Quechua speakers in the highlands of the central Andes
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James Lockhart remains in the early stages, linguistically or otherwise, at least as much as the Mayans of Yucatan. However, it turns out that the linguistic evidence we have does not point in that direction at all. Looking at the texts produced by Quechua speakers – the Huarochirí Manuscript, the Quechua passages produced by Guaman Poma, and the Chuschi documents – we find that they all agree on essentials. Judging from these materials alone, Quechua experienced a Spanish influence very similar to that seen with Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya, but instead of a delay, comparable to Yucatán or greater, we see the opposite; all of these texts are already in many respects equivalent to Stage 3. The Chuschi documents from 1679 fall into Stage 3 Nahuatl tense, but the other two sets come from the first two decades of the 17th century and would put Quechua far ahead. of the Nahuatl chronologically, for thirty or forty years in absolute time and even longer in relation to the beginning of Spanish occupation in the area. The only text that I have so far found the opportunity to systematically examine is that of the legends of Huarochirí. We may not know exactly where the author of the manuscript was from, but the Quechua interference in the Spanish chapter titles and the letter substitutions in his Spanish word versions leave no doubt that he was a native Quechua speaker, or at least least one indigenous person and is not a native Spanish speaker. The text contains an impressive number of loanwords and is even more impressive for the number of non-nouns, compared to even stage 3 Nahuatl texts. As you can see here in the appendix, I counted 103 nouns, 8 adjectives (some of which can be interpreted as nouns), 7 particles and no less than 24 inflectional verbs; there are also 14 phrases and what could be called universal proper names that approximate generic nouns. Finding twenty-four verbs in a corpus this size is amazing. Years of analysis of Nahuatl texts have barely brought the total number of borrowed verbs attested from the conquest to independence to fifty (although, given the nature of the texts, we can be sure that the number borrowed in actual speech was higher).3 There are. a completely consistent convention for incorporating Spanish verbs into the Huarochirí text, to that extent like Nahuatl and ultimately Maya, but very different in nature from the root used. Both Nahuatl and Maya used the nominal infinitive in its entirety as the basis for derived and inflectional suffixes. The Huarochirí manuscript (and Quechua in general) adopts a simpler and more radical solution. Barry Sell, in his ongoing doctoral dissertation research on ecclesiastical remains in Nahuatl, found over one hundred loan verbs present in one form or another in the published writings of an eighteenth-century Nahuatl priest and grammarian working in the Guadalajara region. .
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Three Experiences of Cultural Contact: Nahua, Maya and Quechua tion —also radical in the literal sense— taking the very root of Spanish (the infinitive minus -r, the same as the third person present in many cases)4 as the basis of a verb that is structured like any Quechua verb (sometimes the root turns out to have the consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel form, like many Quechua verb roots), as in pasa-pass, hence pasanqui, "you pass". Since the Huarochirí Manuscript is the earliest known major Quechua text written by a Quechua speaker, we have no direct evidence that there was any lapse of time between the borrowing of nouns and verbs.5 However, there are one or two hints of an earlier verb borrowing mechanism, more similar to those found in Nahuatl and Mayan, since the borrowed word from the Spanish verb casa, “to marry”, has as its root not casa- but casara-, which I take as an infinitive plus a epenthetic added to give it the typical final vowel of a Quechua verbal stem. This form is not
4 One is tempted to think that the third person singular of the present tense, as undoubtedly the most heard, provided the real origin of the Quechua root. The borrowed roots in the Huarochirí text, however, do not show the third-person vowel changes of many irregular verbs. Furthermore, they seem to retain the final vowel of the infinitive rather than the final vowel of the third person, where the two differ. Thus, we see servi (as in Urioste 1983: 182) rather than servi-, destroy- (p. 32) rather than destroy- and reduci- (p. 48) rather than reduce-. However, it is almost impossible to extract certainty from such examples because the writer, like many other Quechua speakers, tended to confuse e and i. Although servi- is the majority variant, servi- also appears occasionally (eg, p. 146). Prometi- (p. 42) clearly implies the merging of i and e, as i would not appear at all in Spanish. Perdi (p. 182) is similar, but contains perhaps the most definitive indication that it is an infinitive form, not a third person present, as the diphthong ie de perdi, the third person form, would not be subject to the same fusion type. From this evidence, it appears that the Quechua borrowing root is derived from the infinitive (minus r) after all. The probability is increased by the exceptional, arguably precocious, stem marrier (see below). However, modern lending calls the matter into question once again. In a modern grammar, stems regularly show third-person vowel changes whenever they occur in the Spanish verb itself: cuenta-, entienda-,pensa- (Bills et al. 1969: 441, 443, 445). Another grammar, while trying to de-emphasize borrowed verbs, confirms comprehend and also has the odd form truequa-, presumably affected by escambo, the third person form of escambo (Grondín N. 1971: 209, 316). In turn, the final vowel of the root is that of the infinitive, not the third person present, and here there is no question of confusion by fusion: bati-, escribi- (Bills et al. 1969: 440, 441). However, perhaps the most likely analysis is the origin of the infinitive influenced by the third person present. 5 Bruce Mannheim tells me about some notarial documents he found in Cuzco, from an earlier era, apparently made by an Indian in Quechua and Spanish. These texts may contain valuable clues about the early period, and I look forward to their publication. Frank Salomon also informed me of two Quechua letters exchanged between Andean lords, which I have not yet had the opportunity to examine. Any ancient Quechua text that comes to light, however brief, fragmentary, or uninteresting in its ostensible subject matter, has great potential for delineating post-conquest Andean cultural history.
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James Lockhart of the Huarochirí text, as, to anticipate, it is found in the Chuschi papers, in Guaman Poma (1980: 420), in the dictionary of González Holguín (1952: 51),6 and in modern spoken Quechua from Bolivia to Ecuador . Chuschi papers also have pay-to-pay, and this is also confirmed in modern grammars.7 I deduce that there was a time when Quechua played with the infinitive like other languages, and that these two verbs were among them. the former borrowed, retaining what became an archaic form after the evolution of the ultimate verb incorporation strategy. "Marry" for Christian rites and "pay" with money are, in fact, among the most likely candidates to be the first Spanish verbs to enter the language, because they are markedly new and, at the same time, basic to the situation. post-conflict .conquest. Although I have no mundane 16th-century Quechua texts available, one can examine the work of pioneer Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás, whose grammar and dictionary appeared in 1560. In a quick review, I did not detect any verb borrowings in Santo Tomás. corpus. , and the dictionary certainly has neither home- nor pay-. In words related to marriage, the dictionary gives expressions that have to do with taking a man or a woman (Santo Tomás 1951b: 73-74). In his grammar, Aquinas includes a model speech or sermon in which the relatively few loanwords are all nouns: Dios, "God," used repeatedly, and ángel, "angel," caballo, "horse," cristiano, "Christian." ” and devil, “devil”; the latter is specifically mentioned as a foreign word and explained (St. Thomas 1951a: 189-207). Caballo also appears in the dictionary (Santo Tomás 1951b: 253). We have some reason to think, then, that verbal borrowings were far more problematic than nouns and came after a time of hesitation, resistance or experimentation, but based on known texts, the gap was not as wide as with the Nahuatl, let alone Mayan. The loan verbs of the Huarochirí document include the somewhat technical type prevalent in Nahuatl, but have a clearly broader semantic and pragmatic scope. Borrowing particles are prominent in the Huarochirí Manuscript, the main one being the expected hasta. As with some Nahuatl words, usually 6 Although casara- appears prominently in the Quechua-to-Spanish section, the older forms used by fray Domingo de Santo Tomás dominate the corresponding part of the Spanish-to-Quechua section (p 449). The married form is presumably a loan noun. 7 Confirmation is certainly a bit indirect. Invoices and others (1969) of the pay- as the main form, illustrated with examples of actual use (pp. 122, 202, 213, 445). However, pagaais is found in the phrase Dios pagaasunqui, "thank you" (literally, "God will repay you"). The same sentence occurs in Grondín N. (1971: 60, 311). I assume it was worth it - it was once the normal form, more recently resembling the general rule, while the even more basic casara held out.
44
Three experiences of cultural contact: Nahua, Maya and Quechua as a transitional measure, until it is always accompanied by a native equivalent, -cama. Again, the same word and the same construction are found in the other texts and in the Quechua spoken today. The frequent use of the conjunctions y, “y” and o, “o” (the latter often accompanied by the indigenous -pas) in the Huarochirí text is noteworthy, even when it is not a vocabulary in Spanish. The particles are all in more or less the same order as those seen in Nahuatl, except for an adverb mood -mente, heretically, "in a heretical manner". More work will be needed to resolve the issue, but I get the impression that the text includes some friction in Spanish sentences. Its borrowed nouns include the types familiar in stage 2 Nahuatl, but also encompass words for indigenous articles or concepts that are apparently already well covered in native vocabulary, another sign of stage 3 Nahuatl. In fact, the manuscript shows all the diagnostic features of Stage 3 Nahuatl. except for the phonological aspect, since judging by the spelling it does not seem that the writer has definitely acquired any of the missing or different Spanish sounds of the Quechua pronunciation.8 With the other two texts I must, for the moment, rely on impressions. In a word, they have all the same signs and much of the same borrowed vocabulary, confirming that the author of the Huarochirí Manuscript was not alone in his tendencies. Such a concordance is significant enough when found in the writings of Guaman Poma, at a time very close to the Huarochirí legends and in somewhat similar gender and auspices, but it is even more surprising when seen in everyday working documents made a few years ago. sixty years later, in a location in the mountains. All three texts have more or less central Peruvian provenance, but even so there is considerable breadth, especially considering the catholicity of Guaman Poma. The Chuschi texts not only have the same tendencies as the Huarochirí Manuscript, but these tendencies are more pronounced. I haven't done a quantitative study, not even a transcription, but it's already clear that loanwords are even more prevalent and verbs even more frequent. The contact phenomena of the three seventeenth-century sets closely agree not only with each other but also with the situation reflected in modern dictionaries and grammars, so there is every reason to imagine that we are dealing with the actual speech of native speakers and not with a artificial language. So what to do with the general situation of Quechua speakers? It is counterintuitive to assume that most Quechua speakers in the vast and remote highlands of the Andes shared the language, having 8 The subject awaits further study. Currently, it seems to me that the main deviation from normal Spanish spelling has to do with vowels and, to a lesser extent, with sibilants. Preliminary research did not reveal any of the expected lyric fusions for both voiced and silent charts.
45
James Lockhart shows strong traces of bilingualism, from the writers of the three texts. Bruce Mannheim reported a marked difference between urban and rural Quechua today. This difference is probably not new. To explain the Andean situation, I hypothesize a bifurcation, much deeper and more marked than the one I imagined in Yucatán. Greater Peru received a strong flow of Spanish immigration, but as I have already said, it tended to be concentrated on the coast, precisely in the area where the indigenous population threatened to diminish and disappear. In the Peruvian coastal region at any time after the middle of the 16th century, the proportion of Spanish speakers compared to speakers of indigenous languages surpassed on the ground the observed in Yucatán, bell all seen in any part of central Mexico, including the main urban centers from Mexico. City and Puebla. As I discovered in my research on post-conquest Peru years ago, many of the Quechua speakers on the coast were displaced highlanders working for the Spanish and very open to all kinds of cultural influence (Lockhart 1968: 217-218). It would not be unexpected if urban-coastal Quechua reached something like Nahuatl Stage 3 even before Nahuatl. The Quechua speakers employed by the Spaniards—yanaconas, ecclesiastical and government assistants—circulated widely in the country, as the example of Guaman Poma shows. These people could easily have spread stage 3 Quechua to mining regions, to larger urban centers, and even to local indigenous ruling groups who had to deal with the Spaniards on an almost daily basis. Most of the highland population could have remained at something more like Stage 1 or Stage 2 indefinitely. I suspect, however, that certain high-frequency items such as married-, paid-, and even achieved wide circulation in the general population from a relatively early period. In any case, we again have a situation where a clear progression of stages cannot be detected. On their first appearance, the Quechua texts are already at a full Stage 3 equivalent; only hints of an earlier progression are seen, and such an evolution must have occurred with the speed of light, if there was a progression at all. Searching for broader cultural phenomena that might shed light on the Andean situation, I find relatively little that is unambiguous, in part because of the lack of a large corpus of mundane indigenous texts that are more revealing to the Nahuas and Yucatecas, and in part because of my current oxidation with Peruvian historical and anthropological literature. In the field of temporary work, we find some initial similarities with central Mexico, followed by very long-term stability in Stage 2. Temporary labor rights originally belonged only to the encomienda, and before the end of the 16th century, they were channeled to the Peruvians. equivalent to repartimiento, mita. Up to this point, the pattern and relative chronology of Peru and central Mexico
46
Three experiences of cultural contact: Nahua, Maya and Quechua ran reasonably closely together, but thereafter Mita remained strong and quite central to the economy, practically until independence, exhibiting an even more marked and prolonged "Stage 2" aspect than in Yucatan. It should be remembered, however, that the Andes of all regions of America had from their beginnings the strongest tradition of rotational shooting work, involving the longest periods of work and the greatest distances covered, and it was not by chance that here the repartimiento took on a Quechua name. In other kingdoms, the comparison is difficult to find.9 Indigenous municipal corporations much like those in central Mexico and Yucatán were formed in the late 16th century, taking the Andean region into Stage 2 in this regard. rotating governor,” although, as among the Nahuas in stage 2 and later, the undisguised pre-conquest local ruler with all the dynastic trappings—called cacique by Spaniards and kuraka by Quechua speakers—manifested more as stage 1 with the nahuas. (Yucatán was midway between the two; the presiding officer was usually called a batab, using the indigenous term for local ruler, and he held office for a long period of time, perhaps ideally twenty years, but he was not strictly dynastic and was closely integrated into the cabildo, this is often not the case in Peru [Restall s.d.: 150-155].) The secular trend of sociopolitical entities was neither the unilinear fragmentation process of the Nahuas nor the stasis of the Yucatecas. , but a wave of consolidation attempted by the Spaniards, followed by a redispersion that may have tended to restore something similar to the original pattern. Regarding the indicator of church construction, in the 16th century almost no large ecclesiastical structures were built in the Andean countryside; the affiliations of later structures are still unclear to me. The reason for the difference is not primarily the Andean region's place in any sequence at any given time, but the lack in the Andean highlands of the strong Mesoamerican tradition in which a splendid stone temple was the main symbol of sociopolitical unity. Likewise, aspects of the stages having to do with writing and written genres cannot easily be applied to the Andes due to the lack of Mesoamerican writing traditions that would prepare Mesoamericans for the large-scale incorporation and adaptation of European-style writing. in their own languages for a single generation after contact. I'll leave it to others to say whether the Virgin of Copacabana or Senhor dos Milagres compares in any way with the Virgin of Guadalupe as a Stage 3 symbol of a new protonational entity that transcends individual indigenous corporations and encompasses both. below, I draw partly on my own Peruvian work and direct knowledge, but also generally on Bakewell 1984, Cook 1981, Fraser 1989, Spalding s.d. and 1984, Stern 1982, Wethey 1949 and Wightman 1990.
47
James Lockhart yards and no Spaniards. Parts of the Andes, throughout the 17th century and perhaps longer, maintained Christianity and indigenous religion as separate and relatively disintegrated cults, a situation practically unheard of in central Mexico after Stage 1; something like this lasted longer in the Yucatán and other peripheral areas. While with Yucatán I imagine I can see enough to convince me that the region has long remained in a perhaps ill-defined Stage 2, but recognizable, in general, as well as in language, only some aspects of the Andean image during the centuries after the conquest are reminiscent of Stage 2; other aspects point to an even earlier phase, while some elements of the sequence seen in Mesoamerica are missing due to marked differences in Mesoamerican and Andean culture. Much more likely would be needed in terms of indigenous language sources to detect any Stage 3 features beyond those already seen in the language itself; so far, none are apparent. The Andean example, as I tentatively envisioned it, does not seem to manifest even the approximate simultaneity and congruence between many domains seen in Yucatán. Such a state of affairs would be compatible with the bifurcation (perhaps multifurcation) that I postulated above when speaking of the language situation. In general, the nature and sequence of certain cultural developments in the post-contact period are very similar wherever we look, although it is not inevitable that a certain point in the sequence will be reached unless local conditions are favourable. Under the right conditions, even a sequence reversal is conceivable. In two of the three examples there is a broad congruence and relative simultaneity of certain phenomena, both linguistic and non-linguistic; in the third example, the Andean region, this does not seem to be currently the case. However, if with further investigation two or more separate spheres can be identified and characterized, even greater congruence can emerge in each. The clear three stages of nahuas do not appear in the other two examples. If Yucatán were better understood from the time of contact until today, I think the three stages would be more recognizable than they are now, but they will never have the clarity and relative uniformity of the Nahua case. I tentatively attribute the well-defined stratification of the Nahua experience to two factors: first, the fact that only here did a large immigrant population come face to face with a large indigenous population, and second, that the Nahua seem to have had more cultural communion. . with Europeans than any other indigenous group, allowing them to build on their own traditions in virtually every sphere,
48
Three experiences of cultural contact: Nahua, Maya and Quechua leading to a closely intertwined system that tended to evolve as a unit. Consequently, I hardly expect further examples of a fully developed three-stage sequence. However, all indigenous societies that came into contact with Europeans went through a somewhat related experience, and, moving from the better known to the lesser known cases, we should be able to identify the universals and come to understand much more than we do now. the principles. of variation
49
James Lockhart
BIBLIOGRAPHY BAKEWELL, PETER J. 1984 Miners of Serra Vermelha: Indigenous work in Potosí. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. BILLS, GARLAND D., BERNARDO VALLEJO C. AND RUDOLPH C. TROIKE 1969 Introduction to spoken Bolivian Quechua. University of Texas Press, Austin. BRICKER, VICTORIA R. 1981 The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual. University of Texas Press, Austin. COLE, JEFFREY A. 1985 La Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California COOK, NOBLE DAVID 1981 Population Collapse: Indigenous Peru, 1520–1620. Cambridge University Press, New York. FARRISS, NANCY M. 1984 Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. FRASER, VALERIE 1989 The Architecture of Conquest: Building in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1535–1635. Cambridge University Press, London. GONÇALEZ HOLGUIN [GONZÁLEZ HOLGUÍN], DIEGO 1952 Vocabulary of the general language of all Peru called Qquichua or Inca language. National University of San Marcos, Lima. GRONDÍN N., MARCELO 1971 Runa simi: Quechua method. Print “Quelco”, Oruro, Bolivia. GUAMAN POMA DE AYALA, FELIPE 1980 The first new chronicle and good government [1615] (João V. Murra and Rolena Adorno, eds.; Jorge L. Urioste, trans.). 3 vol. 21st century, Mexico. HUNT, MARTA ESPEJO-PONCE s.d. Colonial Yucatan: City and Region in the 17th Century. Doctor. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1974. 1976 The Development Processes of Yucatán, 1600–1700. In Provinces of Early Mexico (Ida Altman and James Lockhart, eds.): 33–62. Publications of the UCLA Latin American Center, Los Angeles. KARTTUNEN, FRANCES 1985 Nahuatl and Maya in contact with Spanish. Texas Linguistic Forum 26. Department of Linguistics, University of Texas, Austin. LOCKHART, JAMES 1968 Spanish Peru, 1532-1560. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. 1991 Nahuas and Spaniards: History and Philology of Post-Conquest Central Mexico. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, and UCLA Latin American Center Publications, Los Angeles.
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Three cultural contact experiences: Nahua, Maya and Quechua
The Nahua after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, 16th to 18th Centuries. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.
MANNHEIM, BRUCE 1991 The Language of the Incas since the European Invasion. University of Texas Press, Austin. RESTALL, MATTHEW B. n.d. The World of Cah: Postconquest Yucatecan Maya Society. Doctor. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1992. ROYS, RALPH L. (ED. AND TRANSLATION) 1939 The Titles of Ebtun. Carnegie Institution, Washington, DC. SALOMON, FRANK, AND GEORGE L. URIOSTE (TRAD. AND EDS.) 1991 The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion. University of Texas Press, Austin. SANTO TOMÁS, FRAY DOMINGO 1951a Grammar or art of the general language of the Indians of the kingdoms of Peru (Raúl Porras Barrenechea, ed.). National University of San Marcos, Lima. 1951b Lexicon or vocabulary of the general language of Peru called Quichua (Raúl Porras Barrenechea, ed.). National University of San Marcos, Lima. SPALDING, KAREN n.d. Indigenous rural society in Peru: the example of Huarochirí. Doctor. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1967. 1984 Huarochirí: An Andean society under Inca and Spanish rule. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. STERN, STEVE J. 1982 The Indigenous Peoples of Peru and the Challenge of the Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. URIOSTÉ, JORGE (ED.) 1983 Children of Pariya Qaqa: The oral tradition of Waru Chiri (mythology, rites and customs). 2 vol. Foreign and Comparative Studies, Latin American Series, no. 6. Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y. WETHEY, HAROLD E. 1949 Colonial Architecture and Sculpture in Peru. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. WIGHTMAN, ANN M. 1990 Indigenous Migration and Social Change: The Foreigners of Cuzco, 1520-1720. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina.
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ANNEX: WORDS AND PHRASES OF SPANISH ORIGIN IN THE LEGENDS OF HUAROCHIRÍ*
Nouns: grandmother, grandfather, bonus, mayor, stilts, soul, animal, year, room, spider, bow, arm, witch, horse, street, bell, cantor, canaveral, chapter, snail, sky, chest, count, correction, custom, christian, cross, body, care, sister-in-law, flood, god, physician, doctrine, gift, maiden, enemy, corner, bushel, faith, party, foreign, spawn, border, font, doodle, church, indian, june, oath, Latin, teacher, manga, march, May, bushel, table, mongrel, miracle, mystery, mortar, boy, world, November, work, prayer, sheep, father, part, easter, courtyard, danger, forgiveness, goldsmith, plate, square, preaching, procession, province, point, royal, reduction, roman, rosary, scholar, priest, measles, sign, lord, lady, shadow, nephew, lieutenant, time, scissors, work, betrayal, trumpeter, adventure, dress, virgin, eve, tendril. Total: 103 Verbs: marry (marry-), confess, conquer, invite, destroy, fall in love, envy, spend, inherit, join, belittle, offer, spend, lose, forgive, paint, promise, reduce, renew, pray, sentence , signal, serve, visit. Total: 24 Particles: until (and until), heretically, or, because, if, but, and. Total: 7 Adjectives: blue, white (?), curly, whole, crazy, older, rich, second (a). Total: 8 Phrases, proper names: Ave María, Cabrillas, face to face, Cieneguillas (place or town), Corpus Christi, that is, holy spirit, wild cat, Jesus Christ, Lima, our father, means four, Santa Claus Maria , All Saints. Total: 14 * I used the 1983 edition of Urioste. The words in the Spanish chapter titles, although generated by the same writer, were obviously not included. This list should be considered provisional. Although I have researched the text carefully and verified my findings more than once, my experience with similar works in Nahuatl fonts leads me to believe that lists like this need to evolve for several years before reaching final form. .because of inadvertent omissions and parsing problems. I have adopted modern Spanish spelling and used citation form, including the full infinitive of verbs; in texts, the r would be missing in all cases except with marry. 52
art and architecture
records
53 God, baptism
(segundo James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest [1992: 428])
Religion
?
pictorial/ideographic-oral
Santos proliferate, one per sociopolitical unit
Large idiosyncratic monastic complexes were built; frescoes and decorative carvings in a Spanish/Indigenous language mix
Pictorial/ideographic-alphabetic (last dominant)
Annals equally divided between before and after the conquest
Concepts of marriage and terminology adopted
no change
Kinship
?
The complex layered naming system develops gradually
Christian names (first)
naming standards
History
Applied to councilors
no change
Noble rank terminology
Mixed genre pre-conquest-post-conquest in content, pre-conquest in form, with word-indicated verses, verse pairing, and symmetrical arrangement of pairs
Hispanic-style town hall, cabildo (run by tlatoani and nobles)
Tlatoani (king) and nobles as usual
local state government
?
Repartimiento (small parties divided among Spaniards for short periods of time)
Encomienda (all indigenous status ascribed in the long term to a Spaniard)
Temporary work mechanisms
songs
Loan noun, no other changes.
essentially unchanged
2 aprox. 1545–50 a ca. 1640–50
Language
1 1519 to ca. 1545–50
A saint, Guadalupe, acquires national importance
Small Spanish-style parish churches were built; mainly european style art
mostly alphabetical
Annals almost exclusively after the conquest. Syncretic and timeless legends called "titles" are written
Rhyme, meter, verse length, set of indefinitely continuous lines with no numerical pattern
Terms for brothers, cousins, nephews/nephews, and in-laws change to accommodate Spanish
Mature naming system, accurately placing each individual in society by rank
It disappears, replaced by a mature naming system that precisely places each individual in society by position.
Fragmentation of local states and more idiosyncratic ways of holding public office
Informal and individual agreements between Spaniards and Indians
Full range of bilingualism phenomena
3 1640–50 to 1800, in many cases to this day
TABLE 1: THE THREE STAGES AMONG THE NAHUAS AND SOME OF THEIR IMPLICATIONS
Three cultural contact experiences: Nahua, Maya and Quechua
Litigation over the Rights of "Natural Lords"
Litigation for the Rights of the “Lords of Nature” in the First Colonial Judgments of the Andes INSTITUTO ANDINO DE PESQUISAS JUAN V. MURRA
you
IN THE FIRST DAYS OF THE EUROPEAN INVASION, when potentially threatening Inca resistance proved virtually absent (Lockhart 1972), the Pizarros acquired a staunch ally in the Wanka lords. It was in its territory, Xauxa, that the Europeans established their first capital. Along with thousands of soldiers and porters, the Wanka provided the newcomers with strategic information, as well as food and weapons stored in hundreds of locally-supplied Inca-built depots (Polo de Ondegardo 1940 [1561]). In a region where the Incas had managed to improvise some resistance, as in Huánuco, the Europeans had to call in Wanka troops to help them put down "the rebellion."1 All this help given to the Europeans was carefully recorded in a khipu. maintained by the Wanka lords. This record was first described by Cieza de León, about fifteen years after the invasion. This accounting was later the subject of a dispute initiated in the viceroyalty court of Lima by one of the lords who in 1532 had opened the country to the troops of Carlos V (Murra 1975). This man, Don Francisco Cusichac, felt betrayed by the mistreatment of his people and the neglect of his own privileges. The idea that his Wanka, and he with them, would be handed over to some newly arrived European was shocking; Cusichac reasoned that if there were any encomendero, he, Cusichac, was the most suitable candidate (Espinoza Soriano 1972). In 1560, Wanka made many adjustments to European rule. Most notable was his children's intensive training in the new language and beliefs. Several of these young bilinguals, accompanied by their own European-style notaries, traveled to Spain to petition the courts for the reward of
1 An Inca “general”, Ylla Thupa, withdrew to the region of Huánuco and managed to resist there for almost ten years. It was smoked by Wanka's auxiliary troops (Ortiz de Zúñiga 1967).
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Juan V. Murra served the emperor or his son (Espinoza Soriano 1972).2 Some of these “natural gentlemen” were received by the monarch; some were given Spanish-style coats of arms. One of the petitioners requested that the crown grant him the right to buy and sell land, a privilege unknown in the Andes. In 1570, when the new viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, decided to carry out an inspection in the mountainous provinces of the crown, Don Francisco Cusichac and his entire generation were dead. Now his sons were in charge, some of them very young men who had known Charles V or his son Philip in Europe some fifteen years earlier. The new viceroy asked all native officials to show their European credentials, and many did. Toledo ordered the parchments burned. This was the beginning of a campaign against the Andean elite bloodlines who collaborated with the invaders, an effort to destroy European evidence of what the Spanish crown had granted.3 The only other group to be treated so harshly in Toledo were the descendants of from another wing of the Andean elite that also sided with the invaders from the earliest days. These were the "sons" and heirs of Pawllu Thupa, the only Inca "prince" who made peace early and openly with the Europeans. Pawllu helped them in extreme difficulties, most notably in Almagro's invasion of Chile. Many attributed the efficiency of this southward advance to Pawllu Thupa's ability to mobilize the lords of Charcas, the region now known as Bolivia. - producing fields and many other Inka riches. A test came in 1550 with the death of Pawllu: several Europeans tried to deprive the heirs of the "Indians" of these lands and people, but the emperor's representative, Bishop LaGasca, resisted such claims. Over the next two decades, Pawllu's many sons formed a distinguished and rich lineage in Cuzco. They spoke Spanish, invested in the long-distance coca leaf trade to the Potosi mines, and employed Europeans in their various enterprises. The main heir, Don Carlos, was married to a European. Thirty-five years after the invasion, the Pawllu Thupa heirs were the only group of Inkas in Cuzco who managed to maintain status and wealth (Glave 1991). When Toledo arrived in Cuzco on his way to the Potosí mines, he selected the Pawllu strain for special attention. As in Xauxa, the lords were ordained 2 These concessions are transcribed from the originals in the General Archive of the Indies, Seville: Lima section, file 567, lib. 8, folks. 107v–108r; see also other scholarships cited by Espinoza Soriano (1972). 3 Letters from Francisco de Toledo to Felipe II, found in the National Library, Madrid. 4 See the testament of Pawllu Thupa published in the Revista del Archivo Histórico del Cuzco (1950: 275, 286).
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Litigation on the Rights of "Natural Gentlemen" holds the credentials that accredit their services to the Spanish Crown. The papers were publicly burned. Don Carlos and his relatives were accused of having illicit contacts with the Incas who had taken refuge in Vilcabamba in the eastern plains (Kubler 1946). About twenty of Pawllu Thupa's heirs were tried for subversion; During the process, which lasted several months, the princes were kept in animal pens, exposed to the elements. Testimony was given in Quechua, although many of the defendants spoke Spanish; a mestizo, a certain Gonzalo Gómez Ximénez, "interpreted" for the only record of the trial, despite continued protests from the defendants. Ximénez's version of what they "confessed" became the official transcript. The "natural lords" were condemned by Gabriel de Loarte to the loss of "their" Indians and their coca plantations, which were granted by Toledo to Loarte. About twenty Incas, including elderly princes, Don Carlos and several children, were deported on foot to Lima. From there they were to be sent into exile in Mexico.5 Of the twenty, seven survived. They managed to rally the support of some of the Audiencia judges who were hostile to the viceroy. Toledo remained in the altiplano for almost another decade, being the only viceroy to devote such personal attention to the Andean population. He sponsored many institutional innovations; some of these were consistent with ideas to end Las Casas's "benevolent" approach to Indian affairs, which he brought with him from court. He tried to break the influence of bishops Gerónimo de Loaysa de Lima and Domingo de Santo Tomás in Charcas, men of another era, who spoke Quechua and corresponded with Las Casas (Las Casas 1892). Of the people Toledo consulted, the most knowledgeable were two lawyers trained in Salamanca —Juan de Matienzo and Juan Polo de Ondegardo— who gave him diametrically opposed advice. Matienzo, a crown judge at the Audiencia de Charcas, was often active outside his court. Even before the arrival of Toledo in 1569, Matienzo had advocated the "extirpation" of the Inka lineage that had taken refuge in the jungle of Vilcabamba. The high court of Lima was committed to a policy of reductions, which resulted in the conversion of the refugee princes and their resettlement in Cuzco. Matienzo thought that such a policy was dangerous. Resettlement expanded the number of 'natural lords' in Cuzco, a loss of revenue for the Spanish crown and the implicit threat of an additional focus of traditional loyalty (Matienzo 1967). Upon arrival from Toledo, he and Matienzo formed a close alliance broken only by the judge's death in 1579. 5 Most of this material comes from Justicia legajo 465, a three-volume manuscript record of litigation in Mexico, Archivo General of the Indies , Seville . Part of it is cited by Roberto Levillier (1921-1926).
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John V. Murra Matienzo provided Toledo with a working understanding of the Andean system; It was Matienzo who designed the mita rotational system for recruiting Andean labor for the Potosi silver mines, based on the Inka mit'a established for the cultivation of maize by the state (Wachtel 1982). All efforts were now directed towards increasing the revenues of King Philip's armies, whether they were active in Flanders or facing Constantinople by sea. Though educated at the same law school as Matienzo and coming from the same social background, lawyer Polo de Ondegardo had a very different view of the Andean world. One dimension of this perception was his length of service in the region: he had arrived in 1540, about twenty years before Matienzo, at a time when Andean society was much closer to its indigenous status. He also never entered the courts, but held various positions that put him in daily contact with Andean realities: a soldier in the infantry, managing the newly discovered mines of Potosí, tracing royal lineages in Cuzco, facing the dangers of coca in the lowlands. -cultivation of leaves for the mountaineers, recognizing that the ethnic groups residing 3,800 m from the Andes would also control people and fields at sea level. He noted the remarkable system of warehouses that continually filled up along the Inca road; in pre-Toledo times, he was often consulted by viceroys and colonists. He had no ideological difficulty in recognizing that the descendants of King Thupa or Wayna Qhapaq were, according to European law, "natural lords". repeats as governor of Cuzco. Dissatisfied with many of the viceroy's decrees, Polo wrote a memorandum in the form of a book addressed to Toledo: “informing about the premises that lead to the notable damage resulting from the disrespect for the fundamental rights of the Indians. . .” (Pole Ondegardo 1916 [1571]). In it, he also argued against the resettlement policy dictated by Matienzo and Toledo: when resettled in compact reductions, ethnic groups became impoverished because they lost access to their outliers located in many distant resource bases. Even if one wants to convert them to Christians, Polo argued, it is best to proceed with one's own "order" in mind. Further insight into this transitional period in Andean history came through my recent 1990-1991 "discovery" in the Archivo de Indias in Seville of a large set of archives (over 3,000 pages) recording in detail the acts of the Cuzco trial of the "natural lord" Don Carlos Inca. Although this source was cited in print as early as the 1920s by the Argentine scholar Roberto Levillier (1921–26, 7:192–193), it remained 6
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See details in Murra 1991.
Disputes for the Rights of "Natural Masters" underused by anthropologists. It greatly expands our understanding of Cuzco's social structure a generation after the invasion. There are many details about the kangaroo court headed by Toledo and his main advisor, Judge Gabriel de Loarte. The doctor "inherited" the defendants' assets and subjects. One can also note the later career of the interpreter Gonzalo Ximénez7: a few years later he was burned at the stake in Charcas, accused of the heinous sin, the abominable sin of homosexuality. The Inca princes unsuccessfully raised the issue during the “trial”. While awaiting his fate in Charcas prison, Ximénez reportedly expressed his desire to confess his perjury and apologize for the harm done to Don Carlos. Ximénez is alleged to have recorded this wish in writing. This confession was not located in the documents of the Audiencia de Charcas; It is said that Dr. Barros de San Millán, judge of that royal court, expressed a keen, albeit suspicious, interest in locating this document, without success. Barros deserves the attention of anthropologists interested in Andean history. Educated in Salamanca, like our other two lawyers, his American career spans nearly thirty years, serving in the royal courts of Guatemala, Panama, Charcas and Quito. Our first notice of this in Andean scholarship reached us a few decades ago, when Waldemar Espinoza, a Peruvian colleague, published a Warning, author unknown. It was a petition, signed by a dozen ethnic landlords from Charcas (present-day Bolivia) (Espinoza Soriano 1969); Addressed to the king, it seems to date from the end of Toledo's reign. In it, the Andean lords trace their lineages four or five generations back, when it is alleged that the Incas had presented their ancestors with luxurious fabrics and court wives: “we were the dukes and marquises of this kingdom”. They volunteered to take on additional tasks at the Potosí mines, but they didn't mind only being given labor recruitment tasks. The argument that they were "natural lords" has now been reconsidered outside of Cuzco and under new colonial circumstances. The author of the memo remained unknown for decades. It was clear that he knew both the administrative procedures of the mines and the ethnic map of the Southern Andes; He clearly enjoyed the confidence of the Aymara lords. The memorandum was recently the subject of a detailed study by a Franco-British team that is preparing a documentary collection in honor of Don Gunnar Mendoza, director of the National Archives of Bolivia. They finally decided that the author was the same person disguised in the Notice as transmitting the text to the Madrid court. Between the service in Charcas and
7 A large part of this material was found in file 844A of the Chamber Notary Office branch, General Archive of the Indies, Seville.
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John V. Murra Upon his return to the Americas as superior judge in Quito, Barros spent some years in Spain. His activities there and his ideological connections have not been fully determined. The identification of Barros as the author of the Notice is reinforced by the events that occurred in the royal court of Charcas in the last years of the Toledo regime.8 A year or two before the judge's return to Madrid, Barros was accused by his colleague , Matienzo, for being homosexual. At that time, in the late 1570s, the court was reduced to just two judges, Matienzo and Barros. If one of them became a defendant, the court would be reduced to a single judge. In a manifestly illegal maneuver, Matienzo co-opted two residents of Charcas as assistants; Barros took refuge in one of the monasteries of La Plata, but if that accusation had prevailed, the Franciscans could not have protected him. The testimony was given by a team of truck drivers: none of the important encomenderos participated. Witnesses recalled that "the doctor" freed the slaves he had brought from Panama; One of the secretaries reported that, on going to the judge's headquarters for the signature, he found the doctor unceremoniously serving a group of “Indian” chiefs in his kitchen. Freed Africans were also there. Another employee thought that the doctor said too much and did not keep secret the positions taken on the court in front of the cameras. Other witnesses, from the mining center of Potosí, highlighted his homosexuality and his lack of concern for His Majesty's interests in the mines. It is also reported that Barros asked for the confession of the interpreter Ximénez to show that he himself had committed perjury during the interrogation of Don Carlos in Cuzco. Barros is quoted as saying that the viceroy had not only appropriated the fields of the Incas, but was now ready to destroy their good name. While all this was going on, in 1579, Matienzo died. Barros came out of hiding and, as the only judge in the region, took over the Royal Court. Potosí miners somehow tried to continue the trial, to arrive at a conviction. They petitioned the viceroy who was now in Lima awaiting permission from the crown to return to the peninsula. Toledo replied that the court of Charcas was reduced to a single judge, Barros. The case against him was dropped. As soon as he arrived at the Charcas court, Barros took an important step. One of the measures most resented by Toledo, with Matienzo's connivance, had prohibited the sending of resources to the peninsula from the Andean cases processed in the court of Charcas. General of the Indies, Seville. It also follows. 9r from Charcas 16, bouquet 15, fol. 3 v.
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Disputes over the Rights of “Natural Lords” had not been referred to Madrid. All this has now been sent to the crown. Soon after, Barros returned to Spain for the first time in some twenty years, presumably taking the Notice with him.
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Juan V. Murra
BIBLIOGRAPHY ESPINOZA SORIANO, WALDEMAR 1969 The memorial of Charcas: unpublished chronicle of 1582. In Cantuta. Magazine of the National University of Education, Chosica, Peru. 1972 The Huancas, allies of the conquest. Scientific Annals of the University of Central Peru 1: 201–407. Huancayo. GLAVE, LUIS MIGUEL 1991 The coca leaf and the colonial internal market. In Visiting the Sonqo Valleys (John Murra, ed.): 583–608. Institute of Ibero-American Cooperation, Madrid. KUBLER, GEORGE 1946 Quechua in the Colonial World. In Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 2 (Julian H. Steward, ed.): 331–410. WE. Government Press Office, Washington, D.C. LAS CASAS, BARTOLOMÉ DE 1892 The ancient people of Peru. In Collection of rare books or Spanish curiosities, vol. 21 (Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, ed.). Madrid. LEVILLIER, ROBERTO (ED.) 1921–26 Rulers of Peru. 14 vols. vols. 1–3 published by Successors of Rivadeneyra, vols. 4–14 published by Imprenta de Juan Pueyo. Madrid. LOCKHART, JAMES 1972 The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the Early Conquistadors of Peru. University of Texas Press, Austin. MATIENZO, JUAN DE 1967 Government of Peru [1567] (Guillermo Lohmann Villena, ed.). French Institute of Andean Studies, Paris-Lima. MURRA, JOHN V. 1975 The ethnocategories of a Khipu state. In Economic and Political Formations of the Andean World: 243–254. Institute of Peruvian Studies, Lima. 1991 Le débat sur l'avenir des Andes. In Culture et sociétés andes et méso-amérique, vol. 2 (Raquel Thiercelin, ed.): 625ff. ORTIZ DE ZÚÑIGA, IÑIGO 1967 Visit of the province of León de Huánuco in 1562, vol. 1: 312. Faculty of Letters and Education, National University Hermillo Valdizán, Huánuco, Peru. POLO DE ONDEGARDO, JUAN 1940 Report to Mr. Briviesca de Muñatones. . . [1561] Historical Review 13: 120–196. Lime. 1916 Report of the fundamentals on the notable damage that results from the non-maintenance of the privileges of the Indians. . . [1571] In Collection of books and documents referring to the history of Peru, ser. 1, Vol. 3. Graphic and Bookstore Sanmartí y Cia., Lima. REVISTA DEL ARCHIVE HISTÓRICO DEL CUZCO 1950 Revista del Archivo Histórico del Cuzco 1: 275, 286. WACHTEL, NATHAN 1982 The Mitimas of the Cochabamba Valley (George A. Collier, ed.). In The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History: 199–236. Academic Press, New York. 62
Family values in 17th century Peru
Family Values in 17th Century Peru IRENE SILVERBLATT DUKE UNIVERSITY
T
YOUR DOCUMENT CONSIDERS “FAMILY VALUES”
in the 17th century Peruvian Andes and its role in the colonial culture wars. Colonial family values, like their modern counterparts, expressed moral concerns about "proper" sexual relationships and legitimacy, the workings of kinship and lineage, the place of women and their flaws, and the meaning of purity, honor, and blood. Furthermore, like their modern counterparts, family values can be found at the heart of politics. Peru's colonial enterprise, enhanced by the ethics and zeal of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, spawned its brand of reproductive politics in a world fractured by demographic collapse and new social categories of race. Andean culture wars, fought on the often precarious psychic and social terrains of colonialism, thrived on the politics of fear and guilt. This essay hopes to make sense of family values by placing them in the broader arena of colonialism's cultural burden: the task of reshaping the humanity of colonized men and women. Disputes over definitions of humanity were at the heart of the colonial effort;1 and in the Andes this process began with Pizarro's conquest of the Inca empire and Iberia's attempt to convert Andean peoples into Spanish subjects called "Indios". “Family Values” examines a part of this extraordinary concept and offers a small entry into Spanish colonialism's drive to manufacture new social relationships and social personalities. The colonial attempt to build up Indians and Spaniards also produced mestizos and mulattos, bastards and legitimates, free subjects and slaves, Andean witches, virgins and whores. Cultural identities and sexual activities triggered moral battlegrounds intrinsic to the creation of Spain's Inca colony. So is the politics of fear. 1 This exploration of the cultural dimensions of colony building owes particularly to Corrigan and Sayer (1985) and to the elaborations of the "civilizing process" developed by Norbert Elias (1982). Discussions of reproductive policy in colonial contexts owe much to the important work of Ann Stoler (1991). See also Lavrín (1989) for significant articles on marriage and sexuality in colonial Latin America.
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Irene Silverblatt drew on the staggering death rate of native peoples (Cook 1981) and the Spanish empire's sense of warfare and religious crusade (Elliott 1963; Kamen 1985). SPANISH AND INDIAN
The building of the Spanish empire revolved around the contradiction between conqueror and vanquished, by building that great social fiction at its core: the division of colonial humanity into Spaniards and Indians. The “humanizing” prerogatives of power and privilege, Spanish law, religious preaching, and popular sentiment shaped social relations in racialized ways. Spanish imperial practice interpreted its colonial subjects in broad and universal categories: all Spaniards, despite the social distinctions that might have set them apart in Europe, were privileged colonists in the Americas; all indigenous peoples, regardless of their ethnic claims or prior political position, whether peasants, provincial lords, or Inca kings, became "Indians" (Spalding 1974; Gibson 1987; Morner 1967). Colonial social categories revolved around the legal construction of two separate republics – the Indian and the Spanish – whose members were, in principle, defined by ancestry and racial “purity”. Spanish political theory proclaimed their equality, or nearly so: the Indians, like the Spaniards, were fully human, free vassals of the Crown, capable of honor (Solórzano 1972 [vol. 252]: 371–383). However, colonial rule was based on the subjugation of indigenous peoples, and the Andeans found themselves degraded by colonial institutions, official policy, and popular prejudice (see also Solórzano 1972 [vol. 252]: 417–432). The colonial enterprise was a confusing and contrary process; and while Spain's attempts to wrap indigenous life practices in the machinery of colonial rule were successful (until independence), it was an achievement that varied dramatically by agenda and region. It was also a long engagement. The half century after the conquest witnessed a series of political, demographic and religious challenges to Iberian control. During Peru's first decades, civil wars raged in the Andes as the Spaniards fought the Spaniards for dominance of royal power and the settlers' rights to native labor and resources; rebel descendants of the Incas, with strongholds in the Vilcabamba Valley, carried out guerrilla attacks on settlers and trade routes until the execution of the "last" Inca king in 1572; And after three decades of colonial presence, the evangelists marveled at the age-old designs they discovered among their disciples in the central highlands: nativist religious movements aiming to expel the Spaniards and their gods from Peruvian soil (Millones 1973, 1990; Stern 1982 : 51-62; Kubler 1963). Perhaps most threatening to the colonial enterprise, however, were the unintended consequences of conquest: epidemic diseases (smallpox, measles, and measles).
Family values in seventeenth-century Peru (flu) brought over from Europe, against which the Spaniards enjoyed some immunity and the Indians none, swept through Indian settlements, devastating their numbers (Cook 1981). In the last quarter of the 16th century, royal officials expressed concern that the entire colonial effort was in jeopardy, blaming at least part of it on the economic and sexual exorbitance of the colonists. Although authorities attributed various causes to the high mortality rate of the Andeans, many judged the excessive behavior of the Spaniards as the instigator of the precipitous decline of the native population (Solorzano 1972 [vol. 252]: 117–129). Faced with these challenges, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo launched a series of measures to reinforce the Spanish presence and stop the deterioration of the Andean peoples. His solution was based on a strict separation of the Spanish and Indian republics (Solórzano 1972 [vol. 252]: 371–383; Spalding 1984: 168–238) and, after a long debate, a principled political apparatus of government. indirect state paternalism was established. The Spanish monarchy envisioned the colonial state as the protector of its indigenous subjects, the legal defender of inherently handicapped weak souls. The colonial nobility obliged the Crown to guarantee the corporate right to land and resources of indigenous communities. Their local government plans continued with this model based on adapting Iberian paradigms to colonial circumstances. Mimicking the authority granted to Spanish municipalities, colonial policy allowed indigenous communities significant autonomy from local interests. The provincial elite (kurakas) ended up establishing themselves as intermediaries for the Crown; a hierarchy of city officials, derived from the native population, were given responsibility for maintaining the (colonial) order of everyday life (Rowe 1957; Spalding 1984: 136-167). The considerable political game of the Andeans was, however, held back by powerful limits: native customs could not contradict Iberian habits, or rather, could not contradict what was becoming, at the end of the 16th and 17th centuries, a canon increasingly rigid conduct, trapped in an increasingly restricted view of the civilizing process. SEX AND THE CIVILIZING PROCESS
Toledo's reforms went hand in hand with renewed campaigns to root out idolatry and savagery from Peruvian hearts. Bilingual, even trilingual catechisms 2 Later settlers would argue that Providence had judged the Andeans as sinners and punished them accordingly. Judging by the Andeans' long history of heresy and bad customs, God, they claimed, must have decided to slaughter them in retribution for past transgressions.
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Irene Silverblatt were produced to better facilitate the preaching and proselytizing of the Church.3 In the early sixteenth century and for much of the following century, soldier-priests "idolatry eradicators" were sent to scour the Archdiocese of Lima for evidence of the presence of Satan. presence. (Duviols 1971). Clergymen and civil authorities were surprised to find native heresies flourishing after a hundred years of evangelization; and the Jesuit congregation in Peru, which had proselytism as its main objective, worked hard to convince colonial skeptics that idolatry was indeed widespread in the Andes (Acosta 1954a: 261-300; Arriaga 1919: xxxi, 82-103, 188 -196). The Jesuits led the campaigns to extirpate demonic influence from Andean soil, and subsequent ecclesiastical trials, with their Inquisition-like procedures, provide a window into Catholic incursions into the process of colonial civilization. While the Jesuits' efforts may have been selfish, they were also taken seriously: they believed that the practice of idolatry threatened not only Christianity but also the foundation of the colonial order. By promoting bad customs, including heretical sexual relations so anathema to Christian family values, native religion undermined the making of "good" Indians who would be loyal colonial subjects of the Crown and the Church. The clergy, the religious arm of Spain, had primary responsibility for instructing the Indians in the beliefs and practices of civilization. From his perspective, good morals and Christian doctrine were inseparable (Doctrina 1985: 214–15, 498, 515). Clerics preached civilized "lifestyles" to their Indian subjects, lessons that went hand in hand with pronouncements on idolatry and principles of faith. Seventeenth-century written guides to missionary priests in Peru—elaborate sermons and confessional manuals written in Spanish and native languages—had much to say about family values (eg, Doctrina 1985: 126–132, 143–144, 198; Pérez Bocanegra 1631: 211-250); This shouldn't be surprising. The Peruvian incursions came on the heels of the peninsula's culture wars: the Counter-Reformation crusade to end the persistent religious heresies, peasant superstitions, and ubiquitous "bad customs" practiced throughout Spanish society (Cruz and Perry 1992; Silverblatt 1987: 159-180; Sánchez 1991: viii-xi). The idol hunters of Peru were well aware that the Counter-Reformation campaign was a test case for efforts in the Americas; and the clergy, in comparing the Old World with the New World, were especially in tune with the more "barbaric" and "vile" inhabitants of Spain (Arriaga 1919: xxxi, 3-4).
3 The process of evangelization in Peru must be seen in light of the activities of the Jesuit José de Acosta and the work of the Third Council of Lima (Tercer Concilio Limense 1982), in which he played a significant role. The Third Council of Lima promoted the writing of catechisms and sermons preaching Catholic doctrine in native languages (Doctrina 1985).
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Family Values in Seventeenth-Century Peru The Spanish Counter-Reformation was concerned with sexual issues (Perry 1990), which is not surprising given the Church's relatively recent focus on family values as a field in which it hoped to assert its authority and dominance. Correspondingly, a growing desire to define and control sexual activities was carried to the Andes, where it gained vivid expression in catechisms, manuals of confession, and sermons inspired by the Third Council of Lima. Peruvian texts from the late 16th and 17th centuries place explicit restrictions on sexual relations. Uniformly celebrating the state of chastity as humanity's greatest achievement, they criticized various categories of sexual sin, often in stunning detail. Sexual transgressions encompassed a range of "unnatural" acts, that is, any sexual practice that was not procreative. Some of the more serious acts included heinous sin (sodomy), masturbation, homoerotic encounters and bestiality. Furthermore, lawful sex was explicitly limited to the marriage bed, duly blessed in the holy sacrament of matrimony (Doctrine 1985: 126–132, 143–144, 198, 204–213, 514–524, 618–619, 642–656; Pérez Bocanegra 1631: 211-250). Limiting approved sex to marriage, a social status that required religious sanction and thus served to reinforce the Church's preeminence in family matters, was a relatively recent concern in the history of Western morality (Foucault 1978). In Spain and seventeenth-century Europe, crimes of fornication increasingly appeared in Church records (Perry 1990: 18–136; Kamen 1985: 202–206); they occupy an equally prominent place among the crimes punished by the Peruvian Inquisition (Medina 1959; Lea 1908: 451). the "evil customs" believed to be married to the devil. High on the list of sexual transgressions were cohabitation (unmarried men and women living together, or the ancient Quechua custom of “experimental” marriage), adultery, and various sins related to love magic.5 If the devil was behind Andean pagan worship of the sun and moon, huacas (sacred places and Andean sanctuaries) and ancestors, there it also incited illicit love, the spread of guacanquis (Andean love charms) and, in general, it deafened the natives to explanations of how sex - unless practiced according to Church rules - was a mortal sin (Arriaga 1919: 50–51, 59, 62–65; Doctrina 1985: 126–132; 514–524; Pérez Bocanegra 1631: 211–250, 391, 415, 416). 4 The Inquisition was brought to Peru in 1569. Although the Indians were not subject to the Inquisition (Medina 1959, 1:27–28; Lea 1908:210–332), the Extirpation of Idolatry campaigns played a similar role. 5 This estimate comes from the catalog of lawsuits filed against indigenous peoples in extirpation campaigns. The catalog was first compiled by Lorenzo Huertas (n.d.).
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Irene Silverblatt Clergy saw intrinsic connections between weak family values, heresy, and political revolt: sex, idols, and public discord formed the three ends of the devil's pitchfork. Consequently, the Church's civilizing crusade launched attacks simultaneously on all three fronts (see Silverblatt 1987: 181-196). A telling example of how the devil's actions were intertwined with threats to the colonial order was announced in a case prepared before the ecclesiastical tribunal in Lima: "Criminal proceedings against Don Francisco Gamarra, second person to the governor (local indigenous office) for having escaped from the prison where he was incarcerated, having been accused of being an idolater-sorcerer, promoting witches, committing incest, being a public arsonist, leader of rebellions and conspiracies” (Sánchez 1991: 169-188). Previously, Don Francisco had been accused of adultery and of “celebrating marriage according to pagan rites” (Sánchez 1991: 153–157). Sexual politics had wide implications in the seventeenth-century Andes, particularly when churchmen believed that the very foundation of the colonial order (civilization) would be destroyed if indigenous peoples did not practice family values in their own way. COLONIAL PREACHINGS: GENDER LESSONS AND HONOR TALES
Spanish ideologies of sex and gender harbored conflicting yet integrated feelings about women, their “nature” and possibilities. European norms created female icons of the sexually lascivious witch (and prostitute), mortal enemy of man and the kingdom of God, along with the virgin, idealized in the sacred figure of the Virgin, intercessor of Jesus and God (Sprenger and Kramer 1970 : 47 ). ; Warner 1983; Silverblatt 1994). On the one hand, women, as a sex, were condemned for their supposed vulnerability to satanic advances; on the other hand, women, as the personification of family honor, saw their virginity celebrated and also subject to greater surveillance by their relatives and the state (Silverblatt 1987: 160-181; Perry 1990). Spanish common sense considered women morally and intellectually inferior to men. These beliefs, enshrined in a legal system that institutionalized male advantage, were also sanctioned by a state religion that declared women particularly vulnerable to the devil's advances (Silverblatt 1987: 119-124, 159-180). Clergymen, armed with bilingual catechisms and sermons written for native evangelism, taught a variety of gendered moralities. Some teachings established the submission of women to men, expressed in a familiar language of mutual (patriarchal) obligation: men were obligated to support their wives and women to obey their husbands. Sermons spoke of Eve's treachery, and the Indians were warned that Eve's general weakness extended to her entire sex (Doctrina 1985: 213, 427, 619–620). 68
Family Values in 17th Century Peru Lessons of gender, strengthened by the biblical mandate, were written into colonial laws and policies. Women as a corporate group—ethically weak, prone to diabolical persuasion, lacking the rational means to independently represent themselves—needed guardianship. Spanish legislation considered women underage. This assessment of women's maturity permeated colonial Peru's two-tiered, caste-based legal structure: full privileges to enter into contracts independently and enjoy title to property, privileges reserved for descendants of the Incas or provincial nobility, were limited. to men. Or we find this revealing legal equation: the testimony of one Spaniard was equal to that of two Indians or three Indian women (Silverblatt 1987: 119-124). Permeated by the assumption that women were unfit to hold public office, colonial policies prevented their direct and formal participation in the political life of the ayllu (here, the community). While conforming in principle to local traditions, colonial administrators in practice did not recognize the parallel pre-Columbian authority structures in which women – as women – governed their own political and religious groups (Silverblatt 1987: 31-66). Certain elements of Spanish gender ideologies could not be addressed: among them, a deeply rooted conviction that, by nature, only men were capable of assuming civic responsibilities. Andean women and men often quickly modified Spanish policy in line with their own notions of how local government should be organized. Surely they must have been amused by the moral prescriptions of Christianity that obliged men to support their wives financially (Andean norms not only recognized that women worked, but also dictated that women, independently of men, inherited the rights to use the land). land and control its production) and forced women to obey their husbands (women were used to raising their voices in defiance of their spouses and male civic authorities) (Silverblatt 1987: 3–14, 134, 181–196). However, Spanish gender practices, inscribed in law, religion, customs and colonial expectations, took their toll. Spaniards also brought a refined sense of honor and shame to the Peruvian Andes, an ethic of life that, as many commentators on the Mediterranean and Spanish colonized worlds have noted, sharply colored relations between men and women (Gilmore 1987; Peristiany 1965; Seed 1988; Gutierrez 1991). In the fissured worlds of Spain, honor permeates the ethics of personal relationships and the social hierarchy. Central to moral sensibilities in Spanish and Creole life, honor marked social position by defining social virtue6 – always in gendered forms.
6 The following discussion on “honor” is based on studies by Patricia Seed (1988) and Ramón Gutiérrez (1991). For a recent assessment of the configuration of honor and shame in the Mediterranean, see Gilmore (1987).
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Irene Silverblatt As a marker of social status, the honor was born in the centuries-old story of the reconquest of Spain, Christian Spain's 700-year battle to wrest the Iberian peninsula from Arab control. It was the reward granted by the king to the victorious vassal, conveying a personal prestige inseparable from material rewards. Awards of honor included privileges of rank: titles of nobility, land ownership, and exemption from personal tribute. They also implied privileges of conquest, perhaps best symbolized by the precious booty of (sexual) rights over conquered women (Gutiérrez 1991: 176-240). God was ranked: God, of course, was at the height, and men who claimed more honor took precedence over those who had less. Conforming the Spanish body politic, the rule of honor placed God in preeminence, followed by the king, the ecclesiastics, the aristocrats, the vassals, the peasants and, finally, the slaves, whose status, by definition, was devoid of honor (Gutierrez 1991: 176-206). The hierarchy of honor, based on social relations of power and domination, rested on the social ruin or misfortune of others. Assessments were made in the public arena, and Peru's forums, where honor trials framed Indian-Spanish relations, were legion. Sermons preached that God's honor was tarnished whenever Andeans worshiped their deities, ancestors, or shrines (Doctrina 1985: 242). Human beings lost honor when they were publicly humiliated. Public shaming included the punishments meted out to convicted Indian heretics, who were first flogged and then dragged through the city streets while the crier denounced their sins of idolatry or concubinage (eg, Duviols 1971: 385; AAL: leg. 1, file XII ; BN: C4142). Public “scandals” also brought humiliations such as those suffered by a Spanish priest, tainted by not being able to contain the revelry of his indigenous parishioners (AAL: leg. 6, exp. VIII); or by male descendants of the Andean nobility, who fell out of favor when the Spaniards called them perros (dogs) and “sons of whores” on city streets (Guaman Poma 1980: 1018); or by a Cusco Ñusta (princess), claiming kinship with the great Inca queens, who was publicly shamed by the “plebeian” Indians who dared occupy the lands she claimed as her title (ADC: ACC, Top. 9, leg. 5). Public affronts to dignity and outrageous behavior associated with disgrace and infamy were gendered in the world of honor and virtue. Men lost face if they didn't keep their word or if they couldn't defend themselves physically and protect their family. The Women Shamed Themselves: 7 Challenges to Doña Beatriz Coya's Inheritance is a glaring example of how the conquistadors' sexual rights over vanquished women were merged with claims to their property. Her inheritance was disputed by the Spanish conquistador who allegedly raped her when she was twelve. Tom Cummins pointed this remarkable case out to me.
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Family values in 17th century Peru and especially their male relatives when they engage in illicit sexual intercourse. Spanish and colonial honor codes linked female virtue directly to male reputation: the most common offense to the honor of men, and by extension of the entire kin group (for honor had a way of spilling over), was that virtue of a relative was tainted (Gutiérrez 1991: 207–226; Semilla 1988: 61–74). Lessons from the catechism may have taught Indians that sex outside of marriage was equally harmful to men and women, and that chastity honored both (Doctrina 1985: 126–132, 514–524; Pérez Bocanegra 1631: 211–250, 417). However, colonial social practices, permeated by codes of honor, taught double standards.8 Otherwise, how to explain the following descriptions of the premarital sexual activities of native women written by Spanish men? The first comes from the chronicle of Pedro Pizarro, a relative of the conqueror: Peasant women are faithful to their husbands after they are married; but before their parents didn't notice whether they were good or bad; nor was it considered shameful among them. (Pizarro 1968: 579) The second is the opinion of one of Peru's most famous clerics, the Jesuit José de Acosta. He was responsible for catechisms in the native language that preached chastity for both sexes; He also played a decisive role in the campaigns to purge the Peruvian coasts of idolatries and bad customs: There is another serious error. . . that is deeply rooted in the hearts of barbarians. Virginity, which is cherished and honored by all men, is despised by those barbarians as base. With the exception of virgins consecrated to the Sun or the Inca (the aclla), all other women are considered of lesser value when they are virgins, and therefore, whenever they can, they give themselves to the first man they find. (Acosta 1954b: 603) I have not found a corresponding assessment of male virginity. If the Spaniards here reveal a double standard regarding sex, they also make it clear that this kind of sexual hypocrisy, rooted in gender honor rules, was not part of Andean family values. For the most part (with the exception of the aclla, or “sun virgins” [Silverblatt 1987: 81–108]), Andean women were allowed to have premarital sex, like men, without the stigma attached to them and without consequences. . for them. the reputation of relatives or kinship group. 8 Look at works written at the time that vividly and infamously, for example, El Burlador de Sevilla (1961), by Tirso de Molina, portray a world of men proving their position by seducing (and abandoning) women. On the legendary Don Juan and ideologies of honor in the context of patriarchal norms, see Mandrell (1992).
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Irene Silverblatt OBSESSION: CHASTITY, LEGITIMACY AND THE PURITY OF SOCIAL BOUNDARIES
It seems that the Andeans did not consider the children that could result from their non-marital sexual relations to be contaminated in any way. "Legitimacy" was a European creation, worked out in Spanish law and prejudice. With twin preoccupations with the integrity of lineage and property, Spanish principles of ancestral purity – “blood” untainted by Jews, Moors or bastards – determined social possibilities in Castile and its domains.9 Like Spain's inquisitive history, the Iberian identities were haunted by legitimacy, ancestry, and social boundaries (Kamen 1985: 61, 115–133, 220, 224, 235; Elliott 1963: 212–248). In colonial circumstances, Spaniards amplified this concern by fabricating and institutionalizing the category of human beings they called mestizos or mestizos (Morner 1967: 21-34). This mala casta (bad caste), part of the racial taxonomy of colonialism, would become synonymous with disgrace, flawed character and bastardy. The indigenous chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, who, as we shall see, shared the Spanish horror of “mestizo blood,” so closely associated mestizo with illegitimacy that he called secondary Inca lineages mestizos (Guaman Poma 1980: 96). Peru's renowned jurist Juan de Solórzano, with comparable sentiments in the late seventeenth century, railed against the dishonor of mestizos: their defective nature, the product of an impure and tainted birth (1972 [vol. 252]: 441–450) ) .10 The weight of the mestizos, their disgrace and their infamy, kept in the very soul of honor, born in the long history of the Spanish reconquest. Because the rules of honor, laid out in conquest, declared that defeated women were the ultimate trophy of honor. Illegitimate, impure, contaminated and "mestizo" races were the inevitable result of colonization: the fuel of a social morality, born of the subjugation of other peoples, which exalted women's chastity, ancestral purity and impenetrable social boundaries. Spanish domination of the Inka empire, realized in gendered forms, was anchored in sexual aggression: to paraphrase Magnus Morner writing over twenty years ago, the colonization of the New World was based on the conquest of women (1967: 21-25), with the miscegenation, the genesis of contaminated “mestizos”, not only as an inevitable consequence, but a necessary one. 9 The obsession with blood purity was reinforced in the 16th and 17th centuries, when proof of ancestral “purity” or purity of blood was required to hold political and religious positions. The Cabinet of the Inquisition was responsible for ensuring that no Jewish or Moorish “stain” (“blood”) stained a candidate's record (Kamen 1985: 115-133). See also Stolcke (n.d.) for a discussion of the implications of these concerns for issues of race and virginity in the Spanish colonies. 10 See also Spalding (1974) for an important analysis of colonial categories of race and their relationship to social position.
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Family values in 17th century Peru “Family values” thus entered the colonial struggle. Conflicts over its meaning and moral importance placed the politics of identity creation – the broad disputes over definitions of humanity – at the heart of the colonial enterprise. Spanish lessons about gender and sex, about legitimacy and race – with all their contradictions – were imposed on Andean worlds. As part of the ideological landscape of colonialism, they could be grafted onto native intellectual and ethical sensibilities as Andeans struggled to understand themselves and the changes of colonialism. Colonized Peruvians embraced family values in many ways: they could become standards for judging and critiquing the colonial experience, as well as inspirations for a range of political strategies. Now we turn to some of the strange and perhaps surprising ways in which they became part of Andean life.11 GUAMAN POM: THE VIRTUE OF WOMEN, SOCIAL PURITY AND THE POLITICS OF INDIAN SURVIVAL
An ideology of chastity, honor, and blood purity deeply colored Guaman Poma's vision of social order and social justice. In the critical hands of Guaman Poma, Iberian family values became devastating evidence of the sharp decline of Peru's native population, the hypocrisy of colonial authorities, and ultimately the legitimacy of colonial rule. Guaman Poma's chronicle of good government argued that the successful biological reproduction of "Indians" was inseparable from the social order and only from colonial rule. A good colonial government would be based on a legitimate political hierarchy, while its success would ultimately depend on preserving strict boundaries between the constituent groups of society. Echoing Spanish trends, Guaman Poma's vision of the colonial order was based on notions of purity, both of nation (Spaniards, Indians and blacks) and status (nobility, commoner/peasant). Drawing on (and transforming) Iberian gender ideologies, Guaman Poma saw control over women's sexual activities, their virtue and honor, as crucial: premarital chastity along with marriage to suitable men would ensure lineage purity , nation, and position required.
11 This article focuses on the cultural dimensions of the Spanish colonization of the native peoples of Peru, and I cannot outline here analogous processes that marked the Inca expansion. Suffice it to say that conquest was nothing new to the Andes; the Inca Empire was the latest in a series of pre-Hispanic imperial efforts that transformed Andean life. Conquered peoples owed work and loyalty to Cuzco and the gods of Cuzco, and male representatives of the empire could alienate conquered women, the “sun virgins” or aclla, from their native communities and place them in imperial service. While it is difficult to reconstruct Inca cultural policy with great detail or certainty, it does not seem to contain the extent of sexual proscriptions or harbor the kinds of policies of exclusion of Europeans that followed.
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Irene Silverblatt for social order and the procreation of native peoples. Rigorous surveillance of women's sexuality, then, was crucial to the successful reproduction of colonial society, as measured by standards of good governance, political order, and indigenous population growth. In general, women were blamed for social failures (eg, 1980: 162, 205, 207, 413–414, 421, 474, 566, 800, 801, 816, 896, 1019–1020). Guaman Poma insisted on these themes throughout his Nueva corónica and made a point of comparing the moral decay of colonial society with the virtue of Andean customs before the Spanish invasion. Guaman Poma, with great irony, took Christian ethics as a moral norm. Therefore, although the Andeans were not practicing Catholics before the Iberian attack, the Andeans knew how to govern well, that is, in a “Christian” way, with charity, justice and sexual moderation. Women's honor and virtue were intrinsic to Guaman Poma's vision of good government. He described women's sexual practices before the Spanish conquest - when good government reigned in the Andes - this way: among his women he found no adulteresses, no prostitutes. . . [W]emen were virgins when they were married, and they considered it a [matter of] honor and [kept] their virginity until they were thirty years old. Then they got married. . . . . . . And so they multiplied greatly. (1980: 48-49; see also 54, 56, 89, 275, 720, 871) Though ambivalent about the legitimacy of Inka rule, Guaman Poma conceded that the lords of Cuzco presided over a well-ordered society. Again, linking the fair dominion of the Inka with the overwhelming virtue of the Inka woman, he wrote: The greatness that this New World of the Indies had, keeping women virgins until they were thirty-three years old. . . Oh what a beautiful law, not only from the land, but from God. . . neither the [Spanish] emperor nor any of the kings of the world have known such a beautiful law. . . . (1980: 199) Keeping women chaste was half the key to the pre-Columbian social order; the other half resided in “marrying well,” which for Guaman Poma meant ensuring that women married their social equivalents. Prior to the Spanish conquest, classification would have been society's main concern; Colonial rule, however, introduced the additional complexities of "race", and Guaman Poma urged Andeans to marry in kind. He instructed the Kurakas, members of the indigenous colonial elite, to make sure that: they would not give their daughters in marriage neither to Indian peasant women [mitayos] nor to Spaniards, but to their equals, so that a good caste
Family values in 17th century Peru [good caste] occur in this kingdom. (1980: 692) If marriage between unequals in rank was a threat to good governance, out-of-caste marriage, Guaman Poma charged, would sound its death knell. Furthermore, Guaman Poma linked this corruption of the social order to the corruption of women: their essential disloyalty and their unbridled sexual impulses produced social decay, impure races, and blurred social boundaries. Denouncing the villainy of Indian women, she explained that they were prone to men outside their caste, preferring Spaniards to honest, hard-working Andeans. This was her insidious misfortune; Worse still, these Indians had no honor, even less than the black women who, like slaves, were at the bottom of the barrel of honor. Calling the Indians, women without virtue, “prostitutes”, Guaman Poma lamented his betrayal: Some [of these Indians], for having been cooks for the priest or encomendero or corregidor, or for some [sic] maid, mistress, or had a child with he either baked with a Spanish, mestizo or black, mulatto woman, these aforementioned Indians end up being liars, thieves, whores, lazy. . . . and they do not serve God nor his Majesty, nor obey his authorities. . . . . . . in fornicating with a Spaniard and a priest, corregidor, encomendero, or with a mestizo or mulatto, black, yanacona [servant], an [indian] no longer wants to marry a . . . indian commoner. And these Indian women are worse than black women, and now they have no honor. (1980: 800) Guaman Poma offered two solutions. The first was in line with Viceroy Toledo's residential segregation policy. He maintained that all non-Indians - Spaniards, blacks, mulattoes, mestizos - be banished from indigenous settlements. If, despite this prohibition, indigenous women have children of non-indigenous people, both the woman and her children must be exiled from their city and prohibited from residing in indigenous villages (Guaman Poma 1980: 1019-1020). Guaman Poma's second solution defended the right of parents (or the state) to intervene in women's marriage decisions. Armed with this prerogative, Andean elders could pressure their daughters to marry indigenous men of comparable status. Guaman Poma looked to Inka politics as a model in this regard, and credited Cuzco's supposed ability to distribute women in marriage to the empire's remarkable social order and stability (1980: 190-192). argument about an idealized version of Inka government, order, and justice. A careful reading of the chroniclers' accounts also casts doubt on the much-vaunted role of the Inca elite in directly determining local marriages (Silverblatt 1987: 8, 15).
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Irene Silverblatt's disorder, however, went against ecclesiastical law, something Guaman Poma must have known, who accompanied several clerics on their extirpation missions. The 17th-century Church celebrated the right of spouses to marry of their own free will and gave clear priority to the spouse's choice over parental objections when in conflict (Seed 1988: 17–94). Guaman Poma's resolution suggests the depth of his concern for indigenous survival, along with a deeply held conviction that "shameful" marriages caused Andean decline. Guaman Poma wrote with great horror of Peru's proliferation of the bad castas, of the illegitimate and tainted "mestizos"—mostly mestizos, but also mulattoes and sambaigos (unions of Indians and blacks)—whose scandalous lives (in his opinion) seemed nurture colonial culture. disorder (1980: 189, 498, 504, 509). Guaman Poma's vision turned the mestizos of Peru into icons of death, blatant evidence of native mortality and social degeneration. Her impassioned pleas for purity of rank and “race” – and the need to police women's honor in the name of the public good – were based on the dominant/hybrid rhetoric of those colonial times. Through it, he tried to make moral and cognitive sense of a threatening and deteriorating world. Guaman Poma's chronicle of good government defended Andeans by defending their honor, that is, by remaking pre-Columbian history into a utopia of social virtue, where women were chaste and social boundaries fiercely guarded. Imprisoned by this view, he was able to eloquently denounce the plight of indigenous women under colonial rule (1980: 534, 542-547, 610, 618-619), even as he blamed them for the breakdown of the social order. Native women were not the only object of his piercing attacks; The Spaniards, the entire colonial entourage and the priests in particular, were punished for bringing iniquity to the Andean world. However, with Christian intuition, Guaman Poma reminded his readers that “the first sin that was committed was that of the woman” (1980: 122). And continuing an exhortation addressed to the daughters of Eve, he rebuked: “thus you began the first idolatry” and “you served the demons” (1980: 122). The rhetoric of family (colonial) values was a censorship narrative; and when Guaman Poma apportioned the blame for the collapse of indigenous cities and the colonial order, he pointed to women, their sexual lust, their tarnished honor and their shame: And this is how Indian men know their women walk, having become them. if you were whores and whores and had a child with another Indian or mestizo. . . . And it is for the women that the men leave [their villages]. . . . And so women deserve to be punished more. (1980:816)
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Family Values in 17th Century Peru NEW HONOR
Guaman Poma elaborated a vision of the past and present of the Andean world, based on an idealization of pre-Columbian history, while drawing on a language of honor, purity and disgrace. Other native Peruvians – men and women, kurakas and comuneros – envisioned themselves and their society through a similar discursive web, but arrived at different understandings. The records of the processes instituted against the practitioners of idolatry and bad customs in the Lima plateau of the seventeenth century allow us to glimpse these transformations. For many of those accused of a range of mischief, from mountain worship to fornication, issues of honor took on other forms, fostering new approaches to power and legitimacy, new insights into the colony's social relations, and new practices in defense of honor. However, we must bear in mind that these testimonies were the product of the most direct and pronounced culture wars in the Andes, the campaigns to root out idolatry, and that living through them had its own effect on the particular moral and practical imperatives they “honor”. ". would inspire. The extirpation of fear-driven idolatry campaigns as extirpators, as inquisitors, fomented terror. Preparing the way for the village survey, all adults were called and assembled, warned of the upcoming investigation: [It is ] directed, ordered, and required in twelve days . . . [members of a given city] must reveal to us if they know, see or hear that anyone is . . . a heretic or a witch or an idol worshiper . . . (AAL: leg. 2, exp. XXVII) With this announcement, the uprooters tore at the fabric of city life, pitting native Peruvians —kin, ayllu, kurakas, peasants, members of different ethnic groups— against each other. Anyone who did not denounce a “heretic” faced public punishment or, even worse, the dire possibility of being accused of practicing idolatry or sorcery. Punishments were severe: public flogging; forced labor in obrajes (proto-factory/sweatshops), mines and hospitals; or banishment, the most feared sentence. Throughout the 17th century, extirpation campaigns triggered wave of alarm after wave of dissent as Andeans clashed with Andeans. Native Peruvians had experienced the arbitrariness of power before the Spanish invasion, but not in the face of this particular dynamic, embedded in a legalistic form and a greedy social logic. Nor had they lived under a state religion that declared their ways of life criminal. Although they recognized a certain Spanish responsibility for the devastation suffered by the original peoples,
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Irene Silverblatt, 17th-century clerics and jurists also preached that the extraordinary sufferings of the Andeans represented God's punishment for a nation that stubbornly resisted his ways (Doctrina 1985: 652–653). Andeans have been torn apart by betrayals: indigenous gods and colonial gods, the colonial state and indigenous officials. Haunted by terrible ambiguities and widespread fears of colonial circumstances, the Andeans were still visited by the terrors of extirpation campaigns. “Honor” sustained these brambles of the colonial experience, a framework that created the colonial hierarchy and gave it meaning, imposing colonial exchanges and also, within the limits of colonial hegemony, reversing them. Hispanic notions of honor penetrated the etiquette of social relations in seventeenth-century indigenous communities; and public considerations of honor, along with public insults, marry its ethos with the practices of everyday life. Contests of honor were the temperament of status in a status-obsessed colonial world. Public affronts to personal honor demanded interactions between Spaniards and Indians and between Indians, particularly those with elite pretensions and commoner peasants. Public exchanges became testing grounds, arenas for checking status in a society where boundaries were often blurred: Indians could become mestizos; mestizos could pass for Spaniards; elite Indians found themselves in a state of limbo as privileged members of the colonized caste (Spalding 1974: 31-126, 147-196). Hispanic codes highlighted insults as a means of assessing the relative measure of honor. The Andeans were furious when the Spaniards called them an Indian dog. It was a terrible abuse, an affront to the humanity of the indigenous people, and we find indigenous people from all over the Andes denouncing the Spaniards for trying to dehumanize them through public indignities. Strong feelings about the insults emerged in the text written by Guaman Poma (1980: 1018), who was outraged by Spanish slights to his status and race. They also appear in idolatry proceedings, revealing tensions within indigenous communities. Elite Indians used dishonorable terms in Spanish to distance themselves from their fellow castes. These insults may be linked to other scourges, such as Christian Indians siding with the Spanish establishment, humiliating their fellow ayllu members by accusing them of unchristian activities. A common affront was publicly calling Indians devil worshipers as well as dogs. Several residents of San Lorenzo de Quinti were duly dishonored by the mayor's wife who "disgraced indigenous men and women, calling them sorcerer dogs [sic]" (AAL: leg. 2, Exp. XIV). Indian women were also shamed by other dishonorable words. These were the insults expressed in the language of virtue, insults that dishonored women through accusations of sexual licentiousness. Women can be embarrassed by public episodes78
Family values in 17th-century Peru saw the concept of puta, or prostitute, and in the 17th-century Andean women discovered that sexual conduct, now converted into a measure of honor, was a dimension according to which they could be publicly judged and reprimanded ( AAL: Leg. 7, Exp. I). Before the Spanish invasion, these honor practices were unknown in the Andes; colonization brought new ways of weaving women's sexuality into an accepted public discourse about civic morality.13 If words can bring dishonour, so can public punishments. Such visible lessons of social order reverberated like shame on those who were disciplined, at least according to colonial rules.14 The punishments were more than humiliating, they tarnished the name and, by extension, the lineage of the accused. Once tainted, the Kuraka compromised their position, along with that of their kin, in the colony's political establishment. In Spain and non-Indian Peru, the Inquisition, with its autos de fe (public spectacle of proof of faith) and accusations of foul blood, swept men and their descendants from civic grace and public office, as well as accusations of witchcraft. The testimony of a renowned kuraka and sorcery consultant, who lives in the city of Iguari, expressed the following concerns: Francisco Gamarra's sister feared that her brother's next trial would stain, or stain, not only him, but the whole family group (AAL: leg. 5, exp.Xll; Sanchez 1991:xl), and thus impede its political future. Andeans quickly learned the importance of "honor" to the ideals, if not the practice, of Spanish norms about female virtue. They also learned a quick lesson about Spanish hypocrisy: honor can pass for dishonorable acts. The Indians were adept at Spanish ironies, turning them into barbs of honor to mock their Iberian creators. One example comes from an extirpation suit against an accused Indian witch whose clients included a conspiracy of local Spaniards. Francisca Carguachuqui, an old woman, was accused of witchcraft, murder (through diabolical pacts), idolatry and love magic. The Spaniards sincerely believed in their magical powers of love and were willing to use them, pay for them, if Francisca Carguachuqui could fulfill their hearts desire. A Spaniard, madly in love with the village priest, consulted the Carguachuqui lady about potions and spells to make sure she would stay by her side.
13 Andeans also turned words of honor upside down, taking Spanish titles of honor and applying them to those they held dear in community life, regardless of whether by Spanish law and custom such titles were carefully restricted, or that the Andeans themselves will use to designate women and men. who, as healers and religious specialists, have been condemned by Church and State. Thus we find accused idolaters/witches called dotor/a by the “indians” who honored them (AAL: leg. 4, exp. XVIII). 14 Of course, women and men who participated in seventeenth-century nativist movements may instead see the public punishments inflicted on “idolaters” during extirpation campaigns as badges of integrity and honor.
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Irene Silverblatt The inquisitors/extirpators were horrified when they learned of this appalling prank and pressed Francisca Carguachuqui to explain why she had not confessed her grave sin sooner. After all, the removers were very suspicious of this old "witch": worshiper of the mountain god/devil, provider of cures and love spells. They interrogated her for days and even tortured her. Francisca Carguachuqui finally explained her reluctance to testify with the following diabolical response: she alleged a great reluctance to confess this particular request to Church authorities, made, as it were, by a Spaniard through the magic of love: "[Francisca Carguachuqui] could not testify because he cared for, protected, the honor of the lady” (AAL: leg. 1, exp. XII). Thus, the Andeans took some lessons of honor seriously and learned to use them to mock the social hierarchy that the colonial practices of honor they tried to impose. They also expanded their scope from relations between people to an entire social order: honor and purity were suddenly associated with Andean culture.
In the early 1600s, the extirpators of idolatry discovered that an emerging nativism—an “indianist” movement that challenged Spanish authority and orthodoxy—was taking hold of the Andean imagination.15 In the following century, Indianist sentiments—while competing with a variety of ideologies and loyalties—galvanized Andeans across boundaries of ayllu, ethnicity, gender, and privilege (Silverblatt 1995). Indianist ideologies portrayed the Andean experience as colonized subjects in devastating terms: Peru's staggering population loss haunted all assessments of the fabric of life, compounded by apprehension over the loss of land, insufficient food and clothing, and anxiety over tribute service and work (AAL: Step 2, Exp. XVIII; Step 4, Exp. XVIII; Step 3, Exp. X). Nativism articulated Andeans' persistent insecurities and growing fears. He did so in a religious philosophy that protested Spanish rule, even when framed in Iberian categories. The Spanish gods were opposed to the Andean ones, and the Peruvians, by abandoning the native gods for the charm of Christianity, had broken the faith. Huacas, in response, turned his back on the Andeans, while the gods of the Spaniards - despite their universalist rhetoric - proved to be only gods of the Spaniards, and 15 Huertas (n.d.) gives us one of the first descriptions of this movement that is based on a study careful of the records of the Extirpation of Idolatry. See also Spalding (1984) for a discussion of nativist practices in Huarochirí, as well as Stern's (1983) analysis. I have explored aspects of the gendered nature of nativism (1987, 1994) as well as its implications for the construction of colonial subjects (1995).
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Family values in 17th-century Peru, like their mortal compatriots, betrayed Andeans with false promises to uphold their well-being. A respected community elder, convicted by the extirpators of witchcraft and heresy, explained: The reason why the Indians [are] dying [is] because they no longer worship their malquis [ancestors] and huacas as their elders used to do. , there were so many Indians who had more gardens and clothes and lived more peacefully. It is because they worship the huacas of the Spaniards — nothing more than painted and gilded sticks — that the Indians continue to die and lose their lands. The gods of the Spaniards give nothing to the Indians. Indians, because we are Indians, we must worship [our] huacas and ancestors. (AAL: leg. 6, exp. XI, fol. 9–9v) Nativist religious practices were exuberantly anti-colonial: while Andean huacas were celebrated, Andean foods appreciated and Andean rituals exalted, Spanish gods were condemned, Andean products Spaniards were banned and rites were insulted. Following indigenous dictates, whenever nativists worshiped their huacas or their ancestors, they refused to trade in Spanish goods or food. And even more dangerously, nativists would try to avoid the most execrable defilements of Christianity: church, mass and catechism classes (AAL: leg. 6, exp. XI, fols. 33v, 37, 39). Despite their valiant efforts to combat Spanish influence, nativism was torn apart by compromise: the Indianists, besieged by idol-destroyers, could ignore neither the weight of Spanish institutions nor their antagonism to native beliefs. “Indianism” had to be practiced with great astuteness and prudence, as nativist ideologies admitted that the huacas should share the Andean skies with the gods of the Spaniards (AAL: leg. 6, exp. XI, fols. 33v, 37; leg. 2, exp. XVIII; leg. 4, exp. XVIII; leg. 3, exp. X). Indianism, recognizing (intentionally? right?) Spain's seemingly unshakable presence (Silverblatt 1995), strove to recreate Andean purity and a new sense of Andean honor amidst colonial contaminations. Thus, an elaborate "purity"—the spiritual impulse behind Spanish Counter-Reformation Baroque—transformed and colored the strategies of Andean nativism. The purity of food, clothing, habits and tradition guided the Indian lifestyle. Building walls against Spanish contamination, Indianist practice then turned to sexual issues. Much of what we know about seventeenth-century Andean nativism and the family values ethic that goes with it is drawn from judgments of idolatry; because, as I discussed, the extirpators understood that their mission encompasses heresies of thought and lifestyle. Orthodox patrols in Peru found a litany of sexual abuse.
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Irene Silverblatt sins: the scandalous and dishonorable ways of life, the bad customs, so dangerous for the civilizing process and the colonial effort. Many caciques were infamous "bigamists" or, following the good customs of their ancestors, took polygamy as a privilege and status symbol (Doctrina 1985: 520). Under most circumstances—the Inca institution of the aclla being the notable pre-Columbian exception and, as we shall see, the female ministers of Indianism the other—the Andeans scoffed at premarital chastity. The concepts of feminine virtue and masculine arrogance, so valued in Spanish self-presentations (Seed 1988: 61-74; Gutiérrez 1991: 207-226), did not find a place in Andean sexual etiquette. Although customs varied across the region's many ayllus, colonial accounts suggest that sexual experimentation thrived (at least before marriage), that both women and men were encouraged in sexual play, that some form of marriage "test" guided eventual marriage choices, and that, in a world where "being fertile" was genuinely revered, "illegitimacy" made little sense (Doctrina 1985: 217-220, 316, 514-524; Pérez Bocanegra 1631: 211–250; AAL: leg.6, exp.X; leg.6, exp.VIII).16 Although Andean ethics authorized premarital sexual relations (Guaman Poma, on the contrary), it seemed to disapprove of what we would call adultery.17 Once , a couple expressed a mutual commitment through Andean marriage. style, they were probably warned not to engage in sexual relationships with other people. Interestingly, confessional manuals praised Inca teachings in this regard, while severely criticizing other Andean sexual habits (Doctrina 1985: 514–524, 646; Arriaga 1919: 50–51, 59). When the priests/inquisitors carried out comparative analyzes of sexual sins, they discovered, to their chagrin, that fornication never appeared in the Andean lists, while having relations with someone already married did (AAL: leg. 6, exp. X , fol. 6, leg.4, exp.XXVII, fol.2v). In the colonial Andes, control over sexual behavior seemed to be increasingly imposed on ministers of nativism. Hernando Hacas Poma, the renowned Indianista from Cajatambo, chided one of his pastors for flagrantly engaging in love affairs.16 Andean traditions of premarital sexual experimentation are confirmed by contemporary ethnography. See Barrionuevo (1973); Isabel (1978); Palomino (1984). 17 This is what the evidence suggests. As for another matter, I cannot judge with any degree of certainty how the Andeans evaluated homoerotic encounters. Peoples living on the north coast seem to have freely engaged in male homoerotic activities as well as heterosexual anal sex, a long tradition to judge from Moche pottery. According to Cieza de León, the “abominable sin” was categorically condemned by the Incas (1986: 198-200). However, at least one confession manual written for the Cuzco area asks very specific questions about homosexual and human/animal activities. I don't know if this reflects a general Church concern because issues of sodomy and bestiality are found in other Counter-Reformation manuals, or if the great detail in Pérez Bocanegra's manual reflects his experience in the southern sierra (1631: 218-220) . .
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Family values in 17th century Peru with several women at the same time (AAL: leg. 6, exp. XI, fol. 46). When Juan Raura did not want to change his lifestyle to meet the requirements of a stricter canon of behavior, Hacas Poma removed him from his post. The origins of this part of the sexual ethic are difficult, if not impossible, to trace, but Hacas Poma's concerns may be part of the broader ideological thrust of nativism that exalts purity. His actions, then, seem to fit an emerging Andean practice that confuses sexual virtue and communal honor. During a generation of idolatry hunting in the Lima highlands, one trend became evident: virgin women—girls and adults sworn to celibacy—played increasingly significant roles in Indianist ritual practice (AAL: leg. 2, exp. IV; leg 3, exp. X; leg. 4, exp. XVIIIa; leg. 3, exp. XV; leg. 4, exp. s.n.; leg. 6, exp. XI; Silverblatt 1987: 203–205; 1994) . In a process of hybridization, fusion, and opposition to gendered ideologies, Indianism fused women's sexual virtue (and perhaps the political prestige associated with the Aclla Inca era) with efforts to preserve the "purity" of Andean life. Trying to live as "Andean" as possible, virgin and chaste women took care of sustaining the "indianist" ritual. Hidden from Spanish ecclesiastics and census takers, protected from the contamination of Spanish society, these women were systematically excluded from Spanish religious institutions and civic positions. As a consequence, contact with the Spaniards was also forbidden, and they were kept pure from their corruptions and immoralities (See AAL: leg. 4, exp. XVIIIa and exp. s.n.). Extirpation campaigns, such as Peruvian law and the ecclesiastical canon, divided the Andean social universe into Indians and Spaniards. Some seventeenth-century Andeans increasingly saw themselves and their world in these categories. But if, at this moment, the Andeans could no longer imagine expelling the Spaniards from their soil and sky, they could at least fight to conquer a space of dignity for themselves within the limits of colonial surveillance. Nativist religion, reflecting the absolutist categories of the colonial enterprise, saw itself as a collective effort with a collective purpose. The chastity of female ministers had a special meaning in a religious movement that questioned the legitimacy of Iberian culture and later sought to define its own virtues. The honor of highland virgins was far from being a nostalgic reminder of Inca times, or a measure of the status of a family group, or simply a vow of religious commitment. It was linked to the honor of a besieged people. This became clear when nativists in the city of Guatán collectively berated the mayor's sister for offending their main huaca. In 1680 she was kidnapped with the intention of holding a public trial on charges of blasphemy. Convicted of desecrating the community's beloved shrine, she suffered public humiliation.
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Irene Silverblatt Spanish-style punishments. The Guataneños publicly flogged her, paraded her through the streets, and then placed her in the Spanish stocks. As they shamed her throughout the city, the Guataneños shouted their sin: “by condemning the worship of our Andean gods, I lost the honor of [our] people” (AAL: leg. 4, exp. XLII, fol. 14). THE REPRESENTATION OF HONOR
Spain unleashed waves of social contradiction by manufacturing "Indians" as part of its blueprint for colonial rule, as contrary gender practices fused uncomfortably with the racialized social core of the colony. This dance of contradictory experiences and life principles constructed contradictory colonial selves and helped explain the range of (hybridized) understandings and feelings that dominated the Andean imagination. values and ethics of honor - in the formation of the 17th century Spanish Andean colony and its colonized subjects. Spanish domination over the Inca empire, carried out in a gendered manner, was linked to the insurmountable contradictions of honor: a social morality – which thrived on the subjugation of other peoples and promised women a right of conquest – which exalted women’s virtue, legitimacy of birth and "racial violence". "purity. The gap between the principle and the practice of Spanish political-religious ethics was not more evident than in the field of good manners. Family values, the moral foundation of the colonization process, pointed to the greatest hypocrisies. Flagrant colonization: sermons Christians praising chastity, teaching sex only within marriage, rebuking greed, denouncing the perfidy of women, and warning of the dangers to the soul (and civilization) when God's commandments are broken. Andean Colonials, Pervaded Andean Worlds Guilt and Suggested Strategies Along with colonial categories of humanity, Andean nativists incorporated the Counter-Reformation exaltation of purity and obsession with the virtue of women into their own program of cultural restoration. As new ministers on the rise18 For a more detailed exploration of the contradictory social relations involved lives in the creation of the Andean colonial world and its indigenous subjects, see Silverblatt (1995). See Silverblatt (1988, 1995) for analyzes of hybrid understandings that shape Andean perspectives on the colonial experience.
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Family values in 17th century Peru pretending to be “Indianism”, Andean women were protected from Christian contaminations, including the Spaniards, and their shame. Unlike Guaman Poma and his elaboration of Counter-Reformation family values, Andean nativists did not blame women for their sharp decline in numbers or the deterioration of Andean ways of life. On the contrary, the “virtuous” Indianist ministers, separated from the ranks of the sexual spoils of the conquest and, therefore, appropriate envoys of the community “honor”, undertook strategies for the sustenance and reproduction of the “Indians”. Colonial ironies, however, deeply inscribed nativist family values: women's virtue could only be celebrated at the expense of gender, costs anchored in the very ideologies and practices of the Spanish conquest that Indianistas so vehemently repudiated. Acknowledgments I want to thank Elizabeth Hill Boone and Tom Cummins for inviting me to attend the Dumbarton Oaks conference in 1992. I was fortunate to benefit from the wisdom of an excellent group of comrades/seminars. Tom Cummins has been a patient, encouraging, and highly insightful editor, and had it not been for his timely insistence, this article would never have been written. Bruce Mannheim, Jorge Klor de Alva, Kitty Allen, and Heather Lechtman gave me a lot to think about in Washington, as did Bill Fowler, Steve Houston, and Tom Gregor of the anthropology department at Vanderbilt University, where this article had its second hearing. . anonymous readers also offered helpful critiques. I first conceptualized this essay as a Rockefeller Fellow in the Spanish Department/Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Maryland; I then developed and refined it as a Guggenheim Fellow. My thanks to both institutions for their generous and enabling support. “Family Values” is part of a larger work that focuses on the cultural dimensions of colony building in 17th-century Peru. It is a first foray into issues of sex, honor and legitimacy in the Peruvian Andes. This essay owes much to the pioneering work of Regina Harrison (1992) and unfortunately was printed before the publication of Stavig (1995).
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ACOSTA, JOSÉ DE 1954a Minor writings [ca. 1571-78]. In Works: 249–386. Spanish Authors Library. Atlas editions, Madrid. 1954b Natural and Moral History of the Indies [1590]. In Works: 1–247. Spanish Authors Library. Atlas editions, Madrid. ARRIAGA, PABLO JOSEPH DE 1919 Extirpation of the idolatry of Pirú [1621]. Sanmartí and Ca, Lima. ÁVILA, FRANCISCO DE 1966 Gods and Men of Huarochirí [1598] (José María Arguedas, trans.). National Museum of History and Institute of Peruvian Studies, Lima. BARRIONUEVO, ALFONSINA 1973 Sirvinakuy: An essay on the marriage test. Lime. CIEZA DE LEÓN, PEDRO DE 1986 Chronicle of Peru. First part [1553]. Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Lima. COOK, NOBLE DAVID 1981 Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. CORRIGAN, PHILIP AND DEREK SAYER 1985 The Great Arch Basil Blackwell, Oxford. CRUZ, ANNE J. AND MARY ELIZABETH PERRY (EDS.) 1992 Culture and Control in the Counter-Reformation in Spain. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. DOCTRINE 1985 Christian Doctrine and Catechism for the Instruction of the Indians [1584,1585] (Luciano Perena, ed.). Superior Council for Scientific Research, Madrid. DUVIOLS, PIERRE 1971 La lutte contre les réligions autochthones dans le Pérou colonial: l'extirpación de l'idolâtrie entre 1532 e 1660. Institut Français d'Études Andines, Lima e Paris. 1986 Andean culture and repression: trials and visits of idolatry and sorcery. Cajatambo, 17th century. Bartolomé de Las Casas Center, Cuzco. ELIAS, NORBERT 1982 Power and Civility: The Civilizing Process, vol. 2. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. ELLIOTT, JOHN HUXTABLE 1963 Imperial Spain, 1469-1719. St. Martin's Press, New York. FOUCAULT, MICHEL 1978 The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Robert Hurley, trans.). Pantheon, New York. 86
Family values in 17th century Peru GIBSON, CHARLES 1987 Indigenous societies under Spanish rule. In Colonial Spanish America (Leslie Bethell, ed.): 361–399. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. GILMORE, DAVID D. 1987 Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean. Special Publications, no. 22, American Anthropological Association, Arlington, Virginia. GUAMAN POMA DE AYALA, FELIPE 1980 First New Chronicle and Good Government [1615] (Juan V. Murra and Rolena Adorno, eds.; Jorge Urioste, trans.). 3 vol. 21st century, Mexico. GUTIERREZ, RAMON A. 1991 When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Gone: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. HARRISON, REGINA 1992 “True” Confessions: The History of the Viceroyalty of Peru, Latin American Studies Series 5, University of Maryland, College Park. GARDENS, LAWRENCE n.d. The religion of an Andean rural society: Cajatambo in the 17th century. Bachelor's thesis, Faculty of Letters, National University of San Marcos, 1969. ISBELL, BILLIE-JEAN 1978 To defend ourselves: ritual and ecology in an Andean people. Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas Press, Austin. KAMEN, HENRY 1985 The Inquisition and Society in Spain in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. KUBLER, GEORGE 1963 The colonial world. In Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 2 (Julian H. Steward, ed.): 331–410. Cooper Square Publications, New York. LAVRÍN, ASUNCIÓN (ED.) 1989 Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. LEA, HENRY CHARLES 1908 The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies. The Macmillan Company, New York. MANDRELL, JAMES 1992 Don Juan and the Point of Honor: Seduction, Patriarchal Society, and Literary Tradition. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park. MEDINA, JOSE TORIBIO 1959 History of the Court of the Inquisition of Lima, 1569 –1820. 2 vol. Historical and Bibliographic Background J. T. Medina, Santiago. MILLIONS, LUIS 1973 A Sixteenth-Century Nativist Movement: The Sickness of Song. In Messianic Ideology of the Andean World (Juan Ossio, ed.): 83–94. Ignatius Pastor de Prado, Lima. 1990 The Return of the Huacas: Studies and Documents of the Sixteenth Century (ed.). Institute of Peruvian Studies/Peruvian Society of Psychoanalysis, Lima.
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Family Values in 17th Century Peru SPALDING, KAREN 1974 From Indian to Peasant. Institute of Peruvian Studies, Lima. 1984 Huarochirí: an Andean society under Inca and Spanish rule. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, California SPRENGER, JACOB AND HEINRICH KRAMER 1970 Malleus maleficarum [1484] (Montague Summers, trans.). Benjamin Blom, New York. STAVIG, WARD 1995 Living in Offense to Our Lord: Indigenous Sexual Values and Marital Life in the Colonial Crucible. Hispano-American Historical Review 75 (4): 397–622. STERN, STEVE 1982 The indigenous peoples of Peru and the challenge of the Spanish conquest. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. 1983 The Struggle for Solidarity: Class, Culture, and Community in the Indigenous American Highlands, Radical History Review 27: 21–45. STOLCKE, VERENA s.f. Invaded women: sex, race and class in the formation of colonial society. Paper presented at the international colloquium “New anthropological, demographic and ecological perspectives on the conquest of America (1492–1992)”, Barcelona,1990. STOLER, ANN LAURA 1991 Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia. In Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge (Micaela di Leonardo, ed.): 51–101. University of California Press, Berkeley. THIRD COUNCIL OF CAL 1982 Third Council of Lima, 1582 –1583 (Enrique Bartra, ed.). Pontifical and Civil Faculty of Theology of Lima, Lima. VARON GABAI, RAFAEL 1990 The Taki Onqoy: the Andean roots of a colonial phenomenon. In The Return of the Huacas. Sixteenth-century studies and documents (Luis Millones, ed.): 331–406. Institute of Peruvian Studies/Peruvian Society of Psychoanalysis, Lima. WACHTEL, NATHAN 1973 Rebellions and millenarianism. In Messianic Ideology of the Andean World (Juan Ossio, ed.): 103–142. Ignacio Prado Pastor, Lima. WARNER, MARINA 1983 Alone of all her sex: the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary. Knopf, New York.
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Let me see! Reading is for them: Colonial Andean Images and Objects "As It Is Usual to Have Chiefs" TOM CUMMINS UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
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FRONTISPIA FOR A New Chronicle and Good Government
Felipe Guaman's Poma de Ayala is as good a place as any to discuss the problems of native Andean visual traditions in the postconquest world (Fig. 1). With its portraits of the author, the Pope and the King of Spain, one of the most significant objects of colonial Andean intellectual production thus begins. The discovery of over a thousand pages of drawings and writings addressed to Felipe III is as rich a mine for 20th-century scholars as the discovery of Potosí was for 16th-century Spaniards. However, the temptation of this portal invites us to enter the Andean world constructed from Spanish pictorial and written narrative, just as the portals of colonial churches open onto the ritual space of Catholicism (Fig. 2), and the ephemeral portals that they once welcomed the triumphant entry of a new viceroy, archbishop or votive icon into the city. All these entries have their charm of promise, knowledge, salvation, sanctuary or exaltation, but one must not simply look at the document from the frontispiece, any more than one can pass through the door of a church without realizing that one is heading towards Spanish. world. even when he tells us about the Andean. It is important to remember that almost all Andeans stopped at the threshold of these entrances, existing there between their culture and another, most of the time without direct access to the inner world of Spanish discursive power. The cape of Guaman Poma is that threshold, neither completely western nor completely Andean.
1 Rolena Adorno argues that this position shapes the very way in which Guaman Poma describes and represents the Spanish colonial world: “Through visual and verbal texts, Guaman Poma, as a narrator, approaches the sphere of the European as if he were a foreigner and a native of it” (1986: 131).
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Fig. 1 Frontispiece, layer, by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, New chronicle and good government, ca. 1615 (after 1980 edition). 92
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Figure 2
Portal, cape, from San Francisco, Quito, ca. 1590.
dressed as a gift for the King of Spain – this intuits, I believe, the kind of presence of the Andean tradition that exists in colonial representation as we know it through the images and objects that have been preserved until today. persistence in Andean colonial representation, purity cannot be pursued as if the "authenticity" of Andean expression were a static, uncompromising and unitary phenomenon, or as if European influence somehow corrupted "authenticity". Andina 2 Certainly there were Andean practices and forms of representation from the 16th and 17th centuries (perhaps the majority) that, due to their mundane or anodyne character within the norms of observation and recording, remained hidden from us. (This is equally true for all of the Americas.) It is only in the casual record of specific practices, such as those discussed by Frank Salomon (in this volume), that one can glimpse a wider range of continuing traditional representational practices in the Andes. . The range of what came to our knowledge as forms of tradition was already understood (mostly) by natives and Spaniards as important places/places of negotiation and contestation and, therefore, are historically conditioned as privileged forms of tradition. 3 Both the notion of authenticity and originality have pursued the study of colonial art in all its manifestations more tenaciously than its European counterpart. The easily accepted art historical idea that colonial art is derivative and therefore lacks its own authenticity in terms of the production of its referent is an assumption of the last two centuries. It presupposes an always prior referent that is situated
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Tom Cummins' forms and practices of representation are simply a matter of resistance to Spanish control.4 Certainly, Andean forms of religious practice and social behavior that ran counter to Spanish-imposed norms, notably in terms of idols and idolatry, persisted; there is much evidence in the extirpation literature to suggest otherwise.5 Yet we are familiar with these practices and images precisely because they form the content of that literature; they reveal themselves in the historical record as an ongoing tradition only because that tradition continued to trouble the Spaniards.6 If we want, as I do, to penetrate this historically overdetermined view, we cannot limit ourselves to reading the documents of suppression. Rather, we must also look to Andean colonial objects, images, and practices that circulated more or less openly within the economy of colonial society and that operated within the nexus of representational exchange both within the Andean community and across cultures. Here one sees the continuation of Andean representational practices in the types of objects and images produced and used, but now combined with European-style images and values, so that these images and objects moved fluidly within colonial culture in various contexts, being alternately or simultaneously a relic, gift, exchange and/or merchandise. That is, these images and objects could operate both in relation to traditional forms of Andean reciprocal exchange and in relation to a European monetary economy; therefore, they were able to express meaning within an Andean colonial society between Europeans and indigenous people.7
whether in the European or pre-Hispanic prototype. Therefore, colonial art is almost always a copy rather than an original (see Kubler 1962: 112-113). Baudrillard raises the historicism of the copy and the original in relation to European copies, but he also belongs to the categorization of colonial art as copies. Baudrillard points out that “until the 19th century, copying an original work had its own value, it was a legitimate practice. In our time copying is illegitimate, not authentic: it is no longer 'art'” (1981: 103). 4 The notion that artistic representation constitutes a locus of cultural, political and/or social resistance in the Andean colonial world is a common theme in modern academia. See, for example, Wachtel (1977) and Gisbert (1992). 5 The literature of the extirpation campaigns has constituted the main locus for the study of Andean colonial culture. See, for example, Duviols (1971). 6 This overdetermined historical view is as true for modern studies of Mexico as it is for Peru. See, for example, Gruzinski (1988) and Clendinnen (1987). 7 I am not saying that there is a single or mutual meaning, but that the value (meaning) of the object is contextual in the way Arjun Appadurai analyzes objects. Appadurai (1986) speaks of the “social life of things” in the sense that “politics [in the broad sense of relationships, assumptions and power struggles] is what links value and exchange in the social life of things”. . It is the nature of the politics in which these “things” operate (Appadurai would use the word circular) that allows for their mutability because within politics there is “a constant tension between the existing frameworks [of price, 94
Andean Colonial Images and Objects This circulation of objects and images is an important avenue for Andean colonial studies because, unlike in Mexico (see Wood and Lockhart, this volume), writing plays almost no role in Andean colonial discourse outside Mexico. questions. And while certain types of documents were retained as important possessions, the number of colonial Peruvian illustrated manuscripts or documents written in Quechua or any other Andean language is minimal.8 Moreover, this lack is not just a matter of restriction on the part of the Spanish authorities. . I believe that Andeans were not inclined to write and accompany illustrations as a means of self-expression because these European forms were so far removed from traditional Andean modes of expression (Cummins 1994). The tactile and visual world in relation to oral discourse continued to be for the Andeans the way in which the Andeans “inscribed” their existence. of them appear only as words written in various types of
trading, etc.] and the tendency of the commodity to break these structures. That very tension stems from the fact that not all parties share the same interests in any value regime, nor are the interests of two parties in a given exchange identical” (Appadurai 1986: 57). The emphasis of Appadurai's discussion is on the material aspect of the thing in relation to its production and its subsequent transformation into value according to the context of exchange; I'm expanding this slightly to images that may or may not be physically exchanged, but circulate, in part, through the act of copying. 8 Bruce Mannheim (1991: 143-144) points out that only two fragments of notarial records written in Quechua are known. He suggests that the lack of notary records in Quechua compared to the long history of Nahuatl records in Mexico is possibly due to Viceroy Toledo's strict enforcement of a royal decree (1576) that prohibited mestizos from holding the office of notary. . There were Quechua-speaking scribes in the early 17th century, as indicated by the specific set of confessional questions written for them in Spanish and Quechua by Juan Pérez Bocanegra (1631: 277–280, 297–301). From the kinds of questions asked, it appears that the main duty of the city clerk was to prepare the wills of the natives; however, this does not mean that these Andean scribes prepared their documents in Quechua. The section of indigenous wills in the Archivo General de la Nación Lima is written in Spanish, although occasionally a native scribe will sign not only with the Spanish term escribano, but also with quellcacamyoc, a colonial Quechua term used to denote someone who can write. 9 Thus, even when the Huarochirí Manuscript, the only Andean colonial document that records the pre-Hispanic religious tradition in a native language, begins the written text, the emphasis is placed on the visibility of the writing and not on the process of decoding the reading: “If the ancestors of people called Indians had known writing in earlier times, then the life they lived would not fade from view. Just as the powerful past of the Spaniards Vira Cochas is visible even now, so would theirs be” (Manuscrito Huarochirí 1991: 1, 41). Forgetting or remembering is expressed here in terms of seeing or not seeing. This is not an isolated example, and reading in general is expressed as another way of looking, seeing an image. For example, the verb to read is translated by González Holguín (1989: 561) as Qquellccacatam ricuni. Ricuni means "to look or see" and Qquellccacatamu, "an image". 95
Tom Cummins' documents, however, remained important in the Andean colonial world because, first of all, they appealed to Andean forms of sociopolitical and economic discourse, forms that were primarily oral and/or performative. The appearance of these images and objects in colonial documents, therefore, is not based on the discourse of difference, that is, on the radical alterity between natives and Europeans framed in the extirpation literature of pagan idolatry. Rather, as I will argue, they existed within what Nicholas Thomas (1991: 3-4) calls a "mutual entanglement" in which these images and objects operated in various ways within the complexity of Native-Spanish relations in the sense of exchange. in which the distance between the two cultures is bridged by the contextual mutability of the images and objects themselves (Appadurai 1986: 15; Thomas 1991: 211, note 4).10 Textiles, for example, are a bridge of this kind in the Andes colonial period. because they were highly valued within the norms of each culture before contact. In the colonial period, textiles (both European and native) came to function at a mutual level of commodity value,11 and at other levels continued to be valued separately according to Spanish sumptuary laws and Andean symbolic usage.12 In Mexico , this community is most immediately recognized in the colonial mix of Mexican pictorial traditions and Spanish writing (see
10 Although Thomas (1991) discusses colonialism and material culture in the South Pacific, his analysis of objects as dynamic, “promiscuous”, within the negotiations of colonial relations that assume non-uniform interests (whether European or native) (p 205 ), it allows those working in Latin American colonial studies to abandon the extremely misleading term “syncretism”. As a concept in colonial studies, “syncretism” creates a static and uniform definition of cultural relations between natives and Europeans that precludes theoretical and specific (ethnohistorical) study. For an excellent critique of “syncretism” see Henrique Urbano (s.d.). 11 Sixteenth-century Andean and European textiles were valued for monetary cost and were bought, sold, left as valuables in wills, and used as collateral for money loans by Spaniards and indigenous peoples. 12 Textiles are recognized by anthropologists (Zuidema 1991), art historians (Paul 1992: 289), ethnologists (Zorn 1987: 67), archaeologists and ethnohistorians (Murra 1962) as one of the main means of Andean artistic production and expression symbolic. ; however, the fact that textiles have equally high symbolic and economic values in European culture is not part of this recognition. Thus, descriptions of Andean textiles in colonial documents and the continuation of an Andean textile tradition into the present are interpreted as a result of the primacy of textiles in Andean culture, with little attention paid to the implications of privileging or highlighting Inca and Andean colonial textiles in writings. Spanish colonies and economy. This lack of recognition of the “mutual interweaving” of textiles in the early stages of Andean colonization has led to a very unhappy state of academic research in which textiles have become an essentialist quality of “andinidad”. to use here in the homologous sense of Said's (1979) meaning of the term 'Orientalism'.
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Andean colonial images and objects Karttunen, Lockhart and Boone, in this volume), which, as privileged European forms of recording historical knowledge, seem more accessible or transparent in revealing the nature of tradition and its transformation.13 But writing and O Illustrated text, as I suggested, is very far from orality and Andean visuality, and if we remember the rejection of Valverde's breviary book by Atahualpa in Cajamarca as the metaphorical act that precipitated its capture, it was from the perception that the written word did not could neither speak nor represent the Andeans.14 IMAGES, TRADITION AND CUSTOMS
The lack of proper interchange in Cajamarca, which pictorially frames one of the first published narratives (Anonymous/Cristóbal de Mena 1534) as its frontispiece and final piece (Figs. 3, 4), represents both the Spanish arrival and the final destruction of Tawantinsuyu. 15 And although the Tawantinsuyu as a political entity was recent and in many conquered areas resented by the local ethnic group,16 the destruction of this last Andean empire provided the colonial symbols and images of an Andean past that were attached to the objects. Andean tradition. Symbols were freed from their imperial shackles of precise Inca content and began to operate in a wider semiotic field of Andean colonial culture for Spaniards and Andeans, from Bolivia to Ecuador. For example, the Inca imperial "crown" (mascaipacha), or red fringe hanging from the ruler's forehead, became a pictorial sign representing several often contradictory concepts, including, within the Spanish context, the defeat of the Inca. 17 Therefore, one must look first to the fragmentation of the Inka system and then to the reconstitution of Andean representation within the colonial context to understand the power of tradition as dynamic, creating both the form and the locus of expression. Pan-Andean Colonial Use of 13 It would be impossible, for example, for there to be an art historical study in Peru of any body of colonial work comparable in subject to Donald Robertson's (1959) study of early Mexican colonial manuscripts. 14 That is, at least, according to Spanish accounts of the event. Tito Cussi Yupanqui's version is completely different in its exchange and rejection approach. Here it is the Andean present that is rejected by the Spaniards (Tito Cussi 1988: 128-130; Cummins s.d.a), and the book is an image, quellca, that cannot be understood visually. 15 See MacCormack (1988) for a discussion of the book's role in this episode. 16 See Murra, in this volume. 17 In 1537, Francisco Pizarro received a new coat of arms on which one of the first representations of Cuzco was placed “in memory of the habella vos populated and conquered, with a king’s crown, of gold, on it, of which a red tassel [mascaipacha] that the aforementioned chief Atalbalipa brought is attached. . .” (Peace and Melia 1892: 45).
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Fig. 3 Title page of Anonymous (Cristóbal de Mena), The Conquest of Peru, 1534 (post-1929 edition). 98
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Fig. 4 Endpiece to Anonymous (Cristóbal de Mena), The Conquest of Peru, 1534 (after the 1929 edition). 99
Tom Cummins Inka's symbolic objects and/or images of them cannot, however, be considered as a natural phenomenon, endemic to any colonial formation. It is historically specific and indicates the active intervention of the Spanish institutional recognition of these images and objects as beneficial in the "rationalization" of the sociopolitical and economic interaction between the two peoples for the effective control of the Spaniards, as well as the Quechua and Aymara that became the main languages of religious interaction (see Mannheim 1991 and this volume). The construction of this Andean colonial representation takes place approximately in the first seventy years after the conquest (Cummins n.d.a: 307–364). Here you can see more than read the willingness to persist in the Andean understanding of what constitutes the tradition, it is to say, yachacuscamccani, the know-how to lead ahead the social, religious and political life before the conquest, and that can be incarnated in a object and/or an image.18 But this Andean tradition of knowledge is mediated and, therefore, transformed by the Spanish colonial concept of custom, into which the tradition can morally be divided into two categories: bad customs and good customs. 19 It is said, the tradition in the Andean sense of “knowledge” and the tradition in the Spanish sense of custom can exist simultaneously in an Andean colonial object/representation, so that any object/representation can be categorized differently depending on the context and the court hearing. Thus, as on the threshold of colonial portals, there is an ambiguous character for any object of Andean tradition that enters the European record of its existence. If we dwell then on the frontispiece of Guaman Poma (Fig. 1), we will first see this ambiguity in terms of what I mean by the fragmentation of Inca imperial representation and its reconstitution in an Andean colonial design. The page is divided by a central vertical axis composed of three coats of arms: the papal arms, the royal house of Spain and the “manufactured” coat of arms of Guaman Poma himself. His coat of arms is composed, like that of León and Castile, by the pictorial resemblances of the things to which the words of his name refer: Guaman
18 This is the Quechua term used by González Holguín (1989: 464) for the Spanish entry custom. The root of the word is the verb saber which means “to know” (ibid.: 361). In the Huarochirí Manuscript (1991: 153, 253), when expressing the sense of tradition as something that originated in the past but is still practiced in the colonial present, the root of the word is knowledge. 19 For example, José de Acosta (1988) uses the word custom as a negative term in his discussion of idolatry and as a positive term in his discussion of the civil and political practices of the Aztecs and Incas. However, good morals is a political term in the administration of the colonial world that was codified in the royal decree of Carlos V and Doña Juana issued in Valladolid on August 6, 1555 (Colección de Leyes, 1973, 1: lib. 2 , title ) .1, law 3, 126); see also Hampe Martinez (1985).
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Andean Colonial Images and Objects (falcon) and Poma (puma). The difference is that here you see an ideographic representation of the Andean parts of its name as opposed to the ideographic representations of territory on the Spanish royal coat of arms.20 The coat of arms of Guaman Poma, although “manufactured” — false in the European sense of authenticity the design of a coat of arms is to be given, bestowed, by the crown on a royal warrant, it is assumed here that the gift would be bestowed if the king had known of Guaman Poma's noble heritage and service. Thus, the coat of arms of Guaman Poma is legitimate in the sense that its noble status predates Spanish recognition and is based on Andean precedent. Their coat of arms, in a sense, recognizes the acceptability of the exchange of images between Europeans and Andeans as a sign of social relationship, and copies the European-style heraldic figures of a lion and an eagle to indicate its Andean name as a part of that exchange. 21 This circulation of imagined exchange, however, is based on the mutual nobility status of Felipe III and Guaman Poma. Thus, below the European-style eagle image on the Guaman Poma shield is a third figure, a tiana or low seat, which was a sign of rank within Inca sumptuary laws, as described by Guaman Poma himself (Fig. 5)22 . Here, the representation of the tiana refers not only to a past symbolic Inka object, but, like their own ideographic symbols, it also refers to Guaman Poma's personal claim to the privileged colonial status of a kuraka, legally recognized by the possession of Aunt No. frontispiece Guaman Poma, the object in its material form is absent. Its transformation into a European system of representation23 opens its possible field of reference and association, so that the image of the tiana corresponds not only to the object of its imitation and its Andean meaning of authority, but also to the alphabetical transcription of Spanish. word prince on the left side of the page. This word, added a little later, is written below Guaman Poma's monogram, so it occupies a position equal to that of the tiana in 20 Rolena Adorno (1986: 95) interprets, I think correctly, that the very composition in which it is builds on symbolic Andean spatial concepts that appear here as a colonial transformation of the original paradigm, including the fact that Guaman Poma elsewhere even translates the name as royal eagle and lion (Guaman Poma 1980: 1037); but Guaman Poma does not completely eliminate “all indigenous elements” from the title page as she suggests, since the tiana (noble seat) in the coat of arms of Guaman Poma is the image of an Andean object. 21 As far as I know, there is no pre-Hispanic Andean pictographic image of names in the way Guaman Poma pictorially unites his name. 22 Guaman Poma (1980: 422) points out that range was indicated by the size and material of the tiana. From archaeological evidence, it appears that the most prestigious silver and gold tianas were also made of the same wood and covered with silver or gold leaf. 23 As far as I know, there are no pre-Hispanic Inca graphic images of the tiana, so the form of its representation in Guaman Poma is completely within a European framework.
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Fig. 5 Incatian. Photo courtesy of Lowie Museum, University of California, Berkeley.
relationship with the heraldic images that make up the name of Guaman Poma.24 The coat of arms, with its two European heraldic animals and the Andean object, is literally located between the pictorial portrait of this Andean author and the written form of his name and status. It is in this kind of fusion of Andean objects and European-style imagery that Andeans are found using the power of European representation to assert, by appealing to notions of Andean and European tradition, both place and identity in colonial culture. 25 That is, Guaman Poma appropriates European signifiers (coat of arms, totemic pictorial images) to demarcate Andean meaning (social/political position) in order to promote a personal claim to conquer a place in the new colonial social order. 24 Rolena Adorno pointed out that the word prince was later added to the frontispiece (Guaman Poma 1980: 1317). It is as if Guaman Poma wanted to ensure the reading of the claims made visually on the shield. 25 In the first part of the “Good Government” section, Guaman Poma (1980) gives a narrative explanation of the Inca hierarchy in which he establishes the position of his ancestors just below the Inca king; their classification is indicated by the material and height of the tiana they may have. Due to this background, Guaman Poma can be presented in this section as "Don Phelipe de Ayala, prince, author of this chronicle". Here then he makes a textual connection between its alleged colonial status and ancient precedent using the same combination of elements that appear visually on the title page (Guaman Poma 1980: 462, fol. 453 [455]).
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Andean Colonial Images and Objects Although Guaman Poma is unique in Andean colonial history for his production of Nueva corónica, he is not alone in appropriating the old and producing new images to establish an Andean identity within a colonial world. Instead, as Andean elites, descendants of the Incas and local Kurakas, struggled for personal rights and privileges, they reused Inca symbols to establish their own personal claims within a colonial legal context of individuality and genealogy. By becoming representative images, imperial symbols appeared in a variety of media and contexts, including other objects from the Andean tradition, to play a broader role in Andean colonial society. be seen for the first time in their manipulation by Andean elites to (re)establish their position of power within the hierarchy of colonial authority.27 This is especially true in the face of acts such as those of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo. , which in 1575 brought together the main kurakas of Xauxa (Jauja) and all their “documents attesting to the legitimacy of their cacicazgos. . . and had them burned” (Judgment of residency taken from Dr. Loarte, A de I, quoted in Levillier 1935: 210). The ownership of traditional objects and images of the nobility within colonial documents could be used to establish legitimacy, a legitimacy that could be enforced in courts as far back as Spain. (Toledo law recognizes the power of such documents, which included images, and appears to have been a pre-emptive move against such claims by the kurakas of Xauxa.) An example of such documents and the use of Inka symbols can be seen in the temple. painting on parchment (Fig. 6) of a coat of arms granted in a certificate from 1545 by Carlos V to Felipe Tupac Yupanqui, kuraka from Cusicanqui de Pacajes. 26 My discussion of mercedes in relation to the use of Inca symbols by the local elite is due to Rolena Adorno's work on Guaman Poma (1986) and to Carlos Espinoza's discussions and publications (sd, 1989, 1995). . 27 The middle ground of the sixteenth-century Kuraka between their communities and the Spaniards produced a series of sociopolitical tensions that affected not only their position in the economic and social structures of the Andes (see Spalding 1984 and Stern 1982), but also their understanding of E use. also cultural forms such as history (see in particular Urton 1990). The traditional authority of the Kuraka, therefore, was not only incorporated into the secular hierarchy of colonial political authority, but was instituted in denominational practices of church control. In the trilingual confessional —Spanish, Aymara and Quechua— the Indians were asked for the first time, regarding the fourth commandment: “Did you honor [informally as if speaking to a child] your parents or grandparents, the priests, the magistrates and did you obey the kurakas in all the proper things they ordered you to do? (Confessional 1982: 430). By the middle of the 17th century, the cultural forms of history produced by these antagonisms had become almost entirely theatrical forms, although they could be enacted on a real political stage, but if pushed into an Andean utopian reality would end in legal suppression (see C. Espinoza s.f., 1995).
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Fig. 6 Portrait of Tupã Inka Yupanqui and shield of Cusicanqui, after 1545. Photo courtesy of the Archivo de Indias, Seville.
Here is seen stamped on the upper right quadrant of the shield the mascaipacha, the royal red sash permitted only to the Sapa Inka, flanked by two amaru, serpents; and below, in the lower right quadrant, a heraldic bird appears below a rainbow at the base of which are galloping felines, colonial heraldry that was associated with the Incas. regions, but like Guaman Poma, also in terms of relationship with Inka. In this case, there is a direct claim of dynastic descent through a relationship with Tupã Inka Yupanqui, 28 Describing the Coricancha, the most important sacred structure in Cuzco, Garcilaso de la Vega writes that “they dedicated another chamber to the rainbow because they believed who came from the sun and that is why they took him as their sign and symbol because they boasted that he came down from the sun” (1918, 1: lib. 3, ch. 21, 219). It is unknown whether or not the Inka used the rainbow prior to the conquest as a heraldic device, as described by Garcilaso de la Vega. However, it quickly became part of Andean coats of arms, being one of the first granted to the descendants of Huyana Capac by Carlos V in 1545 (Montoto de Sedes 1927: 300–305).
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Fig. 7 Portrait of Manco Capac, by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, New chronicle and good government, ca. 1615 (after 1980 edition).
Fig. 8 Portrait of Capac Yupanqui, by Martín de Murúa, Historia del Perú, fol. 30v, ca. 1615. Photograph courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California.
the tenth Inca king, according to Guaman Poma, whose fictional portrait is shown holding the coat of arms on the verso of the previous folio.29 This coat of arms and portrait were probably produced in Cuzco and sent to Spain as part of a case in the 17th or early 17th century. presented by the descendants of Felipe Túpac Yupanqui to present legal claims.30 Linking the coat of arms to a historical precedent through its juxtaposition to the pictorial representation of an Inca king is part of the visualization of the Andean culture that is found in the late sixteenth and early from the 17th century.29 For a brief discussion of the coat of arms and its description as found in the Peace Archive documents, see Escoari de Querejazu (1982: 163–166). 30 This would explain how the painting and shield reached Spain, where they are now on display in the Exhibition Room of the General Archive of the Indies, in Seville.
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Tom Cummins tury in the related Guaman Poma and Martín de Murúa manuscripts.31 Furthermore, there is more than a passing resemblance between the image of the Inka in the Cusicanqui document and the dynastic portraits of the Inka in Guaman Poma and Murúa (Figs 7, 8) .32 This is not to say that one served as a source for the other, but rather that in sixteenth-century Peru there was a common colonial style of Inca imperial portraiture to which all these images belong. But whereas the portraits in Nueva corónica and Historia del Perú are illustrations of an Andean meta-history, the portrait in the Cusicanqui document refers through the specific coat of arms to the contemporary history of a discrete set of individuals and their colonial legal claims based on that meta-history. story . .33 The ancient figure of the Inka dressed in traditional clothing therefore represents the foundation of a political claim, although as an image it is the antithesis of how a kuraka of the late 16th century should dress and behave. In another document that grants a coat of arms similar to the kuraka Juan Ayaviri de Sacaca, the kuraka is presented to Felipe II like this: Yten. Being in said city on his royal service, I dress too smartly in expensive Spanish clothes to be both respected and feared. . . . Yten. I am a man of twenty-six years of age, of good looks, good stature, and refined manners, so that I am not different in bearing, dress, and speech from polite and courteous Spaniards. . . .3.4
31 Both Andeans and Spaniards participate in this visualization of the Inca past in which images are sent to Spain. See Cummins (1991). 32 Many of the portraits of the Inca kings of Murúa are accompanied by a distinctive coat of arms that would link these portraits to the living descendants of the various kings. 33 Guaman Poma indeed intertwines his personal history with this Andean metahistory, but more subtly than appears in the Cusicanqui document and for less personal reasons (see Adorno 1986: 54-55). The fusion of personal history and metahistory in Nueva corónica has its roots in documents from its first legal struggles in Ayacucho, in which ancestor portraits play a similar substantiating role for claims of rights and privileges. Cusicanqui document (see Guaman Poma 1991; Cummins n.d.b). 34 “And ten. For being in the said city on your royal service and bringing my person very adorned as a bundle with expensive Spanish dresses to be respected and feared. . . . Yten. I am a well-groomed twenty-six-year-old man, of good stature, sleek and well-groomed, who makes no difference in my treatment, appearance, and I speak with Spanish and Cortian politicians. . . .” In “Memorial de Charcas”, 1584–1598, fol. 12, cited in Arze and Medinaceli (1991: 15). Such statements are pro forma in the acquisition of rights granted in Spanish documents in a way that almost a hundred years later and more than a thousand miles to the north is found in the inauguration document of Cacica Doña
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Andean colonial images and objects The good kuraka thus describes himself as a Spanish courtier in dress, words and manners, although the status of this acculturated decorum is linked to the ability to establish hereditary links with traditional authority. In the identity document of Cusicanqui, these links are visually presented both in the fictitious portrait with archaic clothes and in the elements of Andean authority placed inside the coat of arms.35 These images and coats of arms, as much as they refer to traditional Andean objects, European static images and part of a Spanish legal text built around Mercedes. In other words, they continue to form part of the colonial world of text and image in the same sense as Guaman Poma's Nueva corónica. In this context, symbols of the Inca imperial past are universalized as signs of tradition within Andean colonial society from Bolivia to Ecuador. For example, the tiana that Guaman Poma places on his shield is invoked as one of the signs that established the legitimacy of Don Alonzo Hati and, consequently, the legitimacy of his son, as kuraka of San Miguel Cotopaxi at the Audiencia of Quito. At the trial, the witnesses were questioned: whether they knew that the said Don Alonso Hati, my father, was chief and main lord of the city of Tiguahalo, which is now called San Miguel [and that] the said Don Alonso was chief and principal since the time of the Inka [the time of the Inca] having its duho and tiana as lord of the bassallos. . . .36 Witnesses stated that Don Alonzo had effectively been his kuraka who went with Atahualpa to Cuzco as his captain37 and “He was in his government for a long time and tiana.”38 The tiana that Guaman Poma so carefully places as Picto Potenciana Zumba “of this city of sigsiglay" a witness testifying that "I said that he knows Doña Potencia [daughter] legitimate and heiress of Don Francisco Zambo and this legitimate and eldest daughter of Don Miguel Zumbo the Elder whom he met on a visit who was a chiefido bestido in costume Spanish” in Cacicazgos, National Historical Archive of Quito, Box 10, 1730–1802; doc. 10, the 1692 acquisition document, is annexed to a 1752 document on the chieftainships of Hatun Sigachos or Sicchos "in the jurisdiction of Latacunga". 35 For a discussion of the relationship between colonial kurakakuna portraits and the establishment of privilege, see Cummins (1991). 36 "Iten if you know it is public and notary that the dho Don Alonzo Hati my father was cacique chief lord of the city of Tiguahalo which is now called San Miguel where they populated and reduced the dho Don Alonzo since the time of Inga he was chief and main having his duho and tiana as lord of bassallos....." This document, dated August 24, 1592, is included in "Auto followed by Luis Hati Pasan with Guillermo Hati about cacicasgos de San Miguel in Cotopaxi, 1687", in the section entitled Chiefdoms, National Historical Archive of Quito, Box 3, doc . eleven; citation is from fol. 15r. 37 Ibid., 50v. 38 Ibid., 50r. 107
The image of Tom Cummins' rial on his coat of arms has a resonance beyond his place in the Incan imperial government. It becomes one of the colonial signs that authenticate contemporary claims to authority, because both Andeans and Spaniards consider it a traditional sign within the metahistory of the Andes. In this sense, one sees here the transformation of the Inca imperial object into an Andean colonial image in which local histories are seen as part of an Andean meta-history based on a colonial construction of Inca cultural hegemony. In other words, the tiana becomes both a pictorial sign, as in the case of the coat of arms of Guaman Poma, and a sign written in Alonzo Hati's document for "the time of the Inca", which serves as the term post quem to establish descent. . of a kuraka throughout the colonial period.39 These sixteenth-century documents were therefore often inserted or copied in later cases. Possession of one, even if its owner could not read it, was tremendously powerful because it authenticated any subsequent claim to the rights and privileges of a kuraka.40 In this sense, documents replaced the mallki, the ancestor's body, as the object of authentication. of genealogy and descent.41 IMAGES ABOUT CURRENT OBJECTS
The fact that these documents only establish through the text the association with the “time of the Inca” does not mean that the Andean symbolic objects named in them physically disappear, becoming European graphic signs of tradition.42 For example, throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru , the tiana was repeatedly carried to the inauguration, the inauguration ceremony of a new high-ranking kuraka who sat on it in the square in front of the door of the For further discussion of “the time of the Inca”, see C. Espinoza ( 1995). The orality in the form of testimonial testimony that is inscribed in these documents as a means of authenticating succession claims ends up giving way to the document itself as the only substantive means of proof. Without the document, a person's legal and therefore economic status could change from noble to peasant; see, for example, Yaurisque's 1791 document (A.D.C., Intendencia, Real Hacienda) transcribed by Urton (1990: 144, note 1). 41 See Joanne Rappaport's (1994) discussion of the importance of colonial documents as objects of empowerment that exist independently of the need for literacy. My thinking and reading of colonial documents was greatly influenced by my conversations with Joanne Rappaport. 42 The term “the time of the Inca” is a synecdoche that represents the never fully realized simulacrum of an Andean past that could be invoked to authenticate various contemporary colonial practices. Its amorphous reference meant that the term could be double-edged as a positive or negative value in recognition of rank and personal privilege, depending on who was involved and how the term was invoked. Whereas the term could be invoked up to 39 40
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Andean colonial images and objects and dressed in Spanish clothing (Fig. 9).43 Furthermore, the procedure for taking possession remained the same for most of the colonial period. In recorded records from the 16th and 17th centuries, the Quechua term tiana and the Caribbean word duho are used together to name the seat on which the new kuraka is placed (cf. Espinoza Soriano 1974: 131). a “concretion” given to the phrase “the time of the Inca” established by the physicality of the tiana that conveys both the Andean concept of tradition and the colonial concept of custom and the authority that it means in a way that no written document could. The object, by its physical presence and use, becomes a sign of transition between the ancient authority invested by the Incas in a kuraka and the colonial authority conferred on a kuraka by the Spaniards. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo articulated this position more clearly when writing about installing Hernando Pillohuanca as the kuraka of Carabuco, first stating in general that it was important to recognize the good order in which the Incas ruled: and how when one of their dead caciques, the Inka, who was the one who gave the duho or investiture of the said cacicazgos, did not confer it on the eldest children left by the dead caciques; before, [checked]
Kurakas in the questionnaires of legal documents as a positive value to establish legitimate descent, could equally be invoked by the Spaniards in the questionnaires of their legal documents as a negative value defining a period of idolatry that existed and continued to exist, the battle against which they played the state service. For example, in the “Información de servicios” by Cristóbal de Albornoz, the sixth question asks the witnesses: “Iten, sy know that, in addition to the content mentioned among the questions preceding these, the said Cristóbal de Albornoz discovered among the natural sayings a lot of sum and quantity of huacas that they had and worshiped since the time of the Incas. . .” (Huamanga 1570, in Millions [1990: 64–65]). In confessional practices, the first question asked specifically to the kurakas dealt with their condition in relation to the past: “The cacicazgo that you have, did you inherit it from your parents since the time of the Inca, or did you usurp it from another that belonged to him, to enter with a lawsuit against false relatives and spend the Indians' money to stay with the cacicazgo? (Confessional 1982: 434). The point is that essential or irreducible definitions rarely exist in a colonial situation because of the contradictory nature of colonialism itself. 43 At the end of the 18th century, the term chair is used, which may indicate a European-style chair or the stool form of the tiana; see, for example, “Inauguration of Nicolas Lema y Torres,” fol. 5v:1778, “In the city of Punin, jurisdiction of the city of Riobamba,” Cacicazgos, National Historical Archive of Quito, Box 10, 1730–1802, doc. 17, fol. 5v. See also José Luis Martínez (1986: 101–124). 44 The fact that Spaniards were able to use duho and tiana interchangeably, just as they could substitute the Caribbean word cacique for the Quechua word kuraka, indicates that Spanish recognition and understanding of Andean symbols and political positions were not intended to be specific. in terms of Andean meaning, but universal in relation to the establishment of a colonial system of government through an elite native body. 109
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Fig. 9 Painted Colonial Tiana, 19th C. XVIII (?). Photo courtesy of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, acc. do not. 2832.
the one that suited him best or [if the sons of the dead chief were not capable] he would choose among the sons of other Indians in the community or even outside the community those who had more skill and capacity for the trade. . . . So Toledo writes directly about Hernando Pillohuanca: as the aforementioned visitor says, according to his opinion, being of age, ability and capacity, and a good example to occupy the aforementioned cacicazgo consistent with what has been said, because in the use of the faculties that his Your Majesty I grant favor to the said Mr. Hernando Pillohuanca. . . I appoint you the main chief of the said division of Carabuco of the Hurinsaya partiality so that you may be a chief as your father was and as such I give you the investiture of the said main chief. . . said cacicazgo which you can use and exercise according to what has been said and you will sit on a tiana like 110
Andean Colonial Images and Objects It is customary among the other caciques and principals of this kingdom and you will not consent under any circumstances that any other Indian, be it a second person or cacique of pachaca or ayllu or another Indian who owns a tyana, sit on it if is not a chief cacique who, to be recognized as such, has my title or provision and if in the said division there is an Indian who, in favor of any person or ecclesiastical or secular justice or by appointment of the encomendero or otherwise, uses the said position of cacique or is entitled to it, will not allow him to occupy the said position or hold the said title under penalty of loss of said chieftain for three years. . . . (Toledo 1989: 113-115) In this passage, Toledo usurps the role of the Inka by installing a kuraka in his authority and seat. But for that, Toledo first establishes that paper itself derives from antiquity and is therefore validated by it: "given the order they once had". He then moves on to the present tense and the specific case in which sitting on a tyana is a constant part of political custom: "and you sit on a tyana as is customary among other chiefs and principals of this Kingdom". The phrase “this kingdom” here applies to the contemporary political entity of the viceroyalty, so that the power of this custom to bestow authority is no longer controlled by Andean tradition. Instead, the violation of precedent set by Toledo – those who may or may not sit in the tiana – allows state authority to remove the kuraka from office. The custom object is expanded in meaning to allow the “legitimate” penetration of control over Andean authority by the viceroy under the pretext of maintaining the sovereignty of the object's traditional symbolic function. Where the power of being meaningful lies, in the sense of the Andean tradition outside this Spanish colonial legal discourse, for the tiana to continue to operate within the community as a valid sign, is in the "objectivity" of the object itself. Possession of objects from antiquity is one of the Andean ways of continuing the past in the present, since such objects were, together with quipos, records of history and memory before the arrival of the Spaniards. When in the colonial period certain objects, such as plaid tunics and keros, wooden drinking vessels (Figs. 10, 11), were identified as evoking memories and stories that were considered part of idolatrous behavior, naturally, they became the object of campaigns of extirpators such as Albornoz (1989: 171-172). But such identifications were contextual in the Spaniards' understanding, so that the custom and the objects and images of the custom were not themselves idolatrous and were subject to total suppression anyway. The good Andean history in the form of service to the king reached 111
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Fig. 10 “military” Unku Inka with black and white checkered design, ca. 1500. Private collection.
Fig. 11 Inka kero or wooden vessel, ca. 1500. Private collection.
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FIG. 12 Shield granted in 1563 by Felipe II to Felipe Guacarpaucar, chief of Xauxa (after Paz y Melia 1892: fig. IV.)
be remembered and rewarded by combining Andean and European signs. Thus, in the coat of arms granted in 1563 by Felipe II to Felipe Guacarpaucar, kuraka de Xauxa, so that "the services of the said father and yours remain in perpetual memory", the image of a checkered tunic with three decapitated Indian heads in The neck was placed in the upper quarter of the field (Paz e Mellia 1892: 272-273) (Fig. 12). Spaniards understand that “Perpétua memoria” resides within the coat of arms as an image that can be inherited and displayed only by Guacarpaucar and his descendants, but Andean memory, in the pictorial form of the tunic, is also represented for display. coat of arms of the Andean city of Xauxa would have a versatile reading, depending on the cultural context. The contextual understanding of uses, customs and, by extension, representation is expressed by José de Acosta at the end of De procuranda indorum salute, in the chapter entitled “Mores indorum christo non repugnantes permittendos esse et de conocordia praetoris cum priest”: A little bit of little, Christian customs and our way of life must be instilled in the Indians. And it is necessary to eliminate step by step the rites and the superstitious and sacrilegious and the customs of the barbarian savages. But in those places where their customs are not contrary to religion or the law, I don't think they should be changed for the sake of changing. You must preserve your native and traditional customs that do not go against justice. . . . (Acosta 1984: 586–593) 113
Tom Cummins In fact, the use of the tiana as described in the ownership documents and the representation of the checkered tunic in the coat of arms of Guacarpaucar corroborate the application of Acosta's philosophical position to the scope of political rituals. However, it is the identification of other objects in the wills of the Kurakas and other Andeans that reveals a sense of the continuing importance of Andean objects as signs of custom beyond this Spanish political domain, which, however, by their inscription in these documents, indicates that they were under surveillance of a Spanish judgment. For example, in the 1598 will of the chief of Panzaleo in northern Ecuador, Don Diego Collin lists among the following: – Departure I declare that I have three feathered shirts in the old style [and] it is my wish that one of them be left to my nephew don Miguel Zumba and another one for my son don Diego and another one for my son don Luis. – Departure I declare that I have two chambachiquer [standards] as it is customary [that] the main caciques have them [as is the custom of senior caciques], [and] it is my will that they be inherited and transmitted to the aforementioned Don Miguel Salcatacci Sumba, my nephew .45 In addition, Collin leaves at least six pairs of keros (keros) painted (Fig. 13). In another testament from 1592, further north of Panzaleo, the kuraka of Tuza identifies his painted keros and also those made in silver even more specifically as "two pairs of painted keros from Cuzco" and "two silver vases which in the language of Cuzco it is called aquilla” (silver keros)46 (Fig. 14). That is, sentences 45 “– Item I declare that I have three more old-style feathered shirts, it is my will that one of them leaves my nephew Don Miguel Zumba and the other one for my son Don Diego and the other for my son Dom Luís. "Writs of the Indians of Panzaleo against the College of the Society of Jesus" which contains "the testament of Don Diego Collin in Panzaleo on the fifth of July, one thousand five hundred and ninety-eight years", Cacicazgos , Quito National Historical Archive, Box 7 , III-22, 1657, folios. 29r–42r. 46 “Two pairs of limbiquiros from the use of Cuzco” and “two silver coconuts that in the language of Cuzco are called aquilla” (Historical Archive of the Central Bank of Ecuador, Ibarra, 16th century, 1592 Testament of Christóbal Cuatín, Principal of the city of Tuza, fol . 1v). The linguistic form of inscription of these traditional articles in the will indicates their already bicultural position. The word limbiquiro is a relatively faithful transliteration of the Quechua word for painted (limbi) kero (chiro). The form used to indicate plurality (-s) is Spanish, not Quechua (kuna). Thus, it can be said that, due to their pluralization in this document, they become both linguistically and graphically Spanish and indigenous objects. I would like to thank Joanne Rappaport for bringing this document to my attention and discussing it with me.
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FIG. 13 Colonial Painted Steel, ca. 1600. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Archeology, Quito.
Fig. 14 Pair of colonial hawks, ca. 1600. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Archeology, Quito.
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Tom Cummins as “usso antiguo”, “as it is customary to have lords caciques” and “uso del Cuzco” could be used in the context of Andean wills throughout the viceroyalty to modify these personal objects without necessarily causing alarm.47 Pano Inca and the vessels constituted a recognizable and viable form of pan-Andean material culture associated with a past prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. Thus, tradition exists within these objects as part of their essential character as gifts passed down from one generation to another, and although the gift is recorded here in the context of a European-style will, such objects already existed in the Andean gift exchange. network. before the Spanish invasion (Murra 1962; Cummins n.d.a). Equally important, it turns out that the keros, aquillas and kumbi (upholstery) textiles listed in the wills are not just old, but new.48 These objects continued to be produced and valued, and it is in this context that the continuity of customs in terms of Andean representation sites operated openly in colonial society. It is no coincidence that, just as so many colonially produced native maps, titles and codices have survived in Mexico, colonial Peruvian textiles, keros and aquillas are frequently cited in native texts of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. testaments, are the things that have been best preserved in Peru, especially in the southern mountains. But equally important, just as the maps and other pictorial documents of New Spain were transformed to include European forms and meanings, so too were the traditional Andean objects of colonial production mentioned in wills modified in relation to the new demands of colonial representation. In particular, newly produced colonial pictorial images of Inca material symbols, many of which came from the coats of arms that granted mercedes, were attached to the newly produced objects “as is customary to have the caciques señores”. If, for example, we return to the cover of the Nueva corónica (Fig. 1) and compare the elements of the coat of arms of Guaman Poma with a sixteenth or a seventh47. for example, “Testament of Ysabel Chumbicarba natural Santaorlla” of February 8, 1628, made in Santiago del Cercado: “Yten declare that I have ten chimpanzees to eat [and] three llimpi [queros] from Cuzco”, or the “Testament of Ines Guamguan Indian Natural widow from the city of San Bartolomé de Guacho, March 27, 1614.” Among other Andean items, he lists "a black lliclla and another black-and-white painted blanket made of new cotton and a pair of old-fashioned silver drinking coconuts and a wooden crucifix sculpture." Both documents can be found in the General Archive of the Lima Nation, Indigenous Testaments. 48 For example, the 1574 will of Pedro Arapa, chieftain of the Pueblo de Pocona in the jurisdiction of Mizque (Bolivia), lists “20 old and new cumbi dresses, blankets and cumbi shirts” (Archivo Municipal de Cochabamba/Ramo Mizque , vols .1561–1590, file no.3). I would like to thank Lolita Gutiérrez for sharing this document with me.
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Fig. 15 Colonial Unku, ca. 1600 (?), side A. Private collection.
Fig. 16 Colonial Unku, ca. 1600 (?), side B. Private collection. 117
Colonial Unku, male tunic, made in kumbi fabric from the 19th century by Tom Cummins, we can observe the type of adaptations made (Fig. 15). The unku has a sash of three t'oqapu logs around the waist.49 Just above the t'oqapu alternate a series of Inca shields and helmets, about which I will speak later. What matters for now are the images on the neck, framed by a staggered design of three t'oqapu registers. On one side of the tunic are lions rampant facing each other, and on the other side is a crowned eagle with two heads (Fig. 16). Perhaps someone wants to read these images as the pictographic representation of Guaman (eagle) Poma (lion) stamped on an Andean colonial fabric, as his name seems to represent on the cover of Nueva corónica. These heraldic images, however, may represent other concepts, whether European or Andean, such as the metaphorical categories of the division of the Andean moiety, Hanan and Hurin. Regardless of their specific referent, we are witnessing here the transfer of Spanish heraldic imagery, granted within the scope of grants, to the type of objects mentioned in wills. Thus, the double-headed eagle and rampant lions could also have been derived from any number of coats of arms, including those of Potosí designed by Guaman Poma (Fig. 17). What is important, however, within the context of colonial imagery and tradition is the slippage or loss of control of heraldic imagery such that there is an exchange between European and Andean sites of presentation. Thus, while the checkered tunic of Andean memory can become a two-dimensional image on a shield, the heraldic figures of the lion and eagle can be transferred to the Andean tunic itself. There is, then, a proliferation of images as well as objects themselves, such that there is no stable category of traditional representation that can be subject to the systematic Spanish suppression of symbolic meaning.50 The unku probably comes from Bolivia, and of course that in Potosí, at least around 1620, silver objects of formal Inka design were also being decorated with Inka symbols that were incorporated into colonial Andean heraldic forms. For example, the standard Inka ceramic flat plate with a geometric band dividing the circumference (Fig. 18) is modified into a colonial silver example to display a heraldic image (Fig. 19a-c). The dividing strip is made up of four t'oqapu and a central shield on which the mascaipacha is placed and two 49 The t'oqapu is an Inca abstract geometric design composed of a square or rectangular shape and often included in colonial coats of arms. ; see Rojas and Silva (1981: 128-130). 50 It is here that I depart from Kubler's essay (1961) entitled “On the colonial extinction of pre-Columbian artistic motifs”. For Kubler, language, objects and images can simply be "purified" of native symbolic content as if there is an essentialist "native" symbolic content that can be identified everywhere and equally, to be "inert" by will. European ( p. 15 ).
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FIG. 17 Shield of Potosí by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, New Chronicle and Good Government, ca. 1615 (after the 1980 edition).
flanking condors in profile. The mascaipacha, which, as mentioned, appears on several Andean colonial coats of arms, is replaced, not on the head of an imaginary Inca king, but on an Andean-style object. The heraldic presentation of the mascaipacha connotes, in European terms, the venerable nobility of the image and, by its placement on the plate, a sense of ancient nobility extends to the object itself. Likewise, there is the image of the mascaipacha also used as a disconnected motif in a colonial unku similar to the heraldic eagle and lions around the neck (Fig. 20). Certainly, the notion of sovereignty invested in the person of the Inka king (sapa Inka, the only Inka) and symbolized by the mascaipacha itself is not part of the experience of colonial reality, and of pre-Hispanic imperial authority, as political power in the present. , does not intend to be symbolized by this colonial representation. The multiplicity of the image of this highly restricted pre-Hispanic object produces, on the contrary, a place to locate current objects —plate, tunic, etc.— and their possible colonial wear and tear. within the aristocratic traditions originating from the pre-Hispanic past. This process of reattaching symbolic Inca objects like images to other Andean objects began at least around 1600 and probably much earlier. The silver plate with 119
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Fig. 18 Inka pottery plate, circa 1500. Museum für Volkerkunde, Berlin.
Fig. 19th Inca colonial silver from Atocha, before 1622. Private collection. Photograph by Dylan Kibler. 120
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Fig. 19b Drawing of colonial Inca silver plate from Atocha, before 1622. Drawing by D. L. Dillin.
Fig. 19c Inca colonial silver from Atocha, pre-1622, central detail. Photography by Scott Nierling. 121
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Fig. 20 Colonial Unku, ca. 1600 (?). Photo courtesy of Enrique Poli Collection, Lima.
The mascaipacha, for example, must have been made before 1622, as it is part of the material recently recovered from the Atocha, a Spanish galleon that sank off the coast of Florida in September of that year. The passenger list reveals that most of them came from the Viceroyalty of Peru. That this piece was probably produced in Potosí is suggested by other Andean colonial pieces recovered from Atocha. At least six pairs of silver keels were recovered from the wreckage, all but one with figurative designs on the top edge. The only non-figurative pair has a standard Inka design of two rows of repeated concentric squares resembling wooden keros from Ollantaytambo dated some fifty years earlier (Figs. 21a-b, 22). In another pair, this geometric motif is combined with two lions in heraldic profile, each framed by two columnar shapes (Fig. 23a-b). The feline motif is found in another pair, but here it is a jaguar in a typical Andean posture with the body in profile and the head turned towards the viewer (Fig. 24a-b). The last three pairs indicate why the place of manufacture was probably Potosí. All are essentially the same, with the upper border divided into five distinct sections composed of different figurative motifs (Figs. 25a–b, 26a–b). A lion in profile, a cleric from the front, a basilisk in profile, a knight wielding a sword (per122
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Fig. 21a Pair of Atocha aquillas, before 1622. Maritime Heritage Society. Photography by Scott Nierling.
Fig. 21b Drawing of one of the two Atocha aquillas, before 1622. Drawing by Ann Theroux. 123
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FIG. 22 One of the two keros of Ollantaytambo. Photo courtesy of the Archaeological Museum of Cuzco.
in each of the four sections.51 In the fifth section, the hill of Potosí itself is represented with figures that function both on the surface and inside the wells, the very source of the wells. the material the glasses are made of. The image is remarkably close to Cieza de León's illustration of Potosí some forty-five years earlier (Fig. 27). But here the relationship of the image is not with a written text, but, at least in part, with the vessel itself through the material from which it is made, the silver extracted from the mines of Potosí. We are not sure why these objects were on board the Atocha, but they could very well have been part of the baggage of Diego de Guzmán, Corregidor of Cuzco; Lorenzo de Arriola, Vezino from Potosí, or Diego de Yllescas, mestizo (Anonymous 1622). The aquillas were probably acquired as a purchase or gift in Potosí or Cuzco, indicating the fairly free commercial circulation of these Andean objects. This circulation, however, depended on 51 The meaning of the combination of these discreet motifs is not clear, and their enigmatic allusions may derive from “hieroglyphs”, pictorial symbolic motifs used to decorate colonial monuments. Several of the images of the aquilla appear in Arzáns' metaphorical description of Potosí (1965, 1: 3).
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Fig. 23a Pair of Atocha aquillas, before 1622. Private collection. Photograph by Dylan Kibler.
Fig. 23b Drawing of one of the two Atocha aquillas, before 1622. Drawing by K. Amundson. 125
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Fig. 24th Pair of Atocha aquillas, before 1622. Private collection. Photograph by Dylan Kibler.
Fig. 24b Drawing of one of the two Atocha aquillas, before 1622. Drawing by D. L. Dillin. 126
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Fig. 25a One of a pair of Atocha aquilles, pre-1622. Private collection. Photography by Scott Nierling.
Fig. 25b Drawing of one of the two Atocha aquillas, before 1622. Drawing by K. Amundson. 127
Tom Cummins in both its exchange value and its use value. (Their mere presence in Atocha places them outside an Andean economic and symbolic context.) Their symbolic value was incorporated into the mercantile economy of colonial capital. Aquillas, keros and fine kumbi fabrics could be sustained by their exchange value for the various social relations between Andeans and Spaniards. What is equally important is that, although native craftsmen could still produce these things, many of the objects of their production entered social circulation through the market. Here the relationships between artist,
Fig. 26a Drawing of a pair of Atocha aquillas, before 1622. Location unknown. Drawing by DL Dillin.
Fig. 26b One of a pair of aquilles from Atocha, before 1622. Photograph by Dylan Kibler. 128
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Fig. 27 View of Potosí, woodcut illustration in Cieza de León, Chronicle of Peru, First Part, 1553.
image and audience were mediated as much by market desires as by traditional use.52 Thus, not only aquillas, keros and textiles are mentioned in terms of “Cuzco use”, which implies use value according to Andean custom. , otherwise they could be pawned, sold, or bought.53 Furthermore, aquillas are also referred to for the intrinsic value of their metal in terms of their exchange value, hence the passage cited above (p. 114) on Andean value 52 For example, Francisco de Toledo (1986: 205-207) organized the large number of Indian goldsmiths in Cuzco, ordering that a price list, signed by the corregidor, be placed on the door of each house where They worked. Basic prices depended on the size and weight of the part, but the price could go up if the part was machined. In this context of price control, Toledo also points out that native goldsmiths "paint their idols" on the pieces, especially when they work with gold and silver. He instructs the foreman to guard against this type of decoration, unless expressly requested by the Spanish customer. The market, therefore, was designed to police both content and price. 53 For example, the ham could be sold to pay off a debt; see “Testament of Lorenzo Collegue Guaman de Santo Domingo de Olleros April 4, 1659,” Testaments of Indians, General Archive of the Lima Nation; and Christóbal Cuatín had “pledged to D. García Tulcanga for 50 pesos of current silver that he lent me a silver coconut”, 1592 Testament of Christóbal Cuatín; cf. note 46.
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Tom Cummins lengua del cusco se llama aquilla” (two silver vases called aquilla in the Cusco language) is associated with the Spanish exchange value “que entre both peson cuarenta pesos” (which between the two weighs forty pesos).54 Al As with a metaphor of the covers, these objects disturb and mean by these different values, both Andean and Spanish worlds. The use of aquillas and keros and the use of traditional clothes circulated, however, as an image of tradition. On a silver Atocha tray, traditionally dressed Andean men and women stand around the side where the August agricultural ritual of Chacra Yapuy takes place (Fig. 28a-b). As in the Nueva corónica image (Fig. 29), the men remove their chakitacllas (plows on foot), while the women break up the clods and sow the maize. In another part of the composition, a female tends a pair of keels or keros to the male. Thus, this batch of Andean colonial silver objects contains a whole set of images that appeal to Andean and specifically Inca symbols and rituals, as well as contemporary heraldic signs and topographical references. Its appearance in objects found in the Atocha treasure attests to its exotic status for Europeans, native things and images brought from the New World. But they're not just exotics or commodities. They are also the type of objects mentioned in nearly contemporary wills that are left to family members. And although few Andeans could afford the types of Atocha aquillas and silver plaques, the images found on them are precisely those that proliferated in the Andes on keros and traditional clothing that circulated mainly among native communities.55 For example, the figure that O Atocha aquilla the horn is played on painted keros, the wooden equivalent of an aquilla (Fig. 30). In fact, the image is almost identical, with the puffy pants to the knees, the tight jacket and the feathered hat falling forward. In this case, however, the figure is situated between two rainbows emanating from either side of a feline's head. The trumpeter thus poses as a kind of herald of the figures under the rainbow, an Inca with a staff (champi) and shield and a Ccoya, the Inca queen, holding a flower. In another kero, an image of the mascaipacha, similar to the one carved in the center of the Atocha silver, appears as a central motif within the rainbow (Fig. 31). Thus, it appears that a recombination of heraldic and pictorial elements composes one of the most common motifs in colonial keros. 1592 Testament of Christóbal Cuatín, cf. note 46. Keros and traditional clothing were also bought and sold and therefore had commodity status in colonial Peru; however, their circulation of goods seems to have taken place only within a native market, while Kumbi silverware and other textiles circulated in a larger market involving Europeans. 54 55
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Fig. 28th Plate of Atocha, before 1622. Location unknown. Photography by Scott Nierling.
Fig. 28b Drawing of a silver plaque from Atocha, before 1622. Drawing by D. L. Dillin. 131
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FIG. 29 Farm Month of the Farm by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, New chronicle and buen gobierno, ca. 1615 (after the 1980 edition).
Fig. 30 Detail of a kero figure, ca. 1600. American Museum of Natural History, acc. do not. B9165 (after Rowe 1961). 132
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FIG. 31 Colonial Kero, sec. XVII. Linden Museum, Stuttgart.
The act of tracing pictorial sources indicates here the interface between images and mercedes, exchange value and use value. However, it is the objects' traditional use value that propels them into the world of colonial production at a time when other ancient forms are disappearing. Keros and aquillas were used not only as a traditional sign of friendly social relations between Andeans, but also between Andeans and Spaniards (López Medal 1990: 239). And it is to this value that the images appeal.56 That is, there seems to be in this restorative montage an attempt to produce images that intentionally provide or reify the meaning of the term “in the old usage” in relation to the fact that the objects in which they appear are new. The exotic appeal to Europeans of images of the Inca past on Andean objects made of precious materials is not in question here, nor is their commercial value. Instead, European-style imagery of the Inka past intensifies these objects' interrelated connection to the past. Figures and motifs are used interchangeably in Keros and Kumbi textiles and create a common element that pictorially relates them to a common "historical" past. 56 Aquillas, keros and Inca-style textiles have a social use value among Andeans in the colonial period that depends on pre-Hispanic precedents and explains the proliferation of their production, especially keros. For a discussion of this topic, see Cummins (n.d.a).
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Tom Cummins For example, the rainbow motif just discussed is also found in a colonial unku (Fig. 32). And if we go back to the first unku discussed (Fig. 18), we will see that the helmets and shields placed on the t'oqapu sash are worn and carried by figures in keros or are autonomous figurative elements as they appear in the plot. .57 It is certainly no coincidence that t'oqapu designs on most colonial unku are now placed at the waist of the garment and that similar sashes appear at the “waist” of keros (Rowe 1961: 336; Cummins 1994). In at least one tunic this association is reversed, and the waist area where the t'oqapu sash is normally woven is filled with repeating pairs of Andean men and women with the woman holding two keros or aquillas (Fig. 33). These images, t'oqapu and figures with keros, also become interchangeable as signs of Andinism, any of which can form borders for elite colonial fabrics in a more European fashion (Fig. 34). In this sense, these colonial figurative motifs refer to objects as “proof” of the existence of a tradition, a visual memory. What is more important, the images do not systematically resort to the written word. I saw only a colonial kero and an unku with words attached (Figs. 35, 36). In kero the words are indecipherable and in unku the name of Diego Díaz is written backwards. In objects of production and use in the Spanish colony, words often anthropomorphize the relationship between production and ownership of the merchandise, as in an eighteenth-century wooden and leather box that bears the phrase “soi de Don Juan Phelipe de Villavicencio” as part of of the wooden inlays. design on the inside of the lid, as well as embossed on the leather cover (Fig. 37a–b). The inscription on the edge of a 17th-century Cusco silver plaque with an image of the cathedral's facade combines text, image and object to commemorate the place, specific time and ritual act of a child's baptism, as well as the child's relationship to godparent through its presentation as a gift (Fig. 38).58 This form of inscription does not occur in the colonial production of Andean objects, even if they were bought and sold in a market economy.
57 The southwest wall of Sayri Tupac's palace in Yucay has four staggered niches in the back wall containing multicolored colonial paintings described as representations of red-feathered Inca helmets (Moorehead 1978: 85 and fig. 30). These paintings are remarkably similar to the textile and kero imagery on the helmets, and as these niches today are often used to store items, it is possible to speculate that the Sayri Tupac Palace niches may have been places for storage and display. objects under discussion. 58 The text on the edge of the plaque reads: “In homage to Infante Don Juan Miguel Campero as a memory of his Cristinazion in this sacred Cathedral Church being Padrinho S.B. Count Mariano Peralta, Cuzco Year 1674.”
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Fig. 32 Colonial Unku, 17th century. Photo courtesy of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago.
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Fig. 33 Inka colonial Unku, 17th century. Private collection.
Figure 33 Detail
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Fig. 34 Colonial tapestry. The British Museum.
Figure 34 Detail 137
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FIG. 35 Colonial Kero, sec. XVII. Linden Museum, Stuttgart.
Fig. 36 Unku as a colonial Inca child, 17th century. Photo courtesy of the Archaeological Museum of Cuzco. 138
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Fig. 37th Leather and wood box, with closed lid, 19th C. XVIII. Private collection.
Figura 37b
Leather and wood box with open lid. 139
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Fig. 38 Silver plaque from Cuzco, 1674. Photo courtesy of the Phoenix Museum of Art.
Writing carried the voice of authority in the Spanish colonial world, but things and their images must be seen in the Andean colonial world. These are the objects "as it is customary to have the lords caciques" and for them the kurakas acquired status in both worlds, but it is the status invoked by the force of the Andean tradition, and not the morality of the Spanish custom, that these objects are finally images. rendered. THE COLONIAL OBJECT AND THE PRESENCE OF HISTORY
There is a meeting point in the Andes between Europeans and Andeans, but it is not in the texts of the documents, but in the customs and objects of tradition. They do not carry the words that enumerate them in the documents we read, but it is the “objectivity” in relation to the images that constitutes a forum for the continuity of the tradition. And although these objects with their images can be mentioned in written texts, they operated in the Andean community in performative oral texts in which the Kurakas participated. It is here that the written word is completely excluded. The objects themselves are the important element, not only to convey the status of an individual kuraka, but also to link you to him, his community and tradition (Cummins n.d.a). If keros and unkus are con140
Andean colonial images and objects conceived as representative of the “time of the Inca”, this reference is not only to a legal time to establish political descent within a Spanish colonial framework; instead, "the time of the Inca" is a past time that, perhaps, could have been connected to the present by these objects, old and new. This connection can only occur within the oral text of Quechua speakers. Rosaleen Howard-Malverde has suggested that among the various past tenses used in Quechua narrative by contemporary Andeans from the central Andes, there is the past tense suffix -shqa, which she defines as a "near past". It functions in various ways to refer to the recent past, the temporarily undefined past, and a past event whose effects are still being felt in the present. While it does not inherently carry reference to the source of knowledge of past events, its function as a "past in the present" leads to it being used to refer to past events for which there is only present evidence through the past. senses (visual, auditory, etc.). olfactory, etc.) as opposed to experimental evidence of an event. Thus, the use of -shqa in conjunction with personal knowledge -mi can be used to achieve the rhetorical effect of bringing past events into the present, conceptually speaking. In the case of the oral narratives about the Incas analyzed by Howard-Malverde, the physical clues are basically topographic features, but not necessarily natural features of the landscape. Thus, the ruins of a colonial building near the speaker's home serve as evidence for the speaker to discuss a past cacique as part of their immediate reality (Howard Malverde 1990: 73-83). I would suggest that venerable objects mentioned in wills and held in communities to this day may not have been regarded simply as family heirlooms in the modern Western sense of nostalgia. These Andean forms and functions have their origin in the past to which the colonial images found in them refer. They acted in Andean communities as testimonies of the bond with the past. The production of new pieces, destined one day to be old, perhaps served as poles between the past and the future, but the images themselves already put the new objects in relation with the past at the point of their production.59 59 O Andino O The concept of object and its copy as witness to the past perhaps anthropomorphizes the object, a theme that occurs in Andean mythology and pictorial representation (see Quilter 1990: 42-65). Its transformation from an object of immediate socio-ritual discourse to the stature of a real witness is, in part, a factor of the passage of historical time. In this sense, there is a parallel in Western art in the accumulation of aura in relation to authenticity, as discussed by Walter Benjamin: “Certainly, at the time of its origin, a medieval image of the Virgin could not be said to be 'authentic.' It becomes 'authentic' only during the following centuries and perhaps more surprisingly during the last” (1969: 243). In this sense, the object/image accumulates the power that it originally did not have and can only happen through its carefully curated survival.
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Tom Cummins It is hypothetical whether or not the keros, fabrics, and objects discussed here allowed Colonial Quechua speakers to grammatically and conceptually alter the way they actually talked about the past; we cannot recover colonial orality, but certainly these objects allowed an intimacy with the past in a way that no written text could. There is at least some indication in 17th-century Peru that the evidentiary value of visuals may have altered the way an event was remembered in Spanish used by an Andean. Rolena Adorno points out that there is a linguistic difference between the way Guaman Poma writes about the account of Hernández Girón's rebellion in 1553 in the text and the way it is written in his drawing. In prose narrative, the account of an incident is written in second hand or tense: "A single arquebusier is said to have killed a hundred men" (a single rifleman is said to have killed a hundred men). Already in the image, a caption that appears above a figure that specifies the same fact omits the qualifier "They say that" and is written in the assertive form of an eyewitness: "this man killed a hundred men" (this man killed a hundred men). . Adorno, quoting Barthes, relates this shift to the theoretical difference between text and image in which the power of images “lies in the fact that they signify not by argument but by imperative; appears at the same time generalized, neutral and innocent” (Adorno 1986: 83-84). I would suggest that one could move from this general theoretical explanation to the specific properties of Andean relations between orality and images as an explanatory model. Therefore, when Spaniards describe Atahualpa's rejection of the book in Cajamarca because the book did not speak to him, we must understand this as a literal accusation by Atahualpa: that he could not hear the words emanating from the object? Or is it possible that the foreign object had no place in Andean culture and therefore could not speak to Atahualpa because the relationship between Andean speech acts and objects/images is fundamentally different from decoding a written alphabetic text? Furthermore, was not the European interpretation of the oracle figures at Pachacamac and other sites visited by Pizarro's band of conquerors based on their own understanding of the Delphic way in which images "speak" through one? Our western hermeneutic/talmudic tradition of close reading and interpretation of the text binds us too closely to the written word and our sense of unfolding history. It almost breaks any relationship with the object on which the story is imprinted. Objects in the Andean world occupied a greater place.60 60 For example, Garcilaso de la Vega directly states that objects were kept as a memory of the person and the event. Describing the June celebration of Inti Raymi, during which the Kurakas and Incas celebrated together a series of toasts with aquillas and keros, he
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Andean Colonial Images and Objects This is as true today as it was then. Therefore, it is said that many of the colonial textiles and keros that are so carefully guarded in Andean communities today came from and were used by Machulakuna ancestors, or ñawpa machukuna. They are only brought up on special occasions to provide those material links to the past to ceremonially communicate with the Apukuna, the timeless powers that reside in the mountains and waters (Jorge Flores Ochoa, personal communication, 1993; Gary Urton, personal communication ). communication, 1989 and 1990: 114). These objects form what Annette Weiner calls, speaking of Marcel Mauss's Essai sur le Don, “inalienable wealth” (1985: 210). They are objects that, whatever happens to them, are perceived as inherently belonging to their original owners. . . The primary value of inalienability. . . it is expressed through the power these objects have to define who one is in a historical sense. The object acts as a vehicle to bring the past into the present, so that ancestral stories, titles or mythological events become part of a person's current identity. Losing that right to the past is losing part of who you are in the present. In its inalienability, the object must be seen as more than an economic resource and more than an affirmation of social relations. . . Being able to keep certain objects that document these [ancestral] connections attests to one's power to keep oneself or a group intact. Because to give up these objects is to lose claim to the past as a functional part of one's own identity. (1985: 210) Wiener analyzes his oceanic objects and their exchange in an ethnographic present, as if cultures, such as the Maori, lived and lived in an abstract and non-colonial universe. They didn't, and they don't, nor did the Andeans. From the moment of their inscription into European texts, there has been a continual siege to traditional native identities, both to destroy and to define their otherness. This "encounter" would suggest that the inalienability of such objects "as it is customary to have the lords caciques" constituted a very material site for the continuation of the tradition in which an "Andean" history could be seen. The fact that history is not written does not mean that history does not exist for those who practice it as an aesthetic ideal. Furthermore, such an ideal is forever rooted in the real for those who at the same time live with the very real consequences of the historical contradictions of conquest and colonialism. he writes: “These vases [keros and aquillas] were touched with the hand and with the lips, the curacas held them in great veneration, as a sacred thing; They neither drank from them nor touched them, but placed them as idols where they worshiped them in memory and reverence of the Inca who had touched them. . .” (emphasis mine) (Garcilaso de la Vega 1919, 2: 192). 143
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BIBLIOGRAPHY ACOSTA, JOSÉ DE 1984 From Procuranda Indorum Salute [1588]. Superior Council for Scientific Research, Madrid. 1988 Natural and Moral History of the Indies [1590]. History 16. Madrid. ADORNO, ROLENA 1986 Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. University of Texas Press, Austin. ALBORNOZ, CRISTÓBAL DE 1989 Instruction to discover all the guacas of Pirú. In Fables and Myths of the Incas [ca. 1579] (Henrique Urbano and Pierre Duviols, eds.). History 16. Madrid. ANONYMOUS 1622 Report of what happened on the galleons and in the Tierrafirme fleet. Spain. ANONYMOUS (CRISTOBAL DE MENA) 1534 The conquest of Peru. House of Bartolome Perez, Seville. APPADURAI, ARJUN 1986 Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Arjun Appadurai, ed.): 3–63. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ARZÁNS DE ORSÚA Y VELA, BARTOLOMÉ 1965 History of the Imperial Village of Potosí [1736]. 3 vol. Brown University Press, Providence, R.I. ARZE, SILVIA AND XIMENA MEDINACELI 1991 Images and omens the shield of the Ayaviri, Mallkus de Charcas. HISBOL, La Paz. BAUDRILLARD, J. 1981 For a critique of the political economy of the sign. Telos Press, St. Louis, Missouri. BENJAMIN, WALTER 1969 The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In Illuminations [1955] (H. Arendt, ed.; H. Zohn, trans.): 217–252. Shocken Books, New York. CIEZA DE LEÓN, PEDRO DE 1553 First part of the chronicle of Peru. Seville. CLENDINNEN, INGA 1987 Ambivalent Conquest: Maya and Spanish in the Yucatan, 1517-1570. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. CONFESSIONAL 1982 Confessional for Indian priests with instruction against their rites and exhortation to help die well and sum of privileges and form of impediments to marriage [1585]. In The catechism of the III Provincial Council of Lima and its pastoral complements (1584-1585) (Juan Guillermo Durán): 419-443. Faculty of Theology, Catholic University of Argentina, Buenos Aires.
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Andean Colonial Images and Objects CUMMINS, TOM 1991 We Are the Others: Colonial Portraits of Kurakakuna. In Transatlantic Encounters (K. Andrien & Rolena Adorno, eds.): 203–231. University of California Press, Berkeley. 1994 Representation in the 16th Century and the Colonial Image of the Inca. In Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Elizabeth Boone and Walter Mignolo, eds.): 189–219. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C. n.d.a Toast with the Incas: Andean abstraction and colonial images in Kero vases. University of Michigan Press (in press). n.d.b Guaman Poma de Ayala and Martín de Murúa: the place of images in two 17th-century Peruvian manuscripts. Paper presented at the Copenhagen Academy of Sciences and Letters. DUVIOLS, PIERRE 1971 The struggle against indigenous religions in colonial Peru: the extirpation of idolatry between 1532 and 1660. Instituto de Estudos Peruanos, Lima. ESCOARI DE QUEREJAZU, LAURA 1982 Inca Heraldry and the Cusicanqui Chiefs of Pacajes. Art and Archeology 5–6: 163–166. Peace. ESPINOZA, CARLOS 1989 The Mask of the Inca: An Investigation with the Political Theater of the Colony. Ecuadorian Historical Miscellaneous 2: 6–39. 1995 Colonial Visions: Drama and Art Legitimation of the Colonial Power Structure in Peru and Ecuador. Phoebus 7:84–106. North Dakota. The portrait of the Inca: aesthetics and politics in the Audiencia of Quito, 1630-1750. Doctor. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1989. ESPINOZA SORIANO, WALDEMAR 1974 The ethnic landlords of the Condemarca valley and the provinces of Cajabamba. Scientific Annals 3. GARCILASO DE LA VEGA 1918–1919 The Royal Commentaries of the Incas [1609], vols. 1–2. Printing and Liberia Sanmartí y Cia., Lima. GISBERT, TERESA 1992 Art and Resistance in the Andean World. In Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus (René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini, eds.): 629–677. Hispanic Issues 9. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. GONZÁLEZ HOLGUÍN, DIEGO 1989 Vocabulary of the general language of all Peru called Qquichua or Inca [1608]. Major University of San Marcos, Lima. GRUZINSKI, SERGE 1988 La colonization de l'imaginaire: sociétés indiginés et occidentalization dans Mexique espagnol, XVI–XVIIIe siecle. Gallimard, Paris. GUAMAN POMA DE AYALA, FELIPE 1980 The first new chronicle and good government [1615] (João V. Murra and Rolena Adorno, eds.; Jorge L. Urioste, trans.). 3 vol. 21st century, Mexico. 1991 and there is no remedy [1600] (E. Prado Tello and A. Prado Prado, eds.). Amazon Research and Promotion Center, Lima.
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Tom Cummins HAMPE MARTÍNEZ, TEODORO 1985 Continuity in the Andean World: Indigenous Peoples in Peru versus Colonial Legislation (16th Century). American Indian 45(2): 357–390. HOWARD-MALVERDE, ROSALEEN 1990 Talking about history: 'I'm telling you' or Quechua ways of telling the past. Institute for Latin American Studies Research Papers 21. University of London. HUAROCHIRI MANUSCRIPT 1991 The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Religion [ca. 1607] (Frank Solomon and George L. Urioste, trans.). University of Texas Press, Austin. KUBLER, GEORGE 1961 On the colonial extinction of pre-Columbian artistic motifs. In Essays in Pre-Colombian Art and Archeology (Samuel K. Lothrop et al., eds.): 14–34. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1962 The Shape of Time. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. LEVILLIER, ROBERTO 1935 Don Fco de Toledo: Supreme Organizer of Peru. Space-Calpe, Madrid. MEDAL LÓPEZ, TOMÁS 1990 On the Three Elements Treatise on Nature and Man in the New World [1570]. Editorial Alianza, Madrid. MACCORMACK, SABINE 1988 Atahualpa and the Book. Indian Journal 48: 693–714. MANNHEIM, BRUCE 1991 The Language of the Incas since the European Invasion. University of Texas Press, Austin. MARTÍNEZ C., JOSE LUIS 1986 The "character of the Senate" in Keros: towards an identification of Andean elders. Bulletin of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art 1: 101–124. MILLONES, LUIS 1990 The return of the huacas. Institute of Peruvian Studies, Lima. MONTOTO DE SEDES, SANTIAGO 1927 Spanish-American nobility of the 16th century. In Collection of unpublished documents for the history of Latin America, vol. 2. Editorial Iberoamericana, Madrid. MOOREHEAD, ELISABETH 1978 Highland Inca Architecture in Adobe. Early History 16:65–94. MURRA, JOHN 1962 Cloth and its functions in the Inca state. American Anthropologist 64 (4): 710 to 727. PAUL, ANNE 1992 Paracas Necropolis Textiles: A Symbolic Vision of Coastal Peru. In The Ancient Americas: Art from Sacred Landscapes (Richard Townsend, ed.): 279–289. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. PAZ Y MÉLIA, ANTONIO 1892 Nobility of the conquerors of the Indies. Society of Spanish Bibliophiles, Madrid.
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Andean Colonial Images and Objects PÉREZ BOCANEGRA, JUAN 1631 Ritual form, and institution of Cures, to administer to the natives of this Kingdom. . . . Geronymo de Contreras, Lima. QUILTER, JEFFREY 1990 The Moche Revolt of Objects. Latin American Antiquity 1 (1): 42-65. RAPPAPORT, JOANNE 1994 Object and alphabet: Andean Indians and documents in the colonial period. In Wordless Records: Alternative Literacy in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Elizabeth Boone and Walter Mignolo, eds.): 271–292. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C. COLLECTION OF LAWS 1973 Compilation of laws of the kingdoms of the Indies [1681]. 4 vol. Hispanic Cultural Editions, Madrid. ROBERTSON, DONALD 1959 Early Colonial Mexican Manuscript Painting: The Metropolitan Schools. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. ROJAS Y SILVÁ, DAVID 1981 The Tocapu: An Interpretation Program. Art and Archeology 7: 119–132. Peace. ROWE, JOHN 1961 The chronology of Inca wooden cups. In Essays in Pre-Columbian Art and Archeology (Samuel K. Lothrop et al., eds.): 317–342. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. SAID, EDWARD 1979 Orientalism. Vintage, New York. SPALDING, KAREN 1984 Huarochirí: an Andean society under Inca and Spanish rule. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, California STERN, STEVE 1982 Indigenous peoples of Peru and the challenge of the Spanish conquest. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. THOMAS, NICHOLAS 1991 Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. TITO CUSSI YUPANQUI, DIEGO DE CASTRO 1988 Instruction by Ingá. In At the meeting of two worlds: The Incas of Vilcabamba [1570] (M. del Carmen Martin Rubio, ed.). Atlas, Madrid. TOLEDO, FRANCISCO DE 1986 Francisco de Toledo: Government Arrangements for the Viceroyalty of Peru 1569 – 1574. School of Hispano-American Studies in Seville, Seville. 1989 Francisco de Toledo: Government Arrangements for the Viceroyalty of Peru 1575 – 1580. School of Hispano-American Studies in Seville, Seville. URBANO, HENRIQUE n.d. Syncretism and Religious Sentiment in the Andes: Notes on Their Origins and Development. Unpublished paper presented at the Andean History Workshop, University of Chicago, February 1992.
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Tom Cummins URTON, GARY 1990 The Story of a Myth: Pacaritambo and the Origin of the Incas. University of Texas Press, Austin. WACHTEL, NATHAN 1977 The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru Through the Eyes of the Indians (B. Reynolds and S. Reynolds, trans.). Harper and Row, New York. WEINER, ANNETTE B. 1985 Inalienable wealth. American Anthropologist 12(2): 210-227. ZORN, ELAYNE 1987 Sense of the Environment: Economics and Aesthetics in Taquile, Peru. In Andean Aesthetics: Textiles of Peru and Bolivia (Blenda Feminias, ed.): 67–80. University of Wisconsin-Madison. ZUIDEMA, R. TOM 1991 Guaman Poma and the Art of the Empire: Towards an Iconography of Inca Royal Costume. In Transatlantic Encounters (Kenneth Andrien and Rolena Adorno, eds.): 151–202. University of California Press, Berkeley.
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Pictorial Documents and Visual Thought in Post-Conquest Mexico
Pictorial Documents and Visual Thinking in Post-Conquest Mexico ELIZABETH HILL BOONE TULANE UNIVERSITY
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IN MEXICO, THE INDIGENOUS TRADITION of handwritten painting and pictorial documentation continued strongly for three generations after the conquest until nearly 1600. It was the only graphic or “artistic” tradition to do so. In this article, I analyze the nature of tradition in the early colonial period to explain why it has remained an important documentary medium. Much of the pre-conquest tradition atrophied and died after the conquest, while entirely new genres were conceived in response to a purely colonial situation. What is most characteristic, however, is that many types of manuscripts continued to occupy the same niche in pre-Columbian and colonial times, and it is on these that I want to focus in more detail. It is clear that the manuscripts were painted in post-conquest Mexico because they continued to serve the documentary needs of the Nahuas, and it is equally clear that this could only have happened with the tolerance and support of the Spaniards. Americanists are not surprised that the tradition of Aztec manuscript painting survived after the conquest; authors frequently noted this fact, and a corpus of about 500 colonial paintings survives, proving the point. Donald Robertson's groundbreaking 1959 book Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period provided an impressive amount of scholarship on precisely this subject. and commissioned much of the codex's literature for us and on which Robertson collaborated, Robertson's mission was to provide the first classification scheme for colonial paintings according to their painting styles. In doing so, he identified and characterized three metropolitan schools of manuscript painting, centered on Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlatelolco, and attempted to explain how native painting styles blended with European traditions. My intention with this article is not to repeat or update Robertson, for although I talk about many of the same
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Elizabeth Hill Boone did manuscripts and therefore found her book very useful. I'm interested in different aspects of tradition. Robertson concentrated on the figurative and compositional style of paintings and paid far less attention to the purposes of colonial documents. My attention focuses precisely on the roles that pictorial manuscripts continued to play in the post-conquest era. I am interested in knowing what kind of manuscripts they were and why they were painted, to explain their social and administrative niches and the documentary needs they served. This article will first review pre-Columbian books and then discuss their varying destruction and preservation in the years after the conquest. I argue that two important factors – the Spanish interest in painting and the Nahua penchant for graphic expression – worked to continue the tradition. I examine the new colonial genres and then focus on those indigenous manuscript genres that have remained strong: practical documents (including testimonies, censuses, estate plans, and tribute records) and genealogical and historical manuscripts (including community maps) that have remained. as important features of community identity. PRE-CONQUERED BOOKS
The Nahuas relied on painted books and records to document nearly every aspect of life. As only twelve pre-Columbian codices from central Mexico survive, and these are either Mixtec historical canvases or Borgia Group-type divinatory almanacs, there is sometimes a tendency to doubt the full range of pre-conquest books, and the secondary literature is not of by no means clear means about it. It is useful, therefore, to review the different genres of manuscripts that emerge from the descriptions of conquerors and early friars, who often mention painted manuscripts and passing records. Some authors, such as Motolinía, Peter Martyr and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, describe the manuscript tradition and mention many of the types.1 Painted books can be grouped into three broad categories: religious books and life guides, historical books and practical documents, although categories overlap.
1 Motolinía, in the introductory letters to his Historia (1951: 74-75) and Memoriales (1971: 5), talks about the five types of books that the Aztecs had. The first is history, and the other four are largely "religious" in nature. Mendieta (1971: 145) and Las Casas (1967, 1: 497) follow Motolinía's description. The others who review the different genres of painted books are Martyr d'Anghiera (1964, 1: 426), the anonymous Franciscan author of The origin of the Mexicans (1941: 257), Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (1975–77, 1: 527), and Zorita (according to Baudot 1983: 77), although Zorita seems to follow Motolinía's description, perhaps filtered by Mendieta.
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Fig. 1 Féjérváry-Mayer Codex, a skin-screened tonalamatl, showing page 1. Facsimile photograph 1971, ed.
Religious books focused on humanity's relationships with the supernatural and the natural, which for the Nahuas were of the same world. For example, temple priests relied on protocols for rituals and ceremonies to remind them of correct procedures for rites; remnants of such protocols survive in sections of the Borgia Group of divinatory codices. 1), were divinatory books. almanacs that gave the predictions that governed the different units of time (days, thirteen, etc.). These were essential guides to a balanced life, as they allowed observers of the day (soothsayers) to know which forces could affect personal actions and events; they also included prescriptions for appropriate rituals. see also the obverse of the Vienna Codex. Chroniclers who specifically mention ceremonial books include Martyr d'Anghiera (1964: 426), Motolinía (1951: 74–75), Origen de los Mexicanos (1941: 257), and Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (1975–77, 1: 527). 3 Pre-conquest examples are the five members of the Borgia Group (Borgia, Cospi, Féjérváry-Mayer, Laud and Vaticanus B); the Codex Borbonicus and Tonalamatl Aubin are
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Elizabeth Hill Boone Most of the tonalamatls were applicable to a variety of activities, specialized books were developed for omens and rites relating to marriage and the naming of children.4 Dream books, which seem to have been related to divinatory almanacs They have not survived. 5 Nor do songbooks and prayerbooks survive, although these were the founding documents from which elaborate Nahua chants and some speeches (including huehuetlatolli, or speeches of the elders) developed orally; these were the books that must have contained much of Nahua philosophy.6 The histories, of course, recorded the past, encompassing what we would call the mythical and the secular. Cosmogonies, which may better fit religious manuscripts, explained the formation of the world then and today.7 More secular histories tell how present-day inhabitants came to be as they were and, in the process, explain their relationships with neighboring peoples. The only surviving pre-conquest stories come from the Mixtec, but the earliest extant colonial documents from the Aztec world and the testimonies of chroniclers allow us to understand the native forms of the Mexico Basin. These histories recorded, for different peoples, their mythical origin (apparently always from caves), their migration to the present area, the foundation and security of their rule, wars and conquests, the succession of their rulers, and other notable events; some then carried the story through the Spanish invasion and occupation. Several of the chroniclers specify that these stories were organized as annals, where events are arranged along the armature of continuous signs counting years (see figs. 18-20); the shape
in almost pure pre-conquest style. The books of omens and predictions mentioned by many of the chroniclers can be identified as tonalamatls, although Moctezuma speaks of what must have been a mythical story that prophesied the arrival of the Spaniards (Díaz del Castillo 1956: 245). 4 Motolinía (1951: 207) specifies both types of books; Sahagún (book 6:197-199) explains how the day-keepers would interpret the predictions of the baby's day signs. 5 Sahagún (book 3: 67; book 10: 191), Motolinía (1951: 207; 1971: 5) and the author of The Origin of Mexicans (1941: 257) all mention dream books, and no. thus within the general context of the augral books. 6 Sahagún (book 3: 67; book 10: 191) speaks of “songs of the gods inscribed in books” and elsewhere (book 10: 191) mentions songbooks among the paintings that conveyed the knowledge of the community. Direct evidence of painted sentences is sparse, and indeed Lockhart (1992: 328) surmised that such speeches were not painted; but Zorita (1963: 140) speaks of such documents and recalls a situation in which Nahua nobles wrote an alphabetical version of a huehuetlatolli from its pictorial source. 7 Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (1975-77, 2: 7) alludes to painted cosmogonies; moreover, the creation story of Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas (1941: xxxiv, 209–240) was clearly verbalized from a pictorial manuscript. 152
Pictorial documents and visual thinking in post-conquest Mexico were called xiuhtonalamatl (the book of counting the years). .17 for general form).9 Biographies of rulers recorded their great deeds, and noble genealogies traced lines of descent and rule.10 All these historical manuscripts, with the possible exception of cosmogonies, were the domain of political and civic rulers. leaders, who took care of its maintenance. Other manuscripts documented the practical side of life. The maps, some painted on large canvas-like cotton fabrics, visually organized vast territories so that Cortés could find his way to Honduras with one of them. the boundaries and showing how the land was distributed. The altepetl authorities kept these land documents, along with lists of local taxes and dues, censuses, and other private property accounts (such as those drawn up for newlyweds).12 There the paintings were available should questions or disputes arise. The metropolitan center kept the most complete lists of taxes and tributes, as well as census documents, and it was probably in the main cities that the paintings of the law were kept.13 It is difficult to know what these legal books would have looked like. , as none have survived, although colonial paintings of taxes, lands, and censuses give an indication of these genres (see Figs. 8–14). More ephemeral documents included painted business records, records of court cases, 8 See especially Motolinía (1971: 5, 9), Origen de los Mexicanos (1941: 258), and Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1975–77, 1: 527; 2: 137, 149, 185), who relied on several annals for his history. 9 Although none of the chroniclers actually describe or specify such map-based stories, Díaz del Castillo (1956: 157) mentions a Tlaxcalan story of a battle painted on a large cloth or canvas, and the collated list of places appended to Alva La Sumaria Relación of Ixtlilxóchitl seems to derive from a painted map (1975–77, 1:56, 382–384). 10 Durán (1971: 69) and Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (1975–77, 2: 146) mention manuscripts that appear to be biographies rather than histories of altepetl. Motolinía (1973: 151) and Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (1975-77, 1: 527) mention genealogies; the Relación de la genealogía (1941: 240-256) is a verbal expansion of such a genealogy. 11 Cortés received several maps from Moctezuma and others; see Cortés (1986: 94, 192, 340, 344, 354, 365) and López de Gómara (1964: 181, 345, 349). 12 Zorita (1963: 110) and Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (1975–77, 1: 286, 527) talk about land documents; see also Williams (1984: 103-104) who cites Torquemada and Zorita. An idolatry trial of 1536 (Procesos 1912: 3) mentions a local tribute painting, and Durán (1971: 396, 124) speaks of census documents and property accounts of newlyweds. 13 Conquistadors were impressed by the tax records painted by Moctezuma (Cortés 1986: 109; Díaz del Castillo 1956: 211; López de Gómara 1964: 155); Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (1975-77, 2: 145) mentions that the imperial tribute was divided according to a royal census. Martyr d'Anghiera (1964, 1: 426), Motolinía (1971: 359), Durán (1971: 396) and Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1975–77, 1: 527) mention law books and Pomar (1941: 40) proudly points out that the empire's legal archive was in his hometown of Texcoco.
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Elizabeth Hill Boone and current paintings, such as the paintings by Cortés and his painting that Moctezuma received shortly after his landing in Veracruz.14 The upheaval and social destruction caused by the conquest of Mexico destroyed many of these documents, especially in the metropolitan area. . centers. Cortés's secretary reported that the conquistador knocked down idols (and presumably any codex that were with them) whenever he entered a city (López de Gómara 1964: 331–332). According to Pomar (1941:3), the Spaniards and Tlaxcalans burned the royal archive of Nezahualpilli when they first entered Texcoco in 1520. Then, during the last weeks of the siege of Tenochtitlan, when the palaces and temples were burned and that great city it was completely destroyed. destroyed and the canals filled with debris (Cortés 1986: 222-223, 248-257, 270), countless books and painted fabrics must have perished. As soon as the begging fathers arrived, a widespread and concerted effort was launched to destroy the idols. Motolinía (1951:99-100) characterized the 1524/25 New Year's Eve strike against the priests and idols of the temple complex at Texcoco as only "the first battle given to the devil". Although reports on the destruction of temples and idols do not specify that scrolls were also targeted,15 it can be assumed that scrolls found in temples would perish along with idols. So great was the general loss of painted books that many of the chroniclers writing in the middle and second half of the sixteenth century complained that most of the paintings had been burned or destroyed.16 Durán (1971: 55) says this most poignantly: “Wrong were those who with fervent (though reckless) zeal at first burned and destroyed all ancient Indian pictographic documents. They left us with no light to guide us.” Thus, religious codices were expunged in the decade following the conquest. By the 1530s most had apparently perished. Of the fifteen idolatry trials of the 1530s and 1540s whose records have been published, for example, only one involved a painted religious manuscript (a tonalamatl), and that single manuscript was among hundreds of idols found in the ruler's house. native 14 Valadés (ch. 27, translated in Palomera 1988: 445) speaks of commercial documents; Sahagún (book 8: 42, 55) and Motolinía (1971: 354; plus Mendieta, Las Casas and Zorita after him) describe the judicial reporting procedure; the conquerors observe various news bulletins painted on fabric and taken to Moctezuma and themselves (Díaz del Castillo 1956: 72, 162, 204, 257–258, 360; López de Gómara 1964: 5; Tapia 1980: 586). 15 Ricard (1966: 37-38) discusses this point; see also Motolinía (1951: 99–100, 177), Mendieta (1971: 226–230). 16 See Relación de genealogía (1941: 241) and Origen de los Mexicanos (1941: 257), Durán (1964: 14; 1971: 395–396), Zorita (1963: 86, 174), Acosta (1979: 288), Baudot (1983: 77).
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Pictorial Documents and Visual Thought in Post-Texcoco Conquest Mexico (Procesos 1912; Proceso 1910). None of the other native priests, shamans, and god-men brought to trial in the late 1530s and 1540s appear to have divination codices, or if they did, detractors have not found the books. These religious codices were the product of the highest stratum of the Nahua religious background, and the conquest cut off their heads. Likewise, painted law books, songbooks, and prayer books, being the work of the Aztec tlamatimes, the "sages" (Sahagún, lib. 3:67; lib. 10:29), practically ceased. Then, the imposition of Christianity took most of the indigenous religious ideas and, with them, the divination codices underground. Durán (1971: 397-398) comments that ancient calendars are still preserved and consulted as late as the 1570s in some places, but the official religious documents were all Christian texts: prayer books, catechisms, and Catholic treatises. Secular manuscripts—history and practical documents—also perished in the physical and social upheaval of the conquest, but they were not the clear targets that were the religious codices. The role of a painted story in an idolatry trial in 1539 corroborates this point (Procesos 1912: 177-184). Don Baltasar, ruler of Culhuacan, was accused before Bishop Juan de Zumárraga of hiding idols in nearby caves. His accuser, seeking to help identify these caves, testified that he had painted a genealogy and family history of Dom Baltasar showing the cave from which his ancestors (and some deities) had emerged. The painting's existence became a fact, but at no point in the process was any man blamed for commissioning or painting it. In contrast, the historical and practical genres seem to have remained remarkably intact at least until the end of the sixteenth century, despite the destruction of many metropolitan centers, the crushing demographic collapse, and the new Spanish political order. Painted histories of various kinds continued in their importance to community and family identity, and painted records continued to document the mundane and practical aspects of life and death. Indeed, the manuscript painting tradition developed into new niches in the early colonial period as it adjusted to suit European patrons and distinctively European goals. Two new types of pictorial, namely the cultural encyclopedia and the curious Testerian catechism, developed as a result of European interest in Nahua pictorial documentation. SPANISH INTEREST
Spanish attitudes had much to do with the strength of the handwritten painting tradition. From the outset, conquistadors were impressed by pictorial documents: Cortés, through his secretary López de Gómara (1964:345), praised Aztec maps as reliable even beyond Montezuma's borders.
The empire of Elizabeth Hill Boone. Díaz del Castillo (1956: 162, 204, 257, 360) highlights the precision and naturalism of the painted stories, and Martyr d'Anghiera (1964, 1: 425–426) makes the manuscript painter's art known to the world. his De Novo Orbe Décadas de 1530. Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, as the first president of the Royal Audiencia of Mexico, soon drew Charles V's attention to the special status of pre-conquest manuscript painters. In his letter of 3 November 1532 to the monarch he pointed out that painters, scribes and singers were specifically exempt from Aztec taxes because they were transmitters of native stories and beliefs and were "wise and highly esteemed" (Col. de docs unpublished 1870 , 13: 255). Of the friars, Motolinía (1971: 4-5) praised the veracity of the Aztec stories, as did Mendieta (1971: 145) and Las Casas (1967, 1: 497) who followed him. Durán (1971: 396) related how the laws and ordinances, the census, history and native knowledge were "established with care and care by the most competent historians", also lamenting that "these writings would have enlightened us considerably if the ignorant zeal that I would not have destroyed them." open to the comparative merits of Aztec pictorial writing, he considered it along with alphabetic and hieroglyphic scripts as a way of recording history. he particularly wanted information on Indian geography, demography, and economics to establish tribute and service requirements. In 1525 Charles V requested a geographical description, which he finally received in 1532 after some hints. Those who compiled this “Description of New Spain” noted that information was gleaned in part from paintings of native lands (León-Portilla 1969: 15–21; Baudot 1983: 43–52). Carlos V began requesting information about pre-Hispanic tribute as early as 1523, when he instructed Cortés to make a preliminary investigation, however such reports were slow to arrive from the Mexican authorities and the Spanish monarch would continue to insist on information about tribute through much of the sixteenth century (Baudot 1983: 63; Simpson 1982: 149-150). With the aim of establishing colonial tribute at or below pre-Hispanic levels (Simpson 1982: 97, 131, 149), the crown recognized the accuracy of indigenous tax documents. Thus, a royal decree of 1530 specifically ordered the Spanish authorities in Mexico to send native homage paintings along with their report, and a later request led Cortés himself to send such a painting to the Council of the Indies in 1538 (Baudot 1983: 63–64 ). Fifteen years later, the king was still looking for good information about the homage paid to Moctezuma. Seemingly exasperated with previous attempts, the crown went so far as to outline how such information (as well as governance data) should be collected; the December 156 certificate
Pictorial Documents and Visual Thought in Post-Conquest Mexico 1553 ordered the Audiencia to consult the ancient Indians (“yndios viejos y antiguos”) and “in addition to the information obtained from witnesses, he will have any paintings, tablets or other records from that time that may prove the what is said, and you will cause the religious to seek and request such records among the Indians. have some knowledge of them” (Zorita 1963: 191-192; Baudot 1983: 65).17 The crown's requests for economic and geographic information translated in Mexico into a broader desire for more general cultural information about indigenous peoples. Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, president of the Audiencia from 1532 to 1535, was clearly interested in the Aztec past. In 1533, he and Martín de Valencia, guardian of the order of San Francisco, commissioned the Franciscan priest Andrés de Olmos to compile a book on indigenous antiquities, in order to preserve the memory of the positive and negative aspects of that culture (Mendieta 1971: 75 ). By this express authority of the two most powerful Europeans in Mexico,18 Olmos had to gather and use existing pictorial codices and consult the elders who still remembered the old customs. Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, successor to Ramírez de Fuenleal, maintained this official interest. Mendoza's instructions from the crown included a directive to complete the census and determine actual and potential tribute (Simpson 1982: 112); however, he greatly expanded this mandate to encompass wider cultural issues and prepared an "account of the things of this land". Around 1541, Mendoza commissioned a master painter to make a list of all the lands in the empire, the lords who governed and how the lands were distributed, the tribute and the battles of the conquest, which he intended to send to Carlos V. generally that this pictorial report still exists as the Mendoza Codex (Nicholson 1992: 1-2). Painted by a native artist and written alphabetically in Spanish, the codex contains a history of the annals of Mexica rulers and their victories, a list of tributes, and an ethnographic section that traces the life of an average Native from birth to death. The mendicant friars continued the ethnographic tradition started by Olmos, collecting pictorial sources and interviewing the elders. As Zorita (1963: 87) would later describe him, three Franciscan friars (certainly Olmos, Motolinía, 17). , and eventually Zorita's own Breve relación of the 1560s (Keen in Zorita 1963: 54, 277, 285).18 León-Portilla (1969: 24-25) and Baudot (1983: 54-56) point out that 1533 ordered officially such ethnographic research, perhaps a posteriori, but at the suggestion of Ramírez de Fuenleal.
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Elizabeth Hill Boone y Sahagún) “was especially concerned to know the ways and customs of this people, and they could do better than is now possible, because they knew old Indians who could help them, and the pictorial writings were still solid. and complete. They got a lot of accurate information from these images because they were helped by leading Indian elders who knew how to interpret them and who had seen and heard their elders do the same. Mendieta (1971: 77) reported that Olmos collected paintings and accounts of the rulers of Mexico, Texcoco, Tlaxcala, Huexotzinco, Cholula, Tepeaca and Tlalmanalco, and other capitals. Motolinía, Sahagún and, a little later, Durán also opened their networks. Tovar, writing at the end of the 16th century, observes that “the viceroy Don Martín Enríquez, wanting to know exactly the antiquities of this city, ordered that a collection be made of the libraries they had on these subjects. The people of Mexico, Texcoco and Tula brought them, as these people were the historians and scholars of these matters.”19 Tovar then used this library and some of the informants to write his own history. Both the Spanish administration and the mendicant friars saw the pictorial manuscripts as repositories of information. They accepted painted manuscripts as the indigenous equivalent of European written books and documents and gave them the same status. If we can judge from the actual orders for painted tribute lists, the pictorial records were considered even truer than their alphabetical counterparts. VISUAL THINKING
The other reason manuscript painting continued to function effectively after the conquest is that indigenous ideas of documentary expression remained strong. In short, the Nahua continued to think in visual terms and express ideas pictorially. Graphic communication systems in pre-Columbian Mexico were never intended to communicate speech. European alphabetic texts preserve the words, sentences and paragraphs of a spoken language. In contrast, pre-Columbian texts in central Mexico ignore spoken language and preserve meaning visually and within their own pictorial conventions. Although an oral discourse accompanies the interpretation/execution of a book, the images themselves codify, structure and graphically present knowledge. Like a musical score or mathematical notation, a pictorial document can be read without constructing a verbal narrative. When alphabetic writing arrived in Mexico, some Nahuas soon learned the new system, but the old graphic system continued. Motolinía (1973: 95) 19
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Quoted from Robertson (1959: 49) which follows Kubler and Gibson (1951: 77–78).
Pictorial documents and visual thought in Mexico after the conquest illustrate this very well when he recalls that “One Lent time I was in Cholollan, . . . the number of those who confessed was so great that I could not give them the advice I would like to give them. I told them that I could only hear the confession of those who brought their sins written with numbers, because writing with numbers is something they know and understand, this being their way of writing. It was not to a deaf person that I said this, that immediately they began to bring so many writings with their sins, that I could not attend to all of them" (quoted from Robertson 1959: 54).20 Diego Durán (1971: 64-65 ) shows us the importance of pictorial imagery in remembering the past. Durán interrogates a wise man from Coatepec about the deity Topiltzin-Quetzalcóatl: “I begged him to tell me if what was written and painted there was true, but it is difficult for the Indians give explanations, unless they can consult the book of their people. . Then he went home and brought a painted manuscript. . . . What these two passages indicate is that for many sixteenth-century Nahuas "reading" and "writing" continued to be primarily graphic rather than alphabetical. A good many of the Nahua community continued to read and express themselves in pictures more easily than what in biblical texts, and the Spaniards accepted this different system as comparable to their own. Thus, indigenous paintings entered and easily adjusted to the post-conquest situation. MANUSCRIPT IN SPANISH OF NEW GENRES
Some of the Europeans in Mexico, and particularly the ethnographically inclined mendicant friars, went beyond simply collecting, reading, and using whatever native pictorial works they could find. They actively participated in the tradition, encouraging painters and sponsoring manuscripts. Furthermore, Spanish patronage and Spanish purpose combined to create two new genres of manuscripts in the 16th century: the cultural encyclopedia and the Testerian catechism. These genres served both Spanish needs and Spanish notions of what indigenous peoples needed. The ethnographic projects of the mendicants, as well as the official interest in Aztec history and culture, led to the creation of the cultural encyclopedia (Fig. 2). This compendium of indigenous customs does not come from Aztec roots, but from the late medieval encyclopedic tradition, which classified the culture according to20 Mendieta (1971: 246, 282) and Acosta (1979: 289) also mention the indigenous custom of confessing with images; see the discussion in Ricard (1966: 119).
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Fig. 2 Tudela Codex, 50v–51r. Sacrifice of hearts, shedding of blood and burning of incense represented as rites around Mictlantecuhtli, with explanatory glosses added (Codex Tudela 1980).
encompassing such categories as history, gods and religion, funeral customs, and the like (Robertson, 1966). Friars like Olmos and Sahagún, seeking to create an orderly record of Aztec traditions, hired native painters to paint their ancient stories, gods, rites and calendars. The friars provided the European paper and requested that the painters leave space for alphabetical notations that would clarify the images for European readers. Clearly, native painters often referred to or copied earlier paintings. They took the images from their own cultural traditions, but created documents that were essentially European in their audience, purpose and conception, documents that satisfied the European thirst for cultural information. There seems to have been a whole industry of such photographs. Mendoza had one sent to Carlos V, and the beggars ordered any number, some made to circulate among their brothers in Mexico and others clearly prepared to be sent to the authorities in Spain. Such cultural encyclopedias, painted by native artists and 160
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Fig. 3 Testerian Catechism in Nahuatl from the early 18th century (after Boban 1891, atlas: pl. 77).
Annotated with texts in Spanish or Nahuatl, are the Codex Tudela (Fig. 2) and the Codex Magliabechiano, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, all those calendar turns, as well as the great work of Sahagún. Another new genre was the pictorial catechism, often called the Testerian manuscript, after the Franciscan friar Jacobo Testera, who used inks to help instruct the indigenous people in the Christian religion.21 These manuscripts record the texts of the catechism in a rebus system. , with images that are translated into a series of words or sounds phonetically or ideologically (Fig. 3). Rather than developing out of the indigenous pictorial tradition, the Testerians represent European notions of what indigenous documentary needs were; there is almost nothing indigenous about them, except for a few images, and they don't look like they were painted by native artists. The idea behind the pictorial catechisms was that the natives, used to reading in pictures, could read the Christian prayers: a banner (pantli) and a nopal fruit (nochtil) reading like Pater noster, for example. These rebus phrases However, the books may not have been very effective and, in fact, Mendieta (1971: 246) characterizes them as the most difficult, albeit curious, method. 21 Glass (1975: 285) points out that there is no evidence that Father Testera invented the pictorial catechism. . As Testera did not know any indigenous languages (Mendieta 1971: 665), it is doubtful that he could have created pictorial hieroglyphs that worked in Nahuatl and Otomi. Glass (1975) describes and evaluates the manuscripts well and takes a census; Normann (n.d.) classifies and describes the several dozen existing versions in greater detail.
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Elizabeth Hill Boone used Franciscans in teaching. Motolinía does not mention them at all. The Testarians could not have been successful because their documentary premise was wrong; its aim was to recreate phonetically or ideographically a specific spoken text. But since there was no native tradition of graphically recording speech, it made no sense to the native interpreter that the images provided a fixed text. Given the advanced nature of rhetoric in Aztec Mexico, the Nahua were perfectly capable of easily memorizing a catechism; Motolinía (1951: 105, 245-246) and others speak of the ease with which the indigenous population learned to sing and recite the catechism and taught it to others. The Nahuas were not intellectually prepared to read such catechisms and did not need them; so I doubt they used the testers. All but two of the thirty-two extant date from the 17th to 19th centuries (Normann n.d.); one wonders why there would still be a need for them so long after the conquest. This raises the question of why and how Testerians emerged, and the answer, I believe, lies in European notions of instructing and converting infidels, especially those with a strong pictorial tradition. Early Testerians fit the general Franciscan approach of teaching Christianity to the Nahuas through the use of illustrations (Glass 1975). Mendieta (1971: 665) and Valadés (Palomera 1988: 73, 185, 306-307) tell how the friars saw paintings as effective instructive aids in the process of conversion. So they would set up large paintings of the Ten Commandments or the Articles of Faith, for example, and point to them as they preached (Ricard 1966: 104–107; Glass 1975: 282–283; Normann nd: 12–17). Engravings in the Rhetorica christiana de Valadés from 1579 show this practice in action (Fig. 4): Pedro de Gante uses a canvas to teach Nahua trades, while another friar in front of another canvas talks about the creation of the world. The practice was a Franciscan invention, which he claimed was particularly suited to the Nahua (Palomera 1988: 306-307). Valadés had good reason to highlight the first educational innovations of his Franciscan brothers, since in 1564 the Council of Trent decreed to the Catholic flock the legitimacy and effectiveness of the use of images to spread the faith. Specifically, the twenty-fifth decree suggests that “bishops teach diligently. . . [the “illiterate”] through the stories of the mysteries of our redemption, portrayed in paintings and other representations” (López-Baralt 1988: 124-125). Several books on sacred images were published in Europe at this time, among them one that established “the rules of the new Christian iconography” and a catechism containing sixty-seven figures “to instruct the illiterate. . . , according to the order of the Council of Trent” (López-
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Fig. 4 Valadés diagram of the evangelical process as an idealized Franciscan establishment. In the upper left part, Pedro de Gante points to a canvas that shows the work of men, and in the upper right part another friar teaches about the creation of the world in front of another large painting (according to Fernández 1992: 181). 163
Elizabeth Hill Boone Baralt 1988: 125).22 Valadés tried to show the Franciscans in Mexico as pioneers in this method. This mid-century European emphasis on images was related to the rise of medieval and Renaissance interest in the art of memory (López-Baralt 1988: 125). Valadés, a mestizo friar who had lived in France, Spain, and then Italy since 1571, was in tune with this interest. He included in his Rhetorica christiana an explanatory chapter on the development of memory and, in addition, created his own mnemonic alphabet to help remember. This alphabet was no different from other mnemonic alphabets also created in Europe, except that it included native Mexican imagery and was used by indigenous inhabitants (Palomera 1988: 72, 271–278; Glass 1975: 283). I see the pictorial catechisms, the Testerians, as part of this broader European interest in mnemonics and the efficacy of images, since they approached the question of documentation from a European rather than a native point of view. They represented the friars' view that Christian prayers were set texts to be learned and repeated word for word; someone remembered them by seeing them written down and another wrote them down by recording the words as they were spoken. The Nahuas, on the other hand, would have simply memorized the texts; they might refer to a single painted image to evoke the entire sentence, but would not look for a word-for-word sequence for that sentence. In this way, the larger paintings that illustrate the sermons and instructions of the friars were closer to the indigenous tradition than to the testers. The cultural encyclopedia and the Testerian were artificial genres of manuscript painting, created to meet Spanish needs or to meet European ideas of indigenous needs. They were certainly not central to Nahua thought or action, although they exemplify the perceived centrality of the manuscript painting tradition to indigenous life and help us to understand why so many other post-conquest pictorial forms continued to be important. CONTINUATION OF NATIVE GENRES
The indigenous paintings that remained important to the Nahua were practical documents such as legal accounts, land records, and lists of tributes or taxes, or they were histories and genealogies. They survived as types precisely because they continued to serve the same needs as before the conquest. Published in Rome, it carried the descriptive title Doctrina Christiana nelle quale si contengono le principali misteri della nostra fide representati con figure per istruttione degli'idioti et de quelli che non sannolegere. According to what is ordained by the sacred Conc. Trid. at the XXV session. 22
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Pictorial Documents and Visual Thought in Post-Conquest Mexico. So too the painter/scribe who recorded all sorts of practical matters continued with the same relative status. In considering these illustrations, we must realize that, at the level at which these manuscripts operate, the so-called Spanish world and the Indian world are largely inseparable. Donald Robertson (1959: 34–55) had previously tried to distinguish between manuscripts painted exclusively for the Nahua and those painted under Spanish encouragement, seeing them as two separate arms, but found the distinction almost impossible to maintain. Just as before the conquest the handwritten tradition served the needs of a purely indigenous administration, after the conquest it served the Spanish-Indian mix. Manuscript painting has always been an elite endeavor directed upwards or used by those in authority. With the arrival of the Spaniards and assuming positions of authority, the manuscript tradition readily embraced them and their administrative institutions. Practical Documents Paintings that functioned primarily as administrative, secular, and mundane records were painted after the conquest in the same general niches as before. While we have no evidence that the kind of painted reports that Moctezuma and Cortés occasionally received during the conflict continued for long, other forms did. They include painted testimonies archived in court cases, censuses, tax and tribute lists, and land tenure records. Painted testimonies. One genre for which we have extensive ancient evidence is court records, or what might be called painted testimony or depositions. These are photographs created specifically as evidence in a court case. These paintings were often executed for litigation in pre-Columbian times; several of the chroniclers speak of them. Referring to the Aztec judges at the local level, Sahagún (book 8: 55) says: “They wisely listened to the complaints of the common people. They defined and verified the denunciation, recorded it on paintings so that they could take it to Tlacxitlán, where they informed the judges that they were princes, so that the sentence could be pronounced there”. Motolinía (1971: 354) explains that in each room a painter recorded the litigants or defendants, the accusations, the testimonies and the judge's decision. This procedural document tradition continued, now serving the colonial courts. In 1539, for example, the manuscript painter Mateos testified against his countrymen in an Inquisition investigation into the whereabouts of idols stolen from the temples of Tenochtitlán during the conquest and still hidden. The case is notable both because it involves what was thought to have been
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Fig. 5 Testimony painted against Pochteca Tlaylotla, accused of harboring the idols of the ritual site of Tenochtitlan (as per Greenleaf 1961: opp. 52).
same idol of Huitzilopochtli from the Templo Mayor, but also because a painting on native fiber carried the accusation and was attached to the file as evidence (Fig. 5).23 Mateos himself probably painted this document because it parallels his alphabetically recorded oral testimony, who started the process. The next day, his brother Pedro, also a manuscript painter, testified. Mateos reported that his father, Tlatolatl, was a trusted man of Lord Moctezuma and had been put in charge of the wrapped idol of Huitzilopochtili. When Tenochtitlan fell to the Spaniards, Tlatolatl removed this heavy idol from the city and brought it to the house of Oquicin, the ruler of Azcapotzalco, for safety; At that time, Oquicin and a director named Tlilacin were the guardians of four other idols: those of Cihuacoatl, Telpochtli, Tlatlauhque Tezcatlipoca and Tepehua. A few years later, when Cortés left for the war in Guatemala, he took with him Mateos's father, Tlatolatl, Senhor Oquicin de Azcapotzalco, and
23 The judicial process is published in Procesos (1912: 115-140). For partial summaries of the trial, see Nuttall (1911: 153–171); Robertson (1959: 35-36); green leaf (1961: 59); Padden (1967: 253-274); and Boone (1989: 26). Here I am using the spelling of personal names generally as they appear in the painting, rather than one of the variants that appear in the published record. An editorial note in the Processes (1912: 140) identifies the paint's paper as maguey fiber.
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Pictorial Documents and Visual Thought in Post-Conquest Tlilacin Mexico; there the three Aztec nobles died. Once news of these deaths reached the capital, the idols were moved again by two lords that Mateos identified as the Mexican tlacochcalcatl (military leader) named Hanauhacacin and the ruler of Tollan named Yxcuecueci. They transferred the five idols and ritual paraphernalia back to Mexico City into the custody of Pochteca Tlaylotla, a nobleman who had already taken the name Miguel. A painting of the idols and their paraphernalia, linked by lines to the people who supposedly kidnapped them, was admitted as evidence (Fig. 5). The five wrapped idols are depicted, Huitzilopochtli painted darkly at the far left as a bundle of tight netting, and the ritual implements (including a Coatopilli or "snake staff") to the right of the other four. The principals in the case are represented by their heads, the rulers or high-ranking lords are also qualified by speech lists that indicate their status as tlatoque or "speakers". All of these individuals, except the defendant Pochteca Tlaylotla, were apparently dead at the time of the trial because their eyes are painted dead. The lines connect the people to the idols and to each other: Tlatolatl in the lower left corner connected to Huitzilopochtli, who is then connected to the other four beams; Oquicin and Tlilacin (and members of Tlilacin's family) in the upper left corner linked to the group of idols and sacred utensils; all sheaves and implements then tied to Hanauhacacin and Yxcuecueci (and their confederates) in the upper right, and finally to Pochteca Tlaylotla, with its mouth open in the lower right. The story of the safekeeping of sacred objects begins with Tlatolatl in the lower left corner and ends with Pochteca Tlaylotla in the lower right corner. All idols and individuals are named alphabetically with glosses, but the essential evidence, sequential property and lines of association, are presented graphically. The images explain that important nobles and rulers, now dead, were involved and describe the idols and utensils in more detail than the alphabetical text, which only names them.24 In this painting, the accusation itself is not conveyed by the words of the glosses or the short text, but by the images, the connecting lines and their relative location. It is a pictorial narrative, in an indigenous form, adapted to serve in a Spanish court. ) ), whose bale form is the most anthropomorphic of the group, Tlatlauhque Tezcatlipoca (the “Red Tezcatlipoca”, manifestation of the flayed god Xipe Totec), and Tepehua (“Owner of the Mountains”), whose image is qualified both by a head of bird (top) and the cave of an inverted mountain glyph (bottom). See Nicholson (1971: table 3); Simeon (1981: 497). 25 Greenleaf (1961: opp. 108) reproduces another Inquisition painting, in this case a pictorial complaint against a nahua for concubinage.
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Elizabeth Hill Boone This type of painted complaint was not limited to manuscript painters in and around Tenochtitlan in the decades after the conquest. The practice appears to have been widespread, if not customary, within the ancient realm of the Aztec empire, and has continued. for much of the century. In 1553, in the remote town of Tehuantepec, for example, resident Indians used ink to testify against their own chief and governor, Don Juan Carlos, whom they accused of excessive punishment and tribute (Zeitlin and Thomas 1992). The offended villagers, who were neither artists nor scribes, had three painters carry out their grievances for them. The painters differed greatly in their skill and training: one drew rough images on maguey paper; one worked in a predominantly native style; and one painted in a mostly European style on European paper. In any case, all the paintings had the same purpose: to document the accusations. A good number of these pictorial testimonies have come down to us. Some represent the interests of high Nahua authorities to some of the most powerful Spanish administrators in Mexico. Such paintings found their way into the hands of Jerónimo de Valderrama, for example, who had arrived in Mexico as Visitator General in 1563 and was visiting the government of Viceroy Luis de Velasco, specifically investigating clientelism and excessive living on the part of Viceroy Luis de Velasco. king. and Hearing judges (Vigil 1987: 184). The Nahua rulers of Mexico, Texcoco and Tacuba used this opportunity to file damages claims for unpaid bills and complain about taxes and unfair treatment. They had their allegations painted over. The Codex Osuna lists the goods and services that the Nahuas provided to the viceroy's government, the church, and members of the Audiencia in the 1550s and 1560s. . -Tenochtitlán, who were also joined by indigenous officials from Tlatelolco, Texcoco, Tacuba, Tula and Tetepango. In Figure 6, the Mexicans indicated how they should pay 6 x 20 bales of hay for Viceroy Velasco's horses, plus 5 bales for his daughter Doña Ana's horses. Below that, they demand from the viceroy the services of 20 workers, 2 bricklayers, 2 carpenters, 2 plasterers and 20 maids (from left to right) who worked in his house. The viceroy himself is represented and glyphically identified at the bottom of the page next to the residence that required all this attention. Elsewhere in the codex (Fig. 7), Mexican authorities claim that Dr. Vasco de Puga, the judge of the Audiencia of whom the Nahuas complain the most, has six horses in Iztacalco; Another ten cities (pictured right) had to provide food for the horses, depriving the Mexicans of their just tribute. As with the record of the Inquisition and Tehuantepec accusations, the main documentation is painted in the Osuna Codex. Encouraged by Valderrama's 168
Pictorial Documents and Visual Thought On the post-conquest visit to Mexico, Don Esteban de Guzmán and the other Mexican leaders brought charges against senior viceroyal officials before "the Illustrious Mr. Licenciado Valderrama of His Majesty's Council and Inspector General in this New Spain ", and brought these accusations in painted form. They swore by the truth represented here, their declarations were written in Nahuatl directly on the paintings; the court's Nahuatl interpreter provided the Spanish translation, which was also transcribed onto the paintings; Finally, the indigenous authorities and the judicial secretary confirmed the process and signed it. These oral testimonies are essentially readings and explanations of the documents; they are clearly insufficient in themselves, but are supported by the paintings, which remain the main evidence. These various pictorial testimonies that I have been commenting on come directly from the facts of the case, as these facts were brought to the attention of the painters. They were basically painted “from scratch”, with no specific background. It often happened, however, that previous indigenous documents, created for other purposes, were copied into declarations. In 16th-century Mexico, where tribute, land ownership, and population size were concerns, many of these native documents were reviewed for Spanish authorities. Native censuses, tribute lists, and property records kept at altepetl centers were copied and therefore subject to legal action. The Oztoticpac Land Map and the Kingsborough Codex are such documents. When Don Carlos Mendoza Ometochtzin, ruler of Texcoco, was executed in 1539 for heresy, his lands in Oztoticpac came into dispute. For the court, painters updated cadastral maps of his palace, fields, and orchards to create an up-to-date record of his land, the rights by which he owned it, who worked it, and the rents and taxes he received (H. F. Cline 1966, 1968; Harvey 1991). The newly created document (Fig. 8) details the ancestral palace at Oztoticpac (top left), Don Carlos's grafted orchards (bottom left), the various lands worked by others (right) and some of his income (bottom left). top right). Fields are identified by place names and by their perimeter measurements. The Codex Kingsborough was created when the Nahuas of Tepetlaoztoc accused their encomendero and his son of cruelty and excessive tribute (Paso y Troncoso 1912; Codex Kingsborough 1912; Glass and Robertson 1975: 151). In building their case, Nahua officials dug up ancient pre-Hispanic histories and genealogies, maps, as well as ancient tribute records, and copied them for the court, augmented with new and updated records to cover the postconquest period. Figure 9 illustrates the painted record, later glossed in Spanish, of the tribute due to Mr. Cocopin de Tepetlaoztoc no
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Fig. 6 Codex Osuna, 21r. Painted accusations against Luis de Velasco, with explanations in Spanish and signatures of the interpreter and the clerk (from the 1973 edition).
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Fig. 7 Codex Osuna, 11r. He brought charges against the judge of the Audiencia Puga, accused of unfairly stocking his horses at the expense of the Nahuas; with explanations in Nahuatl and Spanish and the bailiff's signature (after 1973 ed.).
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Fig. 8 Map of the Lands of Oztoticpac, on native paper. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
pre-conquest period. On the right, below the Tepetlaoztoc plaque, Cocopin receives the goods represented by his vassals on the left, who are identified by the location plaques of their political entities. Qualified painters were selected to undertake this pictorial report because this case was destined to go to the Council of the Indies. These colonial documents created for the courts were based on the collection of cadastral plans, censuses and lists of taxes and tributes existing in the altepetl archives. Property plans, censuses, tax and tribute records. Despite the introduction of alphabetic script to write in Spanish and Nahuatl, Nahua communities still depended to some extent on pre-conquest forms to record land tenure, family size and composition, and taxes due and paid. These documents were controlled by the heads of the altepetl. Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (1975–77, 1:527) mentions that along with the annals and genealogies kept by the altepetl were painting172
Figure 9
Kingsborough Codex, 2v [209v]. Register of pre-conquest tributes (after the 1912 edition).
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Elizabeth Hill Boone ings of Boundaries, Lots and Land Distribution. Zorita (1963: 110) explains that the chief of the calpulli “is in charge of guarding and defending the lands of the calpulli. He has drawings showing all the plots, and the boundaries, and where and what fields the plots meet, and who cultivates each field, and what land each has. The paintings also show which lands are vacant and which were handed over to the Spaniards, by whom and when they were handed over. The Indians continually alter these paintings according to the changes made by time, and they perfectly understand what these paintings show." The Codex Vergara and the Codex Santa María Asunción of ca. 1545 are the types of manuscripts about which Alva Ixtlilxóchitl and Zorita spoke (Offner 1984; Williams 1984, 1991; Williams and Harvey 1988). These are related paintings, painted on European paper, each containing a census and two types of cadastral records for about 250 households in the vicinity of Tepetlaoztoc. , called tlacatlacuiloli (“painting of people”) (Fig. 10), the heads of individual families are represented by heads painted next to the conventionalized houses, their names are given glyphically. To their right are the heads of their dependents: wives, male and female children and babies. The painting distinguishes age, sex, women's marital status and the marital relationship between men and women (they face each other). Black faces cids may indicate death and footprints may indicate a change of location, suggesting that the census has been updated (Offner 1984: 129–135). The cadastral sections of these codices record land tenure in two different ways. A cadastre describes the shape of the fields and provides measurements of their perimeters, much like the fields identified on the Oztoticpac Land Map (Fig. 8). The other focuses on field sizes as areas (Fig. 11). Both represent and glyphically name the property owner, and both glyphically indicate soil type (Williams 1984, 1991).26 The cadastres here are in the form of records, but many (I would venture to say perhaps most) are in map format. , such as the Oztoticpac Lands Map. A mid-century Tlaxcalan tlalamatl or territorial document (Figs. 12, 13) has this map format. I use it here as an example because it has not been published before and it consists of a brief genealogy that has changed over time. It shows how easily land records can be updated and updated. The lower half of the native paper diagram shows the 26 Although the written wills had no pre-Columbian prototypes (S. L. Cline 1984: 49), S. L. Cline (1986: 125) points out that Nahuatl colonial wills from Culhuacán identify parcels of land by their names of places, types of soil and measurements, reflecting the pictorial records.
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FIG. 10 Codex Vergara census page (after Boban 1891, atlas: pl. 37).
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Fig. 11 (above) Cadastral record from the Codex Vergara, which gives the nominal glyphs of the owners and the aerial size and soil type of their fields (after Boban 1891, atlas: plate 39). Fig. 12 (on the side) Floor plan owned by Ocelotzin's descendants. Photo courtesy of Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, acc. do not. P1964.18M. 176
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land parcels identified with glyphs by their place names and/or located in relation to roads, forests and buildings; on the right, glyphs of relatively prominent places for the towns of Altzayancan ("where the waters part") and Axopilco ("the end of the sour waters") place properties in the far east of Tlaxcala state, east of Huamantla and dependent on her and finally on Tizatla's cabecera in the 16th century.27 The upper right corner (Fig. 13) briefly presents the ownership line of these properties, before 27 Glass and Robertson (1975: 184) They give a brief description of the manuscript and locate it in east Tlaxcala; see Anaya Monroy (1965: 48, 72, 166–167, map opp. 138) for the etymology of the place names, their specific location, and their relationship to Huamantla; see Anderson, Berdan and Lockhart (1976:4–5) for Tizatla's status.
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Fig. 13 Detail of the genealogical part of the heritage map of Ocelotzin's descendants. Photo courtesy of Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery.
dismounting with Ocelotzin who sits in the elaborate building in the upper corner, glyphically named with a jaguar's head and in Nahuatl for its glow. The land of Ocelotzin apparently passed first to his descendant Cuauhtliztactzin, and then to that man's two sons who are represented and named literally below; they are Don Pedro Chichimecateuctli (perhaps the same Chichimecateuctli who fought with distinction alongside Cortés)28 and Teohuaonohualli. The lines of descent connecting them are painted like strings, a native convention for lines of descent.29 Chichimecateuctli clearly lived long enough after the conquest to be baptized with the Christian name of Don Pedro. Apparently, this was the layout of the territory when the document was painted. See Cortés (1986: 185, 243) and Díaz del Castillo (1956: 129, 322, 394, 439). As Lockhart (1992: 72) points out, the Nahuatl words for "human being" and "rope" combine to give -tlacamecahuan, "the descendants of one". 28 29
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Pictorial Documents and Visual Thinking in Post-Conquest Mexico Later, another hand, cruder and far less inclined to native pictorial conventions, added more levels of descent by drawing a large circle, a small circle, and then an even larger circle. to one of them. brothers. The first two circles, like the figurative images, are glossed with the names of the characters: Don Julián García and Diego García.30 This second notary, keeping the original document, limited himself to updating it. Although taxes and tributes in the colonial period largely fell to the Spaniards, who kept alphabetical records of these goods and services, Nahua communities continued to maintain their own accounts. Many of these stories have maintained the traditional pictorial form. As we have already seen, some of these local tribute paintings were copied in complaints lodged against excessive tribute by the Spaniards, as in the Codex Kingsborough. Others were simply stripped without copying from the altepetl files. Most of the surviving censuses, cadastres, and tax records, in fact, seem to have entered the Spanish administrative and legal system in some way, having been collected by visits, filed in lawsuits, and the like. Such was the situation with the Codex Huejotzingo, which survives because it became part of a lawsuit brought by Hernán Cortés against three members of the Audiencia, who had usurped Cortés' financial interests in the city of Huejotzingo when Cortés returned to Spain in 1528. Cortés charged that the members of the Hearing demanded and received from Huejotzingo goods and services that rightfully belonged to him. Shortly after the beginning of the process in 1531, Cortés' lawyer discovered “that in this city [Mexico] there are some of the principals of the said city [Huejotzingo] who have the paintings of what the said city gave to the said lawyers. I ask Your Majesty to order and oblige them to deliver the paintings to the [court] clerk because I do the presentation of them” (Library of Congress 1974: 85). Indigenous authorities in Huejotzingo presented eight paintings on native paper, which were recorded in the court case along with a transcript of their oral explanation.31 Although the paintings became part of the court case, they apparently predate the case. Thus, we can understand Huejotzingo's own record of goods and services provided by the city. Painting 2 (Fig. 14) details some of the textiles, building materials, and food that the Huejotzingo people provided for the construction work in Mexico City, including work on an irrigation ditch, monasteries, and the private house. I appreciate Frances Karttunen's help with these transcripts. The surviving pictorial and alphabetical records of the case are translated by Benedict Warren with an introduction by Howard Cline, as the “Harkness Codex 1531 Huejotzingo” (Library of Congress 1974). 30 31
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Fig. 14 Codex Huejotzingo, painting 2. Goods supplied by Huejotzingo for construction in Mexico City. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
the defendants If we read from left to right top to bottom, Huejotzingo contributed 8 x 400 loads of cloth, 7 x 20 loads of beans, 3 x 20 bowls of some other food, 5 piles of bricks and 6 loads of lime, 7 x 20 turkeys, 8 x 400 corn loads, 3 x 8,000 chiles, 2 x 400 probably sage,32 and 3 x 8,000 again sage (Library of Congress 1974: 51, 56). Painting 5, famous among historians of Mexican colonial art for containing the oldest indigenous image of the Virgin and Child, records military equipment and other items provided for Nuño de Guzmán's expedition to Nueva Galicia (Fig. 15). Don Tomé, brother of the lord of Huejotzingo, accompanied Guzmán. The expedition cost Huejotzingo (reading from the top row): 400 pots of liquid amber, 400 small cloaks, 4 x 400 pairs of sandals, 1 banner for Don Tomé to carry, 3 gold plates, 9 x 20 long green feathers; in the second row: 10 x 400 metal-tipped darts, the Standard of the Virgin in Gold Leaf carried by Guzmán, 21 gold plates with which he bought a horse for Don Tomé; in the third row: 10 x 200 32 Although the identity of this food as salvia is not safe, the attached oral testimonial (p. 125) mentions that the paintings show the canvas, the chile and the salvia that were spent on maize and materials of construction. .
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Fig. 15 Codex Huejotzingo, painting 5. Huejotzingo's contribution to the Nuño de Guzmán expedition. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
loads of loincloths, 8 slaves; bottom row: 3 x 20 leather-lined chests and 12 slaves; slaves were sold to acquire gold for the Madonna Standard (Library of Congress 1974: 51, 62–63). As this only represented a part of Huejotzingo's contribution, one can understand why Cortés was not happy that all this wealth was going elsewhere. Histories, Genealogies, and Communal Land Paintings The other pictorial works that maintained their niche in the colonial era were Histories, Genealogies, and Communal Land Paintings. These we might call maps, to distinguish them from property plans; The difference between property plans and community land diagrams is more than just scale, as community maps function like community statutes or titles and are very historical. In Mexico, histories, genealogies and maps, far from being three different types of documents, easily intermingle. Many painted stories are cartographic and genealogical, and it is impossible to separate them.
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Elizabeth Hill Boone an altepetl's territory from its history and the families that have controlled it for generations. These are the documents that address the domains of Nahua life where the most was at stake. By that I mean the realms of titles and privileges (of nobility and continuing status), lands, estates, and rights. Nahua elites may have lost their official religion when it was engulfed by the force of Christianity, but the Spanish government legally recognized “indigenous hierarchies and privileges (such as exemption from cacique tribute, personal service, and corporal punishment)” (Simpson 1982: 120). . Thus, native elites were still able to maintain their relative social and economic status within the indigenous community and retain some of their former territory.33 They used traditional pictorial manuscripts to support this status. The Relaciones transcribed in the early 1530s at the behest of the conquistador Juan Cano may be one of the earliest uses of pictorial histories. In an attempt to legitimize the position, landholdings, and tribute receipts of his wife, doña Isabel, daughter of Moctezuma, Cano had an anonymous Franciscan friar from Culhuacán rewrite the pre-conquest histories in alphabetical Spanish (García Icazbalceta 1941: 240–280; Glass 1975: 336, 345–346; Baudot 1983: 73–75). The resulting “Relation of the genealogy and lineage of the Lords. . . of New Spain" and "Origin of the Mexicans" were addressed directly to the Spanish monarch, supporting the request for favor and restitution of hereditary rights for Doña Isabel. Spanish chroniclers and early mestizo historians mention pictorial archives that Nahua rulers continued to preserve for generations after the conquest. Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, a descendant of Texcoco rulers, writing after 1600, cites paintings held by the lords of Texcoco, Huexotla, and Chalco, some of which survive from pre-conquest archives and others painted after the conquest ( Alva Ixtlilxóchitl 1975–77, 1: 286, 527; 2: 242, 245). He himself drew on many of these illustrations to craft his textual history. We know that he used the Codex Xolotl, a cartographic history detailing the history of Texcocan from the arrival of the first Chichimecas under Xolotl in the 13th century to the Tepanec War in 1427 (Codex Xolotl 1951) Alva Ixtlilxóchitl o cham or "Original History", and its account of the pre-Imperial history of Texcoco is essentially a verbal reading and interpretation of the Xolotl codex. He also used the Tepexpan Strip, the Tlotzin Map, and the Quinatzin Map (O'Gorman in Alva Ixtlilxochitl 1975–77, 1:80). 33 Taylor (1972: 35-66) points out that the indigenous nobility in Oaxaca continued to be important landowners and leaders; their bloodlines remained undiluted with Spanish blood. Shortly after the conquest, they successfully petitioned the crown to confirm (and expand) their hereditary lands and titles, which gave them clear legal title to the lands within the Spanish system.
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Pictorial Documents and Visual Thought in Post-Conquest Mexico It appears that every Nahua state of any size maintained its collection of community photographs, which could be used to demonstrate genealogical ties, historical rights, and social relationships. These codices are the Cuauhtinchan Maps, the related maps linked to the Toltec-Chichimec History, and the annals of the Toltec-Chichimec History itself (Leibsohn 1994, s.f.). As Dana Leibsohn (1994: 181-182) points out, these histories and cartographic annals are addressed to the indigenous inhabitants of Cuauhtinchan; they exist to maintain knowledge of the pueblo, its territory and boundaries, its history and its relationship to other political entities, in particular the large communal kingdom of Cholula nearby (Leibsohn 1994: 180-181). One of the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca maps (Fig. 16), for example, efficiently documents the founding of Cuauhtinchan. The tracks lead people into the area on the left, after which they defeat some of the already established policies and find the city of Cuauhtinchan in the center of the map. Other footprints walk from place sign to place sign around the outer edges of the map, establishing the boundaries of Cuauhtinchan's territory. The history of the annals provides additional information. There is no evidence that the Cuauhtinchan maps were ever seen by Spaniards or presented in a colonial administrative context; nor do Spaniards appear in them. As Leibsohn (1994: 161, 180) puts it, the 'Others' in the stories are the 'indigenous peoples who live nearby, people with similar histories and territorial claims'. So these stories were essentially painted to “teach people how things used to be” and to shape one's identity. Most other pictorial histories of the mid- and late sixteenth century can be seen in this light. The Codex Xolotl establishes Texcoco's claim to its territory, starting with a founding story virtually parallel to that of the Cuauhtinchan map, albeit more elaborate. On Map 1 (Fig. 17), Xolotl and his people enter territory in the lower left corner, reconnoitre and establish a base in Tenayuca, and then mark the boundaries (Boone 1994: 60–61). Annals also often begin with an account of migration or founding history. The history of the annals in the Codex Mexicanus, for example, begins when the Aztecs abandoned Aztlán (Fig. 18). Time, in the form of counting years, begins here as well, and the Aztecs literally extended the gap of the year at their starting point. Lockhart (1992: 15-16) observes that “virtually all altepetl have maintained the tradition of being settled in their sixteenth-century form by immigrants (most often refugees from separation from the legendary Tula or hunter-gatherer people). term of coverage).” In pictorial histories they are often shown leaving Aztlán or leaving Chicomoztoc ("Seven Caves"), sometimes both in the same manuscript.
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FIG. 16 The cartographic history of Cuauhtinchan is bound in Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, fols. 35v–36r (after Boban 1891, atlas: pl. 50).
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Fig. 17 Codex Xolotl, map 1 (after Dibble 1980).
Fig. 18 Codex Mexicanus, p. 18, the Aztecs leave Aztlán in the year 1 Flint (after 1952 ed.). 185
Elizabeth Hill Boone Pictorial histories, like the written annal histories that follow, are all locally biased; each focuses on events pertaining to one or sometimes a few political entities. None provide a general history of the Nahua world before the conquest in the 14th or 15th centuries. They tell the stories of their own altepetl (Lockhart 1992: 377). These histories, along with other city records and genealogies, were kept in the tlatoani's palace, ready to be brought out and read when needed. Chimalpahin gives a specific example: after rival brothers laid claim to the five kingdoms of Amaquemecan, Viceroy Mendoza in 1546 sent a prominent nahua from Xochimilco to confront the brothers and restore order. He "inspected all altepetl histories and local yearbooks in an attempt to determine the legitimate genealogy of each altepetl" (Schroeder 1991: 79). Spanish administrative strategies put many of these indigenous pictorial documents into service. As Charles Gibson (1964: 33-37) admirably explained, the Spanish authorities deliberately sponsored and encouraged a form of native self-government, the post-conquest Cabecera dynasties. By eliminating the imperial tributary system and political overlap, they returned to the pre-imperial level of altepetl centers and established the cabecera as the fundamental unit of political and economic organization. Those communities that had been altepetl—the capitals of communal kingdoms ruled by tlatoque—automatically became cabeceras, with subjects or tributary cities below them. James Lockhart (1991: 9) noted that an altepetl was defined in part by its tradition of ethnic distinction, in part by its ownership of a given territory, and in part by its dynastic ruler, the tlatoani. Gibson (1964: 36) points out that “two circumstances. . . interfered with an absolute equality of the Tlatoani communities with the colonial capitals”. The first was that the Spaniards used the term señores, señores principales, señores naturales or caciques instead of tlatoani. “The fact that they did not use the local Nahuatl title in Mexico had important implications, as it meant that Indians could call themselves caciques and communities could call themselves cabeceras, without meeting the original criteria” (Gibson 1964: 36). The second circumstance was that opportunities opened up “for exceptions to the rule, not least because, over time, the original rules ceased to be in force. . . . Not all Tlatoani peoples could be identified in the early postconquest period, and arguments could be made to support or oppose colonial cabecera status” (Gibson 1964: 36). Here pictorial codices came into play. Indigenous painted histories, genealogies, and community maps contained the necessary evidence for ethnicity, territory, and political independence over time. It is in this light that we must look at manuscripts such as the Tepexpan Strip (Fig. 19). La Tira is a long history of annals for the relatively smaller altepetl of Tepexpan and the Mexican imperial capital of Tenochtitlan (Noguez 1978). At the
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FIG. 19 Tepexpan strip, pg. 10, for 8 Cane (1435) to 9 House (1449). Photo courtesy of the National Library, Paris, Fondo Mexicano 13–14.
on a long leather strap, successive years are read from left to right, from 1298 to 1590. Key events in Tepexpan's history are painted above the year line and the history of Tenochtitlan is painted below. Occasionally, the two succeeding stories intersect, and the painter is careful to show these connections: for example, that a Mexica princess married the lord of Tepexpan (year 13 Flint, 1440) (Fig. 19). The Triple Alliance city Texcoco, which ruled Tepexpan in the days before the conquest, is not mentioned much. Instead, the painter presents Tepexpan as an independent state with its own founding event, which, not coincidentally, predates the founding event of Tenochtitlan. La Tira locates the foundation of Tepexpan at 11 Conejo (1334) and locates the foundation of Tenochtitlán thirty-five years later at 7 House (1369), instead of 2 House (1325) as usual in Mexica histories. In doing so, the painter clearly highlights Tepexpan's antiquity as a form of government. With the arrival of the Spaniards in 1 Caña (1519), pictorial history does not stop; there is no destruction of native mentalities or disruption. Instead, the history painter incorporated Spanish newcomers into the story (Fig. 20). For 1 Reed, the cross and the dove mark the arrival of the Christian faith, and the European figure painted below is presented as Cortés. next year go
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FIG. 20 Tepexpan strip, pg. 15, for 12 House (1517) to 6 Flint (1524). Photo courtesy of the National Library, Paris, Fondo Mexicano 13–14.
the smallpox epidemic (signaled by a stained figure), the burning of the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlán, the death of Moctezuma and the rise and death of Cuitláhuac. Hernando Cortés Pimentel Ixtlilxóchitl, and the story continues with remarkable events. Tepexpan was just one of many cities that regularly sent tribute and provided services to Texcoco (Alva Ixtlilxochitl 1975–77, 1:335; 2:114), but Tira presents Tepexpan's history as paralleling that of the great capital of Tenochtitlán. Whether or not the Strip was created expressly to legitimize Tepexpan's head status in colonial times, it does so by effectively establishing for Tepexpan its separate ethnicity, its long history as an independent entity, and its relationship to the royal lineage in Tenochtitlan. It also shows the continuity of the Tepexpan line and indicates a favorable relationship with the conquistadors. This makes one wonder what specific circumstances led to the painting of the Tepexpan Range. There is a change in the painting style of the figures and images after 1555, indicating that one artist painted the story until the 1550s and another later continued the story until 1590.35 In 1541 the town of Temascalapa (Place of the Bath of Sweat), subject of Tepexpan, called for independence (Gibson 1964: 53). Temascalapa wit35 There also appear to be insertions and amendments to various figures, especially in the colonial section; a thorough stylistic study of Tira is required to classify them.
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Fig. 21 Strip of Tepexpan, pgs. 16–17, for 8 Reed (1539) to 9 House (1553). Photo courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Fonds Mexicain 13–14; (below) drawing detail after Mappe Tepechpan 1849.
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Elizabeth Hill Boonenesses testified that Temascalapa had always been independent until recently. Tepexpan, of course, claimed that Temascalapa had been a subject "as long as anyone can remember", that his tributes and services were paid in Tepexpan, and that he was within Tepexpan's territory. In 1552 the Audience ruled in favor of Tepexpan, but appeals carried the argument well into the 17th century. Gibson noted that "Temascalapa has cited its pre-conquest market and pagan temple as evidence of its cabecera status, while Tepexpan has argued its own great antiquity, asserting that it was founded even before Texcoco, its many pre-conquest subjects". that Temascalapa had been founded by settlers from Tepexpan. (1964: 53). The Tepexpan Strip reflects this argument (Fig. 21): The succession of Temascalapa is pictorially indicated in the House of the year 10 (1541) by footprints and a dotted line with the sign of the place of Temascalapa (a bath of sweat). Tepexpan strip; the Habsburg eagle seems to mark the fate of the petition. Later, when the Hearing officially returned Temascalapa to Tepexpan on 8 Flint (1552), this fact is also pictorially recorded by the series of dots that reconnect the sweat bath to the track of the year (Noguez 1978: 135-138). As this event is one of the last in the original story, as it was painted by the first artist, I strongly suspect that the Strip was painted with this threat to its status in mind. The original artist clearly redacted the Strip to remember Tepexpan's long history. , noble lineage and links to the royal lineage in Tenochtitlan and also to show the unbroken succession of lords; this happened in the 1550s. Then, in the climate of an ongoing dispute with Temascalapa, the Strip was later updated and updated. Although I have no evidence that this was presented as evidence in the dispute, it clearly established Tepexpan's position with respect to this dispute. Colonial Motivations Some of the paintings painted in postconquest Mexico were created with certain functions in mind: proving entitlement to land or honors, or accompanying requests for favors or exemption from onerous taxes. These, like some of the testimonies I mentioned earlier, had a singular purpose; They were created to bear witness. Others, however, were painted out of a more fundamental desire for self-identification, to preserve old memories and preserve what was left of their position. Pedigrees were important in restoring lines of descent in a time of high mortality. The stories also reconnected people with their ancestors and glorified the past stature of a political entity. The same motivations that moved the painters of post-conquest histories
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Pictorial documents and visual thinking in postconquest Mexico led later indigenous historians to write in words. The seventeenth-century Nahuatl analyst Don Domingo Muñon Chimalpahin presented himself as a member of the Amaquemec nobility (Schroeder 1991: xvi). Moving to Mexico City, he spent two decades (1600-1620) collecting information and composing his eight Relaciones de Amaquemecan Chalco y Diario so that his countrymen who had not known Chalco during its golden age could understand its greatness. Essentially, he wrote his textual history to “exalt Amaquemecan Chalco, so that everyone, but especially the [Nahuas], would know how important this place was” (Schroeder 1991: xvi, 22–23, 201). Writing around the same time, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl also wrote his own stories to highlight the greatness of the pre-conquest rulers of Texcoco, his ancestors. But where Chimalpahin appears to have been on the margins of colonial society, Alva Ixtlilxóchitl was not. As part of his noble heritage, he held ancestral lands around San Juan de Teotihuacan and held a succession of governorships in cities such as Texcoco, Tlalmanalco, and Chalco (Alva Ixtlilxochitl 1975–77, 1:9–36). He moved easily between the indigenous and Spanish hierarchies. He was also aware of his position as an heir to old histories and old historical traditions. When he finished his "Historical Compendium of the Kingdom of Texcoco" in 1608, he presented it with other materials to the governor, mayors and councilors and elders of San Salvador Quauhtlacinco and Otumba for affirmation, because the history was the history of the city of Texcoco, in the province of Otumba, the kingdom of the Acolhuas (Alva Ixtlilxochitl 1975–77, 1: 517–521). The “Compendium” would not have been a valid document in their eyes or in their eyes without his affirmation (which, of course, they gave). Alva Ixtlilxóchitl was also aware of and located within the European historical tradition. In the dedication of his "Summary report of the general history of this New Spain" of 1625, addressed to Archbishop Juan Pérez de la Serna, he declared: "Since my adolescence I had a great desire to know the ancient history of this New World, which was nothing less than the history of the Romans, Greeks, Medes and other republics that were famous in the world” (Alva Ixtlilxochitl 1975-77, 1: 525) The difference is that many indigenous historians for much of the sixteenth century still conceptualized history in visual terms. They were painting the stories rather than writing the words into a literal narrative, just as Nahua leaders painted their complaints to the Spanish authorities in the 1550s. Unlike Chimalpahin and Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, the painters and their patrons have so far remained anonymous for us.
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The pre-conquest tradition of handwritten painting survived because the paintings contained valuable information for both Nahuas and Spaniards in the 16th century. During the conquest itself, news reports told Moctezuma about Cortés and the other Spanish intruders shortly after his arrival; in turn, the paintings informed Cortés about the warriors sent against him in the field of Tlaxcallan, and later how he could establish his route to Guatemala. Soon after the conquest, the Spaniards sought tribute paintings to restore and re-establish the flow of these goods and services; the nahuas also saved them to use when their side needed to be represented. The stories satisfied the need on all sides to understand how the peoples of Mexico got to where they are today and how existing relationships with other forms of government and peoples around them were established. All this knowledge was contained in the painted books. The upheaval of conquest and the extirpation of idols burned much of the manuscript corpus and forever destroyed the burgeoning religious genre. Most other forms, however, survived the conquest, reemerging to fill their former niches. This happened because the Nahua continued to think visually and express themselves in pictorial terms, despite the introduction of alphabetic writing. They kept painted records of their lands and cities and the goods and services they provided; they brought pictorial statements to court; and they continued to paint their histories and genealogies. The Spaniards had no choice but to accept the painted world of the Nahuas if they were to manage the land and people efficiently. They accepted pictorial illustrations as evidence in litigation and petitions, regarding them as documents analogous to their own alphabetical records, though less efficient in their eyes. use in your own ethnographic projects. Spaniards commissioned painted books of their own design to illustrate indigenous customs. The Nahuas, in turn, continued to value the old traditional forms as depositaries of their identity. The importance of the pictorials resided in their status as documents. They were more than just the "booklets" or memory aids that Lockhart (1992: 335) sees in them, where the content of the topic is actually contained in the sentence or interpretation that can emerge from them. Instead, we have seen that the Nahuas and Spaniards saw paintings as their own documentary basis; oral explanations were ancillary and explanatory. The statements painted in the court cases of the idols of the Templo Mayor, the
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The pictorial documents and visual thinking in postconquest Mexico, the excesses of services rendered to members of the Audiencia, and the tribute paid by Huejotzingo, were all authenticated by court secretaries; they themselves brought and thus documented the fundamental facts and accusations. History paintings were also seen as the "original stories" by chroniclers, who translated them into alphabetic texts. Throughout the early alphabetic annals and histories, there are references to the early pictorial manuscripts from which the alphabetic texts are derived. . .” The textual histories are oral explanations of the paintings, transcribed alphabetically, but the chroniclers know they are simply copying and completing. This faith in the authenticity of pictorial records and their documentary power continued throughout the sixteenth century. Then, much later, it manifested itself everywhere in the revival of pictorialism in native land titles. Seventeenth-century Techialoyan codices are archaic documents that use inks to give an air of authenticity (Wood 1989, n.d.; Borah 1991). Wood said that “indigenous peoples were asked to send paintings from their land, and if they didn’t have it, they would prepare a set” (sd: 300–362). The primary titles, which Wood writes about in this volume, occasionally also feature paintings, and the aim of these paintings is to impact the veracity and tradition in the titles. In the creation of these title deeds we see clearly that the paintings remain in the minds of the Nahua as fundamental documents.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY ACOSTA, JOSÉ DE 1979 Natural and moral history of the Indies (Edmundo O'Gorman, ed.). Reprint of the 2nd ed. Economic Culture Fund, Mexico. ALVA IXTLILXOCHITL, FERNANDO DE 1975–77 Historical Works (Edmundo O'Gorman, ed.). 2 vol. Institute of Historical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. ANAYA MONROY, FERNANDO 1965 Indigenous toponymy in the history and culture of Tlaxcala. Institute of Historical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. ANDERSON, ARTHUR J. O., FRANCES F. BERDAN AND JAMES LOCKHART 1976 Beyond the Codices: The Nahua View of Colonial Mexico. University of California Press, Berkeley. BAUDOT, GEORGES 1983 Utopia and History in Mexico: The First Chroniclers of Mexican Civilization (1520 - 1569) (Vincente González Loscertales, trans.). Espasa-Calpe, Madrid. BERDAN, FRANCES F., AND PATRICIA RIEFF ANAWALT (EDS.) 1992 The Codex Mendoza. 4 vol. University of California Press, Berkeley. BOBAN, EUGÈNE 1891 Documents pour serving à l'histoire de Mexique. 2 vol. and atlas. E. Leroux, Paris. BOONE, ELIZABETH HILL 1989 Incarnations of the Aztec Supernatural: The Image of Huitzilopochtli in Mexico and Europe. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 79 (2). Philadelphia. 1994 Aztec pictorial histories: records without words. In Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Elizabeth H. Boone and Walter Mignolo, eds.): 50–76. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C. BORAH, WOODROW 1991 Another look at the Techialoyan codices. In Land and Politics in the Valley of Mexico: A Two Thousand Year Perspective (H. R. Harvey, ed.): 209–221. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. CLINE, HOWARD F. 1966 The Map of the Oztoticpac Lands of Texcoco, 1540. The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 23(2): 77–115. 1968 The Map of the Oztoticpac Lands of Texcoco, 1540: Other Notes. 37th International Congress of Americanists, Buenos Aires, 3: 119–137. Good airs. CLINE, S. L. 1984 A legal process at the local level: division of property in late sixteenth-century Culhuacan. In Five Centuries of Law and Politics in Central Mexico (Ronald Spores and Ross Hassig, eds.): 39–53. Vanderbilt Publications in Anthropology, 30. Nashville, Tenn.
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Pictorial documents and visual thought in post-conquest Culhuacan colonial Mexico, 1580-1600. The social history of an Aztec city. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. THE FEJEVER-MAYER CODE 1971 The Fever-Mayer Codex, 12014 M, Liverpool City Museums (C. A. Burland, ed.). Academic druck- u. Publisher, Graz. THE KINGSBOROUGH CODE 1912 The Kingsborough Codex. Memorial of the Tepetlaoztoc Indians to the Spanish monarch against the town's encomenderos. . . . . . . . . (Francisco del Pase y Tronco, ed.). Hauser and Menet, Madrid. CODEX MENDOZA: see Berdan and Anawalt 1992. CODEX MEXICANUS 1952 Commentary on Codex Mexicanus no. 23–24 of the National Library of Paris (Ernst Mengin, ed.). Journal of the Society of Americanists 41: 387–498, with a separate facsimile of the accompanying codex. CODEX OSUNA 1973 Painting of the governor, mayors and councilors of Mexico (Vicenta Cortés Alonso, trans. and ed.). 2 vol. Directorate General of Archives and Libraries, Ministry of Education and Science, Madrid. CODEX XOLOTL 1980 Codex Xolotl (Charles E. Dibble, ed.). Publications of the Historical Research Institute. National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. COLUMN. OF DOCUMENTS. UNPRECEDENTED 1870 Collection of unpublished documents concerning the discovery, conquest and organization of the former Spanish possessions in America and Oceania, vol. 13. Jose Maria Pérez, Madrid. CORTES, HERNÁN 1986 Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico (Anthony Pagden, trans. and ed.). Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. Díaz del Castillo, Bernal 1956 The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–1521 (Genaro García, ed.; Irving A. Leonard, trans.). Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, New York. DIBBLE, CHARLES E.: see Codex Xolotl 1980. DURAN, DIEGO 1964 The Aztecs: A History of the Indians of New Spain. Orion Press, New York. 1971 The Book of Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar (Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden, eds. and trans.). University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. FERNANDEZ, MIGUEL ANGEL 1992 The Indian Jerusalem: the Mexican convent-fortress of the 16th century. Cardboard and Cardboard Smurfit from Mexico, Mexico. GARCÍA ICAZBALCETA, JOAQUÍN (ED.) 1941 New collection of documents for the history of Mexico, vol. 3. Orchard, Zurita, Old Relationships. 2nd ed. Chavez Hayhoe, Mexico. GIBSON, CHARLES 1964 The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. 1986
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Elizabeth Hill Boone GLASS, JOHN B. 1975 A Census of Testerian Manuscripts from Central America. In Handbook of Middle American Indians (Robert Wauchope and Howard F. Cline, eds.) 14: 281–296. University of Texas Press, Austin. GLASS, JOHN B., IN COLLABORATION WITH DONALD ROBERTSON 1975 Census of Native American Pictorial Manuscripts. In Handbook of Middle American Indians (Robert Wauchope and Howard F. Cline, eds.) 14: 81–252. University of Texas Press, Austin. GREENLEAF, RICHARD E. 1961 Zumarraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536–1543. Academy of American Franciscan History, Washington, DC. HARVEY, HERBERT R. 1991 The maps of the Oztoticpac lands: a reexamination. In Land and Politics in the Valley of Mexico: A Two-Thousand-Year Perspective (H. R. Harvey, ed.): 163–185. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. HERRERA AND TORDESILLAS, ANTONIO DE 1601-1615 General history of the actions of the Castilians in the islands i Tierra Firme del Mar Oceano. 4 vol. Royal Enterprise, Madrid. HISTORY OF THE MEXICANS THROUGH THEIR PAINTINGS 1941 History of the Mexicans through their paintings. In New collection of documents for the history of Mexico, vol. 3. Pomar, Zurita, Ancient Relations (Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta, ed.): 209–240. 2nd ed. Chavez Hayhoe, Mexico. KUBLER, GEORGE AND CHARLES GIBSON 1951 The Tovar Calendar: An Illustrated Mexican Manuscript ca. 1585. Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 11. New Haven, Connecticut; THE HOUSES, BARTOLOMEU, 1967 A Short History of Apologetics (Edmund O'Gorman, ed.). 2 vol. Institute of Historical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. LEIBSOHN, DANA 1994 Cardboards for Memory: Cartographic Stories and Nahua Identity. In Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Elizabeth H. Boone and Walter Mignolo, eds.): 161–187. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, s.f. The Toltec-Chichimeca History: Collecting Identity in a Nahua Manuscript. Doctor. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1993. LEÓN-PORTILLA, MIGUEL 1969 Ramírez de Fuenleal and Mexican Antiquities. Nahuatl Cultural Studies 8: 9–49. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 1974 Harkness Collection at the Library of Congress. Manuscripts in Mexico, A Guide (J. Benedict Warren, trans.). Library of Congress, Washington, DC. LISS, PEGGY K. 1975 Mexico under Spain, 1521–1556: Society and the Origins of Nationality. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
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Pictorial Documents and Visual Thought in Post-Conquest Mexico LOCKHART, JAMES 1991 Nahuas and Spaniards: History and Philology of Post-Conquest Central Mexico. Nahuatl Studies Series 3, Publications of the UCLA Latin American Center. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. 1992 The Nahua after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, 16th to 18th Centuries. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. LOPEZ DE GOMARA, FRANCISCO 1964 Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary (Lesley Byrd Simpson, trans. and ed.). University of California Press, Berkeley. LOPEZ-BARALT, MERCEDES 1988 Icon and achievement: Guama Poma de Ayala. Hyperion, Madrid. MARTYR OF ANGLERIA, PEDRO [MÁRTIR D'ANGHIERA, PEDRO] 1964 Decades of the New World (Edmundo O'Gorman, ed.; Augustine Millares Charles, trans.). José Porrua and Sons, Mexico. MATHES, W. MICHAEL 1985 The First Academic Library in America, Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. California State Library, Sacramento. MENDIETA, GERONIMO DE 1971 Ecclesiastical History of the Indies (Joaquín García Icazbalceta, ed.). Facsimile of ed. of 1870. Editorial Porrúa, Mexico. MOTOLINIA, [TORIBIO DE BENAVENTE] 1951 History of the Indians of New Spain by Motolinía (Francis Borgia Steck, trans. and ed.). Franciscan American Academy of History, Washington, DC. 1971 Memoirs or Book of Things of New Spain and Its Natives (Edmundo O'Gorman, ed.). Institute of Historical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. 1973 History of the Indians of New Spain (Edmundo O'Gorman, ed.). Editorial Porrua, Mexico. NICHOLSON, H. B. 1971 Religion in Pre-Hispanic Central Mexico. In Handbook of Middle American Indians (eds.) 10: 92–134. University of Texas Press, Austin. 1992 The History of Codez Mendoza. In The Mendoza Codex (Frances F. Berdan and Patricia R. Anawalt, eds.) 1:1–11. University of California Press, Berkeley. NOGUEZ, XAVIER (ED.) 1978 Tepechpan Range. Colonial Codex of the Valley of Mexico. 2 vol. Encyclopedic Library of the State of Mexico, Mexico. NORMANN, ANNE WHITED s.d. Testerian Codices: Hieroglyphic Catechisms for the Conversion of Natives in New Spain. Doctor. dissertation, Tulane University, 1985. NUTTALL, ZELIA 1911 Bishop Zumárraga and the main idols of the Great Temple of Mexico. Journal of the Society of Americanists, n.s., 8: 153–171.
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Elizabeth Hill Boone OFFNER, JEROME A. 1984 Household Organization in the Texcocan Heartland: The Evidence in Codex Vergara. In Explorations in Ethnohistory: Indians of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century (H. R. Harvey and Hanns J. Prem, eds.): 127–146. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. ORIGIN OF THE MEXICANS 1941 Origin of the Mexicans. In New collection of documents for the history of Mexico, vol. 3. Pomar, Zurita, Ancient Relations (Joaquín García Icazbalceta, ed.): 256–280. 2nd ed. Chavez Hayhoe, Mexico. PADDEN, JOHN 1967 The Hummingbird and the Falcon. Ohio State University Press, Columbus. PALOMERA, ESTEBAN J. 1988 Fray Diego Valadés, o.f.m., humanist evangelizer of New Spain: The man, his time and his work. Iberoamerican University, Mexico. PASO Y TRONCOSO, FRANCISCO DEL 1912 Pictorial writing, Kingsborough Codex, what it teaches us. 18th International Congress of Americanists, London, 1912, part 2: 455–460. London. POMAR, JUAN BAUTISTA 1941 Texcoco report. In New collection of documents for the history of Mexico, vol. 3. Pomar, Zurita, Ancient Relations (Joaquín García Icazbalceta, ed.): 1–64, 2nd ed. Chavez Hayhoe, Mexico. PROCESS 1910 Criminal proceedings by the Holy Office of the Inquisition and the Prosecutor on his behalf against Don Carlos, the main Indian of Tezcoco (Luis González Obregón, ed.). Publications of the General and Public Archives of the Nation, 1. Mexico. JUDGMENTS 1912 Trials of idolatrous Indians and sorcerers. Publications of the General Archive of the Nation, 3. Mexico. LIST OF GENEALOGY 1941 List of the genealogy and lineage of the Lords who ruled this land of New Spain. In New collection of documents for the history of Mexico, vol. 3. Pomar, Zurita, Old Relations (Joaquín García Icazbalceta, ed.): 240–256. 2nd ed. Chavez Hayhoe, Mexico. RICARD, ROBERT 1966 The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and Methods of Evangelization of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain: 1523-1573 (Lesley Byrd Simpson, trans.). University of California Press, Berkeley. ROBERTSON, DONALD 1959 Early Colonial Mexican Manuscript Painting: The Metropolitan Schools. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. 1966 Mexican Encyclopedia of the 16th Century by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. World History Notebooks 9(3): 617–627. SAHAGÚN, BERNARDINO DE 1959–81 Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain (Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, trans. and eds.). 12 books in 13 vols. School of American Research, Santa Fe, N.M., and University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
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Pictorial Documents and Visual Thought in Post-Conquest Mexico SCHROEDER, SUSAN 1991 Chimalpahin and the Kingdoms of Chalco. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. SIMÉON, RÉMI 1981 Dictionary of the Nahuatl or Mexican language (Josefina Oliva de Coll, trans.). 21st century, Mexico. SIMPSON, LESLEY BYRD 1982 The Encomienda in New Spain The beginnings of Spanish Mexico. Pocket Edition. University of California Press, Berkeley. TAPIA, ANDRÉS DE 1980 Report made by Mr. Andrés de Tapia on the conquest of Mexico. In Collection of Documents for the History of Mexico (Joaquín García Icazbalceta, ed.) 2: 554–594. 2nd facsimile edition. Editorial Porrua, Mexico. TAYLOR, WILLIAM 1972 Landowner and peasant in colonial Oaxaca. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. TIPEXPAN STRIP: see Noguez 1978. VALADÉS, DIEGO 1579 Christian rhetoric adapted to the use of preaching and prayer with examples of both faculties inserted in their place; which, indeed, were drawn to a great extent from the histories of the Indians. Therefore, in addition to learning, the greatest pleasure will also be obtained. Petrumiacobum Petrutius, Perugia. VIGIL, RALPH H. 1987 Alonso de Zorita: Royal Judge and Christian Humanist, 1512-1585. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. WILLIAMS, BARBARA J. 1984 Mexican cadastral pictorial records: an analysis of the Santa María Assunção codex and the Vergara codex. In Explorations in Ethnohistory: Indians of Central Mexico in the XVI Century (Herbert R. Harvey and Hanns J. Prem, eds.): 103–125. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. 1991 The Lands and Political Organization of a Rural Tlaxilacalli in Tepetlaoztoc, c. A. 1540. In Land and Politics in the Valley of Mexico: A Two Thousand Year Perspective (H. R. Harvey, ed.): 187–208. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. WILLIAMS, BARBARA J. E H. R. HARVEY 1988 Content, provenance and meaning of Codex Vergara and Codex Santa María Asunción. American Antiquity 53(2): 337–351. WOOD, STEPHANIE 1989 Don Diego García de Mendoza Moctezuma: A genius of technology? Studies of Nahautl Culture 19: 245–268. North Dakota. Corporate Adjustments in Colonial Mexican Indigenous Peoples: The Toluca Region, 1550–1810. Doctor. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984. ZEITLIN, JUDITH F. AND LILLIAN THOMAS 1992 Spanish Justice and the Indian Chief: Disjunctive Political Systems in Sixteenth Century Tehuantepec. Ethnohistory 39(3): 285–315. ZORITA, ALONSO DE 1963 Life and Work in Ancient Mexico. Brief and Summarized Account of the Lords of New Spain (Benjamin Keen, trans. and ed.). Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J. 199
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The social context vs. Legal Nahuatl Titles STEPHANIE WOOD UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
AN
ALMOST SINCE THEIR FIRST ARRIVAL ON EARTH,
natives of the western hemisphere were asked by foreigners to produce any records that might show the extent of their territories, and early Mexico was no exception. Conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1963: 266) refers, among other indigenous paintings, to a large canvas illustrating geographic features covering some 400 miles of Gulf coast. As more Europeans settled in what they called New Spain and indigenous populations began to recover from devastating diseases inadvertently introduced by foreigners, competition for scarce resources increased and the demand for written records of land claims increased. This is the context in which the Nahuatl manuscripts known as primordial titles emerged in communities in central Mexico from the 17th century onwards (Fig. 1).1 Primordial titles are municipal histories in the indigenous language that contain extensive descriptions of communities. territorial boundaries and land tenure. Numerous examples survive, most of them preserved because they were presented during the territorial disputes of the late 17th and 18th centuries to the viceroyalty authorities as substitutes for lost or nonexistent Spanish-language titles (mercedes reales, letters de venta, and the like). 2 Despite the fact that primordial titles rarely conform to the accepted Ibe1, the best description of the title genre can be found in Lockhart 1991, but see also Gibson 1975: 320–321. The Gibson and Glass census (1975) contains examples of titles in languages other than Nahuatl. 2 The strong emphasis on primordial titles in land surveys has led scholars such as Enrique Florescano to describe them as attempts to “try to legitimize, with Spanish procedures and usages, their ancestral rights to land, expressed in the forms imposed by the conqueror . . .” when the more traditional types of property deeds (mercedes, deeds, wills) were lacking. See Enrique Florescano, Mexican memory. Essay on the reconstruction of the past: pre-Hispanic times –1821 (Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, S. A. de C. V., Grupo Editorial Planeta, Mexico, 1987), 167.
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The social context vs. Legal titles in Nahuatl
Fig. 1 Example of title sheet for Santos Reyes (Chalco region). General Archive of the Nation, Tierras Collection (hereinafter AGN T) 3032, 3: 275v. Photograph courtesy of the General Archive of the Nation, Mexico.
Ryan's bureaucratic conventions were sometimes accepted by judges as legitimate records, but were ignored or dismissed by colonial authorities as frauds as long as they were accepted. It is true that, from a strictly Spanish point of view, the primordial titles could be described as unorthodox, but the Spanish point of view in this case is not relevant. Titles are not fraud and are much more than simple registrations. Joint descriptions of corporate boundaries are surprisingly upbeat local indigenous remembrances of the Spanish conquest, gleeful tales of voluntary Catholic conversion, church building, and proud declarations that Hernando
Stephanie Wood Cortés, the first viceroys or Charles V granted land to the community and its helpful rulers. Indeed, at the core of the main titles is a wholly indigenous vision that seems to have a decidedly pre-conquest origin and a very broad set of purposes and functions. Containing both textual and pictorial elements, most of these documents evolved from pre-contact and post-conquest oral accounts of events related to the local altepetl (Nahua city-state or provincial unit). They were written primarily for an indigenous audience by rising native men. operating outside the scrutiny of Spanish priests or colonial magistrates. Most of them were not produced by official Nahua notaries or historians, such as the renowned Chimalpahin. Because of this, they contain inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies that have put the manuscripts in a precarious position with Spanish bureaucrats (see Lockhart 1991; 1992: 410–418).3 One particularly unusual manifestation of titles, now known as Techialoyan Codices, may even contain reconstructions of pre-Columbian elements and conscious archaisms (see Robertson 1975; Borah 1991; Wood 1989; Harvey 1986; and Lockhart 1992: 414). For modern scholars, overriding titles can be eloquent documents, filled with local indigenous traditions and rich perspectives on the past (Lockhart 1991). They provide a glimpse into the process by which local elites, at least, tried to deal intellectually with the upheavals of the conquest and the Spanish system. With these basic insights in mind, the following discussion aims to gain a clearer understanding of the context that produced the manuscripts and some of their most revealing features, often immersed in a process in which indigenous historical traditions were sidetracked by legal claims. open expectations. In the sometimes conflicting context, how did the primordial titles continue to function as mechanisms for preserving the conceptions of corporate life and for proclaiming the rights and statutes of certain individuals, families and political factions in cities? Can ethnohistorians gain further insight into indigenous thought and life by accepting primordial titles on their own terms, illuminating the legitimacy they held for indigenous audiences within?4 The central analytical questions raised by primordial titles 3 Unfortunately, we don't know certainly who wrote these manuscripts (although they sometimes contain the names of notaries that have not yet been verified) or exactly when they were written. They appear to be an accumulation of information collected by various people over time. Furthermore, these people have never hesitated to revise and embellish. We must renounce the comforting concept of a single author and an “original” copy, in favor of a “continuous process”, and there is never a “end result”, but multiple, time-anchored, self-serving or factional versions. 4 Several scholars have raised these questions before, but new examples from manuscripts and
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The social versus legal context of Nahuatl titles can no longer be restricted to the accuracy or relevance of the individual "facts" found in them. It is increasingly clear that the sociocultural implications of these events, the way these events are presented and remembered, are much more significant.5 THE CONTEXT
The Spanish conquest did not have the same impact on all communities in central Mexico, nor did it reach all of them at the same time. Some cities resisted and others quickly surrendered; a good number chose to serve as an ally to the European intruders. Civil and ecclesiastical representatives of the new holders of power in Mexico City sometimes took years to reach the indigenous peoples we now include in the culturally, politically, and demographically defined “core area” (Lockhart and Schwartz 1983: 34). Despite the occasionally dramatic battles of conquest and massive loss of life that occurred with the sixteenth-century epidemics, these unofficial municipal histories from central Mexico tend to emphasize positive events that, in retrospect, seem to have strengthened the city. In addition to recalling pre-Columbian migrations and early settlements, they record the arrival of Spaniards like Hernando Cortés, the victories of the friars over reluctant converts, the later construction of churches, the recognition by civil authorities of the local indigenous council, and the ceremonies that involved surveying territories. Limits. These events, correctly or perhaps incorrectly remembered (or even recreated), help to reconstruct the possible context in which the earliest colonial memory of a given community was born.6 Spanish authorities, whether ecclesiastical or
Additional contextual information continues to emerge, helping resolve lingering questions. The present analysis of the title is based on a corpus of manuscripts from the Toluca Valley, the Cuernavaca region, the Chalco area, the Mexico Valley, and, because I include Techialoyan manuscripts, the territory covered in Donald Robertson's map (1975: fig 92). See Wood (1991: 180 and note 4) for a list of manuscript-specific citations for the most common types of titles. A study of comparable Maya material by Matthew Restall (1991) is an indication of the geographic and cultural breadth that these investigations may eventually reach. 5 What Frank Salomon (in this volume, 266) says about “multiple theaters of remembrance with different functional properties and criteria of truth” could easily be applied to those intracommunity Nahua provincial records that provide access to rare voices outside the chronicles and “forums . administrative and legal” that comprise most of our ethnohistorical sources and are much better known. 6 Pre-Hispanic memory and the methods that preserved it possibly also contributed to post-contact record keeping traditions. 204
Stephanie Wood's own Guardians. A vicar once pointed out a characteristic of the Nahuas that reflected Spanish culture: “they think that with writing you gain a point.”7 Both groups recognized the importance of each other's writing. Bernal Díaz (1963: 393) recalls some caciques who asked Cortés for a letter “because they knew that when we sent a message or a request it was always on paper. . . .” We can therefore assume that both groups kept some record of the events associated with the first colonial reorderings of indigenous peoples. Various official and unofficial copies of these documents written in Spanish and/or Nahuatl, probably progressively fragmented over time and embellished with oral traditions, likely constituted the seed from which the primordial title would sprout in the 17th or 18th century. then be fertilized with a desire to negotiate a group's identity, reshaping the past if necessary. The Indians used to make pictorial representations of the community lands and it is known that they brought them before their kings, like Moctezuma. Again, Bernal Díaz (1963: 248) writes, for example, When a cacique came before the great Moctezuma. . . he presented a drawing or painting on sisal fabric, which represented the cause or question for which he had come, and indicated the grounds of his claim with a thin, polished stick. Attached to Montezuma were two 7 AGN T 1530, 5:13v. The short form of citations represents the file or volume number first, followed by the file (file) number and, if known, the folio (sheet) number (with “r” for straight or straight, and “v” for reverse , or back). The way in which the Nahua attached great importance to writing and painting contrasts with the Andean preference for the “tactile and visual” discussed by Tom Cummins in this volume (p. 95). However, James Lockhart (in this volume, 33) also points to the probably abundant and mundane colonial Quechua manuscripts that may one day shed new light on the adoption of writing systems by Andean natives, much earlier than previously thought. 8 Lockhart (1992: 411) places the titles in his Stage 3 of colonial or post-1650 Mexican periodization, as described in his essay in this volume (pp. 34, 53). That rings true enough, although some manuscripts may fall just short of that mark. The titles from Capulhuac in the Toluca Valley mention a territorial dispute in 1634 (Wood n.d.c: 328–329, 339) that may have provided the impetus for the composition of this manuscript. Likewise, a dispute at nearby Metepec in the 1640s may have spawned the Codex Metepec. The Carrillo family stands out both in the dispute and in the titles. See Jarquín O. 1990: 45; Garibay K. 1949. Robertson (1975: 263–264) and Harvey (1986: 160–163), among others, discuss the dates of the Techialoyan manuscripts, a gender-deviating subgroup of the title. I found additional contextual dates of 1703 and 1696 (see Wood 1989: 255, 258). Furthermore, Santiago Capulhuac's Techialoyan-style manuscript (not San Bartolomé Capulhuac's titles) was transcribed in 1683-1684 (AGN T 180, 3). Robertson's hypothesis of a period "after 1640-1680 and before c. 1733” (1960: 123) is plausible enough, in my opinion. I imagine that most Techialoyans were prepared around the turn of the century, spurred on by late compositional procedures and the 1695 decision on the "six hundred rods".
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The Social Context vs. Legal of Nahuatl Titles the Elders, who were great Caciques; and when they had well understood the allegations, these judges gave Moctezuma the rights of the case, which he then settled in a few words, whereby the ownership of the lands or villages in question was decided. As Elizabeth Boone points out (in this volume, 183), most Nahua peoples had their own pictorial collections. Fray Diego Durán (1971: 65) recognized the indigenous reliance on local manuscripts in this period, and Boone cites a quote (p. 159) to reinforce this: “. . . The Indians find it difficult to give explanations, unless they can consult the book of their people”. Boone also reminds us (p. 149) of how the Spanish authorities accepted and respected native pictorial manuscripts, which explains in part their survival until about 1600. But increasingly, and certainly in the seventeenth century, the pictorial was merged with the textual as people became literate. in nahuatl. (using the Roman alphabet taught to them by Spanish priests) began compiling primordial titles, or what some call village land books, among other more mundane records. vital to the communities that owned them. Various formal programs across the Spanish colony region seem to have encouraged native determination to keep such records. In the middle of the 16th century, the first policies of population concentration were implemented, which affected several towns in the center. The recognition of city councils and the delimitation of boundaries, two common features in primary titles, probably accompanied the concentration process. A title from Ocoyoacac (originally Ocoyacac), in what is now the State of Mexico, recalls how in August 1556 people were brought from the periphery to settle in their community while the viceroy granted a land grant to the city. “Some came, others were afraid and didn't want to come”, but they were finally conquered, according to the titles. At the end, the boundaries were marked in a special ceremony that included blowing trumpets, shooting arrows, handing over flowers, hugging neighbors and, finally, sharing a meal (AGN T 2998, 3: 30r -v). The impetus behind this process may have come from the colonizers, but the celebration has a certain indigenous flavor.10 9 James Lockhart (1992: 345-372) examines the transition from pictographic texts to alphabetic texts in central Mexico. 10 Speculating on the pre-Columbian origin of such a border ritual and its recording, Lockhart (1991: 56) reminds us how deviant and "strange" such material is in parallel Spanish documents. Other scholars of Mesoamerican traditions have also asked me whether these records, especially the titles describing the ritual, could have served as a basis for enacting the historical drama. The possibility is intriguing. The border
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Stephanie Wood's Indian mediators, called judges, sometimes kept careful records of these mid-sixteenth-century assembly proceedings [Wood s.d.: 384]. A visit (official visit, investigation, research) carried out by Don Pablo González, an indigenous judge, in the Toluca Valley, seems to have provided information that was later incorporated into the primordial titles of San Pedro Totoltepec. This last document appeared recently and clearly belongs to the Techialoyan genre. He notes jurisdictional disputes from the time of Axayácatl and Moctezuma – part of the content of the González report – and refers to documents held by the city of Toluca (Wood 1989: 249–252). González's report only partially survives today; the fate of the rest is unknown, but some of their papers were in the hands of one of their supposed descendants, Mrs. Margarita Villafranca González de la Cruz, in the mid-18th century (Fernández de Recas 1961: 137-143). Her father, by the way, probably left her the papers; was a forger of community land grants who worked in Spanish and served towns throughout the Toluca Valley and into Mexico (Wood 1987).11 Another example of sixteenth-century reports of indigenous mediators affecting title content comes from the Tepotzotlan area . It is contained in the Coacalco Codex, a manuscript that combines the tradition of titles with annals and genealogical genres; this combination of annals and genealogies represents the other veins of Nahua historical writing that encompassed the European conquest, one following a strict chronological organization and the other focusing on the kinship ties of a family or individual to prominent ancestors.12 The Codex Coacalco (on paper) and with considerable text) tells of an indigenous ruler in this town near Tepotzotlán who was baptized in the presence of Cortés. It is said that one of the descendants of the local ruler later served as a judge in
The research element, “holding hands like brothers”, in the Mayan manuscript that Restall (1991: 124) examines, evokes a physical act. He describes it as “such a real event. . . and a linguistic formula”. There are certainly also a lot of dialogues in the titles that could serve as a script. 11 Indeed, Villafranca's craft involved what we might describe as “blatant and blatant forgery” – in the words of Woodrow Borah (1984: 31) – its methodology differs considerably from what I perceive as the production of primordial Nahuatl titles. See Carrillo Cázares 1991 for other examples of suspect titles in Spanish. Another Indian judge whose legacy may have contributed to the compilation of later titles in the Toluca Valley is Don Miguel de San Bartolomé, an important historical figure of San Bartolomé Capulhuac. His father figures prominently in community titles as the city's founder. See Wood n.d.c: 335. 12 As Elizabeth Boone points out (in this volume, 181), genders regularly overlapped in central New Spain. However, each vein continues to retain certain distinguishable characteristics. James Lockhart (1992: 376-392) discusses the annals genre in considerable detail. 207
The social context vs. legal title of the Nahuatl Titles in charge of examining the tlalamatl, or indigenous territorial documents. Presumably this officer, Don Esteban de Guzmán, left records that could have been incorporated into the codex, a manuscript in the service of the family and community. This part text, part pictorial has links to the Techialoyan group, and Techialoyan expert Donald Robertson suggests an 18th century date for the extant copy. it at least became a popular subject for later local histories, involved another round of population concentration spanning the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Once again boundaries were lifted and local councils recognized. Spanish authorities also worked to place community centers on a grid pattern, if this had not already been done. In preparation for these events, colonial judges asked communities to make a “real image of the city, its lands and waters, and bring it to their mercy. . . ”, as was the case at Tlilcuautla, modern Hidalgo, on January 6, 1599 (Simpson 1934: 57). the perspective of the Spanish judges. Perhaps later such records would be misinterpreted as "forgeries" despite their genuine origins. On two occasions, in the early seventeenth century, citizens of Metepec, present-day Mexico, when asked what papers or paintings they might have, offered to go to their town and prepare some.15 If such a scenario amuses loyalists, it also underscores the cross-cultural misconception held by so many outside observers today that they can denigrate the integrity of the producers of such “instant” titles or such titles themselves. When the second process of congregation was completed in the early 17th century, the indigenous population of central Mexico was at an all-time low. This meant that, among other losses, a small number of people
13 I have seen the copy of the codex (RARE F 1219 .C6535 LAL) held by the Latin American Library at Tulane University, New Orleans. The reference to the judge is on the page (of the Nahuatl version) marked 19 at the bottom. Robertson and Robertson (1975: 278) briefly describe the codex and its contents. 14 Lemoine (1961) recognizes that the same request was made to the people of Amecameca. These procedures probably echo similar requests made at first contact and probably again mid-century during the formation of geographic relationships, or regional geographic surveys, conducted at the request of the king. 15 AGN HJ vol. 15, 1:79v (an example from April 29, 1636). The HJ collection has both volumes (volumes) and legajos (packages), sometimes with the same numbers, hence the distinction indicated in this citation.
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Stephanie Wood was present at the ceremonies she could have performed and was able to maintain and protect a written record of research and ceremonies. Regardless of how these events were recorded, many titles retain a memory of more recent congregational activity. The primary titles of Capulhuac, in the Toluca Valley, recall that in 1604 (date verified in the Spanish registry office) an official came to grant lots of houses. At the same time, four neighborhoods were delimited, patron saints were chosen and the territory measured. Despite the fact that epidemics devastated local settlements, the authors of this account saw this era as a time when the population was growing, probably a reflection of the strengthening of the city center, even at the expense of outlying villages (Wood 1991). : 182–184 and note 14). Finally, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, indigenous communities in central New Spain experienced waves of title verification programs, called compositions.16 At that time, as had apparently happened many times before, Spanish commissioners again to submit any manuscript indicating the location of boundaries. Then, by paying a fee to the royal treasury and after settling any disputes with neighboring towns or private landlords, the authorities would legalize these manuscripts. If such records were completely absent from the outset, the Spanish account of the songwriting process would serve as a legal title. It was at about the same time that colonial officials often revised or delineated the minimum land base the law stipulated for indigenous communities, a plot that was theoretically square and measured 1,200 varas (the approximate equivalent of a yard) each side, and usually centered on the main church (Wood n.d.c: 110–194; 1990).17 BAD WORKS?
Given this long history of community concentration, land surveys and property concessions, it is not surprising that titles have evolved with a concentrated emphasis on corporate land claims. Altepetl survival (and probably cultural survival to a large extent) depended on a minimal territorial base for agriculture. ), but in my own intensive study of such programs in the Toluca Valley, the later rounds of the 1690s, 1710-1720, and 1725 affected indigenous peoples much more directly. They also overturned (annulled or confirmed) previous decisions. 17 Legal allotment, which originated in the 16th century in a slightly different form, was popularly called “six hundred sticks” from 1687 onwards, but came to be known as legal fund in the 1790s or later. Outside the central area, the allocation tended to be higher.
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The social versus legal context of Nahuatl titles, grazing, timber harvesting and resource extraction for pottery, carpentry and the like. Establishing a city's latifundio was, as Bernal Díaz's quote already illustrates, a concern in pre-Columbian times. The location of borders was also a type of information continually requested by the Spaniards to determine which lands were "unoccupied" (in their opinion) and therefore eligible for distribution to private settlers in royal grants. The evolving Nahuatl-language texts and illustrations preserved in many communities would therefore occasionally end up as evidence in land litigation, likely contributing to Europeans labeling them "titles" at an earlier date. The adjective "primordial", an apparently 19th-century addition, at least attests to the antiquity of his claims and the extent of the history they encompass. The "titles" label is unfortunate because they are not formal writing in any sense of the term. They are subjective and self-serving versions or accounts of a long list of past events relating to a particular people. A magistrate, unfamiliar with its origin and evolution and expecting prescribed title deeds, might be surprised by its heterodoxy. As historian Charles Gibson (1975:321) has noted, the memory they contain "may be mistakenly or deliberately fabricated to support a claim". James Lockhart (1991: 42) agrees that land claims are often inaccurate and 'in some sense deliberately falsified' (although he also believes they were made primarily for local indigenous consumption) (1991: 44). Many manuscripts have large sections speaking in the first person, often with the city's founders or their descendants voicing their concerns or recounting their roles in altepetl affairs and admonishing the youth to protect the city. These are interwoven with historically dated narratives, leading some readers to confuse the citation of older texts or oral traditions with misleadingly packaging these manuscripts as dating from the 16th century, when the paper, hand and illustrative style give themselves away. composition. James Lockhart (1992: 412) captures the chronological and thematic disjunction that characterizes these records in Soyatzingo's example: The reference point in time changes abruptly and without explanation, as do the speaker and the audience, in ways that would be illusory. interpret very accurately. It is as if a body of knowledge about earlier times has become canonical in the community but has not been preserved in its entirety, and the author of this article is writing fragments that he can remember, just as he remembers them, without paying much attention to the fluency and lucidity. .
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Stephanie Wood To support this assessment of the compiler's reliance on memory, the arrangement of passages may vary between different copies of a city's primary titles. Multiple versions of many of these manuscripts exist, forming “sets” of titles.18 Some copies may be the product of periodic demands to present records to colonial officials or lend them to neighboring towns with weaker documentary bases; perhaps, also, different indigenous councils started to have their own copies. Descendants of city founders may have wanted to keep their own record of their ancestors' activities as a source of family pride. Sometimes copyists inadvertently (or perhaps on purpose) omitted or incorrectly copied dates or people's names. The Metepec title, for example, gives a notary's name as "Coyotzin" in one place and "Cotzin" in another. The copyist also dropped his noble title, "Don", in two places (Garibay K. 1949: 19, 22). The use of "Gift" meant a lot to those entitled to it; Coyotzin wouldn't have been so cocky about it, especially in association with his own name. The duplication of large sections of text in manuscripts belonging to different peoples raises the possibility of sharing or mass production. The process is not fully understood at this point. Parallel pictorial elements in the titles of Soyatzingo and Cuixingo (Figs. 2-5), for example, may indicate that one city copied another. Alternatively, both documents may follow the pattern of another earlier record or tradition. The discovery of a few more primordial titles of this nature in the Chalco area may suggest that they all originated from one survey; the fact that they are not identical implies that more than one pair of hands worked on them. Unusual spelling patterns crop up in titles, crossing regional divides. This could also suggest wide sharing or production by a studio. The titles of San Gregorio Acapulco (from the Xochimilco region) spell the Spanish word for archbishop, “arsubizbuc”, with a final sloping “c” indicating a glottal stop (McAfee and Barlow 1952: 126). Manuscripts from Atlauhtla (AGN T 2674, 1:10r [twice], Chalco) and Ocoyoacac (AGN T 2998, 3:31v, Valle de Toluca), also use the final “c” when writing archbishop. Likewise, the compiler of Ocoyoacac titles adds “c” to the end of the fifth (fifth), writing “Callos quitoc” for Carlos Quinto (Carlos V) (31r; see also 29v and 30r). The hand features the 18 Take, for example, the titles of Ocoyoacac. Menegus Bornemann (n.d.: 53–64) reproduces some records and cites others found in local deposits. In addition, AGN T 2298, 3:17r–31v contains two Nahuatl versions and a Spanish translation dated 1871 (AGN T 2298, 3 bis:47r–56r). Likewise, the titles of San Bartolomé Capulhuac include a more complete Nahuatl version (AGN T 2860, 1, cuad. 2: 67r–70v) and a partial version (74v–80v), as well as a Spanish translation (59r– 66r) of the first Nahuatl version. The partial version, which appears to be the most recent, includes more use of the letter "s" instead of "z".
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The social context vs. Legal titles in Nahuatl
FIG. 2 Pictorial image of the titles of San Antonio Soyatzinco (Chalco region). AGN T 1665, 5:170v. Photograph courtesy of the General Archive of the Nation, Mexico.
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Fig. 3 Pictorial image of the titles of Cuixingo (Chalco region). AGN T 2819, 9:55r. Photograph courtesy of the General Archive of the Nation, Mexico.
Stephanie Wood
FIG. 4 Pictorial image of the titles of San Antonio Soyatzinco (Chalco region). AGN T 1665, 5:178v–179r. Photograph courtesy of the General Archive of the Nation, Mexico.
FIG. 5 Pictorial image of the titles of Cuixingo (Chalco region). AGN T 2819, 9:54v. Photograph courtesy of the General Archive of the Nation, Mexico. 213
The Social Context vs. Legal of Nahuatl titles in capital “C”, like a capital “E”, and the “t” resembles a capital “D” (Fig. 6). Atlauhtla's title adds an "r" to the translation of the king's name, "Carllos quitoc", in one line, but elsewhere gives "Calos quito" and "Callos quitoc" (AGN T 2674, 1:7v [twice ] and 5v ). In these last two examples, the “C” and “t” are very reminiscent of the Ocoyoacac hand (compare Figs. 6 and 7). A calligraphy expert might find other strong similarities between the titles of Ocoyoacac and Atlauhtla. A possible third addition to these two comes from Santos Reyes (from the Chalco region), who not only has a similar hand, but also employs the final "c", adding it to "espiricto satoc" (for holy spirit, Holy Spirit ). and “quiniyetoc” (for five, five hundred) (AGN T 3032, 3: 276r, 277r). Shared vocabulary and personalities can point to borrowing or mass production. The four documents cited above for containing the final “c” in loanwords ending in “o”, from Acapulco (Xochimilco), Santos Reyes (Chalco), Atlauhtla (Chalco) and Ocoyoacac (Valle de Toluca), also use the modified loan "gentilestlaca" ("gentile" people, or pagans) to refer to its citizens before Christian baptism. One more title from Xochimilco (from Santa Marta) does the same.19 In the long run, it can be proved that this borrowing (and concept) was better known and used than it appears now, possibly weakening it as an example of miscegenation. . regional distribution. Another rare vocabulary word linking titles from the Chalco area, as James Lockhart (1991: 60-61; see also 1992: 413) has shown, is the Spanish term for questionnaire, interrogatorio, which appears in slightly divergent forms, usually with the first missing the syllable "in" (confuses with the Nahuatl article written in the same way). The 16th-century Spanish authority, Don Pedro de Ahumada, provides another common thread through a variety of primordial titles, again ignoring regional boundaries. He is not a particularly well-known conquistador in Spanish-speaking histories. One gets the impression that he played a larger role in the indigenous communities of central Mexico than is remembered or became larger than life in the native tradition through mass production or borrowing. Both his uncertain memory and his duplication are evident in the treatment his surname received. “Aomada”, “Omada” and “Onmata” are not surprising variations, but in the titles of Cuixingo (Chalco), Soyatzingo (Chalco) and Acapulco (Xochimilco) it appears as “Omemadad”, a deviation that is 19 For Acapulco: McAfee and Barlow 1952: 124 (“getilestlaca”). For Santos Reyes: AGN T 3032, 3: 277r (“tiJetilestlaca”). For Atlauhtla, see, for example, the Spanish translation, “los gentiles hombres” (AGN T 2674, 1: 13r). For Ocoyoacac: AGN T 2998, 3: 18r (“gentilestlaca”), 28r (“tigentilestlaca”) and 29r (“Jetileztlaca”). For Santa Marta: AGN T 3032, 3: 203v (“tigentilestlaca”).
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FIG. 6 (above) Orthographic and calligraphic sample of titles from Ocoyoacac (Valle de Toluca). AGN T 2998, 3:31r. Courtesy of the General Archive of the Nation, Mexico. FIG. 7 (below) Spelling and calligraphic sample of titles from Atlauhtla (Chalco region). AGN T 2674, 1:5v. Courtesy of the General Archive of the Nation, Mexico.
noticeable when repeated. Uncertainty about his occupation and rank, whether he was "Archbishop", "Licensee" or "General", underscores the likelihood that he was, for some communities at least, a figure remote in time or distance (see Lockhart 1991: 59 Wood 1991: 181–182).20 REASONABLE REASONS
Does all this mean that the titles can safely be relegated to the "curious hoax" category and then ignored as legitimate historical sources? The answer to this question must be “no”. The spelling differences found in specific titles likely evolved due to the skills or agendas of individual copyists who operated mostly on their own. The very different occupations and positions attributed to a figure like Don Pedro de Ahumada seem to suggest a borrowing process more strongly than mass production (unless mass production has reached the crooked point where variation falls into place). fails to disguise obvious similarities in the pictorial portions of the Chalco titles, for example). The loan may have involved a rather innocent process of collecting written material from a neighboring town to help 20 Santa Marta titles from the Xochimilco area speak of a “don pedro de mandra” in the same way as the rest; perhaps the "r" is intrusive and a copying error. See AGN T 3032, 3: 206v.
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The social context vs. Full nahuatl legal titles where local memory was incomplete. At that time and context it was not mandatory to cite the source and, in fact, well-known Spanish chroniclers borrowed freely from each other without acknowledging what they were doing; Why should we expect to find a more scrupulous procedure among indigenous authors (see Borah 1984: 29)? Indeed, although many communities disagreed with their neighbors over disputed borders, they have sometimes been known to cooperate in the face of a common external enemy. The inhabitants of Capulhuac and Ocoyoacac testified on behalf of the Tepezoyuca Indians, alongside, amid territorial investigations in the early 18th century, for example. All three communities had their own sets of primordial titles (for Tepezoyuca, see AGN T 1716, 1).21 It would be surprising if these allies had not shared some amount of information of the kind that was incorporated into the titles. It seems that some kind of underground support network that facilitated the sharing of relevant pieces of knowledge and helped endangered neighbors to obtain resources to defend their long-held claims was more likely to report titles than mass production. Who is to say that the claims made in the bonds were more suspect than those made by a nearby farm or town owner with conflicting views? Most allegations probably had at least a grain of truth in them, sometimes much more. Misleading manufacturing was not the norm; the motives were conceivably reasonable, given the sometimes desperate circumstances. Lockhart (1992: 414) suggests how, 'under the pressures of the situation, and perhaps having lost touch with relevant local traditions, some peoples resorted to deliberate manufacture'. or newly independent neighborhoods may have had less of their own pictorial or textual traditions than the well-established altepetl in a given neighborhood, and their representatives may have sought help in establishing their own written record. This scenario may even explain the popular acceptance by many peoples of the manuscripts we now call the Techialoyan Codices. Painted and written on indigenous bark paper (Fig. 8), in a distinctive artistic style, this subset of the title's lore is the most controversial. Some modern observers imagine street vendors offering a "fill in the blanks" form, smaller in size or
21 I suspect that discrepancies in the details contained in manuscripts from neighboring communities – when they do come to light, as they do from time to time – may indicate that these peoples disputed lands adjacent to their borders and altered the information in their titles. to meet their own needs. This phenomenon may explain, for example, why Harvey (1966) denounced a Techialoyan as “fake” when he compared it with another Techialoyan from a neighboring community. See Madeira s.d.a.
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Fig. 8 Example of a text page from the Techialoyan Codex from the Techialoyan Manuscript of Santa María Iztacapan. Photo courtesy of H. B. Nicholson and Wayne Ruwet; now on the property of the Jay L. Kislak Foundation, Miami Lakes, Florida.
greater number of illustrated pages, with or without text, etc., for different fixed prices! It is true that Techialoyan texts tend to be streamlined, with less local detail than other titles, but their spelling and vocabulary lean towards older Nahuatl (or 16th-century imagery). to some older indigenous way of recording community history, particularly land claims. Perhaps they exemplify the rare survival of a record-keeping variety that had 22 See Wood n.d.b in the spelling tradition that Techialoyans share with Cantares Mexicanos.
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The social versus legal context of Nahuatl titles has disappeared in most places. (This seems highly unlikely because Nahuatl diaries from the 16th to 18th centuries were regularly made on European paper, characterized by a recognizable evolution of spelling and progressive adoption of loanwords, all much more like most primordial titles than the original. aberrant subgroup comprising technologists [see Karttunen and Lockhart 1976] Indeed, Lockhart (1992: 414) suggests that Technialoian authors “invented native equivalents of universally used loanwords and substituted letters in elements that are always spelled differently” . . . . " Again, this is conceivably indicative of an effort to recover some purity of indigenous expression. Whatever the circumstances of their composition, the communities that have these manuscripts in their document caches will attest to claims about them, and some anthropologists will, defend them vigorously.23 Except for a few one of the especially unusual features of the Techialoyan group, the form of titles is proving to retain certain basic characteristics across central Mexico as more and more examples emerge.24 details and, occasionally, regional idiosyncrasies, but the general uniformity of the genre in terms of content and execution is impressive. This could be due to the magnitude and efficiency of the underground network, the survival of an ancient tradition, or a combination of both. An argument against linking your main motive to some perceived attempt to deceive the courts is found in the wide range of material, beyond the identification of territorial boundaries, that you will find in the main titles. The introduction of Christianity (Fig. 9), for example, is a prominent theme (Wood 1991). Here we have internal accounts in Nahuatl of the destruction of indigenous images by missionaries and their native assistants. The stories seem to be told by the descendants of new converts and from their perspective, with references to initial resistance replaced by a final, successful conversion. The first ecclesiastic on the scene in San Bartolomé Capulhuac began baptism there in 1539, according to the titles of the village, but as the village still did not “believing well”, he came again “to destroy what they had adored” ( AGN T 2860, 1 , quadrant 2: 68v). 23 Dr. Joaquín Galarza (1980) is its most vociferous defender. On the more recent debate over Techialoyans, see Borah 1991. On other questions of their historicity, see Wood ndb. Some information about the possible "illegal" (from the Spanish point of view) studio production or distribution of Techialoyans is also clarified in Wood 1989. I sincerely hope that, if it is not already clear from my earlier writings, the discussion in the present essay clarifies it. . Of course, I do not advocate applying the simplistic labels "frauds" or "forgeries" to these complex manuscripts. 24 See Haskett (1992) for a summary of the sixteen sets of titles he found for the Cuernavaca region. See also Wood 1991, n.d.b, n.d.c.
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Fig. 9 Baptismal scene from Map of Cuauhtlantzinco, Latin American Library, Tulane University, New Orleans.
On yet another visit, the son of the village founder helped the priest “break the gods” (ibid.: 70r). The parishioners' reluctance to accept the new faith also comes up in this community's memory of a newly built temple (Christian church?) that didn't have an image of a saint, so “we just put a stone saint inside. We still couldn't believe [in Christianity]. All the Otomi and Matlatzinca people came here to see the stone saint” (ibid.: 68r). Incidentally, the blurring of pre-Columbian and post-conquest temporal and cultural distinctions appears in many places in these histories. The first of several apparently pre-contact settlements that were abandoned before the founding of San Bartolomé bears the name of San Luis (ibid.: 68r), a Christian name chosen later and associated with a site of pre-Columbian importance, which may exemplify the kind of negotiated continuity and recontextualization against Christianity that Frank Salomon discusses in his essay (in this volume, 274, 278). Lockhart (1992: 413–414, 416) identifies the main intent of the titles as “providing an authentic altepetl insider's view of the rights of the corporation, based on its history. . . .” This is not the clear and orderly chronological history of indigenous analysts, but a kind of municipal history that emphasizes the
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The Social Versus Legal Context of Nahuatl Titles "immutable unity and strength of the altepetl irrespective of time", in Lockhart's words, and therefore is less careful to follow a temporal progression. This form may reflect the oral root, a recitation of the community's origin and major events that affected it over time, remembered in any order. Some of the very specific dates that might be included in the title text, such as “Thursday of the month, February 15, 1524” or “Today, April 22, 1557. . . ”, may have been preserved in memory, may have come from a fragment of a written record, or may represent a later recreation incorporating conjecture.25 The running of dates in the illustrations (Figs. 10, 11) of the San Titles of Bartolomé Capulhuac suggest an afterthought or some hesitation in the flow of the narrative when it comes to its inclusion. Some compilers may have inserted more and more European calendar dates without much certainty about their accuracy, but with some awareness of their importance to the Spanish authorities. This is not to say that the compilers inserted dates in a calculated or conscious effort to please (or even deceive) the colonial courts, because that was not the intended audience, or at least not the original intended audience. Many titles specifically warn their indigenous audience not to show manuscripts to Spaniards. The title of Ocoyoacac warns its readers: “The Spaniards are coming; do not show them [this document]” (AGN T 2998, 3: 47v). Some Milpa Alta titles predict the same feared invasions as the colonists: “And you will lose everything. The Spaniards will come, they will be your friends, godfathers and brothers-in-law, they will bring money and with that they will gradually take away all the lands that are here” (AGN T 3032, 3: 215r–v). These are not words written for the consumption of Spanish lawyers and judges who had the power to decide the fate of an indigenous community in the midst of a land dispute, particularly a dispute with a Spanish neighbor. These anti-Spanish comments rarely flew a revolutionary flag; Titles usually present kings, viceroys, and ecclesiastics favorably, recognizing them for performing various acts that recognized the altepetl or their indigenous representatives. But the average Spanish colonist who came 25 The first date comes from the primordial titles of Metepec (Garibay K. 1949: 13). The second comes from Santiago Capulhuac's Techialoyan manuscript (AGN T 180, 3: 11r–12r). Its unorthodox form, in Nahuatl, suggests a late colonial recreation: “Axcan sepoal ome tonatiuh tlapoa in metztli Aplil, ipan zentzontli, macuil, macuilpoal onmpoal caxtolome xihuitl”. I suspect that in the sixteenth century mil was not translated as "zentzontli" as a general rule, and five hundred definitely would not have been translated as five times five in twenty. However, the April loan incorporation was standard for most of the colonial period.
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FIG. 10 (top) Shows the insertion of a European date in the text, titles of San Bartolomé Capulhuac (State of Mexico). AGN T 2860, 1, quad. 2:72r. Photograph courtesy of the General Archive of the Nation, Mexico. FIG. 11 (below) Example of the use of a European date in the text, titles of San Bartolomé Capulhuac (State of Mexico). AGN T 2860, 1, quad. 2:71v. Photograph courtesy of the General Archive of the Nation, Mexico.
living close to the native community was something else. The “caxtiltecatl” (Castilian) or “quixtian” (“Christian”) of the neighborhood materializes as a deceitful and conniving person who threatens the survival of the community.26 The fact that many speakers in titles exhort their ears to keep manuscripts hidden from the eyes of the Spaniards, ironically, may have made the authorities more suspicious of them. These same officials often failed to recognize that if the documents were directed at the indigenous community, they were not intended to mislead them as some kind of false fact. An example of 26 See Wood 1991: 187–188; Lockhart 1991: 62-63. Charles Gibson (1964: 271) also cites a primary title that reads: "The Spaniards come to enjoy what we have justly gained."
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The social context vs. The legal title of the Nahuatl Bonds that was dismissed by the authorities as a fraud is what historian Robert Haskett called the “Titles of Díaz”, introduced in Cuernavaca in 1732. 10). Agents of Spanish composition also gave their seal of approval in 1710 to the most scathing anti-Spanish title yet to emerge in modern scholarship (see León-Portilla 1992: 158-162); He came from the community of Ajusco in the mountains south of Mexico City. After reading of their conquest-era colleagues eager to seize all native lands and wealth, burn Indian lords, abuse women, and generally put Indians "under their heel bone," the agents calmly reported that "no there is room for doubt that the city was founded in the year 1531 . . . on land which they call heritage" (AGN T 2676, 4)! Compounding procedures, which charged fees to the royal treasury, would result in a judgment that a given community's primary titles might not fit the Spanish ideal for documenting land claims, but would serve in a pinch. Judges accepted a translated portion of Cuernavaca's “Municipal Codex,” for example, as valid in 1707, notably reinforcing some of the city's possessions disputed by nearby sugar mills (Haskett 1992: 9–10). real songwriting research, that was around the same time. Perhaps bureaucrats sometimes reflected on the reality that all lands were indigenous territory before the arrival of Europeans, a fact that strengthened the claims of many communities against the Spaniards. (Special colonial definitions of “vacant” land, or unoccupied land, such as vacated by sixteenth-century epidemics or left uncultivated for a period of time, decisions usually guided by the authorities.)27 Several liberal-minded magistrates legalized a Tepezoyuca Techialoyan Codex not once but thrice during the composition process of 1696, 1715 and 1720 in that town in the Toluca Valley (AGN T 1873, 2)!28 THE NEGOTIATION OF THE ACT
While deceiving the courts was not necessarily the original intent behind their composition, the titles may have been later reassembled or altered by persons other than their original authors. This is suggested by the existence of multiple versions with different details, and by the fact that some versions 27 See, for example, the pronouncement of the Royal Council of Madrid on June 2, 1628, in AGN HJ vol. 15, 1: 19r. 28 The manuscript in question was the “book-shaped map”, with twenty pages “the thickness of a finger”, written in Nahuatl. See Wood (1989: 258) for a fuller description.
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Stephanie Wood, others have been taken to court to defend the special interests of an individual or faction. Some litigation-related manuscripts have already been mentioned. One set includes the Cuernavaca “Titles of Díaz”, conveniently discovered in the midst of a land dispute involving chief Don Josef Gaspar Díaz, supposed descendant of one of the speakers of the text (AGN HJ leg. 447, 7). Perhaps he took a community land tenure record and modified it to support his own individual interests.29 Surprisingly, such a clear line dividing corporate and individual interests is rarely drawn in the indigenous record. Often, a city and its leadership shared the benefits that a set of titles could confer, further blurring the distinction between the genres associated with municipal history and genealogical heritage. The titles of a city can occasionally function as roles of cacicazgo (the patrimonial legacy of a cacique). The founders of villages, omnipresent figures in municipal histories, represent the inviolable link between individual heroic action and the birth or later defense of the community. Historian William Taylor (1972: 40–41) identifies a Mixtec manuscript that illustrates something of this relationship. The manuscript, presented to the authorities of Oaxaca in 1696, dates back in the historical narrative to 1523 and to a reception given by the first cacique of the city to the Spanish conquerors. In return for his loyalty, the cacique received title to land designated for his own livelihood (a cacicazgo) and other land to support the residents of three barrios that are now part of a modern suburb of Oaxaca City. The cacique's descendants would have the right to use the cacicazgo's lands, but could not attempt to gain "exclusive control" or face heavy fines because these lots also belonged to the city. Taylor points out how the city chiefdom and lands were an "integral unit". Furthermore, having the community and its leader (or his heirs) to protect the endowments gave them a double shield against “Crown seizure or land grabbers” (Taylor 1972: 40-41). As active members of cabildos and descendants of city founders, caciques likely held and guarded many of the primary titles discussed here. Over time, particularly in the 18th century, these men increasingly operated as individuals with private interests that sometimes came into conflict with their communities. They may have had the opportunity to distort corporate heritage and headship records to make them more exclusive. 29 See Haskett (1992) ) for more on this individual and for his excellent more general discussion of the ways in which caciques “came to embody the corporate integrity of Cuernavaca” (1992: 20) in the primordial titles of that region. In the same article (1992: 16), Haskett discusses a Cuernavaca lawsuit in 1582 in which a commoner tried to prove that certain property was corporate and some nobles tried to prove that it was private. Although the commoner lost his claim, this example illustrates the tensions that built up over time regarding land use and definitions.
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The social context vs. Personal advantage of nahuatl legal titles. Caciques also formed factions with relatives or other social, political, or economic allies and fought rival factions for power or wealth (Haskett 1991: 37-41, 83, 146). During such struggles, it is conceivable that they exaggerated or even invented the role of their own ancestors in founding a city and receiving endowments from the local authority and corresponding land base. In part, this helps explain how wills are occasionally incorporated into sets of titles. The titles of San Bartolomé Capulhuac are an example of this. They include the testament of the man who appears as the town's founder, Don Bartolomé Miguel. In the subsequent narrative, the two sons of the supposed founder of the city become involved in a land dispute, one of them in collusion with a family of outsiders of Spanish-Indigenous descent who settled in the city with his permission. . A third lineage, also considered outsiders, appears as yet another threat to the community. At some point, this third lineage must have intermarried with the descendants of the city's founder, as one of its members would claim in his 1715 will to be the great-great-grandson of the city's founder. Incidentally, this will and other earlier documents separate from the titles corroborate many of these same players and sustain the dispute over specific properties in the late 16th century and during the first half of the 17th century. As in the example of the cacicazgo dispute in Oaxaca, the primary titles of Capulhuac do not distinguish between communal ownership of land and the exclusive rights of a cacique over certain properties. They end with one of the supposed sons of the city's founder declaring that his own son will inherit the disputed properties along with the "true title". . . for the help of the people” (Wood n.d.c: 325–343). They saw the protection of their own interests as inherently linked to the survival of the community. Another set of titles from Metepec, in the Toluca Valley, presents Don Juan Ignacio Felipe Carrillo (usually called Don Ignacio) as the city's founder. His apparent grandson, Don Felipe Carrillo, is another prominent figure in the narrative, serving as a beneficiary in a will that appears to date from 1649 (Garibay K. 1949: 24, 25). Judging from different records, some questions apparently arose in the community in the first half of the 17th century around the family's illustrious heritage. A former governor of the city contested the election of a "comunero" (macehual), named Felipe Carrillo, in 1642. This Carrillo, probably the same one with the primary titles, allegedly colluded with some Spaniards who helped him win the fraudulent election. The following year, the viceroy decided not to support Carrillo's election (see Jarquín O. 1990: 45). Here, municipal history may have been embellished as part of the Carrillo family's push to power. Alternatively, it may have been 224
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FIG. 12 Don Jacinto Cortés with coat of arms from the Map of Cuauhtlantzinco, Latin American Library, Tulane University, New Orleans.
assembled at the time in a sincere effort to document his noble status and legitimate claim to office. Whatever the earlier roots of these Metepec documents, the extant "codex" may have arisen in the 1640s, very close to Lockhart's estimate of its association with Stage 3 (post-1650) phenomena. Seizing any opportunity to reinforce their own personal status, caciques sought out (and sometimes made) official Spanish coats of arms (see, for example, Fernández de Recas 1961; Wood 1989: 255). The illustration of the indigenous leader Don Jacinto Cortés with his real or imaginary coat of arms (Fig. 12) appears on the Mapa de Cuauhtlantzinco or Códice Campos (Latin American Library of Tulane University), a primordial title from the end of the colonial period, largely pictorial, 225
The social context vs. Legal titles in Nahuatl
Fig. 13 Detail of a coat of arms, Techialoyan Codex García Granados. Photograph courtesy of Martha Barton Robertson.
associated with a community of the same name near Cholula.30 It is also known that indigenous corporate entities in central Mexico, led by such individuals and following similar routes to increase power in the colonial context, also sought official emblems. Cuernavaca's "Municipal Code" (Wood 1991: 176), for example, states: The King, our lord, has granted us (the right) to do this (shield); it is our strength and our help. It will be done so that we can get rid of the Spaniards, so that they do not dishonor us or take anything away from us, or afflict our priests. The irony inherent here in the way the Nahua would appropriate European symbols as shields against colonial abuses is reminiscent of Tom Cummins's discussion of 30 Many copies of the Map of Cuauhtlantzinco exist in various places today. One not cataloged in the Handbook of Middle American Indians (1975, 14:120–121) is in the University of Oregon Museum of Natural History. This manuscript unites the traditions covered in this study and the pictorial histories described by Elizabeth Boone (in this volume, 181–190).
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Coat of arms of Stephanie Wood Guaman Poma (in this volume, 100–102). Coat of arms are also a feature of the Techialoyan Codices (Fig. 13). Title authors also interpreted and adapted Spanish legal forms that they likely perceived as useful and complementary armor in the defense of corporate integrity. The quiz concept popular in the Chalco titles mentioned above is an example. Another variant of this, found in the San Bartolomé Capulhuac manuscript, is the questioning of twelve witnesses (not a traditional indigenous organization number, vigesimal order was the norm) as to whether any land belonged to the city's founder. Each answered under oath (using the borrowed term “Jorametho”), in turn, “yes yes” and “took up the cross” (AGN T 2860, 1, cuad. 2: 69v). FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
Leaders of indigenous communities and aspirants to political power and social status eagerly sought the legal channels open to them in the courts of New Spain, as they did in this and other ways in several colonies. As experienced litigators, they also regularly represented their peoples in the struggle to maintain or improve a minimal territorial base vital for survival. They witnessed the influx of foreigners and provided testimony to the many surveyors eager to determine the location of the vacant lots. That experience certainly made them cautious and wise. Whole communities were nearly wiped off the maps as the waves of epidemics advanced; this phenomenon not only released physical dominion over much of the earth, but also caused the loss of many recorders and probably numerous manuscripts. As competition at the leadership and community levels increased in the second half of the colonial period, it is not surprising that the surviving guardians pooled all available resources to preserve the altepetl heritage in the consciousness of future generations. The production of great titles grew out of this scenario. Indirect (or sometimes direct) pressures from Spanish authorities contributed to the unconscious (or sometimes conscious) addition of dates and notary names to manuscripts as they were copied and corrected over the decades. The product, which was not intended for the courts but occasionally found its way there, was like driving a square peg into a round hole.31 Some magistrates recognized the inherent value of these documents, lending credence to their general sincerity.31 When these records did, not misrepresented by selfish masters, they were probably at least altered or, as Frank Salomon puts it (in this volume, 272), "reverbalized to make [the past] convincing in external arenas" such as the courts of law. Spotting these changes in major titles requires a lot of guesswork.
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The social context vs. titles in Nahuatl and even their specific claims. Others would gloss over what they considered wrongdoing as long as there were no competing claims on the table. Still others would dismiss manuscripts as inadmissible or seize and burn them.32 The circumstances of living under colonization provided the framework that may have fostered creation, shaped evolution, and determined the ultimate fate of many titles, but these documents were, ironically, , made by and for indigenous peoples. Its reconstruction over time is a testament (though difficult to translate cross-culturally) to the process of negotiation of identity and power in the colonial context. As historical sources that provide reliable and detailed information about boundaries or official acts of local leaders, titles require great care in their handling. But as sources of candid insider knowledge, possibly biased to favor the views of one or more factions, they are threads waiting for seekers.
32 At least two Techialoyan manuscripts were burned in the early years of the eighteenth century (see Wood 1989). One, from Tezcalucan and Chichicaspa, apparently survived and is currently owned by the Jay L. Kislak Foundation in Miami Lakes, Florida. See also Madeira s.d.a.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY AGN T GENERAL ARCHIVE AGN HJ GENERAL ARCHIVE
OF
NATION, MEXICO, TIERRAS NATION COLLECTION, MEXICO, HOSPITAL DE JESÚS COLLECTION
BORAH, WOODROW 1984 Some problems of origin. In Explorations in Ethnohistory: Indians of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century (H. R. Harvey and Hanns J. Prem, eds.): 23 to 39. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. 1991 Another look at the Techialoyan codices. In Land and Politics in the Valley of Mexico: A Two Thousand Year Perspective (H. R. Harvey, ed.): 209–221. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. CARRILLO CÁZARES, ALBERTO 1991 “Chusquis naquis” indigenous scribe, creator of “primordial titles” (La Piedad, 18th century). Relationships 48 (Autumn): 187–210. Díaz del Castillo, BERNAL 1963 The conquest of New Spain. Translated with an introduction by J. M. Cohen. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth and Baltimore. DURÁN, FRAY DIEGO 1971 The Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar. (Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden, eds. and trans.). University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. FERNANDEZ DE RECAS, GUILLERMO 1961 Chiefs and indigenous nobility of New Spain. Mexican Bibliographical Institute, Mexico. GALARZA, JOAQUIN 1980 The Codex Zempoala: Techialoyan E 705, The Zempoala Pictographic Manuscript, Hidalgo, Mexico. Mesoamerican Studies 7. French Archaeological and Ethnological Mission to Mexico, Mexico. GARIBAY K., ANGEL MARY (ED.) 1949 Metepec Codex, State of Mexico. N.P., Mexico. (Republished in facsimile by H. Ayuntamiento Constitucional de Metepec, Mexico, 1991–93.) GIBSON, CHARLES Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. 1975 A Survey of Central American Prose Manuscripts in the Native Historical Tradition. In Handbook of Middle American Indians (Robert Wauchope and Howard F. Cline, eds.) 15: 311–321. University of Texas Press, Austin. GIBSON, CHARLES AND JOHN B. GLASS 1975 A census of Central American prose manuscripts in the native historical tradition. In Handbook of Middle American Indians (Robert Wauchope and Howard F. Cline, eds.) 15: 322–400. University of Texas Press, Austin. HARVEY, H. R. 1966 The Codex of Saint Kitts and Saint Mary: a false techialoyan. Sports 5(2): 119–124.
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The Social Context vs. Nahuatl legal titles 1986
Techialoyan Codices: Seventeenth-Century Indigenous Land Titles in Central Mexico. In Ethnohistory (Ronald Spores, ed.), Handbook of Middle American Indians Supplement 4: 153–164. University of Texas Press, Austin.
HASKETT, ROBERT 1991 Indigenous rulers: an ethnohistory of municipal government in colonial Cuernavaca. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. 1992 Visions of Immeasurable Municipal Glory: The Stories of the Nahuatl Peoples of Colonial Cuernavaca. Historical Review of Colonial Latin America 1 (1): 1–35. JARQUÍN O., MARÍA TERESA 1990 Formation and Development of a Neo-Hispanic City: Metepec in the Toluca Valley. The Mexican College, Zinacantepec. KARTTUNEN, FRANCES AND JAMES LOCKHART 1976 Nahuatl in the Intermediate Years: Phenomena of Language Contact in Colonial Period Texts. University of California Press, Berkeley. LEMOINE VILLICANA, ERNESTO 1961 Visitation, congregation and map of Amecameca since 1599. Bulletin of the General Archive of the Nation (Mexico), ser. 2, 2:7–46. LEON-PORTILLA, MIGUEL (ED.) 1992 The Broken Spears: The Aztec Story of the Conquest of Mexico. Ed expanded and updated. Beacon Press, Boston. LOCKHART, JAMES 1991 Visions of the Corporate Self and History in Some Towns in the Valley of Mexico: Late 17th and 18th Centuries. In Nahuas and Spanish: Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology (James Lockhart, ed.): 39–64. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, and UCLA Latin American Center Publications, Los Angeles. 1992 The Nahua after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, 16th to 18th Centuries. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. LOCKHART, JAMES AND STUART B. SCHWARTZ 1983 Early Latin America: A History of Spanish Colonial America and Brazil. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. MCAFEE, BYRON AND ROBERT H. BARLOW 1952 The Annals of San Gregorio de Acapulco, 1520-1606. Sports 3(2): 103–141. MENEGUS BORNEMANN, MARGARET n.d. Ocoyoacac: an anthology of documents on land tenure in the colonial period. Bachelor's Thesis, Universidad Iberoamericana, 1979. RESTALL, MATTHEW B. 1991 Yaxkukul Revisited: Dating and Categorizing a Controversial Maya Land Document. UCLA Historical Journal 11: 122–130. ROBERTSON, DONALD 1960 The Techialoyan Codex of Tepotzotlan: Codex X (Rylands Mexican MS I). John Rylands Library Bulletin 43(1): 109–130. 1975 Techialoyan manuscripts and paintings with catalogue. In Handbook of Middle American Indians (Robert Wauchope and Howard F. Cline, eds.) 14: 253–265. University of Texas Press, Austin.
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Stephanie Wood ROBERTSON, DONALD AND MARTHA B. ROBERTSON 1975 Techialoyan Catalog of Manuscripts and Paintings. In Handbook of Middle American Indians (Robert Wauchope and Howard F. Cline, eds.) 14: 265–280. University of Texas Press, Austin. SIMPSON, LESLEY BYRD 1934 Studies in Indian Administration in New Spain [I. The Burgos Laws of 1512. II. The Civil Congregation]. Iberoamerican 7. University of California Press, Berkeley. TAYLOR, WILLIAM B. 1972 Landowner and peasant in colonial Oaxaca. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. WOOD, STEPHANIE 1987 Pedro Villafranca and Juana Gertrudis Navarrete: the title forger and his widow (New Spain, 18th century). In Struggle for Survival in Colonial America (David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash, eds.): 472–485. Cultural Economic Fund, Mexico City. 1989 Don Diego García de Mendoza Moctezuma: a genius of technology? Nahuatl Cultural Studies 19: 245–268. 1990 The Legal Fund or Lands by Popular Reason: New Evidence from the Center of New Spain. In The Indigenous Community of Colonial Mexico: Fifteen Essays on Land Tenure, Corporate Organizations, Ideology, and Village Politics (Arij Ouweneel and Simon Miller, eds.): 117–129. Research and Documentation Center for Latin America, Amsterdam. 1991 The Cosmic Conquest: Late Colonial Sword and Cross Visions in Central Mexican Titles. Ethnohistory 38(2): 176–195. etc. The False Techialoyan Risen. Play 12 (coming soon). n.d.b The historicity of the titles and codices of the Techialoyan group. In Tlacuilos and write to us. Studies of Colonial Indigenous Documents from Central Mexico (Xavier Noguez Ramírez, ed.). The Mexican College, Zinacantepec. n.d.c Corporate Adjustments in Colonial Mexican Indigenous Peoples: Toluca Region, 1550–1810. Doctor. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984.
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The Aztec Triple Alliance: A Post-Conquest Tradition SUSAN D. GILLESPIE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA–CHAMPAIGN
you
INTRODUCTION
Amerindian peoples continued to use their pre-conquest traditions to adapt to the Spanish conquest and colonialism, one must first be able to distinguish these traditions from their post-conquest counterparts. The need to do so is especially pertinent when evaluating historical traditions – the pre-contact histories of various peoples – that were written after the Spanish conquest. Questions have been raised about the accuracy with which these documents portray the pre-Hispanic past and the extent to which they may incorporate non-historical elements as a result of Spanish contact, elements that cannot be “easily removed” (Burkhart 1989: 6). . This article considers these questions by examining Aztec histories recorded in the early colonial period. He takes the perspective that "memories" of the pre-Hispanic past continued to play a role long after the conquest. The "story" was a narrative chart for understanding the world. After the conquest, “history” was necessarily modified to suit the new conditions of society. These modifications were updated by incorporating them into “historical traditions”. However, the metamorphosis of the past was not ad hoc, but generated according to the principles of an underlying symbolic system by which people conceptualized both the cosmos and society. A part of this process was the re-elaboration of pre-Hispanic political institutions, to adapt them to contemporary understandings (colonial era), and their projection in the past. One such institution was the Aztec “Triple Alliance” which, according to interpretations of the documents, was the framework for shared imperial rule before the arrival of the Spaniards. Close examination of the evidence reveals the likelihood that the Triple Alliance, as it appears in post-conquest historical traditions, did not exist. Rather, the multiple manifestations of a “Triple Alliance” in the various documents represent N TO INVESTIGATE HOW
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Aztec Triple Alliance reconfigurations of an original Mesoamerican tripartite construction of sovereignty that conformed to Spanish and Aztec conceptions. Aztec Historical Traditions Documents that contain useful information about the pre-Hispanic period include such things as wills, land records, court proceedings, letters, and petitions. Spaniards wrote more descriptive and complete accounts of New Spain at the behest of the Crown. These include the Relaciones Geographicas (which were responses to a 1577 questionnaire) and responses to other questionnaires, including the royal cedula of December 20, 1553 (Zorita 1965: 53); however, the type of document that scholars most often rely on to construct the history and culture of indigenous societies belongs to an entirely separate genre: the "native historical tradition" (Cline 1972: 6-7). part of these other documents. This genre is known as historiography. Historiographies are retrospective historical accounts that relate such things as the migrations of peoples from a place of origin to their capital, their battles and conquests, the dynasties that ruled them, and similar events before and after the conquest (see Carrasco 1971). These coded representations of the past were originally held in oral form. Some were sanctified by their representation in indigenous pictographic records (property of the elite layer of society) and by their recreation in the main religious ceremonies. They were written after the conquest by native and Spanish authors; most of the latter were clergymen interested in the culture of the people they served. These traditional histories are especially plentiful for the Aztecs of the Mexico Basin, who headed a vast tribute-collecting “empire” that incorporated much of non-Maya Mesoamerica.1 Understand why there are so many Aztec historical documents and why they were well written in the The colonial period calls for an investigation of central Mexican society, before and after the conquest, with a focus on sociopolitical organization and its relationship to historical traditions. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, the population of the Mexico Basin was distributed among separate communities and organized into large and small communities on the mainland and on islands within the basin's lake system. 1 Despite an initial argument against the term “Aztec” (Barlow 1990a), the justification provided by Gibson (1971) for the use of that word and also of “empire” to describe sociopolitical organization centered in the Mexico Basin and external extension in much of non-Maya Mesoamerica was not replaced (see also Carrasco 1971:459; Zantwijk 1990).
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Susan D. Gillespie's larger policies were nominally independent and centered on a larger city surrounded by smaller dependent communities. Thus they formed a system of "city-states", each ruled by a tlatoani (Nahuatl for "speaker"). By the end of the Aztec period, there were perhaps 50 tlatoque (plural of tlatoani) in the Mexico Basin, who were cared for by tribute and labor from their subordinate pueblo villages and dependencies (Gibson 1964:34). Basin communities were well integrated socially and economically: they exchanged raw materials and manufactured goods (Calnek 1982: 45), participated in each other's rituals, etc.; however, they were sharply divided politically. Their interrelationships were marked by instability, competition and rivalry manifested in military threats and conquests (Gibson 1964: 20-21). In 1519, conquest and intimidation resulted in a larger political unity at the "imperial" level that united all these states, and even beyond the Mexico Basin, under a single head of state. When the Spaniards conquered the Aztecs, they effectively replaced the native “emperor” with the Spanish king. However, at a lower level of political organization, they ostensibly made use of pre-existing politics by introducing the subject-header institution. Cabeceras were district capitals, and their divisions and dependencies were known as subjects (Gibson 1964: 33). Cabeceras should have overlapped with cities that were governed by a tlatoani in the pre-conquest era; however, problems immediately arose in trying to superimpose this Spanish system on the original political scene. It was difficult to identify the pre-Hispanic cities ruled by Tlatoani. In large part, this was because the Spaniards did not use the term tlatoani, designating the ruler as señor or cacique (a Caribbean term). As Gibson (1964: 36) noted, “the fact that they did not use the local Nahuatl title in Mexico had important implications, as it meant that Indians could claim to be caciques and that communities could claim to be cabeceras, without meeting the original criteria. ”. This possibility for communities to change their position of dependency to one of greater authority opened the door to numerous such claims, and these were supported by the use of "history" as the only means of determining pre-Hispanic status. This situation had a dramatic impact on the "memories" of the original peoples, as they were recorded both in court documents and in historical accounts. Furthermore, beyond city boundaries, the indigenous population was also segmented into larger descendant or “ethnic” groups. They were composed of people who considered themselves to be descended from named ancestral lineages and who maintained their distinctions from one another in various ways. Ethnic identity functioned to integrate into society as a whole. For example, armies were formed with cadres from specific ethnic groups, and large public works projects were organized with the assignment of separate tasks.
The Aztec Triple Alliance for the different groups; there seems to have been a general division of roles according to ethnicity (Gibson 1964: 22). Evidence from documentary sources indicates that at the time of Spanish contact there were nine major ethnic groups in the Mexico Basin organized in a hierarchy of importance or status as follows: Mexica (most powerful), Acolhuaque, Tepaneca, Chalca, Xochimilca, Mixquica, Cuitlahuaca, Colhuaque and Otomi (Gibson 1964: 9). With the major exception of the Otomi, these ethnic groups dominated specific regions within the Mexico Basin and beyond, so the general boundaries that divide them can be drawn (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 Location of major cities and ethnic groups around the Lake Texcoco system in the Mexico Basin (after Gibson 1964: map 2). 236
Susan D. Gillespie Maintaining ethnic identity despite (or more likely because of) the close sociopolitical and economic ties that developed between different communities required the use of symbolic markers, especially historical traditions. Traditions detailed the individual histories of major groups and included events (such as divisions of ancestral lineages, battles, intermarriage) that narratively symbolized each group's perceptions of its relationships with other peoples. Thus, different ethnic groups and their subgroups maintained their own historical traditions, and these necessarily contradicted each other in the narrative of events, which is typically the case among these illiterate peoples (eg Leach 1965; Richards 1960). However, the Spaniards ignored these great divisions in their subsequent reorganization of the political system, based on the head-subject dichotomy. Consequently, little more than a century after the conquest, ethnic identities diminished and the historical traditions that sustained them were lost to memory (Gibson 1964: 30–31, 34). However, during this first century of the colonial period, historical traditions continued to play a role in the reconstruction of ethnic identity to adapt to the changing conditions of post-conquest society, just as in pre-Hispanic times. A major focus for reconfiguration of the past for this purpose was the “Triple Alliance”. According to standard interpretations of documents written in those first hundred years, the Triple Alliance ruled the Aztec empire as a form of division of power between the three main ethnic groups, each of which had a different function. A reanalysis of these texts reveals how the "memory" of the "Triple Alliance" varied considerably along ethnic lines. THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE: FACT OR FICTION?
In 1520, when Fernando Cortés recorded in his “Second Letter” to the King of Spain what had happened during his entry the previous year, he claimed that a single powerful ruler ruled most of the territory from the Gulf coast to the central highlands. . This ruler was known as Moctezuma (the Hispanicized form of Moctezuma) and he ruled from the city of “Temixtitan” (Tenochtitlan) located in “Mesyco”. His kingdom, founded on the conquest or forced incorporation of other political entities, became known as "Culua" (Colhua) (Cortés 1971: 50, 74ss). As Cortés (1971: 173) explains, “. . . the name of Culúa includes all the lands and provinces of this region subject to Temixtitan.” Thus Cortés, writing before the conquest, noted that Moctezuma, ruler of Tenochtitlan, was the supreme head of the "Culua empire", later known as the Aztec empire. 237
The Aztec Triple Alliance In contrast to this view, indigenous historical traditions recorded decades later were interpreted to indicate that a more complicated situation actually existed: the Aztec empire was ruled by a triumvirate formed by the cities of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco (Tetzcoco), and Tlacopan (the modern cities of Mexico City, Texcoco and Tacuba, respectively). These cities were located, respectively, in the center, east and west of Lake Texcoco and were inhabited by peoples that differed ethnically as Mexicas, Acolhuaques (inhabitants of the eastern part of the Mexico Basin) and Tepanecs (inhabitants of the Mexico Basin). Mexico). Westerners) (Gibson 1964: 17) (Fig. 1). According to these modern interpretations, the triumvirate was established after the military overthrow of the Tepanec capital of Azcapotzalco in ca. 1431 by an alliance of Tenochtitlan and Texcoco. Until then, it was said that Azcapotzalco had been the most powerful city and that it had hegemony over a large part of the Mexico basin. His conquered lands were supposedly inherited when he defeated Xaltocan, head of an even earlier Otomi empire (Carrasco 1979: 258). After the conquest of Azcapotzalco, the Mexicas of Tenochtitlan allied with the Acolhuaques of Texcoco and another Tepanec city, Tlacopan, to expand and jointly administer the tribute-collecting empire that eventually spread across much of Mexico east and west ( Gibson 1971: 379). ; see also Barlow 1990b). Individually or together, these three ethnic capitals mobilized armies to conquer other peoples and then sent tax collectors to collect tribute, which they divided among themselves. This ruling triad is known as the “Triple Alliance”, which is often used as a synonym for the Aztec empire (Carrasco 1991: 93). When historian Charles Gibson described the structure of the Aztec empire for the authoritative Handbook of Middle American Indians (Gibson 1971), he devoted a significant portion of his chapter to organizing the Triple Alliance. A major problem that Gibson found was that the documents on which our knowledge of this triumvirate is based provide conflicting information about the Triple Alliance's two ostensible functions: military joint ventures and the formal distribution of tribute received by them. Like others before him (eg, Barlow 1949), Gibson attempted to reconstruct the extent of Triple Alliance hegemony; however, the conquests made by each of the three capitals recorded in native histories did not coincide with other records from the colonial period that indicated to whom the conquered peoples were subject and paid tribute. In these other records, which especially include the Relaciones Geographicas, communities have declared which primary centers they were tributary to, usually because of conquest. Most cities only named a city that conquered them, not a Triple Alliance. Furthermore, cities
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Susan D. Gillespie, supposedly conquered by the Acolhuaque and Tepaneca, according to interpretations of historical narratives, often claimed to have been subjects of Tenochtitlán (Gibson 1971: 384–388). Another difficulty pointed out by Gibson was the conflicting information about the distribution of tributes among the members of the Triple Alliance. A formula for this distribution found in the Acolhua traditions of Texcoco indicated that the tribute received was divided into fifths: Tenochtitlán and Texcoco received two fifths each, while Tlacopan received one fifth. However, other formulas are found in various non-narrative sources, including a division of tribute into thirds and the payment of some tribute exclusively to one of the three capitals (Gibson 1971: 383). A more detailed list of tributes appears in the Mendoza Pictographic Codex and a parallel document, the Matricula de Tributos. Once thought to record annual payments made to the Triple Alliance, these documents are now believed to list only the tribute received by Tenochtitlan (Berdan 1992:63-64); however, two other documents outside historical traditions, dating from the mid-16th century, have been used by scholars to determine the payment of tribute divided between the capitals of the Triple Alliance. These are the “Memorial of the Peoples” (1939–42, 14: 118–122) and the “Insertion of Motolinía”. The latter is a document attached to the Memorials of Fr. Toribio Motolinía (1970, pt. 2, ch. 28: 188–189; O'Gorman 1989: 627–629), which Pedro Carrasco (1991: 95) prefers to call “Memorial de Tetzcoco de Motolinía”, although there is no evidence that that Motolinía is the author of this document (Gibson 1956: 6). These records list the territorial holdings of Tlacopan and Texcoco, respectively, and indicate that some of these cities divided their tribute among more than one conquering city. The documents also use the Spanish terms cabecera and subject to describe pre-Hispanic and contemporary situations. The “Motolinía Insert” is an explanation of a now lost pictographic interpretation of the Texcoco tributary towns. He cites the subjects of the cabecera of Texcoco followed by three separate lists of cities that were tributary to the lords (rulers) of "Mexico" (Tenochtitlan), Texcoco and Tlacopan. The three lists are distinguished by the different formulas used to apportion the tribute. The first lists sixty-eight cities that divided their tribute into thirds, with each capital receiving one third. The second lists thirty-three cities that divided their tribute in the 2:2:1 (fifths) formula described above. The third lists twelve cities that also shared their tribute, but no formula is given. The “Memorial de los Pueblos” is organized in a similar way. Name the cities formerly subject to the chief of Tlacopan and indicate the general classes of
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The Aztec Triple Alliance tribute they paid. He also gives three separate lists of cities and provinces that were tributaries to the lords of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, with their tributes divided among these three cities. Unlike “Motolinía Insert”, no formula is provided for its division. None of the documents explain why these three cabeceras received divided honors from some subjects; that is, they say nothing about a true Triple Alliance. The same lists of tributary cities contained in the “Motolinía Insert” were incorporated into the later historical tradition (ca. 1570) attributed to the city of Cuauhtitlán, the Anales de Cuauhtitlán (1975: 64–65). This document is known to have been used by authors of other historical narratives, such as those by Texcocan Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (Gibson 1956: 5). It is similar enough to the “Motolinía Insert” to suggest that one is a copy of the other, or that both are copies from a third source, possibly the pictographic record that explicitly mentions the “Motolinía Insert” (Gibson 1956: 7). However, the two documents contradict each other regarding the grouping of cities and the division of their tribute payments (Gibson [1956] analyzed these discrepancies). Thus, although mention of the division of tribute appears in some late Native historical accounts, these data are actually derived from documents from the earlier colonial period that belonged to a different category of writings. Gibson (1971: 390, 392; see also Berdan 1992) suggested some possible solutions to the ambiguities posed by these contradictions regarding conquest and tribute sharing, including the likelihood that one group could conquer cities but pay tribute to another. Recent studies indicate that the boundaries of political groupings were not aligned with the tributary divisions of the empire (Carrasco 1991; Hicks 1992). However, the problems inherent in trying to combine Triple Alliance conquests and the division of tribute recorded in historical narratives with subject status and tribute payments recorded in other types of documents seemed intractable to Gibson. They led him to question the accuracy of native histories, which were the only source of information about the alleged creation of this alliance in the early 15th century. Consequently, he proposed what he called a "daring" hypothesis, namely:. . . that the concept of a "Triple Alliance" was primarily a colonial historiographical invention and that, in fact, Aztec practice witnessed many provinces and cities temporarily or permanently "allied" and sharing the spoils of conquest. (Gibson 1971: 389; emphasis added)2 2 Several scholars have proposed that, in pre-Hispanic times, as a means of promoting state power, ruling elites consciously “invented” religious forms and practices that
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Susan D. Gillespie Investigating how the Triple Alliance was incorporated into historical traditions requires a thorough reexamination of the most prominent documents—both historical narratives and these other types of records—in the broader context of events that affected the sociopolitical organization of the native population. peoples in the first century after the conquest. A critical study should be made of the historical information that scholars have already assumed regarding the Triple Alliance, working with the possibility that a Triple Alliance did not exist per se, therefore, reassessing the meaning of this information.3 Beginning of the 16th century: the cities While it is clear that Cortés considered Tenochtitlán and Moctezuma supreme, there are hints in the early records as to the importance of other cities in the Mexico Basin. Did the Spaniards recognize Texcoco and Tlacopan with Tenochtitlan as having higher status than the other cities? Unfortunately, they ignored 'ethnic' considerations – for example, that Texcoco was the capital of Acolhuaque – and concentrated on organizing communities into asymmetrical head-subject groupings (Gibson 1964: 32). However, the Spaniards recognized a higher rank of ciudad (city); this was a designation based on size and importance and extended to just a few cities. Tenochtitlan received its city designation a few years after the conquest and its coat of arms in 1523. However, other cities were designated much later: Texcoco in 1543, Xochimilco (not a capital of the Triple Alliance) in 1559, and Tlacopan (Tacuba) not until 1564 (Gibson 1964: 32, 474). The implication of this chronology is that the Spanish authorities do not recognize
later it appeared in historical traditions (Brotherston 1974; Clendinnen 1991: 41; Conrad and Demarest 1984: 43; Florescano 1990a: 612ff). Rather, Gibson's hypothesis deals with the secular invention of a political organization in the post-conquest era that was designed in the past by subject peoples rather than by the group in power. 3 Such a study relates to the larger issue in Mesoamerican ethnohistory of measuring the literal accuracy of these documents. A debate centered on whether flashbacks should be treated as “myth” or “history” began over a century ago (see summaries in Davies 1987: 3–19, 265–267; Graulich 1988: 21–31; López Austin 1973: 10–11) has continued to receive much attention recently (eg, Baudot 1990; Carrasco 1990; Duverger 1983; Florescano 1990a, 1990b; Gillespie 1989; Graulich 1988; Lida 1990; López Austin 1990; Marcus 1992). Its lack of resolution is likely due to the irrelevance of its guiding axiom—"history" is true or factual, and "myth" is false or fictional—to the actual production and maintenance of historical narratives in traditional societies. Here the approach is different; examines why historical accounts of the pre-Hispanic past continued to be actively manipulated in the colonial period. 241
The Aztec Triple Alliance recognizes some inherent superiority of Texcoco and Tlacopan before or shortly after the conquest. The relative authority of different settlements in the Mexico Basin in the pre-Hispanic period is a crucial point of discrepancy between documentary sources. This may add further doubt to the literal accuracy of historical traditions, while also indicating the importance of this issue to indigenous peoples themselves as a key issue of contention. Cortés' Letters to the King of Spain (Cortés 1971). Although giving supremacy to Moctezuma, Cortés mentioned other important cities and provinces in the Mexico Basin. He paid special attention to Texcoco, whose ruler, Cacamatzin, met Cortés shortly before the latter's arrival in Tenochtitlan and the audience with Moctezuma. Cacamatzin was known for his resistance to Cortés, and was noted as a rebellious ruler who Cortés claimed had tried to kidnap to stop him causing further trouble for the Spaniards. The account of the elaborate ruse by which Cacamatzin was captured is considered apocryphal (Cortés 1971: 470); however, Cacamatzin appears to have been remarkably independent of the ruler of Tenochtitlan compared to Tlatoque's other subject. According to the Memorials of Motolinía (1970, pt. 1, ch. 54: 82), all rulers whose peoples were subject to Tenochtitlan were obliged to live part of the year in that city; the only exception was Texcoco's tlatoani. Cortés (1971: 96-97) further noted that Texcoco was the important city of the province of Acolhuacan, bordering the independent and hostile province of Tlaxcallan to the east and the province of Moctezuma ("Culua" or Colhua) to the west. The similarity between the names "Acolhua" and "Colhua" may have caused confusion (Gibson 1964: 471), but it may also be a linguistic clue to a pairing of the two kingdoms (Gillespie and O'Mack n.d.). This pairing is manifested in a 1522 reference by the King of Spain to Cortés as governor and captain-general of “Aculvacan is Ulua” (Acolhuacan y Colhua) (Gibson 1964: 471). Cortés' comments on the importance of Tenochtitlan and Texcoco were echoed by a much later writer, the Dominican Diego Durán. Durán is considered biased towards Mexica versions of the story, yet he equated these two cities as superior to all others (Durán 1967, vol. 1, pt. 1, ch. 5:47) and reported that their patron deities deserved equal reverence (1967, vol. 1, pt. 1, ch. 4:37). In contrast, Tlacopan has received relatively little attention. Cortés did not mention any Tlacopan or Tepaneca involvement during his stay in Tenochtitlan until the eventual expulsion of the Spaniards in "La Noche Triste".
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Susan D. Gillespie (1520) along the western causeway leading directly to Tlacopan (O'Mack s.d.). Coyoacan, rather than Tlacopan, seems to have been an important Tepanec city. It was here that Cortés gathered the native lords after the conquest (Zorita 1965: 201) and where the Spaniards remained until Tenochtitlan-Mexico was rebuilt after its demolition (Motolinía 1970). , part 1, chapter 53:78). Coyoacán later became part of the Marquesado, Cortés' land grant (Gibson 1964: 445). It has been suggested that Cortés "was unaware of the existence of the Triple Alliance" (Gibson 1964: 24). It may be significant, however, that Cortés took the tlatoque of these three cities with him on his Guatemalan expedition and executed them all in 1525 (Cuauhtémoc de Tenochtitlán, Coanacoch de Texcoco, and Tetlepanquetzal de Tlacopan; Cortés 1971:518; Gibson 1964:155 ). Furthermore, at least in the 1530s, Tlacopan was grouped with Texcoco and Tenochtitlan in several different contexts, implying that these three cities were more important than others according to some criteria, not all of them political. Motolinía's writings are important in this regard because of their early date (ca. 1536-1543 for the Memorials, before 1552 for his now lost De moribus indorum used by other chroniclers; Gibson and Glass 1975: 348-350) and its influence. in other writers. As guardian of Texcoco and Tlaxcalla and founder of the city of Puebla (Cuevas 1914: xxii), his works provide much information and the distinct point of view of the peoples of the eastern basin and beyond. Wigberto Jiménez Moreno (1962: 83) has attributed Motolinía's writings to the first definable phase of postconquest Texcocan historiography, suggesting that his investigations of Acolhuaque history and culture spurred native nobility to create pictographic histories later, such as the Codex Xolotl. Spaniards who placed great faith in Motolinía's works included Las Casas, Zorita, Mendieta, and Torquemada (Gibson and Glass 1975: 349). According to the Motolinía Memorials (1970, pt. 1, ch. 53: 77–79; ch. 54: 82; O'Gorman 1989: 360–363, 369), the “great lord of this land” was Moctezuma; never before has a ruler been so feared and so obeyed. His city of Tenochtitlán, known as Mexico, was the "head and mistress of the whole earth". Motolinía also named and ranked other important cities in the Mexico Basin: Texcoco was second, Tlacopan third, Cuauhtitlán fourth, Coyoacán fifth, and in addition to these, there were other cities that he named but did not rank. An additional hierarchy is seen in his summary statement: these important cities were ruled by their own noble lords, but above them were the rulers of Texcoco and Tlacopan, and all served as King Moctezuma, which in Spanish usage at the time was referred to more as a emperor than a king. In the second part of his treatise, however, Motolinía
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The Aztec Triple Alliance (1970, pt. 2, ch. 15: 162) simplified this complex classification by focusing only on the three main cities of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, while still claiming that Tenochtitlan was the “chief chief of all. It is this last section that seems to have been copied by later writers, so that the other important cities named and classified by Motolinía were left out. The three cities also appear as a group in a 1539 inquisitorial trial against Don Carlos, an idolater who claimed descent from Nezahualcóyotl (pre-Hispanic ruler of Texcoco), although there is no supporting evidence (Pomar 1986: 46). ). Don Carlos proclaimed himself tlatoani of Texcoco after the death of the incumbent, supposedly his brother (Gibson 1964: 170). In his rebuke of Christianity, and indeed the entire Spanish presence, Carlos (who shared his first name with the King of Spain) named himself, along with the Tlatoani of Tenochtitlan and the Tlatoani of Tlacopan, as evidence of a pre-Hispanic continuity of native authority. He considered that, as long as the three lived, they would be the owners of the lands left to them by their ancestors, and the Spaniards were intruders with no right to even live among them (León-Portilla 1974: 28). His defiant statements reflect not so much a Triple Alliance as a more general notion that these three indigenous rulers, appointed along an east-west axis, encompassed indigenous lands and legitimacy. Mid-16th Century: Paying Homage Beginning in the 1550s and continuing into the 1560s, various types of documents were produced that provide a new context for the grouping of these three cities. This new context has to do with the payment of taxes, or more precisely rents, to use the Spanish word. It appears for the first time in petitions by native rulers for the redress of injustices and in responses by Spanish authors to the Crown's inquiry into the payment of tribute. Due to concerns that native peoples were being exploited by their Spanish overlords, the King of Spain issued a questionnaire on December 20, 1553, requesting information on pre-Hispanic and colonial tribute payments. Several responses to the royal cedula of 1553 are known, including the Breve relación de Zorita, which was not written until 1566-1570 in Spain. Four earlier responses have been published, all written in 1554 (Zorita 1965: 52–54, 277).4
4 The published response not described here was a report on the tribute paid to Tenochtitlán that contradicts some of the information in the Codex Mendoza and the Matricula de Tributos (Zorita 1965: 285–286; see Scholes and Adams 1957).
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Susan D. Gillespie One of the last replies to the cedula of 1553 is especially important because it was written by Motolinía, who was writing from Cholula (Motolinía y Olarte 1914). Information from him contrasts with his previous statements, which now grant much greater and shared authority to Texcoco and Tlacopan. Describing the pre-Hispanic situation, Motolinía's answer states that, except for the cities and provinces not subject to Moctezuma (that is, outside the Aztec empire), all others served Moctezuma and the rulers of Texcoco and Tlacopan. These three lords were all "very considerate" and, moreover, had divided all the conquered lands among themselves (Motolinía y Olarte 1914: 228). The document also refers to these rulers as "three universal lords" (1914: 229). However, as in his earlier statements in the Memoriales, Motolinía significantly referred to “Moctezuma” as a synecdoche of his city and empire without naming the other rulers; exceptionally, the tlatoani of Tenochtitlan personally represented the political entity. Another answer was written by Fr. Nicolás de Witte (1914), who was in Meztitlán, located in the Huasteca region of northeastern Mexico. He claimed that there were three "universal lords" in New Spain (the same phrase used by Motolinía), but these three were the rulers of Mexico, Michoacán and Meztitlán. Michoacán was the homeland of the Tarascan empire west of the Mexico Basin, and both it and Meztitlán were independent of the Aztec empire (Barlow 1949; Berdan 1992; Gibson 1971). Thus, de Witte equated Moctezuma with the leaders of two equivalent autonomous governments. states rather than two rulers within their own domain. In contrast to these two documents, Fr. Domingo de la Anunciación (1914), written in Chimalhuacán, part of the southern province of Chalco, mentions only one lord to whom tribute was paid. This was the ruler of Tenochtitlan and the people Chalco was subject to. Thus, the vision presented by Motolinía on the organization of power and the denomination of "three universal lords" was not shared by his clerical counterparts inside and outside the Mexico Basin. In addition to this royal questionnaire, native elites wrote letters to the king of Spain requesting favors from a generation after the conquest (Gibson 1964: 32-33). Among them were the subjects' return requests. This concern also motivated the elaboration of documents known as “Encarte Motolinía” and “Memorial de los Pueblos”, in which pre-Hispanic tribute payments are listed. It is important to note that these last two documents "were prepared in connection with simultaneous petitions to the Spanish Crown made in 1552 by the native rulers of the two capitals" (Carrasco 1991: 95), that is, by the rulers of Texcoco and Tlacopan. they are so similar in
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The Aztec Triple Alliance wording that there must have been collaboration between their authors (Gibson 1964: 51). Therefore, they cannot be used as independent confirmation of a pre-Hispanic division of tax obligations by subjugated peoples. Furthermore, their creation (and therefore the tribute-collecting Triple Alliance they may allude to) can be attributed to this emerging phenomenon of mid-sixteenth-century maneuvers to gain advantage by claiming pre-Hispanic subjects. Several of the petitions sent to the king by the indigenous rulers of the three Triple Alliance cities were published. One was a 1562 letter jointly written by the three rulers. It does not mention the homage, but its authors refer to themselves as "the miserable and despondent caciques and governors of the three provinces of this land to whom the rest, which is Mexico Tezcuco Tlacopa, were subject" (Guzmán, Pimentel y Cortés 1939–42: 141). While indicating that all other villages were subjects of these three cities, the letter goes on to state that Moctezuma was “our prince and chief universal lord of all these provinces” (1939–42: 141). As in Motolinía's writings, Moctezuma (murdered in 1520) appears larger than a simple tlatoani; it became an anthropomorphic representation of the height of the Aztec state in the pre-conquest era. Despite this joint petition, these three colonial rulers disagreed over their pre-Hispanic relative status. The implication in the 1562 letter of a primus inter pares is missing from a separate letter written the previous year by the Tlacopan cacique, Don Antonio Cortés, and other principals of his pueblo (Cortés et al. 1939-42; Gibson 1964: 475). This letter asks the king for the title of city (granted in 1564) and the return of the tributary subjects that had been given to the Spaniards. As justification, the authors explained how the people of Tlacopan worried about Cortés and his men after their disastrous retreat from Tenochtitlán in "La Noche Triste". They even claimed that Tlacopan had been one of the three original cabeceras, along with Tenochtitlan and Texcoco. Furthermore, the authors claim, in the past Tlacopan had not paid tribute to any other lord, not even Tenochtitlán, and instead received one-third of the tribute paid to those three heads, as recorded in a "memoria" (no longer attached) ). , but possibly as the document now known as the “Memorial de los Pueblos”). A similar undated letter from the chief of Texcoco, Don Hernando Pimentel (ruled 1545‒64; Gibson 1964: 171), describes in great detail the extent of the original province of Texcoco. Among its subject cities, according to this document, only five divided their tribute between Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan (Orozco y Berra 1943: 509). This group of five is at odds with the long list of towns with divided tributes in the "Encarte de Motolinía" of 1552.
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Susan D. Gillespie also from Texcoco. In a 1562 letter from Don Hernando, he specifically requested that four subjects be returned to the headwaters of the Texcoco because they had originally been tributaries to it (Pimentel 1939-42). Unlike his contemporary in Tlacopan, Don Hernando did not refer in this petition to a pre-Hispanic grouping of Texcoco with two other cabeceras. In short, during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, native rulers produced various petitions and lists of tributes, claiming that prior to Spanish contact, only these three cities were headwaters and received tribute from dependent communities (Gibson 1964: fifty). Of these documents, the petitions of authors Texcoco and Tlacopan indicate that the tribute was divided between the three, but this crucial point is missing from Tenochtitlan-based documents, including the earlier Codex Mendoza list of tributes (early 1540s). Also missing from the Tenochtitlan materials is the insistence, included in the other petitions, that there were once three equally powerful rulers. Furthermore, the evidence of collaboration and copying in the lists of Tlacopan and Texcoco towns that shared their tribute payments is quite obvious, and such documents cannot be taken as independent or confirming evidence that there ever was such a thing as a Triple Alliance to share. tributes. Later Spanish chroniclers concerned with the issues of paying tribute and subjugated peoples used many of the documents written by Motolinía (Motolinía 1970, pt. 2, ch. 10:150, below), as noted above, and further materialized these claims. One such author was Alonso de Zorita, judge of the Audiencia, whose Breve relacion (ca. 1570) was a detailed reply to the earlier 1553 questionnaire on the payment of tribute. It is known that he had access to a manuscript by Motolinía and Motolinía's 1554 response to this royal decree (Zorita 1965: 62, 281). Probably copying from this last document, Zorita claimed that the three capitals were equal in power, that all other rulers who conquered served them and that they shared among themselves the material gains of these conquests. The only exception to their equality was that Tenochtitlan was supreme in matters of war. Zorita then apparently tried to quickly summarize the disparate formulas for the division of tribute, possibly those contained in the detailed "Encarte Motolinía" of 1552. Rather than listing the different cities and how they distributed their tribute payments, he simply pointed out that in some cases the Communities divided the tribute equally, and in others they divided it into fifths: two parts for Tenochtitlan and Texcoco and one part for Tlacopan (Zorita 1941: 74). Another chronicler, Fr. Geronimo de Mendieta similarly asserted in his Historia ecclesiastica Índia, completed in 1596, that the rulers of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan were like kings among other rulers (Mendieta 1980, bk. 2, ch. 37: 154).
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The Aztec Triple Alliance His statement appears to have been based both on the Motolinía Memorials (1970, pt. 2, ch. 10: 150–153) and his 1554 response to the royal mandate. These documents, dating from after 1550 and indicating that the three cities, individually or collectively, were headwaters before the conquest (using Spanish terminology), derive from a particular set of conditions in New Spain. There was a tremendous expansion of litigation from the first decades after the conquest, when certain towns sought cabecera status over others, and the latter communities fought with equal force to seek or maintain their independence (Gibson 1964: 50-54). . Indeed, there were so many legal disputes that a "class of Spanish lawyers made their living encouraging or provoking indigenous litigation" (1964: 54). Texcoco and, to a lesser extent, Tlacopan were vociferous in their struggle for the "return" of their subjects, while Tenochtitlan, handed over to the Crown shortly after the conquest, made far fewer claims (1964: 51). Until new forms of evidence were developed, such cases were decided on the basis of older people's conflicting "memories" about which villages had maintained tlatoque, making them eligible for cabecera status, and which other communities formed them earlier. Conquest relations were repeatedly cited as precedent for the post-conquest state, and "the memory of man" was appealed to. Local manorial traditions were evoked in the demonstration of the cabecera post, but the indigenous testimonies on both sides took opposing positions on what the status was before the conquest. Fraud and perjury in Indian testimonies were common occurrences. (Gibson 1964: 54) The oral history on which these 'memories' were based was also being recorded in a different form: native historical traditions. The earliest surviving documents containing these traditions date from the 1530s, but information about what is interpreted as the Triple Alliance is found only in historiographies written closer to the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The hypothetical invention of this organization, therefore, can be traced back to the indigenous authors and Spanish compilers of these accounts, but it was certainly part of the same process of remembering the past and sanctifying it in written form that was revealed in this mass of litigation. beginning in the 1550s. Thus, these later historical narratives continued the "arguments" begun by their mid-century predecessors. In his huge Indian monarchy (dating from 1592-1613), Fr. Juan de Torquemada felt compelled to "correct" what he called a common Spanish misunderstanding, namely that
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Susan D. Gillespie The kingdom of Tenochtitlan was larger than others in New Spain. Instead, he asserted that the lands subject to Texcoco were equal to those of Tenochtitlan, citing Motolinía as his authority. He also suggested that it was only because Cortés passed through lands conquered by “Moctezuma” that he did not realize that other provinces, of equal size, were part of Texcoco's lordship (Torquemada 1975, vol. 1, bk. 2, chapter 57: 175 –176). At about the same time, Durán (1967, vol. 2, ch. 43: 335–336), speaking from a Mexica point of view, likewise “corrected” what he considered a misconception of the time, but took the point of opposing point of view and indicated that Texcoco was forced to recognize the superiority of Tenochtitlán. These opposing views were explained and justified by “history,” as revealed in the increasing elaboration of (contradictory) pre-Hispanic historical events in the late 19th century. the century. Late 16th Century: The Triple Alliance in Historiographies An examination of the various historical narratives derived from different ethnic groups and communities in the Mexico Basin (all of which were subjugated by the Aztec state) reveals that a “Triple Alliance” of the majority is lacking for them, and to give preeminence to Tenochtitlan. Significantly, it is not found in the various detailed accounts by the Chalco historian Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin, written in ca. 1606–31 (Chimalpahin 1903, 1965, 1983 and the Mexicayotl Chronicle erroneously attributed to Alvarado Tezozomoc [1975; Gibson and Glass 1975: 330–331]). Chalco was an important province in the southern basin area conquered by Tenochtitlan after a long struggle, and Chimalpahin has provided rich detail on both its history and the history of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan. The Triple Alliance is also absent from Anales de Cuauhtitlan (1975), a town on the north side of the lake, which on the other hand provides information on the war against Azcapotzalco and includes a list of towns with divided tributes similar to those contained in the "Motolinía insert" ." However, something like the Triple Alliance appears in the Mexica and Acolhua histories, but they exhibit a pronounced variation in the relative authority of Tenochtitlan and Texcoco. The fully developed Triple Alliance appears only in the Acolhua (Texcoco) traditions dating to the late 16th and early 17th centuries. and are often referred to together as the “Chronicle X Tradition” (Glass and Robertson 1975: 223–224, 236–237).
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The Aztec Triple Alliance Finally, with respect to any Tlacopan or Tepanec account, it is unfortunate (and possibly highly significant) that there are no comparable historical traditions of Tepanec authorship (Barlow 1949, 1990c; Gibson 1971:386; Hicks 1992:4). . . This is not the result of poor preservation; even Durán (1967, vol. 2, ch. 44: 473), writing in the 16th century, noted with surprise the dearth of information in his sources about Tlacopanec rulers, except when they interacted with Tenochtitlán. The unequal treatment in the historical traditions - by both larger and smaller communities - of what must have been the dominant political organization in the Mexico Basin for approximately ninety years before the conquest, supports the assumption that the Triple Alliance was a colonial organization. vintage invention. However, a closer investigation of the narratives that group the three capitals together indicates that it was not the creation of a single author or group who may have had some "hack to grind" or glory to claim for themselves in doing so. Oddly, the authors representing the two most powerful cities consistently included the smallest of the three, Tlacopan, in this list, and their reasons for doing so are not apparent. There are three main themes about the Triple Alliance in native historical traditions: its founding after the defeat at Azcapotzalco in the early 15th century; joint military campaigns; and the distribution of taxes. How these issues are handled in different traditions varies significantly, as the discussion of tribute distribution has already demonstrated. Durán, who recorded a Mexica version of the story (in 1579-1581), claimed that a triadic scheme was created linking the three cities. However, this did not occur immediately after the defeat at Azcapotzalco, but in the context of a subsequent event: the imminent death of Itzcoatl (fourth tlatoani of Tenochtitlan and winner of the Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco). At that time, Itzcóatl proclaimed that henceforth the ruler of Texcoco would be the second king of the region and the ruler of Tlacopan the third, but the ruler of Tenochtitlan would be supreme: "almost like emperor and monarch of this new world" (Durán 1967, vol 2, chapter 14: 122–123). He thus established a hierarchical triumvirate that would come into effect early in the reign of his successor, Moctezuma I. Durán's text makes no mention of tribute distribution, joint military campaigns, or other attributes of an "alliance"; instead, the three capitals ruled the region, and the ruler of Tenochtitlan could summon the other two rulers when needed. For example, according to Durán, when Moctezuma II learned of the imminent arrival of Cortés, he ordered that the rulers of Texcoco and Tlacopan be called so that together they could receive the “gods” that were coming (Durán 1967, vol. 2, Cap. 73: 535 ); however, this account does not match Cortés's description of the encounter.
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Susan D. Gillespie The story of the creation of a tripartite hierarchy is not found in the homologous Mexica versions of the story written in 1583-1587 by Fr. Juan de Tovar is known to have served as a source for the 1590 account on p. Joseph de Acosta (Acosta 1962: xxiii; Glass and Robertson 1975: 223–224). Rather, these texts indicate that Itzcóatl established a system for electing the future Tlatoque of Tenochtitlan through a council composed of four Mexica voters plus the rulers of Texcoco and Tlacopan (Tovar 1972: 53), who were subjects of Tenochtitlan (Acosta 1962). , bk. 6, chapter 24: 311). Tovar (1972: 53) emphasized the supremacy of Tenochtitlan by recording that the Tenochcas defeated the Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco alone, without outside help from Texcoco, and also by having the ambassadors of the Texcocano ruler go to the tlatoani of Tenochtitlán. as "Supreme Lord and Sovereign" and "monarch and Lord of the whole world". Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, who claimed descent from the Tenochtitlan dynasty and whose history (Crónica Mexicana, ca. 1598) is very similar to that of Durán, also did not record the creation of any kind of government triumvirate. However, he linked the rulers of Texcoco and Tlacopan to the ritual and military activities of the Tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, explaining that the first two rulers had to obey the call of the ruler of Tenochtitlan (Alvarado Tezozomoc 1980, ch. 95: 627). The institution of the call in colonial Mexico was a remnant of a pre-Hispanic practice, expressed by a Spanish word, "which must be understood in the sense of call, specifically for work, or for the region occupied by workers under the authority of a individual official or of a city” (Gibson 1956: 2). This meaning indicates that the Tenochtitlan tlatoani could summon the other two rulers for specific purposes and, as his subordinates, they were obligated to obey him. An example of the summoning of others two rulers by Moctezuma II for non-military or apolitical purposes is found on p. Bernardino de Sahagún's Florentino Codex (the final version of his General History written in 1578-1579). His extensive description of the Tlacaxipehualiztli ceremony in Tenochtitlán includes a dance in which Moctezuma and the rulers of the other two cities participated (Sahagún 1950–82, book 2, chap. 21:55). Despite Sahagún's assertion that the two men who danced with Moctezuma were "great rulers", he did not provide a dynastic history of Tlacopan in his eighth book, On Rulers and Lords, although he did give the Tlatoque lists for Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Texcoco and Huexotla. In contrast to these Mexica accounts of the past, the Acolhua traditions recorded by Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (written ca. 1600–1640), Pomar (in 1582), and Torquemada (1592–1613) play a much larger and more important role in the empire. you conquer Texcoco. Many of these statements, which are at odds with
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Modern historians consider the Aztec Triple Alliance with the other accounts exaggerated (Davies 1987: 43, 267; Gibson 1971: 385; Jiménez Moreno 1962: 84–85). Juan Bautista de Pomar's Relación de Texcoco is described here with historical traditions rather than other types of documents, although it is one of the Relaciones geografías, written in 1582 in response to the royal questionnaire of 1577 (Gibson and Glass 1975: 355). Pomar claimed descent from Nezahualpilli, a late Tlatoani from Texcoco (Pomar 1986: 33), and his response includes detailed information on Texcoco history, customs, and religion. His manuscript, of which only one copy survives, was used by both Torquemada and Alva Ixtlilxóchitl to compile their historical accounts. There is some evidence to suggest that Alva Ixtlilxóchitl himself copied Pomar's lost manuscript and apparently tampered with it (Pomar 1986: 27–30). In his account of the origin of the "Triple Alliance", Pomar attributes the defeat of the Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco to Nezahualcóyotl of Texcoco (father of Nezahualpilli), together with his uncles Itzcóatl and Moctezuma (I) of Tenochtitlán. These two cities took possession of all the land, but in the process created three headlands: Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and also Tlacopan. They all joined their armies to conquer other cities and established garrisons with men representing the three groups, thus becoming “lords of the whole land” (Pomar 1986: 93). When subsequent battles were fought, they were fought by armies formed in the three cities (Pomar 1986: 92–93, 95). This late manuscript contains the strongest claim to joint conquests by the "Triple Alliance". Unlike other historiographies written at the time, Monarquía Índia de Torquemada is a “great work of synthesis” that draws on the writings of Motolinía, Sahagún, Mendieta, Pomar, Las Casas, Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Muñoz Camargo, Tovar and many other sources ( Gibson and Glass 1975: 376). The composite nature of Torquemada's story can be seen in his account of the events that gave rise to the Triple Alliance. He credited Itzcóatl of Tenochtitlán with defeating Azcapotzalco and creating the "alliance", as well as helping Nezahualcóyotl become ruler of Acolhuacan; such details were more in line with the Mexica versions than with the Acolhuas of the past. He also explained how Itzcóatl and Nezahualcóyotl together decided to raise the status of the tlatoani of Tlacopan to their own level. The three rulers then agreed to help each other in their conquests and share their profits: one-fifth for Tlacopan, one-third of the rest for Texcoco, and the rest (seven-fifteenths) for Tenochtitlán as chief and paramount chief. This last fact, Torquemada explained, is the reason why only the Mexicas are credited with conquests that, according to his understanding of the various accounts, should all have been
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Susan D. Gillespie was shared between the three cities (Torquemada 1975, vol. 1, book 2, chs. 37–40). Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, who claimed descent from Nezahualcóyotl, was the most prolific chronicler of Texcoco history. In his Historia de la nación chichimeca (early 17th century), he attributed only to the Texcocan tlatoani, Nezahualcóyotl, the creation of the alliance after the defeat at Azcapotzalco. The newly enhanced status of the three tlatoques of these cities is indicated by the acquisition of parallel titles on their behalf: Acolhua Teuctli (lord of Acolhuaque) and Chichimeca Teuctli for the ruler of Texcoco; Colhua Teuctli for the ruler of Tenochtitlan; and Tepanecatl Teuctli for the ruler of Tlacopan (Alva Ixtlilxóchitl 1977: ch. 32; note that the ruler of Tenochtitlán is called lord of Colhuaque, not lord of Mexica). Unlike Torquemada, Alva Ixtlilxochitl equated the power of Tenochtitlán and Texcoco: “it is true that the [lord] of Mexico and Tetzcuco were always equal in dignity, dominion, and income, and that of Tlacopan had only a certain share as the fifth in what the rents were, and then the other two” (1977, ch. 32: 83). Another account by Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1975, pt. 11:444) clarifies the division of tributes received among the three rulers after the defeat at Azcapotzalco, using the formula 2:2:1. As for joint conquests, with the exception of the Pomar text, the historical accounts of Tenochtitlan and Texcoco do not indicate a consistent pattern. While there are some ad hoc instances of war fought only by "Alliance" cities, sources are conflicting as to which battles were fought. Sahagún, in his Códice Florentino, discussed the role of the tlatoani as a war leader and described a formal organization for war when waged by the ruler of Tenochtitlán. When the battle against a particular city was decided, the Tlatoani of Tenochtitlan asked the rulers of Texcoco and Tlacopan to declare war, but also asked the rulers of the other states to do the same; this action indicates that it was not just a “Triple Alliance” company. Then the armies marched in sequence, organized according to their city/ethnicity: first the warriors from Tenochtitlan, then Tlatelolco (another Mexican city), then Acolhuacan (a region), then the Tepanecs (an ethnic group), then Xilotepec, then Quaquata, and finally the other unnamed groups (Sahagún 1950-82, lib. 8, ch. 17: 51-52). This description contrasts with Pomar's account, which indicates that such conquests involved only the armies of the three capitals of the Triple Alliance. The detailed Crónica Mexicana written by Mexican author Alvarado Tezozomoc (1980, ch. 75: 538; ch. 78: 551) makes no reference to an institutionalized form of joint conquest. However, he related that on two occasions when Ahuitzotl, the Tlatoani of Tenochtitlán who preceded Moctezuma
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The Triple Aztec Alliance II, wanting help in the fight against distant provinces, sent a message to the rulers Acolhua and Tepaneca, and they were obliged to obey and help him because of the institution of calling described above (and not because of any right of conquest). Torquemada (1975, vol. 1, bk. 2, ch. 42) gave a long account of the war against Cuauhnahuac waged by Itzcoatl of Tenochtitlan, who asked the rulers of Texcoco and Tlacopan to also send their armies. The Texcocan Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1977, ch. 39: 106), however, mentions this joint effort to conquer Cuauhnahuac only in passing, following a list of conquests made only by Nezahualcóyotl of Texcoco. The Anales de Cuauhtitlan (1975: 48), on the other hand, credit the ruler of Cuauhtitlan with assisting Tenochtitlan and Texcoco in defeating Cuauhnahuac and (exceptionally) Azcapotzalco as well; this demonstrates very well the ethnic bias present in many of these reports. Therefore, data contained in native historical traditions, the last category of documents that manifest ethnic identity in the Mexico Basin, do not support the notion that a formal Triple Alliance was created in the mid-15th century and that it regularly participated in joint military undertakings. nor do they support a tripartite distribution of taxes. CONCLUSION
This lengthy investigation of existing historical evidence continues to cast doubt on the pre-Hispanic existence of the "Triple Alliance" as it is currently understood. Consistent patterns of variation in ethnic orientation in documents relating to the relative status of the three cities, the size of their conquered provinces, and the share of tribute due to them indicate the persistence of factionalism among interest groups in the colonial period. Factionalism is ever-present in complex societies and often manifests itself in the possession and reporting of disparate versions of 'history'. Indeed, this is a prominent function of the ownership and realization of such traditions, as demonstrated ethnographically in other parts of the world. Building on his classic study of the Kachin of Burma, Edmund Leach (1965: 277) concluded: “Since any social system, however stable and balanced it may be, contains opposing factions, it is likely that different myths exist to validate the individual rights. . different groups of people”. Similarly, Audrey Richards' (1960:177) summary of African oral traditions found that "since myths and legends are used to support political claims, it follows that they are most numerous and complex where claims are made. disputed or the population is mixed. Oral traditions form part of a shared symbolic system, a common language in terms of which "claims and
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Susan D. Gillespie express themselves, but it is a language of argument, not a chorus of harmony” (Leach 1965: 278; emphasis added). Even before Spanish contact, traditional stories were a means of expressing disputes and rivalries as the peoples of central Mexico maneuvered to share state power; this participation manifested itself as a separable identity, function or category claimed by their ethnicity, city or lineage. Europeans turned this already volatile and contentious situation on its head and further confused the “language of argument” with their own concepts of the division of real power and authority. It is conceivable that the first group in the Mexico Basin to regularly gather the tribute received and divide it into fifths for distribution was the Spanish (the Crown took a fifth, Cortés a fifth, and his men divided the rest; Cortés 1971: 451, 470-471). Spanish practice thus provided the vocabulary—the three cabeceras with their subjects who paid them rent—and possibly a rationale for the creation of the Triple Alliance—the division of tributes. However, the conclusion that the Triple Alliance was probably "invented", to use Gibson's term, is not sufficient by itself. Evidence suggests that the Alianza features most prominently and formally in the historical accounts of Acolhua from the late 16th century, whose authors insisted that Texcoco was on a par with Tenochtitlan and proposed a “historical” justification for this assertion. Both Tenochtitlan and Texcoco were important cities with powerful rulers, but apparently Tlacopan was not; so it is somewhat paradoxical that this third city was included. Furthermore, it is not from Tepanec historical traditions that we learn about a Triple Alliance (since they are lacking), but from the histories of peoples who, we might think, would have little to gain by inventing Tlacopan as a third partner. Chronological and ethnically oriented patterns in the documentary evidence may indicate how the Triple Alliance was constructed over time in the colonial period, for what material purposes and by whom. However, without further analysis using a different approach, the documents do not reveal why this particular triadic organization was created in native historical traditions. When Mesoamerican scholars suggest that phenomena were "invented" (in addition to Gibson, see Florescano 1990a: 635), "invented" (Uchmany 1978: 233), "manufactured" (Lida 1990: 604; López Austin 1990: 669), or “innovated”” (López Austin 1990: 673) in native historical traditions, the implication is often that they are “fiction” masquerading as reality, hence beyond the realm of actual facts or “history” (Carrasco 1990: 677). . However, any purely fictitious invention added to the original historical traditions would not have been understandable or acceptable in the absence of some relation to pre-existing traditions.
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The conditions of the Aztec Triple Alliance and conceptual frameworks for understanding the world. As this research has focused exclusively on the colonial period, the time frame in which historical traditions were written, the major question raised at the beginning of this article again arises: how to investigate the survival of pre-conquest traditions in the colonial period without first distinguishing them from their postconquest counterparts. Even in the oldest documents, the same three peoples are consistently grouped together, indicating that they were likely linked to each other for some other, earlier purpose, even if not the later manifestation now known as the Triple Alliance. Therefore, the Triple Alliance is not so much an invention as a transformation of an earlier phenomenon. It appears in historical accounts and other documents as a manifestation of the “power” or “sovereignty” of the State. Understanding its pre-contact counterpart requires a different investigation of Mesoamerican conceptions of sovereignty. A symbolic approach is necessary because, as has already been said, historical narratives themselves constitute a symbolic system. As was the case with some Old World civilizations (Littleton 1982: 68-69, quoting Georges Dumézil), sovereignty in Mesoamerica had a tripartite structure. Furthermore, the values and qualities associated with the three categories in the construction of state power were attributed to the Mexicas of Tenochtitlán, the Acolhuaques of Texcoco, and the Tepanecas of Tlacopan both in their historical traditions and in related religious ceremonies.5 The Final Conclusion is that the interruption of conquest demanded a response, a new argument with a reworked (not “invented”) history as people competed for status positions in the construction of a new society. The past has been transformed, but it is still possible to glimpse in the reconfigured past the preservation, perhaps during the first century, of the system of indigenous symbols that structured the Aztec world. Its expression and manipulation in native traditions persisted in colonial times under the guise of “history” (an acceptable form encouraged by the Spaniards) due to the advantage it conferred in defending identity and legitimacy in the pursuit of order. of disorder 5 In the original version of this article (“Completing the Past: Triplets in Aztec Tradition”) presented at the Dumbarton Oaks symposium, I presented the evidence for the triadic model, as well as the semantic content of the three-part structure that underlies it, in the model Mesoamerican sociocosm. principles in the construction of “sovereignty”. It was this framework that later generated the “Triple Alliance” in the colonial period. This material is omitted here due to space limitations. Other scholars have also investigated the symbolic or functional values associated with the Triple Alliance and its three members (especially López Austin 1987; also Carrasco 1976: 218; Davies 1987: 267), although without doubting its pre-Hispanic existence.
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Susan D. Gillespie Acknowledgments I wish to thank David C. Grove, Rosemary A. Joyce, and Scott O'Mack for helpful comments and critiques. The ideas expressed here have largely been clarified through discussions with these colleagues, although I remain responsible for their explanation.
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The Aztec Triple Alliance CORTES, HERNAN 1971 Letters from Mexico (A. R. Pagden, trans.). Introduction by J.H. Elliott. Orion Press, New York. CUEVAS, MARIANO (ED.) 1914 Unpublished documents from the 16th century for the history of Mexico. National Museum of Archaeology, History and Ethnology, Mexico City. DAVIES, NIGEL 1987 The Aztec Empire: The Toltec Resurgence. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. DURÁN, DIEGO 1967 History of the Indians of New Spain and Mainland Islands (Ángel Ma. Garibay K., ed.). 2 vol. Editorial Porrua, Mexico City. DUVERGER, CHRISTIAN 1983 The Origin of the Aztecs. Threshold Editions, Paris. FLORESCANO, ENRIQUE 1990a Myth and history in nahua memory. Mexican History 39: 607–661. 1990b Answer: Toward a reinterpretation of Mesoamerican history through myth. Mexican History 39: 701–725. GIBSON, CHARLES 1956 General Appeal, Distribution, and the Empire of Acolhuacan. Hispano-American Historical Review 36 (1): 1–27. 1964 The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. 1967 XVI century. Rev. Priest. Stanford University Press edition, Stanford, California. 1971 Structure of the Aztec Empire. In Handbook of Middle American Indians (eds.) 10: 376–394. University of Texas Press, Austin. GIBSON, CHARLES AND JOHN B. GLASS 1975 A census of Central American prose manuscripts in the native historical tradition. In Handbook of Middle American Indians (Robert Wauchope and Howard F. Cline, eds.) 15: 322–400. University of Texas Press, Austin. GILLESPIE, SUSAN D. 1989 Aztec Kings: Government Building in Mexican History. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. GILLESPIE, SUSAN D. AND SCOTT O'MACK n.d. Cortés and Alvarado: reformulation of the Aztec dual sovereignty. Paper presented at the 47th International Congress of Americanists, New Orleans, 1991. GLASS, JOHN B., IN COLLABORATION WITH DONALD ROBERTSON 1975 A Census of Native Pictorial Manuscripts of Central America. In Handbook of Middle American Indians (Robert Wauchope and Howard F. Cline, eds.) 14: 81–252. University of Texas Press, Austin. GRAULICH, MICHEL 1988 Quetzalcoatl and Tollan's Reflection. Institute of American Studies, Antwerp.
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Susan D. Gillespie GUZMÁN, CRISTÓBAL DE, HERNANDO PIMENTEL AND ANTONIO CORTÉS 1939–42 Letter to the King, by Don Cristóbal de Guzmán, Don Hernando Pimentel and Don Antonio Cortés, Principal Caciques of Mexico, Tezcuco and Tlacupa . . . Mexico, March 10, 1562. In Epistolario de Nueva España, 1505–1818 (Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, ed.) 9: 140–142. Mexican Historical Library of Unpublished Works. Former Robredo Library, by José Porrúa and Hijos, Mexico City. HICKS, FREDERIC 1992 Subject States and Tribute Provinces: The Aztec Empire in the North Valley of Mexico. Ancient Mesoamerica 3:1–10. JIMÉNEZ MORENO, WIGBERTO 1962 Tetzcocan historiography and its problems. Mexican Journal of Anthropological Studies 18: 81–87. KLOR DE ALVA, J. JORGE 1982 Spiritual Conflict and Accommodation in New Spain: Towards a Typology of Aztec Responses to Christianity. In The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History (George A. Collier, Renato I. Rosaldo, and John D. Wirth, eds.): 345–366. Academic Press, New York. LEACH, EDMUND R. 1965 Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. Beacon Press, Boston. LEÓN-PORTILLA, MIGUEL 1974 Nahua testimonies on spiritual conquest. Studies in Nahuatl Culture 11: 11–36. LIDA, CLARA E. 1990 Presentation. Mexican History 39: 603–605. LITTLETON, C. SCOTT 1982 The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Evaluation of Georges Dumézil's Theories. 3rd ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. LÓPEZ AUSTIN, ALFREDO 1973 Man-God: Religion and Politics in the Nahuatl World. National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City. 1987 The Masked God of Fire. In The Aztec Templo Mayor (Elizabeth Hill Boone, ed.): 257–291. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C. 1990 On the Origin of the Mexicas: Nomadism or Migration? Mexican History 39: 663–675. MARCUS, JOYCE 1992 Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. “MEMORIAL OF THE PEOPLES” 1939–42 Memorial of the Peoples subject to the Lordship of Tlacupan and those who paid homage to Mexico, Tezcuco, and Tlacupan. In Epistolario de Nueva España, 1505–1818 (Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, ed.) 14: 118–122. Mexican Historical Library of Unpublished Works. Former Robredo Library, by José Porrúa and Hijos, Mexico City.
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The Aztec Triple Alliance MENDIETA, GERÓNIMO 1980 Indian Ecclesiastical History. 3rd ed. Editorial Porrua, Mexico City. MOTOLINÍA, FRAY TORIBIO 1970 Memorials. In Memorials and History of the Indians of New Spain. Library of Spanish Authors, vol. 240. Atlas, Madrid. MOTOLINÍA, FRAY TORIBIO AND FRAY DIEGO DE OLARTE 1914 Letter of Opinion from Fray Toribio de [sic] Motolinía and Fray Diego de Olarte to Don Luis de Velasco the First—Cholula, August 27, 1554. In Unpublished Documents of the 16th Century for the history of Mexico (Mariano Cuevas, ed.): 228–232. National Museum of Archaeology, History and Ethnology, Mexico City. O'GORMAN, EDMUNDO 1989 The lost book: Essay on the reconstruction of the lost historical work of Fray Toribio [Motolinía]. National Council of Culture and Arts, Mexico City. O'MACK, SCOTT n.d. Spaniards in an Aztec Landscape: Or, the Conquest of Mexico from the Beginning MS in Archive, University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology, 1990. OROZCO Y BERRA, MANUEL 1943 Tlacopan and Texcoco. Historical Disclosure 4 (10): 507–510. PIMENTEL, HERNANDO 1939–42 Letter from Don Hernando Pimentel, Chief Cacique of Texcuco, to King Felipe II. . . of Texcuco, on April 6, 1562. In Epistolario de Nueva España, 1505-1818 (Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, ed.) 16: 74-75. Mexican Historical Library of Unpublished Works. Former Robredo Library, by José Porrúa and Hijos, Mexico City. POMAR, JUAN BAUTISTA DE 1986 List of the city and province of Tezcoco. In Sixteenth-Century Geographical Relations (René Acuña, ed.) 8: 23–113. National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City. RICHARDS, AUDREY I. 1960 Social mechanisms for the transfer of political rights in some African tribes. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 90: 175–190 SAHAGÚN, FRAY BERNARDINO DE 1950–82 Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain (Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, trans. . .) . 12 vol. School of American Research, Santa Fe, and the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. SCHOLES, FRANCE V. AND ELEANOR B. ADAMS (EDS.) 1957 Information on the tributes the Indians paid to Moctezuma. Year 1554. Documents for the History of Colonial Mexico 4. José Porrúa and Sons, Mexico City. TORQUEMADA, JUAN DE 1975 Indian monarchy. 3 vol. Editorial Porrua, Mexico City.
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Susan D. Gillespie TOVAR, JUAN DE 1972 (History of the Benida de los Yndios to populate Mexico.) Manuscrito Tovar. Origins et croyances des Indiens du Mexique (Jacques Lafaye, ed.). From Phillips MS from the John Carter Brown Library. Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, Graz. UCHMANY, EVA ALEXANDRA 1978 Huitzilopochtli, god of Aztec-Mexitina history. Studies in Nahuatl Culture 13: 211–237. WITTE, FRAY NICOLÁS DE 1914 Letter of Fray Nicolás de Witte to an Illustrious Lord—Meztitlán, August 27, 1554. In Unpublished Documents of the 16th Century for the History of Mexico (Mariano Cuevas, ed.): 221–228. National Museum of Archaeology, History and Ethnology, Mexico City. ZANTWIJK, RUDOLF VAN 1990 The concept of "Aztec Empire" in indigenous historical sources. Nahuatl Cultural Studies 20: 201–211. ZORITA, ALONSO DE 1941 Brief and summary account of the lords and manners and differences that existed in them in New Spain. . . In New Collection of Documents for the History of Mexico (Joaquín García Icazbalceta, ed.) 3: 65–205. Editorial Salvador Chavez Hayhoe, Mexico City. 1965 The Lords of New Spain: A Brief and Abridged Relation of the Lords of New Spain (Benjamin Keen, trans.). Phoenix House, London.
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The new colonial expression of an appeal to the archaic
Collquiri Dam: The New Colonial Expression of an Appeal to the Archaic FRANK SALOMON UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
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WHO WORKED AMONG THE COLONIAL ANDEANS to renew the memory fund of the pre-colonial era? The most obvious contributors are native chroniclers. But, without underestimating these geniuses of innovative memory, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, it is worth noting that the anamnesis paths of these authors were extremely exceptional. sector of the native elite and lasted perhaps only a decade of the three colonial centuries. Meanwhile, the massive and long-term work of remembering past titles and practices and rehabilitating them for colonial use took place in other theatres. The overwhelming majority of what Andean witnesses said about pre-Hispanic times was said in administrative and legal forums. All the native chronicle literature fits easily into a briefcase, but the administrative legacy piles up in piles and vaults. In fact, the research did not fully investigate these deposits. What is clear at this point is that, unlike the chronicle, oral testimony aloud penetrates provincial derelicts and contains testimonies from social strata unheard of in any other written medium. A whole generation of Andean research grew out of the recognition of the former oral administrative role as a source of knowledge about pre-Hispanic society, but a critical agenda remains. Most ethnohistory treats these sources as if they were windows into the pre-Hispanic era; Rarely does ethnohistory raise or discuss occasions for recalling testimonies or examining the uses and vehicles of pre-Hispanic memory in its contemporary context (Gary Urton's The History of a Myth [1990] is an important exception). It is always dangerous to treat texts as traces of facts, especially when little is known, such as
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Frank Salomon, The Case of the Andes, on the cultural rules by which malleable memory was packaged in the apparently firm statements that attempt historical positivism.1 This essay will cover the trajectory of a specific background of memory, namely, tradition. Conchasica in its pre-Hispanic right to a lake-based irrigation system. The claim is that colonial society provided multiple theaters of memory with different functional properties and criteria of truth, in which particular bodies of memory acquired disparate but intelligibly related meanings. I will contrast two such theaters and their properties from the early 17th century. One is the ritual mobilization of memory in the intracommunity reproduction of rights and authority structures for irrigation, and the other is the mobilization of memory in the external struggle to defend water rights through litigation. In an ethnographic coda, I will also suggest that the symbolism of legitimacy in this deeply colonialized people today is heavily influenced by symbols that intersect in a bilateral mnemonic practice. A LAKE, ITS MYTH AND ITS ETHOS
Lake Yansa (today Yanascocha), a small lake fed by a spring at the top of the puna in the province of Huarochirí, department of Lima, Peru, irrigated for many centuries the terraces of a pre-Hispanic city called Conchasica or Conchasica. The waters of Yansa were, and still are, dammed at the top, released gradually after the rains, channeled down a steep slope to a reservoir in the town of Conchasica and divided into lots of comuneros (comuneros of the legally recognized Comunidade Camponesa da Concha). Yansa resembles other high lakes in its geography and uses (Mitchell and Guillet 1994), but historical chance has made it a unique take on the Andean ethos of resource control. Colonial Concha Sica became part of the parish of San Damián where, at the beginning of the 17th century, Dr. Francisco de Ávila was a pioneer in the extirpation of idolatry. The extirpation was a systematic persecution of the entire archbishopric that lasted about sixty years. The first experience of Dr. Ávila in repressive social research was the intelligence research that left the Huarochirí Quechua manuscript [ca. 1608] - the only book-length source written in an Andean language covering an Andean system of belief and ritual (Salomon and Urioste 1991; Taylor 1987). The longest single chapter in this book, chapter thirty-one, is the mythical manifesto of 1 The term “historical positivism” is by Dominick Lacapra: “sources tend to be treated in strictly documentary terms, that is, in terms of facts. or references to propositions that can be derived from them to provide information about specific times and places. . . . a preferential position is given to apparently direct informative documents, such as bureaucratic reports, wills, records, diaries, eyewitness accounts, etc.” (1985: 18).
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The new colonial expression of an appeal to worship, priesthood, and ritual irrigation of the archaic Lake Yansa.2 Chapter thirty-one begins with an origin myth and a property title. In the times of origin, five mythical heroes, the greatest being Llacsa Misa, emerged from the ground above. Descending into Concha Sica armed with a deadly magical helmet, they scattered all the natives of Yunca (low lands) except one native boy, Yasali, whom his father accidentally left behind in a panic. Yasali's father intended to take him away, but mistakenly took his foster orphan son. Some of the invaders wanted to kill Yasali because he could claim the land in the future, but Llacsa Misa saved him. Llacsa Misa saw in the adoption of Yasali the key to knowledge of the Concha agricultural system and the source of a legitimate, that is, genealogical title to it. In time, Llacsa Misa made the native marry his own sister Cuno Cuyo, and thus Yasali became the ancestor of the reconstituted city. Patrilaterally, Yasali's descent represented right and matrilaterally, power. The second part of the chapter tells a myth about how water infrastructure took its current shape. A huaca or superhuman being named Collquiri lived in the lagoon, and Llacsa Misa learned to care for him in peace. But the trickster demiurge Cuni Raya tempted Collquiri with the promise of a beautiful woman named Capyama. Collquiri only thought of Capyama and soon seduced her in the lake by means of a magic trick typical of Cuni Raya artifice: he disguised himself as a little creature who, by picking her up and putting her inside his clothes, made her pregnant. She immediately gave birth to Collquiri in human form, so beautiful that she fell in love with him. Capyama's blood men were furious with the seduction and furious with Collquiri: "Why have you come to steal our daughter, our sister?" To appease them, Collquiri promised a mysterious bride price called Goesunder (huco ric); Curiosity got the better of them, and they accepted. When the time came for the present, Collquiri fulfilled it by becoming "Goesunder" himself: he tunneled under the shores of the lake and emerged from the earth in the form of a mighty spring overlooking the village of Capyama. The gushing water soaked the drying crops and sprayed the elderly. Mad with rage at their playful son-in-law, they shouted "Plug it in!" Collquiri appeased them by creating a series of smaller, manageable springs. But the Conchas, themselves devotees of Collquiri, felt betrayed when he gave them their water: “And what are we going to live on?” they complained. Collquiri was sorry and compensated by modifying the lake to create a canal and dam for La Concha's use. It was a “wall” with five 2 The title of the chapter in Quechua means: “Just as in the previous chapter we spoke of the existence of a certain lagoon, so now we will speak of the Ayllu Concha lagoon, called Yansa”.
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Frank Salomon precisely measured the openings that could be successively opened to allow irrigation at constant pressure through the Conch's channels. There is now a dam on the lake that matches this description in many respects (Figs. 1, 2, 3). The third part of the chapter establishes the law that Collquiri ordained for Llacsa Misa and his successors, the water priests (yancas) of the Concha: they were to monitor and measure the lake, take care of its dam and vulnerable channels, regulate the irrigation and, in exchange, have their crops worked for them. Then follow detailed passages on sacrificial rites to retain water just before the heavy rains and to release it in stages after planting. The fourth and last part of the chapter summarizes the genealogy of the five groups descended from the founding heroes. This part explains that the major lineage, namely that of Llacsa Misa, became extinct, and the priesthood legitimately passed to a minor lineage. It also mentions that from the union between Cuno Cuyo, the sister-heroine, and the boy Yasali, a lineage with living descendants was obtained. THE RITUAL WITHIN THE VILLAGE AS A HISTORICAL SOUVENIR THEATER CA. 1600
The Huarochirí altiplano, with its high icy slopes and steep, thorny gorges, has patches of irrigable land scattered along the valley walls at around 3,000 meters above sea level and in the valleys of the Rímac rivers. , Lurin and Mala. As in many of the societies that Gellner (1988: 16-17) groups under the heading of "agrarian", the pre-Hispanic inhabitants of the Huarochirí altiplano felt such a tense relationship with resources that the struggle for land and irrigable water it seemed inevitable to them. (Espinoza Soriano 1981; Netherly 1984; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1988: 53–67; Torero 1974: 104–107).3 Consequently, they expressed an intense and self-conscious need to retain and control the productive structures created by previous generations. "Ancestral, or past institutional forms, perhaps in idealized versions, [were] presented as the moral norm, the prescriptive ideal" for both technology and social organization (Gellner 1988: 17). Abundance seemed to depend on the faithful endogamous transmission of the factors of production, within a more or less expansive but localized lineage, whose emblems were the ancestors. The result was a strongly ancestor-centered ideology with participation in mumic cults and the recitation of ancestral facts or vecochina (Hernández Príncipe 1986 [1622]: 484; Duviols 1986: 145) which functioned as the main mechanisms for reproducing groups with heredity. rights. These facts governed the uses of pre-Hispanic memory for intra-village purposes. The myth-history of Huarochirí strongly participates in the characteristics that 3
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For a contrary view, see Lees 1989.
The new colonial expression of an appeal to the archaic
Fig. 1 Represa Collquiri in 1990. It is located in the middle of a canal that runs from Lake Yanascocha to the modern dam.
Fig. 2 The channel seen from the Collquiri dam looking towards the lake. Reinforcing masonry and a permeable stone barrier in the canal are visible.
Fig. 3 Three of the Collquiri dam openings mentioned in the Huarochirí Manuscript. They were successively opened by water priests (yancas) to regulate irrigation. 269
Frank Salomon Jonathan Friedman, paraphrasing a 1971 analysis by Luc de Heusch, attributes to the oral tradition of certain pre-capitalist African societies: [Agrarian societies promote] quasi-historical or even evolutionary mythologies that tell the genesis of the present order in terms of descent genealogy. Such models are common to hierarchical societies ("chiefs") and to "archaic" states, the so-called lukewarm societies. Rather than having a dualistic division of time, they instill a degree of continuity. But this continuity is quickly interrupted by the archetypal pattern of an unchanging structure; thus, the reproduction of the same conflicts between father and son, uncle and nephew, the same type of war, the same type of conquest and the same alternation between stability and chaos. Time here is still marked by a predetermined structure. The essential difference is that there is a spatio-temporal hierarchy linking the living to ancestors, gods and forces of nature, a hierarchy whose aim is not to establish some degree of duration but to define the structure of power. The lineage that descends from the creation of the universe to the king or sacred chief is the line of communication that establishes his power as the "force of nature" responsible for the reproduction of society. (1985: 175) In the ritual theater that reproduced intracommunity social structures, including the right to water, the pre-Hispanic past was imagined as a trajectory from the primordial time of the mountain huacas through the exploits of Llacsa Misa and her companions. into the man-made world of storytellers and immediate ancestors themselves. Privileged people regarded their kin as descent groups with valuable genealogical ties to such heroes (Zuidema 1987). In cases where the genealogical content is precise enough to allow chronological estimates,4 events prior to the third or fourth generation before the Spanish invasion seem to have been remembered under heroic axioms. After 1600, the Spanish invasion still falls within the historical horizon of human memory, usually more or less chronological and factual.5 Halfway through the genealogy of the water priests, the heirs acquired baptismal names. This subargument raises two questions: what kind of forum for remembering the pre-Hispanic era was the intramunicipal ritual? What kind of hit? These are typical cases of chieftaincy where rival native lords make claims based on dynastic legitimacy. 5 In some chapters of the Huarochirí Manuscript, however, the Spanish conquest was already acquiring the miraculous and metaphysical interpretations that heralded its retreat into the mytho-historical horizon where it resides in many modern popular histories. Chapter fourteen is a notable example.
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Was the new colonial expression of appeal to the structured archaic past a colonial narrative of pre-colonial times? In the context of the city and its sacred, the stories of the pre-Hispanic past participated in the “heroic” history of Heusch or Sahlins somewhere between the “coldness towards history” of the unconditional origin myth and the “warmth” of open historicism . Terence Turner (1988) has suggested that this way of remembering, which is also very prominent in ancient Hebrew scriptures, corresponds to the worldview of small autonomous subsistence societies within the orbit of, but not the constant control of, empires. With this view of the past, a pre-Hispanic history had the obvious function of naturalizing normative social relations —rights to water, etc.—as attributes of superhuman natural beings manifested in terrestrial forms (the story of Capyama, a geographical accident related to social infrastructure is an example; Golte 1981). There is an obvious functional point. The perpetuation of social structures that transmit unequal rights to infrastructures is part of the threshold of what is humanly changeable. But this does not explain the value of a specific past. Any fable would serve the ideological purpose. What made the narrative seem "true" lay in what appeared to viewers to be the unshakable homology, or overarching similarity of form, between the geographic, superhuman, and social realms. A prehistory was good because it organized all the local phenomena, from the details of managing the canal to the shape of the cosmos, in a homologous relationship with the matrix that generated the experience, that is, immediate social and productive arrangements. The question at the moment is how seeing the past in this way might affect behavior in a country wholly dominated by Spaniards. If the heroic model was still influencing affairs within the village a generation after the Spanish invasion, one might expect some continuing 'mythopractic'6 action. Unlike historical literature, which emphasizes how quickly litigation overtook ritual and combat as a way for colonized peoples to challenge the status quo (Stern 1982: 114-137; Spalding 1984: 50-51), mythopraxy seems to have colored the local fights. . Before Conchasica's dispute with its neighbors turned into the legalistic dispute discussed below, La Concha sought to resolve it in a battle that recreated the wars of the ancestors in "Inca" times. Indeed, the accounts of ancient wars recorded in the Huarochirí Manuscript may well have gained relevance from contemporary struggles. archetypal events. : “Events are hardly unique or new, but are immediately perceived in the order of received structure, as identical with their [mythical] original. . . . the inhabitants of this world are examples of the same types of beings that came before. . . . Therefore, the experiences of the past themselves are the way in which the present is experienced” (Sahlins 1985: 58-59). 7 The details are as follows: While Sunicancha had gone to mass, the mayor of
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Frank Salomon between popular history and institutional action became much more complex when the struggle entered a Spanish-dominated forum, namely the courts of law. LEGAL PROCESS AND HISTORICAL REMEMBRANCE ANDEAN CA. 1631-1650
As Spanish institutions accumulated commanding power over the disposition of productive assets inherited from the ancients, Spanish courts of law became a common forum for the adjudication of judicial cases. Courts accumulated large stores of knowledge about pre-Hispanic rights and struggles. It turns out that, by a surprising stroke of luck, one of them is a secular record of the same social constellation mythically represented in the Lake Yansa chapter of the Huarochirí Manuscript. This 285-folio manuscript8 records the Conch villagers' struggle with Sunicancha after both went on trial for Lake Yansa and other assets (BN/L MS B-1483; Rostworowski 1978: 117–122). Taylor makes use of the claim in his 1987 translation (p. 475).9 This chance of preservation makes it possible to see a single tradition refracted through different institutions with different criteria of truth. What were the characteristics of courts as forums? Where was the value of truth and effectiveness once the memories were exported beyond the ritual environment within the village? How was the past reverberated to make it compelling in outdoor arenas? What effect did the process have on the Andean understanding of change? Concha led his people to Vacaycocha and told them to cut down the quisuar and wattles that bordered the fields, destroy twenty stone arms of the irrigation canals, uproot the potato plants and take two pots of corn beer from a house. (BN/L MS B-1483, sheet 14r). Less than a week later, the Sunicancha people returned. The mayor of Concha sent them a message saying: “Today, Thursday, we are going to meet with our people to fight, each one face to face, in Antacallua, just as the Incas fought in the past and in ancient times” (fol. 14r). The Conchas invaded Vacaycocha, “all in general, men and women, small and large. . . [their] hands armed with sticks and knives, to kill us.” But Sunicancha said it intended to seek legal solutions: ". . . and that we will never defend it because we understand that for this we have justice and we do not do as in ancient times when the Incas fought" (fol. 14r-v). more fighting took place, apparently with a heavy dose of ritualization, such as the temporary capture of enemy wives, the breaking of women's pins, and the chanting of insults and challenges across borders (fol. 14v). between agricultural work and combat was flexible.The two communities exercised mutually hostile claims by building unauthorized canals in newly occupied fields, building corrals on each other's lands without permission, or cutting down their adversaries' trees and crops (fol. 167v). 8 Unfortunately, this manuscript is missing the initial folios that presumably explain the first phase of the struggle with Sunicancha. 9 In Taylor's footnote, the manuscript is cited as C-1483; the correct citation is that of Rostworowski, B-1483. 272
The new colonial expression of an appeal to the archaic Arnold Krupat (1992) suggests thinking of law (by which he means status) as a special kind of narrative. It is based on the concept of performative language developed by the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin: unlike other expressions, which describe or comment on a real or imaginary world, the legal text has a performative force. The mere existence of the text transforms the world into what the text says it is (for example, a world where the cult of the huaca is punishable). Various subgenres of legal language claim to make their content truthful. More particularly, unlike other discourses, which alter society through persuasion, law does so through coercion. All existing laws incorporate social rewards for telling a story that conforms to the legal facts mentioned above and disincentives or penalties for telling different stories. When addressing a court, the litigant's aim is always that his representation be translated into the performative language of the law. In this process, subordinate Andean peoples had an important advantage: pre-Hispanic memory was supposed to include a crucial point of knowledge that no Spaniard could provide, namely, knowledge of "immemorial" social facts that colonial law was obliged to respect. that he himself could not. to define. Well-established legal precedents required courts to uphold claims that Indians could be "immemorial" and peaceful (i.e. substantially undisputed), unless, of course, they were harmful to Christianity. In the course of the battle to have the supposedly ancient tradition re-expressed as law, the native litigant was forced to shoulder the main burden of cross-cultural interpretation. The reason for this was that, in 1600, the implied sufficiency of legal discourse was not challenged in the courts. The possibilities that native institutions simply could not be directly reduced to Spanish categories, or that translation itself might be problematic, were rarely discussed. native institutions have obvious categorical equivalents in Spanish or Spanish-Quechua administrative jargon. This long cultural span forced native parties and their advocates to conceptualize the assumptions latent in Andean languages of legitimacy; they essentially had to unravel, sometimes as generalizations about 'customs', norms whose effectiveness in the ritual context was inherent precisely in their self-evident axiomatic position. Sometimes this forced explicitness gives native witness
10 Tom Abercrombie studied a rare case of a contested translation process in connection with the Kurakas' challenge to the perpetuity of the encomienda near Cuzco in the early 1560s: the defense attorney for the accused native rebels claimed that they had received a document Quechua translation of the term “perpetuity” which semantically implied slavery, to which they were not legally subject and therefore, in rebelling, they had acted legally to the best of their knowledge (1992).
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Frank Salomon some flavor of auto-ethnography. But the conceptualization operated within narrow limits because its results would be useless unless they revealed that supposedly pre-European concepts were basically compatible with the laws of Christianity. Andean litigators, like Krupat's Cherokee, “found themselves in the position of trying to make this traditional formulated language [ie, indigenous myth, ritual, and political rhetoric] speak of things it had never spoken of (permanent boundaries). payments, annuities, etc.)” (1992: 155). Likewise, in Concha Sica, the mythical and heroic story, which presented the right to water from the great “naturalizing” homology between geographic and social forms, should be made to speak of rights over alienable goods created by human artifice as production., sale, etc. In the action of La Concha, the Collquiri dam itself suffered precisely this detachment from its mytho-historical position. When Sunicancha included the hydraulic structures of Lake Yansa in his claim, Don Domingo Pumasamari de Concha (and many other Concha witnesses) responded by retelling the story of Llacsa Misa, with demystifying alterations (Fig. 4): We [the Concha] We say that our forefathers, whose rightful heirs we are, built and built a reservoir and dam for water with stone walls more than twice the height of a man, fifty ells long or so, and settled beside a hill half a league from the said town of San Damián, with five mouths, where water was drawn from a spring, with which the said Yacha Chauqua, his children, grandchildren and descendants of the ayllu de Concha, irrigated their fields. . . and that he made the said reservoir at his own expense and with his own work, and as it is, only us, our children and our descendants and those who have rights derived from the said Llacsa Chauchu [we can irrigate] because it belongs to us as property and possession we have had from their [i.e., the ancestors'] paganism to this day. (fol. 236r)11 11 We say [i.e. Concha] that the said our ancestor of whom we are the immediate heirs fabricated and built a lake and dam of water with stone walls of more than two states of fifty bars a little more or less long attached to a hill half a league from the said city of San Damian with five mouths in which the water of a puquio was collected with which the said Yacha Chauqua his children, grandchildren and descendants of the Ayllo de Concha irrigated their farms. . . and having made the said lagoon at his expense and with his own work and, therefore, being only us, our children and descendants and those who had cause of the said llacsa chauchu for belonging to us in the property and possession in which they have been from the moment of your kindness so far. Another part of this set of testimonies is quoted by Taylor (1987: 475).
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Fig. 4 Lima National Library/Research Room MS B-1483, fol. 274r. The text shows that on October 29, 1650, the witness Don Antonio Munana, sixty years old, testified on Concha's side in the Concha-Sunicancha process on Lake Yansa or Yanascocha. In his testimony, he says that the lagoon belongs to the Conchas because they are "descendants in a direct line, descendants of Llacsar Chauca, an old Indian, who built at his expense the lagoon called Yanascocha, which is a water reservoir with stone walls with more than twice the height of a man and about fifty eels long, more or less, and which, incidentally, is on the side of a hill half a league from San Damián, with five mouths, where the said people used to collect water from a nearby puquyo, with which the said Llacsar Chauca and his sons and grandsons irrigated their lands and fields. . . .” 275
Frank Salomon The description coincides with Lake Yansa and its hydraulic works in all its details.12 In this presentation, however, Concha's witnesses reported nothing of the miraculous content that dominated the letter of the Yancas. Instead, they focused their argument on a point of colonial law: the Concha have control over the dam not because their ancestor built it in alliance with a huaca, but because he capitalized on it at his own expense and efforts. It is tempting to see representations generated in this way as hoaxes produced only as a passing effect during a trial, but it is unlikely that they were made just for now or just for the lawyers. Native lords who expressed the interests of their subjects were also compelled to act in accordance with their representations in the conduct of government at home. They had to provide performances that also served internal political ends: discrediting rival factions, convincing villagers that their leaders recognized their interests, resonating memorable enough that villagers could remember their leaders' dictates and reuse them as a party line. The texts produced by such a process were typically Janus-faced artifacts, intended to make convincing sense under readings distant in context and genre expectation. Indeed, its valence to villagers' ears may not correspond to what urban officials thought they heard, causing the "colonial irony" sometimes detected in such speech and writing (Hanks 1989; Cornejo Polar 1978; Lienhard 1991). ). One example concerns a genealogical detail taken from the Conch tradition to the judgment of the lake. Chapter thirty-one, telling how Shell acquired rightful title to the lake by harboring and then marrying a boy from among the defeated aborigines, goes on to speak of that boy's offspring. . . . the abandoned boy Yasali was scared to death, being just a child, and hid inside the site where there is now a cross in Concha Sica. At the same time, those three men arrived at the village. When they arrived, they divided the houses and everything between them, and that's when Llacsa Misa found the child. "Son, don't worry," Llacsa Misa told him. "You will stay with me. If my other brothers say to me, 'We are going to kill you,' I will defend you. But in return, you will herd my llamas. 12 Witnesses give various names to the dam builder, but none match the from Llacsa Misa. The word chauca is apparently a common pre-Quechua noun meaning "ancestor" or perhaps "consecrated ancestor" generically, so variants such as "Llacsa Chauchu" and "Yacha Chauqua" may refer to the individual Llacsa Misa using part of the proper name plus an honorary or classificatory title The chaucalla today means a pre-Hispanic mortuary structure.
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The new colonial voice of an appeal to the archaic When the other brothers saw the boy, they bitterly despised him and said: “This boy must die, because sooner or later he will tell us: 'These fields are mine. ; This land belongs to me!'” “Better let him live. He will show us all his customs, his fields and everything. But the others still refused, saying: "Let him die anyway." Llacsa Misa got angry and said: “My brothers, I have already told you many times. Be careful or your bones could end up in the lake. I say, let him live!" Just then the others were finally silent. So Llacsa Misa let the child live and made him graze his llamas. While Yasali tended to the llamas, he married Llacsa Misa's sister, Cuno Cuyo , who came with him from Yauri Llancha. Later, when he was already a mature man, he became a yanca for Uma Pacha, who came from Yauri Llancha. (This boy named Yasali was the grandfather of Cristóbal Chauca Huaman.) (Salomon and Urioste 1991 [1608?]: 137–138) By saying that Yasali later became a priest of Uma Pacha, the narrator means that Yasali so completely joined the top of the Conch that he was allowed not only to worship in the shrine of origin of conquerors, but also to officiate there as a priest.13 In its own context, the passage expresses a ubiquitous motif in western Andean mythology: the insecurity of the conquerors and their demonstration of legitimacy through ritualized relations with the aboriginal inhabitants of the valley (Duviols 1973). Knowing this history helps to understand how two Andean arguments adhered to the data offered by their relevance to the obvious Spanish legal arguments. The first detail is an image on a color sketch or landscape map that Concha submitted to the court to illustrate his argument that Concha and Sunicancha had separate water systems (fol. no num., following fol. 235v, filed September 24, 1649). ) (Figure 5). On the map you can clearly see the abandoned pre-Hispanic city of San Cristóbal de Concha,14 and in its center there is a building with 13 Yauri Llancha is specified in another part of the Huarochirí Manuscript as the sanctuary of origin of the heroes of Concha (Salomón and Urioste 1991: 136). 14 The houses seem designed with small niches; perhaps it was a convention representing pre-Hispanic architecture. This city is mentioned in the denunciation (fol. 63r) as an ancient but “reduced” (ie colonially resettled) city whose people were later transferred to San Damian.
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Fig. 5 A landscape painting ca. 1645 filed by Concha litigants. Show that Sunicancha (the rightmost town) has an irrigation system based on its own lake (top right). Concha Sica, the pre-Hispanic city in the lower center, draws water from Lake Yanascocha or Yansa (upper center) through a reservoir. The Concha Sica cross mentioned in the Huarochirí Manuscript can be seen in the town (which is loosely labeled "San Cristóbal de Concha"). On the bottom left, the colonial resettlement town of San Damian looks across a gorge towards Concha Sica.
a fallen cross, perhaps an abandoned chapel.15 As proof, this image meant that the hometown of the Shells was located on the waterworks of Lake Yansa and Sunicancha was not. But for a Concha witness, certainly familiar with Yasali's story, the cross meant the place where Yasali was saved, i.e. "where a cross now stands in Concha Sica". Since this event was the basis for Concha's rightful possession of Yansa and his succession to immemorial indigenous rights, the cross identifies a sacred place for more than Christian reasons. A symbol destined to supplant the model of legitimacy of the huaca, it became, on the contrary, a cardinal point in the re-articulation of “heroic history” in a colonial landscape. The already mentioned Quechua narration on the origin of the Concha ends by stating that a man who lived then called Cristóbal Chauca Huaman was the great15 of Yasali. The building with the cross is larger than the adjacent ones and appears to be lightly whitewashed.
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The new colonial expression of an appeal to the archaic son.16 His position as a living representative of the Yasali legacy provides a clue to understanding a second detail of the Concha-Sunicancha process. The lawsuit mentions Cristóbal Chauca Huaman under the name “Xpoval Chauca Guaman” (fol. 3r). One of the ways in which Sunicancha tried to show that La Concha had not actually exercised title to the disputed lands was by asking friendly witnesses if they had seen “Xpoval Chauca Guaman”, then in his sixties, planting the Vacaycocha field. . The responses were negative. Why did Sunicancha think that questioning Cristóbal Chauca Huaman's activity (unlike anyone else) would damage Concha's titles? Sunicancha did not explain the reason to the Spanish judge, and we would not know it either if the Quechua manuscript did not inform us that Cristóbal Chauca Huaman was the person through whose ancestors the rights of the Concha continued those of the former pre-conch holders. It was the actual instantiation, as it were, of the orphan Yasali. It is through him that Concha's claims can be said to have the two necessary attributes for oral-traditional land rights to be valid in Spanish law, namely, "immemorial" age (that is, extending beyond the most remote preserved memory) and “peaceful”. possession. From the point of view of Spanish law, Sunicancha's questions explored the rule according to which part of the validity of a title resided in its use. For this argument, the named man was just a more or less random example of Concha's supposed failure to work on a claim. But from the point of view of the Concha or Sunicancha, the challenge was more fundamental; if the very individual who collectively embodied the Shell titles did not exercise them, who had the right to put pressure on them? This double-edged argument suggests that the case against Concha was made in Spanish and Andean legal terms simultaneously, using facts that may be persuasive under both criteria. This is not to say that such colonial reinterpretation protected or reconsecrated the old narratives of legitimacy. The difficult task of developing two-way arguments and extending them cross-culturally to court media must have altered narrators' habits of displaying and interpreting inherited symbols. William Hanks comments regarding Spanish-Mayan discourse that "the new relationships between agents and objects in the lived world that are created by the emerging colonial social order inevitably lead to new linguistic and symbolic collocations" (1989: 20). Symbols that were once “pure Mayan” became colonial and “culturally ambivalent” through new combinations, such as the use of Mayan royal titles to address Spanish authorities. Likewise, the translocation of mythical names to other contexts has altered their range of meanings in innovative ways. 16 The Huarochirí Manuscript says that Yasali was abuelo, or “his grandfather”, to use a Spanish term; it is difficult to determine whether the number of implied generations was only two.
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Frank Salomon AN ETHNOGRAPHIC EPILOGUE: THE LAW OF THE LAKE IN 1990
If the subject is studied ethnographically (De la Cadena and Oré 1986; Gelles 1984), it appears that such changes had a double meaning, at least in Conchasica. Spanish law absorbed Concha's recontextualized legitimations; in contrast, the Yansa Lake stories, once recast as Loyalist testimonies, also added once "pure Spanish" symbols to Concha icons. The court's rhetoric and media were reformulated to confirm what the law itself had already problematic, namely the conviction that legitimate rights to water depend on the ritual perpetuation of the bond with the characters. Their modern names are María Capyama and, not Collquiri, but Pedro Batán. Some of the rites recorded in chapter thirty-one of the Huarochirí Manuscript are still practiced. The rite that the Mass of Llacsa ordered for the closing of the Collquiri dam continues to be carried out under the title of "Birthday of the Lake". Now, as in 1608, irrigation is understood as the continuation of the prehistoric romance between Collquiri and Capyama, between water and land, between nature and agriculture. But a profound change has taken place: the kinship-structured language of the "heroic story" is no longer sufficient to explain the perpetuation of Concha's bond with Yansa; the means of renewing culture's bond with nature from year to year and from generation to generation is legal contractuality in an astonishingly literal sense. Today, the rite is a display of sacrificial reciprocity ratified by forms drawn from legal administration. The Huarochirí Manuscript records the following as a rite for closing the dam: The entire city also went out to dam up the water. As soon as they arrived, the women deposited their coke, each in their own right, and also their corn beer, each in their own right. These offerings were for Lake Yansa, but in reality it was the yanca who received them all. They would also take a llama, they say. They also took guinea pigs, ticti and all other sacrificial offerings. As soon as they finished packing, they took off a quipu to take care of all the people who were absent and began to worship Yansa Lagoon. They loved to say: “Father Collquiri, yours is the lake and yours are the waters; This year, give us lots of water.”
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The new colonial expression of an appeal to the archaic When the service was over, they drank corn beer and chewed coca-cola. After that, the men and women together started to take the lake. (Salomon and Urioste 1991 [1608?]: 142) Decades ago, the people of Conchasica supplemented the old stone dam with a modern steel dam and gate. The old lake shore channel was extended to the new dam, but the old dam was kept within it. Today the old dam is open and the real job of closing the dam is just a matter of closing the steel gate. But the Concha community, although they no longer need to “work” the “Birthday”, still “dance” the “Birthday” and do what is called “training” of the old rite of closing the dam.17 Before sunrise On February 3, 1990, the inhabitants begin their ascent from San Damián to the lake and stop for breakfast at the high pass that marks the last of the six named stops (Fig. 6). From there you can see the dark green waters of Lake Yansa, today called Yanascocha, in a small depression. It is an oval-shaped lake fed by a spring in the puna, bordered by an arid beach (Fig. 7). Descending in procession to the beach, the Concha forms a ceremonial area on the beach. About fifty flank the cross facing the lake, with the ceremonial table or “table” (a tablecloth) of offerings in front of them, and about fifty women sit opposite the men. Subsequent acts constitute a cycle of tributes to Collquiri's modern analogue, Pedro Batán, and María Capyama. Every year, a Concha man and woman are nominated to represent the two “Owners of the Lake” and lead the dance, but the acts of offering and oratory in 1990 were directed at the lake itself. Each round of honors follows a standard sequence (Fig. 8). In each act, the varayos (staff officers who exercise traditional authority over community agriculture) request, receive, record and invent the wills (“offerings”) of each category of devotees: those who fulfill old vows, those who make current offerings , those who make promises and those who enter the sect for the first time. 17 Because the modern province of Huarochirí is monolingual in Spanish, and because it was exposed to Spanish translations by Arguedas and others of the Huarochirí text (as well as to various social science research projects under the leadership of José Matos Mar in the 1950s), one might suspect an "invented tradition" that revives a forgotten past. This is not the case with the dam. First, the rite contains many elements that are not mentioned in any published text; second, closely related rites are performed in cities not mentioned in the texts, including Sunicancha; Third, few Huarochirí are familiar with the contents of these books, knowing only their existence and having a very condensed impression of their orientation towards major milestones. There is a strong tendency to confuse all books about the region as works by Julio C. Tello, a native son who rose to academic prominence in the 1920s.
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Fig. 6 On February 3, 1990, the inhabitants of La Concha made a pilgrimage to Yanascocha to perform rites very similar to those prescribed by pre-Hispanic water priests (Manuscrito Huarochirí, ch. 31 [Salomón and Urioste 1991: 142]). On the high walkway leading to the lake, pilgrims stop for breakfast.
Figure 7 282
Entering the hole where Yanascocha lies.
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Fig. 8 The president and those responsible for irrigation speak with the mythical “owners” of the lake, Pedro Batán and María Capyama. They ask the "owners" to receive offerings and ask permission for community members to draw water for irrigation next year.
Fig. 9 A delegation of Concha villagers break away from riverside ceremonies to cut champa or moss-covered grass. Peat is needed for a "drilling" of the old job of closing the lake by covering the dam openings with measured blocks. 283
Frank Salomon The call for initial offerings on February 3, 1990 was as follows: Owners of this lagoon, I, Roberto Sacramento, representative [of community officials], in the presence of Campos Humberto Urrutia and Jesús Matos, Greetings on behalf of the community from Conchasica. We came to offer this small gift to show our goodwill. Receive this liqueur, a free gift from all community members and visitors. (Throws two shots of liqueur into the lake.) And for you, ma'am, Mama María Capyama. [Throws out two more.] And for you, sir, Pedro Batán. [Throws out two more.] And to everyone with you. [Throws two more.] And please accept the Coke as a gift, as is our custom. [Throws coca leaves into the water three times.] And the flowers that nature gives us. [Throws flower petals.] We ask that you also always provide us with the water we live on; And not only us, but we ask that the world not lack water, especially in Africa. We ask your permission to continue watering according to our custom. The authorities then divide the party into two “comités” (commissions) that carry out simultaneously, but in separate places, the intermediate stages of the “Anniversary”. The lawn mowing party. Campeiros or lawn mowers carried out the “drill” of the dam closing work. His first job was to cut, shape and transport the heavy wet blocks (Fig. 9). The women staggered under the load as they were lowered into the old waterworks (Fig. 10). Much was said in the 1990s about the great skill and tireless effort required to correctly measure and stack grass blocks. Stacking was considered dangerous work that had to be done while standing in the water at the bottom of the canal. The blocks had to be carefully shaped and shaped to withstand the anticipated water pressure. 284
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Fig. 10 The women of the champero “committee” are responsible for bringing fresh grass to the dam. Champa's work ranks among the most strenuous tasks of the year.
The boat launch party. While the reaper team worked in the champeria, most of the celebrants stayed by the lake to prepare the crowning sacrifice, called a boat. Its leaders were the "Boat Launching Committee", four men and (after some disputes over gender roles) two women. One man in particular represents Pedro Batán and one woman, María Capyama. In later years, I was told, these festivals involved wearing costumes that included the cotona, or women's tunic, considered a symbol of ancient culture. The Boat Launching Committee sent a delegate to the farm to find and bring back two blocks of dry grass that had been cut the previous year and left to make the boat. He soon returned with blocks of dry, brownish, almost weightless grass. The leaders laid the dry champas on the ground and built the boat with one of them only with sharp stones and no metal tools. The same man who collected the dry champa brought out the stone tools. The boat was a rectangular raft slightly smaller than an entire champa, about 60 cm long, 30 cm wide and 15 cm deep. In its center a circular well 285
Frank Solomon was empty. A disc was cut from the second dry champa to cover this hole, which formed the hold of the boat. People crowded to watch as the officiants filled the basement with gifts and nearly drenched it with generous drops of liquor. The committee members then fitted the ship to receive its sail. The community secretary brought a pre-prepared candle. The candle was a legal-size sheet of lined paper, folded vertically, containing a carefully numbered handwritten list of all members of the Conchasica irrigation community in 1990 and stamped with the community's legalization seals and signatures (Figs. 11, 12). . This list was called a message. He told the "lake owners" exactly who needed permission to use his water. He also informed them about new users and the departure or death of old ones. In modern Peruvian Spanish, recado means a short note or message. But the term may have entered ritual usage as a collection or a related term meaning a legally binding document such as a title or power of attorney. After many mocking feints, the dancers circling with the boat in the air arrived at the water's edge (Fig. 13). When everyone was finally dancing knee-deep in the lake, the head of the committee shouted, "And now me." I'm going to launch it!" The six gently lowered the taut cloak on which the boat rested and let the water carry it away. As soon as the boat touched the water, the women shouted at the top of their voices: "Give us water, Pedro Batán!" and the men shouted, "Give us water, Mama Capyama!" The president of the community and Mayor Campo were on the shore pouring fennel liquor into the lake and washing the waves with coca leaves (Fig. 14) Two or three excited young men waded in knee-deep and one stripped and swam in the water. ice cold. A rocket was launched to announce that the ship was on its way. From the shore, people anxiously watched the ship's course. It is said that if the ship approaches the shore, the "Lake Owners" will be unhappy with the gifts and they will give little water. If it deviates to one side, it means that the “Owners” will give water to Huarochirí instead of Conchasica. (In other words, a lot of water will leak to the side of Yampilla, in the parish of Huarochirí, due to the filtration that Collquiri opened when it touched the "Goesunder". seats and b They gladly withdrew the message. The campería festival at this time should have appeared and completed its task, but in 1990 it was postponed. In fact, the stacking of the peat blocks was just beginning, and the stackers had to finish in a hurry because the late hour made it imperative to hurry to the legally valid closing ceremony. People
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Fig. 11 On the beach, village officials prepare a hollow “boat” made of dry grass. He will take Conchasica's offering and message to the "Owners" of the lake.
Fig. 12 The sail of the raft is the “message” (message). It consists of a legalized register of community members who claim water use rights for the next year and ask for the lagoon's favor.
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Fig. 13 When the villagers have danced the “boat” several times, the “boat committee” comes to the lake to launch it.
Fig. 14 As the “ship” pulls away, the villagers clap their hands and throw libations and confetti. They watch its course, especially where it floods and sinks, to determine whether or not the "owners" are happy.
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The new colonial expression of an appeal to the archaic was concerned with getting heavy drinkers and children up the steep rocky slope and back to San Damiano before sunset, so the officiant limited the closing ceremony to the legally minimum reading. mandatory from the list of irrigators. call, followed by a short farewell dance on the lake. The epilogue is a minor ceremony in September (not observed by the author) corresponding to the passage in the Huarochirí Manuscript about visiting the lagoon to release water. It was reportedly mitigated by the use of the steel gate. When practiced in full, small crews of three to five men and women went up to the lake to remove the champa and open the “ventanillas” (windows) of the dam, one by one, in time for the irrigation of the potatoes. In short, the “Anniversary” of Yansa Lake dramatically intensifies social and ecological ties, with great expressive force, but the ties between people, water and land feel organized and ratified by an elaborate legalistic, moreover, local criterion. legally binding: exchange code and record keeping. The interpretation of Pedro Batán and María Capyama as the “Lake Owners” is quite literal. In general, the ritual movements, which in their sequence and structure follow the rites recorded ca. 1608, employ the language and writing of the law to signify the compulsive power of superhuman relationships and organize productive action under its aegis. The culminating ritual summarizes the status of the village's water law in a single message to the "owners of the lake", which serves as a request that they ratify in exchange for gifts and guarantees of future good use. CONCLUSION
The history and ethnography of Lake Yansa suggest that the colonial reorganization of knowledge about pre-Hispanic times occurred differently in external and internal forums, but the two processes also maintained an intelligible and almost symmetrical relationship with each other. The ethnography indirectly conveys that in internal forums the “heroic story” of Collquiri and Capyama remained in a still highly mythological form and over time suffered a loss of emphasis on the genealogical links that in 1608 had connected illud tempus with the present. Modern rites have replaced the truth value of the pre-Hispanic defined and self-confirmed homology between society and nature by the performative force of legal declarations exchanged between society and nature. cultured, of course, but also with the appropriation of legitimations developed in external forums. In these external forums, the “heroic history” was also maintained, but in a very demystified form. Your events have been recast as just social and human events. This allowed for an extra emphasis on the genealogical link (regarded as
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Frank Salomon legal inheritance of property) almost to the exclusion of other facets. When brought to the forefront of the debate in this way, pre-Hispanic knowledge could be adapted almost easily to the right of property, and property, in turn, could be given a Christian-style ritual legitimation. However, these two updates to the underlying memory commons could only be effective in their respective forums if they were kept ostensibly irrelevant to one another. A lake rite legible as exogenous, or a legal document recognizable as a pagan myth, would lose its raison d'être. Colonized thought carries its unity like an arcane, incompletely available even to those who give a new voice to tradition. The fact that the underlying units became systematically obscured for all colonial actors can be a unifying vision of the colonial condition. Acknowledgments The author thanks the National Endowment for the Humanities for its grant to university professors. This grant paid for the 1990 research on which this article is based.
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Inca and Christian calendars in early colonial Peru
Time, Space, and Ritual Action: Inca and Christian Calendars in Early Colonial Peru SABINE MACCORMACK UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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INTRODUCTION
19TH CENTURY EUROPEAN OBSERVERS OF PERU
they were in the habit of discussing how soon and how seriously the Andeans could convert to Christianity. Opinions were divided on this issue, and they were also divided on the question relating to the role that Andean peoples would play in colonial society. Were the members of these conquered nations entitled, as the missionary Domingo de Santo Tomás understood it, to the same privileges as any Castilian vassal of the King of Spain, or was their main function that of taxpayers and workers? Discussion of these theological and political issues, which continued into the seventeenth century, obscured not only the increasingly harsh realities of colonial society which, as things turned out, had little room for Andeans in roles that were not subordinate, but also the complexities of the conversion process. It is this last question that I want to address by examining what ritual action, sacred space, and sacred time might mean in Peru during the early colonial period. During his extensive travels through the Andes, historian Pedro Cieza de León, an admirer of Domingo de Santo Tomás, had ample opportunity to comment on the negative consequences of the destruction of the Inca empire. But the process of evangelism gave him some hope that at least some of the evils he had observed could be remedied because, he said, Christian teaching highlighted everything he saw as positive about Andean culture and the Andean past. It was in this context that Cieza related an incident that occurred in 1547 during the teaching of Christianity in the town of Lampaz, near Lake Titicaca. In May of that year, the Kurakas of Lampaz had asked permission from the missionary priest Marcos Otazo, who lived in their community295
Sabine MacCormack sion for the usual celebrations accompanying the potato harvest. With considerable reluctance, Otazo did so. At noon, after the full moon, the community would gather in the city square to the solemn sound of drums, the kurakas would sit on thin cloths spread out on the ground and the people would sit in orderly groups around them. A procession followed. In it walked a boy and a girl, both exquisitely dressed, with several ladies distinguished by their "great bearing and nobility." At the end, six men arrived with digging sticks and another six with sacks of potatoes who also played drums. Having bowed their heads to the kurakas, these members of the procession performed a solemn dance while the villagers watched intently and silently. Then a circle of people gathered around the main kuraka and a llama was killed in the Andean way by disemboweling it (Fig. 1). These were given to diviners who had to make the customary predictions on such occasions, and the llama's blood was sprinkled on the potatoes in the sacks. At that very moment, a kuraka who had recently converted to Christianity emerged and loudly rebuked the assembled crowd for performing "this devilish rite". Father Marcos Otazo added his own exhortations to those of his convert and the ritual was left incomplete, everyone going to their homes in silence (Cieza de León 1984: ch. 117, 305-307).2 Similar collisions between Andean and Christian forms of Ritual action occurred frequently during the first decades of evangelization. In Cieza's eyes, they clarified the difference between pagan "diabolical rites" and the pure rituals of Christianity, and thus fulfilled a crucial didactic purpose. “Every day,” he concluded, “I see great signs by which God is being served in these days more than in the past. And the Indians convert and little by little forget their rites and bad customs.
1 See Domingo de Santo Tomás 1951: 245: “callparicuni, agorar, looking at the light or puffs of animals or birds.” See also Molina 1943: 22: “Calparicuqui, means those who see the fortune and event of having the things they were asked about; For this they killed birds, lambs and rams and, blowing into a certain vein, found certain signs in them, by which they told what was about to happen. In general, on Inca and Andean divination, see Cobo 1964: 13, 24, and for sacrificial animal divination, see 227a. Such sacrifices were still being made in the early 17th century, see Guaman Poma 1980: 880-882. Also Rostworowski 1988: 206–207. 2 This was not an isolated occurrence as the complexities of the conversion did not emerge until later. For a similar incident of early and rapid evangelization, where the Andean community in question appears simply to have added Christianity to the existing observance, see Jiménez de la Espada 1965: 158: “Espantanse los indios con oir esta cosas [sc. Christian preaching]; they gladly listened; They said they would be happy to be Christians and receive baptismal water. They and their wives gathered in the square; they did a concerted dance in their costume. . . .”
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Fig. 1 Andean llama sacrifice. Guaman Poma describes the ritual that was forbidden but was still practiced in his time: “Indians who kill the llama, the llamas; as in the time of idolatry, they place their hand on the right of their heart. They should not kill in this way, but as in this time Christians should be beheaded. . .” (according to Guaman Poma 1980: 880).
toms” (Cieza de León 1984: ch. 117, 307). In effect, however, the difference between Christianity, on the one hand, and Andean rites and bad customs, on the other, proved much more difficult to discern than Cieza and his Spanish contemporaries in Peru had anticipated. That's how about sixty years later, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the missionary priest Francisco de Ávila, convinced that his protégés continued to secretly practice their ancestral religion, roamed the fields of the province of Huarochirí in search of any objects he found. he could find Andean worship and sacred observance. At the same time, the historian Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, descendant of a noble Andean family from Huamanga, was also in the area, and learned of Ávila's exploits from a certain Don Pedro Puypacaxa, who was over a hundred years old and thus witnessed the turbulent history of evangelization in the region since its inception. The people were Christians, Dom Pedro told Guaman Poma. In the town of San Felipe, for example, there was a church, all painted inside, a Christian hospital and a priest's house, all built at the expense of the town and with the work of its inhabitants. However, when Francisco de Ávila came to inspect the place, 297
Sabine MacCormack, under pretense of telling the people that they were idolaters, took from them much gold and silver, clothes, ornaments of feathers and other fine things, cloth accessories for festivals and everyday use, brooches, tunics, cups and vases. and silver. They used these things to dance and celebrate the festivals and festivals of the year like Corpus Christi, and they took all of that away from the poor Indians. (Guaman Poma 1980: 1121; see also 1111-1112) Much happened in Peru during the sixty years that separated these two episodes. At Lampaz in 1547 converts were few, but by the beginning of the seventeenth century nearly all had been baptized. At the same time, however, several missionaries came to the conclusion that the Andean peoples had accepted Christianity only outwardly, while in their hearts, and often in daily practice, they adhered to the beliefs and rituals they had learned from their fathers. ancestors The motives of the missionaries who, like Francisco de Ávila, confiscated the goods of the Andean peoples were, at best, mixed. However, behind his attacks on Andean lifestyles and sensibilities lurked the difficulty of drawing a clear distinction between those aspects of a ritual that expressed beliefs incompatible with Christianity and those that did not. Divination in all its forms was prohibited in Christian Peru. This prohibition extended to the very vocabulary used by Quechua speakers. The oldest Quechua dictionary, published by Domingo de Santo Tomás in 1560, records a term for divinatory sacrifice: callparicuni, "to divine, to look at the entrails of animals or birds." In 1608, a much more complete dictionary by the Jesuit Diego González Holguín appeared in Lima. He listed thirty-three expressions etymologically related to callparicuni, but none of them referred to sacrifice or divination. In any case, in the eyes of the missionary lexicographer, the meaning of the whole group of terms has changed decisively. While the Christian argument against fortune-telling was clear, questions were often raised about the extent to which other Andean customs should be prohibited. Andean dances, musical performance, and ceremonial dress were sometimes recognized as appropriate accompaniments to Christian ritual action; but some missionaries insisted that all forms of Andean self-expression inevitably evoked rituals like the one that had turned the Kuraka convert of Lampaz against his own people. at any consistent resolution. He considered himself, in 3 For a discussion of this topic, see Mills 1994; also, MacCormack 1994. On callpa and related terms, see González Holguin 1952: 44–45; Santo Tomás Sunday 1951: 245.
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Inka and Christian calendars in early colonial Peru in every sense a Christian. Furthermore, although he judged that Francisco de Ávila's conduct in Huarochirí had been motivated by self-interest, he warmly approved the no less violent campaign to extirpate the Andean religion of Cristóbal de Albornoz, undertaken in the 1560s, in which he himself had frequented as a young man.4 This inability to find a safe boundary between the Andean religion, which should be avoided, and Christianity, which should be embraced, also speaks to Guaman Poma's reflections on the Inka and Christian calendars in terms of the nature of the time and sacred time, on space and religious rituals. Guaman Poma discussed the functioning of calendars in the Andes in two separate contexts. His account of the history and social organization of the Inkas includes a description of the twelve months of the year and the sacred actions that the Inkas performed during each month, and the second part of his Chronicle, which consists of a history of Christian Peru, ends with the account of the twelve months of the Christian year and the agricultural work carried out in them. In both calendars, the narrative describing each month is accompanied by a drawing that highlights some aspects of that month's activities. This formal similarity between the two calendars extends to several details. All Christian month pictures show the sun or moon, full, waxing, or waning, at the top, but September and December have both the sun and the moon. In the series of Inka months, January and May have neither sun nor moon, but in February, August, November and December both are present. The remaining Inka months have one or the other. In short, there is a general conceptual scheme that permeates both calendars. Furthermore, the two drawings (Inka and Christian) from August portray the same activity: four men dig the earth with sticks while the women separate clods of earth and bring chicha (Figs. 2, 3). Most significant of all, both calendars begin in January and are twelve months long, although there was a consensus among scholars on the issue that the Inca year began not in January but in December or May.5 Guaman Poma, however, realized for the Incas 4 See Guaman Poma (1980: 280) on Inca priests and other religious specialists: “Everything . . . I know this because he served Cristobal de Albornos as general velociraptor of the holy mother and the church. . . .” See also Guaman Poma 1980: 283, 689-690; Adorno 1991. 5 Juan de Betanzos (1987, 1: ch. 14, 69) led those who thought that the Inca year began in December: “in thirty days it could begin because that is where the month of the beginning of the year. . . .” The same opinion was held by Juan Polo de Ondegardo (1916, 3: chs. 7-8). Polo's work was first published in Doctrina christiana y catechismo para instrucción de los indios (1985: 263–283). The following Inka month accounts are directly dependent on the Polo: Acosta 1962: 5, 28; Murua 1946, book. 2: caps. 71–72; Murúa 1962, book. 2: chap. 38 (adds that the order of the year was invented by Mayta
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Fig. 2 Inca month of August. "August. Month of plowing the land. Time for work. The Inka sings the triumphant haylli" (Guaman Poma: 250).
Fig. 3 Christian month of August. "He works. Song of triumph. Time to plow the land." On the left, under the sun, Guaman Poma delivers the Quechua text of the triumphal song that accompanies the work. the celebration in Inca times, the corn beer for prospectors is carried by a handicapped girl, in accordance with the Inca principle, as Guaman Poma recalls, that all individuals were obliged to contribute to the common good (as Guaman Poma 1980 : 1153 ).300
The Inca and Christian calendars in early colonial Peru continue his own Christian present, so he thought the Inca year started at the same time as the Christian one. AN EXPERT IN CUZCO CALENDARS: CRISTÓBAL DE MOLINA
Long before Guaman Poma put pen to paper, a number of Spanish observers studied the Inca state calendar in some detail. The first of these was Juan de Betanzos, who lived in Cuzco and collected his information from the surviving relatives of Inka Atahualpa in the mid-16th century. Juan Polo de Ondegardo, who served as Corregidor of Cuzco in 1558 and 1559, also wrote an account of the Inca calendar. A compendium of this text was preserved among the documentation of the Third Council of Lima, held in 1583, and was copied by several later historians (Polo de Ondegardo 1990: 20–21). The most extensive and carefully researched description of the Inka calendar was written in ca. 1574 by Cristóbal de Molina, former inhabitant of Cuzco and pastor of the parish of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios since 1565 (Porras Barrenechea 1986). As a young man, Guaman Poma spent some time in Cuzco and perhaps met Molina, which would explain the terms of admiration with which he referred to this “great linguist of Quechua and Aymara” (Guaman Poma 1980: 611).6 A comparison between the Molina's careful description of the festivities of the Inca year, which he says began in May, and that of Guaman Poma reveal how much more distant the Inca past became in the years between ca. 1574, when Molina completed his treatise, and 1615, when Guaman Poma put the finishing touches on his Corónica. But another issue separates Guaman Poma de Molina and other Spanish scholars of Inca antiquity. Spaniards studied the Inca past as a matter of political or antiquarian interest, but ultimately failed to identify with that past in the same way an Andean would. On the other hand, the interest of antiquarians could and did serve practical purposes, in the sense that Polo
capacity); Valboa Hair 1951, bk. 3: chap. 19, 349ss; Ramos Gavilán 1988, lib. 1: chap. 24, 148–157. Bernabé Cobo (1964, bk. 13: chs. 25ff ) also read Polo, but adds information from Molina and elsewhere. Betanzos (1987, 1: 15) is obviously independent of Polo. Cristóbal de Molina is also independent from Polo; according to Molina, the first month of the Inca year, when the corn harvest was celebrated, more or less corresponded to the Christian month of May (1943: 25). For the Inka calendar of Guaman Poma, see 1980: 235–260, and for the Christian calendar, see 1130–1168. 6 Guaman Poma reproduces here an excerpt from a sermon in Quechua by Molina. The passage stands out for its lyrical grace and persuasiveness, while the other excerpts from sermons by various missionaries reproduced by Guaman Poma abound in threats and insults to the Andean audience. 301
Sabine MacCormack de Ondegardo y Molina, like many others, believed that an understanding of Andean history and religion enhanced a missionary's ability to convince his audience to embrace Christianity. Guaman Poma also believed this, but for him the Inca past remained a matter of lived experience because it constantly interfered with his experience and perception of the present. Molina found the works of the Inkas to be absolutely absorbing, and despite his Christian convictions which profoundly disagreed with much of what he learned in the course of his investigations, he also enjoyed and admired them. So he studied the Inca calendar and the topography of Cuzco, in which Inca rituals unfolded month by month, with the warm interest of a shepherd of souls. Molina understood that the festivals of the Inca calendar evolved along a historical process, and this process, in turn, was reflected in the festivals themselves. The festive calendar, Molina learned in Cuzco, took its final form in the mid-fifteenth century by the Inka Pachacuti, who named the lunar months and established which rituals were to be observed in each. At the same time, Molina knew that part of this ritual order predated Pachacuti (Molina 1943: 19). 58), so that a series of ritual actions evoked the dawn of Inka history, thus linking each group of participants to their most ancient ancestors. Thus, it was when Manco Cápac left the cave of Pacaritambo that it was thought that the divine creator of all things had given him the huari song, which the young Incas sang during their initiation (Molina 1943: 51, 57). . , see also Cobo 1964, book 13: chapter 25, 210, 211). Likewise, the loincloths made of animal and vegetable fibers worn by the youths during a phase of their initiation were the same in all respects as those worn by the original Inkas (Molina 1943: 51). Inca origins also played a role in other calendar ceremonies. For example, the gold and silver images of llamas that accompanied the Inka ruler's procession during the winter solstice celebration represented the llamas that had emerged with the first Inkas from Pacaritambo Cave (Molina 1943: 28). Likewise, the beginning of the corn harvest in April was marked by the corn harvest in the field called Sausero, where Manco Capac's sister and consort, Mama Huaco, had planted the first corn (Molina 1943: 66). At the same time, the Inka past was not the only historical dimension that 7 Betanzos Inka Pachacuti also named the months and established the festivals of each month, but the two accounts do not completely coincide. See Betanzos 1987, lib. 1: chap. 14.65; individual. 15, 71.
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Inca and Christian Calendars in Early Colonial Peru Molina discerns in the festive calendar of Cuzco. Inca religious observances naturally dominated this calendar, but behind the Inca rituals, Molina was sometimes able to discern older or different rituals that were possibly still being observed in his time and certainly were observed when the Spaniards arrived in the Andes. For example, almost all extant descriptions of the Inka year, including that of Guaman Poma, refer to the two months preceding the solemn celebration of the midsummer solstice as Oma Raimi and Ayarmaca Raimi. But no one, except Molina, fully understood that these two months were so called because it was when the people of Oma and Ayarmaca respectively celebrated the initiation of their young. networks of sacred places, some of which the Inkas integrated into their own network. The Yavira rock had been a sacred site of the Maras people, but it was incorporated into the Inka system of sacred sites by Pachacuti, who placed an altar on it; later, Inka Huáscar adorned the rock with two stone hawks (Molina 1943: 56–57). Molina's familiarity with the sacred topography of Cuzco and its surroundings allowed him to take into account the topographical framework of Inka festivals. He thus described, in convincing detail, the capacocha ceremonial in which the victims of human sacrifice were accompanied from the confines of the empire to Cuzco, and vice versa (Molina 1943: 69ff). Likewise, he understood the topographical dimensions of the celebration, in August, of Coyaraimi or Citua, the expulsion of evils, during which bands of men belonging to the different Inca relatives of Cuzco ran to the four directions of the empire, carrying lighted torches. . Some distance from Cuzco, these Inka runners were replaced by four teams of new runners representing settler groups from the Inka state. These teams, in turn, were relieved by a final group of runners, who threw the torches into the rivers that carried the evils to be expelled into the ocean (Molina 1943: 31-32). The religious agenda of the Inka empire was thus designed from the sacred center of Cuzco through a process of delegation very similar to admin8 Molina (1943: 47-48), where the text is transcribed with errors. Manuscript fol. 19r-v says: “The month of September was called omacrayma [sic] because the Indians of Oma, which is two miles from Cuzco, celebrated the guaracillo festival, which was when they armed the young with knights. . . They called the month of October Ayarmaca and they called me that because the Indians from the village of Ayarmaca celebrated the festivities of Guarachico”. Polo de Ondegardo (1916: 273), followed by Cabello Valboa (1951, lib. 3: ch. 19, 352), Murúa (1946, lib. 3: ch. 72, 350) and Cobo (1964, lib. 13: ch. 30, 219), all write Ayarmaca as Ayamarca, but Murúa (1962, bk. 2: ch. 39, 136) also uses Ayarmaca. Betanzos calls this month Cantaraiquis. Aside from Molina, the only writer who has captured some sense of the real nature of the celebrations during Ayarmaca Raimi and Oma Raimi is Betanzos (1987, lib. 1: ch. 15, 73).
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Sabine MacCormack Strategic and economic transactions were delegated to individuals who acted as Inka representatives. Most Spaniards interested in the Inca religion focused their attention on the activities of men. Perhaps it was Molina's pastoral concern for the entire Andean population of Cuzco that led him to inquire about women as well. Thus, he noted that although the initiation of young Inca men into adulthood was a public and imperial event, much of women's initiation took place in the home (Molina 1943: 68). But that was not the whole story, for Molina also learned that young women participated in the initiation ritual of men as companions (Molina 1943: 49, 52, 53, 55).9 Furthermore, Molina realized that women played a role crucial in other festivities because they were responsible for the cult of the moon, which was known as Pacsamama or “Mother Moon” (Molina 1943: 49-50).10 INTERSECTIONS OF THE INKA PAST AND THE COLONIAL PRESENT
The sociological and topographical details that characterize Molina's account of Inca festivities are almost entirely absent from the Guaman Poma equivalent. The reason is, in part, that much of Guaman Poma's information about the Inka calendar did not originate in Cuzco, but in his native Huamanga. While Molina thus described the aristocratic rituals of the capital, Guaman Poma had learned from his ancestors the provincial repercussions of these rituals. In November, according to Betanzos and Molina, the Inka in Cuzco immediately began preparations for the elaborate and lengthy initiation ceremonial of the youth,11 and Guaman Poma only mentioned it in passing. However, what immediately concerned her most was that this was also the time when Inca officials selected women who would live in seclusion, weaving and working for the Sun and the Inca ruler. Likewise, Guaman Poma noted that in May, an Inka delegate inspected the crops that had been harvested in each village community, and in June and December, an Inka tocricoc. This information is also found in Cobo (1964), who extracted it from Molina. The movement of the moon was the basis of the calendar of several Inka festivals, in particular the Citua, which began on the first day of the new moon and was subdivided into the different days of the moon's phases. See Molina 1943: 29f, for the beginning of Citua; 44, for the feast days; see also 25, for the beginning of the year and the different months on the first day of the new moon. 11 Betanzos does not mention a month in which his account of the initiation ceremonial begins (1987, lib. 1: ch. 14, 65), but which November he refers to is clear from ch. 15, 71: “Ynga Yupangue told them next month when dried apricots will be made. . . which is where the year begins you will call Pucoy qillaraymequis which is our month of December. . . .” 9
10
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The Inca and Christian calendars in Early Colonial Peru or the village overseer,12 inspected people's homes and property. Finally, in July, the annual redistribution of fields was carried out. These memories of Inca administration overlap with Guaman Poma's own experience with his Spanish colleagues, as he described all these local interventions by representatives of the Inca ruler with the term visit, which was also used to refer to official Spanish inspections. experience also speaks for the attention it pays to the climate and its impact on agricultural tasks and people's health status. April and May were months of bounty, when the crops were taken to the warehouses, and in August meat was plentiful, though fruit and weeds were scarce. February, on the other hand, was a month of cold, hunger and disease, and in July, although the weather was fine, people often got sick and the llamas suffered from mange, karachi. In October the rains tended to be insufficient for young crops, while the rains in March were a good time for plowing. Such is the frame in which Guaman Poma inserts his comments and illustrations referring to the festivities that the Incas celebrated month by month. In December, the Inka observed the summer solstice, and the Guaman Poma image for the occasion is dominated by a mature sun with a beard and a full moon (Fig. 4). For the winter solstice in June, he drew a small sun that the Inca ruler strengthens with a toast of chicha (Fig. 5). For May, Guaman Poma showed the crops being taken to warehouses under the supervision of an Inka official (Fig. 6), and for August, he depicted the ceremonial plowing that kicked off the new agricultural season (see Fig. 2). Another Inca ritual known to Guaman Poma was the Citua, which he described, like Molina too, as a moon festival, accompanying his text with a drawing of the expulsion of evils that Molina so carefully described (Fig. 7). ). All these celebrations marked important occasions in the festive calendar of Inka Cuzco. Elsewhere, however, Guaman Poma's ideas about Inka ritual were conditioned not so much by what had been done in Cuzco, but by widespread Andean practices and Christian reinterpretations of the Inka past. 12 According to González Holguín (1952: 344), an Inka tocricoc is defined as: “Ttocricuc, the guard, the one who has a position in the city or in the town”. 13 See Guaman Poma 1980: 245, May, “the communities and sapci of mays and potatoes and all food and livestock are seen”; 247, June, “the aforementioned corregidor, tocricoc . . . they render accounts of what they have to the so-called Indians of each house”; 257, November, "Inga ordered to visit and count the people in the general vicinity of this kingdom. . . . Becitava won from the community. . ."; 216, December, “That little girl ended, the other little girl turns to hazelnut another little girl in the month of December”; 249, July, “becitated the said sowings . . . and distributed to the poor . . .”
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Fig. 4 Inka month of December. "December, the great solemn festival of the Sun" (Guaman Poma: 258).
Fig. 5 Inka month of June. "June, [the Inka] drinks with the Sun at the Festival of the Sun." According to Catholic notions at the time, corn beer is carried in the sun by a winged demon (Guaman Poma: 246). 306
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Fig. 6 Inka month of May. "May, take the food to the stores." Workers are supervised by an Inka officer who is distinguished by his Inka headdress and earmuffs (according to Guaman Poma 1980:244).
Fig. 7 Inka month of September. "September, solemn feast of Coya the Queen", when runners carrying flaming torches drive away evils. In his account of the Inca festivities, Cristóbal de Molina pointed out that the celebration of this feast began at the new moon shown by Guaman Poma in the upper left corner (according to Guaman Poma 1980: 252). 307
Sabine MacCormack Molina, like the well-informed Juan de Betanzos before him, noted that in the Cuzco region the lunar month of September to October was marked by the initiation of young men in the city of Oma. It was also the time when women in Cuzco began to weave the special garments that would be needed for the initiation of the young Inka that preceded the winter solstice celebration. According to Betanzos, no other celebrations were held in the capital during this month.14 Guaman Poma, on the other hand, preserving the Inka name for the month Umaraimi, described an Andean ritual of praying for rain that was also mentioned by Juan Polo de Ondegardo as still widely observed in his time. This ritual consisted of tying up some black llamas in a public square and letting them starve to “help them cry” because of the rain (Fig. 8). The songs that accompanied this observance were of penance, mourning, and supplication for water (Guaman Poma 1980: 254 [illus.], 255 [text with songs]).15 During the lunar month of October to November, further preparations were made in Cuzco. for the initiation of young people that would take place the following month. Furthermore, as Molina had been informed, this was the time when the Ayarmacas, an ethnic group from the surroundings of Cuzco, celebrated the initiation of their young men (Molina 1943: 47).16 Betanzos (1987, lib. 1: ch. . 15) , 73), on the other hand, confuses this occasion with the initiation of the youths of Oma during the previous month. Guaman Poma gives a completely different account. He called the month not Ayarmaca but Ayamarcai, “carrying the dead” (Guaman Poma 1980: 256-257).17 In his 14 Molina (1943: 46) he says “the Orco Indians”, which is a mistake. . The manuscript says (fol. 19r): "The month of September was called omacrayma [sic] because the Indians of Oma, which is two miles from Cuzco, used to celebrate the feast of the guarachillo"; Betanzos (1987, lib. 1: ch. 15, 73) says: “those from Oma in their city. . . . to whom he did favor and to the Ayarmacas and to the quiaios and to the tambos who could pray their ears. . . .” 15 The editors of Corónica de Guaman Poma translate Umaraimi as “water festival”, perhaps assuming that Umaraimi derives from Quechua Unu, water (González Holguin 1952: 395). An alternative explanation is that Guaman Poma retained the Inka name of the month, but reported a general Andean observance, not specific to or exclusive to Cuzco. Juan Polo de Ondegardo (1916: ch. 8, 273), followed by authors dependent on him (cf. n. 5), describes the ritual slightly differently: “The eleventh month is called Homa raymi puchayquis. In which they sacrificed a hundred sheep, and if there was no water, to make it rain they put a sheep all black tied up in a plain spilling a lot of chicha around and they didn't give food until it rained. This is also used now in many places, around this same time, which is around October.” Cobo (1964, book 13: ch. 30, 219b) combined Polo's account with Molina's. 16 Here again Molina's printed version misspells the name of the month as Ayarmarcaraimi (cf. n. 8). See also Rostworowski 1993. 17 As described by Guaman Poma, the name of the month thus describes its main ritual activity; see González Holguín 1952: 39, “Aya, corpse; Ayamarca, month of
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Fig. 8 Inka month of October. "October. Black llama. The llama helps to cry and asks God for water with the hunger it suffers. Procession. They ask God, the creator of men, for water" (Guaman Poma: 254).
Fig. 9 Inka month of November. "November. Month of bringing the dead. The festival of the dead" (according to Guaman Poma 1980: 256). 309
Text by Sabine MacCormack, mentions the preparations made in Cuzco for the initiation of the young Inka. But the main ritual activity of the month, as he understood it, was removing the dead from their tombs, carrying them on litters, feeding them, singing and dancing with them before returning them to their tombs. (Fig. 9).18 This month's drawing shows a dead man being carried away, and the time is described in a mixture of Quechua and Spanish as “November. Month of bringing back the dead. The feast of the dead. This description of ritual activities during the month of November shows especially clearly the overlapping of Guaman Poma's perceptions of the Inca past. He was not the only one who described the month in question as Aiamarcai, since the same term also appears in the frequently copied account of the Inka months by the lawyer Polo de Ondegardo (1916: ch. 8, 273). Polo, along with those who copied him, however, said nothing about the dead, but did mention preparations for the initiation of young Incas.19 But Guaman Poma did not invent what he wrote about the dead. It was an Andean custom, even in his time, to entertain the dead near their tombs, offering them food, songs and dances. Such commemorations took place on the anniversary of a person's death, regardless of the time of year, and therefore were not restricted to the month of November.20 However, Guaman Poma had a reason to single out November in relation to this Andean custom of bringing and celebrating the dead, because he knew the Christian month of November”; 231, “Marcani, carry in arms”. Polo de Ondegardo (1916: ch. 8, 273) and authors who depend on this text write Ayamarca for November, but describe rituals that lead to the initiation of young people, which have nothing to do with this version of the name of the month. . 18 For a similar ceremony in which the dead person is labeled “aya defunto”, see Guaman Poma (1980: 289-290), where he describes the “burial of the Chinchay Swiss”. 19 Betanzos (1987, lib. 1: ch. 15, 73b) is called November Cantaraiquis; It was the time when chicha was prepared for the initiation of young people. Polo (1916: ch. 8, 273) writes: "The last month is called Ayamarca, in which a hundred more rams are sacrificed, and the festival called Raymi cantorayquis is held." He goes on to mention the preparations for the initiation of youth and the feast of Itu. 20 Witnesses in Visits of Idolatry, published by Pierre Duviols (1986), regularly mentions the honors paid to the dead on the anniversary of their death to help them on their journey to the next world. Sometimes offerings were not presented to the corpse itself, but to pieces of hair and nails (Duviols 1986: 149–151, 176, 183–184, 238). I think this may be a modification of an earlier ritual, when the corpse itself received these offerings; for the Inka precedent, see MacCormack 1991: 68–71. I suggest that the ritual was modified because in Christian times the logistics of honoring one's corpse were impossible to accomplish. Considering the corpse as something sentient, points out Duviols (1991: 157-158), the villagers wept in the streets and at the door of the church where the deceased had been buried in the Christian manner, so that he would hear them. See also, for the year 1613 and an annual cult of the dead, Duviols 1976: 287. 310
Inca and Christian calendars in early colonial Peru November began with a double commemoration of the dead, which was described in the Christian calendar at the end of Coronica as "the feast of all saints" and "the commemoration of the dead". Guaman Poma). 1980: 1163) (Figs. 10, 11).21 It was a time when the Andeans were concerned about the scarcity of rain for newly planted maize and, in Inca times, thought Guaman Poma, penitential processions prayed to the creator for rain. . People used to sing: With corpse faces, crying with corpse faces, little children plead with you in their bosom. (Guaman Poma 1980: 1161) Perhaps in Guaman Poma's mind this song in which the living seem dead provided yet another reason to associate the month in which it was sung with the ritual removal of the dead from their tombs. The deity invoked in the song was both Andean and Christian, their titles being the Quechua Capac Apo, Mighty Lord, and Runa Camac, Creator of Man, as well as the Spanish God. This composite deity permeates the Chronicle from beginning to end. It was invoked in prayer by human beings in the Andes in the most remote times, it was glimpsed in Inca times and after the Spanish invasion, Andean peoples resorted to it in their afflictions.22 But it was not just the names of God that were woven out of this composite texture. Well, many of the ritual activities that articulate the Inca calendar of Guaman Poma are also the result of a fusion of Inca, Andean and Christian components. The clearest example of this merger is the month of January in the Inca calendar of Guaman Poma. Polo de Ondegardo named this month by the term Camay, which designates a task to be performed or an obligation (1916: 271). 23 Betanzos and Molina, based on information from Cuzco, have January as Hatun Pocoiquis and Atunpucuy, respectively, which translates as “year of much water 21 This information was derived from a missal similar to the one reproduced here: Missale Romanum (1560). Guaman Poma models included commemorations of several Spanish martyrs and saints not found in office books elsewhere in Europe. 22 For examples of this, see Guaman Poma 1980: 49, prayer to Senhor Capac by Vari Viracocha Runa; 190, Inka prayer to Pacha Camac; 825, colonial prayer to "Deus Yaya, Deus Churi and Deus Santo Espírito ruracni, camacni, cay pacha rurac" (God the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, my Creator, my Creator, Creator of this world). 23 On camac, camay, etc., see Taylor 1974-1976; For Camay in particular, see González Holguín 1952: 46, “Camay, la task en el trabajo”; 48, "camay, my obligation"; in January as camay, see Polo de Ondegardo 1916: chap. 8, 271, "The feast of the second month is called Camay, in which they made various sacrifices, and threw the ashes into a brook, in this month of January", followed by Murúa (in both versions of his work), Cobo, and Cabello Valboa.
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Fig. 10 Calendar for the Christian month of November. For the first and second day of the month, Guaman Poma marks the celebration of the festivities of All Saints and All Saints respectively. However, despite these Christian observances, Guaman Poma still called the month for the same activity he had mentioned in Inca times, namely "carrying the dead" (according to Guaman Poma 1980:1163).
312
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Fig. 11 Calendar for the month of November from the Missale Romanum (1560). The main sign of the zodiac is Sagittarius, represented at the top along with seasonal activities. As usual, this calendar also states that November has thirty days, while the moon cycle has only twenty-nine. This information was also recorded by Guaman Poma in his Christian calendars (see figs. 10, 18) together with the Sunday letters (second column of the Missal). Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
313
Sabine MacCormack and many harvests” (Betanzos 1987, bk. 1: ch. 15, 71; Molina 1943: 66 [fol. 29r]).24 The term Hatun pocuy appears in Guaman Poma, as well as in Polo and authors who copied from him , like the Inka name of February. This is one of several discrepancies in colonial descriptions of the Inca months that can be explained by the fact that the Inca lunar months did not fully correspond to the months of the Christian calendar. Guaman Poma's name for the Inca month of January provides another example of this discrepancy. He wrote: “The first month. January. Capac raimi camai quilla”: “The first month. January. Big party. Mes del Trabajo” (Guaman Poma 1980: 236).25 Capac Raimi, or Capac Inti Raimi, was the celebration of the summer solstice in December and slipped into the descripción de enero de Guaman Poma precisely because the months inka and Christian did not coincide. complete. The Camay quilla of Guaman Poma, as seen, coincides with the term January in several of our other sources, and also coincides with his description of the Christian month of January, where he described a variety of tasks that needed to be done at that time. . These range from weeding and keeping birds and foxes away from young crops to weaving cloth for the community and paying tribute. Similar works dominate the month of February in the Guaman Poma Christian calendar (Guaman Poma 1980: 1131–1132, 1134–1135). Betanzos implied, and Molina asserted, that the Incas did not observe important rituals during January and February because people worked in their fields at that time (Betanzos 1987, book 1: ch. 15, 71; Molina 1943: 66). But Guaman Poma, when describing the Inca month of January, described an elaborate penitential ceremonial: In this month, they offered sacrifices, fasts and penances, and took ashes, rubbing them on themselves and on their doors. Even today the Indians do this. And they made processions, the stations of the temples of the Sun and the Moon and their gods. . . . From temple to temple and from mountain to mountain they performed rites and wept, going before the pontiffs, sorcerers and confessing priests, revering the said guacas. . . . And so [the Inka] ordered them to fast and do penance and weep in their temples, [before their] idols, performing rites and sacrifices, not sleeping with women. (Guamán Poma 1980: 236)
24 For the translation, see González Holguín (1952: 292): “Gran poccuy, year of much water and many fruits.” 25 Translation based on González Holguin 1952: 292." , for which I cannot find evidence to support it.
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Fig. 12 Inca month of January. "The first month. January. Great Festival. Month of Labor. Penance and fasting of the Inka" (according to Guaman Poma 1980: 236).
The attached drawing shows a crowd of acllas, women chosen by the Sun, dressed in clothes similar to those of Christian nuns, in an attitude of penance and prayer (Fig. 12). The legend says: "Inka's penance and fasting". In a similar way, the penitential processions headed by men of religious authority who traverse the Andean landscape and make stations in the various temples of the capital evoke the penitential processions that were a feature so regular in the preaching and practice of the missionary church of principles of the colony. Peru.26 The ashes that the Inkas “rub on themselves and on their doors” recall the Christian custom according to which on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, the priest who officiates the Mass of the day rubs a cross with ashes in front of the faithful.27 Guaman Poma's idea that the Incas also rubbed ashes on doors perhaps reflects the story of the Exodus (12:1-13), where the Israelites in Egypt were instructed to paint their doors with sacrificial blood. Deus ia 26 See Representation of Guaman Poma de Arequipa (1980: 1053) during the volcanic eruption of 1600, with a penitential procession carrying two crosses and a religious image passing through the main square. Also, on this episode, see Mateos 1944: 217ff; cf. 104f, 132, 137. 27 The ritual of blessing and distributing the ashes, obtained by burning palm leaves or other branches that had been used on the previous Palm Sunday, is described in the Tridentine Missale Romanum (1560) under the heading “proprium de tempore”, for Ash Wednesday (Friday of the fourth cinerum).
315
Sabine MacCormack passed through these gates to defeat only the firstborn of the Egyptians.28 At the same time, however, Guaman Poma was interpreting more than simply inventing the Inca past, as is clear if we juxtapose her January account with Molina's comments. about the month of December.29 Molina called the month of December with the same term Camay quilla, “month of work”, which Guaman Poma applied to January. The camay quilla of Molina witnessed the completion of the Inca initiation ceremonies for the young, followed by a ritual throwing of the sacrificial ashes that were stored throughout the year for that purpose in the small river Capimayo in Cuzco.30 Along with the ashes were coca, fabrics, sandals, tiaras, feathers, llamas, flowers and precious metals. This ritual took place approximately an hour before sunset. The offerings that had been thrown into the river were accompanied downstream by relays of people equipped with torches who took care that none of them was caught on the riverbank. When the offerings arrived at the Ollantaytambo bridge, two baskets of coca were thrown over them and left to walk the rest of the way to the sea by themselves (Molina 1943: 64-65). Polo de Ondegardo also mentions that the ashes were thrown into the river during the month of Camay or January (1916: ch. 8, 271), and Cabello Valboa, who copied this passage some twenty years later, adds that the Inkas believed "that with the ashes left the sins and evils that besieged the republic” (1951, lib. 3: cap. 19, 350). But perhaps this was not the original intention of the ritual that Cabello Valboa and Polo de Ondegardo referred to and that Molina described in more detail. Rather, this ritual harmonizes with other rituals in which the Incas strove to reach inaccessible parts of the earth's surface, and indeed, parts of the earth that were below ground with their offerings. In Cuzco, for example, an underground canal ran from the ushnu, receptacle of sacrificial chicha and other offerings in the main square, to the Coricancha, the temple of the Sun. Also, throughout the Andes, sacrificial offerings to glaciers that could not be reached on foot (Zuide ma 1979). In 28 This ritual may have attracted the attention of Guaman Poma, as there was an Andean rite of painting the doorframes with sacrificial blood, that is, the doorframes of the tombs, on the occasion of the birthdays of the deceased relative; see Duviols (1986: 19, 20): “when they came [to] spoil the end of the year, they killed llamas and offered their blood to the dead and burned tallow, corn, coca cuies with which they incensed them and that this was the reason they were the doors full of blood. . . .” 29 For an analogous process in the interpretation of Mexican calendars, see Ragon 1993. 30 These Christian ashes were not, strictly speaking, a sacrifice, but for an Andean colonial observer like Molina, a certain similarity may have linked this Christian ritual with the Inca. ritual of throwing the ashes of the sacrifice into the rivers.
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Inca and Christian Calendars in Early Colonial Peru Likewise, it was possible to let the ocean participate in the sacrificial offerings made in Cuzco, throwing them, or the ashes, into a river that would carry them to their distant destination. . The capacocha processions that crossed the Inca empire in all directions starting from the capital also functioned under this logic, according to which the Inca's offerings were projected to all parts of his empire.31 IDOLS AND DEMONS, TIME AND SPACE
Christian accounts of Inca and Andean religious observance tended to focus, during the early colonial period, on the various Andean deities and idols with which missionaries were so concerned. Their number seemed to be simply infinite. Guaman Poma's text, therefore, is rich in passages where he lists "their pacaricocs (places of origin) and mountain cows and caves and rocks"; or “the Sun, Moon and their gods, cow bilkas (local gods) and other cows and idols”; or “the Sun, the Moon and the stars, and the cows, and the rocks and the rocks and the lakes and other things” (1980: 84, 237, 265, respectively). 32 Such lists, however, do little to explain the concepts underlying Inca and Andean sacred and ritual topography. This topography documented the various contacts that humans in the Andes experienced and continue to experience with their environment, while rituals perpetuated such contacts and endowed them with religious and political significance in the present.33 With the advent of Christianity, however, this changed the meaning. Andean sacred sites, meaningfully grouped according to a variety of conceptual sequences 31 On the other hand, there are colonial parallels with a penitential significance to the ritual of throwing sacrificial ashes into rivers to be taken to the ocean. See Duviols (1986: 144) for the testimony of Hernando Hacaspoma: after hearing the confessions of the members of his ayllu and having absolved them, he threw offerings into the river and prayed: “Lord Sun, Lady Moon, Lady stars and your children and creatures confessed all their sins and river take these sins to the sea forgive [a] your children and children and lords malquis ladies guacas give us life health there is no disease in the city. . . .”; also ibid.: 157. Perhaps this mid-seventeenth-century ritual should be compared with the Inca celebration of Citua; see Molina (1943: 31-32): the torches that had absorbed the evils that were being expelled from the community were also thrown into rivers to be taken to the ocean. If such a comparison is warranted, then Cabello Valboa's suggestion that "with the ashes vanished the sins and evils that afflict the republic" may be correct. 32 For a list of missionaries, see Doctrina christiana y catechismo para instrucción de los indios 1985: 554–563, “Sermon XVIII de los mandamientos”. 33 On going after the callpa of the deity Tutay Quiri to make it rain, see Taylor 1987: 11, 20, 23 with editor's note; see also this passage in Salomon and Urioste 1991: 11, 158-159. See above (p. 296) and below (pp. 338f).
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Fig. 13 The Inka ruler and his queen in Pacaritambo, birthplace of the Inka lineage. In keeping with Christian decorum, instead of Inka, the Inka removed the imperial diadem and kneels to pray (according to Guaman Poma 1980: 264).
and the ritual procedures that were performed throughout the year were dissolved into lists of idolatrous objects of worship, and rituals were prohibited. As Guaman Poma and others understood, this did not invariably mean that the rituals stopped being performed. However, Guaman Poma's own description of the Inca calendar shows that the Inca and Andean rituals, remembered by the former and many of the latter still practiced, acquired new meanings because they were no longer intelligible in the same terms as before. Molina's account of the Inka Cuzco festivals shows that the days of the festivals, like the days of the months, were counted by the phases of the moon. The first day of the moon and the day of the full moon are regular chronological markers.34 These chronological details are completely absent from Guaman Poma's account of the Inca months because he calculated time using a Christian calendar. Likewise, Molina, like Betanzos before him, was informed about Inka festivals in his geographic setting. Ritual action derived much of its meaning from the place where it was performed or to which it was directed. Very little of this scenario appears in Guaman Poma's descriptions of these same festivities34 See, for example, in December, Molina 1943: 61, for the first day of the moon; 62, for the full moon.
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Fig. 14 “The great city and head and royal court of the Inca kings, Santiago del Cuzco, at the center of the kingdom and the bishopric”. Under this Christianizing title, Guaman Poma represents numerous buildings of the Inca capital (cf. Fig. 13 for a similar mix of old and new components) (after Guaman Poma 1980: 1051).
Fig. 15 “Royal Palaces, home of the Incas”. In keeping with the Inca custom of occupying each person in some useful way (see Fig. 3), the structure described as a Cuyus handle is guarded by a disabled guardian (after Guaman Poma 1980: 329). 319
Waltz by Sabine MacCormack. Guaman Poma knew and regularly mentioned Pacaritambo and Guanacauri, which figure in the myth of Inca origin (Fig. 13),35 and he also regularly referred to some of the main sacred places in Cuzco: the Coricancha del Sol temple, the main square Haucaypata, the ushnu from this square and several other temples. In addition, he produced two drawings of Cuzco, one with a view of its center and the other with details of certain buildings and sacred deposits (Figs. 14, 15).36 But the many topographical links that related one part of Cuzco to another and related the capital itself with the four parts of the empire appear in Guaman Poma for the most part only by implication and indirectly. What was once an actively engaged understanding of sacred space and time, as it still speaks, albeit fragmentarily, in the pages of Molina, has become, in the pages of Guaman Poma, a historical memory bordering on myth. That memory, however, was anchored in the present experience, which is why it remained alive not only during the time of Guaman Poma, but for some time afterwards. The festive calendar of the Inkas was an aristocratic calendar: it articulated the expectations, fears and hopes of the ruling class of Cuzco. When members of this ruling class became aware of ritual events outside Cuzco, they did not fail to point out that, even if a given ritual resembled that of Cuzco, the Inca equivalent granted its participants a privilege that could not be obtained by any other. . (See Betanzos, Book 1: Chapter 15, 73b). the ritual action was very different. Missionaries had preached for decades that the worship of Andean deities was wrong and demonically inspired, and Guaman Poma accepted this reasoning. By representing the ritual of the winter solstice, it thus shows a demon who brings to the sun from heaven the chicha that the Inca ruler offers him on earth (see fig. 5), and similar representations occur in other parts of Corónica ( 1980 ). :246). Guaman Poma consequently condemned all ongoing expressions of Andean religious belief, and there were many. “The infidels,” he pointed out, continued to observe the ancient initiation rites for young men that the Incas had observed, they made sacrifices to the Andean gods.
35 See also Guaman Poma (1980: 79) for the coat of arms of Anancuzco, showing Vanacauri, Pacaritambo and Tambotoco, with Urton 1990. 36 See Bauer 1992: 18–35. 37 Betanzos reports here the initiation of young people from Oma and elsewhere: Pachacuti Inka granted that “they could pray their ears as long as they did not cut their hair because it was known that they were subjects of Cuzco, because the orejones of the were the lords and those who they were supposed to be in all the land and had curly hair. . . .”
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The Inca and Christian calendars in early colonial Peru linked and adhered to demon-inspired beliefs. 38 The ecclesiastical attempts to eradicate such practices were in Guaman Poma's eyes justified and necessary. The extirpation, however, implied not only the destruction of ongoing religious practices and forms of cultural expression, but also a devaluation of the religious practices of the Inca past. The fact that the Incas ruled an empire and that their festivals were a solemn expression of their power mattered less in the early seventeenth century than the idea that these festivals were aimed at false gods. Those who still adhered to Andean beliefs at this time were generally described as backward and unintelligent. As one missionary put it succinctly in a sermon, the joint fate of the Incas and Andeans who foolishly continued in the old religion was to burn in hell (Avedaño 1648: Sermon 4, fol. 44r-v). To remember the Inca festivals of the past was therefore to remember observances which, in so far as they were still followed, were evidence of retrograde intelligence. INCOMPATIBLE TRADITIONS
However, it was not possible to let go of these memories either. On the one hand, Guaman Poma repeatedly pointed out that the social order expressed in Inka festivals and the administrative tasks they articulated was preferable to that of Spanish Peru.39 And, on the other hand, Christianity was unintelligible unless it could be anchored in the Andean experience. . This is why Guaman Poma believed that monotheistic, and indeed Christian, beliefs existed in the Andes long before the arrival of the Spaniards, and why he argued, time and time again, that Andeans had the innate capacity so much to understand Christian teachings. as for putting it into practice (Figs. 16, 17).40 38 Guaman Poma 1980: 100, Inka Capac Iupanqui offers chicha to the Sun, the chicha being carried by a demon; for demons present at Inka sacrifices and divination rituals, pp. 277ss. On initiation rituals, see p. 239; looking at the sun, p. 235. On the devil in colonial Peru, see pp. 862-863. 39 On the one hand, Guaman Poma describes the Inkas as illegitimate, without ancestors and place of origin (1980: 80ff), but, on the other hand, Topa Inka Yupanqui’s “hordenansas” (182ff) describe the Inka empire as a kingdom of peace and order with which the viceroyalty (484ff) makes a bleak contrast. Rolena Adorno (1986: 32-51) analyzes how Guaman Poma formulated this judgment in moral and political terms. 40 Guaman Poma was not alone in this opinion, see MacCormack 1991: 312–331. Declaring that Indians should be included in human history from the beginning, Guaman Poma lit Noah's ark (1980: 24). Fernando Cervantes (1994: 64) comments on the strong impact of Christian historicity on the formation of corporate identities in colonial Mexico. A parallel process took place in the Andes and explains the readiness with which Andean writers integrated the Andean past into a Christian framework.
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Fig. 16 The Apostle Bartholomew, after reaching the Andes, erected a cross in Carabuco on the shores of Lake Titicaca; he preaches to an Andean disciple, who is represented in the act of praying, having first placed his headdress on the ground in front of him (see Fig. 13) (Guaman Poma: 92).
Fig. 17 Two Andean sculptors paint a crucifix. In this image and in Fig. 16, above, Guaman Poma states his conviction that Andean Christians are equal to Spaniards. For the most part, the colonial church thought otherwise (according to Guaman Poma 1980: 673). 322
The Inca and Christian Calendars in Colonial Peru But there was a disjunction between Guaman Poma's professed beliefs and their implementation, and this is what emerges when we examine his Christian calendar. What is at stake here is not the sincerity of belief, but the extent to which a given belief system can be anchored and then deployed to formulate ritual action. Guaman Poma copied his Christian calendar from a Catholic missal or breviary, which was the prayer manual used by priests and members of religious orders to recite the seven daily services of the church. Or possibly, his copy was a simplified and abbreviated version of the breviary, like a book of hours or the Book of Office of the Virgin Mary, which circulated mainly among the laity. Modeling his Christian calendar on such a work, he presented in separate columns the Sunday letters for each day of the month, the saint whose feast was celebrated on that day, and finally the days of the month in numerical order (Fig. 18). . ). Some breviaries and missals provided, along with these numbered days, a Roman calendar, in which the days of each month are numbered by reference to kalends, ninths, and ides (Fig. 19). Elsewhere only the Kalends day is recorded, and this is the usage followed by Guaman Poma. Also, office books indicate the day of each month when the sun enters a new zodiac sign, and Guaman Poma did the same. Finally, office books note in the header of the page assigned to each of the months the number of days in that month and the number of days in the cycle of the moon. Again, Guaman Poma too. Thus, he produced a very faithful representation of the ecclesiastical calendar in force at his time.41 Some office books described activities referring to the different months. They begin with domestic existence during the cold months of January and February (Figs. 20, 21), move on to agricultural chores as well as spring and summer pleasures (Figs. 22, 23), and to the harvest and plowing. summer and autumn (Figs. 24, 25) and finally ending the year with homework in December. Although astrology was, strictly speaking, a forbidden science during the Middle Ages and early modern times, handwritten books of hours, such as missals and printed breviaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as we have seen, refer to the sign of the zodiac that governs each month, and its illustrations amplify these references. Also, sometimes the tasks for the month are combined with pictures illustrating Bible stories. The illustrator for the Hours of Rohan, for example, combined his January winter image with an image of the creation of
41 On the purpose of Sunday letters and other features of liturgical calendars, see Hughes 1982: 275–280.
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Fig. 18 Catholic calendar for the Christian month of January. “Big celebration. January has thirty-one days, the moon has thirty” (as Guaman Poma 1980: 1133).
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Fig. 19 Calendar for the month of January from the Missale Romanum (1560). Under the sign of Aquarius, people warm themselves by the fire during this cold time of year. “January has thirty-one days, the moon has thirty. The night has fifteen hours, the day has nine. Both the Missale Romanum and the Coronica mark the Roman date of the Kalends of February (January 14). Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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FIG. 20 Calendar for the first half of January. Under the sign of Aquarius, a meal is enjoyed by the fire. Oficium Blessed Virgin Mary (1609). Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Fig. 21 Under the sign of Pisces, an old man sits by the fire while God creates heaven and earth. Hours Rohan, fol. 2v. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Latin 9471, painted ca. 1425/1430. 326
Inca and Christian calendars in early colonial Peru
Fig. 22 The month of June, the Très riches heures of Jean, Duke of Berry (fol. 6v, 1413/1416), shows the collection of hay. In the background, the wall and the buildings of Paris, with the Sainte Chapelle on the right. Unlike calendars in other books of hours and missals, which for simplicity make each month coincide with a single sign of the zodiac (see Fig. 23), this calendar more accurately shows Gemini for the first part of June and for the first part of June. June, cancer for the rest. Conde Museum, Chantilly.
FIG. 23 Under the sign of Cancer, the sheep are being shorn in June. Oficium Blessed Virgin Mary (1609). Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 327
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Fig. 24 Under the sign of Leo, one peasant reaps wheat with a scythe while another ties up sheaves. On the right, the Church springs from the side of the crucified Christ, while the faithful pray below. Hours Rohan, fol. 10r, Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS Latin 9471.
Fig. 25 (detail) July Calendar. Under the sign of Leo, hay is being harvested on the right, while on the left, a farmer runs his horses over sheaves of wheat to thresh them. Roman Missal (1560). Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 328
The Inca and Christian calendars in early colonial Peru in the world (see Fig. 21). For each of the following months, this Book of Hours describes a seasonally appropriate activity with an episode illustrating the Genesis story from the Fall and expulsion from Eden to God's curse on Cain and his descendants; this Old Testament episode, in turn, is paired with a coincidental episode in the salvation story told in the New Testament.42 In this way, the viewer looking at the year's calendar embarks on a journey as much through the year's work as through its content. and meaning of human history: a history that began with bliss in paradise, continued with the Fall and its aftermath, and culminated in the life of Christ and the mission of the church. Furthermore, the signs of the zodiac call attention to a way of counting and describing time that has been maintained since the pre-Christian European past and, in fact, has continued to widen and expand despite church disapproval (Garin 1983 ; Bobber 1948). . Guaman Poma adjusted an aspect of this way of looking at time to his own Christian calendar, in order to illustrate, month by month, the different agricultural tasks carried out in the Andes. Here, we begin weeding and protecting the growing maize plants during January to April (Figs. 26, 27), continuing with the harvest and storage of maize and potatoes in May (Fig. 28), June and July, and then plow. and corn planting in August and September, respectively. October and November are dedicated to the care of the very young maize plants, and in December the potato is planted (Fig. 29). Whereas in Europe office books and almanacs brazenly portrayed the originally pagan signs of the zodiac that dominate each month as somehow capable of integrating with Christian time, Guaman Poma kept silent about their Inca counterparts.43 Furthermore, the Christian Andean landscape of Guaman Poma is an empty panorama. Whereas in Europe office books showed the viewer a landscape that had been penetrated by Christian worship and therefore ordered in relation to churches and shrines as well as in relation to civic and military architecture (see Fig. 22). in the vision of Guaman Poma of the Andes. The land was stripped of demons and Andean deities, but the saints and the 42 See Meiss and Thomas 1973; Longnon and Cazelles 1969; Officium 1609. The editor of this last article was Plantin, a printer who regularly published books for use in Spain. Cf. Clair 1964: 155ss. 43 Furthermore, there are only two points where their Inca and Christian calendars explicitly intersect: that is for harvest work (cf. Inca calendar [Guaman Poma 1980: 244] with Christian calendar [Guaman Poma 1980: 1144]) and farming, but this does not represent any explicit continuity between early colonial Andean Christianity, on the one hand, and the religious thought and ritual of the Incas, on the other. For the theological foundations of this question formulated by Garcilas de la Vega, the Inka, see Duviols 1994.
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Fig. 26 Christian month of January. "He works. It's time to dig maize and potatoes. January. Month of the Great Feast" (see Figs. 12, 18). The use of a European model by Guaman Poma for this design becomes evident when comparing his representation of beds separated by paths with the one shown in Fig. 27 (after Guaman Poma 1980: 1132).
Fig. 27 Digging, planting and pruning during the month of March, under the sign of Aries. Oficium Beatae Mariae Virginis (1609). Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 330
Inca and Christian calendars in early colonial Peru
Fig. 28 Christian month of May. "Work. Harvest time, corn harvest. May. Harvest month" (according to Guaman Poma 1980: 1144).
Fig. 29 Christian month of December, with its ripening sun (see Fig. 4). "Work. Potato and oca sowing season. December. Month of the great feast of the Sun" (according to Guaman Poma 1980: 1165). 331
Sabine MacCormack The Virgin Mary, although numerous churches were dedicated to her at this time, has yet to appear in any significant entries. ),45 thus remained inactive when it came to viewing the Andean space as a Christian space. It was possible to integrate an Andean vision of the mythical and historical past with its Christian equivalents, as Guaman Poma did at the beginning of his Coronica. Thus, he compared biblical and Christian epochs with their Andean counterparts before allowing the two sets of epochs to converge around the incarnation of Jesus and the Spanish invasion of Peru.46 For here, universal Christian historiography with its unitary chronology could accommodate the integration of different stories into a single scheme. This gave rise to a vision of the Andean past that was compatible with this scheme, but which maintained some of its own characteristics. Ritual action and the thought and experience that formulated it, however, became less easy Christian uses. In a sense, the missionaries themselves got in the way by their inability to imagine, beyond the conversion of Andean individuals, the adaptation of Christian culture to Andean history and society. Francisco de Ávila, like the other extirpators of the 17th century, thus perceived clandestine articulations of the idolatrous beliefs of the past in the Andean festive manifestation. Guaman Poma and some related people, on the other hand, perceived in such an exhibition the legitimate reaffirmation of Andean musical and poetic traditions, the canons of ceremonial dress, ritualized work and public celebration in a now Christian society. The problem was not simply that most Andeans were baptized, received some Christian instruction, and regularly attended Christian festivals. Because, in a sense, time itself has been reconceptualized in European and Christian terms; however, this reconceptualization left certain Andean realities unreported.
44 Michael Sallnow (1987: 51–99) describes the “reconsecration” of the Andean landscape around Cuzco in Christian terms. 45 See Guaman Poma 1980: 639, Cross of Carabuco with Saints James and Bartholomew; 703, Immaculate Conception; 825, Trinidad; 827, Our Lady of the Rosary with St. Peter; 829, Santos Sebastião, Pedro, Lúcia and Bárbara, among others, for their deep knowledge of Christian iconography. 46 Much has been written on this subject; see, for example, Duviols 1980; Pease 1981; and Szeminski 1983.
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Inca and Christian Calendars in Early Colonial Peru EUROPEAN TIME AND THE FURY OF GOD
The routines of prayer and Christian instruction and work organized by and for Spanish teachers were regulated by the passage of a seven-day week with Sunday as a day of rest, and by the passage of a day whose hours were counted by the clock. 47 Sundials and clocks were imported into the Andes from Europe and, by the time of Guaman Poma, were beginning to change the Andean experience and perception of time. It was a matter of more than vocabulary. European clocks divided each night and day into 24 hours of equal length, regardless of the varying length of night and day at different times of the year (Fig. 30).48 As Guaman Poma realized, this made it possible to regulate times of worship and work in a way that was maintained throughout the year. Therefore, he suggested that each Andean settlement, no matter how small, should have its own “chapel, oratory and clock”. Next to the “clock”, actually a sundial, as he imagined it, there was a bell, which announced to each one the order and duration of their daily tasks (Fig. 31). People had to get up at five and start work at seven. Sunday mass and midday prayer on each day of the week were at noon. The midday meal followed, and more work was to be done from two to five, making an eight-hour day's work. This was not only a method of delimiting the corvee work that the Andeans had to perform for their Spanish masters, but also a way of ensuring that priests celebrated mass and customary prayers at the proper time. The timekeepers who watched the clock, thought Guaman Poma, must be the same Andean peoples (Fig. 32). Hence the paradox that in his Coronica it was not the Spaniards, but the secular Andean officials and the sacristans, who rang the bell that called everyone to tasks that could only be assigned according to a European and Christian conceptualization of time and duration.49 47 See Turner (1994: 21-22) on the reasons for producing sundials that measure equal hours. See also Le Goff (1980: 35-36, 43-52). Jerónimo de Oré (1598: fols. 50v–61v) describes the life and calendar of a (somewhat idealized) missionary doctrine. My thanks to John Rowe and Ann Pollard Rowe for discussing these issues with me. 48 Two missals that show, along with the usual calendar, the variation of the hours of day and night throughout the year are the Missale Secundum consuetudinem (1493) and the Missale Romanum (1499). 49 On the clock in each village, see Guaman Poma (1980: 853–854): “Get up at seven o'clock and have lunch and go to work at five o'clock”. "Ciete" is a correction of an illegible word in the facsimile edition. It seems that Guaman Poma made a mistake here: this can be corrected by reversing the two numbers, resulting in the eight-hour workday he mentions further down the same page. For Andean sextons ringing bells, see, in addition to Fig. 32, Guaman Poma 1980: 652.
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Fig. 30 In this missal, the list of saints and feasts for the month of August is preceded by the usual observation: “August has thirty-one days, the moon has twenty-nine. The night has ten hours, the day has fourteen. Missale Secundum (1493). Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Fig. 31 The daily routine in the Andes according to Guaman Poma: “Indians. Watch that Indians must have. Twelve, one. They must rest. All over the kingdom, they must know the time. Time to eat, one hour. An hour to cook. Take a rest. Starting at seven, you serve for five hours. After twelve, you rest for an hour. Until five, until the afternoon, you serve” (as Guaman Poma 1980: 853). 334
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Fig. 32 Andean sacristan dressed in Catholic liturgical costume counting the hours: "Sacristan of the Holy Church who calls to mass and plays the prayer" (according to Guaman Poma 1980: 664).
But these were not the only tasks that occupied the lives of the Andeans. Because there were periods, as Guaman Poma said, when people had to rest, which did not mean that they did nothing, but that they had to work to weed the fields and rest during this month [January]. They must work in community to weave fabric for the city or tribute, and keep partridges and wild animals and foxes from corn and potatoes. (Guaman Poma 1980: 1131) This type of work was not regulated by European methods of measuring time because at the time of Guaman Poma the Andean peoples still counted the times of their agricultural calendar through solar markers like those used by the Incas . . Guaman Poma himself mentioned this practice: Even today they do and follow when they plant the crops, in what month and on what day and at what time, and at what point, where the sun sets. They look at the high mountains and in the morning [look for] the light and ray that the sun marks on the window. By this clock they sow and reap the crops in this realm. (Guamán Poma 1980: 235) 335
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Fig. 33 “Indians. Astrologer. Poet who knows the wheel of the sun and the moon and the eclipse, and the stars and comets, the Sunday, the month and the year, and the four winds of the world to sow the crops of yore." As a sign of his knowledge, the sage Juan Yunpa of Uchuc Marca wears a quipu (according to Guaman Poma 1980: 883).
Likewise, in his comments on the month of August in the Inca calendar, Guaman Poma pointed out that at that time the people "begin to sow maize until the month of January, according to the clock and the wheel of the sun and time". of the earth” (Guaman Poma 1980: 251). For August on the Christian calendar, he wrote more cryptically: If a month, a week, or a day of wheel and clock freeze, let the old men observe, the corn spoils. It wants to grow in the low of the sun, so that the sun and air from the sky raise the food. So God wants the corn to grow in his time. (Guaman Poma 1980: 1152)50 50 This last passage is full of difficulties. I explain my translation as follows: “Y ci hierra [for “hiele”, from “helar”] a month, a week or a day of the round and clock that the old people see [Guaman Poma rarely uses subjunctives: I read this passage as if to say "let the old people see". But it is also possible “the old see”.] the mays is given. Do you want to enter [for “enter” as “grow” see below. It could also be translated "go in": the meaning would be similar.] at the confluence of the sun [for "concombation of the sun" as "low point of the sun", cf. Real Academia Española 1984: s.vv., concavity, concave, etc. No exact precedent is mentioned for the use of Guaman Poma, but I suggest this translation as its probable meaning.] It seems that the sun rises and food airs from the sky. Aci wants God to enter his time. . . .”
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Inca and Christian Calendars in Early Colonial Peru This way of telling time was based on ancient Andean tradition. As early as the fourth Andean era,51 before the rule of the Incas, Guaman Poma wrote that there were philosophers who understood the annual courses of the sun and moon and described the length of days with reference to sunrise and sunset and, as a result, the Agricultural tasks were carried out in due order. Such astronomical knowledge, recorded in “quipus, cordas y signos, pericia de los indios” (Guaman Poma 1980: 72), was still alive at the time of Guaman Poma. In his description of colonial society, he might thus include a brief portrait of one of its exponents. This is Juan Yunpa of Lucanas, who, like his ancestors of old, recorded his knowledge on a quipu (Fig. 33); he "had the order of philosophy and knew about the stars and the turning of the sun's course and the hours and months, the year" (Guaman Poma 1980: 883). According to Inca norms, he divided the year into two halves, from solstice to solstice, and noted the length of the day, the "hours and minutes" with the help of an Andean time marker or "window", so that the people could see when to do the early and late sowing, and the sowing, and the shearing of the animals [for the] wool of sheep and alpacas and all the food and provisions and fruits [that] they have to eat and not eat due to disease in your months. (Guaman Poma 1980: 883-884) Time was thus divided and measured according to the tasks that were performed in it. Worship and Christian work organized by and for the Spaniards took place during the hours that were counted on a clock. The ancient Andean jobs of planting, harvesting, and caring for domestic animals, on the other hand, were carried out in "rest" time, outside working hours. This time was measured by Andean philosophers according to the course of the sun and moon, which Juan Yunpa described in terms reminiscent of the Incas as "wife [of the sun] and queen of the stars". CONCLUSION
Throughout Guaman Poma's extensive work, Christian and Andean notions of time interpenetrate or are in tension with each other, as well as Andean rituals, lifestyles and religious ideas. Christian concepts are used to explain Andean ones and vice versa, as, for example, when Guaman Poma offered a translation and cultural transposition of the Andean method of measuring time by describing the solar marker and by extension the sun itself as a " watch", 51
Guaman Poma divides pre-Inka Andean history into four periods or ages. 337
Sabine MacCormack watch. The result, however, was more than a fusion of two religious traditions. The Inka religious calendar ritually expressed a set of agricultural, political and social transactions that were fundamental to the functioning of the empire. In fact, these transactions, which united work and feasting and the production and storage of goods with their distribution and consumption, were essential for survival. But, as Guaman Poma and others have repeatedly noted, the Spanish government disrupted these old established harmonies and turned a land of plenty into a land of perennial scarcity, where crop failure and famine were constant threats. Behind these realities, Guaman Poma sensed the hand of an angry Christian God. In February, for example, people must work at home and not go out for fear and danger of diseases and lightning and rivers and torrents, and in the plains [for fear of] earthquakes that happen frequently during this month. And the rivers cannot be crossed at all because God sends them in his fury and we must not tempt God; entering the river that carries mountains is like tempting God or wanting to drown. (Guaman Poma 1980: 1134)52 The punitive fury of the Christian God was a recurring theme in missionary discourse, occasionally repeated by Guaman Poma himself. However, the Christian God only figured as a very remote main engine in relation to the forces and powers that Guaman Poma perceived as operating in the Andean environment. February and March were the months of “the power of the rivers”, when “the great force of water from heaven passes over the earth” (p. 1134). For January, likewise, "God created the river's great strength and disease" (p. 1130). Potatoes and other crops must be sown in December "because all the power to sow with the waters of heaven [is] at this time" (p. 1164). Often, however, crops failed because there was too much water and people starved and began to die: "and it's not their fault, but God says so". But divine action was not the only defining aspect of these forces, as there was also, during the harvest in April, the “power of wine” (p. 1140), in May, the “power of cheese” (p. 1143). , and in June, the “strength of
52 Regarding the force of the waters, note the parallel in Cobo (1964, lib. 13: ch. 27, 214a): “The third month was called Hatunpucuy, because it is the force of the waters. Cobo's phrase, unusual in Spanish, suggests that he is quoting some Andean source and that Guaman Poma drew on similar material.
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Inca and Christian Calendars in Early Colonial Peru Weaving the Clothes of the Poor” (p. 1146).53 Here, the force in question is primarily human. The first Quechua lexicographer, Domingo de Santo Tomás, translated the term “force” as callpa (1951: 139, 245). Among the verbs derived from this noun are callpachini, “to give strength to someone”, and callparicuni, “to divine, to look into the entrails or lungs of an animal or bird”, as the soothsayers used to say during the potato harvest in Lampaz in 1547. if it did (Domingo de Santo Tomás 1951: 245). Callpa also described an Inka divinatory sacrifice offered in times of crisis or when a new Inka ruler was to be appointed, to be endowed, as it were, with the strength to rule.54 The deities also had callpa, which they could pass on to their worshippers. or they lose when they are defeated (Taylor 1987: 25-26).55 Finally, according to colonial dictionaries, human beings had callpa, strength of body, spirit and soul, vigor or energy to work and act (González Holguín 1952 : 44–45).56 Guaman Poma's conception of the divine and human forces that were active during the different months reproduces some aspects of the meanings of the Quechua term callpa. However, a crucial ingredient is missing. This is the dimension of the callpa as an act of sacrifice and divination, which implied accessing the power of a deity or the forces inherent in nature and manifesting them in society in an orderly manner, as the inhabitants of Lampaz had sought to do. In the absence of such rituals in Christian Peru, there remained, on the one hand, energy or human strength that could be invested in agricultural and domestic production. And, on the other hand, there was the inexplicable fury of the Christian God manifested in those natural forces of the Andean environment which could not be controlled or contained by human activity. This fury, although it echoes in the pages of Guaman Poma echoes of the Hebrew Bible, can also be described with the help of a theological terminology rooted in past and present Andean experience. 53 On the “power of the wine” from which the Indians died, Guaman Poma pointed out that wine should not be sold to the Indians (1980: 1140). The subject also figured in colonial legislation, Recopilación de leyes (1973), bk. 6, title 1, law 36 (vol. 2, fol. 192r), reiterating the previous laws of 1594, 1637 and 1640. 54 Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa 1965: chap. 40, 112-113, Collas Revolt; individual. 58, 140, Guayna Capac conquers Chapachoyas; individual. 62, 147–148, in search of Guayna Capac's successor. 55 For the loss of callpa by a supernatural being, see Taylor 1987: 16, 27, compared with Salomon and Urioste 1991: 16, 207. 56 Note in particular 44: “callpa, the forces and power and potencies of the soul or body.” For a more Christian and theological conception of the term, 45: “callpa, the powers. Animap quim can callpan, the three powers of the soul. . . . callpayoc, he who has strength or vigour.” See also Anonymous 1951: 20.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY ACOSTA, JOSÉ DE 1962 Natural and Moral History of the Indians (Edmundo O'Gorman, ed.). National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. ADORNO, ROLENA 1986 The Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. University of Texas Press, Austin. 1991 Images of Ladino Indians in early colonial Peru. In Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century (Kenneth Andrien and Rolena Adorno, eds.): 232–270. University of California Press, Berkeley. ANONYMOUS 1951 Vocabulary and general language phrases. Five. AVENDAÑO, FERNANDO DE 1648 Sermons on the Mysteries of Our Holy Catholic Faith, in Spanish and General of the Incas. Five. BAUER, BRIAN S. 1992 The Development of the Inca State. University of Texas Press, Austin. BETANZOS, JUAN DE 1987 Summary and narrative of the Incas (María del Carmen Rubio, ed.). Atlas, Madrid. BOBER, H. 1948 The Duke of Berry's 'Very Rich Hours' Zodiac Miniatures: Their Sources and Meaning. Journal of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes 11: 1–34. CABELLO VALBOA, MIGUEL 1951 Antarctic Miscellaneous: A History of Ancient Peru 3. National University of San Marcos, Institute of Ethnology, Lima. CERVANTES, FERNANDO 1994 The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. CIEZA DE LEON, PEDRO DE 1984 Chronicle of Peru: first part (Franklin Pease, ed.). Editorial Fund of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Lima. CLAIR, COLIN 1964 Christopher Plantino. Rialp, Madrid. COBO, BERNABÉ 1964 History of the New World. Library of Spanish authors volume 92. Ediciones Atlas, Madrid. CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE AND CATECHISM FOR INSTRUCTION IN INDIA 1985 Christian Doctrine and Catechism for Instruction in India. . . . . . . . . with a confessional. . . . . . . . [1585]. Facsimile of 1585 ed. Madrid. DOMINGO DE SANTO TOMAS, FRAY 1951 Lexicon or vocabulary of the general language of Peru. Institute of History, Lima. DUVIOLS, PIERRE 1976 A petite chronique retrouvée: errors, rites, superstitions and ceremonies of the Indians of the province of Chinchaycocha and others in Peru. Journal of the Society of Americanists 63: 275–297. 340
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Periodization and politics: the prehispanic history of Peru according to Guaman Poma de Ayala. Bulletin of the French Institute of Andean Studies 9 (3–4): 1–18. Andean culture and repression: processes and visits of idolatry and sorcery, Cajatambo, 17th century. Andean Center for Rural Studies "Bartolomé de las Casas", Cuzco. The current commentaries of the Incas and the question of the salvation of the infidels. Caravela 62: 69–80.
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Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life. Routledge and Paul Kegan, London. GONZÁLEZ HOLGUIN, DIEGO 1952 Vocabulary of the general language of all Peru. Facsimile of 1608 ed. IMP. Santa Maria, Lima. GUAMAN POMA DE AYALA, FELIPE 1980 First New Chronicle and Good Government [1615] (Juan V. Murra and Rolena Adorno, eds.; Jorge L. Urioste, trans.). 3 vol. 21st century, Mexico. HUGHES, ANDREW 1982 Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to Their Organization and Terminology. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. JIMENEZ DE LA ESPADA, MARCOS (ED.) 1965 First discoveries. . . . . . . . . of the Chachapoyas. In Geographical Relations of India: Peru, vol. 3:158–164. Library of Spanish authors volume 185. Ediciones Atlas, Madrid. LE GOFF, JACQUES 1980 Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. LONGNON, J. AND RAYMOND CAZELLES 1969 The Very Rich Hours of Jean, Duke of Berry. George Braziler, New York. MACCORMACK, SABINE 1991 Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. 1994 Where is the Church? Perceptions of Medieval Europe in Spanish America. Speculum 69: 74-99. MATEOS, FRANCISCO 1944 General History of the Society of Jesus in the Province of Peru 2. V. Suarez, Madrid. MEISS, MILLARD, AND MARCEL THOMAS: see Rohan Master 1973. MILLS, KENNETH 1994 A Lost Evil to See: An Investigation of Post-Evangelization Andean Religion in Middle Colonial Peru. Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool, Monograph Series 18. Liverpool. MISSALE ROMANUM 1499 Missale Romanum cum multis missis ac benedictionibus noviter additis in locis suis positis quas cetera missalisa printed without having: ut patet in tabula. George Arriuabenus (printer), Venice. 1560 Missale Romanum novissime post omnes alias impressions faciliori et miro quodam order ad commoditatem sacerdotum apte distintum. . . . . . . . Hieronymus Scotus (printer), Venice. 341
Sabine MacCormack SECOND MISSAL 1493 Missal after Roman court custom. Johannes Emericus (printer), Venice. MOLINA, CHRISTOPHER, 1943 Fables and rites of the Incas. In As Crônicas dos Moinhos (R. P. Barrenechea, Francisco A. Loayza and C. A. Romero, eds.). Mr. Miranda, Lima. MURÚA, MARTIN DE 1946 History of the origin and royal genealogy of the Inca kings of Peru 2 (C. Bayle, ed.). Superior Council for Scientific Research, Madrid. 1962 General history of Peru, origin and descent of the Incas (Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois, ed.). 2 vol. Instituto Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Madrid. OFFICE 1609 Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary Pio V Pont. max. published in order with the Gregorian calendar. Plantin, Antwerp. ORÉ, LOUIS JERONIMO DE 1598 Indian Catholic symbol, in which the mysteries of faith are declared. Antonio Ricardo, Lima. PEASE, FRANKLIN 1981 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala: Andean Myths of Western History. Answer 37: 19–36. POLO DE ONDEGARDO, JUAN 1916 The errors and superstitions of the Incas. In Collection of books and documents referring to the history of Peru 3. Sanmartí y Ca, Lima. 1990 The World of the Incas (L. González and A. Alonso, eds.). Story 16, Madrid. PORRAS BARRENECHEA, RAÚL 1986 Father Cristóbal de Molina (Cusco's Parish Priest 1529?–1585). In The Chroniclers of Peru (1528–1650) and Other Essays (Franklin Pease, ed.): 349–361. Credit Bank of Peru, Lima. RAGON, PIERRE 1993 Pedro de los Rios: the gospel between preacher and neophyte (Mexico, 16th century). Notebooks from Latin America 16: 9–24. RAMOS GAVILÁN, ALONSO 1988 History of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Copacabana 1. Edition Ignacio Prado, Lima. ROYAL SPANISH ACADEMY 1984 Dictionary of Authorities. Graus, Madrid. COMPILATION OF LAWS 1973 Compilation of laws of the kingdoms of the Indies ordered to be printed and published by the Catholic Majesty of King D. Carlos II [1681]. Hispanic Culture Editions, Madrid. RICARDO, ANTONIO 1586 Vocabulary and phrase in the general language of the Indians of Peru. National University of San Marcos, Institute of History, Lima. ROHAN MASTER 1973 The Rohan Master: A Book of Hours (Millard Meiss and Marcel Thomas, introduction). George Braziller, New York.
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The Inca and Christian Calendars in Early Colonial Peru ROSTWOROWSKI, MARY 1988 History of Tahuantinsuyu. Ministry of the Presidency, National Council of Science and Technology Concytec, Lima. 1993 The Ayarmaca. In Essays on Andean History, Elites, Ethnicities, Resources: 241–290. Institute of Peruvian Studies, Lima. SALLNOW, MICHAEL J. 1987 Pilgrims of the Andes: Regional Cults in Cuzco. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. SALOMON, FRANK AND GEORGE L. URIOSTE (EDS. AND TRANSL.) 1991 The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion. University of Texas Press, Austin. SARMIENTO DE GAMBOA, PEDRO 1965 History of the Incas Library of Spanish Authors volume 135 (C. Sáenz de Santa María, ed.). Atlas editions, Madrid. SZEMINSKI, JAN 1983 The generations of the world according to Don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. History 1: 69–109. Lime. TAYLOR, GÉRALD 1974–76 Bed, bed and nightstand in the Quechua manuscript Huarochiri. Journal of the Society of Americanists 63: 231–244. 1987 Rites and Traditions of Huarochirí. Institute of Peruvian Studies, Lima. TURNER, A. J. 1994 The Origins of Modern Time, number 1. In Of Time and Measurement: Studies in the History of Horology and Fine Technology. Aldershot, Hampshire, Great Britain. URTON, GARY 1990 The Story of a Myth: Pacariqtambo and the Origin of the Incas. University of Texas Press, Austin. ZUIDEMA, R. TOM 1979 The Ashes. Jornal da Universidade Complutense XXVIII, 117: 317–362. Madrid.
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Pachacamac and the Lord of Miracles
Pachacamac and the Lord of Miracles MARÍA ROSTWOROWSKI PERUVIAN STUDIES INSTITUTE
S
INTRODUCTION
YEARS AGO, I BEGAN to study and analyze the logic of Andean thought in its various manifestations. The myths and cults they narrate are important resources for this type of research, as it is possible to detect the native way of seeing and representing the universe. Lately I have been directing my investigations to the god Pachacamac and his sanctuary, the most important huaca on the central coast, whose cult spread throughout the Andean zone during the last millennium before the Spanish conquest. Equally important, Pachacamac continued to occupy a place in the coastal imagination into the colonial period, and, as I will argue, Pachacamac can be connected to the Lord of Miracles cult that developed in 17th-century Lima around a painting of the crucified Christ. . Pachacamac represents an example of the transformation of a pre-existing native religious center and its ritual practices into a Christian worship practice focused on a sacred image produced in the New World rather than one brought over from Europe. This transfer is a colonial phenomenon that occurred in many parts of Latin America. The Virgin of Guadalupe is perhaps the most famous of these manifestations, and I will return, for comparative purposes, to this image and cult, as well as other Andean examples, at the end of the article. What is at stake in these various cases is the concept of syncretism, which in broad cultural terms is used to mean the coming together of native and European forms and concepts to produce new and totally different practices and beliefs. Syncretism, when used in this way, attributes agency to both European and indigenous social and religious institutions in shaping colonial culture.
Translated by Harry Iceland and Tom Cummins. 345
Maria Rostworowski PACHACAMAC E A PATRIMÔNIA DO HUACAS ANDINO
Pachacamac's pan-Andean importance as a religious site was recognized almost immediately by the Spaniards. For example, Hernando Pizarro wrote in his 1533 letter to the king that the two most venerated huacas were the “Mosque” of Pachacamac and the Temple of the Sun on Lake Titicaca (Fernández de Oviedo 1945). However, to understand the Andean logic within which Pachacamac operated, the first descriptive accounts by Pizarro, Zárate, Cieza de León and others are not enough. I took as a starting point the myths collected by the chroniclers and the uniquely important information provided by Francisco de Ávila's informants (Taylor 1987; Salomon and Urioste 1991; Salomon, in this volume) recorded in the only Quechua text known to date about the Andean world. The text deals with the region of Huarochirí located in the mountains adjacent to the coastal region of Pachacamac and often details the relationship of the local deities of Huarochirí with Pachacamac. The Huarochirí myths provide the first indication of how interregional relations were imagined among Andean religious beings. In this investigation I found that the main Andean huacas had kinship ties similar to those of the human inhabitants (Arriaga 1968; Albornoz 1967). Thus, Pachacamac had three wives and several children and brothers. One of his wives was Urpay Huachac, mother of fish and seabirds (Taylor 1987). Mama is named by Dávila Briceño (1965), corregidor in Huarochirí in 1586, as another wife of Pachacamac; It was an ancient deity whose temple was located at the confluence of the Rímac and Santa Eulália rivers. The third wife was Pachamama, Mother Earth, according to a late report collected by Villar Córdoba (1933) in the region of Canta. That goddess, after a series of episodes, became the mountain called La Viuda. Of Pachacamac's sons, Santillán (1968) mentions four: one who lives in Chincha, another in Mala, a third in Andahuaylas, and a fourth who stayed with the Inka Tupac Yupanqui as a result of his conquest of the coast. These children, brothers, and wives of Pachacamac became religious enclaves whose temple storehouses were filled with the produce of land dedicated to the deity. There is mention by Ávila of another son of Pachacamac named Llocllahuancupa, whose image, according to the same source, was painted on both sides of a canvas (cloth). This is interesting information for my analysis because it is known that there was a long tradition of mantillera painting on the coast, according to data collected for 1566. In fact, these artisan-painters asked permission from the oidor Gregorio González de Cuenca. they ply their trade in the valleys and coastal towns without interference from the Spanish authorities (Rostworowski 1977, 1989). 346
Pachacamac and El Señor de los Milagros Other important huacas also had various ties of kinship, such as the god Pariacaca of the Huarochirí region and peak deities known as Apu and Wamani, who were both male and female and related in various ways. . The concept of kinship between Apu and Wamani was so ingrained in the native mindset that campaigns to eradicate native religious beliefs failed to erase its spirit, and its deep cultural content persists to this day. The importance of the kinship ties believed to exist between native deities is that these ties first formed a nexus between local Andean religious beliefs, and then connected this local network with broader pan-Andean beliefs that allowed simultaneous recognition in large scale inter-regional cult centers like Pachacamac and local. Equally important, this way of understanding relationships between deities based on some form of kinship persisted well into the colonial period and beyond and influenced how the Catholic religion was practiced and manifested visually. Thus, the indigenous people created several kinship ties between the saints, the virgins and Christ himself, which was verified both in field work in contemporary cities and in information from various written sources. For example, in Ocomgate, in Cuzco, during Holy Week, the Virgin of Sorrows is considered the “widow” and wife of Christ, and her procession stage is adorned by single women and widows (Carlos Flores, S.J., personal communication). . In Huaylas, in a town near Caraz, the Virgin is considered to be the twin of Santa Isabel, and they are represented by two statues, one next to the other. The two ride in the same litter in the procession that takes place on Isabel's feast day, July 8, and enjoy identical chapels in the church (Víctor Chauca Pérez, personal communication). Furthermore, in the city of Maca, in the Colca Valley, Santa Ana has a sister with whom she shares the same altar and goes out in procession. In Jauja, in the province of Huancayo, three virgins are venerated, Perpétuo Socorro, Asunta and Fatima, each considered a different person and cousin to one another (Carlos Flores, S.J., personal communication). The city of Queda, in the province of Lucanas-Parinacocha, has two statues of Christ, one large and the other small. They leave together in a procession after which there is a ritual battle to determine which of the two is the victor (Elsa Rojas Osko, personal communication). According to Palomino Flores (1971), the church of Sacsamarca contains two statues of the Virgen de la Asunción, patroness of the city. One is large (hatun) and immovable, while the other is small, for transportation from one place to another. The same situation occurs in Topara (Chincha) in the church dedicated to the Virgen del Rosario, where there are also two statues
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María Rostworowski de la Virgen del Rosario, an older woman who does not leave the sanctuary and a younger one, called "La Peoncita", who roamed the neighboring valleys asking for alms for the cult until recently prohibited by the Bishop of Ica (information collected by the author) . In Gregorio Condori Mamani's moving autobiography (Valderrama and Escalante 1982), he speaks of the belief that the Christ of Pampamarca has four brothers: the first, the Lord of Pampakuchu; the second, the Lord of Huanca; the third, Qolluriti; and the fourth, the Lord of Acllamayo. One more example is the Taitacha Temblores of Cuzco, a highly revered image and patron saint of the city. According to local belief, the Lord makes frequent visits to Mamacha Belén from the parish of the same name (Valencia Espinoza 1991). The Virgin and the Taitacha Temblores have a mother-son relationship and, for the Cusco people, they are ancestral expressions of the cosmogonic couple of the binomial mother/son. Thus we discover that the Andean concept of kinship survives to this day in a jumble of Andean huacas, virgins and Christ. For the indigenous people there is a kinship and spiritual consanguinity with the Apu or sacred peaks that act like humans, visiting, talking and solving human problems. Pilgrimages to certain huacas and famous oracles at specific times of the year are another manifestation of pre-Columbian Andean religiosity that continued into the colonial period in altered forms. For example, informants from Ávila (Taylor 1987; Salomon and Urioste 1991) report that the inhabitants of the central coastal region attended the feasts of the god Pariacaca in the Sierra de Huarochirí. On the other hand, during the time of celebrations in honor of Pachacamac, there was a large flow of pilgrims to the shrine (Cieza de León 1941: ch. 72). This pilgrimage tradition is still maintained in Peru today, with numerous festivals of one or another Virgin, Christ or saint that attract crowds of pilgrims from distant places for short periods. These crowded pilgrimage centers are almost abandoned for the rest of the year. We can cite as examples the Lord of Qolluriti in Cuzco, the Virgin of Chapi in the district of Arequipa, the Lord of Motupe, among many others. PACHACAMAC AND THE LORD OF MIRACLES
The transposition of the pre-Hispanic cult of saints, virgins and Christ is widespread in the country and is part of the contemporary religiosity of its people. However, with the god Pachacamac there was a phenomenon of special transformation, in which a first symbiosis between the native inhabitants and the African slaves led to a later religious syncretism that included Catholicism. I will explain these early developments.
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Pachacamac and El Señor de los Milagros and the transformation of these earlier beliefs into the current devotion of El Señor de los Milagros, a deeply felt religious practice in Peru that has also spread to other countries. According to Ávila, in pre-Hispanic times, it was believed that the god Pachacamac created and controlled earthquakes and earthquakes as an expression of his anger. After the Spanish invasion, the Señorío de Pachacamac passed into Spanish hands in the form of encomiendas, as did all Andean macroethnic groups. There were two original encomenderos, and in 1544 Vaca de Castro granted the encomiendas of Piscas at Atavillos and Pachacamac in the Lurín valley to Hernán González and Bernaldo Ruiz jointly (Torres Saldamando 1900, 1). The La Gasca Tax of 1549 indicates that many Pachacamac natives worked in the Lima fields belonging to González. Their number was such that the place was renamed Pachacamilla (little Pachacamac), its name until today (Torres Saldamando 1900, 1). The strong Pachacamac ethnic identity in this part of Lima implies that there was a cultural presence there that included religious practices. What is significant in terms of Pachacamac's relationship/transformation into a form of Christian belief is that Pachacamilla, a word that already implies a cultural synthesis by combining the indigenous toponym with the Spanish diminutive -illa, became the place of veneration of the images miraculous image of a dark-skinned crucified Christ known as El Señor de los Milagros, a Christian icon that is directly related to earthquakes. Peru suffers from earthquakes frequently, and it is natural that the Indians, after settling in the fields of Lima, reproduce the image of their huaca that protected them from earthquakes in their homeland. For example, if the image of Llocllahuancupa, son of Pachacamac, was reproduced on both sides of a canvas, the same could have been done with the image of Pachacamac. When the earth shook, it is likely that the natives of Pachacamac not only implored the telluric powers of their coastal deity, but were joined in their invocations by African slaves recently brought to the coast, some of whom were owned by Hernán González (Rostworowski 1992: 132). What allows us to hypothesize that African coastal slaves participated in native beliefs in one way or another? First, most of the Africans brought to Peru, especially during this early period of interest to us (1531-1650), were ethnically and culturally an extremely heterogeneous group coming not only from different parts of Africa but also, and especially , the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal. They found among the native followers of Pachacamac a structured religion with strong and deep roots which they naturally adopted as their own. A spontaneous popular symbiosis was thus produced
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María Rostworowski between the two groups regarding these beliefs. It is very possible that Africans took the Andean faith as their own, motivated by fear and terror in the face of terrible earthquakes. A different situation occurred in Brazil, for example, where the number of Africans was considerably higher than in the Peruvian case, and where they could preserve their African customs, languages, rituals and beliefs. With the natives of Brazil, the opposite of what happened in Peru occurred. As African roots were stronger and more vital than those of Brazilian indigenous culture, natives tended to adopt African rites such as Candombé and Caboclo da Bahia as their own (Smith Omari s.d.; Crowley 1984). The ability of the Pachacamac belief to be maintained in sixteenth-century colonial Lima, and even to be transmitted to the African slaves of the González family, is due in part to the failure of Pachacamac's encomenderos to carry out their official duties. According to a 1573 document concerning the conversion of the Pachacamac natives, they received such ephemeral and superficial evangelization that the Royal Audience of Kings imposed a fine of 1,200 silver pesos on each of the encomenderos. At the same time, Africans became important agents in Pachacamac's fusion with the Christian faith. This is partly due to the severe demographic decline that has tremendously affected all of Peru, but especially the central coast. The collapse was due to several factors, including newly introduced diseases and the civil war between the Spaniards, in which troops from both sides caused extensive damage in the Lurín Valley, confiscating crops and animals from the natives. For these reasons, the native population of the coast suffered an almost virtual collapse, and the African inhabitants became co-heirs of the natives' coastal beliefs. More than a hundred years passed during which the Pachacamac Indians worked their encomendero fields in Lima, and the illiterate settlers preserved and passed on their highly charged religious message of faith and hope from one ethnic group to another. During these years, religious devotion to the original image of the god Pachacamac was transformed and directed towards the image of a raw purple Christ painted in tempera on the wall. The central idea of Pachacamac persisted among the faithful as a permanently vigilant being who offered protection against the dangers of earthquakes. The common thread of this ancient story is fear of earthquakes and the indigenous power that could stop them. Meanwhile, the Christ figure took on the racial coloring of Africans and natives rather than Europeans. The first chapel was built in Pachacamilla and attended by blacks and mulattoes.
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Pachacamac and El Señor de los Milagros fingers belonging to a cofradía (guild). It is important to note that the image, venerated and perhaps painted by African slaves, has suffered over the years a similar deterioration to that of the chapel that housed it. In fact, the humble chapel of Christ of Pachacamilla became little more than a ruin, and by all accounts the site was abandoned in 1655, the year of one of Lima's great earthquakes. Vargas Ugarte (1966) indicated that this event was responsible for reviving the cult. The earthquake caused churches and houses to collapse and panic spread in Lima. The roof of the chapel collapsed, leaving only the wall that contained the image of Christ. intact. Years passed and, from 1670 onwards, a neighbor named Antonio León began to venerate the image. According to a much later account by Sebastián de Antuñano (1966 [1670]), the first miracle to occur was León's recovery from an incurable illness. After the earthquake, faith in the Christ of Pachacamilla was also revived within the African community, and on Friday nights Africans joined in the noisy celebrations. These clandestine meetings even aroused the suspicions of the parish priest of the nearby church of São Marcelo, of which he quickly informed his superiors. The vicar general, informed of the celebrations in Pachacamilla, ordered on September 5, 1671 that the image be erased from the wall to end the cult. According to legend, when the mason climbed a ladder and tried to remove the image with his brush, he miraculously fainted. The same thing happened on the second try and no one else volunteered to carry out the order. These miraculous events took place during the regime of the Count of Lemos, but are not mentioned in the viceroy's reports or in Mugaburu's Diário de Lima (1927). That is, whatever happened in the development of the cult of Senhor dos Milagres, it was at the social level that it did not make it necessary to point him out as important in the writings of the viceroyal court. However, the story of the events and the miraculous power of the image would soon become part of Lima's Creole history, just as the Virgin of Guadalupe became an important element in Creole historical consciousness in Mexico (Lafaye 1974). According to later writings by Sebastián de Antuñano of Lima, the Count of Lemos immediately ordered the construction of a stone wall around the image. However, while this wall was being built, an adobe wall containing the images of the Virgin and Mary Magdalene fell to the ground (Vargas Ugarte 1966: 31). This statement indicates that the adobe wall was recently built, replacing the one that collapsed in the earthquake. This is how the regrettable episode of the mason and his ladder, reported by Antuñano, may have occurred. In support of this release,
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María Rostworowski there is a royal decree of April 19, 1681, related to the cult, and it mentions that the attempt to erase the image of Christ took place during the regime of Count Castellar. The certificate is also the first source in which the image of the Christ of Pachacamilla appears, officially called “the Christ of Miracles” (Rostworowski 1992: 154). Later, a document from the Cabildo de Lima dated October 27, 1718, indicates that during the regime of the Count of Monclova, and at his expense, the wall was reinforced with lime and bricks (Vargas Ugarte 1966: 157-163; AGI Lima 537). . From this information we draw the conclusion that the painting has undergone alterations and additions. We first learn that the Count of Lemos ordered the additional images of the Father and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. Then, after the fall of the wall, the original image of Saint John was replaced by that of Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin was redone; according to legend, only the image of Christ remained intact in its original form. Despite its deplorable sunken appearance, other events occurred in relation to the hermitage of Pachacamilla. Among the Notarial Protocols of the General Archive of the Nation are documents relating to the sale of land belonging to Don Diego Manrique de Lara, great-grandson of the original encomendero Hernán González, to Juan de Quevedo, "administrator of the structure of the Chapel of the Most Holy Christ", dated 17 December 1671 (AGN 1671–75, fol. 395), and a later testimony from 1684 deals with the sale of seven lots to a lieutenant Sebastián de Antuñano y Rivas (AGN 1685). Antuñano is one of the most important characters in the invocation of the cult. He was a faithful devotee who dedicated himself to the construction of a new chapel after purchasing the property. In addition, he promoted the cult by writing the "List of the house and sanctuary of the Santíssima Trindade e Santo Cristo da Fé e Maravilhas" in which he narrates the countless miracles attributed to the place and the image. The growing prestige of the image and its chapel attracted not only the lay faithful, but finally a convent founded by Dona Antonia Maldonado took care of the place. Doña Antonia was a Creole born in Guayaquil who, in 1676, married Alonso Quitanilla in Callao on her mother's orders. Their marriage, however, was never consummated and, before her husband's premature death, she founded a beaterio (house inhabited by pious women), taking the name Antonia Lucía del Espíritu Santo. Many years passed before the lay sisters' beguinage became a convent, and it was thwarted several times before finally obtaining a royal decree authorizing the creation of the Convento de las Nazarenas. On October 27, 1718, the Cabildo of Lima sent a petition to the king requesting the necessary authorizations to respond to the clamor of the people and convert the Nazarene Institute into a convent,
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Pachacamac and El Señor de los Milagros with the sisters in charge of the cult of Santo Cristo. The desired confirmation and execution of the royal decree took place in 1730, although Dona Antonia did not live to see her wish fulfilled, having died many years before. EARTHQUAKES IN LIMA
The first earthquake associated with the Pachacamilla chapel, the telluric powers of the image and the procession through Lima of a sculpture copying this Christ occurred on October 20, 1687. The initial earthquake caused extensive damage in Lima and Callao, and aftershocks continued to reverberate in the two cities. Antuñano had a copy of the image of Christ made and then circulated it through the streets. The earthquake most identified with Cristo Morado, however, that of October 28, 1746, was one of the strongest and most destructive in the history of Lima. After this earthquake, the date of the annual procession was changed from September 14 to October 28, and the novena began on the 18th. Since then, the cult of Christ of Pachacamilla, or Lord of Miracles, as he is also called, continues the increase. He is venerated in the provinces of Peru, and his cult was exported to Miami and New York by Peruvians residing in those cities. Christ has been proclaimed the Sworn Patron of Lima, and his protection is implored whenever tremors are felt in the capital. TWO CASES OF SYNCRETISM
We saw how, through religious syncretism, the main attribute of a huaca was incorporated into the cult of Christ of Pachacamilla. This is not an uncommon phenomenon. Similar cases, for example, are known in ancient Rome, when various religious cults from across the empire, including Christianity, gained prominence in the imperial city. However, syncretism, as it has come to be defined by modern usage, is a colonial Christian religious process whereby ancient indigenous beliefs are used to facilitate the establishment, as well as reinterpretation, of new Christian beliefs and practices developed in Europe. The validity of this statement can be demonstrated with two examples. For this, I will briefly mention two Virgins of the Americas who are highly acclaimed and recognized for the expansion of their cults: the Virgin of Guadalupe of Mexico and the Virgin of Copacabana of the Altiplano of Peru and Bolivia.
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María Rostworowski Like the image of El Señor de los Milagros or Cristo Morado, both images of the Virgin have dark skin and are often called brunette Vírgenes, whose pre-Columbian roots would not be difficult to recognize in the minds of Native Americans. In the case of Guadalupe, after its promotion in the seventeenth century by Mexican Creoles (Lafaye 1974), it became the pre-eminent symbol of Mexican nationality in the twentieth century, just as Senhor dos Milagres came to represent, through the Creole promotion of Lima in the seventeenth century, the unity and synthesis of the various ethnic groups that make up the Peruvian nationality. In these examples of colonial syncretism, it should be noted that in none of these cases was the image of the Virgin brought from Europe like most of the images that occupied altars in America. Rather, the Virgin of Copacabana is the work of an Indian sculptor, and the painted image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is believed to have miraculously appeared on an Indian's mantle as proof of her apparition. Both dark-skinned images are the fruit of an indigenous heritage from a thousand-year-old past that flourished under the influence of a new faith. As Teresa Gisbert (1980: 52) rightly points out in her study of the phenomenon of syncretism, all these Christian examples carry with them attributes of their pre-Hispanic ancestors, which they replace and with which they somehow identify themselves as belonging to the New World and the people who adore them. The Virgin of Copacabana In pre-Hispanic times in Copacabana, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, there were two very famous huacas, one of which was called Copacabana (Ramos Gavilán 1988: 191). It was a blue stone whose name, in both Quechua and Aymara, refers to a greenish turquoise, a suitable color for a fisherman's idol (Rostworowski 1983). The stone was beautiful; it had a human face and a body in the shape of a fish. He was worshiped as the god or goddess of the pond. The second idol, a stone with an "extremely ugly body" and a head full of coiled snakes, was called Copacati. It seems that the two idols were opposing and complementing each other at the same time, since Copacabana, by the lake, represented the water of Hurin-Abajo, while Copacati, on top of a hill, symbolized the rain or the divinity of the water from up or Hanan. This complementary duality expressed the social division of the Copacabana community expressed in terms of the Andean half of Hanan and Hurin. Bouysse-Cassagne (1988), however, suggests that the intense and antagonistic rivalry between the two groups may also represent ethnic differences, with the Hanan population of Aymara origin and members of the Hurin Copacabana representing the oldest inhabitants of the lake shores. 354
Pachacamac and El Señor de los Milagros Be that as it may, the image that became known as the Virgin of Copacabana not only replaced the two local huacas, but was venerated by both Hanan and Hurin, miraculously overcoming the old rivalry between the two groups. which had initially raised opposition to the image on the part of the members of Hurin Copacabana. The Augustinian chronicler Ramos Gavilán (1988) tells not only the story of these pairs of pre-Hispanic huacas, but also how they were replaced by the next sacred image: the carving of the Virgin of Copacabana. An Indian named Don Francisco Tito Yupanqui of Hanan Copacabana began carving the image in 1582, despite having great difficulty with the archbishop in obtaining official permission to do so. After getting approval and finishing the image, Francisco was about to sell it before taking it to Copacabana because the members of Hurin Copacabana insisted that the statue be made by a Spanish master. At that time, however, the image manifested its miraculous nature by emitting a glorious light at night while in the Franciscan monastery. As a result, the image was triumphantly brought to Copacabana in 1583, albeit to the great resentment of Hurin Copacabana members. However, just four years later, in 1587, the statue of Francis came to be adored by the entire community when the Virgin interceded on behalf of the Hurin community when their prayers were requested during a severe drought. The fusion of the community is recognized in the most curious and infrequent aspect of the Virgin that kept the name of the pre-Hispanic idol (Copacabana) that it replaced. The image provided a focal point that facilitated the continued pilgrimages to Copacabana that are pre-Hispanic in origin but now have a Christian form (MacCormack 1984). The Virgin of Guadalupe Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe has a similar miraculous story that, like the Virgin of Copacabana and El Señor de los Milagros, connects, on one level, pre-Hispanic beliefs and devotion to the Catholic cult. Mexico City's sanctuary dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe is located at the base of a hill called Tepeyac. At the top of Tepeyac, near Tenochtitlan, the ancient capital of the Mexicas, now Mexico City, there was a pre-Hispanic shrine to a highly revered goddess named Cihuacóatl-Tonantzin. Crowds of followers flocked to her temple, and her worship was deeply rooted in the people. It was there that in 1531 the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to a certain Juan Diego, an indigenous man who reported the apparition and his order to build a church to Zumárraga, bishop of Mexico City. The bishop at first doubted the apparition, and Juan Diego returned to the place where he collected the rose petals that the Virgin
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Maria Rostworowski had grown them and placed them in her cape or tilma. When she opened the mantle to show the bishop the roses, the mantle had the miraculous image of the Virgin. This story gives the miraculous aura to the image that is now revered in Tepeyac. Like many other indigenous Christian icons of the Americas, the image's promotion was initially questioned within the Creole and Spanish community, and it was not until the 17th century that the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe became more universal. At the same time, the miraculous nature of the image maintained its specifically Mexican character (Lafaye 1974). For example, the flowering of the Marian cult among the Indians was accompanied by the appearance of a manuscript in Nahuatl attributed to an illustrious Indian, Don Antonio Valeriano, a former student of the Franciscan College of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, who was related to the Moctezuma II family. It consisted of a collection of poems entitled Nicán Mopouha, dedicated to the praise of the Virgin of Guadalupe and possibly written in the mid-16th century, but published only in 1649 by the vicar of Guadalupe, Luis Laso de la Vega. It was recently translated into Spanish by Ortíz de Montellano (1990). The cult continued to be discreetly observed until 1648, when a monk named Miguel Sánchez published Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God Guadalupe, which gave a definite boost to its dissemination. According to Gruzinski (1990: 188) and Lafaye (1974), an important factor that favored the launch of the cult was the support of Creole religious imbued with a nascent “Guadaloupan patriotism”. CONCLUSION
The final victory over the pagan cults was won by the two dark virgins carved or painted by native artists. They triumphed over Indians, Creoles and Spaniards, like the Cristo Morado de Pachacamilla of indigenous/black origin. A host of beliefs and symbols with roots in America's distant past crystallized around these cults. With them, the triumph of Christianity over the pre-Hispanic deities was established, but the ancient gods did not lose their dominion over the people. Guadalupe endures as "Our Mother"; the Purple Christ continues to protect them from the tremors of the earth; and the ancient deity of the Altiplano becomes the triumphant Virgin who rejects and subdues the devil. These religious syncretisms were achieved through miracles, prodigies and events built according to the tastes of the time, necessary to unite the various ethnic and racial groups in a single integrative vision of America. 356
Pachacamac and the Lord of Miracles
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ALBORNOZ, CRISTÓBAL 1967 The instruction to discover the Guacas del Pirú and its Camayos and Haciendas [ca. end of the sixteenth century]. Journal de la Société de Américanistes 56(1): 7–39. ANTUÑANO Y RIVAS, SEBASTIÁN, 1966 List of the house and sanctuary of the Holy Trinity and Holy Christ of Faith and Wonders [1670]. In History of the Holy Christ of Miracles (Rubén Vargas Ugarte). 3rd ed. Lime. ARRIAGA, FRAY PABLO JOSÉ DE 1968 Extirpation of idolatry from Peru [1621]. Spanish authors library. Atlas editions, Madrid. BOUYSSE-CASSAGNE, THÉRÈSE, WITH PHILIPPE BOUYSSE 1988 Rain and ashes. Two pachacuti in history. HISPOL, La Paz. CIEZA DE LEÓN, PEDRO 1941 The Chronicle of Peru [1553]. Espasa Calpe, Madrid. COLMENARES, FELIPE 1771 The desired day, account of the solemnity with which the Church of Santo Cristo de los Milagros was inaugurated. San Jacinto Street, Lima. CROWLEY, DANIEL J. 1984 African Myth and Black Reality in Bahamian Carnival. Museum of Cultural History, Series of Monographs no. 25. University of California, Los Angeles. DÁVILA BRICEÑO, DIEGO 1965 Description and list of the entire province of Yauyos [1586]. In Geographical Relations of the Indies: Peru, vol. 1 (Marco Jiménez de la Espada, ed.): 155–165. Library of Spanish authors volume 185. Ediciones Atlas, Madrid. FERNÁNDEZ DE OVIEDO, GONZALO 1945 General and Natural History of the Indies [1549]. 14 vols. Editorial Guarania, Asuncion. GISBERT, TERESA 1980 Iconography and indigenous myths in art. Editorial Gisbert y Cía, S.A., La Paz. GRUZINSKI, SERGE 1988 La colonization de l'imaginaire, Société indigenes et occidentalisation dans le Méxique espagnol, XVI –XVIII siècle. Editions Gallimard, Paris. 1990 La Guerre des images, from Christophe Colomb to “Blade Runner” (1942 –2019). Fayard, Paris.
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Maria Rostworowski JOSÉ DA PROVIDÊNCIA 1963 Life of the Servant of God Mother Antônia do Espírito Santo [1793]. 3rd ed. Lime. LAFAYE, JAMES 1974 Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe. The formation of national consciousness in Mexico. Editions Gallimard, Paris. MACCORMACK, SABINE 1984 The Sun of the Incas to the Virgin of Copacabana. Depictions 8: 30–60. MUGABURU, JOSEPH DE AND FRANCISCO (SON) 1927 The Journal of Lima (1640 –1694), vol. 1. Sao Martinho, Lima. ORTIZ DE MONTELLANO, WILLIAM 1990 The Mopouha Nican [text in Nahuatl], 2nd ed. (Antonio Valeriano, trans.). Iberoamerican University, Mexico City. PALOMINO FLORES, SALVADOR 1971 The duality in the sociocultural organization of some peoples of the Andean area, Minutes and Memoirs, International Congress of Americanists, 1970, vol. 3: 231–260. Lime. RAMOS GAVILÁN, ALONSO 1988 History of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Copacabana [1621] (Ignacio Prado Pastor, ed.). Ignatius Meadow Shepherd Editions. ROSTWOROWSKI, MARY 1977 Some Observations Made on Doctor Cuenca's Ordinations. History and Culture 9: 126–154. 1983 Andean Structures of Power, Religious and Political Ideology. Institute of Peruvian Studies, Lima. 1989 Pre-Hispanic Peruvian Coast. 2nd ed. Institute of Peruvian Studies, Lima. 1992 Pachacamac and O Senhor dos Milagres an ancient trajectory. Institute of Peruvian Studies, Lima. SALOMON, FRANK AND GEORGE L. URIOSTE (EDS. AND TRANSL.) 1991 The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion. University of Texas Press, Austin. SÁNCHEZ, MIGUEL 1648 Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God Guadalupe: Miraculous Apparition in Mexico City. Celebrated in its history, with the prophecy of the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse. Bernardo Calderón's Widow Graphics, Mexico. SANTILLÁN, HERNANDO DE 1968 Relationship of origin, descent, policy of the Inca Library of Spanish authors. Atlas editions, Madrid. SMITH OMARI, MICHELLE n.d. Cultural confluence in Candomblé: a socio-historical study of art and aesthetics in an Afro-Brazilian religion. Doctor. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984. TAYLOR, GERALD 1987 Rites and Traditions of the Seventeenth Century Huarochirí. Institute of Peruvian Studies, Lima. TORRES SALDAMANDO, ENRIQUE 1900 First Book of the Town Halls of Lima. 3 vol. P. Dumont, Paris.
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Pachacamac and The Lord of Miracles VALDERRAMA, RICARDO AND CARMEN ESCALANTE 1982 Gregorio Condori Mamani, autobiography. Center of the Bartolomé Houses, Cuzco. VALENCIA ESPINOZA, ABRAHAM 1991 Lord of Earthquakes, Sworn Protector of Cuzco. San Antonio Abad National University, Cuzco. VARGAS UGARTE, RUBÉN 1966 History of Santo Cristo dos Milagres. 3rd ed. Lime. VILLAR CÓRDOBA, PEDRO E. 1933 The myth “Wa-Kon and the Willka” referring to the indigenous cult of the Cordillera de La Viuda. Journal of the National Museum 2 (2).
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Christian ostentation and indigenous identity in early colonial Mexico
Godly Representations: Christian Pomp and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico LOUISE M. BURKHART THE ALBANY STATE UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
you
General History of Things in New Spain, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún wrote:
IN THE PREFACE OF YOUR
I do not believe there were any idolaters in the world who worshiped their gods to such a degree, nor at such cost to themselves, as these in New Spain. Neither the Jews nor any other nation had so heavy a yoke, nor so many ceremonies, as these natives had for so many years. . . . (1950-1982, 1: 49) The scale of human sacrifice and conspicuous consumption of luxury items was intensified by the Mexicas in the glory days of their imperial enterprise. However, the intense ceremonialism that impressed European observers was not an artifact of the empire, but a dominant feature of Nahua religious life in central Mexico. For the Nahua, contact with the sacred was established through ritual and the collective performance of certain actions at prescribed times in a calendar sequence or life cycle. Ritual acts produced, here and now, fleeting but authentic manifestations of the sacred forces on which all life depended. Through rituals, men and women opened themselves to the power of the gods; the ritual structure functioned to channel and limit this dangerous contact, directing the sacred force to persons, images or other objects invested with the insignia of a god, which served as conduits for sacred manifestations.1 In this article, I examine Nahua ceremonialism after the conquest , in the context of the early colonial church. I am not looking for continuities, real or 1 For discussions of the ceremonial and experiential focus of the Nahua religion, see Clendinnen (1990, 1991). For the main sources on pre-Columbian practice, see Sahagún (1950-82, especially books 1, 2, 4) and Durán (1967).
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Louise M. Burkhart imagined, between specific rites or between specific pre-Columbian deities and Christian saints. Rather, I am interested in how the general orientation of the Nahua religion's praxis influenced Nahua ways of becoming and being Christians, as well as the ways in which the friars who presided over their religious life described and interpreted their Christianity. The friars used Nahua Christianity in their various campaigns for better treatment of the natives. They also used it to glorify their own mission, defend the hierarchical ethnic boundaries of colonial society, engage in apocalyptic fantasies, and construct an image of the native that would validate the indefinite perpetuation of colonial rule. By speaking of Nahua Christianity, I do not mean to imply that the Nahua became Christians in the sense implied by the conventional understanding of religious conversion. Nahua Christianity should also not be seen as a unified and systematized body of dogmas and practices. The Nahua understood Christian teachings on their own terms and adapted them for their own purposes, which varied over time and from place to place. I find it pointless, and indeed ethnocentric, to raise the issue of sincerity and question whether Nahuas who spoke or acted in a Christian manner were "truly" Christians. To characterize the colonial Nahuas as cryptopagans operating under the guise of Christianity is to grant an objective reality to the dualistic categories of “Christian” and “pagan”, which were highly significant to Europeans but alien to indigenous self-conceptions. Natives who were baptized and participated in Christian ceremonies chose to present themselves as Christians, regardless of what they understood Christianity to be. Friars judged them according to these representations and constructed their own representations of what native behavior meant. It is this contested public domain of native identity that concerns me most. The formal conversion of the Nahuas to Christianity, characterized by mass baptisms and other enthusiastic demonstrations, quickly became legendary as a "spiritual achievement". The friars' chronicles, on which this legend depends, predictably glorify the accomplishments of the evangelizers while portraying the natives as passive, childlike recipients of the Word. However, if we reverse the rhetorical flow of their propaganda to give agency to the natives, we see that the Nahua, by selectively responding to the devotional options that the friars presented to them, exercised considerable control over the creation of their church. . The friars soon discovered that preaching "fire and brimstone" got them nowhere. But if they put music to the catechism and invite the natives to sing and dance, or have a Christmas parade with actors dressed as natives, all of a sudden
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Christian splendor and native identity in early colonial Mexico, the church atrium could not accommodate the crowd.2 Bishop Zumárraga wrote to Charles V in 1540, “more than by preaching they are converted by music” (Cuevas 1975: 99) . Thus the Nahua manipulated their friars to preside over a church founded not on abstract Christian theological or moral principles but on exuberant pomp; this phenomenon tended to mask a slower and more subtle process by which worldview and philosophy were renegotiated by the Nahua without an abrupt break with the past.3 The more public and participatory the form of devotion, the more formalized it was. standards, and the more preparation and paraphernalia involved, the more eagerly the Nahua accepted it. Consider this passage from Motolinía franciscana, dated 1541, in which he describes the first Christian procession represented among the Nahuas. During a period of excessive rain in 1527, friars in Texcoco led a procession carrying a cross and prayed for the rain to stop. From that same day the waters ceased, confirming the weak and tender faith of that newly converted people; and then they made many crosses and banners of saints and other ornaments for their processions; and the Indians of Mexico went there to make copies of them; and then in a short time they started at Huexotzinco and made many rich and gallant coverings for the crosses and processional platforms of gold and feathers; and then everywhere they began to decorate their churches, make altarpieces, and go out in processions, and children were taught dances to make them more pleasant. (Motolinía 1979: 82)4 Although Motolinía's enthusiasm led him to compress the passage of time here, the account is notable for the kind of actions to which 2 Motolinía (1979: 25) describes the enthusiastic response to the catechism's scenario for a simple song. In a 1557 letter to Charles V, Fray Pedro de Gante claimed credit for first imparting Christian doctrine to the Nahuas in the form of chant, as well as giving them Christian insignia to decorate the cloaks they wore while dancing. He also described the first Christmas parade in the chapel of San José de los Naturales in Mexico City and the enthusiastic attendance of the local population (cited in Stevenson 1968: 93). I am assuming, based on general Nahua Christian practice, that this first parade involved costumed native actors. 3 Clendinnen (1990), by treating native religion as a matter of emotions rather than intellect, identifies continuities in performance as the key factors in the Christianization of the Nahuas. While you are justified in emphasizing the performative aspect of native devotions, I think you overemphasize sensitivity and experience at the expense of conceptual sense and thought structures. On the interaction between Nahua and Christian religious and moral concepts, see especially Burkhart 1986, 1988, 1989. 4 All translations from non-English publications are my own.
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Louise M. Burkhart discusses the making of clothes and the putting on of public spectacles, as well as the extent to which these things were apparently done on the natives' own initiative. While a means of controlling rain has obvious appeal, I suspect the answer wouldn't have been as memorable if those rain clouds had answered a few silent prayers. A decade after the arrival of the first official Franciscan evangelists in 1524, the parameters of Nahua-Christian devotional practices were established by incorporating songs and dances, musical instruments, processions and theatrical presentations into the new cult. Nahuatl texts were based on Christian teachings; crucifixes and images of saints were the main objects of worship. Most musical instruments and the music played on them were European in style. New sexual property rules excluded women from dances and dramas (though not from processions). Human and animal sacrifices were, of course, prohibited; self-mortification took the form of self-flagellation rather than bloodshed. However, even in these new and modified forms of devotion, we can see continuity with the pre-Columbian ceremonial cycle: collective and public representations performed by social groups within a calendar determined by the calendar. ceremonial period, during which temporary manifestations of a divine presence were effected through ritualized clothing and the stripping of people, images and spaces in sacred garments. The ceremonialism that the Nahua brought to their church can be considered a native tradition existing in the post-conquest world. This tradition was transformed, however, not only by its reorientation towards Christian and sacred feasts, but by its location within the complex field of power relations that characterizes the new colonial world. Nahua Christianity was the religion of a colonized people. However much it emulated Old World customs, it was the religion of the "natives," the "Indians," an ethnic category on whose invention and perpetuation depended the colonial enterprise. Nahuas could become Christians, but they could not become Spaniards; their church was separate and unequal, perhaps superior in some respects to that of the Spaniards, but necessarily separate and different. As an ethnic church, Nahua Christianity became the subject of ethnographic descriptions, many of them composed by the same friars who compiled accounts of pre-Columbian ceremonies. No one has recorded a description of the full Nahua-Christian festive round in a colonial community on the scale of what Sahagún and Durán did for pre-Columbian rites. Colonial practice, not being considered mysterious or dangerous, required no such key to decipher; Just be aware of the resurgence of these ancient idolatries.
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Christian Pomp and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico However, accounts of Nahua Christianity describe a cultural “other”: this is what the Indians do now, who used to do these pagan things. There is a rhetorical distance. Although the friars are on stage, parading in processions and leading Masses, the boundary between “us” and “them” is carefully maintained. Indeed, it is more carefully maintained than the boundary between past and present, pagan and Christian, because the survival or rebirth of those pagan customs remained, in the friars' discourses, an imminent possibility. These ethnographic descriptions tend to resemble a fairly standard set of practices raised whenever a friar wanted to testify to native piety. The accounts include general summaries of how the natives celebrate church festivals, as well as some more detailed descriptions of specific events. They rarely distinguish between Nahuatl speakers and other indigenous peoples, but as these accounts come from Nahua areas, it can be assumed that they refer to practices in which Nahuas participated, many of which were shared with other groups.5 Below are some examples of these descriptions are presented. . Motolinía, in his History of the Indians of 1541, illustrates the general tenor: They celebrate the feasts and Easters of the Lord and Our Lady, and the main vocations of their peoples, with great joy and solemnity. The churches adorn them very well with the decorations they have, and what they lack they supply with many branches, flowers, reeds and reeds that they put on the ground. . . and where the procession will pass, they make many triumphal arches made of flowers. . . . The Indian lords and nobles, all dressed and dressed in their white shirts and mantles carved with feathers, and with bouquets of flowers in their hands, dance and sing songs in their language, of the parties they celebrate, which the friars translated for them. . . . . And these dances and songs begin at midnight in many places, and there are many torches in the church courts. . . . And then they also sing a large part of the day without involving a lot of work or load. The entire path that the procession has to pass has been decorated
It should be noted that for the natives themselves at the time, ethnic affiliation was primarily a matter of belonging to the altepetl, or city-state. The Nahuas themselves would have little sense of a "Nahua Church" per se. An identity as nican tlaca, 'people from here', as opposed to Spaniards, Africans and people of mixed descent, seems to inform their self-representations (see Lockhart 1992: 115-116). However, there must have been some sense of themselves as Nahuatl (Mexican) speakers in the context of the church, given the attention paid by the friars and others to questions of translation. 5
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Louise M. Burkhart with branches from one end to the other. . . and the earth is covered with reeds and reeds and leaves and flowers of various kinds and at intervals they place their altars very neatly arranged. (1979: 54) Diego Valadés, a Franciscan of Mexican origin, included in his Rhetorica christiana, a Latin work printed in Italy in 1579, a chapter on how festivals were celebrated among the Indians. Among his comments are the following: The celebration begins with the first vespers, at sunset the day before, when the Angelus is played. They go up to their steeples with drums, trumpets, flutes, shawls, sometimes playing flutes together, sometimes alternating the bells, and thus make a pleasant symphony. Then they beat the drums, or mix the sound of the bells with that of the drums, continuing still, with this joyous spectacle, until an hour before Vespers and the ringing of the Angelus, and an hour after. And they do the same thing, during the same hours, from morning to dawn. . . . They adorn the doors and exteriors of temples very well, so that there is more to admire in the decorations of a single temple in the Indies than in all the basilicas of Spain. They weave long carpets of flowers, which they attach to palm or reed mats, and thus represent all sorts of images, figures and stories, in the same way as you see in Flemish tapestries. They cover, also with these carpets, the steps and walls of temples and chapels, and adorn them with various figures, which seem quite alive, made with fabrics of flowers; as well as with arches and vaults, also made with intertwined flowers and fronds. And it is true that there are no persons designated for this, but everyone participates of their own free will, and they also bring precious feathers, for which they ask permission from the owners to use them. (1989: 512-513) Fray Gerónimo de Mendieta, writing in the mid-1590s, partially copies Motolinía's report but expands it with much additional detail about decorations, organization of processions, dances and music (1980: 429–432 ).6 Among his descriptions of specific celebrations is an eyewitness account of the 1595 Holy Week processions in Mexico City, in which tens of thousands of demonstrators participated, including thousands of penitents, who self-flagellated. The Easter morning finale featured 230 images of Christ, Mary, and 6 Torquemada reproduces the story of Mendieta (1975–83, 5:333–335). By keeping the description in the present tense, it implies that the same practices continue at the time it was written (early 1600s).
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Christian Pomp and Indigenous Identity in Early Colonial Mexico Other saints and “countless” participants, organized according to their traditional neighborhoods and social positions, marched in what Mendieta describes as “one of the most beautiful and solemn processions in Christianity” (Mendieta 1980: 436-437). The chroniclers of the other mendicant orders corroborate these Franciscan accounts. The Dominican Agustín Dávila Padilla, after dedicating two chapters to pre-Columbian religion, dedicates two chapters to the documentation of Indo-Christian devotions (1955: chs. 24-27). The juxtaposition serves to highlight the contrast between pagan and Christian, while also emphasizing the ethnic boundary between Indian and non-Indian. He claims that the Indians "now exercise greater diligence in the service of God than before they dedicated themselves to that of the devil" (Dávila Padilla 1955: 79). He notes their enthusiasm for music and processions and describes the flower arches and images made from flower petals attached to the mats (1955: 79-80). The Augustinian historian Juan de Grijalva tells how newcomers to the colony marvel at the processions of the native communities, which with their many images, banners, candles and trumpets constitute "the most joyful and sumptuous thing the kingdom enjoys"; Even though the kingdom is so rich and the Spaniards so religious, "everyone gives the Indians an advantage in processions" (1624: 72v). Even these few examples are enough to show that, through the combined action of Nahuas and friars, the Nahua church developed as a separate church with its own customs and traditions, and these customs provided a rich and complex ritual life. Borrowed items, such as musical instruments, were employed in different ways: their origins in the Old World did not exclude their functioning as ethnic markers and tools of native devotion in the new context. Mass consumption of flowers appears to be a hallmark of native practice, continuing and even expanding pre-Columbian practice, with flowers serving as readily available substitutes for other types of insignia (gold, feathers, gemstones, fine fabrics) that were now beyond the means of increasingly impoverished native communities. The multiple varieties of flowers provided a whole symbolic code of color and fragrance through which the presence of the sacred was manifested as the dancers danced and the sacred images were carried. And then, at the end of the festival, when the withered remains were picked up and carried away, their faded forms would signal the transience of all contact with the sacred and the transience of all life.7
7 Elsewhere I have discussed the symbolism of flowers and their application to the Christian sacred in Nahuatl devotional literature (Burkhart 1992b).
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Louise M. Burkhart These practices provided the friars with ample evidence of native piety, combined with enough differentiation to maintain the ethnic boundary. The friars seem not to have minded the difference in the ways of celebration, as long as the devotions obeyed their decorum criteria and were addressed to the sacred Christians themselves: God, Christ, the saints. That is to say, they were more concerned with the object than with the act, with the final recipient of the devotion than with its means of expression. The absorption of non-Christian traditions into Christian worship had, of course, ample precedent in the Old World, both in the conversion of pagan peoples and in the appropriation of Old Testament texts as "types" or omens, historical personages, rites and Christian rites. and narratives. The redirection to the Christian sacra elevated such non-Christian phenomena to a higher spiritual level of existence; this ontological trick served the friars in Mexico as well as their ancestors in the early church. Customs that at first could be classified as similar, such as the one Mendieta describes as carrying images of pre-Columbian deities “in procession” (1980: 100), were easily transposed. With regard to flowers, Dominican Diego Durán, the most skeptical of all frailechronists, recognizes the continuity of pre-Columbian practices but considers colonial customs acceptable. He points out how the boys in the temple service took charge of decorating the temples and adds: This service has remained until today for the young people, who adorn the churches with branches and arrange them with leaves, flowers and reeds. For this they have their captains and foremen, whom they call telpochtlatoque.8 And it is permissible, as there is no superstition about it, but only an ancient custom. (Durán 1967, 1: 55)9 And further on, Durán warns that the custom of offering corn, chilli pepper and flowers on the feast of the Virgin (September 15), as well as on other festivities during the month of September, could have remnants of the rites of the female deities Chicomecóatl, Atlan Tonan and Toci. However, he is convinced that it now becomes (already has become) an offering to God (Durán 1967, 1: 141). The exact meaning of an offer depends on the recipient. This attitude left room for the kind of continuity in behavior and experience of the sacred that seems to have mattered more to the Nahua than the names of the images. The “spokespersons”, that is, rulers or leaders, of the youth. Here Durán contradicts Valadés, who, in the passage quoted above, states that this practice was not the responsibility of anyone in particular. 8 9
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Christian Pomp and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico Through these elaborate representations of Christian piety, the Nahua publicly portrayed themselves as converted people and thus, in a sense, adhered to their status as colonial objects. Given their circumstances, acquiescence to conversion was, paradoxically, an effective form of resistance to colonialism. The more strongly an indigenous group resisted Christianity, the more easily Spanish colonists could justify using force against them. There could be a just war against infidels, but how could Spain forgive mistreatment of people who were so obviously Christian? By surpassing the Spaniards in their own religion, the Nahuas could undermine the legitimacy of the colonial government. Colonizers responded by ignoring, belittling, slandering, and trying to suppress Nahua Christianity. The friars themselves, while using Nahua piety to support their anti-colonial position on a number of issues, were not prepared to accept Nahua Christianity on its own terms. Though surprised and delighted by the Nahua's affinity for the things of the church, the friars never characterized their native congregations as fully competent practitioners of the Catholic faith. If they did, they would not only blur the vital boundary between "us" and "them", but would also render them obsolete, because they were evangelists charged only with establishing the church in conquered territories, not overseeing its affairs. indefinitely. Thus, a rhetorical thread woven throughout his writings represents the natives as new Christians, even new people, not yet so firmly planted in the faith as to trust that they would prosper without the care of the friars. Without continued support, the miraculous conversion which God wrought through his mendicant agents would be reversed, and the natives would return to their former idolatries. With the mendicant orders increasingly at odds with the secular church hierarchy, which sought to replace friars with secular parishes. priests, the deficiencies of the natives as Christians became, especially for the warring Franciscans, as important to the defense of their enterprise as all the evidence of native piety which they flaunted as signs of their success.10 The Ceremonial Character of Religious Life Nahua enters the scene. in these speeches as proof of disability. Overall, the Nahua's affinity for ritual display was used to support the construction of the native person as an overly sensual, willful, and spiritually impoverished person who is more concerned with the outside. 10 This is not to say that the secular clergy accepted Nahua Christianity. They also presented him as flawed and deficient, for their own reasons. They argued that the secular church could provide a greater number of priests to native communities than the mendicant orders. These priests, supported by tithes collected from the natives, would provide the local supervision and basic religious instruction that was still lacking. Christianization could thus progress beyond the very superficial achievements of the friars.
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Louise M. Burkhart final appearances of things in the world than with internal mental states or the invisible landscapes of heaven and hell. In this way the friars denied the validity of native spirituality, that connection with an experientially manifested infusion of transforming sacred force in the things of the world, threatening to them perhaps not because it was radically alien but because it was all too familiar: it was, after all, a principle analogous to that of transubstantiation, which they could nowhere recognize except in the celebration of Mass by the ordained Catholic priest. That the Nahuas did not share their dualistic conceptions of matter and spirit, form and substance, body and soul. , of external appearance and internal essence, the friars showed not a different, non-dualistic look, but a lack, an indifference towards the second element in each of these opposite pairs. If the Nahua favored ritual display, which was outward and superficial, it necessarily followed that they did not favor spirituality, which was inward and reflective. As the two categories were contradictory, one could not encompass the other within a single devotional methodology.11 The deep religiosity of the natives was thus reduced to the same familiar category in which European ecclesiastics placed all those who lacked understanding of other things, whether they were heathens, formless children, or of the lower classes. Focusing on external things meant an inferior form of religion, but it was appropriate for certain lower categories of people: the Council of Trent recommended that the religion of the common people should focus on external worship rather than internal faith, assuming that this would help to toughen up against Protestant heresies (Uchmany 1980: 20). The secular clergy, as well as the friars, considered the natives of Mexico to be similar to the less able Christians of the Old World. The decrees of the III Mexican Ecclesiastical Council of 1585 placed the indigenous people in the category of rudos, a theological term that refers to people considered incapable of mastering more than the rudiments of religious doctrine (Poole 1987: 153). The Franciscans used their conception of native character to defend themselves against criticism of their program. If their churches were more ornate than some thought necessary, it was because, as Zumárraga said in a 1536 letter to Emperor Charles V, it was through ornamentation that the indigenous people were attracted to the church and led to reverence the divine cult (Cuevas 1975: 59 , 77). 11 This attitude seems to have accompanied the missionaries throughout the imperial domains of Europe. On English missionaries among the Tshidi of South Africa, Comaroff (1985: 138) comments: “. . . The native's non-dualistic cosmology was taken as proof of his inability to transcend the low confines of the flesh."
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Christian Pomp and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico In 1558, the viceroy Don Luis de Velasco el Mayor, writing to Philip II, defended the Franciscans against criticism from the secular clergy, asserting that the only extravagance of the friars lay in the quality of your church buildings. and the ornaments and music used there, which "attract the Indians to come to the temples and worship"; however, the friars dressed modestly and ate little, giving whatever was left over to the poor (Cuevas 1975: 245). That may have been the case, but the rhetoric is clear: pomp and ceremony are the only means of attracting the natives. Valadés, in the middle of the chapter I quoted above, makes the following comment about the indigenous festivals: It is no small glory for God, for the Franciscan Order, and for the others, namely, the Dominicans and the Augustinians, who with so much reverence the Feasts of God and saints are celebrated in those places where the Devil has exercised such domination and tyranny. The breasts of unbelievers are especially touched by this kind of rite, and the souls of new Christians are greatly strengthened and captivated by these external things, for they are still children and, as such, need milk, not solid food. (1989: 512-513) How easily Valadés transfers the credit of native Christianity to God and to the friars, stripping the natives of their will and reducing them to the condition of children. Their rites, as impressive as they are, are mere mush because they focus on external display rather than internal spiritual states or theological truths. Valadés' words imply an evolutionary process: children grow up and new converts mature in the faith. This enchantment with the external should give way, over time, to deeper understandings. Valadés, who is believed to have had a Nahua mother, did not seek to exclude native Mexicans from being full members of the Christian community. His book's theme is the redemptive power of Christian rhetoric, which could work in the nahua ear as effectively as any other. , because of its weak and sensual nature. This applied not only to the common people, but also to the nobility. The characterization of native peoples as naturally passive and submissive, and therefore both childlike and feminine in relation to their adult male colonizers, is standard in imperialist discourses; in the current context it is relevant because its ceremonialism has been interpreted as a manifestation of this inherent immaturity. 12
For a provocative discussion of Valadés' work, see Watts 1991. 371
Louise M. Burkhart A Franciscan apology prepared in 1569, probably by Mendieta, and addressed to Don Juan de Ovando, a visitor from the Council of the Indies, gives the following explanation of the importance of the ceremony in the Nahua Church: all this [musical] harmony is the greatest benefit among them to their Christianity, and the ornamentation and beautification of churches is very necessary, to lift their spirits and move them to the things of God, because their nature, which is lukewarm and forgetful of inward things, things, you need to be aided by outward appearance. And therefore those who governed them in the time of their heathenism kept them most of the time occupied in building sumptuous temples, and in greatly adorning them with roses and flowers, as well as with the gold and silver they possessed, and in many sacrifices and ceremonies, harsher and more severe than those of the Law of Moses. (García Icazbalceta 1889: 66) The author recognizes the continuity between pre-Columbian and colonial practices, framing it in this discourse of spiritual need. Here, Christian pomp does not only serve to attract new converts: the Nahuas' affinity for the ceremony stems not only from their newness in faith, but from their very (natural) nature. And unless God sees fit to alter their nature, the author asserts later in the text (p. 110), they will remain unfit for the priesthood. In 1571, Mendieta wrote to Ovando that the natives, even in a hundred years, would not be “solid and old in Christianity” enough to be ready for the priesthood (García Icazbalceta 1886: 115).13 This attitude also infected Nahuatl writings. In the Nahuatl Colloquios de la paz y tranquilidad christiana by Fray Juan de Gaona, written around 1540 in the form of a dialogue between a Franciscan and a Nahua student, the young man laments that the natives were not receptive to the teaching of the spiritual wisdom of Christianity . . even if it is admonished by a priest for 400 years. The friar responds by commenting on its childishness and the despair it provokes in priests (Gaona 1582: 23v-24v). If the ritual predilections of the Nahuas allowed them to be considered perpetual children, they also placed a constant responsibility on the priests. The author of the 1569 report states that the indigenous 13 These attitudes were not necessarily racist, in the sense of assuming genealogically inherited differences. A common opinion held that the geography and climate of the New World had deleterious effects on its inhabitants. This was as true for Spaniards as it was for natives. Sahagún, for example, asserts that Spaniards who come to Mexico, and even more so those born there, acquire the same bad inclinations as the natives; he attributes it to the earth's climate or constellations (Sahagún 1950-82, 1: 76-77).
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Christian pomp and native identity in early colonial Mexico is like wax: they bear the imprint of what they learn, but the wax remains soft. Without the ministers' constant guidance, "they leave everything behind and forget" (they forget; García Icazbalceta 1889: 82). A joint declaration by the Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian orders against replacing the friars with secular clergy predicted that the removal of the friars would have devastating effects on the faith of the indigenous people (García Icazbalceta 1886: 180). They will lose all the good customs that the friars taught them, such as the chanting of the canonical hours, and the process of evangelization will have to start all over again. This is due to their entirely sensual nature, which is why they only understand what they see and adopt only the customs they see the priests themselves practice. It is implied that the secular clergy, being less given to devotional exercises, will not provide the necessary models. The pessimism is obvious: the danger is not that the natives cannot advance to a higher spiritual condition, but that they will lose even the lowest form of Christianity they possess. The Augustinian Grijalva saw so little hope for the spiritual advancement of the natives that he interpreted the recurring epidemics as what was best for the people. God was rewarding them for the speed of their initial conversion by gathering them in heaven before the inevitable relapse into paganism occurred (1624:68v). The utopianism that flourished especially among the Franciscans depended on a view of the natives as innocent and infantile, the gender angelicum of the "Age of the Spirit", the new third age of the world prophesied by Joachim of Fiore (see Phelan 1970; also Baudot 1983). In that millennial kingdom, gently protected by the friars, the natives would not need their own priests to reach spiritual perfection. Mendieta invokes the enchanted island of Antillia, according to legend a theocracy founded by bishops of Portugal, where the people "spend most of their time making processions and praising God with hymns and spiritual songs" (Mendieta 1980: 449; Phelan 1970: 69–71). Phelan finds in Mendieta's fantasy echoes of San Agustín's City of God, in which "we will have free time to utter the praises of God, who will be all in all" (Phelan 1970: 71). In paradise, faith is contiguous with its expression; Appearance and essence are one. Such conceptions could have given legitimacy to Nahua religious patrons. However, they belonged in the realm of fantasy, of what might have been if the Franciscans had been able to carry out their program free of charge. Between what the Nahuas were and what they could have been or could have been, there was an unbridgeable rhetorical gulf.
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Louise M. Burkhart The claim that the ritualistic Nahuas were spiritually inferior served the friars well. Not only could they support their own superior position as God's imperialists, but they could criticize any people or policy that interfered with their plans and rationalize the end results when their goals did not come to fruition. Even when they were despairing of the eventual failure of their whole enterprise, they were able to attribute that failure to the deficiencies of the native character. It was not the Indians' willpower, their respect for the traditions of their ancestors, their contentment with their own forms of spirituality, and their insistence on self-determination that led them to accept only some of the pitfalls of the Christian faith; it was their confused indifference to spiritual enlightenment. One can be blamed for failing to convince intelligent, rational pagans that Christianity is superior to their ways, but who could expect it to teach a retarded and recalcitrant child anything? There were various efforts to control how the Nahua practiced even their lowest form of Christian religious life. On the part of the friars, these efforts arose from a strict sense of propriety and a fear of a resurgence of idolatry. These concerns led, on the one hand, to separate dance from more solemn rites, keeping dancers outside the church building and away from processional routes.14 On the other hand, and to a greater extent, the friars sought to control the content of devotional texts in the native language, both oral and written. A greater concern with words than deeds reflects their own preaching-oriented, scripture-based tradition. The songs were particularly suspect; its figurative language was so difficult for the friars to understand that they feared the letters encoded diabolical messages (Sahagún 1583: prologue; Mendieta 1980: 80-81). Written texts had to be carefully examined by literate Nahuatl friars and trusted native assistants. However, singing and dancing as such was not discouraged, and song texts such as those from Psalmodia christiana (Sahagún 1583) were provided as substitutes for the disapproved texts. The natives were allowed to circulate among themselves books and manuscripts approved for their own use under 14 In 1544, Bishop Zumárraga published a Spanish translation of Dionisius Richel's treatise on the proper manner of conducting processions (Richel 1544). The publication was aimed primarily at Spaniards and not at natives. Spaniards were to be discouraged from parties, obscene masquerades and parodies of the ecclesiastical celebrations in which they used to participate. The natives, inclined to such behavior, having celebrated the feasts of their idols with dancing, could not distinguish these vanities from true Christian customs; they imitated the Spaniards, thinking it was their own devotional behavior (appendix Zumárraga, in Richel 1544: 16r). Mendieta claims that the dances performed by the indigenous people on their Christian festivals were kept separate from the processions to preserve due solemnity (1980: 430-431).
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Christian Ostentation and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico: A Guide for the Literate Elite. At one point Sahagún rewrote, or (more likely) had his assistants rewrite, a set of devotional exercises which he claims to have discovered among the natives, which contained many errors and inconsistencies (Sahagún 1574); it is evident that he not only confiscated it, but corrected it, and probably returned it to the natives' hands. Other control efforts were intended to be more invasive. A long series of decrees issued by ecclesiastical authorities and the Spanish Crown aimed to: limit the number of singers and musicians and the types of musical instruments permitted in native choirs; prohibit theatrical performances inside churches; to prohibit the chanting of the canonical hours and to restrict public singing to the catechism on feast days; examine religious images made and used by indigenous people and confiscate those deemed inappropriate; and prevent devotional texts in their native language from circulating among them, except the basic catechism. Repeated legislation aimed at the same ends, particularly with regard to music, suggests an ongoing challenge from native communities.15 Given the importance of religion in native life, control of religious expression was a means of controlling the city itself; the supposed threat of a revival of idolatry was always at hand to justify any restriction. The following account from Torquemada's chronicle illustrates that the Nahua would tolerate only a certain amount of intrusion into their religious life, and that pious action could easily turn into political action. On the feast of the Assumption of 1569, in Mexico City, a group of Nahuas paraded in procession, accompanied by some Franciscan friars, as was customary every year on this day. The Nahuas included the mayors of the city's four native districts; the friars included the famous Peter of Gante. They were going from the chapel of San José de los Naturales, next to the main church and the Franciscan convent, to celebrate mass in Santa María la Redonda, the church in one of the indigenous neighborhoods dedicated to the Assumption. Some clerics (secular clergy) tried to interfere with this procession by blocking the street. They arrested the people at the front, who were carrying the sacred images, and began to harass the Nahua man who was in charge of the process.16 He refused to back down. A court official and Pedro de Gante tried to mediate the dispute, but without success. A crowd began to gather. The 15 The legislation of the ecclesiastical council is printed in Lorenzana 1769; native music and efforts to control it are discussed in Stevenson 1968, Saldívar 1934, and Weckmann 1984. 16 Torquemada describes this individual as the priest, perhaps indicating that he was the patron of the upcoming mass. cofradía I assume from the context that it was Nahua, but this is not specified.
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Louise M. Burkhart's argument turned into jostling and then turmoil. The Spaniards advanced with drawn swords to defend the clerics. The friars, who did not heed their pleas for peace, watched in dismay as these meek and humble natives, women and men, picked up stones and clods of earth and began stoning their opponents. Clerics fled in fear for their lives; the Spanish officer jumped into a canal and two Spaniards were stripped of their swords. Many people were injured. The way was opened, but the poor friars were so nervous that they withdrew to San José to celebrate mass. The clerics filed a criminal complaint with Viceroy Don Martín Enríquez, who began his investigation by arresting the four mayors, among others. Many more people, mainly women, started to arrive in groups to surrender to the authorities. They willingly confessed to having courageously defended the Franciscans from a blunt attack, thus putting the viceroy in the position of having to treat the protection of Catholic friars as a crime against the state. Seeing that he would end up arresting the entire native population of the city without even getting to the bottom of things, Enríquez abandoned the investigation (Torquemada 1975–83, 2: 403–404).17 This incident illustrates several points. The bond between the friars and the natives forged a politically powerful alliance that any group could use to its strategic advantage. Disputes between the mendicant orders and the secular clergy were not just a matter of ecclesiastical intrigue, but involved the native population and their rights to free religious expression. The natives were willing and able to defend these rights through a show of force. In their dedication to the ceremony they exceeded even the pious examples given by their priests, for to carry a customary rite to its intended conclusion they risked the killing of Spaniards. Were Assumption Day protesters more motivated by respect for the saints or by respect for themselves? I suggest that the worship of the community's patron saints was so fused with the collective identity that this may not have been a meaningful distinction. For colonial Nahuas, a procession was a statement of politics and piety. Despite concerns expressed by their priests, the Nahua in their own writings give no indication that they perceived their lot as spiritual impoverishment and immaturity. While his private thoughts and feelings are, of course, irretrievable, his surviving public statements convey easy confidence.17 The incident is also mentioned in a 1570 petition by the Franciscan Alonso of Escalona to the Council of the Indies in the context of a protest against the interference of the secular clergy (García Icazbalceta 1886: 101). The 18th-century Franciscan historian Vetancurt briefly reports the event, describing the perpetrators as students and stating that, to prevent such riots in the future, the archbishop threatened to excommunicate any student or clergyman who came to watch the procession (Vetancurt 1971: pt 4, 83).
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Christian ostentation and native identity in early colonial Mexico and familiarity with church affairs. In their wills, they invoke the appropriate pious formulas, organize Masses to be said for their souls and those of their loved ones, and sometimes leave Christian paraphernalia for their chosen heirs (Anderson, Berdan, and Lockhart 1976; Cline and León-Portilla 1984). ; Cline 1986; Madeira 1991). The historical annals of Nahua communities list a variety of processions and religious dramatizations among notable events (Anales antiguos s.f.). Petitions to the king, such as the 1560 letter from the Ayuntamiento de Huexotzingo to Felipe II (Anderson, Berdan and Lockhart 1976: 176-190), assert an abundance of Christian piety that contrasts, with good rhetorical effect, with deficiencies in funds and fair treatment. that the petitioners are receiving at the hands of their Spanish masters. Tlaxcala city council minutes record considerable spending on Christian pageantry. These include buying musical instruments; the order for custody, altarpiece and feathered platform to carry the Blessed Sacrament in processions, on condition that no one removes these feathers and dances with them; the purchase of elegant cloaks for councilors to wear in processions; and orders to secure yellow flowers and foliage, wings and hair for angel costumes and various devil costumes for Corpus Christi celebrations (Lockhart, Berdan, and Anderson 1986). Within the large corpus of Christian literature produced in the Nahuatl language, there are a limited number of texts that can be considered native authorship.18 Most of these were produced under priestly supervision, and some were based directly on Old World models. However, just as they were composed or transposed by Nahua authors, they are imbued with a poetic language and oratory stylistics belonging to a Nahua aesthetic sensibility very different from that of the friars. For example, a catechism that matches its various prayers and prayers with precious ornaments of jade, turquoise, quetzal feathers, and other treasures invites the devotee to identify Christian piety with pre-Christian nobility and prayer with paraphernalia (Sahagún 1583: 1r-15r) . An Easter morning song depicting the churchyard as a garden, women and men marching in procession transformed into native species of flowers and trees, with angels circling in the form of tropical birds, is reading the Resurrection as a transforming infusion of holy presence in the ritual site (Sahagún 1583: 59r–60r, 61r–61v). 18 Notable examples are Psalmodia christiana (Sahagún 1583), the Colloquia (Sahagún 1986), a religious drama now in the Princeton University Library (Burkhart 1991), an early 17th-century Comedy of Kings (in Horcasitas 1974) , a cycle of prayers to the Virgin (Santoral in Mexican s.f.) and some of the Mexican Cantares (Bierhorst 1985: esp. 254–297).
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Louise M. Burkhart There is no shortage of overtly political statements, however subtle. By describing Nahua ancestors as deficient in nothing more than a knowledge of the true religion, attributing Mexico's conversion not to Spanish invaders but directly to Christ and the saints, and equating Nahuas with Old World Christianity, these native thinkers challenge the legitimacy conquest and continued colonial rule (Burkhart 1992a). One text suggests that even the pre-Christian ancestors of the Nahuas, whom the friars sent to eternal hell, must share in the collective redemption of their people (Burkhart 1991: 164-166). Through their pious words and pious actions, the Nahua actively represented themselves as Christians, maintaining many of the moods, movements, and media that had constituted their traditional religiosity. For the friars, as for all non-natives, the fact that the Nahua were native was more important than any evidence of their Christianity. As colonial objects, their cultural expressions had to be interpreted as different and inferior. The passion for pomp and ceremony that allowed them to so easily adopt the hallmarks of Christian identity served the colonialist end of discrediting not only their religious life but also their very nature as human beings. The supposed crisis of native spirituality did not exist outside these colonialist discourses. Challenged more by poverty, disease, and taxation than by any hint of spiritual shallowness, the Nahua were apparently content with Christianity as long as they practiced it and wished only to continue Christianity. customs they had established.
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BIBLIOGRAFIA ANCIENT ANNALS s.f. Ancient Annals of Mexico and Its Contours. National Library of Anthropology, Historical Archive, Col. antiquity 273–274. ANDERSON, ARTHUR J. O., FRANCES BERDAN AND JAMES LOCKHART (TRANSLATION AND EDITING) 1976 Beyond the Codices: The Nahua View of Colonial Mexico. University of California Press, Berkeley. BAUDOT, GEORGES 1983 Utopia and history in Mexico: the first chroniclers of Mexican civilization (1520 - 1569) (Vicente González Loscertales, trans.). Space-Calpe, Madrid. BIERHORST, JOHN (TRANS. AND ED.) 1985 Mexican Songs: Songs of the Aztecs. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. BURKHART, LOUISE M. 1986 Moral Deviation in Sixteenth-Century Nahua and Christian Thought: The Rabbit and the Deer. Latin American Tradition Magazine 12: 107–139. 1988 The Solar Christ in the Nahuatl Doctrinal Texts of Early Colonial Mexico. Ethnohistory 35: 234–256. 1989 The slippery earth: Nahua-Christian moral dialogue in sixteenth-century Mexico. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 1991 A Nahuatl religious drama from c. 1590. Latin American Indian Literatures Journal 7: 153–171. 1992a The amanuenses appropriated the text: Interpreting a Nahuatl song from Santiago. In On the Translation of Native American Literatures (Brian Swann, ed.): 339–355. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. 1992b Flowery Sky: The Aesthetics of Paradise in Nahuatl Devotional Literature. Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 21: 88–109. CLENDINNEN, INGA 1990 Paths to the Sacred: Reconstructing “Religion” in 16th-century Mexico. History and Anthropology 5: 105–141. 1991 The Aztecs: An Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. CLINE, S. L. 1986 Colonial Culhuacan, 1580–1600: A Social History of an Aztec Town. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. CLINE, S. L., AND MIGUEL LEON-PORTILLA (TRANS. AND EDS.) 1984 The Testaments of Culhuacan. Publications of the UCLA Latin American Center, Los Angeles. COMAROFF, JEAN 1985 The Body of Power, the Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. CUEVAS, MARIANO (ED.) 1975 Unpublished documents from the 16th century for the history of Mexico. Editorial Porrua, Mexico.
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Louise M. Burkhart DÁVILA PADILLA, FRAY AGUSTÍN 1955 History of the foundation and discourse of the province of Santiago de Mexico, of the order of preachers. Facsimile of 1596 ed. Literary Editorial Academy, Mexico. DURÁN, FRAY DIEGO 1967 History of the Indies of New Spain and the islands of Terra Firme (Angel María Garibay K., ed.). 2 vol. Editorial Porrua, Mexico. GAONA, FRAY JUAN DE 1582 Colloquia of peace and Christian tranquility, in the Mexican language. Pedro Ocharte, Mexico. GARCÍA ICAZBALCETA, JOAQUÍN (ED.) 1886 Letters from Religious in New Spain. New collection of documents for the History of Mexico, vol. 1. Former Andrade y Morales Bookstore, Sucesores, Mexico. 1889 Franciscan Codex, 16th century. New collection of documents for the History of Mexico, vol. 2. Former Andrade y Morales Bookshop, Sucesores, Mexico. GRJALVA, FRAY JUAN DE 1624 Chronicle of the order of N. P. S. Augustine in the provinces of New Spain. Juan Ruiz, Mexico. HORCASITAS, FERNANDO 1974 Nahuatl theater: new Spanish and modern times. National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. LOCKHART, JAMES 1992 The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, 16th to 18th Centuries. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California LOCKHART, JAMES, FRANCES BERDAN AND ARTHUR J. O. ANDERSON (TRANS. AND EDS.) 1986 The Tlaxcalan Actas: A Compendium of the Records of the Cabildo of Tlaxcala (1545–1627). University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. LORENZANA, FRANCISCO ANTONIO (ED.) 1769 First and second provincial councils held in the most noble and loyal city of Mexico. Impression of Superior Government, Mexico. MENDIETA, FRAY GERÓNIMO DE 1980 Indian Ecclesiastical History (Joaquín García Icazbalceta, ed.). Editorial Porrua, Mexico. MOTOLINÍA (FRAY TORIBIO DE BENAVENTE) 1979 History of the Indians of New Spain (Edmundo O'Gorman, ed.). Editorial Porrua, Mexico. PHELAN, JOHN LEDDY 1970 The Millennial Reign of the Franciscans in the New World. University of California Press, Berkeley. POOLE, STAFFORD 1987 Pedro Moya de Contreras: Catholic Reform and Royal Power in New Spain, 1571 to 1591. University of California Press, Berkeley. RICHEL, DIONÍSIO 1544 This is a brief compendium that deals with the way in which processions should be carried out. Juan Cromberger, Mexico. SAHAGÚN, FRAY BERNARDINO DE 1574 Mexican language exercise. Yesterday MS 1484. Newberry Library, Chicago.
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Christian psalm and preaching of the saints of the year in Mexican language. Pedro Ocharte, Mexico. The Florentine Codex: A General History of Things in New Spain (Arthur JO Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, eds. and trans.). American Research School, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Discussions and Christian Doctrine (Miguel León-Portilla, trans. and ed.) National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico.
SALDÍVAR, GABRIEL 1934 History of music in Mexico (pre-Cortesian and colonial). Ministry of Public Education, Mexico. SANTORAL NO MEXICANO s.d. MS 1476. Reserved Collection, National Library of Mexico. STEVENSON, ROBERT 1968 Music in Aztec and Inca territory. University of California Press, Berkeley. TORQUEMADA, FRAY JUAN DE 1975–83 Indian monarchy. 7 vol. Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. UCHMANY, EVA ALEXANDRA 1980 Religious changes in the conquest of Mexico. Mexican Journal of Anthropological Studies 26: 1–57. VALADÉS, FRAY DIEGO 1989 Christian Rhetoric (Tarsicio Herrera Zapién et al., trans.). Introduction by Esteban J. Palomera. National Autonomous University of Mexico and Economic Culture Fund, Mexico. VETANCURT, FRAY AGUSTÍN 1971 Mexican Theater: Chronicle of the Province of the Holy Gospel of Mexico. Editorial Porrua, Mexico. WATTS, PAULINE MOFFITT 1991 Hieroglyphs of Conversion: Alien Discourses in Diego Valadés's Rhetorica Christiana. Dominican Memory 22: 405–433. WECKMANN, LUIS 1984 Mexico's Medieval Heritage. 2 vol. The College of Mexico, Mexico. WOOD, STEPHANIE 1991 Adopted Saints: Christian Images in Late Colonial Toluca Nahua Testaments. The Americas 47: 259–294.
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a nation surrounded
A nation under siege BRUCE MANNHEIM THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Poetry is the plow that opens and turns time, so that the deep layers of time, its black earth, end up on the surface. Osip Mandelstam (1971: 50)
you
In The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (1991), I have argued that the descendants of the Inka, the modern Quechua-speakers of southern Peru, are "a besieged nation," to use a phrase by Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas (1968: 296). ). ), in two senses: first and most evident, the Quechuas of southern Peru live in an institutional world mediated by the language of their conquerors, Spanish. The conquerors brought not only priests and interpreters, but also a notary whose job it was to record the legal protocols of the conquest. From then on, Andean indigenous peoples became the subject of extensive discourses that not only shaped colonial and national policies towards indigenous peoples, but also, in the legal and commercial arenas, determined the fate of individual families and communities. For example, the legal processes by which indigenous lands passed into the hands of Spanish settlers were carried out in Spanish, and the archives are full of cases in which even notifications of the processes were given to native communities. In modern Peru, Spanish is still dominant and Quechua is politically subservient, so much so that both Quechua and Spanish speakers consider it normal and take it for granted. The second sense in which the Quechua are “a fenced nation” is that the modern linguistic homogeneity of southern Peru, in which the vast majority of the population speaks Quechua, was also achieved under colonial rule. Before the European invasion in 1532, southern Peru was extraordinarily diverse, N
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Bruce Mannheim linguistically and culturally; it was a mosaic in which speakers of different and often unrelated languages lived side by side, as is still the case in other parts of South America, such as the northwest of the Amazon. Although the Incas spoke Quechua of southern Peru and used it as the administrative language of the vast empire, there is no evidence that it became hegemonic or standardized before the European invasion, even in the center of the Inca state around Cuzco. On the contrary, archaeologist Craig Morris (1985: 478) observes that "the brilliance of the Inca conquest seems to lie in its ability to accept, utilize, and perhaps even promote variability." This is as true for language as it is for Inca economy and society (see Mannheim 1992). The 18th century European slogan “one people, one language, one state” has not held up in the Andes, regardless of whether it has or not. to Europe In the decades after the arrival of Europeans, however, the linguistic heterogeneity of southern Peru leveled out as Andean natives coalesced into a culturally cohesive “oppressed nation” through a combination of conscious Spanish policy and the unintended consequences of other actions. Spaniards found it convenient to demand the use of one of the most widely spoken native languages at the expense of local vernaculars. In the late 16th century, the church adopted a single catechism and standardized sermons, published in artificially standardized varieties of Quechua and another unrelated language, Aymara. They used these materials throughout the Andes, including with people who spoke clearly different languages, both related and unrelated. Spanish missionaries and administrators thus became agents for the dissemination of standardized forms of Quechua and Aymara. Furthermore, the forced resettlement of native populations and massive population movements to escape labor and per capita taxes undermined the ancient identification of language with locality, which had been the basis of the pre-Columbian system of linguistic and cultural differentiation. The older cultural differences among Andean natives became less important than their “shared incorporation into a new colonial category, . . . Indians” (Stern 1982: 80). In The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion and elsewhere, I have called this process "the reterritorialization of southern Peruvian Quechua." In this chapter, I will sketch the contours of a larger account in which I will trace the rhetorical and cultural practices through which Southern Quechua forged a distinct sense of identity during the 450 years since the Spanish invaded Peru. I conceive this project as a comparative analysis of linguistic texts, taking into account their formal structure, the historical and social conditions of their production and the intertextual resonances that these texts had for their audience. The texts I have in mind cover the entire period
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A nation under siege from the European invasion to the present, including Christian and native Andean religious texts; myths and other narratives; religious dramas from the 18th century, such as the famous play Ollanta, with which the elites invented a past; and secular songs and poetry, both vernacular and artistic. My objectives are: first, to trace the processes of national formation as they are tacitly reflected in these texts; second, to identify the rhetorical strategies used to appropriate Quechua and Spanish cultural forms within a specifically Quechua cultural horizon; and third, to link particular rhetorical strategies to specific historical moments in the creation of a Quechua “fenced nation”. I use the phrase “national formation” (evocative of the notion of “class formation” as used by Thompson [1963] and Wright [1985]) to emphasize the unstable and conjunctural character of the Quechua nationality, which has filtered down below the threshold of consciousness. except sporadic eruptions. In addition to asserting cultural positions towards non-Quechua people, in the discursive fields of the Peruvian colony and republic, these texts reaffirm positions within the Quechua-speaking population. For example, in the 18th century, provincial landowners in Cuzco, such as the Marquis of Valle Umbroso, sponsored paintings and verse dramas that invented a utopian vision of the Inca past, invoking the divine intervention of the Virgin Mary on behalf of the provincials. , or - in paintings - they portrayed landowners as Incan nobility (see J. Rowe 1951; Cummins 1991). Verse dramas were generally written in Quechua, except for stage directions which were written in Spanish. These works were part of an effort by provincial elites of Spanish descent to assert their legitimacy within a Quechua field of reference and thus legitimize their vast properties. The self-styled Quechua nobles who patronized them wore “Inka” clothing, spoke Quechua, and addressed each other by the Quechua title Apu or “Lord,” a title used today only for mountain deities. The works, then, were simultaneous claims to legitimacy in two Although I am not the first to use the words “nation” and “national” to describe the Andean natives' process of cultural self-construction (J. Rowe 1955, Arguedas 1968). , I do this reluctantly because I don't want to suggest that they resemble in any way the self-conscious nationalism of Europe since the 18th century. If the Quechua of southern Peru have become "a nation surrounded", it is in the tacit sense of a nation "in itself" and not in the explicit sense of a nation "by itself". Harvey (1987) and Itier (1992: 259) criticize my use of the notion as essentialist, correctly noting that ethnic and linguistic identity is continually negotiated rather than fixed. The notion of a tacit “fenced nation” does not imply that “Quechua” is a fixed corporate identity (indeed, this best describes the explicit ideology of modern nation-states), but serves precisely to draw attention to the problematic. terrain of ethnic and linguistic identity in the Andes. 1
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Bruce Mannheim fields of social containment. They made a claim by the Quechua and provincial elites against the Spanish and coastal elites, and at the same time a claim by the landowners that their rule over the Quechua peasants was legitimate. My strategy is to explore processes of “national formation” through the study of the linguistic and religious ways in which Southern Quechua positioned and repositioned themselves in Peruvian society, and especially the ways in which they became “a nation surrounded by ”. I do this episodically by identifying social movements and linguistic texts that illuminate broader conflicts over cultural images and interpretations; texts are sometimes written by Latino and Peruvian Spaniards and sometimes spoken or sung by Quechua-speaking peasants, and the movements reach imperial or national consciousness. Each of these texts and movements illustrate the complex and often mutually contradictory social positions of their creators, participants, and listeners, as "literatures of the impossible" (to borrow a phrase from Frank Salomon [1982]), occasionally both embodying contradictory societies. interests and utopias of projects. I will mention just four examples of these complexities: a text (discussed below) was added to a priest's handbook, to be sung at Marian feasts, but it evokes native Andean religious imagery through strategic ambiguity. Another set of texts, the eighteenth-century dramatic poems mentioned above, were written in Quechua by educated provincial elites, using an image of empire to appropriate the Inca past not for Quechua-speaking smallholders, but for merchants and merchants. Quechua-speaking owners. Quechua. . Another example (also discussed below) is a modern song from a remote rural community that turns out to be a cryptogram of considerable complexity, with opposing native Andean and Christian religious imagery, although not easily recognized by listeners and perhaps also by singers. As a more recent example, Arguedas' poem Katatay, written in the 1960s, encapsulates erudite and historically powerful imagery in a modernist poetic form, published in Quechua but accessible to most of its readers only through a simplified English translation. Spanish. These examples do not exhaust either the variety of texts or the spectrum of social conditions in which they were produced and sometimes heard, but they can give an idea of the complexity of the project. I approach texts, representations and social movements through their formal structure, working out the details of linguistic form and imagery in a range that may seem overwhelming to some, but there are two reasons for doing so. First, although it is fashionable today to emphasize the indeterminacy of interpretation and the power of interpretive communities to shape cultural strategies (see Fish 1980, for example), texts and other cultural phenomena provide the formal stimuli that guide their interpretation, although such
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Stimuli from a besieged nation may operate below the interpreter's threshold of consciousness. Cultural forms like texts are indeterminate in the sense that they allow for an infinite range of interpretations, but determinate in the sense that the range is constrained by the formal structure of the text and, in particular cases, by the institutional structures within it. the text is transmitted. Interpretive communities not only shape interpretations of texts, interpretive communities are defined and shaped by texts themselves. Second, since the rhetorical mechanisms by which interpretive strategies are formed are often below the threshold of awareness of speakers, writers, and listeners, they provide a view of the cultural landscape within which they were formed that often exceeds statements. explicit from the participants. until. where they are available. Unlike their Mesoamerican and Central Mexican counterparts, neither the modern Quechua speakers of southern Peru nor (I suspect) their Inca ancestors had well-developed traditions of linguistic and cultural exegesis. Consequently, any exploration of Quechua self-formation processes must begin with tacit structural representations of the sort I have been discussing. I follow Gates (1988) in advocating a new kind of formalism, which locates texts and other cultural forms and practices in a historically articulated repertoire; In short, a formalism sensitive to the social conditions of textual production and the repertoire of local figures and strategies. I locate this project within a broader shift in Native American historiography in which sources written in Native American languages, ranging from notarial records to Huarochirí myths, are being used to understand the complexity of the Spanish colonial world and Native Americans. positions within that world and to appreciate the complex and fissured world in which they both lived.2 For those who have worked on the historical ethnography of the central Andes, this represents a departure from the ways in which we have habitually talked about the relationship between native Andean Peru and Spanish. In the 1970s, historical ethnographers of the Andes tried to establish continuity between modern Andean cultural forms and pre-conquest forms to find the quintessence of "Andinidad". In recent years, scholars such as Alberto Flores Galindo (1987) and Michael Taussig (1987) have emphasized that Andean cultures, Andean landscapes, and even Andean utopias were reshaped in the European and North American imagination. and Lockhart 1976; Burkhart 1989; Cumins 1991; Hanks 1986; Karttunen 1982; Karttunen and Lockhart 1976, 1987; Klor de Alva, Nicholson and Quinones 1988; Lockhart 1991; Mac Cormack 1985, 1988, 1991; 1987 Report; Solomon 1982; Salomão and Urioste 1991; Silverblatt 1987; and Szeminski 1987. 2
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Bruce Mannheimtion. The new approach has been a valuable corrective to the romanticism of the old, but it runs the risk of annexing Andean historical ethnography to European intellectual history. In my opinion, the task of Andean historical ethnography is to determine how native Andeans have continually repositioned themselves, given the ever-changing forces of social and cultural domination. There are serious obstacles to such a program. Although there is now a substantial literature on Andean peasant and native uprisings – a legacy of the historiography of the 1970s – almost nothing comes to the attention of political authorities (compare Guha 1983). Furthermore, even these moments of eruption are visibly rare insofar as they articulate explicit cultural policies. In part this is inherent in source materials such as bureaucratic records, court transcripts, and government investigations, but in part it must also be because native Andeans do not typically engage in overt exegetical practices. As examples, I analyze two song texts and a textile pattern to contrast their rhetorical strategies. Hanaq pacap kusikuynin is a Christian hymn composed before 1622 and included in a church manual for priests. The second text of the song, a popular song recorded in the early 1960s, is a cryptogram. I then show that the same rhetorical forms used in the second song are at play in a contemporary fabric. In all cases, I start with a detailed formal analysis of the texts or textiles and work outwards trying to account for the tacit knowledge that allows speakers of the language to understand it. For Hanaq Pacap Kusikuynin, I have also tried to understand the text in terms of the institutional politics of its production, including doctrinal and organizational disputes in seventeenth-century Andean Catholicism. These texts are socially located in very different ways, with the 17th-century hymn composed by an ecclesiastic and the popular song (presumably) by Quechua-speaking peasants. The anthem, although intended and appropriated by Quechua peasants, fits stylistically with European musical traditions. . On the other hand, the popular song, performed in an already Christianized world, stylistically belongs to an archaic Andean indigenous tradition. Not surprisingly, the texts of the two songs exemplify substantially different rhetorical strategies, approaching the place of European Christianity in an Andean world in very different ways. The hymn, Hanaq pachap kusikuynin, appears untranslated at the end of Juan de Pérez Bocanegra's Ritual formario, published in 1631. means this in the context of seventeenth-century Spanish versification. According to Stevenson (1968: 280), it is the oldest piece of vocal polyphony published in the Americas, composed in a style that, except for its language, does not show traces of Andean provenance (Figs. 1, 2). The alleged perpetrator, Pérez Bocanegra, taught 388
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FIG. 1 Cover, ritual form. Photograph courtesy of the National University of San Antonio Abad de Cuzco.
Figure 2
Facsimile of the Heaven's Joy arrangement. 389
Bruce Mannheim of Latin grammar at the University of San Marcos (Lima) and worked as cantor in the cathedral of Cuzco, corrector of choral singing and parish priest in Bethlehem of Cuzco before assuming the positions of general examiner of Quechua and Aymara for the diocese of Cuzco and the parish priest of Andahuaylillas (province of Quispicanchi), a village south of Cuzco (see Mannheim 1991: 47–48, 146). The parish church of Andahuaylillas, built in the early 17th century, with Pérez Bocanegra's name on the cornerstone, is sometimes called the “Sistine Chapel of America” because of its ornate interior (Figs. 3–5). Pérez Bocanegra was an exquisite Quechua stylist, and his manual reveals a deep familiarity with rural Andean life, and includes information on dream interpretation and other forms of divination, marriage practices, etc. A third-rate Franciscan, Pérez Bocanegra was embroiled in a long-running jurisdictional dispute and litigation with the Jesuits, who coveted their parish as a Quechua-speaking missionary training center parallel to the Aymara training center they had established in Juli. (They also amassed titles to several nearby properties.) The Ritual form was published during the period when the Jesuits controlled the parish. Pérez Bocanegra's dispute with the Jesuits was also reflected in his translation style and practical recommendations. The Third Council of Lima, dominated by the Jesuits, began in 1583,
Fig. 3 Inscription in Luis de Riaño, Beatizo de Cristo, commemorating the construction of the church in Andahuaylillas, under Pérez Bocanegra, 1626. Photo courtesy of José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert. 390
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FIG. 4 Exterior of the parish church, Andahuaylillas. Modern Quechua residents say that the three crosses represent the Father, the Son and the Mother.
Fig. 5 Interior of the parish church, Andahuaylillas. Photo courtesy of Tom Cummins. 391
Bruce Mannheim recommended that priests train native Andean adherents to hear confessions, record them on quipu with us, and confess to the entire community; Pérez explicitly advised against the practice. Where the Third Council encouraged the use of neologisms such as I ñiy, “to say 'uh huh'”, to accommodate the absence of a concept of “belief” in the Quechua of southern Peru, Pérez often preferred to use the usual form with the infinitive "to say." The Third Council of Lima agonized over the translation of Christian religious vocabulary and finally recommended that Spanish loanwords be used to avoid possible doctrinal distortions. In contrast, Pérez tried to concretize Christian religious concepts in Andean imagery, including a translation of God by the name of the mountain Huanacauri. To get away with the translation, he arranged the page so that the Quechua and Spanish texts were not directly associated. Quechua passages are followed by their Spanish counterparts, the latter often paraphrasing the former. In the case of Hanaq pacap kusikuynin and two other even more difficult hymns, Pérez does not include a translation. A transliteration and translation of Hanaq pacap kusikuynin appear in opposite columns below.3
3 In transliteration I follow the spelling practice detailed in The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (1991). The salient points are: (1) I distinguish the dorsal s (like s in American English), written z (z, c, and ç in colonial documents), from the apical s (like s in Madrid Spanish), which is written s (s or ss in colonial documents). These are distinguished quite systematically in many of the older sources. However, two transliterated sibilants are dubious: yasuywana (line 23) and qallasanan (line 31) (compare zananmanta [line 20]). (2) I distinguish uvulars (q) from velars (k) in all plosive series, although Pérez Bocanegra did not indicate the distinction directly. (3) I distinguish between flat, ejective, and uvular stops, although Pérez Bocanegra did not record the distinction (see Mannheim [1991: ch. 6] for further discussion). (4) I replaced the vowels with superscript accents by the corresponding vowel-nasal sequences, using other quotations from Pérez Bocanegra to identify the point of articulation of the nasal. In the absence of other citations, I have assumed that it is homoorganic with the following oral stop. (5) I use three vowels instead of the five that Pérez Bocanegra uses. Only the three cardinal vowels were distinct in their Quechua (as they are today). (6) I have restored the y at the end of hupaykuyway (line 56) and qatachillay (line 60), which I believe Pérez Bocanegra removed to fit his rhyme scheme. These appear in parentheses in the transcript. (7) I have inserted spaces to indicate word boundaries in some of the epithets in the four-syllable lines. Some were morphologically prompted (eg, line 48, Runapmarcan), but others were less direct and may affect translation (eg, line 84, Huacchaicuya). Several translations of Hanaq pachap kusikuynin have been published in literary anthologies, including Beltrán (1891: 55–63), Lara (1969: 220–222), and Sichra e Cáceres Romero (1990: 116–123, after Beltrán). The three silently modify Pérez Bocanegra's text, in part to avoid translation problems. Of the three, Lara's is closest to Pérez Bocanegra's original, although it omits lines 17–20. A comparison of these translations with mine is beyond the scope of this chapter.
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The Joy of Heaven [Bliss of Heaven]
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
1. The joy of heaven I kiss you a thousand times Tell the fertile tree The hope of men The smile of strength My call 2. Hear my kiss The ramp of God, the mother of God To you who call, don't be a fool Just say " come" to your Qiza Save my anger, I whisper. 4. Who is like me to repent Of Mit'an and zanan Of old Tiqzi's son Of all the most evil Kiss me yasuywana Your son. 5. Look into your eyes and look at your lips Jump jump into tears Heart for the broken Turn your eyes Show me your face Mother of God 6. Heaven's first sign The clear day growing dark The moon illuminating the moon The joy of angels The fountain of life 7. The fountain of riches The grace of the rich, of the elderly, of those who suck, the cloud that chooses In you awaits the tiqzi circle that pleases God
A thousand times the blessedness of heaven I adore you Tree of countless fruits Hope of the peoples Pillar of the weak To my cry Listen to me, to my adoration Who takes God by the hand, Mother of God To the white dove, to the white hamanq 'ay flor My few cures For your son, what I've distributed Make him see Who shines, qatachillay Daylight guide, dawn dawn For you the crier, never not listening To your scorned, just tell him "come on" Do it o forgive my anger Susurwana. Like me he who repents Of descent, of lineage Of the son of the initial ancestor All victorious, however ugly Worship him for me, yasuywana His son. Look at the splashed tear To the cry of bitter tears To the contrite, with a broken heart Turn your eyes Let me see your face Mother of God Generator of the lineage of heaven That turns daylight into night That illuminates the clear moon Joys of angels Light with this is all seen4 Life-giving source Of the mighty, fertility domain Mighty of the mighty Of the ages that gave birth to her That absorbs Grace, chosen cloud In you awaits the initial circle (tiqzi muyu)5 That brings joy to God
Beltrán (1891:57) translates verse 35 as "In whom all look to themselves." Beltrán (1891: 57) translates tiqzi muyu as "the whole world". 393
Bruce Mannheim 8. The Golden Chariot God Walks With a Single Word Gathered 45 God the Son Immediately In Your Womb He Becomes Human Inside You He Creates the Arms of Man 9. The Joyful Arms of the Chick 55 10. Use My Life Purum tazqi hupaykuywa [ y] God zizaq inkill wiwa From wherever, Aquyayta I can use, your mother 60 Qatachilla[y] 11. Bright light, zuma moon The dawn of justice The hope of all You are the only snowflake 65 The moon of the plain infallible The city of God 13. The fruit tree of the desert The beautiful courage of men 75 The red-red zuma phallcha The white as snow The eyes white as snow The white as snow 14. You are the King of tambourine 80 Alone face to any bed
You walk on gold, which makes God run (puriy) With a single word, just persuading God the Son at that moment6 In your womb, creator of a being Within you, creator of a soul Cradle of humanity [of a person, of the Quechuas ] Cradle of the young creator, of the lucky Glass door of his stronghold Your fabric, Your revered unku You were chosen to weave the figures In you I wanted to become a Rune. Catch me for life Wild child, exhort me to love you7 What pollinates God, gardener From anywhere I would get, for you mother Qatachillay. That shines, that lights, beautiful moon Raiser of the true day Hope of all You, ray for the ugly full moon (pampa killa), that does not diminish City of God To you, Queen, who are equal Of all the saints of all the angels the devil's head is beaten with tupu of dirt they are trampled with just his name. Palm tree (chunta)8 that bears tender fruit Beautiful harvest of the people Beautiful reddish phalcha flower9 That turns volcanic ash into bricks Only your eyes shine in the mystery Translucent ship (wampu) You are the great refuge Anywhere accepted
6 Beltrán (1891: 58) translates lines 44-46 as “Assenting with a yes/To God the Son in the instant/In your womb you made him human”. 7 González Holguín's (1952: 204) entries for hupa suggest that it is a sexual exhortation of the kind made to a woman by a man. 8 Soukup (1970: 37) identifies the chunta as Bactris gasipaes. 9 Phallcha is used for several gentian species: Gentiana scarlatina, Gentiana acaulis, Gentiana primuloides, Gentiana sandienses, and Gentiana campanuliformisis (Herrera and Garmendia 1938: 55–56, 58).
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85 15.
90
sixteen.
95
17
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18. 105
19. 110
Beautiful for your followers Big heart and sacrifice For the humble gentiles Poverty mercy Closed happy smile Rich daddy khayna Count flower, choose Jesus walking bird Bright bird mercy I will wait Your shoes will hold me You are a mother, in this world When I die in a world I will enter in joy I will enter in joy The gate of wealth They stole my soul They lied to the tongue They lied to the palm They inflated life They went round and round. So maybe they feel Wantunqam Sin zupay's escape. Help me with your strength And with your son For this poor man's fight For his eternal life Attack me Gold coin, silver coin Tita knows, keep it Rich food will come Protect my suffering Zamachi in the good For my salvation
To his beloved and big-hearted successor, ayrampu10 To the humble and gentle Who cares for the poor Closed garden of joy Those of the mighty father11 Revered flower, the chosen ones Who made Jesus work (puriy), uruya12 Who models the color, khuya13 what shines My hope Only you are my pillar You are my mother, in the world When I die in the other world For happiness make me fight For joy make me enter Powerful door For my spirit, an ounce (uturunku) With my deceitful lie, Tarry hypocritical life, A crowd surrounds me. So they already surround you with signs of love To be lifted up14 So that demon-sins are removed. With your power, help me With your son to do the same So that this poor thing of yours is like this Live without end Makes me happy Granary of gold (qullqa), storehouse of silver Who knows mysteries, storehouse Great harvest of food In my Hunger sustains my well-being, let me rest for my salvation
10 Soukup (1970: 238–239) identifies the ayrampu as Opuntia soehrensii, a cactus. Its reddish-brown flowers are used to produce fabric dye and to color corn beer. Ayrampu is also used to designate the color produced by the dye. 11 Beltrán (1891: 61) translates verse 86 as “To whom only God has access”. 12 Uruya is a leather elevator strung between two trees to transport someone across a river. 13 Khuya as a verb can be translated as "lovingly care for, protect". As a noun, it is used as an adjective to describe amulets (illa, inqa, inqaychu) that are conceived as "generators of life, . . . source of happiness and well-being, . . . propitiator of abundance” (Flores Ochoa 1977: 218 ), or as a noun to refer to the whole class: simply khuya. Khuya seems to be used in the latter sense in line 89. In contrast, in line 84 I have translated Wakchay khuya as "Who cares for the poor", with the verb nominalized (Compare Lara 1969: 222.) 14 That is, like a burden that would be lifted onto the shoulders.
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Bruce Mannheim 115 20. Glory to God the Father
To God the Son and to the Holy Spirit be the glory, forever and ever Before the foundation of the world Zapay Quya, we say, God chose you for Himself.
Glory to God the Father To God the Son And also to the Holy Spirit Glory, for all eternity For the life of all lives Blessed be, Amen Before the beginning of the world, my only Queen, Our God chose you for himself.
The division of verses into stanzas follows that of Pérez Bocanegra: five verses of eight syllables each, followed by a verse of four syllables. Four-syllable lines close each stanza, sometimes with a word or phrase that syntactically links to the first line of the next stanza (see line 6), sometimes with an epithet for the Virgin, such as Diospa maman, "Mother of God" . (verse 30), or Qatachilla, "Pleiades" (verse 60). This division of verses into stanzas is sufficiently typical of Golden Age Spanish verse to require no further comment, except for the label "sappic verse". The formal poetic restrictions associated with this versification pattern are explained in detail in Figure 6.
Fig. 6 Pattern I: Pérez Bocanegra's Versification: “sappic verse”. Caption, Figs. 6 and 7 X#()
optional syllable word limit
• •
primary stress: penultimate secondary stress on first syllable of all stems preceding primary stress 18 violations in 120 lines of word boundaries coinciding with caesura
•
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FIG. 7 Pattern II: Binary parallelism and rhyme, supported by ungrammatical morphology.
A Nation Surrounded A second pattern intersects the first, creating a syncopation of poetic units. The second pattern consists of pairs of lines that are joined together by final rhyme and sometimes also by grammatical parallelism and morphological repetition (homeoteutelon). Pérez Bocanegra sometimes cuts words and omits grammatical morphemes so that the lines fit the second binary pattern, summarized under “Pattern II” in Figure 7. Although older Quechua poetry did not use final rhyme to group lines into larger groups, it did use homeoteutelon and quite extensive grammatical parallelism, and these devices always resulted in an optional final rhyme. Here the final rhyme was promoted to a poetic figure constitutive of the hymn's organization, evoking the older tradition of poetic parallelism and homeoteutelon. Neither Pattern I (Fig. 6), the Spanish-derived versification pattern, nor Pattern II (Fig. 7), the Quechua-derived pattern, exhaustively explain the poetic organization of the hymn. Both seem to operate at the same time, creating a syncopated rhythm of poetic units. Although the Spanish-derived sapphic verse pattern is printed on the page, it is likely that the hymn was interpreted differently depending on what poetic conventions the listener was most familiar with. Thus, a monolingual Quechua speaker with no exposure to Golden Age Spanish poetry might hear the binary pattern. In addition to the ambiguity of the pattern, the anthem's images are subject to multiple readings. On the one hand, it uses classic European imagery for the Virgin, including “City of God”, “Cradle of Humankind”, “Column of the Weak”. Even the celestial images with which the hymn is saturated are firmly rooted in European poetic imagery and iconography: Mary's association with the moon appears in a painting by Diego Velásquez; it is a short distance from the identification of the Virgin as Maria maris stella, "Mary star of the sea", to Chipchiykachaq qatachillay, "She who shines, Pleiades" (line 13). But the hymn's specific configuration of images and epithets has an unmistakable alienness to European tradition, evoking the Virgin Mary's fecundity, praising her as a source of agricultural fertility, as a weaver of brocades, and systematically identifying her with the celestial sky. objects of female devotion in the pre-Columbian Andes: the moon, the Pleiades, and the dark cloud constellation of the llama and its young (see epithets and images listed below). The ambiguity found in terms of poetic structure is replicated in the hymn's imagery. Hanaq pachap kusikuynin is as much a hymn to Mary as it is a hymn to the Pleiades and other celestial objects of native Andean worship. Again, no single interpretation seems to fully explain the hymn's structure, and although a Roman Catholic priest might find the
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Bruce Mannheim's hymn is an acceptable vehicle for Marian devotion, a Quechua-speaking smallholder may find it a comforting continuation of their ancient religious practices, with neither interpretation dominating.
Epithets I. Mother of God and Humanity 2.8 5.30 8.43 15.88 9.49
The ramp of God The mother of God The mother of God The walker Jesus the walker The happy chick hug
8,46 8,47 15,88 8,43 6,31 8,48
The humanizer in your stomach The creature you carry inside The golden scepter The naked sign of heaven The arm of man
Who takes God by the hand Mother of God Mother of God who makes God run Who made Jesus a function Cradle of the young creator, of the lucky ones In your womb, maker of being Inside of you, maker of soul (basket to cross the river) Litter Golden Genetrix of Heaven's Lineage Cradle of Humanity [of the Quechuas] (Runa)
II. Agriculture, Fertility 1.3 13.73 15.85 10.57 13.74 19.111 13.75 14.82 6.36 7.37
Count fruit tree Small desert fruit tree Closed happy muya God zizaq inkill wiwa Beautiful strength of people Rich food will come Red-red zumaq phallcha hayrampu Living source descending country
Tree of countless fruits Palm tree with tender fruits Closed garden of joy Pollinated by God, gardener Beautiful harvest of the people Great harvest of food Beautiful reddish Phallcha flower (cactus with reddish-brown flowers used for dyeing) Spring giving life Fertility dominance
third celestial 11.61 6.32 11.61 11.65 6.33 11.62 3.14
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Bright light Clear day darkening moon zuma No field yellow moon Moon illuminating the moon The zigzag of the right day Day eight
That shines, that illuminates Who transforms the light of day into night Beautiful moon Full moon, that does not diminish Who illuminates the clear moon Elevator of the true day Guide of the daylight
A nation surrounded 19,109 19,109 19,110 10.60 3.13 7.40
Cloud covered gold and silver coins select glossy cover
Pleiades silver deposit gold deposit granary (see picture) Who shines, Pleiades selects cloud
4. Spiritual 1.1 7.42 6.34 1.4 15.90 11.63 1.5 14.83 14.84 15.89 15.89 7.40
The joy of heaven pleasing God The joy of angels The hope of men My hope The hope of all The smile of the mighty The sweet mercy of the humble The bird of prey The bright mercy of the bird The flower of grace
Happiness from heaven Who brings joy to God Joy of angels Hope of peoples My hope Hope of all Pillar of the weak For the humble, gentle Who takes care of the poor Who models the color khuya that shines Who drinks grace
V. Institutional Church, Power, Mystery 11.66 9.50 16.96 7.38 7.37 7.39 13.76 13.78 19.110
The City of God The Red Gate The Gate of the Rich The Rich of the Rich The Rich of Sut'arpu's Ancient Birth The Destroyer of Khallki The Free Ship Tita Knows
City of God Crystalline door of its bastion Powerful door Mighty of the mighty Of the mighty Of the ages that gave rise to it That transforms volcanic ash into bricks Translucent ship That knows mysteries
Hanaq pacap kusikuynin's images point outside the text to evoke different sets of associations within different Spanish and native Andean interpretive traditions. Furthermore, imagery forms an internal configuration, especially around celestial terms, albeit one that is neither systematic nor open. I have sketched the major celestial images in Figure 8. In the top row, to the left of the dotted line, I include the major celestial epithets, connected to their usual referents (eg, killa for "moon"). Below each of the usual referents, I list conceptually related epithets, linked to the terms in the first row not so much by a shared referent as by a euphemism and
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Figure 8
Key celestial images.
paraphrase. I especially want to note that two of the three terms used for the Pleiades, qullqa and qatachillay, appear along with five conceptually related epithets, but a third Pleiadian term, unquy, does not appear. Unquy is still used today as a polite euphemism for pregnancy and menstruation, and its omission here is shocking in light of the emphasis on fecundity and the other mentions of the Pleiades. I believe the omission reflects a deep fear that Pérez Bocanegra shared with other priests of his time that the millennial Taki Unquy movement would repeat itself. In the 1560s, the Taki Unquy movement spread from what is now Ayacucho into the highlands of south-central Peru, preaching the revival of sacred sites and an imminent battle against Christianity.15 Cristóbal de Molina (1943: 80) described it as "one of a kind music." According to Molina, followers of Taki Unquy “. . . He preached the resurrection of the huacas (sacred places), saying that the huacas were in the air, thirsty and hungry because the Indians no longer sacrificed or poured chicha libations over them, and that they had come to many fields with (parasitic) worms , in order 15 Taki Unquy, from taki, "sing, sing" and unquy, "sick, menstruating, pregnant, Pleiades", is often mistranslated as "dance disease". There is a large body of literature on the movement based on a small set of sixteenth-century sources, including Molina 1943 and Albornoz (in Millones 1971). Major works on Taki Unquy include Millions Santa Gadea 1990; Duviols 1971: 107-122; Watchtel 1977: 179–183; Curatola 1977; Gallo and Doyle 1980; Stern 1982: chap. 3; Hernandez et al. 1987: chap. 4; MacCormack 1991: 181–187; and Adorno 1991: 239-243.
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A Surrounded Nation to plant them in the hearts of Spaniards, Spanish cattle and horses, and also in the hearts of Indians who remained in Christianity. . . .”16 Needless to say, Taki Unquy terrified the Spanish colonists, especially the clerics. Although Taki Unquy took place sixty years before Pérez Bocanegra wrote the Ritual formario, he included a questionnaire asking parishioners directly about the traces of the movement (1631: 145). In the more detailed study I am summarizing here, I suggest that the absence of the epithet Unquy was also significant because the hymn was precisely a Taki Unquy, a song of the Pleiades, drawing on an older tradition of singing to the Pleiades in the time of the interregnum between the late of the lunar year and the re-articulation of the lunar and solar calendars at the winter solstice.17 If so, then our understanding of the ancient Taki Unquy movement must be considerably modified. To summarize the first example, Hanaq pachap kusikuynin is ambiguous, allowing it to be understood by different interpretive communities within two very different interpretive horizons, who can maintain the comfortable fiction that they were involved in the same ritual enterprise. the structural and imaginative ambiguities inherent in the hymn that I have not been able to discuss here: the place of such ambiguity in Pérez Bocanegra's translation policy; the use of the hymn to co-opt indigenous women's ritual practices within the institutional church; and the potentially subversive nature of indigenous readings of this polyphonic text. My second example is a modern popular song recorded in the early 1960s. It is much more complex and introverted in its structural organization than Hanaq pachap kusikuynin. The song, which has no title, begins with an image of red phallcha (gentian) flowers offered at the feet of the baby Jesus; for convenience I will refer to it as the Phallcha song. With fourteen verses, with a crazy fifteenth slogan, it was recorded by filmmaker and folklorist John Cohen in the high Andean community of Q'eros (province of Paucartambo, department of Cuzco). Cohen, who at the time spoke neither Quechua nor Spanish, provides no context for the song other than that it was sung by two older Quechua speakers, a man and a woman. Although formed in an oral tradition, it is extraordinarily complex. sixteen "... they were preaching this resurrection of the huacas, saying that the huacas were already walking through the air, dry and hungry; because the Indians no longer sacrificed to them, nor spilled chicha; and that they had planted many fields of worms, to plant them in the hearts of the Spaniards, Castilian cattle and horses, and also in the hearts of the Indians who remained in Christianity. . . Inka ritual, see Zuidema (1982) and MacCormack (1991: 421), see MacCormack (1988) for a similar suggestion.Unquy was an annual ritual event.
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falca a b b b
1. 2. 3. 4.
Phallcha phallchalla/cha|kichallaman Phuña phuñacha/cha|kichallaman My mother/s/gave it to me|My mother/s/mother gave it to me|
Phallcha phallcha just for (your) little feet Phuña phuña just for (your) little feet My parents sing to me // My parents arrest me My parents sing to me // My parents arrest me
a 5. Human child/may cut b 6. Do not melt/stir b 7. Do not cut/stir
Runa's childish lock simply cannot be destroyed, it simply cannot be broken into pieces.
a 8. Pinnacles want/sun|with a lake b 9. I got the carin b 10. I got/challenged the melon
With my heart of hope and love [And] I break the chain to pieces And destroy the lock
a 11. b 12. b 13. b 14. coda
Only snow my Saqsaywamán Fast as crazy it snows for me My parents could see me My parents could see me Oh tape tape my lemon tape
Satisfy me/just|just snow Slide/laugh|slide fast My mom/she|slaps me My dad/she/slaps me Oh feel feel limunaray feel
a, b = melodic contours, followed by line number / = scannable caesura | = audible caesura in italics = suffixes inserted to rhythmically fill the italicized line = untranslated bold words = semantic couplets
The song is similar to a sonnet in its organization, consisting of fourteen lines divided into two quatrains (four-line lines) and two triplets (three-line lines), with a fifteenth motto. It differs from a classic sonnet in that it can be divided into two parts of equal length. The integrity of the poetic line is important in the classical sonnet, avoiding metrical patterns that allow the line to be divided into two equal segments (Friedrich 1986). In contrast, each line of Quechua music is divided equally. The visual of the song is quite simple, but not simplistic. The images associated with Christian religious practices in the first half of the song are opposed to the images associated with Andean religious practices in the second. The song is a cryptogram, in the sense that the content is systematically hidden by its form, which in turn distorts the perceptual cues that Quechua speakers would normally use to analyze the text. The rhythmic prominences (or accents) that mark the beginning and end of words appear in places where they would not otherwise be. 402
A besieged nation appears in common speech. There is also an inexplicable pause, an audible caesura (or break), in the middle of each line. Together, the offsets result in each line being split in two places, one by the listener's rhythmic expectations (scannable pause) and the other by an audible pause. Scannable breaks occur in the middle of the line. Each line has ten syllables and is divided into halves of five syllables each. The points where the listener's rhythmic expectations split the line (scannable break) are marked in the transcript with a slash “/”. Rhythmic changes occur within each half. For example, line 2, Phuña phuñacha/ cha|kichallaman, has a visible pause after phuñacha and an audible pause after the first syllable of chakichallaman. Audible pauses, marked by silence or laryngeal closure, occur after the sixth syllable, that is, exactly one syllable after scannable pauses, regardless of whether they interrupt a word. Audible pauses are marked in the transcript with a vertical bar “|”. Scannable cuts divide each line into a 5/5 pattern of two equal halves. Audible pauses divide each line into a 6/4 pattern, in which a six-syllable part is followed by a four-syllable part. This is schematized in figure 9, where a solid line marks the axis of symmetry created by the scannable caesura and the dotted line the displacement created by the audible caesura.
Fig. 9 Corner missing, axis of symmetry created by scansión.
Fig. 10 Song of Phallcha, bisector of the axes of symmetry.
Caption, Figs. 9 and 10 solid line = symmetry axis dotted line = antisymmetry points numbers on the vertical axis = syllables in each half line numbers on the horizontal axis = groupings of lines in each half of the song
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Bruce Mannheim The scrolls reflect another characteristic of music, namely, a complex, multilayered icon in which an inversion on one level opens up to an inversion on another. This includes inversions in the accented pattern; in the relationships between words; in the organization of verses in verses; in the organization of the verses of the song seen as a whole; in poetic images; and in the meanings of individual lines. The lines and verses marked in the transcription of the Phallcha song were determined by seven distinct criteria: (1) recurrent melodic phrases, (2) pauses and breaths between lines, (3) metrical regularity, (4) mastery of certain phonological processes, ( 5) parallelism (especially semantic coupling), (6) the length of image sequences, and (7) relationships between image sequences. Line boundaries are marked by strongly audible inhalations; these are more stylistic than physiological. They are of three types: relatively longer breaths mark the boundaries between verses; shorter breaths mark the beginning of the second couplet in the four-line verses; other line boundaries within verses are also short. In the first half of the song, a four-line verse is followed by a three-line verse; in the second half, the sequence is reversed. This creates a second axis of symmetry, around which the images are inverted.18 As with the first axis of symmetry, there is an element of antisymmetry introduced into the pattern, this time by the catchphrase (line 15). The second axis of symmetry is plotted against the first in Figure 10, where the arrows represent the inversion of line and verse structure. The second axis of symmetry organizes the plot of the images in the song. The opening image has phallcha, or red gentian (Gentiana scarlatina, Gentiana acaulis)19 flowers strewn at someone's feet, identified by Quechua speakers as the baby Jesus. For Quechua speakers, Phallcha flowers evoke fertility, and indeed the epithet “Beautiful reddish Phallcha flower” was used for the Virgin Mary in the oldest text. Falcha flowers are used in animal raising rituals that take place throughout southern Peru in February and late June. The same scene is repeated in the second verse with the white phuña flower (Culcitium cenescens; Herrera and Garmendia 1938: 88) replacing the phallcha. Phallcha and Phuña flowers are found at the highest altitudes near mountain peaks. The second couplet (lines 3 and 4) is ambiguous between two interpretations, "my parents sing to me" and "my parents arrest me". As absurd as the second interpretation may sound, it develops into the following trio (lines 5-7): “Of people, the child, his lock/it just cannot be broken/it just cannot 18 There are other inversions that occur through the second axis of symmetry. These are explained in detail in Mannheim (1995a). 19 See Herrera and Garmendia 1938: 55–56, 58.
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A nation besieged will be shattered.” Line 5 is also ambiguous: Runaq wawampa is the Quechua translation of “[the] Son of Man”, but it can be translated as “the son of the Quechua”. Crossing the axis of symmetry, the second triplet (lines 8-10) negates the first (lines 5-7). The lock of Runaq wawan, the Son of Man or the son of the Quechuas, which could not be broken, is now broken. , the chain breaks: “With my heart of hope and love/[And] I break the chain in pieces/And I break the lock”. The image changes abruptly in the final verse: "The snow must be falling right on my Saqsaywamán / fast, like crazy, snow". Saqsaywamán is a mountain adjacent to Cuzco, and the name can be used for local mountains elsewhere. The appearance of a specific mountain in Cuzco in a song recorded in Q'eros is intriguing, given that Q'eros is some forty kilometers from Cuzco; it is not one of the major sacred mountains that the people of Q'eros would invoke in ritual. In any case, the images with which the song closes invert the imagination of the opening. In the opening verse, an Andean ritual action, scattering phallcha flowers, was offered to a Christian holy being. In the final verse, it is replaced by a natural action received by an Andean mountain. Similarly, the final image, “My parents could see me/My parents could see me,” also echoes the opening verse (lines 3 and 4). The singers' parents locked them with the padlock of Runaq wawan, “the son of Man//the Son of Man”; it is now broken so that “my parents could see me”. Each scene in the first half of the song gives way to a counterpart in the second half; for example, the scene of an offering of phallcha and phuña flowers at the feet of the baby Jesus (lines 1 and 2) gives way to snow falling on an Andean mountain (lines 11 and 12). The inversions here are not symmetrical. On the contrary, just as the lock of the Son of Man in the first half of the song is destroyed in the second, so the Christian imagination of the first half gives way to the indigenous imagination in the second. The images are not simply juxtaposed or contrasted, but there is movement from the first set to the second, underlined by the meaningless asymmetrical line (15) with which the song ends. Image inversions are replicated layer after layer of inversions, including reversing the pattern of lines and verses; paired structure inversions; and metric feet inversions within each midline. These inversions occur over time and create asymmetrical and symmetrical pattern shapes. The images, and the relationships between the images, are assembled into a grid of symmetrical oppositions that are positioned in the developing pattern of asymmetry. Conversely, the formal patterns are diagrams of the inversions of the imaginary and the asymmetric pattern through which they unfold over time. The same interplay between symmetrical inversions and asymmetrical development is found in sound.
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Bruce Mannheim as pictured. The music's intricate formal patterns organize the images into a whole and reflect the plot of the images on several different levels. While it is easy to explain the lyrics of the song on paper, the effect of the rhythmic changes and pauses is to disorient the listener, disguising the content of the song. In large part, the disorientation is caused by familiarity with the normal rhythmic conventions of Southern Peruvian Quechua. This is quite unusual, even in song, because the words are being forced into a pattern of inversions as both form and meaning are obscured. The same formal devices that organize and replicate the message hide it from outside ears. How can a song of the complexity of the Phallcha song be composed and transmitted in an oral tradition without the aid of diagrams or other metapoetic discourses? Poet Gary Snyder (1983: 5) reflects on the ancient Chinese Book of Songs: "In making an ax handle/The pattern is not far off." In fact, the falacha song pattern is never far away in the southern highlands of Peru. The same pattern of nested bilateral symmetries and antisymmetries is found in textiles, especially coca clothing, ritual clothing, and women's shawls. The exquisitely developed figures in the song, then, are not idiosyncratic. It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of textiles in the daily lives of the peoples of the southern Andes, pre-conquest and modern. Before the Spanish conquest, textiles were a means of storing and exchanging wealth and an important element in statecraft symbolism (Murra 1962). For modern Andean farmers and herders, hand-woven fabrics are used for transporting and storing goods, for clothing (in more isolated communities), for women's shawls (lliklla) and men's ponchos, in coca cloths and bags. and as ritual fabrics (unkhuña). The style of shawl and poncho worn in a community is in part an index of social status, occasion, and changing fashions, but it also indicates the community of origin of the weaver, the wearer, or both, by features as obvious as the figures. woven into the fabric. fabric and pattern colors or features as subtle as the color of a thin band between two patterns (Cereceda 1978: 1018; Silverman-Proust 1985; Seibold 1992).20 Indeed, in the hymn I mentioned earlier, the Virgin Mary is represented like a weaver: Awasqaykim, yupay unkun Qamtam allwiqpaq akllarqan
Your weaving, Your revered unku. You have been chosen to weave the figures.
20 There is an abundance of specialized literature on Andean textiles, including those from modern southern Peru and Bolivia. See, among others, Gayton 1961; A. Rowe 1975, 1977, 1987; Meich 1985; Zorn 1987; Desrosiers 1988; Gisbert, Arze and Cajías 1992; and Gavilán Vega and Ulloa Torres 1992, in addition to the works cited in the body of this chapter.
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Fig. 11 Composite pattern of a lliklla (women's shawl). The double line is a zigzag seam, the main axis of symmetry. The only line dividing it is the implied axis around which the two halves rotate.
Like the song of the phallocha, the fabrics of the southern Andes are composed of bilaterally inverted figures nesting within each other. The degree of involution and specific numbers vary considerably from community to community, but the general pattern is stable over a wide area including southeastern Peru and Bolivia. Most textiles from the southern Andes are produced by complementary warp weaving, which is a process in which the yarns are combined in pairs so that they have a complementary distribution on the two surfaces of the fabric (Franquemont, Isbell, and Francomont 1992). The effect of a complementary warp is that the two surfaces are duplicated with the thread colors reversed, which is especially impressive for brocade figures, where the figure and background appear to reverse from one surface to the other. Textiles are compositionally structured through nested patterns of bilateral symmetry. As in Phallcha's song, all levels of patterns, from minor to major, are involved. For example, women's shawls are formed by two halves joined by a zig-zag stitch, creating a primary axis of symmetry (represented by a double line in Fig. 11). The two halves are woven in opposite directions (as shown by the arrows), with characteristic finishing weaves marking the end of each section. These identify the beginning and end of opposite corners, creating rotational symmetry around an implied second axis (shown as a single line).21 Each half of the shawl is divided along another axis of symmetry. There is a sequence of bands of various colors on a black (or undyed) background; the bands are arranged by reverse symmetry, so that the sequence of bands on either side of the axis is mirrored, although this partially obscures the parallelism between the axes of symmetry in phallcha song and textiles. In fact, in most communities in the Andes of southern Peru, shawls are worn folded parallel to the main axis of symmetry, with a rotation of 90 degrees from the diagram in Figure 11.
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Bruce Mannheim image of the other. The edges of halves introduce an antisymmetric element into the symmetrical pattern because of their function in the larger whole, i.e., as edges. The most important color ranges carry additional brocades (pallay, "gather"). Brocade bands are also woven in symmetrical pairs. Finally, the figures themselves are fields of symmetrical design, often including paired or quadruple images. Each of these domains of compositional symmetry is subject to the intrusion of an antisymmetric element. This asymmetry can be the result of a pattern's position in the larger whole, it can be deliberately introduced by the weaver, or it can show up in the way the fabric is used. For example, women's shawls are often worn folded, parallel to the main axis of symmetry, but never in the seam itself. The shawls or llikllas woven in Q'eros, the community from which the falacha song was recorded, follow this general pattern (see Silverman-Proust 1985), as does the lliklla I analyze here from the Lares Valley of Cuzco (Fig. 12 ). The weavers of Valle de Lares are especially resourceful in adopting brocade motifs from outside sources, for example from a child's school notebook or a visitor's fabrics (Seibold 1992). They are experts in brocades and show off their skills. in incredibly crowded fabrics where the background almost disappears in brocades, always within the limits of the symmetry patterns discussed above. The central brocade of the shawl is the execution of Thupa Amaru.22 Thupa Amaru was the leader of the massive rebellion of 1780 that swept through much of the highlands of Peru and Bolivia, where it continued for several years after his capture and death. . The rebels looted rural farms and workshops; many tried to expel the Spaniards from Peru. Upon his capture, Thupa Amaru was sentenced to death by dismemberment, which was the standard form of punishment for rebellion against the body politic. The shawl has eight bands of brocade, with seven full brocades and a partial eighth figure that bleeds into a conventional trim pattern. Three brocades are repeated throughout the fabric: Thupa Amaru being torn to pieces by four horses with Peruvian flags (Fig. 13), the horses being torn to pieces by four birds (Fig. 14), and (in a composite figure) Thupa Amaru being torn to pieces by the horses which in turn are drawn by four birds (Fig. 15). The execution motif is drilled in its simplest form into the central figure of seven; this creates an implicit axis of symmetry that divides the major axis of rotation or the seam. A. Rowe (1977: 86–87), Gisbert, Arze and Cajías (1992: 225, the Thupa Amaru motif on plates 248–251) also analyze 22 Textiles from the Valley of Lares, including the Thupa Amaru motif. , and Seibold (1992, the Thupa Amaru motif at 179–183 and plates at 180–182).
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FIG. 12 Tela, Vale de Lares, Cuzco.
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FIG. 13 Cloth detail: the dismemberment of Thupa Amaru.
Fig. 14 Detail of lliklla: the dismemberment of a Spanish horse by condors.
FIG. 15 Cloth detail: encapsulation of the dismemberment of the Pau for the condor motif.
In the middle of the fabric, the central motif shows a dismembered Thupa Amaru, with two Venus motifs on either side. Across the seam, a Spanish horse (sometimes sideways and forked) is drawn by four birds. Each brocade band repeats the motifs with slight variations, but without sequential order between them. The motif of Thupa Amaru dismembered by horses (see Fig. 13) appears six times, and the composite motif of Thupa Amaru dismembered by horses, intertwined with four birds (see Fig. 15) appears another six times. The remaining pictures show four birds butchering the horse (see Fig. 14). Seibold (1992: 179) interprets birds as yams or condors. The brocade figures seem to oppose birds to Spanish horses, but I am not aware of other symbolic representations in which the tinamous play a role similar to that attributed to horses, as synecdoches of the Spaniards, first as conquerors and later as local elites. Playing the birds as condors would better fit the theme of Thupa Amaru's performance. Thupa Amaru identified himself with the condor, both by an alternative name, Condorcanqui, and by a stylized condor he drew under his signature. These are historical details that are unlikely to be widely known, although they can be taught to school children in the community. But if the birds are condors, the figures in which they dismember a horse or pull the horses that in turn dismember Thupa Amaru would represent a kind of revenge for the dismemberment of Thupa Amaru, encompassing and subsuming the original act of his execution.
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A Nation Surrounded Of primary importance is that the same design principles are involved in the weaving composition as in the Phallcha song. In both, there is layer upon layer repetition of the same inversion figure, from the coarsest level of the pattern down to the smallest detail. Both the text of the song and the fabric mobilize an intricate interplay between symmetry and asymmetry. In music, symmetrical inversions become asymmetrical as the music unfolds in time. Audible pauses load the second half of each line against the first. In both music and fabric, later patterns are structurally denser than earlier patterns. There is a similar hierarchy of structural complexity in the brocade figures on the fabric, from the Thupa Amaru figure to the figure of the four birds slaying the horse and the composite figure, but these do not occur in an orderly sequence. The temporal dimension does not dominate the perception of figures on fabric in the same way as in song. Thus, antisymmetric elements are relatively less prominent in the fabric than in the edge. But in both, traditional patterns of bilateral investment and traditional images are mobilized in what are essentially political statements made outside the realm of discursively articulated ideologies. What is striking about the texts of songs and weaving, from different locations and even different centuries, is that they were produced, performed and appropriated in cross-cultural contexts. The hymn, Hanaq pachap kusikuynin, was composed in a European style to be sung in church, intentionally conceived to be appropriated by Andean natives through the evocation of their intertextual experiences. The phallcha song was sung for a visiting folklorist, who recorded it and eventually the anthology in the US, although it was presumably sung and heard on Q'eros on other occasions. The fabric was taken to the district center by its weaver who sold it to an American anthropologist. This could hardly have been a singular event because it appears several times in textile literature. I imagine that the sale of textiles is one of the main ways of publicizing Thupa Amaru's image, political content and all. The three are products of a transcultural border zone (in the sense of Rosaldo 1989: 163 and Behar 1993) and also comment on and constitute another type of border. Each established a rhetorical base, thus subverting the terms under which native Andeans found themselves encompassed by Spanish and Latin Peruvian religious and social forms, and the rhetorical forms themselves formulated implicit strategies of subversion. The 17th century hymn Hanaq pachap kusikuynin concealed its subversion. in the ambiguity of its form in which each interpretation represents only a part of the overall structure. The anthem's structure is therefore a compromise between two distinct sets of interpretive conventions.
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Bruce Mannheim tions and two distinct sets of interpretations. The onus of interpretation falls on the weak links between the images, which could be similarly understood through the matrices of Roman Catholic orthodoxy or older native Andean understandings of the relationship between female celestial bodies and fertility. This is classic "doublespeak" (Paulson 1990), in which conflicting voices are articulated and disguised through a single set of speech forms. In contrast, the Phallcha song used a single form - indeed, a single figure of speech, that of bilateral inversion - to embody the contradictions between Euro-Christian and native Andean religious imagery, representing the contradictions by repeating the figure of inversions in different ways. moments. image levels for the metric structure. As images develop, native Andean images come to include Euro-Christian images. Here, too, the political content is disguised because the inversions of formal structures make the text hide. Ironically, it is the most discursively open fabric in his politics. Like the fallopian song, it uses the repeated, nested figure of multiples of bilateral inversion to subsume the performance of Thupa Amaru, as Quechua and Peruvian national emblem, in the redemptive dismemberment of horses by condors. The subsumption of one image under another can only be established by the relative complexity of the figures (see Figs. 13-15) because images on fabric (unlike those in music) are not read linearly. The texts of the songs and the textile belong to three different historical moments and embody different cultural projects. The hymn was written during a period of consolidation of Spanish colonial institutions, in which the church confidently sought to re-evangelize the native population. The idea of writing a European-style polyphonic hymn for use by native Andean populations reflected this confidence. The ambiguity of the text was both a form of seduction - presenting Christianity in familiar guises - and a "return of the repressed" by obscuring the very images and practices it was intended to help eliminate, which was, in effect, "contraband". . . . parts of the hidden transcript on the public stage” (Scott 1990: 157). The Phallcha song was created in a community (and at a time) where the normative supremacy of the church was well established and where virtually all members of the community voluntarily identified themselves as Roman Catholic. At the same time, specifically native Andean religious practices coexist with church-prescribed liturgical practices in a kind of uncomfortable coexistence. On the one hand, the institutional church must turn a blind eye to the continuation of older practices such as land payments and offerings to mountain deities (cf. Marzal 1971; Regan 1971) and, on the other hand,
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One nation surrounded by another, such practices form the core of what Andean natives consider Catholicism. Not only is the location of boundaries contested, but their very existence is questioned, as reflected in the interpenetration of native Andean and Christian imagery and practices in music. The fabric, woven in the early 1980s, comes from a region of Cuzco with several decades of active involvement in land policy. During the 1970s, Thupa Amaru became a stylized emblem of the departmental agrarian confederation, while the military government appropriated it as a nationalist emblem around which a populist redefinition of Peru would take shape. Since the agrarian unions in Cuzco were organized for (and, locally, by) Quechua speakers, and because small landowning peasants were equated in public discourse at the time with Andean natives, the image of Thupa Amaru acquired ethnic connotations as that was used. in civic discourses at the state level. The most striking feature of these discourses is their heterogeneity. No single slogan runs the gamut of rhetorical strategies: no "double voice"; not “symbolic reversal”; not "ambivalence"; not "ambiguity"; not "hybridization"; not “syncretism”; not "opposition"; not "resistance". The recognition that all cultures are “creoles” – mixed inventions of “(re)collected pasts” (Clifford 1988: 14-15) – is not enough; we must be able to enter the zones of engagement across cultures from which new forms are generated, in order to understand the ways in which these forms articulate the terms of engagement as well as shape their own interpretive communities. It is important to note that these compromise zones rarely announce themselves, and taking them seriously means doing a kind of formal analysis that approaches the tacit patterns and evocations by which these forms dominate their creators, performers, and audiences. . This is, I think, what Alonso Carrió de la Vandera understood when he wrote in 1773 that "by means of songs and stories they preserve many idolatries and fantastic grandeurs of their ancestors, whence comes their hatred of the Spaniards" (Concolorcorvo 1973: 369 ). ).23
23". . . through songs and stories they preserve many idolatries and fantastic grandeurs of their ancestors, whence they hate the Spaniards . . . "
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Bruce Mannheim Acknowledgments The studies discussed in this chapter summarize more extensive work in progress (Mannheim 1995a, 1995b), including more formal accounts of analyzes and translations. The impetus for working on Heaven's Joy was a request from Barry Eigen, director of Amici Cantanti, for a phonological reconstruction and translation of part of the hymn. It was first performed on October 19, 1980 at Grace Church in New York. Jocelyne Guilbault and Tom Solomon transcribed the Phallcha song and discussed some of its formal properties with me. Rosa Chillca Huallpa analyzed both texts, especially some of the Celestial Joy images. Katharine Seibold discussed the broader context of weaving in the Lares Valley. Thanks to Rolena Adorno, Rudolf Arnheim, Tamar Breslauer, Steven Feld, Paul Friedrich, Paul Gelles, Dell Hymes, Diane Hughes, Oren Kosansky, John Leavitt, Sabine MacCormack, and Nash Mayfield for suggestions on the various stages of work represented here. , Julius Noriega, Steven Pierce, Katie Stewart, Terence S. Turner, Harriet Whitehead and R. Tom Zuidema, among others. Finally, I am very grateful to the late A. K. Ramanujan for a critique of my first, tentative attempt to integrate the material discussed here.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY ADORNO, ROLENA 1991 Images of Ladino Indians in early colonial Peru. In Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century (Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena Adorno, eds.): 232–270. University of California Press, Berkeley. ANDERSON, ARTHUR J. O., FRANCES BERDAN AND JAMES LOCKHART 1976 Beyond the Codices: The Nahua View of Colonial Mexico. University of California Press, Berkeley. ARGUEDAS, JOSÉ MARÍA 1968 I am not acculturated. In The Fox Above and The Fox Below. Losada, Buenos Aires. 1977 Formation of a national Native American culture. 21st century, Mexico. BEHAR, RUTH 1993 Translated Woman. Crossing the Border with the History of Esparanza. Beacon Press, Boston. BELTRÁN, CARLOS FELIPE 1891 Civilization of the Indian. Quechua anthology divided into two parts, profane and sacred. Progress, Oruro. BURKHART, LOUISE M. 1989 The Slippery Earth, Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth Century Mexico. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. CERECEDA, VÉRONICA 1978 Sémiologie de tissus andins, les “talegas” d’Isluga. Annales: Economies, Sociétés Civilizations 33 année (5–6): 1017–1035. CLIFFORD, JAMES 1988 The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. COCK CARRASCO, GUILLERMO AND M. E. DOYLE 1980 From the solar cult to the clandestinity of Inti Punchao. History and Culture 12: 50 to 73. CONCOLORCORVO (ALONSO CARRIO DE LA VANDERA?) 1973 The Guide for Blind Walkers [1773] (Emilio Carilla, ed.). Work, Barcelona. CUMMINS, THOMAS B. F. 1991 We Are the Other: Peruvian Portraits of Colonial kurakakuna. In Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century (Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena Adorno, eds.): 203–231. University of California, Berkeley. CURATOLA, MARCO 1977 Myth and millenarianism in the Andes: From taki onqoy to Inkarrí, The vision of an undefeated people. Allpanchis Phuturinqa 10: 65–92. DESROSIERS, SOPHIE 1988 Les technics de tissage ont-elles sens? A way of reading Andean fabrics. Techniques et Culture 12: 21–56. DUVIOLS, PIERRE 1971 The struggle against indigenous religions in colonial Peru. Institut Français d'Études Andines, Lima and Paris. 415
Bruce Mannheim FISH, STANLEY E. 1980 Is there a text in this class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. FLORES GALINDO, ALBERTO 1987 In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes. Agricultural Support Institute, Lima. FLORES OCHOA, JORGE A. 1977 Enqa, enqaychu, illa and khuya rumi, magical-religious aspects among shepherds. In Pastores de la Puna, Los Pastores de la Puna (Jorge A. Flores Ochoa, ed.): 211–2 Instituto de Estudos Peruanos, Lima. FRANQUEMONT, EDWARD, BILLIE JEAN ISBELL AND CHRISTINE FRANQUEMONT 1992 The Weaver's Eye: The Weaver's Eye. The practice of tissue culture. Diario Andino 10: 47–80. FRIEDRICH, PAUL 1986 The unheralded revolution in the sonnet: towards a generative model. In The language of parallax. University of Texas Press, Austin. GATES, HENRY LOUIS, Jr. 1988 The Meaningful Ape: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press, New York. GAVILÁN VEGA, VIVÍAN AND ULLOA TORRES, LILIANA 1992 Methodological proposals for the study of Andean textiles. Diario Andino 10: 107–134. GAYTON, A. H. 1961 The cultural significance of Peruvian textiles: production, function, aesthetics. Papers of the Kroeber Anthropological Society 25: 111–128. GISBERT, TERESA, SILVIA ARZE AND MARTHA CASES 1992 Textile art and the Andean world. 2nd ed.Editorial Argentina Tipografia, Buenos Aires. GONZÁLEZ HOLGUÍN, DIEGO SINCE 1952 Vocabulary of the general language of all Peru called Qquichua or Inca language Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima. GUHA, RANAJIT 1983 The prose of counterinsurgency. In Writings on South Asian History and Society (= Subaltern Studies 2): 1–42. Oxford University Press, Delhi. HANKS, WILLIAM F. 1986 Authenticity and ambivalence in the text: a Mayan colonial case. American Ethnologist 13: 721-744. HARVEY, PENELOPE 1987 Language and Power Relations: Consequences for a Language Policy. Earth Advance 29/30: 105–131. H ERNÁNDEZ , MAX , M OISÉS LEMLIJ , L UIS MILLONES , A LBERTO PENDOLA AND M ARIA ROSTWOROWSKI 1987 Between myth and history: psychoanalysis and the Andean past. Imago Psychoanalytic Editions, Lima. HERRERA Y GARMENDIA, FORTUNATO L. 1938 Curative and killer plants of the flora of Cuzco. University Magazine 75: 4–76.
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A nation under siege ITIER, CESAR 1992 Review of Bruce Mannheim, The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion. Andean Journal 10: 257–259. CARTOON, FRANCE E. 1982 Nahuatl literacy. In The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History (George A. Collier, Renato I. Rosaldo, and John D. Wirth, eds.): 395–417. Academic Press, New York. KARTTUNEN, FRANCES E. AND JAMES LOCKHART 1976 Nahuatl in the Middle Years: A Phenomenon of Language Contact in Colonial Period Texts. University of California Press, Berkeley. 1987 The Art of Nahuatl Speech: Bancroft's Dialogues. Publications of the UCLA Latin American Center, Los Angeles. KLOR DE ALVA, J. JORGE, H. B. NICHOLSON AND ELOISE QUIÑONES KEBER (EDS.) 1988 The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneering Ethnographer of 16th Century Aztec Mexico. Institute of Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York, Albany. LARA, JESÚS 1969 Quechua Literature: essays and anthology. 2nd ed. Youth, La Paz. LOCKHART, JAMES 1991 Nahuas and Spaniards: History and Philology of Post-Conquest Central Mexico. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. MACCORMACK, SABINE 1985 The Difficulties of Missionary Christianity in Early Colonial Peru. Hispano-American Historical Review 67: 443–466. 1988 Pachacuti: Miracles, Punishments, and Final Judgments: Visionary Past and Prophetic Future in Early Colonial Peru. American Historical Review 93: 960 to 1006. 1991 Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. MANDELSTAM, OSIP 1971 Slovo i culture [1921]. Translated as “Word and Culture” in Osip Mandelstam, Selected Essays (Sidney Monas, ed. and trans.): University of Texas Press, Austin. MANNHEIM, BRUCE 1991 The Language of the Incas since the European Invasion. University of Texas Press, Austin. 1992 The Inca Language in the Colonial World. Latin American Colonial Magazine 1: 77–108. 1995a Discursive form and presentation in language. Unpublished manuscript, University of Michigan. 1995b The Virgin and the Pleiades: Poetic and Religious Syncretism in Colonial Peru. Unpublished manuscript, University of Michigan. MARZAL, MANUEL MARÍA 1971 Can a Christian farmer offer a 'payment to the land'?” Earth Plant 3: 116–132. MEISCH, LYNN A. 1985 Symbolism in Tarabuco, Bolivia, Textiles. In Weaving and Symbolism in the Andes (Jeanette E. Sherbondy, ed.): 1–26. Indiana University, Bloomington.
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Bruce Mannheim MILLIONS SANTA GADEA, LUIS 1964 A nativist movement of the 16th century: the taki ongoy. Revista Peruana de Cultura 3: 134–40. 1971 Cristóbal de Albornoz's information: Documents for the study of Taki Onqoy. CIDOC Inquiries, n. 79. Intercultural Documentation Center, Cuernavaca. Reprinted in The Return of the Huacas: Studies and Documents on the Taki Onqoy, 16th Century, 1990. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Sociedade Peruana de Psicanálise, Lima. MOLINA, CRISTÓBAL DE (“EL CUZQUEÑO”) 1943 Fables and Rites of the Incas [1575]. In As Crônicas dos Molinas (Francisco A. Loayza, ed.). The Little Big Books of American History 4. Miranda, Lima. MORRIS, CRAIG 1985 From Principles of Economic Complementarity to the Organization and Administration of Tawantinsuyu. In Andean Ecology and Civilization (Shozo Masuda, Izumi Shimada, and Craig Morris, eds.): 477–490. University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo. MURRA, JOHN V. 1962 Cloth and its functions in the Inka state. American Anthropologist 64: 710 to 728. PAULSON, SUSAN 1990 Double Talk in the Andes: Ambiguous Speech as a Means of Surviving Contact. Journal of Folklore Research 27: 51–66. PÉREZ BOCANEGRA, JUAN DE 1631 Ritual form and institution of Cures to administer the Holy Sacraments to the natives of this Kingdom. . . by Bachelor Joan Pérez Bocanegra, priest, in the general Quechua language. Geronymo de Contreras, Lima. RAPPAPORT, JOANNE 1987 Mythical Images, Historical Thought and Printed Texts: Páez and the Written Word. Journal of Anthropological Research 43: 43–61. REGAN, JAIME 1971 Pastoral reflection on indigenous rites. Allpanchis Phuturinqa 3: 202 to 212. ROSALDO, RENATO 1989 Culture and truth: the reformulation of social analysis. Beacon, Boston. ROWE, ANN POLLARD 1975 Weaving processes in the Cuzco area, Peru. Textile Museum Journal 4: 30 to 45. 1977 Warp pattern fabrics from the Andes. The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C. ROWE, ANN POLLARD (ED.) 1987 Junius B. Bird Conference on Andean Textiles. The Textile Museum and Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C. ROWE, JOHN HOWLAND 1951 Colonial portraits of Inca nobles. In The Civilizations of Ancient America: Selected Papers from the 29th International Congress of Americanists (Sol Tax, ed.): 258–268. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 1955 The National Inca Movement of the 18th century. University Magazine 107: 17–47.
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A nation under siege SALOMON, FRANK 1982 Chronicles of the Impossible. In From Oral to Writing Expression: Andean Native Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period (Rolena Adorno, ed.): 9–39. Foreign and Comparative Studies Program, Syracuse University, Syracuse. SALOMON, FRANK AND GEORGE URIOSTE (TRAD. AND ED.) 1991 The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion. University of Texas Press, Austin. SCOTT, JAMES 1990 Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Occult Transcriptions. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. SEIBOLD, KATHARINE 1992 Textiles and Cosmology in Choquecancha, Peru. In Andean Cosmologies Through Time (Robert V. H. Dover, Katharine E. Seibold, and John H. McDowell, eds.): 166–201. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. SICHRA, INGE AND ADOLFO CÁCERES ROMERO 1990 Quechua poetry in Bolivia. Patino, Geneva. SILVERBLATT, IRENE 1987 Moon, Sun and Witches: Gender and Class Ideologies in Colonial Peru. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. SILVERMAN-PROUST, GAIL P. 1985 The motifs of Q'ero weavings: a description of the weavings. Journal of the Museum and Institute of Archeology 23: 281–308. SNYDER, GARY 1983 Ax handles. North Point Press, San Francisco. SOUKUP, JAROSLAV 1970 Vocabulary of common names of Peruvian flora. Salesiano College, Lima. STERN, STEVE J. 1982 The indigenous peoples of Peru and the challenge of the Spanish conquest. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. STEVENSON, ROBERT M. 1968 Music in Aztec and Inca territory. University of California Press, Berkeley. SZEMINSKI, ENE 1987 A kuraka, a god and a story: “Relation of antiquities of this kingdom of Pirú” by don Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salca Maygua. Institute of Anthropological Sciences, Jujuy. TAUSSIG, MICHAEL T. 1987 Shamanism, colonialism and the wild man: a study in terror and healing. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. THIRD COUNCIL OF LIMA 1584 Christian doctrine and catechism for the instruction of Indians and other peoples who must be taught in our holy faith. Antonio Ricardo Lima. THOMPSON, EDWARD P. 1963 The Making of the English Working Class. Pantheon, New York. WACHTEL, NATHAN 1977 The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru Through the Eyes of the Indians, 1530-1570 (Ben and Sian Reynolds, trans.). Barnes and Noble, New York.
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Bruce Mannheim WRIGHT, ERIC OLIN 1985 Classes. Verse, London. ZORN, ELAINE 1987 An analysis of the plots in the ritual bindings of shepherds. Andean Journal 5: 489–526. ZUIDEMA, R. TOM 1982 Catachillay: The Role of the Pleiades and the Southern Cross and a- and b-Centauri in the Inca Calendar. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 385: 203–229.
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Indigenous Writing as a Vehicle of Post-Conquest Continuity and Change in Mesoamerica FRANCES KARTTUNEN UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS–AUSTIN
you
AT THE END OF THIS VOLUME, I invite the reader to consider two well-known topics and one that is currently evolving. To begin with, I will refer to pre-Columbian writing in the long history of Mesoamerica. While this has been discussed in detail elsewhere, my comments here serve primarily as a reminder of what might be available to accomplish in post-contact literacy.1 Second, I will discuss the changes evident in documents produced over the course of the colonial period. . 2 Finally, I will examine twentieth-century Nahuatl literacy and parallel developments in the Maya Tzotzil language under the aegis of the Maya writers' cooperative Sna Jtz'ibajom.
PRE-COLOMBIAN PRECEDENTS
Before contact with Europeans in the 16th century, Mesoamericans developed, over time, an indigenous symbolic system with which they produced books with painted canvas called codices (Fig. 1). Very few codices survived the flames of conquest and subsequent evangelization. Diego de Landa, referring to the bonfire he made with the Mayan books, wrote: “We found a large number of these books in indigenous characters and, as they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil, we burned them all; 1 For a summary of types of pre-contact literature written and their relationship to early colonial indigenous productions, see León-Portilla 1991, 1992 and Lockhart 1992: chs. 8, 9. 2 James Lockhart and I have several publications, both jointly and individually, on this subject; in particular, see Karttunen and Lockhart 1976, Karttunen 1982 and Lockhart 1992.
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Fig. 1 A page from Tonalamatl Aubin, a pre-Columbian-style divination book of days and fates (Bibliothèque National de Paris, Manuscrit Mexicain, nos. 18–19).
mourning” (Pagden 1975: 124).3 The Maya were not the only ones to weep; Antonio de Ciudad Real, a scholar of the next generation of Franciscans after Landa, lamented in 1588, "thus the knowledge of many ancient things in that land which might have been known to them has been lost". His contemporary José de Acosta wrote that, “. . . Afterwards, not only the Indians felt bad, but also many Spaniards eager to know the secrets of that land.” From the point of view of half a century later, the ecclesiastical historian Bernardo de Lizana shared his sentiments: “They burned many historical books of ancient Yucatan that spoke of its beginnings and history, which would be of great value if they had been translated into our writing because today there would be something original” (Tozzer 1941: 78).4 Some of the books, it seems, had See discussion in Tozzer 1941: 77-78; Tozzer's translation is on p. 169. In Tozzer's 1941 critical edition of Landa's Relación de Yucatán, Tozzer discusses the issue of book burning at length, including his translations of Lizana et al. I direct the reader to this discussion on p. 78.3 4
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Fig. 2 page 38r of the Mendoza Codex. Note the pantli and tzontli symbols, represented by a banner and a feather-like object, respectively. A pantli represents a unit of twenty, while a tzontli represents a unit of four hundred. Also note the cotton boll that identifies the contents of a large bale and the glyphs for place names, with some phonetic elements such as teeth for the locative -tlan, forming a column on the left.
It had already been secretly translated into alphabetical writing and, in one way or another, it survived to later reach the hands of other ecclesiastics, but the loss for the Mayans and for humanity was irreparable. Central Mexico also had indigenous books that were given to llamas. In Nahuatl-speaking Texcoco, famous for its poetry and high rhetorical style, the royal archives went up in smoke and ashes of conquest (Alva Ixtlilxochitl 1975–77, 1:468). According to Juan Bautista de Pomar, in his Relación de Texcoco, the codices that were saved from the destruction of the royal archives of Texcoco were later burned by the same people who guarded them in fear that Bishop Zumárraga, who carried out an inquisition in 1530 , would consider its possession as evidence of idolatry. 153.
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Fig. 3 Mayan vase painting showing scribes seated in front of open codices bound in jaguar skin. Private collection. Photography © Justin Kerr.
Today, at most fifteen Mesoamerican codices remain in existence, and of these, there is debate as to whether any particular one is truly pre-Columbian. While some Europeans burned codices, others ordered new ones to be sent to Europe as curiosities or to retrieve information about how indigenous societies that had been disorganized by the conquest functioned. So we have documents like the Mendoza Codex, in part a retrospective tax register, full of indigenous place names and units of measurement (Fig. 2). From what remains painted on paper and leather, we can only speculate about the full range of uses that the various peoples of Mesoamerica put to their logosyllabic writing systems. To put this in perspective, imagine if the Library of Congress and the rest of our libraries, archives and repositories were destroyed and interstellar archaeologists tried to reconstruct our history and literary tradition from a telephone directory, a tide table, a history in comics and some Civil War monuments. In this scenario, the task would be almost impossible. In short, we know that there were books, but the contents of most remain a mystery. We know about Mesoamerican writing not so much from the surviving remains of fig bark and deer skin paper, but from the Mayan glyphs that were carved in stone and painted on cave walls and vases. On the canisters are representations of the lost codices, sometimes bound in jaguar skins, open before their seated readers, with glyphs leaping from their pages (Fig. 3). 424
Indigenous writing as a vehicle for post-conquest continuity and change ALPHABETICAL WRITING IN THE COLONIAL PERIOD
With evangelism came a new kind of record keeping. Immediately after the military conquest, the Franciscans established schools, especially in Mexico City and Merida, Yucatán. In these schools they taught indigenous children to write and read their languages in alphabetic characters, a skill in which their pupils proved equally capable of playing European music on European instruments. The graduates of these schools went on to the civilian career. The Mayan Gaspar Antonio Chi, who came to serve Diego de Landa, signed himself “General Interpreter of Yucatán”,6 and the Nahua Matheo Severino, whose “good hand” Bernardino de Sahagún valued. Much of the writing of the Florentine Codex (Sahagún 1970–82), he served as a notary in Xochimilco in the 1570s (Anderson and Dibble 1982: 55; Karttunen and Lockhart 1976: 93–97). Like their famous colleagues, other young people graduated from Franciscan schools as teachers of alphabetic writing. Acting as doctrinaires and teachers (assistants to the evangelists, “song and chapel teachers”), they brought the new form of literacy to indigenous communities. There they took on the duties of the traditional tlahcuiloh, the creator and interpreter of written records, or passed their skills on to other men who did. Within two or three decades, all Indian cities had officials, now usually referred to as scribes, who kept local records in the new type of script. It seems to me that at least two distinct indigenous literary traditions took shape in these formative years, one overt and one covert, and in both we can trace the threads of continuity and change. The Manifest Literary Tradition The manifest mode is easily observable in the scribal output. For both the Nahuatl-dominated central highlands and the Maya of Yucatan, a wealth of material of this type exists: wills, land transfers, lawsuits, petitions, judgments, and counterclaims.7 Though written by and for speakers of indigenous languages. he appointed himself notary, translator, interpreter general, lieutenant to the Spanish governor, interpreter to the reigning king, and Indian governor of Mani. 7 Examples of this writing can be seen in Cline and León-Portilla 1984; Anderson, Berdan and Lockhart 1976; and Karttunen and Lockhart 1976. Various publications by Ralph Roys (1931, 1939, 1967), France Scholes, and Alfred Tozzer, as well as Restall 1997, present Maya counterparts in the colonial notary tradition. Comparable documents from the Mixtec and Cakchiquel colonial period are also being discovered and studied; in particular, see Terraciano and Restall 1992, Terraciano and Sousa 1992, and Hill 1991.
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Frances Karttunen and intended primarily for future reference within the community, were public documents. On appeal, they could reach the courts and eventually become subject to scrutiny by the Spanish authorities. Some, like the letter the people of Huejotzingo sent to the King of Spain in 1560 about their fiscal situation, were intended from the outset for European consumption (Anderson, Berdan and Lockhart 1976: 176-191). For the most part, such documents carefully follow the format of the corresponding Spanish documents. They begin and end with all the common legal formulas, whether translated, left in Spanish, or composed in some combination of the two. Like Severino's, the handwriting is typically clear and legible, more so than many contemporary scribes writing in Spanish, and significantly less peppered with abbreviations. I see the annals and great indigenous histories of the colonial period as an offshoot of this notarial tradition. For example, the Chontal text describing the experiences of the Acalan Maya during the Spanish conquest certainly places it in the notarial tradition, opening thus: “I Pablo Paxbolon, public notary in this city of Tichel, here translate what is written in the Mexican language by Juan Bautista, a notary public, long deceased” (Scholes and Roys 1968: 383) (Fig. 4). Acalan's document was attached as evidence to a probanza, which was a request for monetary reward for aiding in the conquest. When their intent is less obvious, indigenous historians and analysts seem to have written with other readers in mind: discerning readers for whom clarity and readability are important. In addition, the moving eyewitness accounts of conquest events, eclipses, earthquakes, riots, and other catastrophes found in the works of the 16th-century analyst Juan Bautista, writing in Mexico City, from Tezozomoc and Chimalpahin, from the Tlaxcalan Juan Buenaventura de Zapata, and the anonymous analyst from Puebla – whose writings on a pirate attack on Veracruz and the strange impostor who later appeared in Puebla are included in Karttunen and Lockhart (1976)8 – could hardly be more timely to make an impact on present and present readers. futures. They have the characteristics of genuine literature, consciously produced. In the 16th century, Nahua and Maya notaries produced some interesting hybrid documents, combining indigenous and European rhetorical elements. Lockhart published a land transfer written in dialogue form (Lockhart 1991: 66–74); the letter to Felipe II from the city of 8 Tezozomoc's Nahuatl script apparently survives thanks to Chimalpahin's copy. See Lockhart (1992: ch. 9) for a treatment and examples of translations of these writers' work. See also Karttunen and Lockhart 1976: 112–116.
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Fig. 4 The opening page of the notarial text Acalan Chontal Maya (after Scholes and Roys 1968; © 1968 University of Oklahoma Press).
FIG. 5 Entries in a Tlaxcalan anal of the years 1639-1642. Note the combination of indigenous calendar symbols drawn with Arabic numerals and the names of the years written in alphabetical order, as in “4 Acaxihuitl” or “Year of the Three Reeds” (1639) (Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Colección de Antigüedades 872 , page 21v); . . . . 427
Frances Karttunen Huejotzingo is rich in parallels and metaphors. Despite the charge that a series of letters from Maya lords to the king in 1567 were fabricated by Franciscan supporters of Diego de Landa, serious scholars study them as examples of high Maya rhetoric (Hanks 1986). The indigenous pictorial elements of this type of writing persisted beyond the 16th century. Maps and house plans that accompany legal documents often contain hill glyphs, house glyphs, small black footprints on roads and trails, etc. Even in the early 18th century, calendar signs from the central region are still found in the Nahuatl annals of Puebla and Tlaxcala. Mexican calendar that follows the written dates of the European calendar (Fig. 5). However, in general terms, public documents show a progressive abandonment of illustration throughout the colonial period. In the first century of contact, professional writers often betrayed their difficulties with Spanish through hypercorrection, nonstandard spelling, and erroneous morphological analyses. bilingualism became evident. In the second half of the eighteenth century, indigenous writing was enjoying a new kind of maturity. Previous problems of language interference gave way to strategies that worked smoothly for borrowing and tracking certain constructions, with pictorial elements being discarded in favor of continuous text. Professional writers, masterfully exploiting Spanish as a resource, were producing documents of particular grace and power (Fig. 6). For Nahuatl, this cuecuepoquiliztli, or flowering, preceded a plunge into obscurity, for with Mexico's independence from Spain came the abolition of indigenous courts and the end of any use for records kept in indigenous languages. From the 19th century we have some publications by Nahuatl teachers10 but almost nothing written by Nahuatl speakers for other Nahuatl speakers. The situation was different for Mayan speakers in Yucatán. There, the Caste Wars in the mid-19th century gave Maya script a new role as a language of military communication and urgent negotiations. In the end, however, the public notary tradition also died for the Maya, and what survived is the other tradition of writing, the covert one. The Covert Literary Tradition The covert tradition may at first seem more evident in Mayan writing than in Nahuatl, but I will also point to some substantial examples from Nahuatl. For specific details, see Karttunen and Lockhart 1976, Karttunen 1982 and 1985. An example of this genre is Epitome or Easy Way to Learn the Nahuatl or Mexican Language, published in 1869 by Faustino Chimalpopocatl Galicia, who hoped to build a career for himself, as a Nahuatl personal tutor to Emperor Maximilian. 9
10
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FIG. 6 A page from an 18th-century declaration to a court case in Amecameca. Note the heading “Yn Formación” in which the Spanish word information has been reanalyzed as two words, the Nahuatl particle plus “formation” (Archivo General de la Nación, Subdivision de Tierras, vol. 1596, no. 7).
It seems to me that local lienzos preserved by the pueblos, especially in Oaxaca, with little or no annotations in alphabetic script other than redundant captions for indigenous symbols, also fit this category.11 The survival of pre-contact codices converted to alphabetic text is a constant attractive theme. In the introduction to his 1985 translation of the Popol Vuh, Dennis Tedlock claims that the "alphabetical Popol Vuh" was created by the Quiché lords as a replacement for a hieroglyphic book, giving the example of passages starting with "this is" followed by statements in time present 11
An excellent example and analysis is found in Parmenter 1993.429
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Fig. 7 On fol. 53v of Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, a woman breastfeeds five smallpox victims. Note the voice rolls indicating that she is talking to one patient and another is calling her.
Fig. 8 On fol. 39v of Book 10 of the Florentine Codex, two women stand over glyphs of water (used symbolically for the syllable [a]) and hold glyphs of water in their hands to indicate that they are the type of woman denoted by a word beginning with that syllable, namely, ahuiyanih, "harlots." 430
Indigenous writing as a vehicle of postconquest continuity and change to support his suggestion that extant text depicts scenes that were originally pictorial illustrations (Tedlock 1985: 30–31). Likewise, based on the use of deictics (“this”, “these”, “here”) and sequential markers (“then”, “next”, “next”), León-Portilla argues that Nahuatl text written alphabetically known as the Leyenda de los soles follows a codex, and even identifies a possible common source for this text and another (León-Portilla 1992: 328-329).12 León-Portilla also calls our attention to Sahagún's use of material images in the collection of information from elderly informants in Tepepulco in the late 1550s. The investigation and response were carried out with the aid of paintings, and then his Nahua assistants, trained in alphabetic writing at the College of Santa Cruz, wrote explanations to accompany the pictures (Anderson and Dibble 1982: 12). Illustrations replete with indigenous conventions, such as speech scrolls (Fig. 7) and phonetic glyphs (Fig. 8), remain an essential part of the final product of Sahagún's long project, a fact more evident in the facsimile than in the edition. Dibble. where the illustrations are gathered, separated from the text. Likewise, from the Yucatán there are documented accounts from the colonial period of traditional Maya texts surviving well into the 16th century and of friars being able to read and interpret the ancient books after Landa sent so many to his bonfire. In the late 17th century, the Franciscan Andrés de Avendaño claimed to have dissuaded the Itza Maya of Tayasal from further resistance to Spanish rule, citing his own prophecies and counting the katun cycles with them (Avendaño and Loyola 1987:38–41). . A few years earlier, Pedro Sánchez de Aguilar reported having confiscated a notebook containing an indigenous version of the creation story of a Mayan teacher and complained that such Mayan myths and stories were being written and read at community meetings (Sánchez de Aguilar 1987). : 115). Maya tradition was combined with appropriate material from Spanish sources in the Maya books of Chilam Balam, which were syncretic works passed from hand to hand, updated from time to time, and read aloud to others. work in your hands. The Maya learned from Diego de Landa how harsh the punishment was for mixing their ancient knowledge with newly acquired material from Europeans. Despite the risks, however, such texts remained in circulation as the core of Mayan secret literature. Written in a characteristic block script, it is not as clean or as sophisticated in appearance as notarial texts (Fig. 9). The secret texts were secretly copied, handed over and read, not intended for European eyes. 12 John Bierhorst (1992: 7) follows the same line of reasoning about the Legend of the Suns.
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FIG. 9 A page from the Book of Songs of Dzitbalche, an undated manuscript collection of colonial Maya poems. Barrera Vasquez Collection.
Today, more than two dozen surviving texts are identified as books by Chilam Balam, one with an annotation that it was borrowed in 1838. In the mid-19th century, events in Yucatán gave rise to a new religious cult. which took as part of its canon the proclamations of its leader Juan de la Cruz. The same process of communal readings was applied to them, and a copy of the proclamations is annotated as far back as 1957 (Bricker 1981: 207). Along with (and sometimes as part of) the Chilam Balam manuscripts, another genre of writing had its beginnings among the Maya in the intellectually expansive 18th century. The European medical tradition was translated into Maya and intertwined with indigenous healing practice.13 It is interesting to see what the Maya thought European medicine had to offer. They were interested in new ways of dealing with universal human problems such as difficult births, and they were also looking for European treatments for introduced diseases. On the other hand, they sensibly concluded that there was nothing to be learned from Europeans about insect bites and snake bites. European herbs and wines figure significantly in Maya medical texts, but the Maya had their own ingredients to neutralize irritants and distractions, malodorous smoke and poor-tasting potions figured prominently in their practice. Running parallel to the Mayan medical tradition are the healing practices of the Nahuas of central Mexico contained in the “Encantamentos” (“enchantments”) of the 17th century.
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A synopsis of much of this material can be found in Roys 1931.
Indigenous writing as a vehicle for postconquest continuity and change Texts extracted by the inquisitor Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón from his reluctant Nahuatl-speaking prisoners in Morelos and Guerrero. Until he wrote descriptions of their practices and composed the chants that accompanied their treatments, it may have remained an oral tradition; there are no surviving medical texts written by Nahuatl speakers comparable to the Maya. Furthermore, practitioners were men and women, and we have no evidence that indigenous women were literate during the colonial period. But in Ruiz de Alarcón's treatises, we see that the Nahuas also adopted the European practice of cupping, introduced European herbs into their pharmacology, and developed treatments for introduced diseases such as malaria.14 I see Techialoyan's texts, community screens, primordial titles, and local histories (overlapping rather than separate categories) as part of the secret literary tradition. As Stephanie Wood points out, many were produced in the 17th century and are so clearly not what they are intended to be that when communities tried to present them as evidence in legal proceedings, they were simply rejected. An example would be the nearly identical twin Maya texts, the Chicxulub and Yaxkukul chronicles, which exist only as 18th-century "copies" of eyewitness accounts of the conquest of Yucatán. When the Yaxkukul document was offered as evidence in 1793 in support of a claim to nobleman status, the court found it inauthentic, and judging by vocabulary and spelling practice, I am inclined to agree (Karttunen 1985: 53-54, 104). Similar, I am sure, was the fate of the document that the Nahua people of Santiago Sula presented in court at least twice in the eighteenth century (Lockhart 1991: 39-64). In it, the people of Sula sought to defend their community against a nearby farm, citing, among other things, how in pre-contact times their lord had managed to prevent the Mexicas from occupying their lands, transforming himself into a fearsome feathered serpent that stretched along the land, along the border of their territory Stephanie Wood points out that, as the indigenous population was pressured by a growing European population, there was a growing need for documentation of indigenous land rights and a market for false titles developed. But these documents are not in the public notary tradition. They are popular rather than professional documents, confusing and grossly illustrated. In fact, they are very similar to the Maya Chilam Balam 14 See Andrews and Hassig 1987: 134–139, 157–208. On p.84 Ruiz de Alarcón mentions a medical text written by a sacristan “who barely knew how to write”, and on p. 91 relates how one of his assistants tricked a beekeeper into dictating a spell to help him locate hives of wild bees.
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Texts by Frances Karttunen. Why would communities invest in documents that would not be presented in court? As Wood and Lockhart argue, these documents served an internal function in their communities: to preserve and sometimes invent historical history in support of corporate identity, local political factions, and status claims. I believe that the filing of such documents with the court was more or less incidental; they were a response to external pressure on communities to produce something they didn't have. My criterion for the "covert" and "overt" categories is simply whether the literature - primarily written, but also, in the case of part of the medical tradition, oral - was intended exclusively for use within indigenous communities, or at least potentially, for the scrutiny of outsiders. In the case of legal documents, the outsiders would be judges of the higher courts of appeal or even the Spanish ruler. As for genuine histories/annals, apparently a genre inherited from pre-contact times, the outsiders would be future generations of readers to whom events should be passed on as the writer intended them to be remembered.15 Stories constructed from subsequent popular documents not serve to convey history, but to reinvent it. While historically inauthentic, they are also creative acts of the imagination, an enterprise of weaving what was remembered from the remote past with what was needed or desired in current circumstances.16 It would be a mistake to associate overt professional tradition with change and innovation. with continuity. Both traditions contain strands of continuity and change. The notarial tradition had its roots in the pre-contact profession of community record keeping, but it proved to be a good mirror for reflecting the evolution of the phenomenon of contact between Spanish languages (and the social changes underlying them) over the course of the period. colonial. Hermetic folklore mostly hid from European scrutiny while filling in the cracks in its own fabric with the warp and woof of invention. Not the fossils. 15 Marcus (1992) strongly argues that dates and statements on pre-contact Mesoamerican monuments and documents should not be accepted at face value due to the intertwining of myth and propaganda. The earthquakes, eclipses, pirate attacks, and succession of bishops and viceroys that make up the annals of the colonial period can easily be compared with independent sources. 16 This kind of self-conscious work on “being an Indian” has continued to the present and can be seen in the costumes and performances of Aztec cronies and in the activities of linguistic and cultural purists, as described by Rudolph Van Zantwijk for Milpa Alta in the 1950s and by Jane and Kenneth Hill for the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the Puebla-Tlaxcala area in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, Judith Friedlander (1975) devotes a chapter to the efforts of indigenous/nationalist organizations to re-establish some form of indigenous religion and elevate Nahuatl to national language status. See Van Zantwijk (1960) on “Teomexica”, Hill and Hill (1986: 122–140 and passim) on Purism, and Friedlander (1975: ch. 7).
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Indigenous writing as a vehicle for post-conquest continuity and change were sensitive barometers of their time; and both deserve the serious attention they have been receiving lately, especially from Nahuatl scholars. The time should have passed not to go back, when only the continuity of Nahuatl and Mayan “classics” were considered worthy of attention and the vital signs of healthy health. change over the last four and a half centuries has been confused with degeneracy. NEW ROLES, NEW PLAYERS
During the colonial period, writing was done by men. It was young men that the Franciscans first trained in alphabetic writing, and it was to other men that they transmitted the skill. Some colonial-era women may have put their own signatures on legal documents, but no documents written and signed by women have yet surfaced. For the pre-contact period, only the most tantalizing scraps of evidence exist for women as codice painters. For example, on a Mayan vase, a woman holds what may be a small, closed codex in her lap. Her free hand is raised and shaped to hold a brush, but there is none there (Fig. 10). This contrasts with the many Maya depictions of men and male deities examining and painting in open codices. If we were to read the paintings literally, monkeys (Fig. 11) and a rabbit (Fig. 12) would have had more access to the codices than the women. Moving forward in time, two documents from central Mexico from the mid-16th century, illustrated according to pre-contact indigenous conventions and both apparently derived from a common source, show us a woman engaged in some form of painting. If it weren't for the gloss on one of the two documents, one would have thought he was knitting. Following an earlier scene with a series of dates ending in 1406, the scene in question is virtually identical in both the Códice Ríos and the Códice Telleriano-Remensis (Fig. 13).17 The woman stands behind the Huitzilihuitl ruler and is linked to him by a line decorated with what could be a flower or a cotton seed. (Compare this to the cotton boll on the cotton bale depicted on sheet 38r of the Mendoza Codex [see Fig. 2]). She kneels before a rectangle that has a brown border and is divided into sections inside which are red and black. Drawings In the palm of the left hand, pointing downwards (not as one would expect a pen or brush to be held, certainly not as the brush is held in Mayan depictions of codex painting) and touching the rectangular object, there is something resembling a fabric. tape, but one of the sources tells us otherwise. 17 The scenes are found in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (1899: 30); the Kingsborough edition of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (1931: 3 [part 3]); and the Ehrle edition of the Codex Ríos (1900: pl. 75).
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Fig. 10 Mayan vase painting of a woman holding what may be a small closed codex in her lap. Her hand is ready to hold a brush, but it's empty. Princeton University Museum of Art. Photography © Justin Kerr.
Fig. 11 Mayan vase with scribe monkey showing closed and tied codex. Private collection. Photography © Justin Kerr.
Fig. 12 Mayan vase with a scribe rabbit painting a codex. Princeton University Museum of Art. Photography © Justin Kerr. 436
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FIG. 13 A concubine of Huitzilihuitl, subtitled do pintor, no Codex Telleriano-Remensis.
Fig. 14 On fol. 70r of the Mendoza Codex, a man labeled the painter paints the same drawing in a framed rectangle as the painter of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis.
In the Codex Telleriano-Remensis there are notes in Spanish. Below the woman is the painter's label ("the F-painter"). In the text that accompanies the entire scene, it is stated that Huitzilihuitl married Acamapichtli's granddaughter, who could not have children, so he had two children with his concubine who called herself the painter. ”). So it seems that despite the way she's holding the object with her left hand, the intention is that she's painting something. It could be a tissue or a codex. The colors red and black suggest that she is involved in meaningful painting/writing rather than decoration, as in Nahuatl the word par tlilli tlapalli ("black [ink], red [ink]") is a metaphor for embodied wisdom. in the codices. In the Codex Mendoza (also from the mid-16th century), in a section on occupations, a man labeled a painter is seated working on a similar framed rectangular object (Fig. 14). He holds the brush in his right hand, but in the same way.
Frances Karttunen walked on the palm of the painter's hand. The resemblance between the seemingly generic painter and the specific individual, the painter, Huitzilihuitl's concubine, is striking. It's easy to convince yourself that women and men are engaged in the same activity. It is unclear whether the painting they are involved in is a codex painting. This, as far as I know, is all the evidence there is of women participating in the writing of Mesoamerican indigenous literature until the twilight of the Porfiriato, but the revolutionary 20th century begins with a publication by women in Nahuatl. The Proceedings of the XVIII International Congress of Americanists, which met in London in 1912, contain an article on the folklore of Milpa Alta by Isabel Ramírez Castañeda (1913). Along with the description of the history and social organization of Milpa Alta, it presents seven short texts in Nahuatl about healing and the presentation of the first fruits of the harvest. In 1912, Ramírez and a man identified only as “Lucio” also provided texts in Nahuatl to Frans Boas, who finally published them in the 1920s (Boas and Haeberlin 1926), after the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution subsided. By identifying the two as “informants” (ie, Isabel Ramírez C. and Lucio were native speakers of the language of the texts), Boas acknowledges that they wrote the texts themselves and helped to translate them. “Lucio” may have been Lucio Tapia, who was director of the Concepción Arenal School in Milpa Alta, where Luz Jiménez, destined to be an important figure in 20th-century Nahuatl literature, began studying in 1910 (Fig. 15). Perhaps Ramírez was one of the "good teachers" that Dona Luz
Fig. 15 Doña Luz Jiménez as a young woman in the 1920s. Photo courtesy of Jean Charlot Estate. 438
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Fig. 16 “The Flower Girl”, painting by Diego Rivera, from 1926, of Doña Luz Jiménez breastfeeding her daughter Concha. Photograph courtesy of the Honolulu Academy of Arts. Gift from Mr. and Mrs. Philip E. Spaulding, 1932.
vote on two chapters of his memoirs of the pre-revolutionary era in Milpa Alta (Horcasitas 1968: chs. 4, 11). In 1916, federal troops occupied the Concepción Arenal School. Zapata's revolutionary forces bombed the building, killing everyone in it; and in retaliation, federal troops massacred every man and boy in the city. For the next four years, the surviving women and children lived as refugees in Mexico City, and when the remnants of her family finally returned to Milpa Alta, Luz remained in the city to work as a model in art schools and dynamic city studies. from Mexico. post-revolutionary art scene (Fig. 16). In 1930, she worked as one of Benjamin Lee Whorf's three informants for Milpa Alta Nahuatl. In the 1930s, President Lázaro Cárdenas brought hope for government-sponsored improvements to rural indigenous communities, and in 1940 an “Aztec Congress” was held in Milpa Alta to clarify what these communities' concerns, needs and desires were. Along with requests for public lighting, road improvements, protection of women from exploitative chiefs, etc., congress called for bilingual education and approved a spelling for Nahuatl that was slightly different from the traditional Spanish-origin spelling of the evangelists. ' schools. As a result of the congress, a literacy program was targeted especially at Nahuatl-speaking communities in the extreme south of the Federal District and in the state of Morelos. A feature of the program was a Nahuatl-language newspaper, for which Doña Luz and others, men and women, wrote contributions. it was the last in a series of short-lived newspapers in the Nahuatl language.
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Fig. 17 In this drawing by Jean Charlot, Doña Luz holds Concha while she tells stories to her fellow Milapalteños (according to Brenner [1992], illustrated by Jean Charlot).
The driving force behind this activity was Robert Barlow, a Berkeley-trained anthropologist for whom Doña Luz worked as an informant. After Barlow's death in the early 1950s, she continued to work as an informant and teacher of Nahuatl under Fernando Horcasitas. After Doña Luz's untimely death in a traffic accident, Horcasitas edited and published two important collections of her work: her autobiography and a collection of forty-four short stories that she dictated in Nahuatl and Spanish to Horcasitas and his assistants (Horcasitas 1968 ; Horcasitas and O. de Ford 1979). This more than doubled the corpus of his published work, as before his death, in addition to his newspaper articles, twenty-five of his stories had been published in English translation as a children's book (Brenner 1992) (Fig. 17). and Barlow had published one of his stories in the magazine Estudios de cultura náhuatl (ECN) (Barlow 1960). The interest in folklore that developed in Mexico before the 1910 Revolution gained new momentum in the 1920s, as Mexico looked to its indigenous roots for inspiration and values. Boas and his many colleagues were always ready to collect what in Nahuatl are called zazanilli (animal fables, moral tales and the like), and Doña Luz was able to supply them endlessly. But she did more than recount the common stock of zazanilli. Without access to the writings of analysts from the colonial period, she was able to reinvent her reporting style. Your
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Indigenous Writing as a Vehicle of Continuity and Post-Conquest Change The descriptions of the shooting war that broke out in Milpa Alta shortly after the school celebrated its centenary and a flood that washed away the pilgrims from Chalma in 1935 are as vivid as anything in his writings. colonial period. his predecessors wrote (Horcasitas 1968: part 2; Horcasitas and O. de Ford 1979: ch. 24). Newspapers in Nahuatl as a medium of writing expired with Barlow and were not revived, but some other avenues of publication were opened for Yancuic tlahtolli "the new word", i.e. contemporary Nahuatl literature. In particular, Miguel León-Portilla has presented essays, short stories and poetry in Nahuatl in editions of ECN (see León-Portilla 1986, 1989, 1990), and CIESAS (a center for advanced studies in social anthropology located in Tlalpan) has published a kind of a historical novel containing an all-indigenous frontier revolt by Carlos López Avila (López Avila 1982). Like Doña Luz Jiménez, many of today's writers hail from Milpa Alta and surrounding towns. It is disconcerting that the 20th century, which opened with a publication by Isabel Ramírez Castañeda and in which Doña Luz captured her work, ends with a Nahuatl literature practiced, as in colonial times, mainly by men. In his three-part essay on yancuic tlahtolli, Miguel León Portilla mentions thirty-five writers by name: all are men except Doña Luz and two are female poets. ECN's seven issues through 1992 include the work of sixteen Nahua writers, all men. These numbers indicate that the academic environment of the Nahuatl Culture Seminar, which has promoted the publication of contemporary Nahuatl writing, has not been a favorable space for indigenous women. Dona Luz herself, whose school was bombed before she could finish her studies, would not have been able to enroll at the National University. I am also struck by the apparent social isolation in which Nahua writers work and have worked. This was painfully true for Dona Luz, and it is a story even older than this century. José Guadalupe Rojas, who published a newspaper El Xocoyotzin (“The Littlest Child”) to promote Nahuatl education and literacy in Tepoztlán in the late 19th century, was later described as “a man who was never well understood” (cited in Redfield [1930: 206] from another short-lived newspaper, El Tepozteco). Another Rojas de Tepoztlán, Mariano Jacobo Rojas, left his city and settled at the National University. On the contrary, social commitment is the raison d'être of the cooperative of Mayan writers located in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico. Reacting to the sense of injustice by anthropologists collecting and reporting information ostensibly for their own benefit rather than that of the communities, the Tzotzil Maya initiated a project to preserve their own oral history and traditional knowledge. From this, an itinerant puppet theater, publications, a literacy school
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Frances Karttunen program and much more. Alongside traditional Tzotzil stories for Tzotzil schoolchildren, puppetry now raises contemporary concerns such as deforestation and habitat destruction. Lately, the acting troupe has mixed adult entertainment with themes of demographic pressure and family planning, alcoholism, domestic violence and issues of power inequality within the family and community. More recently, it has provided a forum at home and abroad for discussing the conditions that led to the Chiapas uprising in January 1994. When Sna Jtz'ibajom, the Writer's House, was founded in 1982, all of its founding members were men. . . The productions of these writers, commendably, centered on the preservation of folklore and the transmission of tradition to subsequent generations (Fig. 18). Two women then got together and began to write scathing comments about domestic life (Fig. 19). The men's aim, with their appeal to the wisdom of the ancients and their nostalgia for the Maya past, has been conservative and didactic, while the women's insistence on the need for dynamic social change (Laughlin 1991; Breslin 1992). CONCLUSION
Doña Luz Jiménez was the second, greatest, and so far last known female writer in the post-contact history of Nahuatl prose. If we could travel to the 21st century. Will there be women inhabiting the Writer's House and, if so, will there be men as well? Having survived conquest and evangelization and taken on vital new forms, can indigenous literature withstand the challenges of the late twentieth century? Will there still be an audience for theater in indigenous languages? Who will be the consumers and who will support the company: local communities, Mexican state and/or federal governments, international organizations or an association of all of them? Will the ubiquitous international pop culture absorbed by satellite dishes in communities around the world render local writing and theatre, indigenous or otherwise, irrelevant? Or will the Nahuas and Mayans succeed in Mesoamericanizing even pop culture?
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Fig. 18 A 1991 performance by male Tzotzil artists from Sna Jtz'ibajom, the House of the Writer. Photo © Macduff Everton.
Fig. 19 Petu'Kruz, one of the playwrights at Casa del Escritor, participating in a show. Photo © Macduff Everton.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY ALVA IXTLLXOCHITL, FERNANDO DE 1975–77 Historical Works (Edmundo O'Gorman, ed.). 2 vol. National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. ANDERSON, ARTHUR J. O., FRANCES BERDAN AND JAMES LOCKHART 1976 Beyond the Codices: The Nahua View of Colonial Mexico. University of California Press, Berkeley. ANDERSON, ARTHUR J.O. AND CHARLES E. DIBBLE 1982 Florentine Codex. Introductory Volume: Introductions, Prologues and Interpolations of Sahagún, General Bibliography, General Indexes. School of American Research, Santa Fe, N.M., and University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. ANDREWS, J. RICHARD AND ROSS HASSIG (EDS.) 1987 Treatise on the Pagan Superstitions Living Today Among the Native Indians of this New Spain, 1629. By Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. AVENDAÑO Y LOYOLA, ANDRÉS DE 1987 Report of two trips to Petén made for the conversion of the pagans Ytzaex and Cehaches (Charles B. Bowditch and Guillermo Rivera, trans.; Frank E. Comparato, ed.). Labyrinths, Culver City, California BARLOW, ROBERT H. 1960 A story about the day of the dead. Nahuatl Cultural Studies 2: 77–82. BERDAN, FRANCES F., ANAWALT AND PATRICIA RIEFF (EDS.) 1992 The Codex Mendoza. 4 vol. University of California Press, Berkeley. BIERHORST, JOHN 1992 History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex Chimalpopoca. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. BOAS, FRANS AND HERMAN K. HAEBERLIN 1926 Ten Folk Tales in Modern Nahuatl. American Folklore Magazine 37: 345–370. BRENNER, ANITA 1992 The Boy Who Knew Everything and Other Popular Mexican Stories Told by Anita Brenner. Shoe String Press, North Haven, Conn. BRESLIN, PATRICK 1992 Coping with change, the Maya discover that play is what matters. Smithsonian Magazine 23(5): 78–87. BRICKER, VICTORIA 1981 The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Mayan Myth and Ritual. University of Texas Press, Austin. CHIMALPOPOCATL GALICIA, FAUSTINO 1869 Epitome or easy way to learn the Nahuatl or Mexican language. Widow of Murguía and Sons, Mexico. CLINE, S. L. E MIGUEL LEÓN-PORTILLA (EDS.) 1984 The Testaments of Culhuacán. Publications of the UCLA Latin American Center, Los Angeles. CODEX MENDOZA: see Berdan and Anawalt 1992. 444
Indigenous writing as a vehicle for postconquest continuity and change CODEX TELLERIANO-REMENSIS 1899 Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Manuscrit Mexicain (E. T. Hamy, ed.). Reproduit en Photochromographie, Paris. 1931 Antiquities of Mexico: Comprehensive Facsimiles of Ancient Mexican Hieroglyphs and Paintings, 1. Lord Kingsborough ed. Robert Havell and Colnaghi, son and company, London. CODEX RÍOS 1900 Il Manoscitto Messicano Vaticano 3738 Detto Il Codice Rios. Ehrle ed. (color fax). Vatican Library, Rome. FRIEDLANDER, JUDITH 1975 Being an Indian in Hueyapan: A Study of Forced Identity in Contemporary Mexico. St. Martin's Press, New York. GARIBAY, ANGEL MARÍA 1964 Nahuatl poetry. 3 vol. National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. HANKS, WILLIAM 1986 Authenticity and ambivalence in the text: a Mayan colonial case. American Ethnologist 13(4): 721-742. HILL, JANE H. AND KENNETH C. HILL 1986 Speaking Mexican: Syncretic Language Dynamics in Central Mexico. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. HILL, ROBERT M. 1991 The Social Uses of Writing Among the Colonial Cakchiquel Maya: Nativism, Resistance, and Innovation. In Columbian Consequences, Volume 3: Spanish Frontiers in the Pan-American Perspective (David Hurst Thomas, ed.): 283–299. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. HORCASITAS, FERNANDO (ED.) 1968 From Porfirio Díaz to Zapata: Nahuatl memory of Milpa Alta. National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. [English edition. 1972: Life and Death in Milpa Alta: A Nahuatl Chronicle by Díaz and Zapata. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.] HORCASITAS, FERNANDO AND SARAH O. DE FORD 1979 The Nahuatl Stories of Doña Luz Jiménez. National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. KARTTUNEN, FRANCES 1982 Nahuatl Literature. In The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History (George Collier, Renato Rosaldo, and John D. Wirth, eds.): 395–417. Academic Press, New York. 1985 Nahuatl and Maya come into contact with Spanish. Texas Linguistic Forum 26. University of Texas Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science Center, Austin. KARTTUNEN, FRANCES AND JAMES LOCKHART 1976 Nahuatl in the Intermediate Years: Phenomena of Language Contact in Colonial Period Texts. University of California Press, Berkeley. LAUGHLIN, MIRIAM 1991 The Drama of Mayan Women. In MS 2(1): 88–89. LEÓN-PORTILLA, MIGUEL 1986 Yancuic tlahtolli: New word. An anthology of contemporary Nahuatl literature. Nahuatl Cultural Studies 18: 123–169.
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Yankee translation: New word. An Anthology of Contemporary Nahuatl Literature (Part Two). Nahuatl Culture Studies 19: 361–405. Yankee translation: New word. An Anthology of Contemporary Nahuatl Literature (Part Three). Nahuatl Culture Studies 20: 311–369. Do we really translate the Mesoamerican “ancient word”? In On the Translation of Native American Literatures (Brian Swann, ed.): 313–338. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. The Aztec image of self and society: an introduction to Nahua culture. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
LOCKHART, JAMES 1991 Nahuas and Spaniards: History and Philology of Post-Conquest Central Mexico. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. 1992 The Nahua after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, 16th to 18th Centuries. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. LOPEZ AVILA, CARLOS 1982 Malacachtepec Momoxco: Legendary History of Alta Milpa. Cuadernos de la Casa Chata, Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology, Tlalpan. MARCUS, JOYCE 1992 Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. MEXIHKATL ITONALAMA: THE MEXICAN NEWSPAPER 1950 1–34, May 12 to December 29. Azcapotzalco, D. F. PAGDEN, ANTHONY 1975 The Maya: Diego de Landa's Account of Yucatan Affairs. J. Philip O'Hara, Inc., Chicago. PARMENTER, ROSS 1993 The Lienzo of Tulancingo, Oaxaca: Introductory study of a ninth painted leaf from the Coixtlahuaca valley. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 83, part 7. The American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. RAMIREZ CASTAÑEDA, ISABEL 1913 The Folklore of Alta Milpa, D.F., Mexico. At the International Congress of Americanists. Proceedings of the Eighteenth Session, London, 1912. Part 1: 352–361. Harrison and Sons, London. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1930 Tepoztlán, a Mexican city. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. RESTALL, MATTHEW B. 1997 The Mayan World: Yucatecan Culture and Society, 1550–1850. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. ROYS, RALPH L. 1931 The ethnobotany of the Maya. Middle American Research Institute Publication 2. Tulane University, New Orleans, LA. 1939 The Ebtun Bonds. The Carnegie Institution, Washington, DC. 1967 The Book of Chilam Balam by Chumayel. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
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SAHAGUN, BERNARDINO DE 1970–82 The Florentine Codex: A General History of the Things of New Spain (Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, eds. and trans.). 13 vols. American Research School, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Florentine Codex 1979. 3 vol. Facsimile edition. Government of Mexico, Mexico City. SÁNCHEZ DE AGUILAR, PEDRO 1987 Report against idolaters from the Bishopric of Yucatán. In El Alma Encantada: Anales del Museo Nacional de México (Fernando Benítez, ed.): 15–22. Facsimile of 1892 ed. Economic Culture Fund, Mexico. SCHOLES, FRANCE V. AND RALPH L. ROYS 1968 The Chontal Maya Indians of Acalan-Tixchel. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. TEDLOCK, DENNIS 1985 Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings. Simon and Schuster, New York. TERRACIANO, KEVIN AND MATTHEW RESTALL 1992 Indigenous writing and literacy in colonial Mexico. In Indigenous Writing in the Spanish Indies. UCLA Historical Review Special Issue 12: 7–28. TERRACIANO, KEVIN AND LISA SOUSA 1992 The “Original Conquest” of Oaxaca: Mixtec and Nahua Myths and History. In Indigenous Writing in the Spanish Indies. UCLA Historical Review Special Issue 12: 29–90. TOZZER, ALFRED (ED.) 1941 Landa's List of Yucatan Things. Peabody Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (available as a reprint from Kraus, 1975). VAN ZANTWIJK, R. A. M. 1960 The natives of Alta Milpa, heirs of the Aztecs. Royal Institute of the Tropics, Amsterdam.
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Native Traditions in the Post-Conquest World: Reviews
Native Traditions in the Post-Conquest World: Reviews TOM CUMMINS UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
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AND INTELLECTUALS, ASSUME A PROPERTY TO HISTORY In ways that are often detached and analytical, are asked in certain liminal moments to give voice to what happened in the past so that we as a community can recognize that past as we move into history . the future. A fifth centenary, the fiftieth anniversary of an event, is a moment to remember because it is different from all the others and, although we don't quite know how or why, it is, among other things, halfway to the end of things, I think that, although we cannot light new fires or experience a pachacuti, it is our sense of time and Judeo-Christian eschatology that moves the western world away from its cold empiricism to mark this mythical passage. To a large extent, however, the global branding of this passage through fairs, stagings, commemorations, parades, exhibitions, speeches, lectures, books, reviews, etc., acts to frame the Quincentennial in an affirmative narrative of history that constructs it as part of the inevitable logic of Western progress and continuity, so that the past, as a series of events, moves further and further away from the present.1 This middle ground, however, also allows us, if we choose, to look back, as Benjamin's "angel of history", to see the last five hundred years not as a series of discrete and distant events, but as a single catastrophe that falls at our feet, and to wish "to stay, to wake the dead and restore what happened" . past. they were crushed”, but pushed by the storm of progress (1969: 257-258). So, in 1992, when institutions and people stopped to reflect on the Quincentennial, the Dumbarton Oaks conference and the articles published here certainly focus on that original date, 1492, and all the other catastrophic dates that followed, 1519 to Mexico, 1532 to Peru. 1 To be fair, there have been attempts to make this position problematic, as Boone points out in his introduction, but the official position represented by the 1492 National Gallery of Art exhibition did not, as Homi Bhabha (1992) points out.
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The story of Tom Cummins took many forms depending on what and how we wished to see and remember it.2 For pre-Columbian studies in Dumbarton Oaks, 1492 is a catastrophe because it marks the beginning of the violent end of his subject, just as it can be said that 1453 marks, even more definitively, the end of the subject of Byzantine studies. The colonial trade that served for the conquest of America developed in the Mediterranean in the shadow of this military victory. In the same way, perhaps, for pre-Columbian scholars, the end was also a beginning in the sense that the objects, images and writings produced after the conquest are one of the main sources of information for the interpretation of things pre-Columbian. In fact, many images and documents, such as Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (1982) by Sahagún and Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1980) by Guaman Poma, were intentionally produced to explain the past, most often through a European audience. Whatever the intentions of the authors and artists of these documents, it seems certain to the modern scholar that they did not intend to produce some kind of historical truth that transcended the colonial context in which their texts and images operated. The types of historical information and the forms of their presentation were fully invested with a variety of contemporary colonial needs (Klor de Alva 1988; Adorno 1986). The record of pre-Hispanic history, culture and religion, therefore, did not necessarily constitute a distinct category in the colonial period, as we project it for ourselves today. For example, Garcilaso de la Vega in his Comentarios reales writes a history of Inca royalty that continues through the conquest until March 1604, when he ends his narrative awaiting information from Valladolid about the outcome of the Inca descendants' petition to the king. . That is, we sometimes forget that these stories were still alive and connected to the present by the people whose ancestors were the actors in these stories and, for many Native Americans, still are. This is why Spanish and native authors have always written with a sense of the past that is still present in contemporary colonial culture. Most importantly, this presence of the past has not only influenced the practice of alphabetic writing to which we have access and therefore privilege, but it has been present in the economic, social and cultural practices of everyday life. 2 All societies remember selectively (Connerton 1989), but we are both privileged and challenged by the possibilities of the form our memories (history) can take and the consequences of our choice (Benjamin 1969: 253–264; Hohendahl 1992: 103–104 ). 3 “The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 ends the history of Byzantine art. . .” (Boyd 1979: 18).
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Native Traditions in the Post-Conquest World: Comments I do not mean to suggest that there was or is a single static view of the pre-Columbian past that had been frozen at the time of the Conquest or that traditional practices continued into the colonial period and beyond. they have not been modified or reconfigured in relation to the contingencies of prevailing economic and political policies. As discussed in many of the articles in this volume, history and traditions were and are categories of Indian social life that continue to the present, not because they are neutral essences of "Indianism", but because they are categories acted upon and developed by natives in the context of colonial power. In this sense, tradition and history are dynamic elements.4 It is on this relationship of the pre-Hispanic past with the colonial present that Elizabeth Boone and I decided, when organizing the Dumbarton Oaks conference in 1992, to focus on the continuation of Mexican and colonial tradition. Peruvian traditions, whether social, visual or linguistic, precisely because dates and events, however catastrophic they may be, do not completely close the past for anyone who cares. Therefore, the articles in this volume focus on the Native American cultural forms that were and still are part of the formation of pre-Columbian America, but not in the teleological sense of the movement towards Creole independence as described by Jacques Lafaye. (1976). . Instead, they focus on symbolic traditions that ensured that identity among indigenous peoples was rooted, at least in part, in practices originating in pre-Hispanic culture, as well as in a political memory that articulated their differences with Europeans as result of one origin and a different origin. the adaptation of some of its differences to European standards as a result of an imposed shared history. Indigenous texts such as the Popol Vuh, the Chilam Balam, and the Huarochirí Manuscript synthesize these sometimes highly conflicting elements into a single coherent narrative that is the result of indigenous representational practices in both epistemology and language. Our focus on Indigenous practices and traditions as having the capacity to articulate something meaningful not only within the Native community but also to a Western audience runs counter to much of the recent scholarship on the Americas that emphasizes its "otherness." to look. from the European he read texts from the 16th and 17th centuries on the Americas (Todorov 1984; Greenblatt 1991; de Certeau 1986: 67-79 and 1988: 209-243). The “postmodern” intellectual attention that has emphasized otherness as the defining epistemological category for understanding the history of the Americas focuses on European experiences and their representation (Taussig 1993). 4 For two excellent studies of the dynamic use of tradition and history as social and political categories of native power, see Rappaport (1990) and Urton (1990).
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Tom Cummins brings together the discourses of European objectification of the “native other”, thus breaking the explanatory homogeneity that colonial texts were thought to possess.5 This attention, however, also shifted to an almost narcissistic view of the Americas, which on the performance of European literary and (to a lesser extent) pictorial traditions as the defining and controlling cultural forms through which the New World can be discussed. Interaction between Europeans and natives is treated as a kind of cultural tourism in which the only subject of interest is the Western experience of the Americas brought back to Europe to be consumed alphabetically for self-definition.6 The Americas are empty of any possible selves in development, either for the Indians or for the Europeans who stay there and/or have children. America is always a text of the "encounter" mediated by European representation and therefore always inaccessible in any other way. However, the theme of the works here also includes texts mediated by European representation. Indeed, the centrality of the text as a locus for analyzing the continuity, change and contestation of tradition and power in the postconquest world is one of the common problems that arise from the various articles in this volume.7 But the text here does not address the rarefied traditions of European literature in which the New World is configured according to an imaginary that admits no voice other than the European one. I believe that there is no article that does not use the word "text", but here it is understood that text is a polyvalent term in which European epistemological control is not absolute, be it the notion of written document as the main hermeneutic tool used by Lockhart, Karttunen, Murra and Wood; or use of the written document in connection with speech, performance, practice, or picture texts as used by Salomon, Boone, and others. Moreover, in one way or another, it is this broad notion of text that brings these works together in relation to the place, status, transformation, and/or role of pre-Hispanic traditions in the colonial world. 5 For example, the uncritical compilation of quotations from widely differing texts as sources of equal value to be counted and reconciled by the methodology of the scholar's discipline, in order to present a monolithic account of a unified pre-Hispanic past, be it Aztec, Mayan , Inka, or other cities, seems like a less viable project theoretically than twenty years ago. 6 This tactic is quite explicit in Greenblatt (1991), who begins and ends his study in the form of a moral tourist. 7 Here, it can be understood that “tradition” and “nation” are disputed terms in the Spanish-American colonial establishment in the sense that both are produced and shaped by European projection, and are also real elements of native identity. This Spanish projection of a “nation” and a “tradition” is similar to what Said (1978) defines as “Orientalism” shaped by post-Enlightenment Western rational thought, and one has to ask whether the roots of this paradigm do not predate the Enlightenment .
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Indigenous Traditions in the Post-Conquest World: Commentary It is, however, the word "discourse," used in the plural by Burkhart in the sense of Foucault's expanded meaning of the term (Foucault 1972: 234-235), that allows one to see that power and the contested power to define and categorize within the post-conquest world lies behind the control of all these texts, be they spoken, written, performed and/or visual. These “texts” or symbolic forms of native culture, therefore, are not just “the fragments of a shipwreck in the depths” nor is their study a “science of the end of things” (Kubler 1961: 14). as the strong cultural presence of the native place and identity within the colonial world. What this means is that there can be no essentialist or master text that governs the study of colonial Latin America as a universal explanatory model. Pre-Columbian traditions, manifested in colonial (con)texts, are transported as forms of affirmation, negotiation and negation in the dispute for the power to define and categorize. There are, therefore, subtle and not-so-subtle differences not just between the types of traditions held in very different native cultures within different viceroyalties (and we have concentrated on just two), but between classes within a cultural area. The rites and traditions recorded in the seventeenth century by Ruiz de Alarcón (1982) in Mexico or Arriaga (1920) in Peru were practiced by a class of Indians very different from the class with which Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl identified himself when recording his version. of Mexican traditions and history (Adorno 1989). But it is not just ethnicity and class difference, but also gender difference, as Irene Silverblatt comments, that determines the forms of tradition and the way in which they are lived and recorded. Frances Karttunen only briefly, but most revealingly, touches on this important question not just as a question of the past, but also as important for contemporary Maya literary praxis when she points out that it is men who are interested in a nostalgic Maya past. and women who insist on the need for dynamic social change. The shared presence of the power of the past is possible, however, and it is most immediate in language because, as Mannheim points out, language is an immediate ethnic identifier through which traditions are maintained, and therefore language permits a certain degree of of power over the definition of self and community within a colonial situation. Yet at the same time, as Lockhart points out, language is a locus of convergence that operates in a process of thoughtless change among native speakers as read through the mundane documents of the notary's register. It is implicit in this analysis that the language of the colonial power, in this case Spanish, penetrates the native language in connection with the destabilization of native social and political institutions. That is, as indigenous peoples came to accept the mundane written document as the natural forum for discussion
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In Tom Cummins' course on the laws that increasingly intrusively structured and controlled their lives, one finds an increasing use of Spanish in Nahuatl as a "natural" or unconscious act. In this sense, the Nahuatl titles discussed by Wood become an internal representation of the native self in alphabetical form, even when seen by colonial Spanish and contemporary scholars as inauthentic. Thus, the transformation takes place not only within the language, but also in the form of the inscription, and it is an even more radical transformation because, as Karttunen points out, in the eighteenth century alphabetic text almost completely replaced pictorial imagery, as he argues. Boone, which had an important place in Mexico in the 16th and 17th centuries. However, these substitutions or changes do not necessarily mean a loss, but rather an ability to strategically employ various new and/or old symbolic forms on behalf of the native and/or the community. . Karttunen begins by raising the question of speaker identity in relation to overt and covert literacy traditions. Karttunen points out that indigenous annals and great histories are a branch of the native notarial tradition, as is the Nueva corónica discussed by MacCormack. Citing the Chontal text describing the experiences of the Alcalán Maya, Karttunen notes that it survived as supporting evidence for a probanza, requesting a monetary reward for aiding the conquest. It can be said that it is between these two poles of unconscious and conscious interaction between cultures that tradition emerges in a colonial society or, as Karttunen suggests, in the differences between hidden and open texts. Documents like notarial records were supposed to control Spanish eyes, and secret literature like the Chilam Balam was kept secret. These are the two poles between which other texts that are not so clear operate. Karttunen, of course, is referring to texts written like Lockhart and Wood, but as Burkhart, Mannheim, Boone and Salomon suggest, there are equally important texts that are performative and visual, kinetic and/or auratic in form. The colonial process of replacement and replacement, then, is never complete, as we are now witnessing in the post-colonial and post-imperial traumas of Eastern Europe and Africa.8 This is possible because people do not easily forget their first 'language'. As Burkhart argues, the native language can impede profound changes in native epistemology. She argues that Christian concepts explained in Nahuatl terms have consistently and persuasively failed to challenge native conceptions and have excluded any deeply felt spiritual crisis. This gives rise to what she calls “nahua Christianity”, in which the theme of “postcolonial” applied to the native peoples of the Americas is extremely problematic in relation to the nature of the revolutionary wars of the 18th and 19th centuries. from North and South America; see Klor de Alva (1992).
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Indigenous Traditions in the Post-Conquest World: Commentary The emmonialism brought to your church may be considered an indigenous tradition in the post-conquest world. It is similar not in form, perhaps, but in content to Andean Christianity, as it appears in Guaman Poma's text, as discussed in MacCormack's article. Here, Andean time and the agricultural calendar are infused with the Christian distinction between human agency and divine acts. Even so, they could only be described with the help of a theological terminology rooted in Inca and Andean religious experience. That is, the fundamental categories that constitute religious belief, the area of tradition most fiercely contested by Spaniards, maintain certain traditional tenets even when used to articulate Christian ideology. Slightly differently, Gillespie argues that the European notion of history, used to record the Mexican past, was subject to traditional Mexican explanatory structures in relation to the political changes introduced by Spaniards to affect the present. Here, in the narrative of Mexican history, the native voice is not registered as that of a passive informant, subject to the discursive power of a colonial process that controls everything; on the contrary, the voice creates its own history according to its own epistemological categories, even when inscribed in the European milieu of alphabetic writing. Even if the tradition is maintained, it can backfire. As Burkhart points out, native Christian devotional practices were, by definition, separate and different, and such differentiation maintained the ethnic boundary so essential to the colonial enterprise upon which colonial Christian discourses constructed an image of native spirituality and, by extension, social and political. inferiority. I dare say that the Protestant evangelical attempts practiced today in the native Christian communities of Latin America still betray a similar logic. In this sense, the spiritual conquest engenders a cultural conversion that creates a hierarchy of difference that legitimizes the exercise of economic and political power by the State over the indigenous subject. Furthermore, as Silverblatt argues, it is the traditions that constitute the social relations between natives that allow the State to begin to appropriate the native subject's own body in order to redefine it. Traditions of family structure and social practice are first classified, judged, and finally patrolled by the Church. Communities are now made up of individuals, each of whom becomes an author who explains himself to Europeans through the act of confession. It is therefore no coincidence that one of the first modern representations of Andean kinship and descent (a diagram that would make any modern anthropologist proud for its elegance) that escapes the biblical metaphor of the genealogical tree of Jesus is an engraving found in Pérez Bocanegra's Ritual form and institution of Cures, to administer to the natives of this Kingdom. . . printed in Lima in 1631 (Fig. 1). The archaic Inka dress of the
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Fig. 1 Engraving in Ritual form by Juan Pérez Bocanegra, and institution of Cures, to administer to the natives of this Kingdom. . . , Lima, 1631.
The numbers denote the indigenous character of the subject and belie the fact that the book intends to help priests penetrate the social fabric of native life to confess, discipline and punish it.9 However much traditions can be used as an indicator for calculating change or understood as a colonial construction in the discursive power of Spanish control, it is essential to remember that traditions allowed for unaccounted for developments that could never be fully controlled by Spaniards. guaman 9
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See Serge Gruzinski (1986) for a discussion of similar problems in Mexico.
Indigenous Traditions in the Post-Conquest World: Commentary Poma de Ayala is perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of the Spanish losing control of speech. He uses Spanish methods of inscription and confession to present himself as an author in order to create the image of the world that the Spaniards had turned upside down. His case is unique, at least in the Andes, and the biggest thorn in the side of the Spaniards was again in the area of religion because religious conversion was the only pretext with which the conquest could be legitimized. The clergy's own repeated confessions of failure in the form of trials and extirpations testify to the tenacity of traditional beliefs. Rostworowski therefore places performative texts and conversion writings within the context of native belief systems in which natives did not participate in the Spanish "winner takes all" theory. In both Peru and Mexico, the native concern was not with definitive replacement, but rather with nesting in which traditional native religious practices still had a place. As Rostworowski points out, this system of hierarchy even shapes the relationship and form of Christian images within Christian worship itself. In addition, it allowed the participation of African-Americans, a theme only briefly mentioned in the symposium. Religion is, of course, the "natural" area on which to focus a discussion of tradition because it was an immediate source of controversy in which certain traditional forms of expressly symbolic language, whether visual or oral, were openly debated. Furthermore, it is the Spanish preoccupation with clandestine religious behavior, whose subtext is fear of native violence and the legitimization of their own violent acts against natives, that creates the image of the continuity of tradition as something occult and fundamentally religious. The practice of native traditions as part of the “discourse” of colonial Mexico and Peru certainly goes beyond the defining parameters of religion and archival documentation. As Karttunen and Salomon so eloquently remind us, they too reach beyond the political confines of time and are just as important today. Karttunen and Salomon consciously realize that the issues discussed here do not end with the political transition from the colonial to the republican period, but simply as the changing dynamics of contact between native traditions and Europeans that continues to the present. None of these articles attempt to read the ethnographic evidence in the colonial record as a means of explaining it. Rather, they recognize that the historical processes that began with the conquest of the Americas continue as native peoples use various mechanisms to maintain historical memory. With a focus on the written text, Karttunen suggests that histories/annals, apparently a retained pre-conquest genre, needed to convey events so that history would not be lost. Interestingly, this is exactly the reason given by the author of the Huarochirí Manuscript (1991: 41-42), although, as Salomon demonstrates,
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Tom Cummins This historical memory in the Andes is only artificially preserved in extirpation literature or legal documents. It is the annual performative textual reading of the landscape that has kept history alive, while the Huarochirí Manuscript, unique in its Quechua alphabetic record of the local Andean religion, rested silently in Spain. If, as Lockhart suggests, there was a wider written tradition in Quechua, we must ask why so few Quechua notary records survive and why none, to my knowledge, come from a native community. The careful preservation of Inca and colonial fabrics in sacred bundles clearly constitutes the kind of secret text Karttunen is referring to, but in the Andes it takes a radically different form. And here, as Salomón suggests, is the legacy of the strength of tradition in which writing never took place in the Andes as it did in Mexico. Thus, one can imagine what Andean history and Quechua studies would be like if Francisco de Ávila's papers, which included not only the Huarochirí Manuscript, but also Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua's Relación de antiquias del reyno del Perú, were on board. of the Atocha .or another Spanish ship that was shipwrecked or shipwrecked in the always dangerous Atlantic. They would have suffered a very different fate than the silver chins discussed in my article. Our control over the Andes through these European-style documents is very tenuous at best and is based on chance rather than the systematic production of all kinds of written and pictorial documents in New Spain that ensured that a portion of them survived until today. Mexico's tradition of a pre-Hispanic book form and pictographic inscription ensured that the native voice and language not only found a place in the mundane documents of the colonial bureaucracy crucial to Lockhart and Wood's detailed historical studies, but also colonized the alphabet technology. also. This never happened in the Andes or anywhere else in the Americas where there wasn't already a tradition of the book. But even in Mexico, as elsewhere, it is visual images, physical objects, and oral literature that are the central forms of pre-Hispanic traditions because nearly everyone in native colonial communities was illiterate (literacy in cities was not much higher than ). ). ). However, the visual world of pre-Columbian representation as a form of tradition that continued into the colonial period is most often conceived around the defining categories of Spanish vision that focused on idolatry. Imagery, in this sense, is often considered the most fragile form of tradition due to its connotation of idolatry and therefore its subjection to Christian iconoclasm (Kubler 1961). Certainly idols were smashed and temples demolished, but, as Boone
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Native Traditions in the Post-Conquest World: Commentaries note that we should begin to see both pre-Columbian imagery and sixteenth-century colonial native imagery production not only as described by Spaniards, who are within religious discourse, but also as forms and images that continued to be used and produced for needs outside that narrow boundary. Thus, in both Boone's articles and mine, the focus is on visual images and objects that have few overt idolatrous connotations. They are traditional images and objects around which a political, ritual and/or social discourse is generated or carried out. These Mexican and Andean objects and images predate alphabetic writing and are carriers of tradition in the colonial period. Alphabetic writing became the form of power discourse in the colonial period and beyond, but the aura and power of images and objects retain their traditional place in many native communities. I conclude by noting two notable absences across the articles in this volume. The first is the absence of comparative use of works in colonial studies generated in subaltern studies of India (Guha-Thakurta 1992), orientalist studies of the Middle East (Said 1978, 1993a) or colonial studies of Africa. (Fanon 1967). This does not mean that colonialism and imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries are the same as those that occurred in America in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, as Klor de Alva (1992) and Said (1993b: 62) have said. argument. In other words, there are still many avenues for pre-Columbian and colonial Latin American scholars to consider when approaching his work. The articles in this volume, however, are intended, among other things, to suggest that there is a growing variety of approaches and goals in Latin American colonial studies that I believe will make it an increasingly controversial area of study (see , for more information). ). example, Rabasa, Sanjinés and Carr 1996). Questioning the underlying assumptions, as has happened in other geographic and temporal areas of colonial studies, I think is best. For too long, scholars who worked in the colonial fields of Latin America, especially in terms of native social and cultural concerns, existed on the periphery, basically unchallenged and without questioning their methods and goals, because the people they studied were marginalized in progress. of history. But as the power to shape and control discourse changes, it is quite possible that one of the legacies of Colombia's Quincentennial is the beginning of the realization that colonialism is not marginal to any of us, that we all have a lot to do with it. . what to learn. each other yet. And this points to the second absence in the articles I will conclude with: the absence of a contemporary native view of colonialism and tradition. For a Mayan woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize means that the history unleashed in 1492 is still present among all of us, natives and non-natives alike. 459
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BIBLIOGRAPHY ADORNO, ROLENA 1986 The Guaman Poma, Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. University of Texas Press, Austin. 1989 Weapons, Letters and the Native Mexican Historian. In 1492 –1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing (René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini, eds.). Special Edition Hispanic Issues 4. The Prisma Institute, Minneapolis, Minn. ARRIAGA, PABLO JOSEPH, 1920 The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru Collection of Books and Documents Relating to the History of Peru, vol. 1, 2nd ed., Lima. BENJAMIN, WALTER 1969 Thesis on Philosophy of History. In Illuminations (Hannah Arendt, ed.; Harry Zohn, trans.) 3rd ed. Shocken Books, New York. BHABHA, HOMI K. 1992 Double visions. Artforum 30(5): 85–89. BOYD, SUSAN A. 1979 Byzantine art. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. CONNERTON, PAUL 1989 How societies remember. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. DE CERTEAU, MICHEL 1986 Heterologies: discourses on the other (Brian Massumi, trans.). 1988 The Writing of History (Tom Conley, trans.). Columbia University Press, New York. FANON, FRANTZ 1967 Towards the African Revolution. Grove Press, New York. FOUCAULT, MICHEL 1972 History, discourse and discontinuity. Salamagunda 20: 225–248. GARCILASO DE LA VEGA, THE INCA 1968 Royal Commentaries: The Origin of the Incas [1609]. Editorial Bruguera, Barcelona. GREENBLATT, STEPHEN 1991 Wonderful Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. GRUZINSKI, SERGE 1986 “Acculturation and individualization: modalities and impact of confession among the Nahua Indians of Mexico. XVI-XVIII centuries”. Notebooks for the history of evangelization in Latin America 1: 9–34. cusco. GUAMAN POMA DE AYALA, FELIPE 1980 First New Chronicle and Good Government [1615] (John V. Murra and Rolena Adorno, eds.; George L. Urioste, trans.). 3 vol. 21st century, Mexico. GUHA-THAKURTA, TAPATI 1992 The Creation of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850-1920. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
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Native Traditions in the Post-Conquest World: Commentary HOHENDAHL, PETER UWE 1992 A Return to History? New historicism and its agenda. New German Criticism 55: 87–104. HUAROCHIRI MANUSCRIPT 1991 The Huarochirí Manuscript [ca. 1613]. A testament to ancient and colonial Andean religion. (Frank Salomon and George Urioste, trans.). University of Texas Press, Austin. KLOR DE ALVA, JORGE 1988 Sahagún and the birth of modern ethnography: representing, confessing and recording the indigenous other. In The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún Pioneer Ethnographer of XVI-Century Aztec Mexico (Jorge Klor de Alva, H. B. Nicholson and Eliose Quiñones Keber, eds.). Studies in Culture and Society 2. Institute of Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany. 1992 Colonialism and postcolonialism as (Latin American) mirages. Latin American Colonial Magazine 1 (1–2): 3–24. KUBLER, GEORGE 1961 On the colonial extinction of pre-Columbian artistic motifs. In Essays in Pre-Colombian Art and Archeology (Samuel K. Lothrop et al., eds.): 14–34. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. LAFAYE, JACQUES 1976 Quezalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1831 (Benjamin Keen, trans.). University of Chicago Press, Chicago. PÉREZ BOCANEGRA, JUAN 1631 Ritual form, and institution of Cures, to administer to the natives of this Kingdom. . . Geronimo de Contreras, Lima. POPOL VUH 1985 Popol Vuh (Dennis Tedlock, trans. and ed.). Simon and Schuster, New York. RABASA, JOSÉ, JAVIER SANJINÉS AND ROBERT CARR (EDS.) 1996 Subaltern Studies in the Americas. Provision 19 (46). RAPPAPORT, JOANNE 1990 The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. RUIZ DE ALARCÓN, HERNANDO 1982 Aztec Sorcerers in Seventeenth Century Mexico [1628] (Michael Coe and Gordon Whittaker, trans. and ed.). Institute of Mesoamerican Studies, no. 7. State University of New York at Albany. SAHAGÚN, BERNARDINO 1982 General history of things in New Spain [ca. 1580]. Banamex, Mexico. SAID, EDWARD 1978 Orientalism. Pantheon, New York. 1993a Culture and Imperialism. Knopf, New York. 1993b The Pen and the Sword: Culture and Imperialism. An interview with David Barsamain. Z Magazine 6 (7/8): 62–71. TAUSSIG, MICHAEL 1993 Mimesis and alterity: a particular history of the senses. Routledge, London. TODOROV, TZVETAN 1984 The conquest of America: the question of the other (Richard Howard, trans.). Harper and Row, New York. 461
Tom Cummins URTON, GARY 1990 The Story of a Myth. University of Texas Press, Austin.
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Index Acamapichtli, 437 Acapulco, 214 Aclla, Acllas (women chosen by the Sun), 71, 73, 82, 315 Acolhua Teuctli, lord of Acolhuaque, 253 Province of Acolhuacan, 236, 238, 239, 241, 243, 256 kingdom of , 191 Acosta, Joseph (Joseph) de, 66, 71, 100, 251, 422 De procuranda indorum salutation, 113 Africa, 284. See also Province of Huarochiri: African mythology, 365 as agents in Pachacamac's fusion with the Christian faith, 348 –351 oral traditions, 254–255 agrarian chiefdom societies, 270 lineage, 270 Ahuitzotl, tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, 253–254 Smoke, Peter de, 214, 215 Ajusco, 222 Alarcón, 254; Hernando Ruiz de, inquisitor, 433 prefects, 168 altepetl, 35, 41, 153, 172–174, 179, 182, 186, 203, 209–210, 216, 227, 365 Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Fernando de, 150, 152, 153 , 172 , 182 , 191 , 240– , 251 252 , 253 , 254 , 453
History of the Chichimeca Nation, 253 Alvarado Tezozomoc, Hernando, 249, 251, 253–254, 426 Mexican Chronicle, 251, 253 Amaquemecan, Five Kingdoms of, 186 Amaru (Serpent), 104 Amecameca, 208 Anais de Cuauhtitlán. See the ancestors of Cuauhtitlán. See Province of Huarochirí; malquis; Mexico Andahuaylillas, pastor of, 390–391 Andes, Andean, 31. See also Atahualpa; Ayarmaca; chronic; colquired; shellfish; cultural contact; epidemics; Hanan and Húrin; huacá; Province of Huarochirí; Indianism; individual chroniclers; Inca; I want; quipu; or textiles; Potosi; property; purity; Quechua; traditions of adultery, concept of, 82 box, Andean colonial, 139 Catholicism, 388 coca leaf cultivation, 58 commerce, 56 artisans, 128 exchange of gifts, 116 guacanquis, Andean love amulet, 67 natural or native, gentlemen, 8, 56, 57, 58–59, 276. See also Cusichac, Francis; Don Carlos works, 77 pacaricocs (places of origin), 317 kinship, 9 rosemary, 9, 348 potatoes, 329, 338
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Vintage index of 296, 339 reductions, 58 religious texts, 385 test marriages, 82 wills, 116, 130 annals, 152–153, 186, 207, 377, 426, 434. See also Cuauhtitlán de Puebla, 427, 428 anonymous analyst de, 426 de Tlaxcala, 428 Appadurai, Arjun, 94 aquilla, aquillas, 114, 116, 122, 123, 124, 125–130, 133, 134, 458 Arguedas, José María, 383, 386 artisan painters, 346 Atahualpa Andean concept of book as a gift, 97, 142 Atlauhtla, 211, 214 titles of, 215 Atocha, 122, 124, 128, 130, 458 silver bowl, 131 silver plate, 120–122 Atunpucuy. View calendar, Inca months: January Audiencia, Audiencia de Charcas, 57, 59, 60 roles, 59 from Mexico (New Spain), 156, 157, 168, 190, 247, 375 from Quito, 107 from Los Reyes (Lima), 350 Augustinians. See religious orders autos-of-fe, 79 Avila, Francis of, 266, 297–298, 332, 346, 348, 349, 458 Notice, 59–61 Barros de San Millan, author of, 60 accused of being homosexual, 60 judge of the royal court of Charcas, 59 signed by ethnic lords of Charcas, 59 Axayacatl, 207 Ayarmaca, ethnicity of Cuzco, 308 tribe, clans, 69, 77, 78, 80, 82 of Concha, 274 Aymara, 100, , 390
464
catechism in, 384 Azcapotzalco, 166, 238, 249, 251 defeat of, 250, 254 Aztec, 233–256. See also ethnicity; Bleeding of the Triple Alliance, 160 funerary customs, 160 conquests, 235 cultural encyclopedia, 159–161 empire, 235, 237–238, 245 explanations of, 234 sacrifice of the heart, 160 stories, 233 burning incense, 160 maps, 155 political organization , 235 state, 249 tax, 190 singer, tax exempt, 156 world, 256 “Aztec Congress”, 439 Aztlán, 183 Bartolomé, apostle, 322 Cuenca de México, 234–256 bastard. See Batab illegitimacy, Yucatán, 47 Batan, Pedro. See Collquiri Beatizo de Cristo. See Riaño, Luis de Betanzos, Juan de, 301, 304, 308, 311, 314, 318 bilingualism in catechisms and sermons, 65–66, 68 in Crete, 18–19 among the Genoese, 24 in Mexico, 439 Nahuatl, as stage in, 53 in Peru, 45–46 Boas, Frans, 438, 440 books, destruction of. See Mexico Borgia Group, 150, 151 divinatory almanacs of, 150 cabecera, cabeceras, 158, 186, 188, 235, 237, 239–241, 246–248, 252, 255. See also subjects
Header-subject index. See heading and subjects Cacamatzin, 242 cacique, 110, 223, 270 cacique, 47, 168, 186, 223, 225–227, 235. See also chief; gentleman: natural gentlemen, principal gentlemen; Tlatoani cadastral records, 174 form of fields, 174 type of soil, 174 Cajamarca, 142 Cakchiquel, documents from the colonial period, 423 ancient calendar, 155, 160 Central Mexico, 428 Christian, 323 festival, 320 operation of Guaman Poma, 299 phases of moon, 318 Roman, 323 kalends, 323 signs and symbols, 427, 428 summer solstice, 303 calendar, Christian months January, 323–326, 329, 330, 335 February, 338 March, 330, 338 April, 338 May, 331 , 338 June, 327, 329, 338 July, 328, 329 August, 300, 329, 334, 336 September, 329 November, 310, 312–313 December, 329, 331 calendar, Inca months. See also Camay; Moon Camay; Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe: New Chronicle; hymns january, 311, 314–315, 316 february, 305, 314 april, 302, 305 may, 305, 307 june, 306 winter solstice, 305, 320 depiction of a devil (demon), 306, 320
July, 305 August, 299, 300, 305, 336 Coyaraimi or Citua, 303. See also Haylli September, 307, 308 October, 305, 308, 309 November, 304, 309, 310 December, 305, 306, 316 Midsummer , 306; 305 calendar, lunar months from September to October, 308 from October to November, 308 callpa (strength), 339 callpachini (endow someone with strength), 339 callparicuni (endow someone with strength), 298, 339 calpulli, 153, 174 month of Jan. 316 of Camay Polo de Ondegardo. See also Calendar, Inca months: Cano, Juan, conqueror, 182 Mexican songs, 217 Capac Yupanqui, 105 Capo Apo (Mighty Lord), composite Andean deity, 311 Capulhuac, Saint Bartholomew, 205, 207, 209, 211, 216, , 220, 221, 224, 227 Cardenas, Lazaro, President of Mexico, 439 Carlos, Juan, chief of Tehuantepec, 168 Carrillo, Felipe, 224 Carrillo, Juan Ignatius Felipe (Don Ignatius ), 224 cartographic history, Mexico. See Las Casas narrative, 57, 243, 252 “benevolent” approach to indigenous affairs, 57 good caste, 75 bad, 72, 76 Ccoya, Inca queen, 130 ballot, 248, 352–353
465
Index for 1530, 156 to 1553, 156–157, 234, 244–245, 247 to 1577, 252 to 1681, 352 Plough, 130 plows to pé, 130 Chalk, 236 Chalk, 182, 191, 204, 211–211; 215, 227, 245, 249 pilgrims Chalma, 441 champa (cana), 130 Charcas. See Audience; Notice: St. Louis Millan, Bars of Charles V, 56, 103, 104, 156, 160, 203, 211, 214, 215, 363, 370 Charlotte, Jean, 440 Chauca Huaman, Christopher, 277, 278–279 Chi, Gaspar Antonio, 425 Chiapas , 442 chicha, 299, 305, 316, 320, 400 Chichicas, 228 Chichimecas, 182. See also History of the Chichimeca nation; History of the Toltecs Chichimeca Chichimeca Teuctli, 253 Chicomoztoc, 183 Chilam Balam, Books of. See Chimalhuacan Maya, 245 Chimalpahin, Domingo Francis of San Antonio Muñon, 191, 203, 249, 426 Chimalpopocatl Galicia, Faustino, 428 Cholollan, 159 Cholula, 158, 183, 226, 245 Chontal text. See the Christ maia. See also Christianity; Cristo Roxo; Mendieta, Geronim of: descriptions; Pampamarca Estate, Christ of, 348 as The Lord of Miracles, 47, 345, 349, 351, 354, 355 Christianity, 9, 47–48, 362. See also language; Begging, Geronimo of; Nahua: religious life; religious orders; sex; Faixa of Tepexpan oil hardly ao ar book, 298, 378
466
anti-Christian activities, accusations of, 78 Baltic, 20 catechism, 155. See also Aymara; Bilingualism among Nahuas, 362, 377 Testerian, 155, 159, 161 and sermons in standardized Quechua, 384 Christianization, 371 conversion, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 162, 362, 368, 457 attributed to Christ and the saints, 378 Ash Wednesday customs, 315 prayers, routines of, 333 importance of the sacred: God, Christ, the saints, 368 introduction of, 218 ties of kinship between saints, virgins, and Christ, 347–348 Concept Andean de, 348 Chronicles of Chicxulub and Yaxkukul. See Mayan Chronicle, Andean Native Administrative Legacy of, 265 Papeles de Chuschi de 1679, 33, 42, 44, 45 CIESAS, Center for Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology, Tlalpan, 441 Cieza de León, Pedro, 55, 82, 124, 129 , 295, 296–297, 346 Cihuacóatl, 166 Citua, 304, 305 city-state. See title and subjects city (city), 241, 246 classification of, 241–244, 245, 246 watch. See Coatepec time, 159 coatequitl, 35 coats of arms, 56, 100, 225–227. See also Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe: Nueva corónica de Anancuzco, 320 by Don Jacinto Cortés, 225–226
Philip Index, Techialoyan Codices 113, 226, Philip 227, 103–106 coca, coca leaf. See the Andes; Painting two Collquiri codices, 438 women painters, 435, 436, 437, 438 codices, 421–424, 429–431, 436–437. See also Painted Testemunhos; ethnic Codex Azcatitlan, 183 Codex Borgia, 151 Codex Fields. See or map of Codex Cuauhtlantsinco Coacalco, 207–208 Codex Fejéráry-Meyer, 151 Codex García Granados, 226 Codex Huejotzingo, 179–181 Codex Kingsborough, 169, 173 Codex Magliabechiano, 161 Codex Mendoza, 434, 7, 2 ; 435, 437 glyphs and units of measurement, 424 or painter, 437–438 or painter, concubine of Huitzilihuitl, 438 Codex Mexicanus, 183, 185 Codex Osuna, 168–171 Codex Rios, 435, 437 or painter, concubine of Huitzilihuitl, 435 , 437 Codex Tudela, 160–161 Codex Vergara, 174–176 Codex Xólotl, 182, 183, 185, 243 Codex Metepec, 205 divination, 151, 422 native leading priests and xamãs, 155 for rituais, 151 Florentine Codex. See Sahagún, P. Bernardino of Tribute Enrollment. See homage: acts of the Municipal Codex, 222 Techialoyan Codex, 193, 203, 205,
207, 208, 216–218, 220, 222, 226, 227, 228, 433 Colhua, 242 Teuctli Colhua, 253 Colhuaque, 236 Collin, Diego, Cacique de Panzaleo, 114 Collquiri, Concha Huaca, 267, 268, 280, 281 , 289. See also Conchasica: Lake Yansa boat (ship), sacrifice, 285 as Peter Batan, 280, 281, 286, 289 Capyama, Maria, mythical figure, 267, 271, 280, 281, 284, 285, 286, 289 ; champeros, champagne festival, 284, 286 coca, used as an offering, 284 Cuni Raya, mythical figure, 267 “dances” the “Birthday”, 281 dancers, 286 “Lords of the lake”, 281, 286, 289 liqueur, toast . ). legal, 209 "six hundred rods", 205, 209 composite deities. See Capo Señor; Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe: New Chronicle; Camac commoners, Peruvian settlers, 77, 266 Shell. View family; shellfish; colquired; entries under Huarochiri Provincia Conchasica, Concha Sica, 271, 286. See also family; Entries under Collquiri
467
Index “Colonial irony”, 276 kinship, 277 Lake Yansa, Yanascocha, 266, 267, 272, 276, 280, 281, 289 “Anniversary” of the lake, 280, 284, 289 dam, 267, 268 structures and hydraulic system, 274 , 278 irrigation, 266, 268, 280 Condorcanqui. See Thupa Amaru congregation, population concentration, 206, 207, 208–209 The Conquest of Peru. See Cristóbal de Mena Coricancha, Recinto Dorado del Cuzco, 104, 316 corregidor. See sex; sexual activities Cortés, Antonio, chief of Tlacopan, 246 Cortés, Hernando, 153, 154, 155, 156, 179, 187–188, 202, 204, 237, 241, 242–243, 249, 250 war in Guatemala, 166– 167 Cortés, Jacinto, indigenous leader, 225 cosmogonies, 152 Andean customs, 74 good, 66, 82, 84, 100 bad, 65, 66, 67, 77, 82, 100 Council of Lima, Third, 301, 390, 392 stimulated writing confession manuals and catechisms and sermons preaching Catholic doctrine in native languages, 66, 67 Council of the Indies, 156, 372, 376 Council of Trent, 162, 370 Counter-Reformation, 63, 81 in Spain, concerned with sexual issues, 67 court files. See painted testimonials; Coyoacán records, 243 Coyotzin, Juan, 211 Crete, 26–27. See also creole bilingualism, creoles, 354 historical awareness, 351
468
Christ of Miracles. See Christ: as the Lord of Miracles Cristo Morado, 350, 353, 354, 356 Cristóbal de Mena The Conquest of Peru, 97, 98–99 Cristóbal de Molina, 301–304, 308, 311, 314, 316, 318, 400 concern for women, 304 Mexican Chronicle. See Alvarado Tezozomoc, Hernando Crónica Mexicayotl, 249 “Chronicle X” tradition, 249 Crusades, 14–17 cross-links, 27 cross-movement, 25 fanaticism for Jerusalem, 22 First Crusade, 22 Second Crusade, 21 traditions of, 16 as a way of unifying the world, 25 Cruz, Juan de la, leader of the Mayan religious cult, 432 Cruzob. See cultural contact cryptogram, 402 Cuauhnahuac, 254 Cuauhtinchan, 183–184 Cuauhtitlan, 240, 243 Anales de Cuauhtitlan, 240, 249, 254 Cuernavaca, 204, 218, 222, 223, 226 Cuitlahuac. See Tira de Tepexpan Cuitlahuaca, 236 Cuixingo, 211, 212, 213 titles of, 212–213 Culhuacan, 155 cultural contact, stages of, 34–42, 45–49 Andes, Andeans, 33, 41–42, 45, 47– 48 Cruzob, 40 texts by, 39 Iroquois, 36 Nahuas, Nahuatl, 32, 33–49 Quechua, Quechua speakers, 32–33, 41–48 Yucatan, Yucatecans, 32, 33, 38, 40, 41, 42, 46 – 47, 48 Maya, 32–33, 37–41, 42–43, 44 cultural differences, Andean and
Mesoamerican Index, 48, 453 cultural encyclopedia. See Aztec cultural identities, as a moral battleground, 63 Culua. See Colhua Cusichac, Francisco, Lord Wanka, 55, 56 Cuzco, 56, 73, 129, 308, 311, 316, 319, 320, 347, 385, 390, 409, 413. See also Polo de Ondegardo, Juan; silver dance See Collquirí; Nahua: religious life: Christianity Dávila Padilla, Augustine, chronicler, 367 Diaz del Castillo, Bernal, 201, 205 Titles Diaz, 222, 223 Diego, Juan. See Doctrines of the Virgin of Guadalupe. See Nahuatl: Dominican Literacy. See religious orders Don Carlos, son of Pawllu Thupa, 56–5 See also Mendoza Ometochitzin, Carlos Trial Minutes of, 58 Duho. See Tiana Duran, Diego, 153, 154–156, 159, 206, 242, 251, 364, 368 Mexican version of the story, 250 encominder, 75 Nahua, 169 Pachacamac, 349, 350 encomienda Central Mexico, 35 and Yucatan, 40 Nahua , 53 Winks and Pachacamac, 349 Wanka, 55 Henry, Martin, Viceroy, 376 Epidemics. See also Tepexpan belt among Andeans, 64–65 among Nahuas, 209 scribes, 95, 425–426 Spaniards, Spaniards, 63, 73, 75, 78 ethnicity among Aztecs, 235–237, 241, 249, 255 preserved in codices, Mexico, 186 ethnohistorical criticism of sources, 265
Fiore, Joaquin de, 373 Florentine Codex. See Sahagun, P. Bernardino Flowers. See Nahua: religious life; Singing Formalism, 387 Franciscans. See Free Affairs of Religious Orders, Peru, 63 legal backgrounds. See Ghent composition acts, Peter of, 163, 375 Gaona, John of, 372 Garcilaso de la Vega, 104, 450 genealogy, genealogies, 153, 178, 268. See also painted testimonies; pictorial documents; tepexpan strip; primordial titles Genoa, Genoese, 17, 18. See also bilingualism; Italy glyphs. See Maya Gomara, Lopez of, Secretariat of the Courts, 154, 155 Gonzalez de la Cruz, Margarita Villafranca, 207 Gonzalez, Hernan, enconder, 349, 352 Gonzalez Holguin, Diego, 44, 95 Gonzalez, Pablo, 207 Gregorio Condori Mamani, autobiography de, 348 Grijalva, John de, 367, 373 Guacarpaucar, Philip, 113 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Philip, 27, 42, 44, 45, 46, 91; , 298, 299, 301, 304, 305, 308, 314, 315, 318, 320, 321, 323, 329, 332, 333, 335, 337, 338, 450, 456. See also calendar; calendar: Inca months colonial order, vision of, 73 language of honor, purity, dishonor, 77 mestizos, 72, 74–76, 78 New chronicle and good government, 73, 74, 91, 107, 116, 118, 130, 132 299 300 301 306 307 309 311 312 315 318 319 320 322 324 330 331 332 335 336 450 454
469
Index coats of arms, 100–103, 107–108, 119, 227 Andean composite deity, 311 demons, beliefs inspired by, 321 dynastic portraits in, 104–106 frontispiece, 91–93 nation purity and status, notions of , 73 social social order and justice, vision of, 73 Guanacauri. See Inca Guatemala. See Cortes, Hernando Guerrero. See Nahua: "Conjures" Guzman, Esteban de, Nahua governor, 168, 208 Guzman, Nuño de, 180 Hacas Poma, Hernando, 82–83, 317 "mestizo". See miscegenation; see also Hanan and Hurin illegitimacy, division of the Andean moiety, 118, 354–355 Hati, Alonzo, 107 Grande Pocoiquis. See calendar, Inca months: January Great harvest. See calendar, Inca months: February Haylli, song sung during the Inca month of August 300 Henry the Navigator, Prince, 24 of Heroic History, Heroic Model. See Province of Huarochirí History of the Chichimeca nation. See Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, Ferdinand of Toltec-Chichimeca History, 183, 184 historical traditions, 256 natives, 233–234, 237, 238, 241, 248, 250, 255 postconquest, 233 Tepaneca, 255 histories, 234 Acolhuad, 42. father; ; local, 433 indigenous, 156 traditional, 255
470
historiography, 234, 243, 332 history, 422, 434, 449, 458-459 as a concept, 233, 234, 235, 241 in contrast to myth, 241 as a construct, 254, 256 vs. myth, 255–256 oral, 441 role of partisanship in, 254–255 honor, 70, 77. See also Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe; shame; woman codes of, 71 double standards, 71 of virgins of the mountain, 83 hispanic notions of, 78 indian dog, 78 social dishonor, 70 as social rod, 70 and virtue, woman, 74 Horcasitas, Fernando, 440 Hostiensis, canonist, 25 huaca, huacas, 67, 80–81, 83, 293, 317, 345–348, 349, 353, 354, 400. See also Collquiri Pachacamac, 9, 345–346, 348–349, 350. See also Pachacamilla Pariacaca, 347 Huamantla, 177 Huari song. See Pacaritambo Huarochirí Manuscript, 42–45, 95, 266, 271, 279, 280, 451, 457–458 Province of Huarochirí, region, 266, 281, 346, 347 ancestors, 268 affiliation groups, 270 heroic history, 271, 274 , 278, 280, 289 relationship with empires, 271 heroic model, 270–271 genealogical content, 270 mythopraxis, 271 courts of law as forums, 272 legal memories of Spanish courts of law, 272 “immemorial” social events, 273 institutions, , 273 lawyers, 276
Legitimation index, appropriation of, 289 meaning of status, 273 mummy cults, 268 myth-history, 268 and African oral tradition, 270 myths, 387 fable prehistory, as an ideological purpose, 271 ritual, to reproduce social structures, 270 truth value of memories, 272, 289 property law, 290 Christian legitimation, 290 city of Huejotzingo, 179, 426, 428 city of, 179 Huexotla, 182, 251 Huexotzinco, 158, 363 Huexotzingo, city, 377 Huitzilihuitl, ruler, 435, 437, 438 Huitzilopochtli, 166 mankind, colonial categories of, 84 idolatry, 373 extirpation of, 66, 77, 94, 192 threat of, 375 judgments, 154–155 idols, destruction of. See idolatry: extirpation of illegitimacy, 76, 82 bastards and legitimate, 63 legitimacy, as European creation, 72 times “Inca” (Inka), “el tiempo del Inca”, 8, 107–108, 141, 271. See also Sorcery Inca. See Nahua: “Spells” Indianism preserving Andean life, 83 and the sexual virtue of women, 83 Indians, Indians, 63, 73, 76, 78 Inka. See also "Inca" times; Matienzo, Juan de; mita system; Quechua pottery dishes, 120 festivals, 318 Guanacauri, myth of origin, 320 mascaipacha, 97, 104, 118–119, 122, 130
“a nation surrounded”, 383–384 rituals, 8 ceremonial capacocha and processions, 303, 317 social order, expressed in festivals, 321 Quechua speakers from southern Peru, 384 tocricoc, village overseer, 304–305 acquisition, 108– 109, 114 snow, 118, 134 unku, unkus, 118, 134, 140 Pacsamama women, "Mother Moon", 304 as weavers, 308 zodiac, 329 Innocent IV, 16, 25 Inquisition Mexico, 165 craft of, 72 Peru, . 67 Iroquois. See cultural contact Italy, maritime cities, 14. See also Genoa; Venice Itzcoatl, 250, 252, 254 Cage. See The Jesuits. See religious orders Jiménez, Luz, 438–442 Juan de Plano Carpini, 16 judges, indigenous mediators, 207 kero, keros, 112, 114–116, 128–130, 132–133, 142–143 limbiquiro, kero Pintura, 114 de Ollantaytambo, 122 khipu, khipus, 55, 111, 392. See also quipu Pérez Bocanegra inadvisable practice, 392 kumbi textiles, 116, 118, 128, 130, 133 chief, chiefs, 47, 65, 74, 77, 79, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108–109, 111, 140, 295–296, 298. See also cacique; tiana's wills, 114 lagasca, bishop, 56
471
Index Lago Texcoco, 238 Lago Titicaca, 295, 346, 354 Lampaz, city of, 295, 298, 339 Landa, Diego de, 421, 425, 428, 431 landscape map, 277 language. See also Aymara; cultural contact; Maya; Nahuatl; performative, 273 of religious interaction, 100 of virtue that produces shame, 78 Weavers of the Valley of Laras, 408 Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25–26, 27 lienzo, lienzos, 153, 429, 433 Lima , 350 –353 blood cleansing. See purity literacy. See Morelos; Nahuatl literary traditions, native, 425–435 literature, 426, 434 Mesoamerican, 438 contentious, 271 agrarian, 210 vocation, 251, 254 cloth, woman's shawl, 409–410 Llocllahuancupa, son of Pachacamac, 346, 349 Loarte, Gabriel de judge , 57, 59 Loaysa, Gerónimo de, 57 Llull, Ramón, 16 Maca, municipality of, 347 maestres. See Nahuatl: literacy Maldonado, Antonia, 352 malquis, ancestors, 81. See also Province of Huarochirí; Mexican tree, body of the ancestor, 108 Cuauhtlantzinco map, 219, 225–226 Tlotzin map, 182 maps, 181–182, 186, 192 as letters or community titles, 181 maps. View registration records; Shell's San Cristobal; marco polo snow, 16,
472
Marqués de Valle Umbroso, provincial landowner, marriage 385, 75. See also Andes: experimental marriage; tonalamatl rights of, choice of, 75–76 Martyr, Pedro, 150 Mateos, manuscript painter, 165–167 Matienzo, Juan de, 57, 58, 60. See also mita system “extirpation” of Inca lineage, 57 as judge in the royal court of Charcas, 60 understanding of the Andean system, 58 Matlatzinca, 219 Registration of tributes. See Mayan tribute, 422, 424, 425, 431, 432, 433, 435, 436, 442, 454. See also cultural contact: Yucatec Maya; Tzotzil Maya Books of Chilam Balam, 431, 432, 433–434, 451, 454 cah, 41 Text Chontal, Acalan, 426–427 Chroniclers of Chicxulub and Yaxkukul, 433 Speaks in Spanish, 279 Glyphs, 424 Itza Maya of Tayasal, 431 Book of Songs by Dzitbalche, 432 vase painting, 424, 436 writers' cooperative. See Sna Jtz'ibajom Maya-European medical knowledge, 432, 434. See also Nahua: “Spells” medical texts, Nahuatl and Maya, 433 memory, art of (Europe), 164 mendicant orders. See religious orders Mendieta, Gerónimo de, 156, 158–159, 161–162, 243, 247, 252, 372, 373 descriptions Holy Week Processions of 1595, Mexico City, 366 images of Christ, Mary, saints, 366– 367 Indians Ecclesiastical History, 247 Mendoza, Antonio de, Viceroy, 157, 160
Mendoza Ometochtzin Index, Carlos, rulers of Texcoco, 169, 244 Mercedes, 103, 107, 116, 118 exchange value and use value, 133 miscegenation, “mestizo”, 72 mestizo, mestizos, 63, 95, 164, 182. See also Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe Mestizos' Burden, 72 Metepec, 208, 211, 224 Mexico, 236, 238, 249, 252, 256, 433 Mexican Revolution, 438, 440 Mexico, 363. See also Aztecs; bilingualism; I trust; ethnicity; Genealogy; narratives; painted testimonials; Ancestors of Tenochtitlán, 190 destruction of books, 154–155, 423 Meztitlán, 245 Michoacán, 245 Mictlantecuhtli, 160 Miguel, Bartolomé, 224 Alta Milpa, 220, 438, 439, 441 Concepción Escuela Arenal, 438–439 Missale Romanum, 311, 31; , 315, 325, 333 Missale Secundum, 333, 334 metro system, Inca, 46 for corn cultivation, 58 according to Matienzo's project for Potosí, 58 mitayos, peasant Indians, 74 Mixquica, 236 Mixtec colonial documents, 423 historical canvases, 150 manuscripts, 223 Moctezuma, 152, 156, 188, 205, 207, 237, 241, 242, 243, 245, 246, 250, 253, Tirso de El Burlador de Sevilla, 71 Morelos, state of, 439. See also Nahua: “Conjura literacy program, 439;
Morner, Magnus, 72 Moctezuma, Hispanic form of Moctezuma, 237 Motolin, Toribio, 150, 154, 156, 162, 165, 239, 242, 243, 244, 245–246, 247, 248, 249, 252, 363, 365 ; “Memorial del Pueblo”, 239, 245–246 Memoriales, 239, 242, 243, 245, 248 “Motoline Insert”, 239, 240, 245–246, 247, 249 mulattoes, mulattos, 63, 75, 76 Municipal Code. . . . See codices Muñoz Camargo, 252 Murua, Martin de, 106 dynastic portraits in, 105, 106 music, musical instruments. See Nahua: Religious Life: Christianity; religious orders: Franciscans Nahuas, 27, 361, 362, 426, 432, 442. See also Christianity: catechism; cultural contact; order; installments; Nahuatl Ceremonialism, 151, 361, 364 “Spells” extracted from prisoners in Morelos and Guerrero, 432–433 deities, Atlan Tonan woman, 368 Chicomecoatl, 368 Toci, 368 noble titles and privileges, 182 philosophy, in books, 152 religious life, 153, 361 ceremonial character of, 369 Christianity, Christianization, 28, 364–365, 369, 454 baptism, 362 patron saints of the community, 376 crucifixes, as objects of worship, 364 dance, 362, 363, 365, 366, 374, 377 women excluded from, 364
473
Festival index, 365 songs, use of, 366, 367, 377 Our Lady, 365 processions, 363, 365, 366, 367, 374, 377 as resistance to colonialism, 369 ritual, understanding of, 9 sacrifices, human and animal, forbidden, 364 secular clerics, 370, 371, 373, 375 teachings, 295 songs, suspected of being diabolical, 374 flowers, use of, 365, 366, 367, 372, 377 ritual marking of boundaries, 206 stages of, 35–37 , 53 titles and privileges, 182 Nahuatl, 374, 377, 425, 429, 431, 437, 438, 439. See also bilingualism; cultural contact; medical texts; Popol Vuh; tonalamatl “descendants”, word for, 178 hieroglyphic book, 429 huehuetlatolli, speeches of elders, 152 Legend of the suns, 431 literacy, 421, 425, 441, 454 doctrine and teachers, 425 “reading” and “writing”, 159 Media Estudios de cultura náhuatl (ECN), magazine, 440, 441 Mexihkatl itonalama, newspaper, 439 El Tepozteco, newspaper, 441 El Xocoyotzin, newspaper, 441 prayers, books by, 152 scholars, 435 songs, books by, 152 sources, 52 speakers , 365, 428, 433 testaments of Culhuacán, 174 yancuic tlahtolli, “the new word”, 441 narratives, Mexico as cartographic history, 153 on the foundation of the territory and migration, 153
474
natural or native lord