Native Traditions In The Postconquest World

"Important anthology marking, but not celebrating, the Columbian Quincentenary, directing attention to indigenous cultural responses to the Spanish intrusion in Mexico and Peru, utilizing as much as possible native documents and sources, and exploring mentalities. While we can benefit from the analysis and methodology in all contributions to this volume, items certain to interest Mesoamericanists include: Hill Boone, 'Introduction,' for the volume's orientation; Laiou, 'The Many Faces of Medieval Colonization,' for background, analysis of colonization as process, and its multiple forms; Lockhart, 'Three Experiences of Culture Contact: Nahua, Maya, and Quechua,' for special attention to language change as a reflection of broader cultural evolution in key areas; Hill Boone, 'Pictorial Documents and Visual Thinking in Postconquest Mexico,' for an examination of the endurance of these forms in 16th-century Nahua culture; Wood, 'The Social vs.

Bringing to bear her extensive knowledge of the cultures of Renaissance Europe and sixteenth-century Mexico, Mónica Domínguez Torres here investigates the significance of military images and symbols in post-Conquest Mexico. She shows how the 'conquest' in fact involved dynamic exchanges between cultures; and that certain interconnections between martial, social and religious elements resonated with similar intensity among Mesoamericans and Europeans, creating indeed cultural bridges between these diverse communities. Multidisciplinary in approach, this study builds on scholarship in the fields of visual, literary and cultural studies to analyse the European and Mesoamerican content of the martial imagery fostered within the indigenous settlements of central Mexico, as well as the ways in which local communities and leaders appropriated, manipulated, modified and reinterpreted foreign visual codes. Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico draws on post-structuralist and post-colonial approaches to analyse the complex dynamics of identity formation in colonial communities.

Bringing to bear her extensive knowledge of the cultures of Renaissance Europe and sixteenth-century Mexico, M?a Dom?uez Torres here investigates the significance of military images and symbols in post-Conquest Mexico. She shows how the 'conquest' in fact involved dynamic exchanges between cultures; and that certain interconnections between martial, social and religious elements resonated with similar intensity among Mesoamericans and Europeans, creating indeed cultural bridges between these diverse communities. Multidisciplinary in approach, this study builds on scholarship in the fields of visual, literary and cultural studies to analyse the European and Mesoamerican content of the martial imagery fostered within the indigenous settlements of central Mexico, as well as the ways in which local communities and leaders appropriated, manipulated, modified and reinterpreted foreign visual codes. Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico draws on post-structuralist and post-colonial approaches to analyse the complex dynamics of identity formation in colonial communities.

In their efforts to convert indigenous peoples, Franciscan friars brought the Spanish Inquisition to early-sixteenth-century Mexico. Patricia Lopes Don now investigates these trials to offer an inside look at this brief but consequential episode of Spanish methods of colonization, providing a fresh interpretation of an early period that has remained too long understudied. Drawing on previously underutilized records of Inquisition proceedings, Don examines four of the most important trials of native leaders to uncover the Franciscans’ motivations for using the Inquisition and the indigenous response to it. She focuses on the consecutive impact of four trials—against nahualli Martín Ocelotl, an influential native priest; Andrés Mixcoatl, an advocate of open resistance to the Franciscans; Miguel Pochtecatl Tlaylotla, a guardian of native religious artifacts; and Don Carlos of Texcoco, a native chief burned at the stake for heresy. Don reveals the heart of Bishop Zumárraga’s methods of conducting the trials—including spectacular bonfires in which any native idols found in the possession of professed converts were destroyed. Don’s knowledge of the contemporary Spain that shaped the friars’ perspectives enables her to offer new understanding of the evolution of Franciscan attitudes toward evangelization. Bonfires of Culture reexamines important primary documents and offers a new perspective on a pivotal historical era.

Mexico of five centuries ago was witness to one of the most momentous encounters between human societies, when a group of Spaniards led by Hernando Cortés joined forces with tens of thousands of Mesoamerican allies to topple the mighty Aztec Empire. It served as a template for the forging of much of Latin America and initiated the globalized world we inhabit today. The violent clash that culminated in the Aztec-Spanish war of 1519-21 and the new colonial order it created were millennia in the making, entwining the previously independent cultural developments of both sides of the Atlantic. Collision of Worlds provides a deep history of this encounter, one that considers temporal depth in the richly layered cultures of Mexico and Spain, from their prehistories to the urban and imperial societies they built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Leading Mesoamerican archaeologist David Carballo offers a unique perspective on these fabled events with a focus on the physical world of places and things, their similarities and differences in trans-Atlantic perspective, and their interweaving in an encounter characterized by conquest and colonialism, but also resilience on the part of Native peoples. An engrossing and sweeping account, Collision of Worlds debunks long-held myths and contextualizes the deep roots and enduring consequences of the Aztec-Spanish conflict as never before.

An illuminating intellectual biography of a pioneering and singular figure in American art history. Art historian George A. Kubler (1912–1996) was a foundational scholar of ancient American art and archaeology as well as Spanish and Portuguese architecture. During over five decades at Yale University, he published seventeen books that included innovative monographs, major works of synthesis, and an influential theoretical treatise. In this biography, Thomas F. Reese analyzes the early formation, broad career, and writings of Kubler, casting nuanced light on the origins and development of his thinking. Notable in Reese’s discussion and contextualization of Kubler’s writings is a revealing history and analysis of his Shape of Time—a book so influential to students, scholars, artists, and curious readers in multiple disciplines that it has been continuously in print since 1962. Reese reveals how pivotal its ideas were in Kubler’s own thinking: rather than focusing on problems of form as an ordering principle, he increasingly came to sequence works by how they communicate meaning. The author demonstrates how Kubler, who professed to have little interest in theory, devoted himself to the craft of art history, discovering and charting the rules that guided the propagation of structure and significance through time.

Presenting a set of rich case-studies which demonstrate novel and productive approaches to the study of colonial knowledge, this volume covers British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial encounters in Africa, Asia, America and the Pacific, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

The arrival of European settlers in the Americas disrupted indigenous lifeways, and the effects of colonialism shattered Native communities. Forced migration and human trafficking created a diaspora of cultures, languages, and people. Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman have gathered the work of leading scholars, including Bill Anthes, Duane Champagne, Daniel Cobb, Donald Fixico, and Joy Porter, among others, in examining an expansive range of Native peoples and the extent of their influences through reaggregation. These diverse and wide-ranging essays uncover indigenous understandings of self-identification, community, and culture through the speeches, cultural products, intimate relations, and political and legal practices of Native peoples. "Native Diasporas" explores how indigenous peoples forged a sense of identity and community amid the changes wrought by European colonialism in the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and the mainland Americas from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. Broad in scope and groundbreaking in the topics it explores, this volume presents fresh insights from scholars devoted to understanding Native American identity in meaningful and methodologically innovative ways.