The Rain Gods Rebellion

The Rain Gods' Rebellion examines Nahua oral narratives to illuminate the cultural basis of the 1977-1984 rebellion against the local Hispanic elite in Huitzilan de Serdán, Mexico. Drawing from forty years of fieldwork in the region, James M. Taggart traces the sociopolitical role of Nahua rain gods--who took both human and divine forms--back hundreds of years and sheds new light on the connections between social experiences and the Nahua understanding of water and weather in stories. As Taggart shows, Nahua tales of the rain gods' rebellion anticipated the actual 1977 land invasion in Huitzilan, in which some 200-300 Nahua were killed. The Rain Gods' Rebellion reveals how local culture evolves from the expression of unrest to organized insurgency and then into collective memory. Taggart records a tradition of storytelling in which Nahuas radicalized themselves through recounting the rain gods' stories--stories of the gods organizing and striking with bolts of lightning the companion spirits of autocratic local leaders who worked closely with mestizos. The tales are part of a tradition of resisting the friars' efforts to convert the Nahuas, Totonacs, Otomi, and Tepehua to Christianity and inspiring nativistic movements against invading settlers. Providing a rare longitudinal look at the cultural basis of this grassroots insurgency, The Rain Gods' Rebellion offers rare insight into the significance of oral history in forming Nahua collective memory and, by extension, culture. It will be of significance to scholars of Indigenous studies, anthropology, oral history, and violence studies, as well as linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists.

Humankind has a special relationship with rain. The sensory experience of water falling from the heavens evokes feelings ranging from fear to gratitude and has inspired many works of art. Using unique and expertly developed art-historical case studies – from prehistoric cave paintings up to photography and cinema – this book casts new light on a theme that is both ecological and iconological, both natural and cultural-historical. Barbara Baert’s distinctive prose makes Looking Into the Rain. Magic, Moisture, Medium a profound reading experience, particularly at a moment when disruptions of the harmony among humans, animals, and nature affect all of us and the entire planet. Barbara Baert is Professor of Art History at KU Leuven. She teaches in the field of Iconology, Art Theory & Analysis, and Medieval Art. Her work links knowledge and questions from the history of ideas, cultural anthropology and philosophy, and shows great sensitivity to cultural archetypes and their symptoms in the visual arts.

This is a book about how Nahuas—native⁠ speakers of Nahuatl, the common language of the Aztec Empire and of more than 2.5 million Indigenous people today—have explored, understood, and explained the world around them in pre-invasion, colonial, and contemporary time periods. It is a deep dive into Nahua theoretical and practical inquiry related to the environment, as well as the dynamic networks in which Nahuas create, build upon, and share knowledges, practices, tools, and objects to meet social, political, and economic needs. In this work, author Kelly S. McDonough addresses Nahua understanding of plants and animals, medicine and ways of healing, water and water control, alphabetic writing, and cartography. Interludes between the chapters offer short biographical sketches and interviews with contemporary Nahua scientists, artists, historians, and writers, accompanied by their photos. The book also includes more than twenty full-color images from sources including the Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century collaboration between Indigenous and Spanish scholars considered the most comprehensive extant source on the pre-Hispanic and early colonial Aztec (Mexica) world. In Mexico today, the terms “Indigenous” and “science and technology” are rarely paired together. When they are, the latter tend to be framed as unrecoverable or irreparably damaged pre-Hispanic traditions⁠, relics confined to a static past. In Indigenous Science and Technology, McDonough works against such erroneous and racialized discourses with a focus on Nahua environmental engagements and relationalities, systems of communication, and cultural preservation and revitalization. Attention to these overlooked or obscured knowledges provides a better understanding of Nahua culture, past and present, as well as the entangled local and global histories in which they were—and are—vital actors.

This book explores the origins, process, and consequences of forty years of nearly continual political violence in southeastern Mexico. Rather than recounting the well-worn narrative of the Caste War, it focuses instead on how four decades of violence helped shape social and political institutions of the Mexican southeast. Rebellion Now and Forever looks at Yucatán's famous Caste War from the perspective of the vast majority of Hispanics and Maya peasants who did not join in the great ethnic rebellion of 1847. It shows how the history of nonrebel territory was as dramatic and as violent as the front lines of the Caste War, and of greater significance for the larger evolution of Mexican society. The work explores political violence not merely as a method and process, but also as a molder of subsequent institutions and practices.

Nahuatl Nations is a linguistic ethnography that explores the political relations between those Indigenous communities of Mexico that speak the Nahuatl language and the Mexican Nation that claims it as an important national symbol. Author Magnus Pharao Hansen studies how this relation has been shaped by history and how it plays out today in Indigenous Nahua towns, regions, and educational institutions, and in the Mexican diaspora. He argues that Indigenous languages are likely to remain vital as long as they used as languages of political community, and they also protect the community's sovereignty by functioning as a barrier that restricts access to the participation for outsiders. Semiotic sovereignty therefore becomes a key concept for understanding how Indigenous communities can maintain both their political and linguistic vitality. While the Mexican Nation seeks to expropriate Indigenous semiotic resources in order to improve its brand on an international marketplace, Indigenous communities may employ them in resistance to state domination.

The ones holding pots on their laps were called "gods of rain." They outlasted the other types and became known as "rain gods."".

The Adam and Eve narrative in Genesis 2-3 has gripped not only biblical scholars, but also theologians, artists, philosophers, and almost everyone else. In this engaging study, a master of biblical interpretation provides a close reading of the Yahwist story. As in his other works, LaCocque makes wise use of the Pseudepigrapha and rabbinic interpretations, as well as the full range of modern interpretations. Every reader will be engaged by his insights.