Bernardino de Sahagún: First Anthropologist

Abstract

The great sixteenth-century Spanish scholar of Nahua culture and language, Franciscan fray Bernardino de Sahagún, is already famous in many circles, but he surely deserves to be better known by the public at large. This book goes far toward making his life more accessible. Readers of biographies usually want to know details of the protagonist’s life, starting with childhood, yet for many great figures of the past such details are unknown and unrecoverable. Sahagún is a prime example: we have only the barest skeleton of facts and reliable deductions for the time before he came to New Spain, based primarily on offhand remarks in his own work. León-Portilla fleshes these out by exploring the intellectual aspects of Sahagún’s home milieu and the current trends and conflicts in Spanish religion and the Franciscan order. In this way, Sahagún comes to life for us, and many of his later actions become more comprehensible. As the book progresses, it turns to the process by which Sahagún’s life work took shape. These intricate developments are set out here more clearly than in any other publication I have seen. León-Portilla does a service not only to a broader public but to experts.The book projects some balanced, subtle views on the overall nature of Sahagún and his career. Sahagún’s fascination with his subject matter has long been obvious, leading many to think that he was purely and simply a scholar of indigenous culture. Others, upon discovering his religious zeal and often harsh opinions about indigenous religion, have seen this as the “real Sahagún.” Here we see the true ambivalence of the man, sometimes holding Nahua culture up for admiration (even above the European) while at other times emerging as a narrowly partisan Franciscan and a bitter enemy of “idolatry.” Despite the subtitle of the work, León-Portilla by no means anachronistically insists on Sahagún as the “first anthropologist.” Rather, he shows that although Sahagún developed some methods anticipating those of modern ethnography, he operated within the frameworks of Christianity, the Franciscan order, and, above all, the humanistic philology of the Renaissance. His first and fruitful approach to anthropology in the modern sense resulted from the combination of a polyglot textual humanism, the rich textual tradition in Mesoamerica, his ambition to impart Christianity to a new population, and his own personal gifts and perseverance.León-Portilla provides a nuanced treatment of the relationship between Sahagún and the corpus of work he called into existence. Earlier scholarship considered him the author of all the material, including the basic Nahuatl portion. Sahagún himself gave some justification this view, but at other times he gave credit to both his Nahua aides as writers and the original Nahua informants as sources. León-Portilla not only allows a large place for indigenous expression and composition within Sahagún’s oeuvre but also distinguishes between indigenous responses to Sahagún’s direct questions and freer expressions in indigenous genres. Still, León-Portilla at times continues to use the word “author” in an unqualified way that could easily be misinterpreted.The book’s clear and comprehensive treatment of previous Sahagún scholarship and editions goes beyond informing a broader public (although perhaps veneration for pioneers in the field hindered him from making decisive distinctions at times). León-Portilla also makes recommendations for the further development of work on the Sahaguntine corpus, very aptly calling for closer attention to Sahagún’s Spanish version of his great General History as known through the Florentine Codex. I cannot fail, however, to note that no mention is made in the text or the bibliography of We People Here (University of California Press, 1993), a volume I edited and which contains (to my knowledge) the only simultaneous printed reproduction and translation of both the Spanish and the Nahuatl of a whole book of the Florentine Codex. Such editions, in which the versions in the two languages confront each other, are imperative precisely in order to proceed in the direction that the author recommends. The omission, I believe, has to do with my treatment of Book Twelve in We People Here. Through philological and other analyses I found that the book fell into two distinct parts, of which the first was more recent and more legendary. León-Portilla, in contrast, vigorously defends the traditional view that all parts of the book are the same and all equally true, and he may have thus failed to mention We People Here in order to avoid unpleasant direct controversy. So do I. Let a coming generation of rigorously analytical philologists see what they think of the matter.Meanwhile, León-Portilla has provided both general readers and specialists with the best available overview of the career and accomplishments of a giant of philology and cultural history.