Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards, and the Choreography of Conquest by Paul A. Scolieri (review)

Abstract

s co li e r 1, paul a. Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards, and the Choreography of Conquest. Austin: U of Texas P, 2013. xii + 205 pp.Paul A. Scolieri's Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards and the Choreography of Conquest is a richly nuanced and well-researched study of indigenous that investigates the importance of as part of the transformation of the Aztec empire into a Spanish colony (back cover). Primarily historiographical, this work is a crucial addition to a growing field of research on indigenous performance. Scolieri's focus on stands apart from scholarship on forms of conquest performance, which tend to ignore or under-theorize the kinesthetic and choreographic aspects of indigenous favor of theorizing the of colonial governmentality. His analysis powerfully argues not only that became a key site which the European self and the Indian other were discursively produced, but that the chroniclers choreographed history the sense that they memorialized, justified, lamented, and/or denied their role the discovery, conquest and colonization of the New World through the Aztec dancing body (2).Scolieri's study is comprised of a series of five chapters spanning from the discovery period through the late sixteenth century. Each chapter considers a selection of texts that demonstrate an epistemological paradigm relation to their understanding of Aztec dance. Well aware of the limitations of terms such as dance and choreography to describe the embodied practices of indigenous people, Scolieri carefully historicizes his terms and offers the complex relationships between danza, baile, arieto, mitote, and others as they functioned epistemologically, without overplaying the alterity of indigenous practice as unknowable.His first chapter, On the Arieto, traces the emergence of writing on from the discovery period texts from Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Peter Martyr d'Anghera, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, and Bartolome de Las Casas. It is here that Scolieri confronts these chroniclers' desires to think of the arieto as a site of collective memory and history, despite the authors' lack of information about the cultural meaning of said performances. Scolieri performs his analysis of the emergence of understood as a form of knowledge through a careful genealogical analysis of how the Taino term arieto applied to culturally distinct practices by Oviedo, who used it to distinguish embodied acts that commemorate history from those that connote a 'mysterious' form of idolatry (38). As Scolieri argues, this distinction, although at times inconsistent and misinformed relation to indigenous ritual practices, nonetheless suggests that Oviedo was on the verge of articulating an early modern notion of performance (39). Las Casas's subsequent desire for the arieto to be a form dedicated to indicting Spanish atrocity is an extension of Oviedo's project. Las Casas's vagueness about the formal practices of the dances themselves is a legacy that is imparted throughout colonial sources. Scolieri's greatest contribution here is subtly imparted: that the chroniclers' desire to think of performances as being in the place of books might reflect upon contemporary scholars' desire for indigenous to stand as a form of historiography. We are, after all, just as hampered as many of the missionaries were by the lack of information about the meaning of these practices within indigenous cultures.Chapter two, and the Counterfeit Histories of Dance, traces the legacy of the texts on the Memoriales by Fray Toribio de Benevente Motolinia through subsequent histories that excerpted and modified them. In this short chapter, Scolieri first analyzes Motolinia's desire to convert indigenous into Christian practice by underscoring the indigenous people's ability to imitate and therefore adopt said practices through performance. …