Indigenous Elites Research Articles

Colonial States, Colonial Rule, Colonial Governmentalities: Implications for the Study of Historical State Crime

The colonial state has been an object of intense study and debate among historians and postcolonial scholars. In this special issue, devoted to questions of colonial state crime, I consider the utility of the colonial state as a conceptual and analytic category for state crime scholars. Focusing upon European colonialism in South Asia, the article first examines definitional problems: within what normative parameters might colonial state behaviour be understood and, thus, its transgressions and crimes registered? I then move to consider two contrasting schools of historiography and their difficulties in settling upon some agreed view of how colonizing foreigners connected with indigenous elites and masses to develop and implement strategies of rule. I suggest that the concept of a colonial state, to which culpability for state crimes may be ascribed, is a chimera and of limited use today. Instead, I describe a model of colonial governmentality and, through a case study of mass famine death, illustrate both its strengths and weaknesses for making sense of how such tragedies occurred and thus how insights from the historical field might improve our understanding of modern and postcolonial states today.

Invisible men: mobility and political change on the frontier of late Roman Africa

The political hierarchies that developed in North Africa in the post‐Roman period have traditionally been ascribed either to invading groups from the Sahara, or to indigenous elites who transformed their political authority to respond to changing circumstances. The present article suggests that such interpretations have neglected the role played by seasonal pastoralists within the emergence of these new polities. Human mobility was a crucial feature of the late antique Maghreb, as analysis of the later Roman frontier system reveals. Equally, contemporary anthropological scholarship emphasizes the influence that mobile groups can have in periods of social and political upheaval and their capacity for hierarchical stratification. The article offers two brief case studies, and argues that Antalas, leader of the ‘Frexes’ in southern Byzacena, and the occupants of the ‘Djedar’ tumulus mausolea near Tiaret, are best viewed as products of a mobile society.

Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800, by Peter B. Villella

Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800, by Peter B. Villella

Native Continuities in Colonial Mexico

Native Continuities in Colonial Mexico Mónica Díaz (bio) The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City barbara mundy Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015 256 pp. Honor and Personhood in Early Modern Mexico osvaldo f. pardo Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015 248 pp. Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500−1800 peter villella Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016 368 pp. Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico amber brian Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press 2016 208 pp. The way in which scholars approach early modern Mexican culture and history has changed considerably over the years, due in part to the sources upon which they rely. The influence of theoretical methodologies that questioned master narratives of conquest and Eurocentric notions of literacy during the 1980s and '90s allowed for the study and discovery of previously unacknowledged sources mainly produced by indigenous peoples. The work of ethnohistorians, and particularly those working in the New Philology led by James Lockhart, has made a lasting impact on the way scholars in the humanities and social sciences approach and write about indigenous peoples' cultures and histories in the Americas.1 The four [End Page 539] books reviewed here attest to the fact that those trends are still current and are also good examples of the groundbreaking scholarship that is being produced about early modern Mexico. They have all been influenced in one way or another by the aforementioned changes in methodological research, which is evident by the central role that native knowledge plays in their intellectual inquiry. All four books are openly and consciously aiming at revising well-established historiographical paradigms and offering alternative and more nuanced readings of dominant historiographical narratives about Mexico and its people. Each author's work is clearly informed by his or her own academic discipline, but they all have an interdisciplinary take on the materials and the methods they use in their analysis. Barbara Mundy's book is openly grounded within the discipline of art history, yet she reads a variety of materials that range from native codices to maps, sculpture, and manuscripts in indigenous languages; and she analyzes them from the perspective of theories of space, producing a highly engaging book that crosses disciplinary boundaries. The same can be said about Amber Brian's and Osvaldo Pardo's work. While informed by their training as literary scholars, both Brian and Pardo use ethnohistorical methods and place archival research at the center of their analytical endeavors. They not only carry out close readings of primary materials but more importantly they place them within a sociohistorical context to provide a much more complex picture of the cultural dynamics of the time they study. Working from the discipline of history, Peter Villella also engages in cultural readings of archival materials, and he analyzes more traditional indigenous historiographical accounts, usually studied by literary critics, in tandem with documents of a bureaucratic nature. He attends to discourse analysis in the sources he studies, and pays special attention to uses of language and rhetoric. Through their interdisciplinarity, these authors draw connections between documents, colonial subjects, and European actors to make evident the network of intellectual relationships that existed and the implications that this had in the making of early modern Mexico. ________ Several parallels can be drawn between the four books under review; however, the most salient one is their argument for the continuity of a significant and active indigenous presence throughout the colonial period, in clear opposition to more traditional historiographical narratives that emphasize [End Page 540] rupture with the native past. This dominant line of historiography has emphasized the losses that many indigenous groups experienced after succumbing to European colonial power. Its focus has been to identify instances of resistance and to chart the survival of "authentic" aspects of native culture. In general, the dominant narrative has been to recognize a tenuous indigenous elite that faded away by the end of the seventeenth century, and the absorption and later interpretation of indigenous knowledge by a cadre of Creoles and mestizos. However, the books reviewed here offer a more nuanced narrative, one that allows for the prevalence of indigenous groups...

Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800

Peter Villella has provided a welcome addition to the scholarly literature with this longue durée intellectual-cultural history. North American Anglophone scholarship on indigenous histories of Latin America have focused heavily on responses to Spanish rule and Spanish culture. This book seeks to understand, rather, the multidirectional processes of identity formation—Spanish, indigenous, mestizo—in Mexico. In the author’s words, the book “is not a story of one-way memory transmission, but rather of resonance, dialogues, intersections and parallels. The cacique agenda of self-fashioning developed in tandem with creole historiography” (5). Solange Alberro explored similar themes—of the uses by creoles of a heroic indigenous past—in her works Del gachupin al criollo and El águila y la cruz. But Villella’s work is among the first English-language studies to provide a comprehensive analysis of the confluence of indigenous elite self-fashioning and creole constructions of a uniquely Mexican cultural consciousness. To that end, the book offers a geographic complement to the recent (2014) study by Danna Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of New Mexico.Elegantly written, deeply researched, and offering an impressive sweep of three centuries, Villella’s book explains how the construction of Mexican historical identities was a complex process of “negotiation within domination” (20), a phrase associated with the book by the same name edited by Ethelia Ruiz-Medrano and Susan Kellogg. Methodologically, this book offers much to consider but most impressive is its wide-ranging use of sources. Unlike many intellectual histories, this book analyzes printed sources but also legal disputes, cacique appeals to the crown, genealogies, and archival material related to negotiation of indigenous privileges.The book begins with the earliest efforts of indigenous caciques to assert their traditional rights as pipiltin, or aristocratic elites. The book then moves from the 1530s through the earliest parts of the nineteenth century. The range of the book is impressive in itself, but it is the execution that impresses the most. Unlike some intellectual histories, Villella’s book moves at a brisk stylistic pace without sacrificing quality analysis. It is, in short, a deeply satisfying book to read.The book has a compelling organization that facilitates its reading. Each chapter takes up a thematic and chronological question. Chapter 2 examines the ways that indigenous caciques who asserted titles and rights placed themselves within the Spanish regalist system as legitimate aristocrats. These caciques stressed the “primordiality of their legacies, their steadfast fealty to the Spanish monarch, and their impeccable Christian orthodoxy” (48). Chapter 3 analyzes the development of Spanish texts about indigenous history from the 1530s to the 1580s, emphasizing the role played by cacique informants in that process. Villella thus places the most famous of these projects, Sahagún’s Florentine Codex, within this broader historiographic process.Remaining chapters follow the decline of the indigenous nobility and the rise of an explicitly Mexican historical-cultural consciousness, even if Villella does not use those precise terms. Chapter 4 discusses “cacique-chroniclers,” the best-known of whom is Fernando de Alva Ixtlixochitl. The study links this tradition with the emergence of creole historiography, notably in the case of Torquemada’s Monarquía Indiana. Chapter 5, focused on the seventeenth century, explains the development of “cacique-hidalgos” especially in light of a growing creole appreciation for the importance of ancient Mexico for the developing baroque cultural consciousness. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora takes center stage in this self-conscious cultural identity formation. Chapter 6 is focused on the ways that Catholicism was promoted by both creoles and caciques as a strategy of “baroque-era myth-making asserting political and genealogical continuities between New Spain and the native civilizations that preceded it” (187–88). Jesuit Francisco Florencia and doña Beatriz de Tapia (descendant of Otomí conquistadors) figure prominently in this discussion. Chapters 7 and 8 follow the story through the end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, reflecting on the ultimate demise of indigenous cacique power in the context of the ultimate Mexicanization of religion and culture.More tightly focused on a specific theme of intellectual-cultural history, the book nevertheless has echoes of The First America, David Brading’s monumental study of creole political consciousness. Even if the latter is more concerned with creoles, Villella’s study seeks to examine the multidirectional process of intellectual and religious acculturation on a multiethnic front. This is an important new kind of intellectual history that helps us to understand the mutual processes of cultural identities forged by indigenous elites and creole sympathizers with indigenous society. Given its felicitous style, the book will find a wide audience—from professional historians to graduate students to undergraduate students and, dare I say it, to lay readers as well.

Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800

Almost six decades ago, Charles Gibson applied his characteristic economy to the task of tracing the trajectory of the Aztec aristocracy through the colonial era. The unique path of this social group led from early and successful attempts to preserve social and economic status to an eventual decline brought about by factors including tributary policies adopted in response to demographic collapse in the sixteenth century. With the exception of Tlaxcala, where cacique families enjoyed remarkable continuity in government well into the eighteenth century, the fate of the Aztec nobility was largely sealed during the first century of Spanish presence.In his engaging and comprehensive Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800, Professor Peter Villella takes the reader beyond this well-established narrative to examine the conditions and strategies that allowed generations of indigenous noble families from diverse ethnic groups to preserve some recognizable guise of their original status under increasingly adverse circumstances. The author painstakingly shows how the Indian nobility developed and exploited its ties to sectors of a creole elite that was still finding its footing in colonial society. Whether through cooperation or rivalry, native and creole elites came to depend on and borrow from each other as they forged their respective self-images and promoted their own agendas. This mutual dependence is evident in each group's use of the indigenous past in its ongoing attempts to legitimize its social place.Borrowing early on from Spanish legal traditions, indigenous elites developed a rhetoric of self-presentation based on exaltation of their lineages, allegiance to the crown, and devotion to Christianity. With slight variations, these basic themes would remain a fixture of arguments that Indian litigants and petitioners made to colonial authorities. For their part, Spaniards who married into the Indian nobility saw the indigenous past as a source of prestige and legitimacy, even when the family in question preserved few if any local cultural traditions. Beginning just after the fall of Tenochtitlan and continuing through and beyond the colonial era, both creoles and Indians revisited the past in response to real or perceived social challenges. This long process gave rise to an impressive corpus of historical writings that reflects the active collaboration of indigenous writers, friars, and creole intellectuals. Professor Villella thus invites us to view Mexican historiography as the product of a close but contentious collaboration between the indigenous nobility and the creole elite.This chronological study is divided into chapters with titles that reflect the social roles that caciques assumed at different stages of colonial history. The reader thus follows their transformation from informants on historical and cultural matters to full-fledged chroniclers and later Hispanized hidalgos, administrators, church patrons, and outspoken defenders of the dignity of indigenous people during the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century caciques occupied new places in the colonial hierarchy, and they understood two things: adaptation remained vital to their survival, and the old definitions of Indian nobility had long ago lost currency. In this sense, Professor Villella's complex account can be read as an illustration, albeit in the colonial context and with the looming presence of the creole elite, of a notion advanced by European scholars and jurists at the time—namely, that honor and nobility are largely intelligible and commensurate across cultures.Specialized readers will be familiar with some of the documentary sources, episodes, and historical characters that Professor Villella introduces in this book, an unavoidable byproduct of the combination of synthesis and original research (a combination carried out here in particularly compelling fashion). Chapter 4, for example, focuses on the well-known generation of chroniclers that included Juan Bautista de Pomar, Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl. The author nonetheless brings a fresh perspective to this familiar territory, exploring the ways that these writers and public officers codified many of the themes that would eventually inform nineteenth-century Mexican nationalist thought.Professor Villella's carefully documented account of the circuitous development of Mexican nationalism seems to give David Brading's suggestions greater focus and precision. The study's generous chronological and conceptual span give Professor Villella the space to touch on numerous topics of very recent scholarship (such as honor, indigenous historiography, and Indian conquerors), a convergence that further enriches an already engaging and thought-provoking monograph. Further work remains to be done on the question of how we talk about the indigenous elite in eighteenth-century Mexico, especially when we include a creole counterpart that had already acquired a rather different configuration. Professor Villella's welcome scholarly contribution will surely encourage further research on this and other aspects of the historical evolution of native elites across colonial Latin America.

Festivals and Daily Life in the Arts of Colonial Latin America, 1492–1850: Papers from the 2012 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum

The eight papers in this volume are a welcome addition to the growing literature on festivals, domestic life, and material culture in colonial Latin America. Several of the papers are primarily descriptive, though thoroughly researched. The foreword does not provide much of an interpretive framework for the selection of papers, which are simply divided into two groups: the first dealing with festivals and the second with daily life. It is, however, possible to divide the papers into two groups based on the types of sources the scholars consult and privilege, and the sorts of discourses they identify. The first group identifies the hegemonic narratives expressed by Spanish governors and culture makers in the New World. The second group of papers, likely of more interest to the readers of this journal, delves into more complicated territory and searches for the subaltern and hybrid narratives embedded in colonial and national discourses and expressed in festivals and other forms of visual culture.The papers in the first group rely largely on written reports and visual records created by Spaniards and creoles to document events occurring in the New World colonies; often these records were created to be sent back to Spain. Gustavo Curiel catalogues the extensive mourning rites held in Mexico City to observe the death of Philip IV in 1665, which he asserts were calculated to express utmost loyalty and defend the interest of the Crown. Beatriz Berndt shows that similar sentiments were articulated more than a century later, when government buildings of the same city were outfitted with temporary facades to celebrate the accession of the new king, Charles IV of Bourbon. While other recent scholarship on Spanish American festivals has identified the specifically “Habsburg” and “Bourbon” characteristics of these pageants, the aforementioned selections as well as Kelly Donahue-Wallace’s chapter on festivals held by the Royal Academy of San Carlos (founded in 1783) show that there was a shared festival culture throughout the colonial period. Even Enlightenment institutions like the Academy, created with the intent to reform the art of Mexico in favor of a more classical (and less baroque) style, harkened back to previous state-sponsored festivals for legitimacy. More local festivals, such as those dedicated to St. Joseph the patriarch in Puebla, Mexico, were also calculated to bolster the legitimacy of the colonial government, as is shown by Frances Ramos. In the arena of fashion or vernacular dress, Susan Socolow shows that women’s clothing in Buenos Aires followed European norms and reflected colonial social hierarchies. Yet she declines to problematize the notion of fashion, which could be juxtaposed with the perceived “traditional” nature of indigenous dress.The second group of papers does go further, first with Barbara Mundy’s foray into the indigenous dances, or mitotes, performed at religious and civic events in early colonial Mexico City. As illustrated in the Tlatelolco Codex (ca. 1560), such dances were even performed at the jura, or oath of allegiance to the king of Spain (specifically that made to Philip II in 1557). Dancers wore feathered costumes redolent with pre-Hispanic associations and danced in the name of indigenous elites who jockeyed for power under colonial rule. Yet the costumes had been altered from their earlier forms, and their meanings were also altered by the new colonial situation in which they operated. Such was also the case with the butaca, a hybrid invention in domestic furniture that Jorge Rivas-Pérez shows was based on both the pre-Columbian Caribbean stool (duho) and the Spanish folding chair (silla de caderas). The ritual and authoritarian associations of the earlier seats largely fell away, while the form of the low inclined chair took on connotations of domestic ease in the colonial environment. Lastly, Alexandra Kennedy-Troya’s article delves into the meanings of costumbrista illustration (images of indigenous “types” in typical dress) in the post-independence era. She contrasts the original, nineteenth-century meanings of a set of watercolors with their probable significance as a collection in the early twentieth century. She asserts that the illustrations no longer served as souvenirs of a past (colonial) era but became elements of a burgeoning national identity that attempted to recognize and rectify the status of indigenous peoples.

Haveli: A Cinematic Topos

The vernacular architectural style of the haveli in India is defined by social historian Sarah Tillotson as a “distinguishable type of inward looking courtyard house” prevalent in precolonial North India. Havelis lost their ability to function as efficient domiciles with the decline of the Mughal empire, under which a hierarchical, patriarchal system of aristocratic patronage and indirect landownership once flourished, to be replaced by indigenous bureaucratic elites as well as subservient princely states suited to British imperialism. The ability of wealthy families to sustain extended communities overseen by the haveli's amir (overlord) dissipated with the declining financial and social powers of the Mughal emperor, and India's many regents and noblemen. Since the mid-twentieth century, havelis largely populate the nation's landscape as heritage sites or decaying buildings parceled out among multiple owners. Studied by anthropologists and architectural historians as signs and ruins of another era, havelis and the lifestyle associated with them have nevertheless been kept alive for popular audiences by novels, television, and, most prominently, commercially successful Hindi films. Popular postindependence Hindi-Urdu films such as Madhumati (1958), Sahib bibi aur ghulam (1962), Bahu begum (1967), Lal patthar (1971), Kudrat (1981), Bees Saal baad (1988), and Purani haveli (1989), among others, have endowed havelis with an affective life that creatively processes and reflects on the structure's material decline, by using architectural form as a trigger point for emotions about the changing role of class, religion, and gender in the biography of a modern nation. The films scramble history and erase India's colonial period, which was historically central to the haveli's decline as an architectural hub of cities. Faced with such a hermeneutic, a historian's attention is drawn away from the logic of causality to the logic of signification, to understand what misalignments of time have meant in the popular imagination of an architectural form. This article recuperates the omitted middle of British colonialism to reveal how ruptures from a sense of continuous time produced this cinematic imagination of a place to write a critical historiography of affective space in cinema.

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and the Mexican Archive

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and the Mexican Archive Jason Dyck Idea of a New General History of North America: An account of colonial Native Mexico By Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci. Translated and edited by Stafford Poole. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial MexicoBy Amber Brian. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016. Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and His Legacy Edited by Galen Brokaw and Jongsoo Lee. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2016. Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800 By Peter B. Villella. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Portraits of colonial scholars in New Spain often depict Spanish and Creole men surrounded by books and manuscripts.1 With quill in hand they are poised to pen the history of America on European paper by candle light. Generations of historians have closely followed this image by imagining colonial intellectuals—normally cloaked in religious habits—as bookish men and antiquarians ensconced in their convent and college libraries. But do the printed and unedited materials surrounding these men offer an alternative vision of scholarly activity in New Spain? The four books under review complicate traditional views of colonial scholars by recognizing the collaborative process of intellectual production and the formation of personal archives. They provide the context in which some of these collections were compiled and their link to the development of both Creole patriotism and Mexican nationalism. They convincingly demonstrate that Creole discourses were not entirely their own but that they were shared narratives with the multiethnic populace. A central figure in the development of colonial archives was Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578–1650), a local governor, interpreter in the Real Audiencia (High Court) and colonial historian of mixed racial background from San Juan Teotihuacan with links to the Tetzcocan nobility. He plays a key role in all four books under review and is the primary focus of Amber Brian's Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico. According to Brian, so-called Native and Mestizo historians have been unjustly marginalized in the "lettered city,"2 both supposedly developing a "vision of the vanquished"3 that was entirely distinct from the cultural patriotism of creoles and other Spanish émigrés. Her goal is to diversify the scholarly community of New Spain by focusing on what she calls the "colonial economy of letters" (10), by which she means the social networks, exchanges and dialogues taking place between intellectuals of all socioracial backgrounds. To understand the collaborative endeavours of viceregal times, she centres on a key event in the development of creole patriotism: the transition of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's "native archive" to Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora's (1645–1700) "creole archive." What is in this archive and how was it compiled? Brian defines the "native archive" as "knowledge native communities collected in an effort to preserve their connection to the pre-Hispanic past in the context of European domination" (14). Alva Ixtlilxochitl, then, was a "material keeper of the historical record" (24) who acquired alphabetic and pictographic texts. His archive of manuscripts was inherited by his son Juan de Alva Cortés (b. 1624) who, in turn, gave it as a gift to Sigüenza y Góngora, a Creole savant deeply interested in the pre-Hispanic past. Upon his death, Sigüenza y Góngora entrusted Alva Ixtlilxochitl's collection to the Jesuit college of San Pablo y San Pedro, which the Jesuits eventually transferred to their other Mexico City college of San Ildefonso. By the early nineteenth century Alva Ixtlilxochitl's writings and collected documents had been dispersed to various parts of the world, forcing Creoles to work with transcriptions the Milanese scholar Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci (1698–1755) had made at San Pablo y San Pedro in the eighteenth century. This "native archive" was used by Creole patriots to write the history of New Spain and is among the most important collections for scholars of central Mexico today. It is impossible to know the extent of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's "native archive," but the original documents Boturini worked with were discovered in three vellum-bound volumes in the library...

The Post-Enlightenment Moral Crisis and the Emergence of Secular Tyranny in the Middle East

This article explores humanity’s ethical transformation during Europe’s post-Enlightenment era and assesses its impact upon the originsand development of secularism. Thereafter, it investigates how secularism was introduced into the Middle East, isolating that importation as directed through western colonialism or spellbound indigenous elites. Eventually, introducing secularism into the region’s socio-cultural milieu achieved nothing resembling what Europe or North America had experienced, particularly as regards the purported aims of social reconciliation, industrialization, and modernization. Without the European context, secularism emerged in a radically offensive manner, one that uprooted the local axiology and thereby leading to unprecedented levels of secular tyranny as well as entailing the justification of socio-economic and political oppression.

The Post-Enlightenment Moral Crisis and the Emergence of Secular Tyranny in the Middle East

This article explores humanity’s ethical transformation during Europe’s post-Enlightenment era and assesses its impact upon the originsand development of secularism. Thereafter, it investigates how secularism was introduced into the Middle East, isolating that importation as directed through western colonialism or spellbound indigenous elites. Eventually, introducing secularism into the region’s socio-cultural milieu achieved nothing resembling what Europe or North America had experienced, particularly as regards the purported aims of social reconciliation, industrialization, and modernization. Without the European context, secularism emerged in a radically offensive manner, one that uprooted the local axiology and thereby leading to unprecedented levels of secular tyranny as well as entailing the justification of socio-economic and political oppression.

Writing Pre-Hispanic History in Viceregal Peru: The Dynastic Iconography of the Inca Kings

This essay discusses the ways in which the indigenous elites of viceregal Peru fabricated Inca history through visual representations of their kings, giving shape to an Andean identity that adapted to the ideological demands of the colonial society while at the same time defying them. Images of the Inca dynasty were an essential part of the indigenous Peruvians’ attempt to challenge, intellectually and socially, the definition of Andeans as “Indians,” a colonial legal concept that signified cultural inferiority. In this process the indigenous noblemen, especially those living in Lima, who presented themselves as representatives of a united “Andean front” refashioned the official iconography of the Inca dynasty. This had been created in the 1570s under the auspices of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo who portrayed the Incas as devil-worshipping, tyrannical sovereigns in order to legitimize the Spanish conquest. Audacious neo-Incan effigies were created with specific references to Christian and classical iconographic prototypes, such as the Resurrected Christ, Saint John the Baptist, and Saint Michael the Archangel in order to present the Indian nation as a viable political and Christian community.

Conflictos y alianzas en tiempos de cambio: Azcapotzalco, Tlacopan, Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco (siglos XII–XVI)

In Conflictos y alianzas María Castañeda de la Paz unravels the political and dynastic histories of the Mexica and the Tepaneca, two of the largest and most powerful ancestral groups among the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of Late Postclassic and early colonial Mexico. Yet this is no simple task, given the political and ethnic complexity of the Nahua world as well as the eclectic and contradictory nature of many historical sources. Beyond archaeology, much of Nahua political history is revealed in colonial-era artifacts, each requiring its own careful methodology and interpretive filter—from painted codices and pictorial manuscripts, to alphabetic texts in Spanish and Nahuatl derived from oral traditions and songs yet reflecting the influence of Spanish clergy, to colonial legal and administrative documents.It is in this regard that we should recognize Conflictos y alianzas as a considerable achievement. While “Aztec history” as a topic of inquiry is almost five centuries old, Castañeda’s project has only recently become possible, as it synthesizes the insights of two largely discrete traditions in contemporary Mesoamericanist research. The first involves the interpretation of Nahua codices and pictorial texts, most of which show the political interests and genealogical concerns of indigenous elites. This requires not only translation but also recontextualization, as the corpus is highly fragmented, often rendering opaque both the circumstances of a text’s production and its relationship to other records. The second is postconquest Nahua ethnohistory, which has revealed much about the shape and trajectory of Nahua society and culture before and after the arrival of Spanish conquerors. By uniting both, Castañeda effectively traces central Mexican political history by way of the diplomatic and dynastic pursuits of the most important scions of the Tepaneca and Mexica ruling lineages.Conflictos y alianzas tells at least four overlapping stories. First, it is one of the few political histories of the Nahuas that straddle the 1521 Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan, drawing on recent ethnohistorical research uncovering the initial continuity of some Nahua political and diplomatic relationships into the colonial era. Second, it is an intimate history of four Nahua dynasties and their postconquest heirs: their victories, their entanglements, and their struggles. Third, it is by necessity a mapping and a genealogy of the sources themselves, which present enormous problems of interpretation. Castañeda carefully reveals the common origins of many seemingly discrete colonial sources and traces their links to the political and legal activities of contemporary noble families. As such sources frequently contradict one another, Castañeda notes the disagreements and weighs them transparently; even as this adds heft and narrative complexity to the book, it discloses broader truths about the ethnic and dynastic structures of the Nahua world, as well as illustrating how such legacies inflected indigenous politics and memories into the colonial era. In the process Castañeda corrects historical errors in the interpretation of certain codices, exposing instances in which misunderstandings persisted for centuries. Finally, a running endeavor in Conflictos y alianzas reverse engineers the development of many discrete Tepaneca and Mexica enclaves by way of their modern footprints, such as the boundaries and place-names of the parishes and neighborhoods of today’s Mexico City.As a multidisciplinary political history, a dynastic and genealogical history, and a comparative interpretation of the Nahua pictorial archive, Conflictos y alianzas most directly pertains to experts and scholars of Mesoamerica and colonial Mexico. Yet by systematically integrating such a broad variety of indigenous sources, it will also become a new reference about the empires of Late Postclassic central Mexico, their leaders, their colonial-era descendants, and the pictorial histories they produced.

Architectures émergentes à El Alto (Bolivie): essai d’interprétation sociologique

This article applies Bourdieu’s analysis of the formation of the “scholastic habitus” in medieval times, elaborated in his 1967 afterword to his French translation of Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (2005 [1967]), to a different historical case and social context, namely the correspondence between indigenous mental categories and architectural efflorescence in a city of the contemporary Andes: El Alto. This same principle of homology between mental categories and building layout (rooted in a common habitus) can be used to interpret one of the most spectacular characteristics of “emerging architectures” known as chalets in Bolivia. The term chalet designates a hybrid structure consisting of a penthouse and storey dwelling built on the rooftops. The chalets are architectural forms embedded within an economy of symbolic goods characterized by a “dual truth”: they are at once material and symbolic; they perform economic functions while at the same time seeking conspicuous exposure and public visibility. The hypothesis developed here is that the conspicuous lifestyle revealed by the construction of chalets on the rooftops can be understood by reference to the emerging social power of the indigenous (cholos) elites. This article thus identifies in the fraternities of El Alto the structural equivalent of the scholastic institution that Bourdieu associated with Gothic architecture, in order to reveal the formation of a specific habitus, shared among urban categories defined by similar residential locations, economic activities and forms of collective organization.

Philippine Indios in the Service of Empire: Indigenous Soldiers and Contingent Loyalty, 1600–1700

Abstract Philippine indios served in the Spanish armies in the thousands in expeditions of conquest and defense across Spain’s Pacific possessions, often significantly outnumbering their Spanish counterparts. Based on detailed archival evidence presented for the first time, this article extends the previously limited nature of our understanding of indigenous soldiers in the Spanish Pacific, focusing in particular on the problem of what motivated indigenous people to join the Spanish military. The existing historiography of reward structures among indigenous elites is here coupled with an analysis of the way in which military service intersected with other forms of coerced labor among nonelite Philippine indios. An understanding of pre-Hispanic cultures of warfare and debt servitude helps make the case that many indigenous soldiers were pushed into military service as a way of paying off debts or to avoid other forms of forced labor. Thus indigenous participation in the empire was always tenuous and on the brink of breaking down.

Fitzpatrick-McKinley's "Empire, Power and Indigenous Elites: A Case Study of the Nehemiah Memoir" (Book Review)

Fitzpatrick-McKinley's "Empire, Power and Indigenous Elites: A Case Study of the Nehemiah Memoir" (Book Review)

Between hearts and minds: The relevance of the British colonial experience to contemporary Russian counter-insurgencies in the North Caucasus

Although Russian authorities point to the supposed success of Britain’s late colonial counter-insurgency campaigns as a model even in the 21st century, their grasp of the historical lessons is partial at best. This article considers the applicability and relevance of the counter-insurgency experience of the late British colonial state to present-day ethno-religious conflicts in the North Caucasus. The article suggests that the flexibility of British arrangements for counter-insurgency was a major factor in achieving long-term stability for the gradual transition to indigenous self-rule. The key practice was to devolve responsibility and power to indigenous elites operating with a high degree of autonomy. The article then proposes guidelines relevant to the conditions of the present and the near future that will affect prospects both for full-fledged democratization of Russia and for effective state-building, also vitally important for the development of the North Caucasus. The article concludes that the most relevant factor in the British counter-insurgency experience is to win the hearts and minds of the population. However, this cannot be achieved without a legitimate indigenous administration capable of taking full responsibility and ownership of the campaign. Otherwise, diminished political access and accountability create propitious conditions for adherents of radical movements, who are increasingly capable of and prepared to use violence and who are the only de facto rival political forces within the Russian Federation.

La jeunesse en mouvement : Scouts et guides en Malaisie britannique (1910-1966)

This thesis examines the paradoxical role of youth movements such as Scouting and Guiding in British Malaya. Initially conceived in England in 1907 and 1910 to toughen and to prepare British youths for their roles as ‘bricks in the wall of Empire’, Scouting and Guiding were thus instruments of colonialism. Yet both movements quickly expanded beyond the metropole and into the colonies, where they thrived and flourished on a global scale, enjoying immense popularity amongst indigenous parents and children alike. Indeed, in Malaya, both youth movements outlasted colonialism. Both continue to be popular in the post-colonial era, as the newly independent states of Malaysia and Singapore (former British Malaya) have also re-appropriated the movements for their own nationalistic agendas of ‘social engineering’ and ‘nation-building’. Why is this so? Is this an example of the effects of ‘soft power’, whereby Scouting and Guiding effectively served imperial agendas by being a cultural heavyweight in post-independent Southeast Asia? Or, conversely, have both movements actually facilitated decolonisation? For instance, as both movements advocated equality amongst all members (colonial/colonised), were the lines of established hierarchy between ‘European’ and ‘Native’ communities compromised as a result? More crucially, the Scout and Guide philosophy of ‘independence’ and emphasis on ‘good citizenship’ could have also been subverted against the colonial agenda by indigenous nationalists. As such, to what extent were the boundaries between ruler and ruled constantly (re)-defined by these organisations? How can we understand the impact of these global youth movements upon Malaya and British imperialism at large? In order to address these questions, this thematically-organised thesis argues that Scouting and Guiding played a key role in the political, social and cultural history of childhood and youth in British Malaya in four main ways. First, it illustrates how Scouting and Guiding served Malayan youths as a platform for social mobility, by allowing them to climb the imperial social ladder of Malaya’s highly stratified colonial society. Second, this thesis delves into the long-term impact of Scouting and Guiding upon the construction and conception of indigenous childhood in Malaya. In this chapter, it argues that Scouting and Guiding introduced alternative forms of boyhood and girlhood which promoted childhood as a ‘carefree’, playful, idyllic and leisurely period – as opposed to more ‘traditional’ forms of indigenous childhood, in which children were married at a young age and where economic realities obliged local children to work. The third section of this thesis adopts a wider, more global perspective of the impact of Scouting and Guiding upon Malaya by arguing that both movements – contrary to established or received assumptions – were organisations shaped by extra-European cultures with the active participation of indigenous elites acting with and alongside their European counterparts from its very inception. To illustrate this point, this chapter shows how European Scouting adapted African (Zulu) and Native American (e.g. Sioux) cultures – collectively labelled as ‘martial tribes’ – into their central pedagogical tool of role-playing to physically strengthen European boys. In return, elite indigenous Malayan Scouts played ‘Zulu’ or ‘Indian’ alongside their European counterparts, but in order to mimic ‘European’ masculinities. These multi-cultural exchanges and re-appropriations by European and extra-European actors illustrate their interdependency in power relations, and it is key to understanding the flexibility of both youth movements as tools for different communities. The fourth part of this thesis focuses on another example of the re-appropriations of Scouting and Guiding in Malaya by delving into the context of the Malayan Emergency (1948 – 1960). It illustrates how local nationalists, Malayan communists and British colonials each sought to use Scouting and Guiding as political instruments to win over indigenous youth in the tumultuous post-war era, thus showing how different political actors established, endorsed and set the stage for Scouting and Guiding as premier movements for Malayan youths in the post-colonial era. By drawing upon a wide range of archival sources such as colonial records and over 950 hours of oral accounts of Malayan Scouts and Guides, this thesis seeks to draw attention towards colonial histories of indigenous youth and childhood. Situated within current historical concerns of gender and childhood in colonialism, this thesis aims to contribute towards on-going debates on a relatively recent area of research in imperial history by emerging with a deeper understanding of youth movements as a historical and global phenomena in its colonial past and post-colonial present.

The “Little Doctrine” And Indigenous Catechesis in New Spain

This paper traces the history of a catechetical quiz widely used in colonial New Spain. A succinct summary of Jerónimo de Ripalda's catechism directed at less “capable” Christians, the text makes its first appearance in works published in the 1630s by secular clergy posted in indigenous communities. Jesuit father Bartolomé Castaño, laboring in the colony's northern missions, published the questionnaire's most frequently repeated version in 1644. Renditions in Spanish and in 11 (or more) native languages vary somewhat in the number of questions and the exact questions asked, but a large number of shared questions, presented in the same order, allow the versions to be treated as variants of a single text, which I here call the “Little Doctrine.” That this seventeenth-century text is a standard component of pictographic catechisms calls into question the conventional placement of these pictorial manuscripts into the evangelical tool kit. I here propose a later origin for the genre, as one of the legitimating strategies pursued by indigenous elites in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I suggest that pictographic catechisms supported elites' claims that they accepted Christianity immediately upon the arrival of the friars, learning doctrine in pictographic writing because they had not yet adopted alphabetic script. I compare pictographic versions of the text with alphabetic ones and note how indigenous artists transformed a text intended for “crude” native people into a testimony to the wisdom and faith of their picture-literate conquest-era ancestors.

Wenkai He. Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: England, Japan, and China.

Wenkai He. Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: England, Japan, and China.