Spanish Friars Research Articles

Mériter et commander

To deserve and to rule. Blood-letting rituals, penance and power among the ancient Mexicans The Spanish friars from the XVIth century translated the nahuatl words "tlamàcēhua" and "màcēhua" into « to do penance » and « to deserve », « to obtain » respectively. But these verbs were describing a deeper and more complex reality for the "Mexica". Refering to etymology, myths, historical accounts and also to iconography, the present study reconstitutes the ritual configuration that these terms truly meant and reveals clearly the essential link between blood-letting practices and political power. Finally, the investigation discloses surprising similarities between the meaning of the "Nahua" 's verbs "tlamàcēhua" and "màcēhua" and the signification of the Yucatan Classic Maya's verb "na".

Sahagún and the Transition to Modernity

There is much that is good in this book. The author’s stated intent is “to estrange the reader from Sahagún” (p. 7), replacing the familiar image of Bernardino Sahagún (ca. 1499–1590) as a kind of early modern ethnographer of indigenous central Mexico with a more historicized image of a late medieval Spanish friar obsessively groping his way towards a very limited understanding of a strange new world.In the first part of the book, Walden Browne takes issue with several “myths” of Sahagún scholarship. He argues persuasively that Sahagún was a victim not of government persecution but of government inefficiency. Sahagún’s multivolume magnum opus, the Florentine Codex, he suggests, “was not confiscated by the bureaucratic government of Philip II so that it could be destroyed” (p. 34). It was appropriated so that it could be filed with a growing mass of centralized data. It was then lost for two centuries. Browne also insists that Sahagún was not, as many Mexican scholars have claimed, “the father of modern anthropology” (p. 54). Nor was he a “Renaissance humanist” (p. 80), studying the pre-Christian cultures of Mexico much as European humanists studied the classical cultures of Europe.In fact, Browne maintains, Sahagún’s methodology was not so much chosen as thrust upon him by the conjunction of a medieval mind and a foreign culture that refused to align itself with a medieval Christian scheme of things. The first generation of Franciscans was idealistic, inclined to misread apparent similarities between Mexican and European religious customs and to assume conversion to Christianity was easily accomplished. Sahagún saw the differences. “The crisis that drives all of Sahagún’s work,” Brown proposes, “is his realization that the easy fit between Christian and Nahua customs, as reported by [Fray Toribio de] Motolinía and the rest of the first twelve Franciscans, was nothing more than a dream” (p. 110). Gathering volumes of information from elderly Nahua informants, Sahagún spent years arranging and rearranging his material into a structure modeled on such encyclopedic medieval works as Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. To the degree that he failed to reduce the Nahua world to a medieval Christian scheme of things, he inadvertently contributed to “the disintegration of the medieval world view” and the transition to “a modern view of the world” shaped not, as has been assumed, in Europe but in the Americas (pp. 8–9).Although much of this sheds fresh light, some of it smacks a little of attacks on straw men. Those who are more familiar with Sahagún’s work than with his reputation will have realized long ago that Sahagún ushers us into a world that baffles efforts to explain it in European terms. And anyone who has done graduate work recently will share the postmodern recognition that mediation of another’s words subjects them to distortion. Inga Clendinen noted a decade ago (1991) that “Sahagún’s works have fallen out of favor with scholars . . . on the grounds that they are too highly mediated, too distanced from Indian actuality” (see her Aztecs, p. 9). Browne is sometimes belatedly suspicious rather than full of fresh insight.My main complaint, however, is that Browne too often buries his insights in fashionable jargon and abstruse digressions. The book is published as part of the Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory. Written more simply and published in a less rarified context, it might have made an excellent cautionary introduction to Sahagún. As it is, it is too demanding for undergraduate students and offers less than it pretends to advanced scholars of the cultural collisions of colonial Mexico.

Hunter-gatherer complexity on the west coast of North America

The west coast of North America encompasses some of the richest and most diverse maritime environments on earth. Even in their presentday impoverished state, they support major commercial fisheries, large whale migrations and dense sea mammal populations. From the earliest days of European exploration, visitors such as the redoubtable Captain James Cook commented on the rich culture of Pacific coast peoples (Beaglehole 1967). ‘Their life may be said to comprise a constant meal,’ remarked Spanish friar Pedro Fages of the Chumash peoples of the Santa Barbara Channel in southern California. At European contact, between the 16th and 18th centuries AD, the shores of the Bering Strait, the Pacific Northwest and parts of the California coast supported elaborate, sophisticated and sedentary huntergatherer peoples. These decimated and muchchanged societies still enjoyed elaborate ceremonials and intricate social relations as late as the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when pioneer anthropologists such as Franz Boas and John Harrington worked among them. From these researches have come classic stereotypes of west coast peoples as ‘complex huntergatherer societies’, some of which were organized in powerful chiefdoms. Peoples like the Tlingit, the Kwakiutl and the Chumash have become the epitome of complex huntergatherers in many archaeologists’ eyes.

Getting under the Aztec Skin: Evangelical Theatre in the New World

In NTQ16, Adam Versényi explored the theatricality of performance rituals in pre-Columbian Latin America. Here, he takes up a line started by Robert Potter in NTQ8, and examines the way in which the Spanish mendicant friars who followed hard on the heels of Cortés adapted Aztec rituals for their own pedagogic purposes. Less expectedly, the friars were also to some extent ‘adapted by’ those rituals, in moulding a performing medium that borrowed from the medieval cycle drama, yet also anticipated the later form of the auto sacramental - and which, intriguingly, combined an expression of the internal politics of conquest with its theatricalization of Christian baptism. Adam Versényi is currently preparing a study which parallels recent developments in Liberation Theology and Liberation Theatre in Latin America.

Computer-assisted compilation of a Nahuatl dictionary

Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs and many of their neighbors, survives as the language of a million people living in Mesoamerica today. Communities of Nahuatl speakers are to be found from northern Central Mexico to El Salvador and from Vera Cruz to Michoacan. It is the best documented of all indigenous American languages. Used as a lingua franca throughout Mesoamerica during the precolumbian period of Aztec expansion and continuing as a lingua franca during most of the Spanish colonial period, Nahuatl is the language of countless local records and documents which are only now beginning to be mined for their historical and linguistic significance. At the time of the European conquest the Nahuas shared with several other Mesoamerican groups a writing system that was partially pictorial and partially syllabic. Thanks to this, they brought a ready receptivity to European alphabetic writing which the Spanish friars adapted to their language. Until recently the friars' sixteenth-century grammatical descriptions of the language and fray Alonso de Molina's dictionary of 1571 have remained the standard reference books for research in and about Nahuatl, but now modern research tools are being created for linguists, anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and lexicographers. One of them is An Analytical Dictonary of Nahuatl, which we compiled at the Linguistics Research Center of the University of Texas.

Manufacture of Mesoamerican Prismatic Blades: An Alternative Technique

Recent analyses of primary documentary sources have demonstrated that Don Crabtree's technique of prismatic blade manufacture differs significantly from that of the ancient Mexicans. The most widely known of these ethnohistoric descriptions of blademaking, as well as several previously not considered, are reevaluated and compared to the Crabtree technique. Major discrepancies between the Aztec technique and that described by Crabtree then became the focus of replication experiments. Finally, prismatic blades were successfully produced in the manner and with the tool described by the early Spanish friars.

Narcisco Durán and the Secularization of the California Missions

The secularization of the Franciscan missions is one of the most controversial problems which historians of Mexican California are called upon to interpret. This essay is an addition to the story of the secularization process in California in the hope that it will render it more complete by illuminating the mind of one of its chief protagonists, Fray Narciso Durán, the Spanish Franciscan friar who held the offices of president and commissary-prefect of the missions during the secularization controversies.

Speech to the Congress

Abstract In 1575, Martin de Rada, a Spanish friar of the order of Saint Augustine, spent two months in Fukien on a mission to obtain a secure religious and commercial footing in China. Though futile, his mission made a lasting mark in history by his report, from which an excerpt concerning women is reproduced here.

A Spanish Sidelight on “Siamese” White and Francis Davenport

A brief but interesting glimpse of Samuel White, the Shāhbandar of Mergui, and of his secretary Francis Davenport, is afforded in the account of a Spanish friar who saw them twice in 1687, travelled with them to Madras after their flight from Mergui, and claimed to have converted Davenport to Catholicism.

The Terra Australis–A Franciscan Quest

The Story of the Franciscan friars who sailed with the Mendaña (1567) and Quirós (1605) expeditions from Callao, Port of Lima in Peru, in search of the Unknown Southland, finds a place in the vast missionary enterprise of the Spanish Friars of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: as maritime expeditions they form important links in the chain of discoveries that eventually led to the finding of Australia; as religious enterprises they are part of the world-wide missionary apostolate of the Franciscan Order of that period.

The Terra Australis–A Franciscan Quest

The Story of the Franciscan friars who sailed with the Mendaña (1567) and Quirós (1605) expeditions from Callao, Port of Lima in Peru, in search of the Unknown Southland, finds a place in the vast missionary enterprise of the Spanish Friars of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: as maritime expeditions they form important links in the chain of discoveries that eventually led to the finding of Australia; as religious enterprises they are part of the world-wide missionary apostolate of the Franciscan Order of that period.

Geographical Notes

AFRICA.—M. F. Deloncle, a member of the Geographical Society of Lyons, has recently translated into French a remarkably interesting itinerary of the voyages made by a Spanish friar in the middle of the fourteenth century. The work was originally written in the Catalonian dialect and devoted chiefly to travels in Africa.