Social Reproduction of Late Postclassic Ritual Practices in Early Colonial Central México

Notes

1. In any case, according to the findings of Gruzinski 1993 and to the three-tiered development of Náhuatl legal texts and wills advocated by Lockhart 1992, one would expect this period to be important for the appropriation of writing and the transformation of native-language lexicons in Central México.

2. López Austin (1966, 1967a, 1967b) claims this incantation was the one used by the infamous temacpalihtotiqueh, the thieving Aztec hypnotists described by Sahagún (Anderson & Dibble 1979).

3. This semantic content may refer to the piciyetl’s association with the presence of nine tiers in the Nahua cosmos (López Austin 1973).

4. Another relevant example is Codex Indiarorum 7 of the John Carter Brown Library. While it contains a collection of Náhuatl devotional texts which belonged to a confraternity located in the Valley of México at the close of the sixteenth century, the volume also features a Náhuatl version of the voyages of Saint Amaro (Burkhart 1995).

5. An English translation of the Saint Amaro text is given in Burkhart 1995.

6. A facsimilar reproduction of this manuscript was apparently published under the title Ayer MS Planetary Calendar en Lengua Náhuatl del año 1639 by the Maya Society (Publication 17, Baltimore, 1935). A photographic reproduction of uneven quality is kept at the Newberry Library as Ayer MS 1675.

7. There exist many examples of the genre; a good one is d. 22715 Cluny, a 15^th-century book of hours featuring illuminated miniatures at the Musée de Cluny in Paris.

8. For example, "San Francisco" is represented with an adobe wall (xan-), a flag (pan-), a pair of buttocks (tzin-), and an earthen pot (co[m]-).  For further discussion, see Galarza 1979.

9. My translation departs slightly from that of Anderson (Schroeder 1997: 129) because I read the beginning of Chimalpahin’s explanation of Geminis as Ipãn quicuepa in ilhuica[tla]matinimeh…, rather than as Ipãn quicuepa in ilhuicamatinimeh…, which does not seem to contain the verbal compound ahquimatih, "they do not know it," implied in Anderson’s reading. Molina (1992: 37v) translates Ilhuicatlamatini as "astrologer."

10. A translation of the above selection from Fonds Mexicain 381 would be: "Sunday. The planets follow below. First, grammar, a true lord. Monday. The second mercielo [heaven?] planets [sic], which is the moon, and is located in [this heaven]. Sterile. Tuesday. The third ytel marius [Mars?]. Third planets [sic] knight. Wednesday. The second heaven ytel [?] Mercury, which is planets [sic]. The healer will go."

11. The words in italics appear as Spanish or Latin terms in the original text.

12. This is an assumption made also by Alcina Franch (1993).

13. Due to the relative abundance of legal texts written in Nahua communities in Tlaxcala and in the Valley of México, researchers have privileged the study of these texts in historical surveys about the spread of literacy in Central México (Karttunen and Lockhart 1976, Lockhart 1992).

14. Derrida’s theory of logocentrism and about the radical difference between orality and the written sign rests on a Heideggerian survey of the properties of writing that goes from Plato’s Phaedrus to Rousseau’s Essai sur l’Origine des Langues (Derrida 1967). However, one of Derrida’s crucial assumptions–the absence of linguistic signs prior to the emergence of writing–is based on a Greco-Latin conception of writing that excludes, in both historical and epistemic terms, the Mesoamerican writing systems. Although the scope and limitations of this essay exclude a detailed analysis of this issue, an incipient "Mesoamericanist" critique of Derrida’s theory of logocentrism has appeared in Mignolo 1996.

15. This notion was explored by a collection of essays on pre-Columbian recording systems (Boone and Mignolo 1994).

Previous Page  |  Table of Contents  |  Next Page

Return to top of page