Rethinking Zapotec time : cosmology, ritual, and resistance in colonial Mexico
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Rethinking Zapotec time : cosmology, ritual, and resistance in colonial Mexico
（Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture）
University of Texas Press, 2022
- : cloth
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [424]-440) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
2023 - Best Subsequent Book - Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
2023 - Honorable Mention, Best Book in the Social Sciences - Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section
2022 - Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize - New England Council of Latin American Studies
2023 - Honorable Mention, LASA Mexico Social Sciences Book Prize - Mexico Section, Latin American Studies Association (LASA)
As the first exhaustive translation and analysis of an extraordinary Zapotec calendar and ritual song corpus, seized in New Spain in 1704, this book expands our understanding of Mesoamerican history, cosmology, and culture.
In 1702, after the brutal suppression of a Zapotec revolt, the bishop of Oaxaca proclaimed an amnesty for idolatry in exchange for collective confessions. To evade conflict, Northern Zapotec communities denounced ritual specialists and surrendered sacred songs and 102 divinatory manuals, which preserve cosmological accounts, exchanges with divine beings, and protocols of pre-Columbian origin that strongly resemble sections of the Codex Borgia. These texts were sent to Spain as evidence of failed Dominican evangelization efforts, and there they remained, in oblivion, until the 1960s.
In this book, David Tavarez dives deep into this formidable archive of ritual and divinatory manuals, the largest calendar corpus in the colonial Americas, and emerges with a rich understanding of Indigenous social and cultural history, Mesoamerican theories of cosmos and time, and Zapotec ancestor worship. Drawing on his knowledge of Zapotec and Nahuatl, two decades of archival research, and a decade of fieldwork, Tavarez dissects Mesoamerican calendars as well as Native resistance and accommodation to the colonial conquest of time, while also addressing entangled transatlantic histories and shining new light on texts still connected to contemporary observances in Zapotec communities.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and Tables
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Rethinking Time: Zapotec and Nahua Cycles after the Conquest
Chapter 3. Northern Zapotec Writing, Literacy, and Society
Chapter 4. The Shapes of the Universe: Theories of Time and Space
Chapter 5. Deities, Sacred Beings, and Their Feasts
Chapter 6. Singing the Ancestors Back to Earth
Chapter 7. Confronting Christianity: Resistance, Adaptation, Reception
Chapter 8. Conclusions
Appendix. Analytical Translation of Songbooks 100 and 101, and Manual 1, Excerpt
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
