Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World

Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World PDF

Author: Justyna Olko

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2014-06-15

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 1607322412

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This significant work reconstructs the repertory of insignia of rank and the contexts and symbolic meanings of their use, along with their original terminology, among the Nahuatl-speaking communities of Mesoamerica from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Attributes of rank carried profound symbolic meaning, encoding subtle messages about political and social status, ethnic and gender identity, regional origin, individual and community history, and claims to privilege. Olko engages with and builds upon extensive worldwide scholarship and skillfully illuminates this complex topic, creating a vital contribution to the fields of pre-Columbian and colonial Mexican studies. It is the first book to integrate pre- and post-contact perspectives, uniting concepts and epochs usually studied separately. A wealth of illustrations accompanies the contextual analysis and provides essential depth to this critical work. Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World substantially expands and elaborates on the themes of Olko's Turquoise Diadems and Staffs of Office, originally published in Poland and never released in North America.

Everyday Life in the Aztec World

Everyday Life in the Aztec World PDF

Author: Frances F. Berdan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-12-03

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1108894410

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In Everyday Life in the Aztec World, Frances Berdan and Michael E. Smith offer a view into the lives of real people, doing very human things, in the unique cultural world of Aztec central Mexico. The first section focuses on people from an array of social classes - the emperor, a priest, a feather worker, a merchant, a farmer, and a slave - who interacted in the economic, social and religious realms of the Aztec world. In the second section, the authors examine four important life events where the lives of these and others intersected: the birth and naming of a child, market day, a day at court, and a battle. Through the microscopic views of individual types of lives, and interweaving of those lives into the broader Aztec world, Berdan and Smith recreate everyday life in the final years of the Aztec Empire.

Universal Empire

Universal Empire PDF

Author: Peter Fibiger Bang

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-16

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1107022673

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This book explores the aspiration to universal, imperial rule across Eurasian history from antiquity to the eighteenth century.

Words and Worlds Turned Around

Words and Worlds Turned Around PDF

Author: David Tavárez

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2017-12-14

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1607326841

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A sophisticated, state-of-the-art study of the remaking of Christianity by indigenous societies, Words and Worlds Turned Around reveals the manifold transformations of Christian discourses in the colonial Americas. The book surveys how Christian messages were rendered in indigenous languages; explores what was added, transformed, or glossed over; and ends with an epilogue about contemporary Nahuatl Christianities. In eleven case studies drawn from eight Amerindian languages—Nahuatl, Northern and Valley Zapotec, Quechua, Yucatec Maya, K'iche' Maya, Q'eqchi' Maya, and Tupi—the authors address Christian texts and traditions that were repeatedly changed through translation—a process of “turning around” as conveyed in Classical Nahuatl. Through an examination of how Christian terms and practices were made, remade, and negotiated by both missionaries and native authors and audiences, the volume shows the conversion of indigenous peoples as an ongoing process influenced by what native societies sought, understood, or accepted. The volume features a rapprochement of methodologies and assumptions employed in history, anthropology, and religion and combines the acuity of of methodologies drawn from philology and historical linguistics with the contextualizing force of the ethnohistory and social history of Spanish and Portuguese America. Contributors: Claudia Brosseder, Louise M. Burkhart, Mark Christensen, John F. Chuchiak IV, Abelardo de la Cruz, Gregory Haimovich, Kittiya Lee, Ben Leeming, Julia Madajczak, Justyna Olko, Frauke Sachse, Garry Sparks

Translating Nature

Translating Nature PDF

Author: Jaime Marroquin Arredondo

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2019-03-26

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 081229601X

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Translating Nature recasts the era of early modern science as an age not of discovery but of translation. As Iberian and Protestant empires expanded across the Americas, colonial travelers encountered, translated, and reinterpreted Amerindian traditions of knowledge—knowledge that was later translated by the British, reading from Spanish and Portuguese texts. Translations of natural and ethnographic knowledge therefore took place across multiple boundaries—linguistic, cultural, and geographical—and produced, through their transmissions, the discoveries that characterize the early modern era. In the process, however, the identities of many of the original bearers of knowledge were lost or hidden in translation. The essays in Translating Nature explore the crucial role that the translation of philosophical and epistemological ideas played in European scientific exchanges with American Indians; the ethnographic practices and methods that facilitated appropriation of Amerindian knowledge; the ideas and practices used to record, organize, translate, and conceptualize Amerindian naturalist knowledge; and the persistent presence and influence of Amerindian and Iberian naturalist and medical knowledge in the development of early modern natural history. Contributors highlight the global nature of the history of science, the mobility of knowledge in the early modern era, and the foundational roles that Native Americans, Africans, and European Catholics played in this age of translation. Contributors: Ralph Bauer, Daniela Bleichmar, William Eamon, Ruth Hill, Jaime Marroquín Arredondo, Sara Miglietti, Luis Millones Figueroa, Marcy Norton, Christopher Parsons, Juan Pimentel, Sarah Rivett, John Slater.

American Contact

American Contact PDF

Author:

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 151282576X

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A Hawai’ian quilt stitched with anti-imperial messages; a Jesuit report that captures the last words of a Wendat leader; an invitation to a ball, repurposed by enslaved people in colonial Antigua; a book of poetry printed in a Peruvian penitentiary. Countless material texts—legible artifacts—resulted from the diverse intercultural encounters that characterize the history of the Americas. American Contact explores the dynamics of intercultural encounters through the medium of material texts. The forty-eight short chapters present biographies about objects that range in size from four miles long to seven by ten centimeters; date from millennia in the past to the 2000s; and originate from South America, North America, the Caribbean, and other parts of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Each essay demonstrates how particular ways of reading can render the complex meanings of the objects legible—or explains why and how the meanings remain illegible. In its diversity and breadth, this volume shows how the field of book history can be more inclusive and expansive. Taken together, the essays shed new light on the material practices of communicating power and resistance, subjection and survivance, in contact zones of America. Contributors: Carlos Aguirre, Ahmed Idrissi Alami, Chadwick Allen, Rhae Lynn Barnes, Molly H. Bassett, Brian Bockelman, George Aaron Broadwell, Rachel Linnea Brown, Nancy Caronia, Raúl Coronado, Marlena Petra Cravens, Agnieszka Czeblakow, Lori Boornazian Diel, Elizabeth A. Dolan, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Cecily Duffie, Devin Fitzgerald, Glenda Goodman, Rachel B. Gross, David D. Hall, Sonia Hazard, Rachel B. Herrmann, Alex Hidalgo, Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis, Alexandra Kaloyanides, Rachael Scarborough King, Danielle Knox, Bishop Lawton, Jessica C. Linker, Don James McLaughlin, John Henry Merritt, Gabriell Montgomery, Emily L. Moore, Isadora Moura Mota, Barbara E. Mundy, Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, Marissa Nicosia, Diane Oliva, Megan E. O’Neil, Sergio Ospina Romero, John H. Pollack, Shari Rabin, Daniel Radus, Nathan Rees, Anne Ricculli, Maria Ryan, Maria Carolina Sintura, Cristina Soriano, Chelsea Stieber, Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman, Chris Suh, Mathew R. Swiatlowski, Marie Balsley Taylor, Martin A. Tsang, Germaine Warkentin, Adrian Chastain Weimer, Bethany Wiggin, Xine Yao, Corinna Zeltsman.

Amerasia

Amerasia PDF

Author: Elizabeth Horodowich

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-09-05

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 1942130848

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A connected world as imagined by early modern European artists, mapmakers, and writers, where Asia and the Americas were on a continuum America and Asia mingled in the geographical and cultural imagination of Europe for well over a century after 1492. Through an array of texts, maps, objects, and images produced between 1492 and 1700, this compelling and revelatory study immerses the reader in a vision of a world where Mexico really was India, North America was an extension of China, and South America was marked by a variety of biblical and Asian sites. It asks, further: What does it mean that the Amerasian worldview predominated at a time when Europe itself was coming into cultural self-definition? Each of the chapters focuses on a particular artifact, map, image, or book that illuminates aspects of Amerasia from specific European cultural milieus. Amerasia shows how it was possible to inhabit a world where America and Asia were connected either imaginatively when viewed from afar, or in reality when traveling through the newly encountered lands. Readers will learn why early modern maps regularly label Mexico as India, why the “Amazonas” region was named after a race of Asian female warriors, and why artifacts and manuscripts that we now identify as Indian and Chinese are entangled in European collections with what we now label Americana. Elizabeth Horodowich and Alexander Nagel pose a dynamic model of the world and of Europe’s place in it that was eclipsed by the rise of Eurocentric colonialist narratives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To rediscover this history is an essential part of coming to terms with the emergent polyfocal global reality of our own time.

Universal Empire

Universal Empire PDF

Author: Peter Fibiger Bang

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-16

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1139560956

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The claim by certain rulers to universal empire has a long history stretching as far back as the Assyrian and Achaemenid Empires. This book traces its various manifestations in classical antiquity, the Islamic world, Asia and Central America as well as considering seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European discussions of international order. As such it is an exercise in comparative world history combining a multiplicity of approaches, from ancient history, to literary and philosophical studies, to the history of art and international relations and historical sociology. The notion of universal, imperial rule is presented as an elusive and much coveted prize among monarchs in history, around which developed forms of kingship and political culture. Different facets of the phenomenon are explored under three, broadly conceived, headings: symbolism, ceremony and diplomatic relations; universal or cosmopolitan literary high-cultures; and, finally, the inclination to present universal imperial rule as an expression of cosmic order.