Amos Megged

Indorum. This is an engaging read, but it is not for the novice. It is clearly intended for an audience already familiar with the general outline of early colonial history in Mesoamerica and the various documents that stand as testimony to the complex processes of colonization, acculturation, syncretism, and resistance that characterized this period. Although clearly written, sections of Sparks’s work lean heavily on bodies of literature and epistemology that lie well beyond expectations for an introductory or casual audience. There are few figures, and the lack of a map assumes readers’ familiarity with the region and its peoples. The effect is to create a gulf between author and reader that is only partially bridged by expansive endnotes, extensive referencing, a well-organized index, and helpful sections, such as Sparks’s notes on orthography and pronunciation.

In one of the six essays accompanyingthis re-edition of Bernal Diaz del Castillo's famous "diary" of theSpanish Conquest of New Spain, which is devoted to the theme of humansacrifice, David Carrasco concludes: The purpose of this essay is not tojustify Aztec ritual killing or condemn the Spaniards for their violence orlack of understanding. Rather, by beginning with Diaz del Castillo's point ofview as an outsider and harsh critic of Aztec rituals, we move to indigenouswords, practices, and perspectives to see through the Spanish account into somedimensions of what the Aztecs and Maya believed they were doing. (465)

ABSTRACT What is the ability of poor single women today to maintain an economically autonomous household? In the context of gender power relations, the literature often employs the concept of de-familialisation, which is the degree to which a woman is able to maintain an autonomous household without having to depend on a male breadwinner. Scholars argue that current welfare reforms deliberately aim at re-establishing the family as the primary source of economic security and encourage a traditional model of gender relations where women have to be dependent on male breadwinners. By reinstating the nuclear family as the primary source of economic security and a comprehensive alternative to the welfare state, women’s ability for agency and resistance becomes narrower and heavily limited by their inferior gender and class positions. Today, studies clearly indicate the problematic condition of poor women. It seems that without a massive reform in the labour market as well as welfare state expansion, de-familialisation among poor women will become almost impossible. In the current article, we explore the possibility that low-income women, whose common survival strategies are very limited, nonetheless could engage in alternative ways of providing for themselves and their children. We ask to learn from the experience of poor Mexican women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about the ability of de-familialisation. Drawing on historical data, we argue that the formation of alternative household arrangements – sisterhoods – women-only households, enabled women to develop new family models and to maintain an extended household headed by women, without the need to depend on a male breadwinner. By learning from history, this article offers insights that may enhance poor women’s economic and social conditions today, and suggests that women’s joint power can resist traditional patterns of gender relations, even in times when conservative values are reemphasized.

This article aims to fill in some of the lacunae that still exist regarding the Cohuixca ethnicity of the northeastern part of the State of Guerrero. To do so, it introduces a qualitative methodological approach into ethnohistory, which discerns pervasive patterns of special understanding that guided indigenous testimony in the colonial Spanish courtroom. It emphasizes that early colonial Cohuixca testimonies were deeply influenced by what are called, in Western terms, cadastral maps or cartographic histories or, in Nahuatl, amoxtli tlalamatl altepeamatl (“land papers,” titles of each town and district) in the former Cohuixca province of Tepecoacuilco (Cohuixcatlacapan), these geographical elements being heavily reinforced by oral retelling. Therefore, in order to establish a seemingly coherent plot of the past that would overcome fragmentation and chaos, the indigenous witnesses appearing in our sources relied heavily on unique visual schemata that assisted them in assembling the m...

ABSTRACT The present article aims to re-evaluate the gamut of ostensible alliances forged between colonial subordinates and those who subordinated them in the ethnic state of Napiniaca, Mexico, as well as identify the social spaces and contexts in which such alliances were formed and ultimately fell apart. It will do so by attempting to “unwrap” indigenous strategies and forms of resistance based on the admittedly limited texts we currently possess, in light of modern research and theory in both (ethno) history and anthropology.

A deep reading of testimony delivered at the Spanish colonial court of the Audiencia uncovers distinctive speech formulas, nonverbal cues, and conceptual constructs that throw light on the intentions and goals, as well as the cultural predispositions, of communities and individuals. Historians can employ a similar methodology to derive patterns of “cognitive schemata” from testimony in other legal settings of the early modern era.

... All rights reserved ... Spanish priests in Mesoamerica con-cerned themselves with essences similar to those that troubled sixteenth-century reformist iconoclasts in Europe ... And their magical image spoke again when the thun-der came."36 In the nineteenth century, in the course of ...

... the other lawsuit was fought in court between the inhabitants of the parcialidad of santiago tlatelolco, as a corporal body, with don lucas de santiago, a native from the barrio of la concepción, as well as with some inhabitants of the barrio of san sebastián, between 1704 and 1708 ...

In this paper we examine the Israeli government's use of law to institutionalize the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs displaced by the 1948 war and trace the legal transformation of their land during the formative years of Israel's land regime (1948^60). This legal transformation facilitated the expropriation and reallocation of formerly Arab land to primarily Jewish hands and was therefore a central component of the legal reordering of space within Israel after 1948. Based on close examination of Israeli legislation, archival documents, Knesset proceedings, and other sources we delineate a 12-year legislative process consisting of four phases, each concluding with the enactment of major legislation. The process was led by senior and second-tier Israeli officials, and the result was the construction of a new Israeli legal geography. The culmination of the process was the integration of appropriated Arab land into the country's new system of Jewish-Israeli 'nati...

Recent in-depth research on the Nahua Corpus Xolotl, as well as on a large variety of compatible sources, has led to new insights on what were “boundaries” in preconquest Nahua thought. The present article proposes that our modern Western concept of borders and political boundaries was foreign to ancient Mexican societies and to Aztec-era polities in general. Consequently, the article aims to add a novel angle to our understanding of the notions of space, territoriality, and limits in the indigenous worldview in central Mexico during preconquest times, and their repercussions for the internal social and political relations that evolved within the Nahua-Acolhua ethnic states (altepetl). Furthermore, taking its cue from the Corpus Xolotl, the article reconsiders the validity of ethnic entities and polities in ancient Mexico and claims that many of these polities were ethnic and territorial amalgams, in which components of ethnic outsiders formed internal enclaves and powerbases. I arg...

Amos Megged ... partidos in the outlying provinces or one of the influential posts in the cathedral and churches of Santiago, Ciudad Real, San Salvador and San Miguel.'5 Several of the fortunate few were, for example, Geronimo Becerra, the son of Bernal Dfaz del Castillo, who in ...

... In 1648, one of them, Juana Bautista, a free mulatta, a widow, sold the house of her late husband located in the barrio de Analuco, in ... One of the most elaborate of cases to be found in New Spain's Inquisitorial records for the mid-seventeenth century is that of Isabel de Montoya. ...

Amos Megged ... In his principal book on witchcraft, Disquisition magicarum, first published in Louvain between 1599 and 1600, the Jesuit Martino Del Rio had devoted a large part of his discussion to deeds that are but natural potencies, or a kind of delusion.6 Nevertheless ...

This article aims to fill in some of the lacunae that still exist regarding the Cohuixca ethnicity of the northeastern part of the State of Guerrero. To do so, it introduces a qualitative methodological approach into ethnohistory, which discerns pervasive patterns of special understanding that guided indigenous testimony in the Colonial Spanish courtroom. It emphasizes that early colonial Cohuixca testimonies were deeply influenced by what are called, in Western terms, cadastral maps or cartographic histories or, in Nahuatl, amoxtli tlalamatl altepeamatl (" land papers, " titles of each town and district) in the former Cohuixca province of Tepecoacuilco (Cohuixcatlacapan), these geographical elements being heavily reinforced by oral retelling. Therefore, in order to establish a seemingly coherent plot of the past that would overcome fragmentation and chaos, the indigenous witnesses appearing in our sources relied heavily on unique visual schemata that assisted them in asse...

While earlier census studies yielded population data mainly for the Tepetlaoztoc and Morelos regions of central Mexico during the 1530s and 1540s, this ethnohistoric study, based on a newly discovered manuscript, sheds light on household types and population density in the town of Zinacantepec by 1574. By comparing population figures, household types, and migration patterns, this article reconsiders how Aztec invasion, and thereafter the Spanish conquest, affected population movements and stability in the Valley of Toluca, a former Aztec stronghold in central Mexico. Furthermore, the nature of Toluca Valley habitats may prompt us to rethink about how we interpret the nature of indigenous demographic layouts before and after the Spanish conquest, whether its features be urban or rural.

Amos Megged ... In his principal book on witchcraft, Disquisition magicarum, first published in Louvain between 1599 and 1600, the Jesuit Martino Del Rio had devoted a large part of his discussion to deeds that are but natural potencies, or a kind of delusion.6 Nevertheless ...

ABSTRACT This article seeks to further contribute to our understanding of the outcomes of earlier Nahua-Spanish alliances after Guatemala was pacified. The richly documented struggles of the Maya-Pok'omam communities around Lake Amatitlan in Guatemala between 1524 and 1580 reveal - in microcosm - the larger processes some of them stretching back into the pre-contact period that Mesoamerican scholars call ‘conquest-after-conquest.’ As this essay highlights, fifteen years after the initial phase of the Spanish conquest of Guatemala had ended, Nahua conquistadors from Central Mexico initiated their own colonization of Maya-Pok'omam towns, mobilizing both Nahua and Kaqchikel migrant groups to settle there. Within these Maya towns, the Nahua conquistadors impinged upon Maya economic assets, sharing them with their Dominican allies while maintaining political and social control over their local Maya subjects. Nahua economic and political encroachment of Maya assets finally brought about distinct and recognizable currents of Maya dissent against their foreign overlords, in parallel to the revival of local historical legacies of self-rule.

ABSTRACT In their thesis on the role of acculturation and thought control during the age of the Counter-Reformation, the French historians Pierre Channu, Jean Delumeau, and Robert Muchemledt depicted a deeply divided society, two disconnected worlds: "the superior," to which belonged jurists and the Republic of Letters, and "the inferior," the uncouth, that by nature required control and suppression. In the age of the post-Tridentine Church, the term "acculturation" indeed signified repression—of sexuality, thoughts, magic, popular religion, festivals, and language. Nevertheless, in his 1984 response to these authors ("Against the Acculturation Thesis"), the French art historian Jean Wirth challenges their views by proposing that the Catholic reformists directed their moral reproach specifically towards the cultivated, the lettered, and the wealthy echelons of European society and that the criticism was focused on sexual and moral permissiveness among the priesthood and the nobility rather than on the "madding crowds." According to Wirth, Church elites endeavored to protect themselves against, and ward off, all those who criticized them concerning their bad habits and their ill performance, "far more than they ever wished to acculturate other peoples." Would Wirth's hypothesis have any bearing on Martin Nesvig's present book, then? The answer to this is positive. Nesvig's erudite, thought-provoking, and meticulously researched study on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico examines the inner workings and local debates "about the ideological justification for censorship from the points of view of the censors themselves" (p. 6). This study is divided into three parts: the first part, titled "Theories of Inquisitional Authority," addresses the theological, scholastic, and ideological upbringing of the Iberian and Mexican censors (namely, the credo). The second part is titled "Practice of Censure in Mexico" (namely, praxis), while the third is entitled "Censors and their Worlds." However, the latter embodies the issue of control, which would have fit much better into the second part of the book, while its other contents, namely the mental world of the Mexican censors (though nothing of their clientele's) could well have been placed in the first part of the book. The world of the Mexican censors indeed intersects in many direct and indirect ways with the issues challenged by the Catholic Reformation and its agents in continental Europe as well as in its overseas colonies. The major issues dealt with in the present study are a direct continuation of the very same concerns deliberated within the confines of the convents, universities, Inquisition chambers, and reformed colleges back on the old continent, from where many of the Mexican censors rose to fame. Moreover, the responses produced for such concerns were also generally on the same lines in Mexico as in the Old World. The censors in Mexico were an inseparable part of a whole apparatus of Spanish inquisitors, secular clergy, and mendicant superiors who concerned themselves with the goals set out for them by the Tridentine reforms and ordinances. Apart from endeavoring to establish clear-cut definitions as to what was considered heresy, blasphemy, sin, or simply immorality in accordance with the new morality, they were also deeply committed to a new definition of literacy. All these agents, including the censors, sought the best possible channels through which to curtail, curb, and purge such sins, as well as all the various kinds of printed materials that reverberated through the processing of such major or minor offences. However, questions of the solidity or effectiveness of their control or the degree of the independence they maintained in their judgments of the cases brought forward before them are thoroughly treated here, throughout the period concerned. Nesvig thus effectively demonstrates the feeble state of the censors' control of their likely "clientele" in the cities and the countryside and in particular, in the port of Veracruz, where special inspections were held. Yet another point which is worth a discussion here: Nesvig's proclaimed goals. On the one hand, he aims "to reverse the investigative focus from those who were affected by the Inquisition to those who fashioned and created it" (p. 6). Nevertheless, on the other, and in a manner wholly unorthodox to his own field of the history of ideas, he seeks to find the traces of the...

Amos Megged ... partidos in the outlying provinces or one of the influential posts in the cathedral and churches of Santiago, Ciudad Real, San Salvador and San Miguel.'5 Several of the fortunate few were, for example, Geronimo Becerra, the son of Bernal Dfaz del Castillo, who in ...

Amos Megged ... In his principal book on witchcraft, Disquisition magicarum, first published in Louvain between 1599 and 1600, the Jesuit Martino Del Rio had devoted a large part of his discussion to deeds that are but natural potencies, or a kind of delusion.6 Nevertheless ...

... In 1648, one of them, Juana Bautista, a free mulatta, a widow, sold the house of her late husband located in the barrio de Analuco, in ... One of the most elaborate of cases to be found in New Spain's Inquisitorial records for the mid-seventeenth century is that of Isabel de Montoya. ...

... offered one of the most enduring and serious challenges to Axayacatl and the Aztec Triple Alli-ance, being situated on a strategic point on a high-rising hill.10 We know from the Codex Mendoza that Axayacatl's son, the Mexica ruler Motecuh-zoma Xocoyotzin (1502–20 ...

... The initiation of this process was on 1 November 1591, with a royal decree (real cédula) sent by Philip III that legal-ized a ... Chimal-pahin might well have contributed his help in supplying historic informa-tion pertaining to earlier Chalca sources, such as local Annals and ...

This article aims to fill in some of the lacunae that still exist regarding the Cohuixca ethnicity of the northeastern part of the State of Guerrero. To do so, it introduces a qualitative methodological approach into ethnohistory, which discerns pervasive patterns of special understanding that guided indigenous testimony in the Colonial Spanish courtroom. It emphasizes that early colonial Cohuixca testimonies were deeply influenced by what are called, in Western terms, cadastral maps or cartographic histories or, in Nahuatl, amoxtli tlalamatl altepeamatl (" land papers, " titles of each town and district) in the former Cohuixca province of Tepecoacuilco (Cohuixcatlacapan), these geographical elements being heavily reinforced by oral retelling. Therefore, in order to establish a seemingly coherent plot of the past that would overcome fragmentation and chaos, the indigenous witnesses appearing in our sources relied heavily on unique visual schemata that assisted them in assembling the mental shreds and remnants of past experiences to restore them within the traditional framework and formulae of information transmission only modestly affected by the Spanish conquest.

This article aims to fill in some of the lacunae that still exist regarding the Cohuixca ethnicity of the northeastern part of the State of Guerrero. To do so, it introduces a qualitative methodological approach into ethnohistory, which discerns pervasive patterns of special understanding that guided indigenous testimony in the Colonial Spanish courtroom. It emphasizes that early colonial Cohuixca testimonies were deeply influenced by what are called, in Western terms, cadastral maps or cartographic histories or, in Nahuatl, amoxtli tlalamatl altepeamatl (" land papers, " titles of each town and district) in the former Cohuixca province of Tepecoacuilco (Cohuixcatlacapan), these geographical elements being heavily reinforced by oral retelling. Therefore, in order to establish a seemingly coherent plot of the past that would overcome fragmentation and chaos, the indigenous witnesses appearing in our sources relied heavily on unique visual schemata that assisted them in assembling the mental shreds and remnants of past experiences to restore them within the traditional framework and formulae of information transmission only modestly affected by the Spanish conquest.

In the case examined herein, the Popollocan elites of Tepexi de la Seda, headed by the ruling native lord Matzatzin Teuhctli, endeavored to reassert, explain, and represent one particular version of the circumstances surrounding their encounter with the Spanish and the establishment of an alliance with Cortés. Much of the space in the Popollocan elites' version of events is devoted to highlighting the glory of the native rulers, nobles, and warriors, in the process minimizing or obliterating completely the memory of the initial defeat. The indigenous testimony clearly emphasizes the ability and adeptness of the local tlatoque (town and ethnic state rulers) and the pipiltin (nobles) who met with and negotiated an alliance with the Spaniards. Furthermore, the testimony underscores the recognition on the part of the Spaniards of the might and status of the Popollocan elites.