Texts, Dialogue and Contexts

1. Texts, Dialogue and Contexts Dialogic nature of language/texts: Orders Given to the Twelve (1523) #8 The Lords and Holy Men of Tenochtitlan Reply to the Franciscans (1524) #3 Contexts: “restless discipline of context” Where do you find texts? Contexts as frames Context of the Encuentro/Great Encounter

2. Orders Given to the Twelve (1523) • Francisco de los Angeles (1475-1540), minister general of the Franciscan order, later Cardinal • The New World as Battleground/Vineyard • Apocalyptic urgency: “Hurry down to the active life”

3. Athirst for the welfare of souls "Among the continuous cares and affairs which daily present themselves to me and occupy my mind, this one presses, worries, and afflicts me first of all, as to how with all the cunning of my bowels and continual sighs of my heart, I might labor with the apostolic man and father of ours, Saint Francis, toward liberating and snatching away from the maw of the dragon, the souls redeemed with the most precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, deceived by satanic wiles, dwelling in the shadow of death, held in the vain cult of idols---and bring them to fight under the banner of the Cross and to place their neck into the yoke of Christ, through you, my dearest brothers, with the favor of the Most High; because otherwise I shall not be able to escape the zeal of Saint Francis athirst for the welfare of souls, pounding day and night with unceasing knocking at the door of my heart."  

4. A Few Mad men • Preach by example • Via activa/via contemplativa—(#9) • “Sublimest poverty” • "For, thus become madmen of the world, you might convert the world by the foolishness of your preaching.” • “And the Lord told me that I would be a new madman in the world.” The Legend of Perugia Diego Mufioz Camargo Historia de Tlaxcala

5. The Lords and Holy Men of Tenochtitlan Reply to the Franciscans (1524) Florentine Codex: The twelve volume encyclopedia of Aztec life describing the supernatural, human and natural world of pre-Columbia central Mesoamerica. Compilation: Bernardino Sahugún (1499-1590), editor, primarily Nahuatl text prepared by native students, parallel translations. Original source materials: interviews with native informants Illustrations done by Aztec scribes (tlacuilo) Prologue: Diagnosing the native

6. Giving order to the unknown Twelve books of the Florentine Codex: 1.) Gods 2.) Ceremonies 3.) Origin of the Gods 4.) Astrology and Divining 5.) Omens and signs 6.) Rhetoric and moral philosophy 7.) Natural Astrology 8.) Kings and Lords, governments 9.) Merchants and artisans 10.) Vices and virtues of Indian people, Health and medicine 11.) Animals, birds, fish, trees, grass, flowers, metals 12.) The Conquest of Mexico • Encylopedia tradition: Bartholomeus Anglicus De Proprietatus rerum Pliny, Naturalis Historia Classifying and giving order

7. Signifying the “other” CLASSICAL ANALOGY DEMONIC ANALOGY

8. Ambivalent terms “God, our lord, has brought you to rule us. We do not know where you come from or where our lords and gods dwell because you have come from the sea, through clouds and mist, a route we have never known. God sends you among us as His own eyes, ears, and mouth. He who is invisible and spiritual becomes visible through in you.” “You have told us that we do not know the One who gives us life and being, who is Lord of the heavens and of the earth. You also say that those that we worship are not gods. This way of speaking is totally new to us.”

9. And the word was Dios/teotl • "The word in language is half someone else's.   It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.  Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of the dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own."     Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

10. Teotl • Translations: “god” “saint” “demon” •  Used interchangebly with Dios in Sahagún's Colloquios y doctrina christiana (1564) • Anything mysterious, prominent, beyond the ordinary • Vital force in this world, natural phenomena • Often paired with tlatoani “divine speaker” • Corporeality of the divine: deity-impersonators

11. Encounters and Exchanges I

12. Feitiço->Fetish • Despite the intellectual prominence of psychoanalytic and Marxist accounts of fetish, the anthropologist William Pietz's genealogy of the concept and term points to violent colonial encounter and religious misunderstanding as a key and overlooked historical engine for their development and reproduction in the European imagination. • 16th and 17th century encounters between Portuguese slave traders and West Africans; “fetish” deriving from Portuguese word for magic and witchcraft. Indigenous investments in cultural objects considered fantastical and dangerous by European Christians. • If Pietz is correct, our very economic and secular psychological concepts are always and already laden with histories of terrible cross-cultural encounters and colonial management. Marx and Freud overlay theory upon colonial histories which we can excavate.

13. Commodity Fetish • For Marx, social suffering stems from alienation specific to the context of industrial capitalism. Our world and self transforming capacities are constrained by the artificial and technical division of life into production and consumption/work and leisure. Labor is performed for wages, exchanged on the market, rather than necessarily serving practical, organic ends. The objects of our labor, commodities, are measured according to abstract exchange value rather than organic use value. Marx uses poetic language (e.g., such as in his description of the “theological niceties” and “mystical character” of commodities) to discuss the ways in which the concrete grounds for production are obscured by our projections and externalization of human values onto commodities. They are like idols and false gods until we realize that they have no life or power beyond the distortions of economic conditions. They distort human relationships.

14. A Pope Rewards “So Salutary and Laudable a Work”(1455) • “(conquest) not without the greatest labors and expense and with dangers and loss of life and property and the slaughter of many of their natural subjects” • “Also by the laudable endeavor and industry of said infante (Afonso), very many inhabitants or dwellers in diverse islands situated in the said sea, coming to the knowledge of the true God, have received Holy Baptism”

15. A Pope Rewards “So Salutary and Laudable a Work” Con't(1455) • “In time it might happen that persons of other kingdoms or nations, led by envy, malice, or covetousness, might presume, contrary to the prohibition aforesaid, without license and payment of such tribute, to go to said provinces, and in the provinces, harbors, islands, and sea, so acquired, to sail, trade and fish.”

16. “Orders Given to “the Twelve”” (1523) • Fray Francisco de los Angeles: “...I might labor with the apostolic Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, deceived by satanic wiles, dwelling in the shadow of death, held in the vain cult of idols—and bring them to fight under the banner of the Cross” • “ (you) are not hired for a price like others, but like true sons of a father, not seeking your own interests but those of Jesus Christ without promise of pay or reward”

17. “Orders Given to “the Twelve”” (1523) Con't • “Further than this, I charge and command you the twelve through the merit of holy obedience, and the rest who in the future should join your company” • “And win the for Christ in such a manner that among all Catholics an increase of faith, hope and love may result”

18. Bernardino de Sahagún's“The Lords and the Holy Men of Tenochtitlan Reply to the Franciscans” (1524) • “You showed us all sorts of precious stones...you showed us new kinds of feathers, rich ones of great value” • “We know that you come from among the clouds” • “It would be a fickle and foolish thing for us to destroy the most ancient laws and customs left by the first inhabitants of this land” (Hierophanies and Ritual Power)

19. Profe Carrasco's Work • Make sure to pay close attention to what he has to say about rites of renewal and human sacrifice among the Aztecs (ch 3) What's being exchanged? • Chicano resistance as most vocally represented by the Farmworkers Union, fighting for just wages and cultivating agricultural commodities. But, among other things, they have recourse in hierophanies: “But in the religious imagination a sacred place can be anywhere there is a revelation of the spiritual resources and destiny of a people.” (Carrasco, Religions of Mesoamerica, 156)

20. Chiquita Banana

22. “One of the most difficult realizations for students of religion to reach is the multiple, sometimes contradictory meanings of symbols or religious symbols. In a religious cosmovision, whether in Mesoamerica or Europe or China, a single symbol will have multiple meanings”--Davíd Carrasco, Religions of Mesoamerica, 137 Restless Seekers of Context