Rethinking Zapotec Time: Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico

Description

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 Tavárez 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, Tavárez 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. Contents List of Illustrations and Tables List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Chapter One. Introduction Chapter Two. Rethinking Time: Zapotec and Nahua Cycles after the Conquest Chapter Three. Northern Zapotec Writing, Literacy, and Society Chapter Four. The Shapes of the Universe: Theories of Time and Space Chapter Five. Deities, Sacred Beings, and Their Feasts Chapter Six. Singing the Ancestors Back to Earth Chapter Seven. Confronting Christianity: Resistance, Adaptation, Reception Chapter Eight. Conclusions Appendix. Analytical Translations of Songbooks 100 and 101, and Manual 1, Excerpt Notes Glossary Bibliography Index