I got through to chapter 11 of The Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs, and this chapter is written by Michel R. Oudijk and Maria Castaneda De La Paz and titled Nahua Thought and the Conquest.
Michel Oudijk is an investigator/ researcher with the Instituto De Investigaciones Filológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma De México, and there are several titles available on Amazon in which he is author and co-author/contributor.
Maria Castaneda De La Paz is very active with sharing her work and with a search I found several video lectures, commentaries, and links to instruction on her work. One of my favorite parts of this chapter is a shiny new thimgy to keep in my fun-thoughts collection, and it's one of her topics of interest. She has studied spanish heraldry compared with similar practices in pre-colonial mexico, and how they fused in later use. Here's a great link to a bio I could never do justice to: https://clais.macmillan.yale.edu/maria-castaneda-de-la-paz
I appreciated the preface material of the chapter, addressing some well-known issues with the source material when studying and writing about Conquest era events, and world history in general. "...history was forged by white European men and was written by their equally white descendants. While the latter is still very much true, what has particularly changed is the sensibility of scholars toward the indigenous role in its own history, which can be observed in the use and treatment of the sources over time."
I'm very limited in my own reading indulgences as I only read in English, so I feel the limits of this directly every day. This made me appreciate even more the directly named nod to those alphabetic Nahuatl translators who have contributed to the ongoing expansion of texts for historic documentation.
"The translation and analysis of the alphabetic corpus has been growing steadily since the 1940s with Ángel María Garibay (1979 [1965], 1987 [1953], 2000) and his successor Miguel León-Portilla (1961, 1992 [1959], 2011), and particularly since the 1970s with James Lockhart (1991, 1992, 1993) and his followers in the United States (Haskett 2005; Horn 1997; Restall 1995, 1998; Terraciano 2001; Wood 2003) and Luis Reyes García (1977, 1988, 1996, 2001) and his followers in Mexico (Medina Lima 1995; Medina González 1998; Rojas Rabiela et al. 1999–2004). These studies show that indigenous peoples played an important role in colonial society, without losing their identity, which made it possible to adapt to the new situation. However, the focus of this field was not the Conquest but rather the Colonial society from the second half of the sixteenth century until Independence. While not its initial objective, with time this field has shown to be the breeding ground for the subsequent revisionist current."
The main claim of the chapter, which was fascinating in itself, is the Spanish conquest of the region was a continuance of pre-existing indigenous beliefs and practices of conquest and cultural adoption.
There are some compelling points made, but I do want to just take a minute to recognize what struck me as sassy clap-backs worth giggling over.
Disagreements on theories and interpretation are a foundation of academic debate, and they can get spicy! However, barring an actual brawl in a conference in their chosen fields of study, these disagreements are limited to a kind of barbed-but-cordial clap-back.
Some examples from just this chapter are "...as some have said (Name, year)" citing the researcher and year of the work where the claim was made, and "...(name, year) which I agree with" for a more positive claim. I like to watch for these and sometimes can't help but imagine a mic drop after some of the more savage rebuttals!
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