In xochitl, in cuicatl (the flower, the song) : analysis of colonial cultural-social transformations through Nahuatl metaphor (original) (raw)
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In the pre-Hispanic period, couplets were widely used in ritual or ceremonial contexts, and they prevailed in the contact period through their use in evangelical texts to convey a more indigenous character to evangelization materials. Nahuatl couplets were recreated to achieve a better reception for Catholic dogma; this textual strategy was a way to introduce new meanings into the belief system of native peoples in New Spain. As is well known, the contact between Spanish and Nahuatl led to a process of intensive borrowing. The aim of this paper is to show how this particular situation of language contact influenced the couplets employed in doctrines, sermons, confession manuals, catechisms, hymns, grammars, dictionaries and other evangelization texts. The analysis will deal with couplets that were created from borrowed lexemes from Spanish and native lexemes in Nahuatl.
Language and Religion, 2019
The two most famous alphabetical transcriptions of songs from the Aztec oral tradition are the early colonial manuscripts known as the Cantares Mexicanos and the Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España. These songs express deep insights from Aztec religious cosmovision in a language dense of symbol, metaphor, and imagery. This preference for imaginary thinking is also visible in the Aztec non-linguistic writing system, which used a complex visual structure based on pictograms and ideograms to express knowledge about (sacred) reality. This mode of non-logographic writing was, however, denigrated by European conquestadores and scholars as presenting only a preliminary stage of writing not capable of expressing modern, secular and scientific rationality. This paper aims to challenge the ideologies behind these European interpretations by providing an alternative interpretation of Aztec religious imagery based on the example of ‘flower and song.’ This image is found within both of the two semiotic modalities of language and pictorial writing and is one of the most famous and controversially discussed examples of Aztec religious imagery. According to my interpretation, the imagery used in Aztec forms of communication expresses fundamental experiential knowledge about the cosmos; a knowledge that transcends the limits of linguistic expression as much as the categories of science and religion. It is based on a kind of embodied rationality, which combines cognitive intellectuality with rich sensory experiences through the use of embodied metaphors.
Isabel Laack, 2019
Because of copyright reasons, only a preview is available for download here. In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of “sacred scripture” traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. "This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system." Davíd Carrasco, Harvard University
Perspectivas sobre la investigación cualitativa / Perspectives on qualitative research, 2015
Language and other elements that constitute culture should be treated as independent variables when trying to understand late pre-Hispanic and early colonial central Mexican society. At the time of the Spanish conquest, native kingdoms in this region were inhabited by speakers of several languages belonging to diverse linguistic families. The majority languages were Nahuatl and Otomi. A comparative study of the words used in these languages to express concepts from several semantic fields reveals an abundance of calques, or semantic loans devoid of phonological correspondence. In this study, which draws on fifteen years of research on central Mexican culture, language, and writing, examples of calques will be presented from six semantic fields: toponyms, anthroponyms, names of deities, calendrical terms, social structures, and metaphorical couplets. This research reveals a high degree of cultural unity between these two language groups, forcing us to rethink the relationships between language, culture, and ethnicity. The abundance of calques between these and other native languages is the cultural basis for the fundamentally semasiographic system of pictorial writing used throughout much of Mesoamerica; most of the graphic signs in this system of notation can be read in any of the languages spoken by groups that participated in Mesoamerican culture.
Ancient Mesoamerica, 2024
This article unpacks a Nahuatl metaphor based on the kin term hueltiuh, "man's elder sister," used in multiple sixteenth-century Nahuatl texts and their Spanish derivatives. Through a minute analysis of several Nahua stories, the article identifies various roles described with this term: spies, "toothed-vagina" femmes fatales, heart-eating monsters, and seducers. Applying a method borrowed from cognitive linguistics, it then constructs a model of "man's elder sister," which explains the application of this metaphor to different contexts. In Nahua stories, hueltiuh is usually a female mediator who throws the male characters off balance, leading to a new status quo. Confusingly, this metaphor often appears where one would expect a real kinship term and in a way that makes identifying its symbolic meaning difficult. These complications have led scholars to see (only) genealogical information in stories concerned with symbolic rather than genealogical relations between elite members or deities. The results presented here allow for refining our understanding of some famous Nahua narratives, such as the one on Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl's abandonment of Tollan. They also invite a rethinking of our views on the Nahua (Aztec) pantheon of gods, whose figurative "family bonds" may, in fact, indicate complex nonkinship relations and dependencies.
Is: Understanding Nahua Metaphysics, Language, and Cuicatl Brock Wade MU 5368: Music in Mexico
Is: Understanding Nahua Metaphysics, Language, and Cuicatl, 2023
I am arguing Nahuan agglutination reflects their worldview metaphysically and culturally through metonymy, influencing their act of cuicatl. Various components and findings supporting this argument are through Nahuan metaphysics, agglutination, and metonymy in order to open up the Nahuan cultural world. Articulating my argument was not in a linear path, but instead a patchwork that my sources have pieced together to which I glue together and present in my project. My methodology generated my argument due to the Nahua’s metaphysical idea of Teotl and their use of agglutination in their language. Due to the nature of Nahuan culture, I am both studying and researching about them and their output. My overall methodology goes as follows: Metaphysics (Teotl and Xochipilli/Xochiquetzal), Language (Agglutination in Nahuatl, Metonymy, and Xochitl in music), and Musical Representation (Xochicuicatl Cuecuechtli).