Of things of the Indies : essays old and new in early Latin American history / James Lockhart.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lockhart, James.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Latin America--History--To 1830.

Latin America.

History.

Latin America--History.

Latin America--Social conditions.

Local Subjects:

Latin America--History.

Latin America--Social conditions.

Physical Description:

xii, 397 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, [1999]

Summary:

This volume offers an illuminating overview of the work of a pioneering and highly distinguished scholar of early Latin American social and cultural history and philology. Known for the originality of his approach and the variety of his research interests, James Lockhart has gone from studying social history using career pattern methods to an ethnohistory emphasizing indigenous-language philology, all the while stressing general interpretation, synthesis, historiography, and the development of analytical concepts and categories. The present volume illustrates all these interests and activities within the covers of a single book; the reader can see not only common threads running through the individual essays, but also the close relationships between types of scholarship all too often seen as utterly distinct.

The "old and new" of the subtitle is meant literally; the first piece was written in 1968, the last in 1998. Some are already well known, while others have appeared in quite obscure venues. Four of the twelve chapters are published here for the first time. They elucidate the reading of texts for social and cultural purposes, expound on aspects of Nahuatl historical linguistics, discuss the problematic nature of the concept of resistance in Western Hemisphere culture encounters, and review the author's experience with the scholarly disciplines, which involves a certain amount of intellectual autobiography.

The tone of the volume is generally colloquial, for nine chapters originated as lectures and attempt to interpret for a wider audience the author's research as represented in his monographic books. Previously published pieces have been revised or expanded to a greater orlesser degree. Their subjects include the transition from encomienda to hacienda, the evolution of social history in Latin American studies, the economic rationality of Spanish procedures, the changing role of merchants in Spanish America, the editing of Nahuatl texts, the author's concept of Double Mistaken Identity, and the process of cultural contact in three major Latin American areas.

Contents:

1. Encomienda and Hacienda 1

2. The Social History of Early Latin America 27

3. Letters and People to Spain 81

4. Double Mistaken Identity: Some Nahua Concepts in Postconquest Guise 98

5. Trunk Lines and Feeder Lines 120

6. The Merchants of Early Spanish America 158

7. A Double Tradition: Editing Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex 183

8. Three Experiences of Culture Contact: Nahua, Maya, and Quechua 204

Appendix to Chapter 8: Words and phrases of Spanish origin in the Huarochiri legends 228

9. Between the Lines 229

10. Some Unfashionable Ideas on the History of the Nahuatl Language 281

Appendix to Chapter 10: Equation in Nahuatl 301

11. Receptivity and Resistance 304

12. A Historian and the Disciplines 333.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [373]-386) and index.

ISBN:

0804738092

0804738106

OCLC:

41564990