Santo Niño in Recoding the History of the Spanish Conquest

Santo Niño de Cebu is one of the most revered saints in the Philippines and draws tens of thousands of devotees during his fiestas, like few others. Santo Niño’s origins and cult formation can be traced to the very first instances of the Spanish conquest. This chapter analyzes the documentary genealogy of the colonial discourse that figures Santo Niño as the symbol for the predestined Christianization of the Philippines and tracks the rise of a native counter-narrative at the end of the sixteenth century that denies his Spanish origins. Its argues that for the Cebuano subjects, as well as other natives of the colonized Philippines, to speak of the pre-Hispanic origins of Santo Niño could have been a means to maintain their own collective memory of the material and spiritual pillage that arose with the Spanish conquest.

The Green Deer: Chaya as a Potential Source of Protein for the Ancient Maya

Archaeologists have used isotope analysis (δ13C, δ15N) of the collagen of human bones, as well as knowledge of available nutrients, to infer that the diet of the ancient Maya was drawn from the resources of the Maya forest landscape. The interpretations have focused on plant carbohydrates from maize and protein dominated by white-tail deer. The δ15N values of bone collagen suggest that most of the protein requirements of the Maya could have been satisfied with a mixture of wild animal flesh and wild and cultivated plants including beans. Chaya, Cnidoscolus aconitifolius, domesticated before the Spanish conquest, has a high-protein content and the potential to have been a significant contributor to the ancient Maya diet. Chaya is easily propagated, is grown in home gardens by the Maya today, and is a significant part of the local traditional diet. Chaya's stable isotopic composition of carbon (δ13C) resembles that of other terrestrial plants, but its values for nitrogen (δ15N) are significantly higher. Consumption of chaya would result in slightly higher δ15N values in humans than expected from the consumption of terrestrial animals. Thus, chaya is situated well as a component of the complex, diverse, and varied diets of ancient Mesoamericans.

The mirror, the magus and more: reflections on John Dee's obsidian mirror

The obsidian mirror associated with the Elizabethan polymath and magus John Dee (1527–1608/1609) has been an object of fascination for centuries. The mirror, however, has a deeper history as an Aztec artefact brought to Europe soon after the Spanish conquest. The authors present the results of new geochemical analysis, and explore its history and changing cultural context to provide insights into its meaning during a period in which entirely new world views were emerging. The biography of the mirror demonstrates how a complex cultural history underpins an iconic object. The study highlights the value of new compositional analyses of museum objects for the reinterpretation of historically significant material culture.

Intercultural communication and cultural transfers in the colonial context. The encounter between Pizarro and Atahualpa in 1532 ans its discursive representations in early-modern cultures

This contribution treats the historical representations of the encounter between the Inca King Atahualpa and the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro on november 16th, 1532, in the Peruvian town of Cajamarca which was one of the decisive turning points of the Spanish conquest of South America. After theoretical and methodological reflections on the relations between intercultural communication processes and cultural transfers in the context of the conquista, it focuses first on the various contemporary Spanish discourses on the event of November 16th, 1532, which represented predominantly an official ideological version of it. In a further step are analyzed the new 18th-century discourses, influenced by different historical sources, like the work of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, which reveal very different ‘constructions’, based on a transcultural network of cultural transfers and intercultural mediators, of this event.

Sixteenth-century tomatoes in Europe: who saw them, what did they look like, and where did they come from?

BackgroundSoon after the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the first tomatoes were presented as curiosities to the European royals and drew the attention of sixteenth-century Italian naturalists. Despite of their scientific interest in this New World crop, most Renaissance botanists did not specify where these ‘golden apples’ or ‘pomi d’oro’ came from. The debate on the first European tomatoes and their origin is often hindered by erroneous dating, botanical misidentifications and inaccessible historical sources. The discovery of a tomato specimen in the sixteenth-century ‘En Tibi herbarium’ kept at Leiden, the Netherlands led to claims that its DNA would reveal the ‘original’ taste and pest resistance of early tomatoes.MethodsRecent digitization efforts greatly facilitate research on historic botanical sources. Here we provide an overview of the ten remaining sixteenth-century tomato specimens, early descriptions and 13 illustrations. Several were never published before, revealing what these tomatoes looked like, who saw them, and where they came from.ResultsOur survey shows that the earliest tomatoes in Europe came in a much wider variety of colors, shapes and sizes than previously thought, with both simple and fasciated flowers, round and segmented fruits. Pietro Andrea Matthioli gave the first description of a tomato in 1544, and the oldest specimens were collected by Ulisse Aldrovandi and Francesco Petrollini in c. 1551 from plants grown in the Pisa botanical garden by their teacher Luca Ghini. The oldest illustrations were made in Germany in the early 1550s, but the Flemish Rembert Dodoens published the first image in 1553. The names of early tomatoes in contemporary manuscripts suggest both a Mexican and a Peruvian origin. The ‘En Tibi’ specimen was collected by Petrollini around Bologna in 1558 and thus is not the oldest extant tomato. Although only 1.2% of its DNA was readable, recent molecular research shows that the En Tibi tomato was a fully domesticated, but quite heterozygous individual and genetically close to three Mexican and two Peruvian tomato landraces. Molecular research on the other sixteenth-century tomato specimens may reveal other patterns of genetic similarity and geographic origin. Clues on the ‘historic’ taste and pest resistance of the sixteenth-century tomatoes should not be searched in their degraded DNA, but rather in those landraces in Central and South America that are genetically close to them. The indigenous farmers growing these traditional varieties should be supported to conserve these heirloom varieties in-situ.

The Mexican social unconscious—part I: The roots of a nation

The social unconscious of a country or people is shaped by their origins and by the major collective traumatic experiences of their past. In the case of Mexico, this has been the trauma of the Spanish Conquest, that aimed to subjugate its originary peoples and obliterate their whole culture, language, and religion, which nonetheless subsisted subterraneously, syncretized with those of their invaders. It was a veritable genocide, both physical and cultural. The Mexican population was born from the mating of a brutal foreign conqueror and a subjected native woman, resulting in mestization, both physical and cultural. The psychic and social aftermath of these origins has been a deep ambivalence of Mexicans towards their identity and the foreign invader. This is similar to the fate of the unwelcome and abused child described by Ferenczi. Such underlying factors, derived from the collective history of peoples should be taken into account in any psychoanalytic or group-analytic enquiry of individual patients and groups.