Exhuming the Nahualli: Shapeshifting, Idolatry, and Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico

2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-228
Author(s):  
Anderson Hagler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Central Valley ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
At Will

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between ritual specialists, nanahualtin or nahualistas (pl.) and nahualli or nahual (sing.), and healing practices, adding context to the social roles they fulfilled and the range of feats they performed. The cases examined here reveal that nanahualtin operated as intellectuals in their communities because of their ability to control animals, prognosticate, and heal or harm individuals at will. Some nanahualtin shapeshifted from humans to animals while others possessed animal companions. The elevated status of nanahualtin led commoners to seek their advice, which conflicted with the established orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. Because clergymen championed the sacraments as the best way to access the divine, non-orthodox rituals performed in mountains, rivers, and caves were derided as idolatrous devil worship.The 11 criminal and Mexican Inquisition cases examined here range from 1599 to 1801. Two seventeenth-century cases (1678 and 1685) and one eighteenth-century case (1701) contain Nahuatl phrases and testimonies from Chiapas and Tlaxcala, respectively. The cases from Chiapas demonstrate the use of Nahuatl as a vehicular language outside the central valley of Mexico. This article examines the gender of the animals into which ritual specialists transformed as an emergent category from trial records, which provides insight into Catholic officials’ understanding of the nahualli. Last, this study notes social divisions between rural and urban clergy regarding the power of nanahualtin and the efficacy of their magic.

The Convent of Santa Clara, the Elite and Social Change in Eighteenth Century Querétaro

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELLEN GUNNARSDÓTTIR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article focuses on the changes that occurred within Querétaro's elite from the late Habsburg to the high Bourbon period in colonial Mexico from the perspective of its relationship to the convent of Santa Clara. It explores how creole elite families of landed background with firm roots in the early seventeenth century, tied together through marriage, entrepreneurship and membership in Santa Clara were slowly pushed out of the city's economic and administrative circles by a new Bourbon elite which broke with the social strategies of the past by not sheltering its daughters in the city's most opulent convent.

Hesitant Steps: Acceptance of the Gregorian Calendar in Eighteenth-Century Geneva

2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 544-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Powell McNutt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Gregorian Calendar ◽  
Julian Calendar ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
At Will ◽  
The Catholic Church

History demonstrates that the calendar is a tool of far more significance than simply a means to organize units of time. For Roman high priests prior to the reign of Julius Caesar, the calendar was a tool of power, symbolizing political supremacy over society through the manipulation of time at will. Under Pope Gregory XIII, the calendar was a symbol of papal responsibility to ensure the proper worship of the Catholic Church. In the case of European Protestants, the Julian calendar was a symbol of religious identity and protest against Catholic domination. Likewise, within revolutionary France, the Calendrier Républicain symbolized the rejection of the Ancien Régime and Catholicism. These few examples are an indication that throughout history in various times and places calendars have proven to represent more to humanity than mere time reckoning methods. Consequently, one may approach the study of the calendar as a means to grasp cultural and religious identity within specific regional contexts.

scholarly journals Cooperation and conflict in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (8-9-10) ◽  
pp. 371-382
Author(s):  
James M. Medina ◽  
P.M. Shreenidhi ◽  
Tyler J. Larsen ◽  
David C. Queller ◽  
Joan E. Strassmann
Keyword(s):  
Dictyostelium Discoideum ◽  
Fruiting Body ◽  
Sexual Cycle ◽  
Evolution Of Cooperation ◽  
Bacterial Symbionts ◽  
Spore Dispersal ◽  
Social Amoeba ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum has provided considerable insight into the evolution of cooperation and conflict. Under starvation, D. discoideum amoebas cooperate to form a fruiting body comprised of hardy spores atop a stalk. The stalk development is altruistic because stalk cells die to aid spore dispersal. The high relatedness of cells in fruiting bodies in nature implies that this altruism often benefits relatives. However, since the fruiting body forms through aggregation there is potential for non-relatives to join the aggregate and create conflict over spore and stalk fates. Cheating is common in chimeras of social amoebas, where one genotype often takes advantage of the other and makes more spores. This social conflict is a significant force in nature as indicated by rapid rates of adaptive evolution in genes involved in cheating and its resistance. However, cheating can be prevented by high relatedness, allorecognition via tgr genes, pleiotropy and evolved resistance. Future avenues for the study of cooperation and conflict in D. discoideum include the sexual cycle as well as the relationship between D. discoideum and its bacterial symbionts. D. discoideum’s tractability in the laboratory as well as its uncommon mode of aggregative multicellularity have established it as a promising model for future studies of cooperation and conflict.

The Gender of Subscribers to Eighteenth-Century Music Publications

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 94-152
Author(s):  
Simon D. I. Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Musical Interests ◽  
Insight Into

One of the most important and valuable resources available to researchers of eighteenth-century social history are the lists of subscribers that were attached to a wide variety of publications. Yet, the study of this type of resource remains one of the areas most neglected by academics. These lists shed considerable light on the nature of those who subscribed to music, including their social status, place of employment, residence, and musical interests. They naturally also provide details as to the gender of individual subscribers.As expected, subscribers to most musical publications were male, but the situation changed considerably as the century progressed, with more females subscribing to the latest works by the early nineteenth century. There was also a marked difference in the proportion of male and female subscribers between works issued in the capital cities of London and Edinburgh and those written for different genres. Female subscribers also appear on lists to works that they would not ordinarily be permitted to play. Ultimately, a broad analysis of a large number of subscription lists not only provides a greater insight into the social and economic changes that took place in Britain over the course of the eighteenth century, but also reveals the types of music that were favoured by the members of each gender.

Power, Class, and Family: Men and Women in the Mexican Elite, 1750-1810

1983 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tutino
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Sexual Differentiation ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Class Membership ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Landed Elite

This essay explores the social relations within a landed elite—the dominant class in eighteenth-century Mexico. It aims to outline the nature of the powers that sustained that elite, to determine who directly exercised those powers, and to detail the relations between those pivotal powerholders and the remaining majority of elite class members. My primary concern, then, is the relationship between elite power and class membership.That, in turn, brings atttention to the roles of elite men and women, and the relations between them. Powerholders were usually men while class membership was shared equally between men and women. Was the internal structure of the elite thus based on sexual stratification? Were men able to be powerful and thus wealthy, while women could be wealthy only through subordination to a powerful man? To a great extent, that was true. But the majority of men within the Mexican elite were also wealthy while subordinate to a powerful man. And in a few notable cases, elite women exercised great power while men and women lived as their dependents. Sex was not the only principle of stratification among late colonial Mexican elites. Rather, sexual differentiation interacted with inequalities primarily based on economic power. This essay attempts to study the relations between economic power and sexual differentiation to approach an understanding of life within the late colonial landed elite in Mexico.

Sport Teams as Promoters of Pro-Environmental Behavior: An Empirical Study

2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (5) ◽  
pp. 417-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuhei Inoue ◽  
Aubrey Kent
Keyword(s):  
Behavioral Intentions ◽  
Sport Organizations ◽  
Proenvironmental Behavior ◽  
Environmental Practices ◽  
Sport Team ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sport Teams ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

The purpose of this study was to explain the process of how a sport team could induce consumers to engage in proenvironmental behavior. Building on Kelman’s (1958, 1961, 2006) internalization perspective, this study demonstrated that positive environmental practices by a team increased consumer internalization of the team’s values. In turn, this increased internalization mediated the relationship between environmental practices and proenvironmental behavior measured by two behavioral intentions: intention to support the team’s environmental initiative and intention to engage in proenvironmental behavior in daily life. The results of this study contribute to the literature by highlighting the significant role of internalization. This research further provides a significant insight into the social impacts of sport organizations.

The Organization and Use of Household Space for Work in Early Modern England: 1550–1750

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 480-503
Author(s):  
Amanda Flather
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Time Of Day ◽  
Business World ◽  
Social Closure ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

This paper explores the neglected topic of the organization and use of household space for work (paid and unpaid) during the early modern period. It engages critically with the concept of ‘the open house’ in relation to recent arguments about processes of spatial and social closure of houses and households in the early modern period associated with the development of a capitalist socio-economic system. Drawing on a variety of sources including diaries, autobiographies, inventories and court records the analysis considers how work was organized in the domestic context and how experience varied according to gender, age, status and location as well as time of day, week or year. The paper argues that a perceived dichotomy between an open house and a closed home secluded from the social and business world of community and commerce is inadequate in the consideration of space and attitudes in this period. Individuals in larger houses could control access to certain spaces at specific times and work could be concentrated in certain rooms. But in practice in most households the complicated demands of the household economy required openness to outsiders that rendered the boundaries of houses more permeable and potentially more unstable than they are today. The analysis considers the case of England and compares rural and urban homes in a particular regional context, but it opens up several ways for historians to think about the relationship between work and home in other European regions.

The social silos of journalism? Twitter, news media and partisan segregation

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 815-835 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wihbey ◽  
Kenneth Joseph ◽  
David Lazer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Social Media Networks ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Standard Text ◽  
Media Ecosystem ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Modest Correlation

The present work proposes social media as a tool to understand the relationship between journalists’ social networks and the content they produce. Specifically, we ask, “what is the association between the partisan nature of the accounts journalists follow on Twitter and the news content they produce?” Using standard text scaling techniques, we analyze partisanship in a novel dataset of more than 300,000 news articles produced by 644 journalists at 25 different US news outlets. We then develop a novel, semi-supervised model of partisanship of Twitter following relationships and show a modest correlation between the partisanship of whom a journalist follows on Twitter and the content she produces. The findings provide insight into the partisan dynamics that appear to characterize the US media ecosystem in its broad contours, dynamics that may be traceable from social media networks to published stories.

Samuel Clain and the Rumanian Enlightenment in Transylvania

Slavic Review ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 660-675 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Hitchins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The West ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

In the second half of the eighteenth century the leavening effects of the Enlightenment began to be felt among the Rumanians of Transylvania. The Enlightenment in Transylvania—and in Eastern Europe generally —was a curious blend of natural law, rationalism, and optimism, drawn from the West, and nationalism, a response to local conditions. It is no coincidence that the first tangible signs of national awakening among the Rumanians manifested themselves at this time. In the thought of the Enlightenment they discovered new justification for their claims to equality with their Magyar, Saxon, and Szekler neighbors. For example, they applied the notion of “natural” civil equality between individuals to the relationship between whole peoples, and they accepted wholeheartedly the myth of the social contract as the foundation of society and as the guarantee of the rights of all those who composed it.

scholarly journals “Fake News” and Christian Freedom

Kairos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-106
Author(s):  
Benjamin KL Simon
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Social Climate ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Social Consensus ◽  
Media Development ◽  
Four Dimensions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

Politics and media development in our days is terrifying. Manipulation is dominating the social space. The so-called Overton window concept show us how, by way of “fake news” in a particular setting, certain completely unacceptable opinions slowly become part of the social consensus. Without understanding this change, people become deprived of their freedom and begin to feel more and more helpless. Five hundred years ago, theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546) rose against such attempts, defending his theological beliefs form estranged and twisted interpretations. In his essay, On Christian Freedom (1520), he took a firm position. Using a twofold thesis - that the Christian is both a free man and master of everything so he is not subjected to anyone, and that the Christian is also a humble servant to everyone and that he is subjected to everyone - he clarified that faith and love lead the Christian in all his activities and works. Luther clarified that in faith and love a fullness of the relationship between God and His loved ones - the mankind - is achieved, thus being humble does not mean giving up on our freedom; instead, it means to have the strength and courage to achieve it! Based on the four dimensions of freedom - political, social, identity, and dialogue - Luther provides an insight into his own understanding of freedom, which is still applicable in today’s social climate and the challenges of this age. These four dimensions helps the believer to take a clear stance against targeted attempts at deception which are immersed in “fake news.”

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