Pedro de Alvarado, Tonatiuh: Reconsidering Apotheosis in Nahua and Highland Maya Narratives of the Spanish Invasion

Ethnohistory ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-79
Author(s):  
Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
New World ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Highland Maya

Abstract Recent scholarship on the Spanish invasion of the New World has brought under scrutiny the historiographic theme of apotheosis—the notion that Indigenous peoples regarded the invaders as gods or godlike beings and that such beliefs influenced their responses. This article examines the question by focusing on Pedro de Alvarado, a leading member of Hernán Cortés’s contingent, who was known as Tonatiuh—a Nahuatl word that designated the sun, the day, and the sun god. Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Guatemala used the name during the invasion, and Nahua, K’iche’, and Kaqchikel authors employed it frequently in later writings that variously hinted at, endorsed, or questioned Alvarado’s associations with the sun god. Rather than an imposition resulting from Spanish teachings, the association of Alvarado with the sun god derived from Mesoamerican beliefs about the rise and fall of successive eras, which provided Indigenous paradigms to explain the Spanish invasion.

Early Modern Spaces in Motion

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
New World ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Earth ◽  
German Speaking

Stretching back to antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment. But during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, individuals across Europe increasingly designed, experienced, and described a new world of motion: one characterized by continuous, rather than segmented, movement. New spaces that included vistas along house interiors and uninterrupted library reading rooms offered open expanses for shaping sequences of social behaviour, scientists observed how the Earth rotated around the sun, and philosophers attributed emotions to neural vibrations in the human brain. Early Modern Spaces in Motion examines this increased emphasis on motion with eight essays encompassing a geographical span of Portugal to German-speaking lands and a disciplinary range from architectural history to English. It consequently merges longstanding strands of analysis considering people in motion and buildings in motion to explore the cultural historical attitudes underpinning the varied impacts of motion in early modern Europe.

A Provocation of The Modes of Black Indigeneity

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-50
Author(s):  
Kyle Mays
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Indigenous Land

This essay explores the meaning of the term Black Indigeneity (BI). Afro-Indigenous Studies scholar Kyle T. Mays asks, what is Black Indigeneity? How do scholars talk about it? What are its possibilities? Relying on a survey of recent scholarship, Mays argues that BI is largely understood as a form of Black Americans participating in settler colonial processes meant to erase and displace Indigenous peoples. He argues that we should look at BI as an analytic that African Americans have used to create belonging and continue to express cultures practiced throughout the African diaspora, adapted and transformed into a modern iteration of cultural expression. In this way, we should rethink how we view blackness and indigeneity as two separate entities, and explore how people of African descent create belonging on dispossessed Indigenous land.

Slavery in the Americas

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. Paquette ◽  
Mark M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
New World ◽  
Western World ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Forced Relocation ◽  
Western European ◽  
Ethnic Origins

This article presents a general discussion of slavery in the Americas. Slavery in the Americas pre-dated Columbus, but once taking root in the Americas under western European auspices, acquired a predominantly commercial character whose benefaction to the sustained economic growth of the Western world no serious scholar can any longer doubt. The introduction of slavery into the New World affected indigenous peoples in many ways, sometimes drawing them into the orbit of slave society, sometimes alienating them from it, and sometimes augmenting a preexisting commitment to different types of slavery already practiced by some of those societies. The experiences of the enslaved also varied depending in factors such as the ethnic origins of the slave, the timing of his or her forced relocation to the Americas, the type and size of plantation, and the particular proclivities and personalities of the master and mistress.

The March of Neocolonization Folly in the Amazon

2020 ◽  
pp. 153270862097874
Author(s):  
Marcelo Diversi
Keyword(s):  
Global Warming ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
New World ◽  
Amazon Rainforest ◽  
Resource Extraction ◽  
Direct Connection ◽  
Natural Resource Extraction ◽  
Plant Extinction

The Amazon Rainforest is the most biodiverse place on Earth, home to hundreds of indigenous peoples, many of whom still with no or little contact with settler civilization, and of vital importance for our planet’s climate sustainability. Yet the march of neocolonization continues to advance deforestation, indigenous displacement, animal and plant extinction, unsustainable natural resource extraction, and disruption in river connectivity and to greatly contribute to global warming. In this article, I will deconstruct the narratives used to justify the Amazonian westward march in pursuit of energy, land, and natural resources, establishing a direct connection between contemporary narratives of justification and the Spanish “Requerimiento” of 1513, a declaration by the Spanish Monarchy of their divine right to conquer the New World and its peoples.

Problems and Promises of Pietism Research

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 536-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Strom
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Church History ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Church Historians

Since 1970, when Church History last published a review of Pietist scholarship, there have been significant contributions to almost all areas of the field. Research on Pietism—once the distinct province of German church historians—has become increasingly international as well as interdisciplinary in scope as Germanists, musicologists, social historians, and historians of Christianity explore the influence of this movement in Europe and the New World. The yearbookPietismus und Neuzeit, the magisterial four volume handbookGeschichte des Pietismus, and the first International Pietism Congress in 2001 all testify to the vitality of current scholarship in this field. As much recent scholarship makes clear, Pietist research can contribute significantly to how historians understand the development of Christianity in the last three hundred years.

American Indians Encounter the Bible

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-157
Author(s):  
Christopher Vecsey
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
American Indians ◽  
New World ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Indian Languages ◽  
The Bible ◽  
To Receive

Abstract This article explores how Native Americans have received the Bible. Over the centuries some Indians have been inspired by the Bible, and some have been repelled by its long-standing place in colonization. The Christian invaders in the New World carried the Bible in their minds. It served as their inspiration, their justification, and their frame of reference as they encountered Indigenous peoples. In effect, the Bible was the template for exploration, conquest, identification of selves and others. The Christian invaders brought along or produced physical Bibles, which served their catechetical purposes, and in time they began to translate the Bible—in whole and in part—into American Indian languages. Therefore this article illustrates that to the present day Native Americans continue to receive the Bible actively and variously, attempting to fit it to their unfolding cultural stories. Ultimately, it has not lost its potency, nor have they lost their power to consider it on their own terms.

scholarly journals Braverman's New World? Assessing the Labour Process In Recent Scholarship

1969 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Milloy
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
Labour Process ◽  
Recent Scholarship

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. By Henry Braverman. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998. 338 pp. $19.00. Paperback.

Micromobility, Space, and Indigenous Housing Schemes in Australia after World War II

Transfers ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Ellinghaus ◽  
Sianan Healy
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Housing Development ◽  
World War ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Housing Design ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Australian Case

This article examines state efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples through the spatial politics of housing design and the regulation of access to and use of houses, streets, and towns. Using two Australian case studies in the 1950s, Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve in Victoria and the Gap housing development in the Northern Territory, and inspired by recent scholarship on imperial networks and Indigenous mobilities, it explores Aboriginal people’s negotiation of those efforts through practices of both moving and staying put. We demonstrate the importance of micromobility—which we define as smallscale movements across short distances, in and out of buildings, along roads, and across townships—and argue that in order to fully appreciate the regulation of Indigenous mobility and Indigenous resistance to it, scholars must concentrate on the small, local, and seemingly insignificant as well as more drastic and permanent movement.

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