The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico - Softcover

Tavarez, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804788650 ISBN 13: 9780804788656

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2013

Synopsis

After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among indigenous peoples—a project they envisioned as spiritual warfare. The Invisible War assesses this immense but dislocated project by examining all known efforts in Central Mexico to obliterate native devotions of Mesoamerican origin between the 1530s and the late eighteenth century.

The author's innovative interpretation of these efforts is punctuated by three events: the creation of an Inquisition tribunal in Mexico in 1571; the native rebellion of Tehuantepec in 1660; and the emergence of eerily modern strategies for isolating idolaters, teaching Spanish to natives, and obtaining medical proof of sorcery from the 1720s onwards. Rather than depicting native devotions solely from the viewpoint of their colonial codifiers, this book rescues indigenous perspectives on their own beliefs. This is achieved by an analysis of previously unknown or rare ritual texts that circulated in secrecy in Nahua and Zapotec communities through an astute appropriation of European literacy. Tavárez contends that native responses gave rise to a colonial archipelago of faith in which local cosmologies merged insights from Mesoamerican and European beliefs. In the end, idolatry eradication inspired distinct reactions: while Nahua responses focused on epistemological dissent against Christianity, Zapotec strategies privileged confrontations in defense of native cosmologies.

About this title

About the Author

David Tavárez is professor of anthropology at Vassar College. Besides 45+ articles and chapters, he is the author of "The Invisible War," editor of "Words and Worlds Turned Around," a co-author of "Painted Words" and "Chimalpahin's Conquest," and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

From the Back Cover

"In ... The Invisible War, two longstanding projects come to fruition: Inquisition studies and Indigenous-language-based ethnohistory . . . The book is admirably transparent in its use of text and data, and impressive in its mobilization of diverse tools of inquiry . . . Its greatest strength, [...], is its rich description of the diversity of cosmologies and magical practices that existed in the netherworld of unsanctioned belief among communities whose cultures layered Indigenous and European religion."
--Sean F. McEnroe, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

...

"Thoroughly researched in the primary sources and meticulously contextualized in current scholarly literature. Summing Up: Highly recommended." -- V. H. Cummins, Choice Review

From the Inside Flap

"In this eye-opening book, Tavárez shows that colonial religion was an "archipelago of faith" of multifarious and constantly changing indigenous Christianities. Change was often prompted by violence and was as relentless as the strategies of those friars, parish priests, and minor civil magistrates who devoted their lives to homogenizing the faith and rooting out idolatry, the origin of all sin. This is a magisterial study that spans three centuries and plumbs a formidable cache of Nahua, Zapotec, and ecclesiastical sources scattered throughout Europe and the Americas. A landmark."
--Jorge Cańizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804788650
• ISBN 13: 9780804788656
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 398