El gobernante en Mesoamérica

Focused on pre-Columbian Mesoamerican rulership, this collection stems from collaboration among a group of scholars who came together for a conference organized in 2015 in Mexico. El gobernante en Mesoamérica contains five essays that boldly aim to discuss the state of current knowledge about native government across Mesoamerica. Such work is necessary and increasingly relevant, particularly given recent studies on the persistence of native government in the early colonial period that have sought to understand how native rulership helped to shape the identity and limits of colonialism in New Spain. Yet problems have always existed in understanding native institutions. The invasion and the passage of time have destroyed documentation, native and European actors have sought to position themselves advantageously using the past, both political and religious actors have sometimes misconstrued or misunderstood preinvasion native ideas about rulership and governance, and Mesoamerica consisted of many different cultures even within larger linguistic groups, which European evidence often fails to convey.This book brings together studies from across many areas of Mesoamerica that tend to fall within the borders of modern Mexico and northern Central America. The cultures considered include the Nahua, Maya, Zoque, and Zapotec and range from the Classic period (ca. 200 CE–ca. 800 CE) to the Late Postclassic (ca. fifteenth century CE). Most essays utilize linguistic or philological analysis coupled with archaeological evidence. The work aims to augment the current understanding of indigenous ideas about governance by analyzing the extant sources carefully and critically to understand the “character, nature, function, and historical development of the main Mesoamerican governments” (p. 7). The five main chapters are organized chronologically, and a short introductory essay explains the emphasis of each.The first two chapters search for continuity over broad swaths of time. David Stuart, using a comparative linguistic approach, explains the curious continuity of the royal diadem, a kind of crown, as a symbol of the ruler and of nobility to many Mesoamerican peoples, finding evidence of it across nearly 2,000 years in Nahua and Maya regions. Continuity seems to also be important in the second chapter, which discusses the evolution of a particular kind of noble title, k'uhul Chatahn winik, among certain groups of the Maya. The title, according to Erik Velásquez García and Ana García Barrios, appears to signify a particular kind of transitional ruler and appears as a glyph in early Classic Maya writing (third century CE) and in seventeenth-century colonial writing.The three remaining essays provide more specific spatial and temporal focus. María Elena Vega Villalobos analyzes three women rulers in two Maya cities. She writes that “classical inscriptions document no more than a dozen women rulers” but that understanding women rulers, even though they were rare, helps to clarify how rulership functioned in the Maya world (p. 87). Maya women came to power, it appears, during periods of political crisis or uncertainty. Yet women ruled similarly to men, as warriors and conquerors but also as ritual leaders. Miguel Pastrana Flores writes about the circumstances in which Nahuas executed tlatoque (rulers), concluding that the execution of a tlatoani changed little for everyday Nahuas, who saw this as part of high politics and geopolitical affairs. The person changed; the system of governance endured. The execution of a tlatoani also reveals the limits of mythology, which saw rulers as semidivine; their execution suggests that they were all too human. Sergio Ángel Vásquez Galicia conveys how don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl's accounts ascribe a hybrid European-Nahua version of rulership to Nezahualcoyotl of Tetzcoco. The image of Nezahualcoyotl, through the depictions of a colonial-era chronicler, seems to reveal a colonized ruler imbued with European attributes—a hybrid figure, stripped largely of indigenous identity.The editors provide an informative introduction to the essays but oddly did not include a concluding essay. Such an essay might help to inform and orient an audience less deeply engaged in the complex analysis showcased in this collection. It would amplify the work by pointing out clearly its collective contribution to the understanding of native governance in Mesoamerica. Apart from that critique, scholars and interested readers will find value in these concise and nuanced essays focused around very specific themes. The authors speak with great authority, engaging and synthesizing known evidence and the scholarship around that evidence effectively and convincingly. Students just coming to this area of research will find a valuable introduction to the state of a field that is developing and flourishing

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Ethnology · Fifteenth · Genealogy · Geography · Humanities · Indigenous · Maya · Mesoamerica · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · State formation · Anthropology · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Law