Tongues of Fire

Language and Evangelization in Colonial Mexico

Bibliographic Data

ID7526240
AuthorsNancy Farri (corresponding author), Nancy Farriss (corresponding author)
Year2018
Pages416
Publication date2018-10-17
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueTongues of Fire (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780190884109.001.0001
OpenAlexW2895909979
Open LibraryOL28691093M
ISBN9780190884109
LanguageEN
Citations received10

Language and translation governed the creation of Mexican Christianity during the first centuries of colonial rule. Spanish missionaries collaborated with indigenous intellectuals to communicate the gospel in dozens of local languages that had previously lacked grammars, dictionaries, or alphabetic script. The major challenge to translators, more serious than the absence of written aids or the great diversity of languages and their phonetic and syntactical complexity, was the vast cultural difference between the two worlds. The lexical gaps that frustrated the search for equivalence in conveying fundamental Christian doctrines derived from cultural gaps that separated European experiences and concepts from those of the Indians. This study focuses on the Otomangue languages of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, especially Zapotec, and relates their role in the Dominican evangelizing program to the larger frame of culture contact in postconquest Mesoamerica. Fine-grained analysis of translated texts is used to reveal the rhetorical strategies of missionary discourse and combines with an examination of language contact in different social contexts. A major aim is to spotlight the role of the native elites in shaping what emerged as a new form of Christianity. As translators, chief catechists, and parish administrators they made evangelization in many respects an indigenous enterprise and the Mexican church it created an indigenous church

Ancient history · Archaeology · Christianity · Ethnology · Gospel · Indigenous · Linguistics · Mesoamerica · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy · Intercultural communication · Language and culture · Language and languages · Language and languages, religious aspects · Language in missionary work · Mexico · Religion · Religious aspects

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