The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. Vol. 2

Multivolume compilation reference works by their very nature face two challenges. One is the challenge of timeliness, which I shall discuss later. The other is the challenge of coherence, of covering the history of a large region over a substantial period of time using a wide array of scholars and still achieving some degree of consistency of form and interpretation. With respect to the book under review here, the time and place is postconquest Mesoamerica—this is the second of the three-volume, six-part Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, in which each volume is divided into two discrete parts, one for pre-Columbian times, the other for the colonial and modern periods.The book is divided into 10 chapters that average over 40 pages in length, each one devoted to the native peoples of one of Mesoamerica’s subregions, whose “definitions have been kept deliberately fluid” (p. 1). Indigenous central Mexicans are alone granted two essays, with Sarah Cline writing on the colonial period and Frans Schryer discussing the region “since Independence,” and the Maya are judiciously treated in separate chapters on the Lowlands (by Grant Jones) and the Highlands (by George Lovell). The rest of Mesoamerica is carved up into “Northwest Mexico,” covered by Susan Deeds; “Northeastern Mexico,” assigned to David Frye; “Western Mexico,” in Eric Van Young’s capable hands; “the Gulf Coast,” taken on by Susan Deans-Smith; and “Oaxaca,” discussed by María de los Angeles Romero Frizzi.Although the contributors were given considerable leeway in interpreting their mandates, all but one present essays divided into subheaded themes and con cluded with bibliographical essays of 5-13 pages. The exception is Deans-Smith, whose entire 27-page contribution is a historiographical essay that deftly positions most of the works she cites within the evolution of the field. As a result the chapter is drier than the others, while in some ways being the most useful (a graduate student of mine working on colonial Totonacápan has found it absolutely invaluable).Two examples stand out as contrasts in form and style to Deans-Smith’s chapter. One is Schryer’s contribution, which opens with a travelogue-style description of a stroll by the author through Mexico City’s zócalo in 1990 (pp. 223–24), moves on to draw a clear and lively outline of the modern Nahua experience, and closes with a few lines of poetry translated by him from Nahuatl. The other example is Lovell’s chapter on Maya history in colonial and modern Guatemala. Some readers may find it romantic and reductionist, but the essay’s passionate edge enables Lovell to embrace everything from the conquest of the Kaqchikel to Rigoberta Menchú and the Zapatistas in a single coherent narrative; the essay is a tour de force. Lovell’s contribution is made all the more effective by the other Maya chapter preceding it—Jones’ coverage of the lowland Maya (that is, the Yucatan peninsula), which is marred only by an incomplete and error-prone bibliographic essay (for example, on p. 385, there are no fewer than three typos in the name of one Spanish scholar; to be fair, other bibliographic essays have typos too). These two superb chapters, in less than 80 combined pages of text, offer the best concise synthesis currently in print of the last five centuries of Maya demography, political geography, acculturation, and accommodation and resistance to conquest, colonization, and various modern manifestations of invasion and intrusion. I have already found these chapters to be most useful in undergraduate courses.Scholars and students will likewise find the other essays of varying utility depending on individual specialization and need; all have their virtues and, at the very least, all serve as effective introductions to their respective regions. For example, the potentially confusing history of the many indigenous groups in northwest Mexico is skillfully clarified by Deeds through her use of multiple subheaded sections to discuss cultural geography and the “Mesoamerican connection” (pp. 49–50), then a brief chronology of the indigenous experience from contact to the revolution, and finally an ethnohistoric/ethnographic guide to the region’s indigenous peoples as broken down into five groupings (mirrored in similar categories in Deeds’s bibliographic essay).Van Young’s essay adopts a similarly effective structure combining chronological and ethnic categories of discussion, while Cline and Schryer, taking advantage of the fact that they have fewer centuries to cover, discuss the Nahuas by topics such as land. Frye focuses on the colonial period, explaining why indigenous groups in northeastern Mexico barely survived into modern times. Romero Frizzi presents an accessible and uncluttered chronological survey of indigenous Oaxaca.These varying characteristics and qualities make the volume’s essays useful, but also represent the disparate nature of such an enterprise. How does the volume therefore meet the challenge of coherence? It does this in various ways, two of which I would like to highlight. One is the way in which Murdo Macleod uses the introduction. Richard Adams and Macleod are coeditors of the volume, but their respective specializations and consequent division of labor makes this book (part 2) Macleod’s baby—and an admirable father he proves himself to be. His 35-page introductory essay is an exemplar of the genre; instead of merely summarizing the other chapters, he takes us smartly and succinctly through the key themes, issues, and events that come up in later pages.One of these issues functions as the other mechanism whereby the volume achieves coherence; this is the question of who, in each subregion, are the “native peoples” of the series title and how do they remain that way during these centuries of colonization, neocolonization, and modernization. This is of course a vast topic that pertains to the very definition of fundamental terms such as “culture” and “ethnicity”; it is arguably the cornerstone question of ethnohistory, at least as practiced by Latin Americanists. Macleod contextualizes this question solidly in Mesoamerican history, rather than attempting to answer it by privileging one theory of cultural or historical interpretation over others; he is then able to refer to his contributing authors for support. Put another way, he uses the profoundly historical and regional approaches of the volume’s essays to propose a theoretical approach to colonial and modern Mesoamerica that consists not of any single model or paradigm but of using local, empirical evidence to strike a balance or find middle ground between contrasting theoretical approaches.In their introduction to The Legacy of Mesoamerica (1996), a text which makes an interesting shelf companion to Adams and Macleod’s Mesoamerica, Robert Carmack, Janine Gasco and Gary Gossen position themselves between essentialist and materialist interpretations of Mesoamerican culture. They claim an interactive middle ground that borrows from both theoretical traditions, being concerned more with how native peoples of the region developed and reproduced cultures in response to material conditions. The degree to which Legacy achieves this goal is not relevant here, but suffice to suggest that the essays in Adams and Macleod’s Mesoamerica do a fine job of collectively offering this kind of interactive interpretation of native Mesoamerican history. Because the book is more historical than anthropological, discussion of cultural interaction and survival (in the broadest sense of the term) tends to use the language less of essentialism-vs.-materialism and more of persistence-vs.-acculturation. The middle ground between both these two poles is expressed variously, but it runs consistently enough through the volume.Van Young, for example, writes of “indigenous languages and cultural traditions thus expunged,” while there yet remains “a discernible, even vital, indigenous tradition in the Center-West,” where Mesoamerican history in the past five centuries “has been one of failed redemptions imposed by other people” (p. 172; emphasis mine). Cline strikes a balance between “cultural tenacity” and “the deleterious impact of colonial rule” (p. 217). Lovell emphasizes structures of adversity in Guatemala and Maya responses, adaptations, and challenges to it. Jones likewise highlights cultural accommodation and the ways in which “Maya cultures have successfully reinvented themselves” repeatedly (p. 381). Not only do these essays and Macleod’s introduction avoid any misguided attempts to define Mesoamerican culture or Mesoamericans as one, but they tend to accept that even at the sub-regional level the definition of ethnic groups and the category of “native” is elusive and problematic. Frye argues for “a broader definition” of native American rather than one derived from “colonial ideologies of race and identity” (p. 128), but one still regionally rooted. Likewise, Deeds suggests that a more inclusive appreciation and understanding of native history might be achieved through the study of micro-regional experiences and identities. She articulates directly a skepticism that is hinted at in other essays in the volume regarding the “heuristic approaches” of “social scientists” (p. 77), emphasizing instead the particular subregional historical factors that created ethnic groups and distinct communities within them, and “reinforced social cohesion within each group” (p. 78). Or, as Schryer puts it (in effect, expressing that interactive approach to essentialism vs. materialism), the issue turns on “the day-to-day social practices of native people in their ongoing struggle to maintain or regain access to land and other resources and formal recognition of political autonomy on the local or regional level” (p. 232).If coherence is one of two challenges facing this type of book, the other is that of timeliness; during the many years that such volumes inevitably take to compile, fields develop, new scholars and findings and paradigms emerge, and state-of-the-art contributions begin to look a tad dated. While all scholarly work is to some extent subject to this process—as indeed it must be for any field to avoid stagnation—the phenomenon is particularly applicable to the genre of synthetic and semihistoriographical essay that makes up volumes such as this one. In the case of Mesoamerica, the editors have dealt commendably with this challenge. Admittedly, the reader is given the impression that the essays were originally written about ten years ago, with subsequent updates taking the essays to various points in the 1990s; some chapters are more successfully, thoroughly, and recently revised, with new scholarship incorporated into the body of the text, while others seem to have received no greater overhaul than the addition of some items to their bibliographies.But few readers will find this a hindrance to the profitable use of the volume as a reference, and fewer still will care about or even notice the clues that reveal these mechanical details of the book’s compilation. The fact that some of the con tributors, all of whom are described by Macleod as “mid-career or younger” (p. 1), are now senior scholars, adds to the volume’s profile rather than detracts from it. Furthermore, the problem of timeliness in this field is a product of its vibrancy and vitality; specialists are likely to perceive the matter from this angle and understand that it is a good problem to have. Finally, a small but important aspect of the challenge of timeliness in volumes such as this is that of maps; in Mesoamerica, they are clear and plentiful (25 in all), and should be useful for many decades.MacLeod, above all, but also Adams and the contributing authors, are to be congratulated for creating a volume that rises to the challenges of coherence and timeliness, that functions effectively as a reference work, that serves as a student resource (ranging from graduate students exploring dissertation topics to upper-level undergraduates researching term papers), and that all scholars of Mesoamerica will wish to possess

Archaeology · Ethnology · Geography · Mesoamerica · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Latin American history and culture

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