Cycles Of Time And Meaning In The Mexican Books Of Fate

Author : Elizabeth Hill Boone
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292756569
Total Pages : 527 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate written by Elizabeth Hill Boone and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-05-17 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. Today, only a few of these divinatory codices survive. Visually complex, esoteric, and strikingly beautiful, painted books such as the famous Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus still serve as portals into the ancient Mexican calendrical systems and the cycles of time and meaning they encode. In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the entire extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and offers a masterful explanation of the genre as a whole. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar priests and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the graphic vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing principles that structure the codices. She shows how they form almanacs that either offer general purpose guidance or focus topically on specific aspects of life, such as birth, marriage, agriculture and rain, travel, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone also tackles two major areas of controversy—the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia, which she freshly interprets as a cosmic narrative of creation, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a single religious and divinatory system.

Author : Elizabeth Hill Boone
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292783124
Total Pages : 552 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stories in Red and Black written by Elizabeth Hill Boone and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Aztecs and Mixtecs of ancient Mexico recorded their histories pictorially in images painted on hide, paper, and cloth. The tradition of painting history continued even after the Spanish Conquest, as the Spaniards accepted the pictorial histories as valid records of the past. Five Pre-Columbian and some 150 early colonial painted histories survive today. This copiously illustrated book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Mexican painted history as an intellectual, documentary, and pictorial genre. Elizabeth Hill Boone explores how the Mexican historians conceptualized and painted their past and introduces the major pictorial records: the Aztec annals and cartographic histories and the Mixtec screenfolds and lienzos. Boone focuses her analysis on the kinds of stories told in the histories and on how the manuscripts work pictorially to encode, organize, and preserve these narratives. This twofold investigation broadens our understanding of how preconquest Mexicans used pictographic history for political and social ends. It also demonstrates how graphic writing systems created a broadly understood visual "language" that communicated effectively across ethnic and linguistic boundaries.

Author : James Maffie
Publisher : University Press of Colorado
ISBN 13 : 1607322234
Total Pages : 512 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aztec Philosophy written by James Maffie and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2014-03-15 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Aztec Philosophy, James Maffie shows the Aztecs advanced a highly sophisticated and internally coherent systematic philosophy worthy of consideration alongside other philosophies from around the world. Bringing together the fields of comparative world philosophy and Mesoamerican studies, Maffie excavates the distinctly philosophical aspects of Aztec thought. Aztec Philosophy focuses on the ways Aztec metaphysics—the Aztecs’ understanding of the nature, structure and constitution of reality—underpinned Aztec thinking about wisdom, ethics, politics,\ and aesthetics, and served as a backdrop for Aztec religious practices as well as everyday activities such as weaving, farming, and warfare. Aztec metaphysicians conceived reality and cosmos as a grand, ongoing process of weaving—theirs was a world in motion. Drawing upon linguistic, ethnohistorical, archaeological, historical, and contemporary ethnographic evidence, Maffie argues that Aztec metaphysics maintained a processive, transformational, and non-hierarchical view of reality, time, and existence along with a pantheistic theology. Aztec Philosophy will be of great interest to Mesoamericanists, philosophers, religionists, folklorists, and Latin Americanists as well as students of indigenous philosophy, religion, and art of the Americas.

Author : Patrick Thomas Hajovsky
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 1477307249
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On the Lips of Others written by Patrick Thomas Hajovsky and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary study investigating how the name and portrait of Moteuczoma (a.k.a. Moctezuma/Montezuma) II were represented in Aztec monuments and colonial manuscripts and how the concept of fame operated in the Aztec world.

Author : Leisa A. Kauffmann
Publisher : University of New Mexico Press
ISBN 13 : 0826360378
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Legacy of Rulership in Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Historia de la Nación Chichimeca written by Leisa A. Kauffmann and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Leisa A. Kauffmann takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the writings of one of Mexico's early chroniclers, Fernando de Alva Ixtilxochitl, a bilingual seventeenth-century historian from Central Mexico. His writing, especially his portrayal of the great pre-Hispanic poet-king Nezahualcoyotl, influenced other canonical histories of Mexico and is still influential today. Many scholars who discuss Alva Ixtlilxochitl's writing focus on his personal and literary investment in the European classical tradition, but Kauffmann argues that his work needs to be read through the lens of Nahua cultural concepts and literary-historical precepts. She suggests that he is best understood in light of his ancestral ties to Tetzcoco's rulers and as a historian who worked within both Native and European traditions. By paying attention to his representation of rulership, Kauffmann demonstrates how the literary and symbolic worlds of the Nahua exist in allegorical but still discernible subtexts within the larger Spanish context of his writing.

Author : Penny C. Morrill
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292759304
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Casa Del Deán written by Penny C. Morrill and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Extensively illustrated with new color photographs, this pioneering study of a masterpiece of colonial Latin American art reveals how a cathedral dean and native American painters drew on their respective visual traditions to promote Christian faith in the New World"--

Author : Susan Schroeder
Publisher : Apollo Books
ISBN 13 : 9781845192990
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Conquest All Over Again written by Susan Schroeder and published by Apollo Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spaniards typically portrayed the conquest and fall of Mexico Tenochtitlan as Armageddon, while native peoples in colonial Mesoamerica continued to write and paint their histories and lives often without any mention of the foreigners in their midst. Their accounts took the form of annals, chronicles, religious treatises, tribute accounts, theatre pieces, and wills. Thousand of documents were produced, almost all of which served to preserve indigenous ways of doing things. But what provoked record keeping on such a grand scale? At what point did pre-contact sacred writing become utilitarian and quotidian? Were their texts documentaries, a form of boosterism, even ingenious intellectualism, or were they ultimately a literature of ruin? This volume seeks to address key aspects of indigenous perspectives of the conquest and Spanish colonialism by examining what they themselves recorded and why they did so.

Author : Lori Boornazian Diel
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 462 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aztec Codices written by Lori Boornazian Diel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the migration of the Aztecs to the rise of the empire and its eventual demise, this book covers Aztec history in full, analyzing conceptions of time, religion, and more through codices to offer an inside look at daily life. This book focuses on two main areas: Aztec history and Aztec culture. Early chapters deal with Aztec history—the first providing a visual record of the story of the Aztec migration and search for their destined homeland of Tenochtitlan, and the second exploring how the Aztecs built their empire. Later chapters explain life in the Aztec world, focusing on Aztec conceptions of time and religion, the Aztec economy, the life cycle, and daily life. The book ends with an account of the fall of the empire, as illustrated by Aztec artists. With sections concerning a wide variety of topics—from the Aztec pantheon to war, agriculture, childhood, marriage, diet, justice, the arts, and sports, among many others—readers will gain an expansive understanding of life in the Aztec world.

Author : Geoffrey E. Braswell
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317543599
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Ancient Maya of Mexico written by Geoffrey E. Braswell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The archaeological sites of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula are among the most visited ancient cities of the Americas. Archaeologists have recently made great advances in our understanding of the social and political milieu of the northern Maya lowlands. However, such advances have been under-represented in both scholarly and popular literature until now. 'The Ancient Maya of Mexico' presents the results of new and important archaeological, epigraphic, and art historical research in the Mexican states of Yucatan, Campeche, and Quintana Roo. Ranging across the Middle Preclassic to the Modern periods, the volume explores how new archaeological data has transformed our understanding of Maya history. 'The Ancient Maya of Mexico' will be invaluable to students and scholars of archaeology and anthropology, and all those interested in the society, rituals and economic organisation of the Maya region.

Author : Penelope Dransart
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000182983
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Living Beings written by Penelope Dransart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living Beings examines the vital characteristics of social interactions between living beings, including humans, other animals and trees.Many discussions of such relationships highlight the exceptional qualities of the human members of the category, insisting for instance on their religious beliefs or creativity. In contrast, the international case studies in this volume dissect views based on hierarchical oppositions between human and other living beings. Although human practices may sometimes appear to exist in a realm beyond nature, they are nevertheless subject to the pull of natural forces. These forces may be brought into prominence through a consideration of the interactions between human beings and other inhabitants of the natural world.The interplay in this book between social anthropologists, philosophers and artists cuts across species divisions to examine the experiential dimensions of interspecies engagements. In ethnographically and/or historically contextualized chapters, contributors examine the juxtaposition of human and other living beings in the light of themes such as wildlife safaris, violence, difference, mimicry, simulation, spiritual renewal, dress and language.