Sensational Religion

Sensational Religion
Author: Sally Promey
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 793
Release: 2014-06-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0300190360

The result of a collaborative, multiyear project, this groundbreaking book explores the interpretive worlds that inform religious practice and derive from sensory phenomena. Under the rubric of "making sense," the studies assembled here ask, How have people used and valued sensory data? How have they shaped their material and immaterial worlds to encourage or discourage certain kinds or patterns of sensory experience? How have they framed the sensual capacities of images and objects to license a range of behaviors, including iconoclasm, censorship, and accusations of blasphemy or sacrilege? Exposing the dematerialization of religion embedded in secularization theory, editor Sally Promey proposes a fundamental reorientation in understanding the personal, social, political, and cultural work accomplished in religion’s sensory and material practice. Sensational Religion refocuses scholarly attention on the robust material entanglements often discounted by modernity’s metaphysic and on their inextricable connections to human bodies, behaviors, affects, and beliefs.

Mesoamerican Memory

Mesoamerican Memory
Author: Stephanie Wood
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2012-11-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 080618809X

Euro-Americans see the Spanish conquest as the main event in the five-century history of Mesoamerica, but the people who lived there before contact never gave up their own cultures. Both before and after conquest, indigenous scribes recorded their communities’ histories and belief systems, as well as the events of conquest and its effects and aftermath. Today, the descendants of those native historians in modern-day Mexico and Guatemala still remember their ancestors’ stories. In Mesoamerican Memory, volume editors Amos Megged and Stephanie Wood have gathered the latest scholarship from contributors around the world to compare these various memories and explore how they were preserved and altered over time. Rather than dividing Mesoamerica’s past into pre-contact, colonial, and modern periods, the essays in this volume emphasize continuity from the pre-conquest era to the present, underscoring the ongoing importance of indigenous texts in creating and preserving community identity, history, and memory. In addition to Nahua and Maya recollections, contributors examine the indigenous traditions of Mixtec, Zapotec, Tarascan, and Totonac peoples. Close analysis of pictorial and alphabetic manuscripts, and of social and religious rituals, yields insight into community history and memory, political relations, genealogy, ethnic identity, and portrayals of the Spanish invaders. Drawing on archaeology, art history, ethnology, ethnohistory, and linguistics, the essays consider the function of manuscripts and ritual in local, regional, and, now, national settings. Several scholars highlight direct connections between the collective memory of indigenous communities and the struggles of contemporary groups. Such modern documents as land titles, for example, gain legitimacy by referring to ancestral memory. Crossing disciplinary, methodological, and temporal boundaries, Mesoamerican Memory advances our understanding of collective memory in Mexico and Guatemala. Through diverse sources—pictorial and alphabetic, archaeological, archival, and ethnographic—readers gain a glimpse into indigenous remembrances that, without the research exhibited here, might have remained unknown to the outside world.

The Möbius Strip

The Möbius Strip
Author: Jonathan D. Amith
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 803
Release: 2005-10-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0804767351

The Möbius Strip explores the history, political economy, and culture of space in central Guerrero, Mexico, during the colonial period. This study is significant for two reasons. First, space comprises a sphere of contention that affects all levels of society, from the individual and his or her household to the nation-state and its mechanisms for control and coercion. Second, colonialism offers a particularly unique situation, for it invariably involves a determined effort on the part of an invading society to redefine politico-administrative units, to redirect the flow of commodities and cash, and, ultimately, to foster and construct new patterns of allegiance and identity to communities, regions, and country. Thus spatial politics comprehends the complex interaction of institutional domination and individual agency. The complexity of the diachronic transformation of space in central Guerrero is illustrated through an analysis of land tenure, migration, and commercial exchange, three salient and contested aspects of hispanic conquest. The Möbius Strip, therefore, addresses issues important to social theory and to the understanding of the processes affecting the colonialization of non-Western societies.

The Tenochca Empire of Ancient Mexico

The Tenochca Empire of Ancient Mexico
Author: Pedro Carrasco
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 564
Release: 2012-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806178477

The most important political entity in pre-Spanish Mesoamerica was the Tenochca Empire, founded in 1428 when the three kingdoms of Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco, and Tlacopan formed an alliance that controlled the Basin of Mexico and other extensive areas of Mesoamerica. In a unique political structure, each of the three allies headed a group of kingdoms in the core of the Empire. Each capital possessed settlements of peasants both in its own domain and in those of the other two capitals; in conquered areas nearby, the three capitals had their separate tributaries. In The Tenochca Empire Pedro Carrasco incorporates years of research in the archives of Mexico and Spain and compares primary sources, some not yet published, from all three of the great kingdoms. Carrasco takes in the total tripartite structure of the Empire, defining its component entities and determining how they were organized and how they functioned.

Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest

Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest
Author: David Carrasco
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 538
Release: 2007
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 9780826342836

The culmination of recent restoration and analysis, these richly illustrated essays examine the history and meaning of one of Mesoamerica's surviving documents dating from the 1540s.