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Books > History > American history
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Annals of Native America - How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,184
Discovery Miles 11 840
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Annals of Native America - How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (Hardcover)
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For many generations, the Nahuas of Mexico maintained their
tradition of the xiuhpohualli (SHOO-po-wa-lee), or "year counts,"
telling and performing their history around communal firesides so
that the memory of it would not be lost. When the Spaniards came,
young Nahuas took the Roman letters taught them by the friars and
used the new alphabet to record historical performances by elders.
These written texts were carefully preserved and even expanded upon
for over a century. The annals, as they have often been called,
were written not only by Indians but also for Indians, without
regard to European interests. As such they are rare and
inordinately valuable texts. But they have also been difficult for
recent generations to understand. They have often been assumed to
be both largely anonymous and at least partially inscrutable to
modern ears. Now Nahuatl scholar Camilla Townsend, by dint of
careful research, has been able to deduce authorship in the case of
most of the texts, allowing her to restore them to their proper
contexts and make sense of long misunderstood documents. She
follows a remarkable chain of Nahua historians chronologically,
generation by generation, telling of their lives and exploring what
they wrote and why they wrote it. Sometimes they conceived of their
work as a political act, reinstating bonds between communities, or
between past, present, and future generations. Sometimes they
conceived of it as art more than anything else, and delighted in
offering language that was beautiful or startling or humorous. They
were the writers of a literature that they hoped would be passed
down to posterity. Their work did survive. Here for the first time,
samples of their many creations have been brought together into one
book, together with the stories of the writers' lives, to produce a
work accessible to the people of today even as it remains faithful
to the ethos of the past.
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