Spring 2005

History 408/508 Aztec History and Philology

Professor Robert Haskett

Office Information: 355 McKenzie Hall, 346-4836
Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays, 10:00-12:00;
Thursdays, 1:30-3:30, or by appointment
Email: rhaskett@darkwing.uoregon.edu

History 408/508 is an experimental course never before offered at the UO. Our main intent is to find out about colonial Aztec, or Nahua, history and culture by learning how to read and translate the Nahuatl language. The Nahuas, an ethnicity that included the famous Aztecs, were the dominant culture group of central Mexico at the time of the Spanish invasion of 1519. After the invasion, some Nahuas learned how to right their language in Latin script, a process facilitated by the fact that they had had a written language prior to 1519 (though not in a form recognized as “true” writing by Europeans). Nonetheless, from the 1540s onwards, indigenous notaries and scholars wrote thousands of manuscripts in Nahuatl, from mundane records such as wills and land sale documents to elegant local and regional histories that looked back at precontact times or rethought the conquest and colonial eras from indigenous points of view.

 Until not too long ago few people could read or translate these sources, and most of them were ignored. Now a growing group of scholars in the United States, Mexico, and Europe are learning how to handle Nahuatl records, and how to use them to deepen our understanding of the Mesoamerican historical experience. This kind of investigation is part of a discipline known as ethnohistory, but is more particularly called “historical philology,” which is the dynamic study of language in an effort to tease out markers of cultural persistence, adaptation, and change. The roots of this discipline stretch far back in time, all the way to sixteenth-century efforts by Spaniards, particularly Catholic friars and priests, to understand how to convey the teachings of the Church to the indigenous people in their own languages. Their grammars, dictionaries, and linguistic primers are still invaluable aids, and we will be able to use some of them ourselves in HIST 408/508. The huge number of surviving texts exist thanks not only to the propensity of the Nahuas to write almost everything down on paper, but because until late in the 18 th century the Spanish bureaucracy accepted all manner of native-language texts as “legal” mediums of communication, and employed a corps of bilingual interpreters to read them.

 Details about the structure of HIST 408/508 will be available soon on a Blackboard site dedicated to this course. For the moment, the following summary must suffice:

 Reading : There will be two required texts for the course. One of them is James Lockhart’s Nahuas and Spaniards: Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology (Sanford: Stanford University Press). It will be available at Mother Kali’s Books, which is located on 13 th Ave. next to Dairy Queen. The other required text is a Nahuatl lesson book created by historical linguist Frances Karttunen. This is available through John Frederick Schwaller, a leading scholar of Nahuatl; ordering details will be provided on the Blackboard site.

 I will also be posting transcripts of representative, simple colonial-era Nahuatl language texts on the Blackboard site. Some of these will be used for in-class translation exercises in the latter part of the quarter. Hard copies of some of these texts will be made available, too, particularly those related to in-class exerecises.

 Assignments : Active participation in class is a must in a course like this. Participation (including attendance) will represent 40% of your grade. Another 40% of your grade will be based on your completion of regular language exercises. The final 20% of your course grade will be linked to one or more brief written assignments.

Course Calendar :

 The following calendar is provisional, but represents the general structure of HIST 408/508. Readings and lessons will be keyed in on the version posted on the Blackboard site.