The Body in the Mixtec Codices

The Body in the Mixtec Codices PDF Author: Monica L. Bellas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Human body
Languages : en
Pages : 822

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Painting the Skin

Painting the Skin PDF Author: Élodie Dupey García
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816538441
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Mesoamerican communities past and present are characterized by their strong inclination toward color and their expert use of the natural environment to create dyes and paints. In pre-Hispanic times, skin was among the preferred surfaces on which to apply coloring materials. Archaeological research and historical and iconographic evidence show that, in Mesoamerica, the human body—alive or dead—received various treatments and procedures for coloring it. Painting the Skin brings together exciting research on painted skins in Mesoamerica. Chapters explore the materiality, uses, and cultural meanings of the colors applied to a multitude of skins, including bodies, codices made of hide and vegetal paper, and even building “skins.” Contributors offer physicochemical analysis and compare compositions, manufactures, and attached meanings of pigments and colorants across various social and symbolic contexts and registers. They also compare these Mesoamerican colors with those used in other ancient cultures from both the Old and New Worlds. This cross-cultural perspective reveals crucial similarities and differences in the way cultures have painted on skins of all types. Examining color in Mesoamerica broadens understandings of Native religious systems and world views. Tracing the path of color use and meaning from pre-Columbian times to the present allows for the study of the preparation, meanings, social uses, and thousand-year origins of the coloring materials used by today’s Indigenous peoples. Contributors: María Isabel Álvarez Icaza Longoria Christine Andraud Bruno Giovanni Brunetti David Buti Davide Domenici Élodie Dupey García Tatiana Falcón Álvarez Anne Genachte-Le Bail Fabrice Goubard Aymeric Histace Patricia Horcajada Campos Stephen Houston Olivia Kindl Bertrand Lavédrine Linda R. Manzanilla Naim Anne Michelin Costanza Miliani Virgina E. Miller Sélim Natahi Fabien Pottier Patricia Quintana Owen Franco D. Rossi Antonio Sgamellotti Vera Tiesler Aurélie Tournié María Luisa Vázquez de Ágredos Pascual Cristina Vidal Lorenzo

The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts

The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts PDF Author: Maarten Jansen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004193588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 598

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Book Description
This handbook surveys and describes the illustrated Mixtec manuscripts that survive in Europe, the United States and Mexico.

The Mixtecs of Oaxaca

The Mixtecs of Oaxaca PDF Author: Ronald Spores
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806150890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
The Mixtec peoples were among the major original developers of Mesoamerican civilization. Centuries before the Spanish Conquest, they formed literate urban states and maintained a uniquely innovative technology and a flourishing economy. Today, thousands of Mixtecs still live in Oaxaca, in present-day southern Mexico, and thousands more have migrated to locations throughout Mexico, the United States, and Canada. In this comprehensive survey, Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkansky—both preeminent scholars of Mixtec civilization—synthesize a wealth of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data to trace the emergence and evolution of Mixtec civilization from the time of earliest human occupation to the present. The Mixtec region has been the focus of much recent archaeological and ethnohistorical activity. In this volume, Spores and Balkansky incorporate the latest available research to show that the Mixtecs, along with their neighbors the Valley and Sierra Zapotec, constitute one of the world’s most impressive civilizations, antecedent to—and equivalent to—those of the better-known Maya and Aztec. Employing what they refer to as a “convergent methodology,” the authors combine techniques and results of archaeology, ethnohistory, linguistics, biological anthropology, ethnology, and participant observation to offer abundant new insights on the Mixtecs’ multiple transformations over three millennia.

The Codex Nuttall

The Codex Nuttall PDF Author: Zelia Nuttall
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486136450
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
The only value-priced, full-color edition of the pre-Columbian Mexican (Mixtec) book. Features 88 color plates of kings, gods, heroes, temples, sacrifices, and more. New introduction.

Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico; Mixtec Place Signs and Maps

Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico; Mixtec Place Signs and Maps PDF Author: Mary Elizabeth Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mixtec language
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Writing Without Words

Writing Without Words PDF Author: Elizabeth Hill Boone
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822313885
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
The history of writing, or so the standard story goes, is an ascending process, evolving toward the alphabet and finally culminating in the "full writing" of recorded speech. Writing without Words challenges this orthodoxy, and with it widespread notions of literacy and dominant views of art and literature, history and geography. Asking how knowledge was encoded and preserved in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Mesoamerican cultures, the authors focus on systems of writing that did not strive to represent speech. Their work reveals the complicity of ideology in the history of literacy, and offers new insight into the history of writing. The contributors--who include art historians, anthropologists, and literary theorists--examine the ways in which ancient Mesoamerican and Andean peoples conveyed meaning through hieroglyphic, pictorial, and coded systems, systems inseparable from the ideologies they were developed to serve. We see, then, how these systems changed with the European invasion, and how uniquely colonial writing systems came to embody the post-conquest American ideologies. The authors also explore the role of these early systems in religious discourse and their relation to later colonial writing. Bringing the insights from Mesoamerica and the Andes to bear on a fundamental exchange among art history, literary theory, semiotics, and anthropology, the volume reveals the power contained in the medium of writing. Contributors. Elizabeth Hill Boone, Tom Cummins, Stephen Houston, Mark B. King, Dana Leibsohn, Walter D. Mignolo, John Monaghan, John M. D. Pohl, Joanne Rappaport, Peter van der Loo

Imagining the Fetus the Unborn in Myth, Religion, and Culture

Imagining the Fetus the Unborn in Myth, Religion, and Culture PDF Author: Vanessa R Sasson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190452250
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
In contemporary Western culture, the word "fetus" introduces either a political subject or a literal, medicalized entity. Neither of these frameworks does justice to the vast array of religious literature and oral traditions from cultures around the world in which the fetus emerges as a powerful symbol or metaphor. This volume presents essays that explore the depiction of the fetus in the world's major religious traditions, finding some striking commonalities as well as intriguing differences. Among the themes that emerge is the tendency to conceive of the fetus as somehow independent of the mother's body -- as in the case of the Buddha, who is described as inhabiting a palace while gestating in the womb. On the other hand, the fetus can also symbolically represent profound human needs and emotions, such as the universal experience of vulnerability. The authors note how the advent of the fetal sonogram has transformed how people everywhere imagine the unborn today, giving rise to a narrow range of decidedly literal questions about personhood, gender, and disability.

Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate

Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate PDF Author: Elizabeth Hill Boone
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292756569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
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.

Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza

Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza PDF Author: Logan Wagner
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 029274983X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The plaza has been a defining feature of Mexican urban architecture and culture for at least 4,000 years. Ancient Mesoamericans conducted most of their communal life in outdoor public spaces, and today the plaza is still the public living room in every Mexican neighborhood, town, and city—the place where friends meet, news is shared, and personal and communal rituals and celebrations happen. The site of a community’s most important architecture—church, government buildings, and marketplace—the plaza is both sacred and secular space and thus the very heart of the community. This extensively illustrated book traces the evolution of the Mexican plaza from Mesoamerican sacred space to modern public gathering place. The authors led teams of volunteers who measured and documented nearly one hundred traditional Mexican town centers. The resulting plans reveal the layers of Mesoamerican and European history that underlie the contemporary plaza. The authors describe how Mesoamericans designed their ceremonial centers as embodiments of creation myths—the plaza as the primordial sea from which the earth emerged. They discuss how Europeans, even though they sought to eradicate native culture, actually preserved it as they overlaid the Mesoamerican sacred plaza with the Renaissance urban concept of an orthogonal grid with a central open space. The authors also show how the plaza’s historic, architectural, social, and economic qualities can contribute to mainstream urban design and architecture today.

Handbook of Latin American Studies

Handbook of Latin American Studies PDF Author: Dolores Moyano Martin
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292752313
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 956

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Book Description
Beginning with volume 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of more than 130 specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year between social sciences and humanities. The Handbook annotates works on Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the Guianas, Spanish South America, and Brazil, as well as materials covering Latin America as a whole. Most of the subsections are preceded by introductory essays that serve as biannual evaluations of the literature and research under way in specialized areas. The Handbook of Latin American Studies is the oldest continuing reference work in the field. Dolores Moyano Martin, of the Library of Congress Hispanic Division, has been the editor since 1977, and P. Sue Mundell was assistant editor from 1994 to 1998. The subject categories for Volume 56 are as follows: ∑ Electronic Resources for the Humanities ∑ Art ∑ History (including ethnohistory) ∑ Literature (including translations from the Spanish and Portuguese) ∑ Philosophy: Latin American Thought ∑ Music