Teenth Centuries. by Kevin Terraciano (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002) 514 Pp
REVIEWS | 119 The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eigh- teenth Centuries. By Kevin Terraciano (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002) 514 pp. $65.00 The peoples of the Mixteca region possess a larger extant corpus of writ- ten and pictorial records created before and during the Spanish colonial era than any other native cultural group in the Americas. Terraciano bases a study of these peoples in the colonial period on archival sources, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/34/1/119/1706971/002219503322645835.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 including many Mixtec-language documents. The native-language sources open the door to a world of meanings, and allow Terraciano to probe local social divisions, religious understandings, political forms, gender relationships, and ethnic identities from an internal point of view. Because of similar work on colonial Mexico by others, notably Karttunen and Lockhart, in what Terraciano refers to as the “New Phi- lology,” he is able to compare local processes of change in the Mixteca with central Mexico and Yucatán.1 Writing and language are the subjects of the lead chapters. The book begins with an analysis of the hybrid pictorial/alphabetic sources produced in the years following the Spanish arrival, followed by a de- scription of the alphabetic sources produced by the people of the Mixteca themselves. The book does not look back to the prehispanic period, but examines processes of change that unfolded because of con- tact between the people of the Mixteca and the Spaniards—especially the Dominicans, who taught them to write and who profoundly trans- formed their religious beliefs.
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