David Haskell

Existing analyses of a Tarascan (Purépecha) narrative contained in the Relación de Michoacán about a ballgame contest have focused only on the paradigmatic relations between the characters in this story. Additionally, these paradigmatic understandings of this particular ballgame narrative have only been formulated in coordination with what is known of characters in related stories that contain similar elements. Resulting interpretations based on the paradigmatic relations of characters within the story and comparison with other stories explain the meaning of the story as an allegory of celestial phenomena, as all other such stories have been interpreted. This article goes further than those studies by applying a syntagmatic approach that analyzes the sequential action and transformations of the story itself. Paradigmatic or symbolic meanings are incorporated within such an approach, with the recognition that such relations are the subject of transformation through the plot of the st...

The recent translation and description of La Memoria de Don Melchor Caltzin, produced in 1543 and the earliest document written in the Tarascan (Purhépecha) language, opens an important window into the study of Tarascan historiography and state formation, which has generally been an understudied region of Mesoamerica. For too long, a more extensive document, the Relación de Michoacán, has dominated investigations of the Tarascan state, a late pre-Hispanic polity centered in West-Central Mexico, and wider Tarascan culture and history. I discuss how reading both documents in light of one another sheds light on the selective and ideological skewed way in which they represent the past. While La Memoria de Don Melchor Caltzin focuses on a strict set of events to argue for the preservation of the rights of a Nahua community residing in the pre-Hispanic capital of Tzintzuntzan, it also sheds further light on the conspicuous silences in the Relación de Michoacán. Furthermore, the information contained in the Memoria indicates that an important stage in the development and consolidation occurred thanks to an alliance between a king and foreign merchants. This data suggests that political consolidation was an ongoing process within the Tarascan state. The data indicating that merchants were key to this king’s accession to power is indicative of a struggle to monopolize preciosities leads to the discussion of the possibility that this struggle was also a possible factor in an earlier phase of state formation.

"The present study investigates the manner in which the king of the prehispanic Tarascan kingdom of West Central Mexico exercised his authority and established his legitimacy over subordinate lords. I argue that this authority and legitimacy was established through the king’s ability to encompass the subordinate lords of his realm, in effect making them aspects of his own persona and not autonomous agents. The king’s ability to achieve this effect was an inherently intersubjective phenomenon that relied on the perceptions of other social beings, most notably the commoners that the subordinate lords oversaw. By engaging subordinate lords in specific material practices such as unilateral or asymmetric exchange, the king was able to cause commoners to perceive that the king was the primary agent that endowed subordinate lords with the capacity to act meaningfully, and on his behalf. The ability of the subordinate lords to act on their own behalf was severely compromised, because the commoners who witnessed their actions were led to perceive, through the presence of material objects and the social practices behind those objects, the king’s agency in the actions of the subordinate lords. I demonstrate that the king was able to encompass the subordinate lords of two sites in the Tarascan core zone, the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin. I achieve this through both ethnohistoric and archaeological investigations. I first analyze how certain discursive practices and narratives, contained in the ethnohistoric record, publicly proclaimed the histories of those social agents and material objects involved in the realization of any act, leading witnesses to perceive that he was the primary motivating and enabling agent in the actions of the subordinate lords. Additionally, I use the ethnohistoric record to identify material correlates of the realization of these material practices. Lastly, I examine the object biographies of those material objects that the king relied upon in his ability to encompass the subordinate lords. Witnesses would have made their inferences according to not only the discursive framing that surrounded particular actions or objects, but also the histories of those objects and whose agencies had gone into the production of their existence in the hands of the subordinate lords."

This paper seeks to broaden our understanding of the Tarascan state by analyzing the cultural logic of hierarchy as revealed in the Relación de Michoacán. Following the insights of Dumont (1980) and Sahlins (1985), it is proposed that the historical narrative contained within that document is concerned with legitimizing the rule of the Tarascan royal dynasty through a conception of hierarchy based on the logic of encompassment. This analysis interprets the characters of the narrative as instantiations of “elementary categories,” and the interactions between these characters serve to define and ultimately transform those categories. The most important transformation is the encompassing of the “Islander” category by the “Chichimec” category. It is through this encompassment that the royal dynasty symbolized a socio-cosmic totality and therefore possessed legitimate authority. Furthermore, I outline a model of elite interaction and the development of the Tarascan state in which the roy...

Una historia de juego de pelota retomada como anti-mito en la Relación de Michoacán: realeza, identidad y recuerdo olvidado en un cuento del origen de los españoles Abstract: Existing analyses of a Tarascan (Purépecha) narrative contained in the Relación de Michoacán about a ballgame contest have focused only on the paradigmatic relations between the characters in this story. Additionally, these paradigmatic understandings of this particular ballgame narrative have only been formulated in coordination with what is known of characters in related stories that contain similar elements. Resulting interpretations based on the paradigmatic relations of characters within the story and comparison with other stories explain the meaning of the story as an allegory of celestial phenomena, as all other such stories have been interpreted. This article goes further than those studies by applying a syntagmatic approach that analyzes the sequential action and transformations of the story itself. Paradigmatic or symbolic meanings are incorporated within such an approach, with the recognition that such relations are the subject of transformation through the plot of the story. By using this method, I show that the total transformations of the story are best explained as an 'anti-myth'. In an 'anti-myth', a foreign entity is explained as the opposite of some aspect of indigenous society. The ball game story in the Relación de Michoacán functions as an anti-myth because the remains of a dead ancestor are transformed into a deer that is a post hoc mythological precursor to the Spaniards' horses. Through this transformation the horses, as fetishized vehicles and sources of Spanish power, are represented as the results of an indigenous failure to remember one's ancestors which immediately precedes that transformation. The point of the story is revealed to be an effort to understand the nature of the Spaniards' power, and to indigenize that power in order to reclaim it. Resumen: Un cuento sobre el juego de pelota contenido en la Relación de Michoacán pre-senta elementos que lo asocian a otras narraciones mesoamericanas de origen. Abundan los estudios de este cuento tarasco (purépecha) sobre un combate con la pelota focalizados en las relaciones paradigmáticas entre los personajes o dioses representados. Tales aproximaciones

This chapter examines the spatial and temporal paradoxes created by the fractality of obsidian idols and their itineraries in the late prehispanic Tarascan kingdom of west-central Mexico. Through ethnohistoric sources, we see how the various obsidian idols were inextricably entangled with the history of the Tarascan royal dynasty. Furthermore, pieces of the main idol were distributed across the kingdom as integral parts of conquest and other processes, moving but then staying put, thus constituting the deity’s presence across space. This distribution across space, incorporating the itineraries of the entire fractal idol in myriad particular instantiations, instigated spatial and temporal paradoxes that were fundamental to Tarascan political ideology, social reality, and beliefs about the metaphysical world.

The recent translation and description of La Memoria de Don Melchor Caltzin, produced in 1543 and the earliest document written in the Tarascan (Purhépecha) language, opens an important window into the study of Tarascan historiography and state formation, which has generally been an understudied region of Mesoamerica. For too long, a more extensive document, the Relación de Michoacán, has dominated investigations of the Tarascan state, a late pre-Hispanic polity centered in West-Central Mexico, and wider Tarascan culture and history. I discuss how reading both documents in light of one another sheds light on the selective and ideological skewed way in which they represent the past. While La Memoria de Don Melchor Caltzin focuses on a strict set of events to argue for the preservation of the rights of a Nahua community residing in the pre-Hispanic capital of Tzintzuntzan, it also sheds further light on the conspicuous silences in the Relación de Michoacán. Furthermore, the information contained in the Memoria indicates that an important stage in the development and consolidation occurred thanks to an alliance between a king and foreign merchants. This data suggests that political consolidation was an ongoing process within the Tarascan state. The data indicating that merchants were key to this king’s accession to power is indicative of a struggle to monopolize preciosities leads to the discussion of the possibility that this struggle was also a possible factor in an earlier phase of state formation.

The present study investigates the manner in which the king of the prehispanic Tarascan kingdom of West Central Mexico exercised his authority and established his legitimacy over subordinate lords. I argue that this authority and legitimacy was established through the king’s ability to encompass the subordinate lords of his realm, in effect making them aspects of his own persona and not autonomous agents. The king’s ability to achieve this effect was an inherently intersubjective phenomenon that relied on the perceptions of other social beings, most notably the commoners that the subordinate lords oversaw. By engaging subordinate lords in specific material practices such as unilateral or asymmetric exchange, the king was able to cause commoners to perceive that the king was the primary agent that endowed subordinate lords with the capacity to act meaningfully, and on his behalf. The ability of the subordinate lords to act on their own behalf was severely compromised, because the commoners who witnessed their actions were led to perceive, through the presence of material objects and the social practices behind those objects, the king’s agency in the actions of the subordinate lords.
I demonstrate that the king was able to encompass the subordinate lords of two sites in the Tarascan core zone, the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin. I achieve this through both ethnohistoric and archaeological investigations. I first analyze how certain discursive practices and narratives, contained in the ethnohistoric record, publicly proclaimed the histories of those social agents and material objects involved in the realization of any act, leading witnesses to perceive that he was the primary motivating and enabling agent in the actions of the subordinate lords. Additionally, I use the ethnohistoric record to identify material correlates of the realization of these material practices. Lastly, I examine the object biographies of those material objects that the king relied upon in his ability to encompass the subordinate lords. Witnesses would have made their inferences according to not only the discursive framing that surrounded particular actions or objects, but also the histories of those objects and whose agencies had gone into the production of their existence in the hands of the subordinate lords.

“The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán is a closely argued, carefully researched, theoretically astute, and persuasive analysis of a complicated sixteenth-century Central Mexican text and the historicity—the specific cultural consciousness, construction, and communication of past happening and its relationship to present experience—that informs and motivates it.”
—Eduardo Douglas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán investigates how the elites of the Tarascan kingdom of Central Mexico sought to influence interactions with Spanish colonialism by reworking the past to suit their present circumstances. Author David L. Haskell examines the rhetorical power of the Relación de Michoacán—a chronicle written from 1539 to 1541 by Franciscan friar Jerónimo de Alcalá based on substantial indigenous testimony and widely considered to be an extremely important document to the study of early colonial relations and the prehispanic past. Haskell focuses on one such testimonial, the narrative of the kingdom’s Chief Priest relaying the history of the royal family. This analysis reveals that both the structure of that narrative and its content convey meaning about the nature of rulership and how conceptualizations of rulership shaped indigenous responses to colonialism in the region.
Informed by theoretical approaches to narrative, historicity, structure, and agency developed by cultural and historical anthropologists, Haskell demonstrates that the author of the Relación de Michoacán shaped, and was shaped by, a culturally distinct conceptualization and experience of the time in which the past and the present are mutually informing. The book asks, How reliable are past accounts of events when these accounts are removed from the events they describe? How do the personal agendas of past chroniclers and their informants shape our present understanding of their cultural history? How do we interpret chronicles such as the Relación de Michoacán on multiple levels? It also demonstrates that answers to these questions are possible when attention is paid to the context of narrative production and the narratives themselves are read closely.
The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on indigenous experience and its cultural manifestations in Early Colonial period Central Mexico and the anthropological literature on historicity and narrative. It will be of interest to Mesoamerican specialists of all disciplines, cultural and historical anthropologists, and theorists and critics of narrative.

https://upcolorado.com/university-press-of-colorado/item/3372-the-two-tariacuris-and-the-early-colonial-and-prehispanic-past-of-michoacan

Traditional conceptualizations of the relationship between elites and craft producers of elite status goods emphasize either “managerial” models, in which craft producers work in relative autonomy, or “political” models, in which elites exert direct control over production.  However, research in Mesoamerica highlights the importance of household production, even in politically centralized contexts, and recent examinations of pottery production within the Tarascan state has underscored the autonomy of potting households in the relative absence of elite meddling.  This paper investigates the implications of an integrative analysis of both production and consumption of ceramic fine wares at administrative centers within the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin core of the Late Postclassic Tarascan state (ca. AD 1350-1525).  We demonstrate that production and consumption data indicate that ceramics were produced and exchanged primarily through markets and that for polities in the Patzcuaro Basin “political” models do not apply.

The Pátzcuaro Basin of West-Central Mexico was a core zone of state formation in Mesoamerica that produced the Late Postclassic Tarascan State. Theorizations of state formation and the longer record of human occupation and human ecodynamics have produced a foundational record of human occupation, environmental change, and to some extent the relation between the two. Such efforts are, however, limited because they envision temporality and landscape in a restricted way that does not address the temporality, the integration of past-present-future in recollection and action, of social life. Our position is that to inhabit the Pátzcuaro Basin was to perceive its fluctuations, the ways in which the landscape changed, and therefore to be keenly aware of temporality and the passage of time. Integrating GIS analysis, such as remotely sensed imagery analysis and cost surface modeling, with phenomenological philosophy, we quantify and discuss how changes in the landscape would have affected daily life and made inhabitants of the basin keenly aware of such fluctuations. Moreover, archaeological records of settlement demonstrate that past inhabitants of the basin attuned their lives to lake levels, and furthermore such inhabitation demonstrably left evidence of settlement in zones that were variably visible or hidden due to lake fluctuations. We develop a novel way of representing this process of human inhabitation as “being in time” that incorporates the past, present and future. Finally, we offer a case study in which data from the Middle Postclassic (ca. 1100-1350 CE), interpreted through this phenomenologically oriented and GIS enabled process of envisioning time and space, show peoples of the Pátzcuaro Basin forming a close relationship with the landscape such that this process drew on intimate knowledge of their environment in producing ongoing social processes of settlement, landscape modification, and ultimately sociopolitical transformations.

The recent translation and description of La Memoria de Don Melchor Caltzin, produced in 1543 and the earliest document written in the Tarascan language, opens an important window into the study of Tarascan historiography and state formation. For too long, a more extensive document, the Relación de Michoacán, has dominated investigations of the Tarascan state and Tarascan culture. While other documents have recently been used to study the Tarascan state, many have been provincial and have not contained much information that might be used to study historical processes in the Pátzcuaro Basin core in which the first stages of state formation took place. Here I discuss the manner in which La Memoria suggests that the account of Tarascan history contained in the Relación de Michoacán might be a less reliable source than this document and other documents that similarly contain historical information designed to address specific grievances. Furthermore, the information contained in the Memoria indicates that an important stage in the development and consolidation occurred thanks to an alliance between a king and foreign merchants. This data suggests that political consolidation was an ongoing process within the Tarascan state, and that the initial form of the Tarascan state was different from that encountered by Spaniards. The data indicating that merchants were key to this king’s accession to power is indicative of a struggle to monopolize preciosities likely had deep temporal roots, and therefore such access and monopoly on such objects in earlier phases of state formation is discussed.

Pieces of obsidian were used as idols of gods, including the patron god of the ruling elite and thus the state as a whole, in the prehispanic Tarascan kingdom of West-central Mexico. Utilizing primarily ethnohistoric (documentary) evidence, I argue that it was the fact that obsidian is easily knapped that allowed pieces of obsidian to simulatenously be direct indexes of kingly power and focal points of historical oratory, ideal metaphors for kingly power, and self-evident agents that allowed conquest and the exercise of power by the elites to be fetishized and mystified as they were recast as divine mandates.

The Relación de Michoacán (ca. 1540) claims to record the official history of the Tarascan kingdom of West-central Mexico. This history largely focuses on the “founding father” of the Tarascan kingdom, Tariacuri. I examine how the “events” of the narrative are syntagmatically ordered so as to construct Tariacuri as the singular paradigmatic instantiation of the process of state formation, and ultimately equate him with the product of that process. In contrast, characters who would otherwise share qualities with Quetzalcoatl, generally associated with kingship, are “anti-agents” who merely serve to instigate the manifestation of the agency of Tariacuri and his descendents.

In this introduction to the session we want to do three things: First, emphasize the inherent relation between ethnohistory as a discipline -particularly the variant that Fogelson called ethno-ethnohistory- and the study of non-Western historicities. Second, assess some of the most serious epistemological problems that the study of non-Western historicities confronts, linking them to the more general problem of the relation between time, narrative, and history. And third, outline some of the basic characteristics of the syntagmatic / paradigmatic method of narrative analysis, which in our opinion allows for these problems to be overcome.

Archaeologists often use the concept of hierarchy in the context of investigations of archaic states in ways that that either ignore actors or views them as preconstituted actors holding certain preexisting ranks. Such approaches lead us away from recognizing variations in how hierarchy is created through practices and thus how some actors define, establish, and reproduce their hierarchical superiority over subordinates.  This paper seeks to examine the ways in which a concept of hierarchy radically different from that commonly used by archaeologists was conceptualized and constituted in specific practices in the prehispanic Tarascan State of West-Central Mexico.  Through an analysis of the ethnohistoric record, we see how the Tarascan king defined his relationships with the lesser nobility.  We can combine other documentary evidence with archaeological data to examine the practices in the past that actually constituted these relationships and therefore the Tarascan State.  Through such an analysis we can evaluate the king’s representation of his relationship with the lower nobility as well as Spanish accounts of the government bureaucracy against the realities of such practices, not in order to select a more accurate representation, but rather to examine how myriad practices in a delimited context of relationships between the king and specific subordinate lords would have been differentially constitutive of these contrasting representations.

The Relación de Michoacán has emerged as the preeminent source for the study of the Tarascan State. Whether alone or as the basis for interpreting the archaeological record, literalist interpretations of the RM have guided research of the development of the Tarascan State.  I argue that the literalist position is unfounded, however.  Furthermore, an alternative interpretation is proposed in which the “historical” details contained within the document can be explained through the cultural logic of the indigenous conception of hierarchy.  This position can provide alternate avenues for the archaeological investigation of the development of the Tarascan State.