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2023 - Best Subsequent Book - Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 2023 - Honorable Mention, Best Book in the Social Sciences - Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section 2022 - Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize - New England Council of Latin American Studies As the first exhaustive translation and analysis of an extraordinary Zapotec calendar and ritual song corpus, seized in New Spain in 1704, this book expands our understanding of Mesoamerican history, cosmology, and culture. In 1702, after the brutal suppression of a Zapotec revolt, the bishop of Oaxaca proclaimed an amnesty for idolatry in exchange for collective confessions. To evade conflict, Northern Zapotec communities denounced ritual specialists and surrendered sacred songs and 102 divinatory manuals, which preserve cosmological accounts, exchanges with divine beings, and protocols of pre-Columbian origin that strongly resemble sections of the Codex Borgia. These texts were sent to Spain as evidence of failed Dominican evangelization efforts, and there they remained, in oblivion, until the 1960s. In this book, David Tavárez dives deep into this formidable archive of ritual and divinatory manuals, the largest calendar corpus in the colonial Americas, and emerges with a rich understanding of Indigenous social and cultural history, Mesoamerican theories of cosmos and time, and Zapotec ancestor worship. Drawing on his knowledge of Zapotec and Nahuatl, two decades of archival research, and a decade of fieldwork, Tavárez dissects Mesoamerican calendars as well as Native resistance and accommodation to the colonial conquest of time, while also addressing entangled transatlantic histories and shining new light on texts still connected to contemporary observances in Zapotec communities.

Fear of envy plays a central role in the social interactions of a Teenek community in northeastern Mexico, as it influences the daily behavior of its members and inhibits the accumulation of material excess. In this paper, in addition to the socioeconomic explanation of this phenomenon, the symbolic approach to envy provides insights into certain aspects of the group's sociality because the ramification of envy serves to demarcate the Teenek community. Thus, envy could also prove to be a cognitive means of defining an ethnic group.

RésuméLa spectaculaire exhumation en 2006 d’un monolithe d’andésite de douze tonnes représentant Tlaltecuhtli, divinité de la terre, sur le site du Templo Mayor (ville de Mexico), sera le point de départ d’une interrogation sur les intrications entre motions du psychisme et productions culturelles dans les sociétés du Mexique ancien et actuel. À l’aune du concept de sublimation, on examinera une série de paradoxes et, en particulier, comment la logique sacrificielle s’ajuste à celle de la spiritualité indigène, jusque dans l’art de « penser avec les dents », acte originaire par excellence, délivré de tout affect.

The royalty of the Classic Maya of Mesoamerica, and later sages of the Maya, used a powerful diphrastic kenning chab akab’, glossed as “generation-darkness” to convey a range of objectives, conjuring foremost among them. Known principally from hieroglyphic written expressions, but also depicted in the form of sacrificial instruments and offerings, Eleanor Harrison-Buck, following Timothy Knowlton, proposed that the kenning references sexual intercourse. This essay proposes that a black steatite carved figure stylistically dating to the Middle Preclassic period (900–350 CE) depicts this incantation as an old woman giving birth to her maleness in the form of a circumcised penis. A second Middle Preclassic figure of a dancing child, found as an heirloom in a Classic tomb, is compared to show the link between Preclassic and Classic meaning.