<br><div class="gmail_quote">I agree with Galen, and I would like to add that in terms of the scholarly minds Gordon has trained and inspired and the international scholars he has brought together for dialogue and sharing over the past twenty years, Gordon has been extremely influential among the international community of thinkers and analysts of Mesoamerican texts and their contexts. His work has caused many of us to reexamine a text for a specific purpose (including numerical significance, place name relevance, geo-spatial information) that has led to further understanding of many of the canonical and non-canonical pictorial (and alphabetic!) manuscripts. He has also helped students and scholars have access to materials in libraries around the world not previously available, and he is most generous in engaging in scholarly discussion and debate about his work.
I think you can contact him at his Essex email, (<a href="http://www.essex.ac.uk/literature/people/gordon_brotherston.htm" target="_blank">http://www.essex.ac.uk/literature/people/gordon_brotherston.htm</a>) but someone may have a more up-to-date one. For questions about the calendar stone, I suggest that you contact Emily Umberger at Arizona State and Cecelia Klein at UCLA as well.
<br>Jeanne<div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 22, 2008 8:47 AM, Galen Brokaw <<a href="mailto:brokaw@buffalo.edu" target="_blank">brokaw@buffalo.edu</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Evidently both Bernard's post and my response were unreadable. I think<br>Bernard accidentally reposted his message to Aztlan. I reposted mine<br>again in response to his before I realized that it was going to Aztlan.
<br>I'll repost it here for anyone who is not subscribed to Aztlan:<br><br>My main point here has to do with the way in which one engages in<br>scholarly debate, not with the accuracy of Brotherston's work. Of<br>
course, the burden of proof of any given argument is on the claimant,<br>but that includes the claimant who wishes to refute someone else's<br>argument. Of course, such refutations can be made on both substantive<br>
and methodological grounds. It is perfectly legitimate to point out
<br>logical or methodological flaws that invalidate an argument, as Bernard<br>seems to do. My point is that you can't just dismiss someone's work by<br>merely asserting that it is fantasy. Bernard, it seems to me that your
<br>criticism engages with Brotherston's work in a perfectly legitimate way,<br>and I have no problem with that. This type of engagement makes possible<br>a responsible dialogue about substantive issues. For example, although I
<br>haven't searched for the passage that you cite in your message, just<br>based on that quote in isolation, one could argue that your criticism of<br>this statement is based on a misreading: it doesn't seem to me that
<br>Brotherston is claiming that "the Aztecs contrived their creation story<br>so that one day in their 260 day ritual calendar would match the Spring<br>Equinox of a year some 4700 years in the past." In the quote, he says
<br>that it "incidentally coincides" with the spring equinox. Saying that it<br>is incidental by definition means that it was not contrived. In<br>isolation at least, Brotherston's statement merely seems to be pointing
<br>out the fact that the systematicity of the calendar has certain<br>incidental effects that contribute to our understanding of its<br>systematicity. In the larger context of the quote, maybe there would be<br>more to say. In the case of the serpents and the numerical significance
<br>of their dots, I don't have an answer. Maybe you have a valid criticism<br>there. This is precisely the point, which is that we can discuss these<br>things and disagree about them in substantive terms rather than
<br>
dismissing them out of hand. As I said before, I'm not claiming that<br>Brotherston's work is flawless. Whose is? However, even if it is more<br>fraught with error and/or speculation than other work in the field, that
<br>does not mean that it is pseudo-scholarship.<br><font color="#888888"><br>Galen<br></font><div><div></div><div><br><br>ANTHONY APPLEYARD wrote:<br>> These two messages from this group:<br>> From:
<a href="mailto:brokaw@buffalo.edu" target="_blank">brokaw@buffalo.edu</a> at Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:47:33 -0500<br>> From: <a href="mailto:bortiz@earthlink.net" target="_blank">bortiz@earthlink.net</a> at Mon, 21 Jan 2008 18:27:01 -0500 (EST)
<br>> both with title
<br>> Re: [Nahuat-l] Aztec World Ages and the Calendar Stone<br>> reached me as a random jumble of characters, e.g.:<br>> "J‰žÉ櫱¨("Z('çiëmÉÉh±érjÐk¢Ø^®ËhžÃÚŠ{^t ('Ê 1ìbr†§uú. ÛajØr‰íj)Þv"
<br>> What mode were they input as?
<br>><br>> _______________________________________________<br>> Nahuatl mailing list<br>> <a href="mailto:Nahuatl@lists.famsi.org" target="_blank">Nahuatl@lists.famsi.org</a><br>> <a href="http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl" target="_blank">
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</a><br><a href="http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl" target="_blank">http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl</a><br><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br></div></div><font color="#888888">-- <br>
Jeanne L. Gillespie, Ph.D.<br>Associate Dean
<br>College of Arts and Letters<br>The University of Southern Mississippi<br><br>601-266-4315<br><a href="mailto:jeanne.gillespie@usm.edu" target="_blank">jeanne.gillespie@usm.edu</a>
</font></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Jeanne L. Gillespie, Ph.D.<br>Associate Dean<br>College of Arts and Letters<br>The University of Southern Mississippi<br><br>601-266-4315<br><a href="mailto:jeanne.gillespie@usm.edu">
jeanne.gillespie@usm.edu</a>