Interpreting the Mappe Quinatzin, leaf 2 and leaf 3

Tue Apr 21 19:30:31 UTC 2009

Jongsoo Lee’s attempt at a preemptory and dismissive post is well-timed and opens the door to allow me to speak briefly of generalities and to make some items clear.  As this post deals with generalities, it is easier to read, much less intense in focus and less compressed into journalese.  Perhaps these comments will relieve some anxieties, perhaps not.  First, I have stayed close to the facts in the sources and Lee’s handling of those facts.  This allows me to know and show precisely what Lee knows and does not know and what he does and does not do while performing the basic functions of Nahua research.  I have deliberately avoided the generalities that allow for loose argumentation and shifting frames of reference because I wanted to stick to the facts rather than jump to a useless and undisciplined discussion of what I maintain are faulty conclusions based on faulty facts.  In my view, it is the construction of any work from the ground up that requires examination and de!
 termines whether or not it is quality work.  

Second, if a person sets out to gore the sole pre-conquest Mexican national icon of law, he should at least have some knowledge of comparative law and legal anthropology and he should be prepared for a response or two.  The best I can determine is that Lee’s overall agenda is to show Nezahualcoyotl as somehow unoriginal in literary matters and so he has wandered into the legal realm and seeks “authorship” of a fresh and original set of legal rules concerning crimes and punishments by Nezahualcoyotl, even seeming to demand some certain mark of authorship on each item later in the article.  Leaving aside the fact that a fresh and original set of rules would have had scant chance of popular acceptance and would never have been attempted by a wise legal thinker, Lee should know that legal anthropologists emphatically dismiss lists of legal rules as important in favor of the flow of cases and decisions emanating from a legal system.  A few surviving legal rules are not a legal sy!
 stem.  Nor should the criminal justice system be mistaken for the entire legal system.  And one does not simply promulgate a list of rules into a vacuum that are then obeyed.  Nor can rules cover more than a small portion of human conduct, disagreement and conflict; it is for this reason that the great majority of legal systems in world history have not been rules oriented and extremely few have been legalistic in the sense of applying rules strictly to cases wherever possible.   Concepts of precedent and equity have to come into play, even if some behavior can be covered by rules.  And it is probably necessary to mention here some basic tenets of comparative law: that a legal system that has a legal code is not better (or more civilized, etc.) than one that doesn’t, and that a legal system that applies its legal rules strictly is not better than one that does not, and that a legal system that is more sophisticated is not better than one that is not (cf. our U.S. legal syst!
 em).  Legal systems are like people—there is little agreement about wh

at they are for or should be for.  Lee should read my prior post on this in Aztlan-l (Wed Jan 14 21:42:16 CST 2009)

 (http://www.famsi.org/pipermail/aztlan/2009-January/005515.html)

especially regarding the matter of comparing Nahua legal systems.  

It is important as a researcher to maintain a little humility.  In the sense that an orange expanded to the size of the earth would allow us to see its constituent atoms as the size of cherries, if we were able to observe the Texcocan legal system in operation in 1460, it would take a half dozen trained ethnographers two or three years to capture a synchronic slice of it with some diachronic depth.  In the same way, even in this arrogant age of revisionism, we have to realize we know only a very tiny part of the content of the system and have to be extremely circumspect about what we say about it.  That is why I rely on the opinion of the people on the ground at the time, Duran and Motolinia far more than others.  They, Pomar and Ixtlilxochitl, in addition to mentioning Nezahualcoyotl’s legislative activity, praise the entire legal construction and accomplishment of Nezahualcoyotl which involved the conception, negotiation among power and ethnic blocs, design, staffing and d!
 ay to day management of a system that was going strong past the time of the Spanish conquest for about a century from 1431.

Lee’s claim that Nezahualcoyotl was not an original legislator and did not legislate many legal rules is, simply put, feckless.  To legislate after all means “to create, provide or control by legislation,” with legislation meaning “the act of making or enacting laws.” And even these definitions are infused with a modern Western emphasis on rules found in few systems in world history.   The creation of the legal system and its maintenance necessarily involves initial and ongoing legislation and management of cases and decisions that might serve as future precedents or even legal rules. Legal systems need consistency to maintain public acceptance and just the management of determining and applying precedents in decisions and incorporating them or not incorporating them into a legal code in this or that area of their small empire, would have been a huge task, especially over Nezahualcoyotl’s reign from 1431-1472.  Lee needs to read up on the elaboration, complexity and expertis!
 e to be found in so many legal systems among all different sorts of societies to understand that the data we have on the Aztec system is most inadequate to appreciate its true level of sophisitication and complexity. Just unpacking the expertise in a single Aztec judge of the time would constitute a substantial part of a career for a legal anthropologist.  Overall, by searching in the forest for a piece of paper containing an initial, original list of rules regarding a limited number of crimes and punishments, Lee misses the trees and then disagrees with the people on the ground at the time about the nature of the forest.    

Third, the same pattern that initially caught my interest in Jongsoo Lee’s article, recurs in his most recent comments and I am going to point it out before sending on my, by now, third post on this matter.  One of his comments is not fair to Patrick Lesbre.  The pattern to which I object involves inaccurate facts, false claims and damage to others’ perceptions of other people’s work, whether Nezahualcoyotl, Duran, Motolinia, Ixtlilxochitl or people from our time.  In this instance, Lee states: “I would just point out that Lesbre didn’t cite major works in English about Texcoco in his works either.  For example, Offner’s major work, Law and Politics in Aztec Texcoco and others were not even mentioned there.”  I am not sure of Lee’s frame of reference when he says “there” and “his works”—the mere three works of Lesbre that I specifically cited, his entire output through 2001 or perhaps even until today--but this certainly is a false claim and I would think it is fair to consi!
 der at least his work to 2001 and then consider his latest work.  I should mention that Lesbre publishes in French and in Spanish, so why limit the publications of native speakers of English to those in English; why not extend the criteria to such people writing in Spanish?  But even that is not necessary.  Leaving aside Dibble’s indispensable work on the Codex Xolotl (in Spanish), I can note that in the 1998 article on the Mappe Quinatzin, Manumission d'esclave dans la Mappe Quinatzin ? Lesbre cites my 1983 work.  In the Coyohua Itlatollo work (on my short list) he cites Bierhorst’s 1992 History and Mythology of the Aztec: The Codex Chimalpopoca.  In Oublis et Censures, also on my short list, he cites Bierhorst (in English) and Gillespie (in Spanish).   In his 1998 Nezahualcoyotl entre historia, leyenda y divinizacion, El héroe entre el mito y la historia, also on my short list, he cites Bierhorst (in English) as well as Barlow (in English). 

Lesbre’s 1998 Historiografia acolhua : seudo-rebelion e intereses coloniales (Ixtlilxochitl) cites Bierhorst, Codex Chimalpahin and a major Texcocan expert, Fred Hicks, all in English.  In his 2000 "Onomastique indiennes coloniale (Tezcoco, XVIe siècle)” he cites Gillespie (in Spanish), Hewitt (in English), Lockhart (in English), and Barbara Williams (in English).  He also cites the U of Oklahoma Press Codex Chimalpahin by Anderson and Schroeder. Lesbre’s Mapas de Tepetlaoztoc (f. 208r, 209r). Cartografia indigena colonial temprana (México Central, 1554) from 2001 cites Breton, Brotherston, Coy, Guzman, Leibsohn, Lockhart, Mundy, Offner, Robertson, Williams and Herb Harvey, all in English.  Skipping forward to his 2007 ECN article, he cites Berdan and Anawalt, Boone, Douglas, Lockhart, Offner and Robertson.  And this list in not exhaustive, being drawn only from the selection of articles that I have immediately at hand.  Is there a problem here with Lesbre’s knowledge of the!
  literature generated by Americans, British or anyone else writing in English before or after 2001, especially given the scant English language offerings on the subjects on which he wrote regarding Texcoco?  Thus, Lee’s related ad hominem comment that I seek to personalize these issues falls rather flat.  It is not one person’s work I prefer above another’s, but the quality.  But perhaps I  have misunderstood what Lee really meant to say and that he is not saying Lesbre is not knowledgeable on English language research.  

I can only observe that Lee’s understanding of the concept of “historical fact” continues to appear different from mine and I hope he masters the indiscipline that permits him to come out with such false and damaging claims as when he states in his article that I am among a rather ill-defined group of people with birth years (as far as I can determine from the Library of Congress) ranging from 1819 to 1950 who “bring into relief the peaceful and civilized image of Nezahualcoyotl as well as his anti-Mexican ideology.”  I have never imbued Nezahualcoyotl with anti-Mexican ideology, but I’ve got no problems with having portrayed him as “civilized.” A major part of my effort was to produce a clear portrait of something that could be easily understood by people outside of Aztec studies—Aztec law—that would offset the perpetual Aztec “apocalypto” to which they are always subjected.  The expression “bring into relief” is imprecise, but I suppose it was for nothing that I wrote many!
  pages in 1983 that recounted the (non-peaceful) wars of Nezahualcoyotl and his cooperation with the Mexica during them and after them.  I also wrote about the Mexica ruler Itzcoatl’s early activities and holdings near Tollantzinco (follow the obsidian…), on interlocking land holdings and on tribute being paid by towns and other entities to more than one entity, and on Texcoco rapidly losing power to Tenochtitlan, and I wrote an entire article on human sacrifice, prisoner capture and how they related to the ideology involved in Texcocan political divisions in 1979.    These ideas were common knowledge in the discipline by that time, in the same way it was understood Nezahualcoyotl was not against human sacrifice.  (OK, the jury was still officially out on the otiose high god, monotheism issue, but most people did not take it too seriously by that time and my interest in religious affairs has always been peripheral).  I have trouble seeing the novelty in Lee’s work other tha!
 n this insistence on authoring legal rules when the various dots are c

onnected and this counter-productive research strategy of overemphasizing the limited similarities in the few reports of legal rules.  Legal anthropologists would be urging us to look elsewhere to understand what was really going on in Nahua law.  

And by the way, an observation in that article on prisoner capture is part of the confirmation of the identity of Nezahualcoyotl in the Codex de Xicotepec.  The most honorable captor position was the first position.  The person Lee mistakes for Nezahualcoyotl in Section 10 is only in fourth position in the prisoner capture scene and his son is in fifth position—hardly fitting for an overlord.  Instead, the principal captor is the town founder of Cuauchinanco from Section 9, followed by his sons in second and third position.  The person that Lee mistakes for Nezahuacoyotl is instead the town founder of Xicotepec.  In addition, it is Thouvenot’s determination, not mine, that the glyph in Section 10 is not a coyo-based glyph but a xolo-based glyph and therefore not Nezahualcoyotl’s and he speaks with rather more authority on glyphs than Lee or me.  The irony is that when Nezahualcoyotl does show up in the Section 16 of the Codex de Xicotepec, he is on a peaceful trip bringing a!
  wife or wives for the local ruler or rulers and assigning tequitl or domestic service to support them, assuring the local rulers’ place in the new world order.  Evidently, he was remembered in such a happy, peaceful light by the ruling people in Xicotepec in the mid-sixteenth century, but I can note, he does come wearing the Tenochcan or Triple Alliance hegemonic warrior hairdo at the same time.  (This article is in press and my presentation on it is scheduled for the ICA this Summer in Mexico).   The avenues for argument about this issue are closing down, although one can argue about anything I suppose … It is interesting that the codex does exhibit a two tier system a bit like the Tira de Tepechpan  in many of its sections, especially towards the end, with Cuauhchinanco's affairs at the top and Xicotepec's at the bottom.   

My concern, however, is centrally with Nezahualcoyotl and his city of Texcoco and false claims made about them and it is for that reason that I am going to pursue the matter on a fact-level basis in the next post.  It will be focused and in journalese.   

Finally—what’s my motivation?  Principally, it is keeping the Western perception of this important legal figure on track.  I have worked in private industry for nearly three decades and plan to stay there.  I had dropped out of active study due to my clients’ needs until Stresser-Pean published the Codex de Xicotepec.  Being at the time one of about a dozen people who might have more to say about this document, and not seeing anyone saying much, I started looking at it every night.  After about two years, I stumbled on Lesbre’s review of it and was shocked (“yes, shocked”) to see how far ahead his analysis had gotten in similar time, without him even actively pursuing it.  I decided I needed to raise my game and contacted him.  He required me to study Thouvenot, and some people in the field whom I had never met arranged a visit to the Stresser-Peans in Mexico a few years ago.  And Marc Thouvenot has been astonishingly generous with his time during recent trips to Paris and t!
 he south of France, with help in one instance from the very sharp Sybille de Pury. 

Now I remain “in it” for the puzzles and the opportunity to find out more about the small empire that Texcoco had to the east of the Basin of Mexico.  It is a structured, dependable diversion from work. There are several areas in Aztec law that still beg addressing—one of which is an intensive effort to understand the legal system in Tenochtitlan.  Sylvie Peperstraete, in her most excellent study of the Cronica X has just made this even more difficult by pointing out that there is a very good chance that the legal reforms ascribed to Moteuczoma I, which were mostly concerned with palace or household law in any event, were thrust back in time from Moteuczoma II’s period.  Another project would be to study the ethnoscience or ethnojurisprudence of some Nahua legal terms and concepts.  What were or are the Nahua words, for example, for illegal taking and what do they tell us about Nahua culture and jurisprudence?  Still another would be to gather and try to understand the addit!
 ional Nahua land tenure terms that colonial researchers have been turning up at a pretty good rate.  Still another is to study the scant and scattered indigenous legal system information in the RG’s from Central Mexico to see if anything interesting “falls out.” 

So there it is, that’s my motivation.

Jerry Offner
ixtlil at earthlink.net
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