Interpreting the Mappe Quinatzin, leafs 2 and 3

[Jerry Offner]

I like Jongsoo Lee’s post for a variety of reasons and have a proposal for joint effective action at the end of this post.  
 
Lee’s quote from my book’s introduction is a good, basic starting place.  Certainly, regarding political systems, in the early 1980s, there was further development of the idea of Tenochtitlan’s dual (maybe tandem) cihua:co:a:tl/tlahtoa:ni  internal/external governmental structure and process, especially as described by Hr. Dr. R.A.M. van Zantwijk (pardon my orthography if necessary; I can’t tell what is approved and disapproved after the last few days and this after I had just decided to follow Karttunen strictly in the last several months).  There is no evidence for a cihua:co:a:tl with any significant power at Texcoco.  In addition, the Mexica empire grew rapidly; its urban core ballooned in size and diversity; its economy intensified; and it had a more rapid turnover of rulers while the Texcocan empire maintained its traditional conformation, with a foothold in the Basin and control of the ancient and lucrative trade route through Cuauhchinanco and Xicotepec at least unti!
 l Ahuitzotl’s time (there’s interesting evidence in the Codex de Xicotepec on this).   From 1431 to 1515, there were only two long-lived Texcocan rulers who seemed to have had great, enjoyable, perhaps more slow paced lives.  Also, Torquemada tells us that the ruler was not the head of the legal hierarchy in Tenochtitlan, while in Texcoco the ruler was.  So, I am quite comfortable about maintaining there were importance political system differences on the macro level as well as below.  
 
On the other hand, the last time I saw Fred Hicks he gave his customary well-crafted paper on similarities between the noble houses of the Nahua both inside and outside of the Basin of Mexico in a session I co-chaired at the 2005 Ethnohistory meetings in Santa Fe.  There were only so many ways to collect tribute and recruit labor in those days.  So, similarities and differences there were of course at the same time.  It is perhaps going to prove best at some time in the future for Jongsoo Lee and me to list these items and discuss them and their degrees of difference and similarity, rather than just say things overall were more or less the same or different.  The same goes for a thorough study of the events of the period from about 1400 to 1440.  These remain in many instances unnecessarily unresolved.
 
You can also note from the quote that I believe the jury was still out on the legal differences and similarities between Tenochtitlan and Texcoco because of the scarcity of evidence for Tenochtitlan.  A bit more basic research by those who control the Tenochcan sources better may turn up facts to decide the matter more clearly—I have remained optimistic about this for thirty years but haven’t put sufficient priority on this project.  The nature of the more urban Tenochtitlan may well have led to the development of a different legal approach and jurisprudence.  It would be surprising if it had not.  The list of legal rules in the Historia … por sus pinturas seems a bit more commercially minded and I have often thought it might have come from Tlatelolco via Azcapotzalco and, speculating on the fringe here, if Azcapotzalco is as old and continuous as some think, perhaps from the jurisprudence of Classic Teotihuacan  (there are some continuities or apparent continuities in other!
  cultural areas and morality and jurisprudence tend to be conservative cultural subsystems).  Another approach is to observe that after the recitation of some legal cases (as opposed to legal rules) from Tenochtitlan, the document mentions cases at Tenayuca and Cuauhtitlan and only then transitions into a list of legal rules.  This may indicate the rules are not from Tenochtitlan but instead from the fairly well documented Cuauhtitlan.  This would make the task of understanding what was going on in Tenochtitlan that much more difficult.   It would be unfortunate if we can’t do the extra work to investigate this further.  
 
Jongsoo Lee did not come up with the most critical and interesting of the reviews my book received a quarter of a century ago.  I think it was by Jane Collier and the part that was not consumed in a sidebar with my advisor Leo Pospisil, had good ideas on the need to study other than mere legal rules, some of which have stayed with me and helped lead to what I recently presented—the worst reviews tend to be the best.  Unfortunately rules are mostly what we have left so we can never act fully on such criticisms.  (I could not search this on-line quickly, my apologies to her if she was not the reviewer).    Laura Nader also wrote an interesting review although with some sidebar with Pospisil and also expressing reservations regarding rules.  I think Pedro Carrasco was still distracted by our dispute in American Antiquity in 1981 over “doctrinal issues” when he wrote his review.  In that dispute, I advanced the scandalous notion (at the time) that the case in favor of the Aztec !
 economy being almost entirely redistributive was not closed and that it was necessary to pursue research into the market sector of the economy.  Others, doubtless on their own trajectories beforehand, have pursued that line of argument very successfully in the last three decades.  Nevertheless, those who follow Polanyi in their research will probably never forget.  My favorite review is by another person, Brumfiel, still strongly influenced by Polanyi, because I gave her most of the criticisms she makes during a phone call she initiated one Saturday about noon, saying she had her tape recorder running to take notes, while I lived in San Antonio, Texas and was making the index for my book.  By that time, I was irretrievably captured by the remuneration levels in the private sector and at the end of the conversation, I gave her complete freedom to acknowledge or not acknowledge the source of the comments.  Maybe this was why the French researcher Durand-Forest’s favorable rev!
 iew of my book criticized the quality of its index.  In addition, it w

as an entertaining review because she assumed I was a naïve American because I emphasized that it was important to note that the state assumed the right to punish adulterers and would not allow the aggrieved party to do it.  Herb Harvey, directly active in Texcocan history and about to make some significant discoveries on Aztec mathematics and surveying with Barbara Williams, had no axes to grind and gave it a very good review.  In the end the book was the co-winner of the 1985 Cline Prize from the Council of Latin American History (CLAH).  My calligraphed prize certificate arrived with the title of the book misspelled (cf. my misspelling of their name above) and a request to get it corrected was never answered.  I also remember a review from Scandinavia where the reviewer did not seem to realize that my description of early Texcocan history was merely a report of the version in the sources, rather than some definitive analysis and report on my part.  He did seem taken by my!
  work on political numerology and divisions, which I have always considered one of the most speculative parts of the book.   I think the best comment on all this reviewing was made by my colleague at the time, Russ Ciochon, still a physical anthropology professor today.  “Jerry,” he said, “this is the same book and look at all these reviews.  How can you call Social and Cultural Anthropology a science?”  I have never been able to answer him.  Jongsoo Lee will go through a similar process.
 
Overall, this on-line disputation process has not been unlike my day-to-day job where I arrange practical, ongoing solutions between three and sometimes four parties by establishing the basic facts with great accuracy, identifying and outlining differences and reaching a durable solution that contains no errors—these would lead to catastrophic or at least extremely expensive problems down the road.  One gets inured so that any level of conflict becomes routine, so my everyday focus and manner of doing things which doesn’t strike people in my work as intense or aggressive--to the contrary, I am seen as some mild-mannered ex-egghead--may have been carried over inadvertently to this discussion.  (“It’s what I do and it hasn’t gotten to me in years.”)  
 
Nevertheless, I think well-refereed online disputation can move issues along quickly and accurately in this very slow moving discipline—no wonder that museum or university administrators or even worse, outsiders, sometimes get impatient or crossways with researchers and want to question the resources they consume and the quantity and nature of the product they produce.  Changes to working conditions for those in universities are going to accelerate further.  No matter how I try to explain things, the people I work with and meet everyday just don’t understand the value of very much of the enterprise at all and think I am quaint at best, stupid at worst, for spending my time on such things when I should be out playing golf or some such.  Maybe our moderator and others can devise some rules and a forum to faciliate the process.  Otherwise, it would take years to get a reply in a journal and then there would be an answer, etc.  
 
I do think that this process is too dangerous for untenured people, who must avoid essentially all risk for many years, but my understanding has been that Lee is tenured.  And as I have seen before, American academics prove more averse to conflict that others, with Europeans tending to rather enjoy it.  Careful reading of the posts already reveals each of us declaring what is and is not really important to us and where there are no important differences, so my experience tells me we have the beginnings of a working arrangement.
 
I suppose my remaining gripe with Lee is that he needs for generational reasons to label me as “old school” and not a new and true critical reader of sources.  Certainly, I am not a new reader, but anyone with doubts about critical should read my 1979 Ethnohistory article on Techotlalatzin where I very delicately and without objectifying and damaging the objects of study, work close to the facts in the Codex Xolotl to show that Torquemada’s (and the Anonimo Mexicano’s) version of events is not as accurate as Ixtlilxochitl’s description.   I recall seeing Brumfiel making good use of this article in years past.  (There is one small error in my article, hiding like Waldo, who will find it?)  Still, the old (all of 58 in my case) must eventually make way for the new and there is a pleasing symmetry with the timing of my disagreement with Pedro Carrasco when he was at an age very similar to mine now when I have had to respond to both Lee and Luz Maria Mohar Betancourt.  This must!
  be the life cycle of ideas in this field, but it needs speeding up, perhaps by as much as an order of magnitude or the rest of the world is going to lose interest, patience and eventually respect.  That process is already well under way; the situation is not good.    
 
As for my proposal mentioned at the beginning, I find that a virtual beer is not sufficient.  Instead, I propose that Lee and I co-chair a session at the upcoming Ethnohistory meeting in New Orleans (or at another meeting soon).  The airfare is low from Houston, Denton and also from Mexico City and hotels remain inexpensive.   The session proposal would have to go in by May 15.   The only ground rules would be that participants eschew reviews of prior work and instead develop new research on Aztec/Central Mexican law and perhaps the closely related field of morals and that neither I nor Lee would serve as discussant.  Topics for short, feasible projects would be easy to generate.  Lee can decline if he wishes and I will not pursue it independently, although I would continue to work toward some sessions on Aztec law fairly soon.  I do think it would be the start of hammering out a joint position with residual differences so the two squabbling people from North America can qui!
 t messing with Nezahualcoyotl and quit blocking the view.  
 
I also want to acknowledge our moderator’s steadfastness in allowing this debate to continue and to thank those who emphasized the standard bounds and rules of the arena.  I hope serious disputation will continue here, such as in the last 48 hours over orthography.  That also got a bit heated, but the stakes involving a living culture and people were quite a bit higher. 
 
Finally, if there is any lingering resentment I invite people to read my upcoming publication on the Codex de Xicotepec.  It has been possible to interpret some of the document very well; some other parts are damaged and obscure but I have, like Guy Stresser-Pean, put up my best current tentative (i.e. lower probability) interpretations for them precisely so that others can disagree, expose bad readings and propose better wholly or partly-formed alternatives.  The Stresser-Peans told me a few years ago that they had done their best in the time they had away from their planned publication schedule and strongly wanted to see more research into the document.  Its coming to light was a most unlikely event. This is no "one person" project, so, as no one can deny me tenure or limit my raise and so forth, I decided to put myself up for “arrow sacrifice” to jumpstart a new wave of study of this very interesting document and to further research into the nearby Map of Metlatoyuca, the!
  Papers of Itzcuintepec, and the very enigmatic reverse of the Codice de Chiconquiaco, recently published and available for purchase from the FCE Mexico website (about $12 plus shipping--only $17, so order more than one title).  
 
Jerry Offner 


Jerry Offner
ixtlil at earthlink.net
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