Calling attention to the French and how they help in one's research

[John F. Schwaller]

From: "Jerry Offner" <ixtlil at earthlink.net>
Date:   Sat, February 28, 2009


Recent comments on the list provide an opportunity to point out again the
excellence
and utility of the body of work assembled by French researchers on things
Nahua or
Aztec or whatever.  For present purposes to avoid further controversy,
let's call
them "residents of what is now called part of Mexico before the Spanish
invasion"--that's got a great commercial ring to it!   I only wish we saw
such
energy invested in line by line understanding of the written sources and
their
relationships, and more importantly the written sources' relationships to the
pictorial material.  Instead, until recent times, we have seen so many
resources,
decade after decade, directed towards reclassifying Nahua culture and
history to fit
Western ideologies and related grand theoretical schemes.  The results
have proven
better at exposing the explanatory inadequacy of these themes than in
understanding
the Nahua.  The French, in the meantime, have been paying attention to the
facts on
the ground an!
 d trying to understand Nahua culture in its own terms and the results
show it.

There is no question that the work of the French is little regarded and
little
known.  A recent article in Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl by Jongsoo Lee
purports to
provide a new and proper understanding at last of Texcoco and
Nezahualcoyotl.  It
does not cite or discuss at all the work of Patrick Lesbre, available in
both French
and Spanish.  Lesbre had covered this same ground years earlier, better,
far more
accurately and with far more insight, experience, appropriate restraint and
subtlety.  Had the author been aware of or read Lesbre's work, the
publication might
have been abandoned as inferior and superfluous.  Neither is the work of Marc
Thouvenot productively utilized, especially his lifetime of work on the Codex
Xolotl.  The lack of evidence presented from and evident lack of knowledge
of the
content of the Codex Xolotl invalidates the author's "telescoped history"
attempts
to discuss Tenochcan, Texcocan (and Azcapotzalcan) history and their
interrelationships.  A hund!
 red years of history comes across as flat as a printed page.  You can't
write about
Aztecs and in particular you can't write about Texcoco without knowing the
work of
the French researchers over the past three decades.

Recently, Lacandena published on Nahua writing, appearing to scold many,
and I think
quite inappropriately, for their perceived inadequacies in linguistic
formalities
and presentation methods without making more than a passing reference to
Thouvenot's
work--only his dissertation and not the body of programs--in French,
Spanish and
also usually English easily found on-line at:

http://www.sup-infor.com/index.htm

(At least one list member of these lists is a contributor.  It is still
fashionable
in some shrinking enclaves to deride or dismiss on-line material but this,
as is
often the case, is of the highest quality and is in many ways better than
printed
material.  A major DVD of the resources on line and new material is in
press for
those who prefer a material token or talisman for legitimacy).

Marc's work is easily searched to form and investigate hypotheses on
glyphs and
their readings.  For example, Lacandena does a good job of showing a
particular kind
of bird glyph can be read as huilo- as well as or instead of toto- (uh-oh,
I hope I
am not scolded for my presentation method in this instance, I took off
those pesky
-tl's but left the rest in lower case and did not use the canonic form,
and did not
indicate vowel length, but I think they're all long anyway...).  A quick
use of the
program CEN from Thouvenot and his group automatically provides just over
a dozen
examples of glyphs with the huilo- element, easily allowing the user to
pop up
pictures of the glyphs and providing exact references as to their location.
Experienced people working on glyphs in a document  are going to be using
Marc's
program to investigate all types of birds that appear as candidates,
although you
can usually quickly rule in or out owls and other birds with distinctive
appearances. Fo!
 r example, if you are trying to match toponymic glyphs in a pictorial
document with
colonial and modern lists of place names or with names on maps, you are
going to
investigate any possibility that comes to mind--and most of the time you
still
won't get a "hit" or you'll get too many--e.g. Coatepec, Huehuetepec,
etc..  You
will also be more efficient time if you are not using canonic forms.  The
same is
true of types of trees and snakes.  Lacadena's work does contain the
promise of a
deeper grammatical understanding of glyphic texts, except that there
aren't any,
other than a few strings in the Codex Xolotl that Dibble has published on
years
ago.  Still, Lacandena does a good job of showing that the Codex de
Xicotepec has
strong relationships to the Texcocan school of tlacuilome.  Perhaps some
sort of
non-prescriptive-laden bridge can be built between the two efforts of
Lacandena and
Thouvenot.

Regarding the website mentioned above, can anyone cite instances of
references to
this on-line body of work in recent, non-French, non-Mexican published
work?  (There
are some among the Mexican researchers that Marc has patiently trained,
but any from
the US?  Getting a list of those works would very likely prove an
efficient roadmap
to good recent work).


Other resources on the website produced by Marc and his collaborators
include an
on-line Nahuatl dictionary and a veritable Nahua encyclopedia placing
individual
glyphs in a natural science context or in a cultural context via
references to
Sahagun and other sources.  All resources are linked, so that if your are
investigating snakes, you might recognize, as Sybille de Pury did, at a
glance, that
the apparent Coatepec glyph in Section 5 of the Codex de Xicotepec is very
likely
not Coatepec but instead is more likely related to the snake
teuctlacozauhqui.  If
you enter "TECUTLACOZAUHQUI" into the GDN program (yes, they know about
teuc- and
tecu- so let's skip all that...), you find:

TECUTLACOZAUHQUI : "La amarilla gobernante"
(Tecutlaco?auhquj)
Ay en esta tierra una culebra que se llama tecutlaco?auhquj. Dizen: es el
principe,
o princesa de todas las culebras, es gruessa, y larga: tiene eslabones en
la cola,
como vibora: tiene grande cabe?a, y gran boca tiene dientes; y la lengua
orcaxada:
tiene escamas gruessas, es de color amarillo de la color de la flor de la
calaba?a:
tiene unas manchas negras como las del tigre: los eslabones tienen
pardillos, y
duros: silva esta serpiente. Come conejos y liebres, y aves; come
cualesqujer aves
/o anjmales: y aunque tiene dientes no los masca, sino tragalos, y alla
dentro los
dixiere, o desmuele. Si alguna ave topa tragasela entera, y si estan
encima de algun
arbol arrojelos la pon?o?a con que los haze cayer muertos. Lib. 11, fol.
77, p. 229
r. y v.
Esta serpiente siempre anda, acompa?ada, con su hembra; y la hembra con su
macho:
aunque siempre andan el uno apartado del otro y quando se qujeren juntar
silva el
uno, y luego viene el otro. y si alguno mata al uno dellos el otro
persigue al que
le mato hasta que le mata. En los eslabones se parece, si esta serpiente
es de
muchos a?os: porque cada a?o produce un eslabon esta culebra /o serpiente
no puede
andar por tierra rasa mas va por encima del heno y de las matas como
volando, sino
le hazen mal no hazen mal. Lib. 11, fol. 78, p. 230 r. y v.
Ay otra culebra que se llama cincoatl, o cencoatl; es mediana, no tiene
cascabeles,
nj muerde es amarilla, y colorada, y parda escura, qujere parecer a la
culebra que
se llama tecutlaco?auhquj. Lib. 11, fol. 87, p. 239 v.
You then go back and look more closely at the Codex de Xicotepec glyph and
you see
it is composed of two facing yellow snakes with spots, forked tongues and
(small)
rattles.  One of the most obvious Coatepec glyphs of all times then
becomes most
likely not a Coatepec glyph at all.   And you broaden your search of place
names
well beyond Coatepec.
Marc is extremely generous with his time and a researcher ignores his work
at their
peril.  For example, his efforts, along with Sybille de Pury have helped
me identify
the second town in the Codex de Xicotepec as Cuauhchinanco and have helped
me rule
out any appearance of Nezahualcoyotl in that codex until Section 16
(rather than
Section 9 as the author of the ECN article, uncritically following
Stresser-Pean,
supposes).   And it was of course Lesbre in his review of Stresser-Pean's
book long
ago that initially suggested that Stresser-Pean's reading of the
Nezahualcoyotl
glyph in Section 9 was incorrect and that he appeared instead in the later
section--where his glyph is quite clear but was misread by Stresser-Pean. 
And of
course, the French Guy and Claude Stresser-Pean were the ones sufficiently
trusted
by the people of the small village of Cuaxicala to allow them to being
their codex
to the public.

The French education system has had a way of producing people with finely
tuned
sensitivities to texts, pictorial as well as alphabetic--every detail is
considered
important, and Marc's, and his collaborators' and Patrick's work all show
it.  And
leaving aside facility in reading French, which is often just a few sound
changes
away from Spanish and can be managed with a good (on-line or paper)
dictionary, the
French have been diligent in their efforts to publish in Spanish and they are
enthusiastic in their efforts to communicate by e-mail in English or Spanish,
finding French not sufficiently challenging).  Why, then, their low
profile in the
US?  Perhaps  their empirical rather than ideological approach has kept them
isolated?  Although academic resources may be at an all-time low,  albeit
with some
hope of improvement on the horizon, it would be good to get Thouvenot and
his group
and Lesbre over to the US to raise our game some.


Jerry Offner
ixtlil at earthlink.net

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