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

Thu Mar 12 15:27:58 UTC 2009

Dear listeros,

A couple weeks ago, Professor Offner mentioned my article on Nezahualcoyotl published in Estudios de cultura nahuatl and presented it as lacking in scholarship because I didn't consult French scholars such as Professor Patrick Lesbre. I apologize for the delay, but I would just like to respond briefly. First, even though my article was recently published, I finished this piece in 2001. It is true that at that time I was unaware of Professor Lesbre's work. To a large extent this is a problem related to limitations of institutional resources and the dissemination of work published outside the US and in other languages. However, since that time, I have come across Professor Lesbre's work, and I have cited him in a subsequent publication. Even after reading Professor Lesbre's work, however, I don't feel that my article in Estudios de cultura nahuatl should be considered inferior or superfluous as Professor Offner suggests. Lesbre's work has a different focus, is based on different sources, and is informed by a different point of view. I believe that any prudent reader will easily see that professor Lesbre and I approach Nezahualcoyotl and Texcoco in different ways and thus enrich the understanding of this important topic in different ways. I would urge those interested to read the respective arguments and make their own decisions.

Best,

Jongsoo Lee

From: nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org [mailto:nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org] On Behalf Of Jerry Offner
Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2009 2:03 PM
To: Aztlan; Nahuat-L
Subject: [Nahuat-l] Calling attention to the French and how they help in one's research

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 and 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 hundred 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. For 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 pro!
 mise of a deeper grammatical understanding of glyphic texts, exce

pt 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 th!
 e 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"

(Tecutlacoçauhquj)

Ay en esta tierra una culebra que se llama tecutlacoçauhquj. Dizen: es el principe, o princesa de todas las culebras, es gruessa, y larga: tiene eslabones en la cola, como vibora: tiene grande cabeça, y gran boca tiene dientes; y la lengua orcaxada: tiene escamas gruessas, es de color amarillo de la color de la flor de la calabaça: 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 ponçoña con que los haze cayer muertos. Lib. 11, fol. 77, p. 229 r. y v.

Esta serpiente siempre anda, acompañada, 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 años: porque cada año 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 tecutlacoçauhquj. 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 St!
 resser-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<mailto:ixtlil at earthlink.net>

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