History Compass 8/6 (2010): 491502, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00681.

Language and Communication in the Spanish Conquest of America

Daniel Wasserman Soler*
University of Virginia

Abstract

This article was originally presented as part of The 2009 Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference. You can read the article along with two commentaries and discussion at http:// compassconference.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/conference-paper-language-and-communicationin-the-spanish-conquest-of-america/. One of the central questions arising from the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians concerns language and communication. An encounter between two peoples that had not known about the others existence an encounter that scholars have long characterized as a clash of cultures raises the question of how they managed to communicate with each other. Over 25 years ago, Tzvetan Todorov put forth one way of linking communication and conquest when he argued that Europeans conquered the Amerindians through their superior ability to understand the Other. More generally, he contended that Western Europeans had a general superiority in human communication, demonstrated by the fact that they used alphabetic writing (Todorov 251). For Todorov, Europeans displayed remarkable qualities of exibility and improvisation, characteristics that allowed them to be more effective in imposing their ways of life on others (Todorov 2478). They were so successful, Todorov argues, that in the centuries following the initial encounter between Europeans and Amerindians, Europeans were able to gradually assimilate the Other and eliminate alterity. While Todorovs 1982 work initially received much acclaim, since then several scholars have challenged (directly and indirectly) his claims by subjecting the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians to further study. Scholars have questioned the extent to which these groups were able to communicate with one another, and in some cases, they have questioned what Spanish conquest, authority, and domination actually mean when Spaniards and Indians had such difculty communicating their ideas to one another. By posing these questions, scholars of varied backgrounds in anthropology, history, religion, and art history have fundamentally reshaped the eld of colonial Latin American studies. While they have shown that barriers impeded communication and understanding between Amerindians and Europeans, scholars have also demonstrated that both groups made important contributions to new cultural and religious syntheses. This article will explore a range of scholarly works over the past 25 years that responds to the question of how language and communication are interrelated with conquest.

In 1512, the Spanish Crown directed the Franciscan Order to send friars to the New World to instruct the Native American communities in the Catholic faith.1 To make doctrine as comprehensible as possible, the friars studied the natives languages. Documentation from approximately 35 years later indicates that the Emperor Charles V sought to encourage the friars to continue to learn native languages.2 By 1550, however, Charles sent a decree to the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians in New Granada, ordering them to teach Castilian to the natives.3 Support for the use of Native American languages, however, did not cease. Charless son, Philip II, sent a decree in 1578 to the archbishops of Cuzco and Lima asking that evangelization only be the duty of individuals who spoke the native languages well.4 By 1596, however, the Council
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of the Indies recommended to Philip that Catholic doctrine be taught in Castilian.5 The reign of Philip II, however, did not terminate the issue.6 The question of how to communicate doctrine to Native American groups remained contested, with documentation from as late as 1770 demonstrating the persistence of questions concerning evangelization, language, and communication.7 That Spanish monarchs, ofcials, and ecclesiasts could not conclusively determine a language policy indicates, in part, that Europeans constantly experienced obstacles to communication with the Native American peoples. The subject of communication has long held signicance for colonial Latin America, perhaps most notably in examining the religious forms that developed as a result of interactions between European priests and Native Americans and in studying how Spaniards and natives together established a New World civilization. In what follows, this study offers an introduction to scholarship addressing language and communication in the Spanish conquest and the early colonial period. It cannot, unfortunately, provide an exhaustive treatment of the subject. This essay examines English-language studies and even within this somewhat smaller eld, several works that deserve attention cannot be included because of limits on space.8 We begin with a famous (or, perhaps, infamous) argument about communication and the Spanish conquest made by Tzvetan Todorov in 1982. While many scholars have rejected his thesis, the theme of language and communication has remained central to scholarship on Latin America. Specically, this essay demonstrates that since the late 1980s, scholarship on the conquest and early colonial Latin America is largely unied by the attempt to show that Native American peoples were effective communicators. Todorov and the Theory of European Communicative Superiority Perhaps the most controversial work to examine communication in the Spanish conquest is Todorovs The Conquest of America.9 In his monograph, Todorov, a literary critic and philosopher, argues that Europeans were able to conquer the Mexica because of their exceptional ability to understand the Other and because of a superiority in human communication.10 This ability, he contends, arose from European alphabetic writing, a form of communication more advanced than the pictogram-based system employed by the Mexica.11 The Mexica, according to Todorov, lived in a tradition-based world, xed on the past, and because they lacked alphabetic script, they could not compete with the European ability to quickly communicate through signs.12 That the Spaniards came from a society that had alphabetic writing worked in their favor because the presence of writing favors improvisation over ritual.13 More specically, Todorov explains that while Spaniards preferred man-to-man communication, the Mexica preferred exchanges between man and the world.14 Perhaps most illustrative of this difference is Todorovs description of how the Mexica emperor, Moctezuma, dealt with intelligence he received regarding the newly-arrived Spaniards. Once he knew about the Spanish presence, Moctezuma sought not the advice of other men but rather the knowledge conferred by master interpreters who communicated with gods.15 Todorov concludes, It is this particular way of practicing communication (neglecting the interhuman dimension, privileging contact with the world) which is responsible for the Indians distorted image of the Spaniards during the rst encounters, and notably for the paralyzing belief that the Spaniards are gods.16 As Spaniards favored the quicker and more exible man-to-man communication, Todorov argues that they were able to assert their authority over the Mexica. He
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maintains, furthermore, that European communicative skills enabled them to assimilate n Corte s, Todorov explains that the conquistador the Other. In his discussion of Herna took an interest in the natives by learning about their language, forms of political organization, and methods of communication. Following his acquisition of knowledge about s (and other Europeans) attempted to eliminate the Native Americans, however, Corte the strangeness of the external other by incorporating the natives into the European world. Europeans, according to Todorov, exhibit remarkable qualities of exibility and improvisation, traits that allowed them to more effectively impose their ways of life on others.17 Although Todorov argues that westerners conquered America through their communicative prowess, he claims that in asserting this superiority, westerners also lost communication with the rest of the world (by attempting to assimilate it).18 In fact, Todorovs aim, in his words, is to provide a cautionary tale of what happens if we lose communication, as the Europeans did, and do not discover the external Other. As Europeans have, in Todorovs opinion, largely succeeded in their 350-year effort to assimilate the Other and eliminate alterity, he implies that Europeans have failed to understand the Other, and thus, have fallen short in acquiring self-knowledge.19 The political theorist and historian Anthony Pagden notes that Todorov aimed to understand the process of conquest in order to prevent it, in order to recognize it when we encounter it today.20 While many colonial Latin Americanists do not acknowledge Todorovs study as a foundational work,21 others consider his research important.22 Regardless, we begin with him here as a useful baseline for considering more recent works on communication in early Latin America. Native Americans as Effective and Active Communicators Shortly after the release of Todorovs work, Inga Clendinnen questioned not only the superiority of European communicative abilities but also the very notion of conquest by examining the encounter between the Franciscan friars and the Maya in the Yucatan peninsula.23 The friars were simple, motivated, and devoted men who received from the pope the task of establishing a new Church in the Indies.24 They believed their duties included not only teaching doctrine but also protecting the Maya from the abuses of Spanish landowners who often sought to take advantage of native labor.25 Through forming personal relationships with the Maya, these idealistic friars believed that they had made strides in their initial efforts at evangelization. Clendinnen shows, however, that their idealism changed when they realized that the Maya had not done away with their idols. For Clendinnen, the friars, who had dedicated themselves to the service of the Maya, interpreted this continued idol worship as betrayal.26 By arguing that the Maya remained strangers to the Franciscans, Clendinnen demonstrates that the friars had not been able to communicate effectively with the Maya. In discovering the continued use of idols, the friars took issue with the Maya mingling of elements from Christianity and native religions. Clendinnen paints an image of friars who struggled to make sense of how the Maya brought elements of Christianity together with native religious practices to form one coherent system. The friars bewilderment and confusion at the religion of the Maya, therefore, almost seem to invert Todorovs claim about superior European communicative skills. Furthermore, because the Maya appropriated some elements of the Christian religion and mixed them with their traditional religion, Clendinnens study implies that the Maya actually conquered Christianity and put it to a new use.
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While Clendinnen challenges Todorovs claims about communication and conquest, part of her argument mirrors his. She demonstrates that the encounter between the friars and the Maya radically changed the former. After discovering the idols, the friars instituted ad hoc inquisitions to discover which Maya had engaged in idolatry. They utilized torture to nd answers, and they violently punished the guilty natives. Some of these Franciscans, Clendinnen argues, were monstrous inversions of the Franciscan ideal; missionaries as brutish as the worst pagans; men enslaved by the passions of anger, pride and cruelty.27 While many Europeans had perceived the natives as violent barbarians, now the friars had become the monsters, and in making such a claim Clendinnen parallels Todorovs argument that Europeans discovered not an external Other but rather an Other within themselves.28 While Clendinnen and Todorov differ signicantly on the question of European communicative abilities, Louise Burkhart takes a position somewhere in the middle.29 She demonstrates that Catholic friars, aiming to explain Christianity to the Nahuas, mastered Nahuatl and employed concepts from the native tongue to illuminate Christian ones.30 Her contention that friars used indigenous rhetoric to bring the Nahuas closer to understanding Christianity echoes one of Todorovs points, namely, that Europeans took an interest in Amerindian languages, political organization, and forms of communication in order to incorporate them into the European world. Furthermore, similar to Todorovs claim that Europeans displayed remarkable qualities of exibility and improvisation, Burkhart attributes exibility to the friars in their effort to t Christianity within a Nahua context, arguing that the friars actually remade themselves.31 Despite these basic parallels between Burkhart and Todorov, Burkhart makes no claim that Europeans had communicative skills superior to those of Nahuas. Rather, she attributes exibility both to the friars and to the Nahuas. For Burkhart, the latter became sufciently Christian for the new colonial society, but they retained their Nahua ideological and moral orientation.32 While Burkhart implies that the Nahuas demonstrated exibility in employing Christian concepts as expressions of their original beliefs, she contends that the universe that they inhabited remained a Nahua one.33 Despite the NahuaEuropean interaction, a fundamental difference remained, namely the disparity between a dualistic Christian worldview, which separated the spiritual and material worlds, and a monistic Nahua worldview.34 Because of this divergence, Burkhart contends that the transfer of Christianity onto the Nahua worldview was impossible. Rather, the friars contented themselves with a transformation of Christian elements to t into an already-existing Nahua logic. For Burkhart, the friars success in communicating Christian concepts to the Nahuas relied heavily on using tropes from indigenous moral philosophy.35 Like Clendinnen, Burkhart challenges Todorovs claim that Europeans assimilated Native Americans into a European world. Rather, both Clendinnen and Burkhart demonstrate that the natives incorporated European concepts into their belief systems while retaining the foundations of their own traditions.36 While Clendinnen and Burkhart trouble Todorovs arguments about communication and assimilation, we nd an even greater challenge to Todorovs argument about European communicative superiority in the work of Serge Gruzinski.37 While his subtitle The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World may seem similar to Todorovs description of the European effort to assimilate Native Americans, their studies differ considerably. Gruzinski does not describe an encounter in which the European remains unchanged and the native gradually approaches the European world. While Gruzinski wishes to understand the impact of Western Europeans on America,38 he does
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not describe a one-way exchange from Europe to America. Rather, he contends that the conquest encounter produced a new, hybrid society.39 To describe this hybridity, Gruzinski examines a revolution in modes of expression and communication, a revolution resulting from the introduction of European script to the Mexica in the early 16th century.40 According to Gruzinski, we nd the most signicant disparities between Spaniards and Mexica in their systems of representation, namely, in the ways that they communicated and recorded their lived experiences. Before the Spanish arrival, the Mexica largely used a pictograph system to record information, but the introduction of European script produced a combination of European and Mexica forms of expression, which in turn facilitated a new manner of recording the past.41 For Gruzinski, examining forms of expression provides a unique window onto how the Mexica conceived of the world in which they lived. He notes that in the early 16th century, when the Europeans arrived, the peoples of central Mexico had been undergoing a constant process of acculturation, a process that continued with the introduction of European script.42 In explaining how the Mexica moved from resistance to accommodation of European realities,43 Gruzinski argues that in the second half of the 17th century, they rewove the torn net that resulted from the violent European arrival in the early 1500s.44 The sources that he examines, he argues, cannot be separated from either their colonial context or from Western European modes of expression.45 Rather, Europeans and Mexica alike put together seemingly contradictory traits, which came to coexist and form a new, evolving way of thinking about the world, a mestizo reality, which he examines more fully in a later work.46 While he parallels Clendinnen and Burkhart in arguing that Native Americans were crucial contributors to a New World society, he differs from them in his contention that native elements were permanently transformed through their interaction with European ones. Like Gruzinski, Sabine MacCormack also troubles Todorovs contention that Europeans had superior communicative skills and that Europeans have largely succeeded in eliminating alterity.47 Whereas Gruzinski made extensive use of image analysis for his argument, MacCormack bases her study almost entirely in Spanish accounts concerning native Andeans. In her own words, she examines Andean religion through the eyes of those who sought to destroy it. She studies changes in Andean religion over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries and changes in the ways that Spaniards perceived it. 48 MacCormack indicates from the outset that, despite the Spanish invasion, Andean religious life was largely continuous outside of Cuzco.49 Although Andeans accepted Christianity, MacCormack maintains that they used it to develop their own brand of religion.50 While they often desired to become Christian, they also sought to maintain old religious practices.51 The encounter between Andeans and Spaniards, furthermore, did not have uniform results, but rather, produced a wide range of religious experiences.52 Besides arguing that much continuity (despite the Europeans arrival) characterized religious life in the Andean highlands, MacCormack also addresses the subject of communication between Europeans and natives. She indicates that some Dominican friars attempted to learn about Incan religion in order to help Andeans understand the path to Christianity.53 She demonstrates, furthermore, that some Spanish intellectuals possessed a sophisticated understanding of the mental processes at the foundation of native religions. The friars believed, in the tradition of Aristotle, that the imagination constituted an intermediate step between ones sensory perception and ones intellect: that is, an object perceived by the senses traverses the imagination before arriving at the intellect. The imagination was crucial for a number of reasons: as an intermediary, it could change the reality of the object perceived by the senses. The process of recognition rst through
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the senses and then through the imagination had posed a problem for Aquinas and Catholic theologians, for they believed that one could not perceive God with any of the senses. Aquinas had concluded, therefore, that one apprehends deities directly through the imagination, therefore bypassing sensory perception. Although humans could conceive of deities only in the imagination, sensory perception could enforce ideas about deities or phantasms existing in the imagination. In Europe, for example, the extensive network of visual imagery produced by the Church (e.g., artwork, rituals) helped to reinforce the idea of the Christian God in peoples imaginations. As this visual imagery did not exist in the New World prior to the Europeans arrival, the devil had had more opportunities to mislead the Andeans. In other words, in the New World, the devil found a privileged space in the imaginations of the natives but did not nd the same space in Europe because of the sensory reinforcement that Christian artwork and rituals provided. Although MacCormack describes a complex system by which Spanish intellectuals sought to understand the relationship between the devil and Andean religion, she concludes that the Andeans and Europeans employed distinct mental structures to understand religion and that this difference instigated the incommensurability between the two religions. MacCormack, furthermore, questions the efcacy of European methods used to understand Andean religion. The Andeans, for MacCormack, generally viewed their deities in more nuanced ways than did the Spaniards.54 While the Andeans administered a complex network of sacred power that had developed over several centuries, the Spaniards thought little of it: they considered it a delusion or a fabrication.55 Furthermore, she contends that her Spanish sources contain few descriptions of Incan festivals, a phenomenon that she attributes to a Spanish failure to understand the rituals theological and political signicance.56 Of the Europeans who read these accounts, she maintains that few understood them.57 Part of MacCormacks work, thus, shows that Europeans did not necessarily have a more sophisticated understanding of religious concepts than did the Andeans. Furthermore, the continuity of religious traditions in the Andean highlands shows that the Andeans continued to communicate their ancient religious traditions to younger generations well beyond the initial contact period. For Mesoamerica, the ethnohistorian Matthew Restall provides a similar take on the Maya during the colonial period.58 With his rst major contribution to the study of Maya communities, Restall confronts an earlier generation of scholarship, which had demonstrated either the superiority of the Spaniards or the indigenous peoples acceptance of their own inferiority.59 He demonstrates, rather, that the Maya were a complex, (largely) culturally independent, and thriving society. Restalls work mirrors that of most authors hitherto discussed in that he recognizes the need to write the history of colonial Latin America not only from the Spanish colonial perspective but also from a Native American perspective. Above all, Restalls study examines the Maya concept of the cah, or local community, which served as the central social unit of Maya society. He demonstrates that, through the colonial period, the Maya identied most strongly with their own communities, continuing to produce traditional goods, choosing their own leaders, and regulating their own local affairs.60 Restalls study differs from those examined above, however, in its use of Mayalanguage sources. These sources, he argues, contradict old scholarly ideas of a Maya decline during the colonial period. Of interest to our discussion on communication and conquest and central to Restalls work are Spanish genre texts (e.g., wills) written largely in Maya. After the arrival of the Spaniards in the Yucatan, says Restall, the Mayas learned how to use Spanish legal culture to their advantage, thus employing the requisite Spanish legal terms and form, while also communicating their customary Maya rights in
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their own language.61 The Maya from this period, thus, demonstrate both Spanish inuence and the continuing importance of their own customs. Operating on a wider scale than Restalls study of the colonial Yucatan is the work of the linguist Frances Karttunen, Between Worlds.62 Karttunen highlights the lives of a select group of Native Americans, each of whom lived in a different location in the Americas, anywhere from the 16th to the 20th centuries. While her stated aim is to study several individuals who, all became bridges between their own worlds and another, unfamiliar one,63 she demonstrates implicitly that the establishment of a New World society involved not only the efforts of European conquistadors and missionaries. Absolutely fundamental was the part played by Native Americans who had the talent of communicating in both Castilian and one or more native tongues. Through her chapters on Don a Marina (a.k.a. La Malinche, or Malintzin), the translator n Corte s, and Gaspar Antonio Chi, a Maya civil servant trained by the Francisfor Herna can friars, Karttunen demonstrates how crucial native translators were to the establishment ss ventures are of a New World society. While Don a Marinas contributions to Corte well-known both by specialists and non-specialists of Latin America, Karttunen makes a ss ventures entirely to Don welcome point by not attributing credit for Corte a Marina or s. Through Karttunens subtle narration, the reader infers that Corte ss clever and to Corte deceitful approach in playing various native Mesoamerican groups against one another contributed to his success, as did the talents of Don a Marina. Thus, Karttunen like the authors hitherto discussed avoids depicting New World societies as subsuming the Native American to the European world. Just as Karttunen and others have identied Native American European communication as foundational to New World enterprises, Amos Megged emphasizes concepts such as dialogue and negotiation as characteristic of the religion of the Chiapas region in southern New Spain in the early colonial period.64 Overall, he contends that the interaction between the friars and the Chiapas Maya produced a twofold identity, in which the Maya and colonial components were inseparably joined.65 Drawing upon the historiography of the Catholic Reformation in Europe, Megged places friars and their Mayan ock on a level in which both contribute actively to local religion. Weekly sermons, in particular, demonstrate the dialogue that emerged between the spiritual needs of the Indian parishioners and the growing awareness by the Spanish priests of local world views.66 While Megged describes dialog between friars and the Maya, he also highlights miscommunications and misunderstandings. He maintains that the friars sometimes failed in the interpretation of local reality,67 having too easily formed connections between Maya concepts and Catholic teachings, only to nd that the parallels did not serve Catholic doctrine well. Megged, however, does not claim that miscommunication characterized local religion. Rather, his examination of native-language sermons and etymological dictionaries demonstrates a slow but solid understanding of indigenous terms on the part of the European priests.68 Similar to Meggeds argument about wrongly-identied parallels, Walter Mignolo contends that Spanish intellectuals misconstrued some unfamiliar New World objects.69 When Europeans observed the Mexicas amoxtli and the Mayas vuh, they often described them as objects folded like accordions and translated them as books.70 The problem here, according to Mignolo, lay in the narrow European denition of book. Renaissance Europeans assumed that their specic ideas about communication were universal and, therefore, misunderstood the real function that the Mexica amoxtli and the Mayan vuh served.71 Through the distortions caused by European terms, Native American
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semiotic interactions were combined with or replaced by the materiality and ideology of western reading and writing cultures.72 Through Spanish inuence, therefore, European writing and books replaced Mexica and Maya forms of communication.73 The assumption by 16th-century Europeans that their reading and writing norms were universal has continued into the present, according to Mignolo. He refers to fairly recent scholarly works,74 which have argued that syllabic and alphabetic writing produced a critical and unique breakthrough into new worlds of knowledge.75 Mignolo notes that neither Maya nor Mexica forms of recording information could t within this rubric. The concepts of writing and book, he argues, ought to be construed sufciently broadly to include forms outside the Western European tradition. Because very specic models of these two concepts were ingrained in 16th-century European minds, Spaniards were, according to Mignolo, unable to inquire into different writing systems and sign carriers other than simply describing them by analogy with their own model.76 While Mignolo disagrees with Todorovs statement regarding Europeans superior capability for understanding the Other, his article nonetheless serves as something of an anomaly among the authors discussed here for its emphasis on Spanish colonization and lack of attention to native forms of communication that continued beyond the conquest. Similar to the other authors mentioned here, however, he provides extensive evidence to demonstrate the sophistication of Mexica and Maya forms of communication. Todorov and Modern Scholarship Over 25 years ago, Todorov linked communication and conquest, positing that the conquest of the Mexica succeeded because of European communicative superiority. In explaining why many scholars disregard Todorovs work, Pagden has made two observations. The rst lies in Todorovs implication of Mexica inferiority. As Pagden notes, however, Todorov indicated that his distinction between Europeans and Mexica was meant to refer to a communicative event, not to the quality of their civilizations.77 A second reason for the controversy over Todorovs work rests in its moral quality, warning the reader of the dangers of conquest. Since then, several scholars have challenged his claims both directly and indirectly that alphabetic literacy was the decisive advantage in the Spanish conquest of the Mexica and that, consequently, Europeans gradually eliminated Native American alterity. Scholarship since the late 1980s nds a common thread in arguing that the members of a range of Native American communities possessed effective communicative skills. Anthropologists, art historians, linguists, literary critics, and historians alike have generally contended that Native Americans continued to communicate to younger generations their religious, governmental, legal, and quotidian traditions. Rather than characterize Native Americans as individuals who passively received European culture, recent scholars have generally depicted Native Americans as equal interlocutors with Europeans in forming a New World society. When placed against recent work, which shows Native Americans to be active and skilled communicators, Todorovs arguments seem out of place. Scholars today, however, perhaps should not distance themselves as far from Todorov as we would like to think. First of all, the scholarly view of colonial Latin America as a hybrid society, comprised of African, Amerindian, and European contributions evident in much recent work but perhaps most clear in the research of Serge Gruzinski is by no means foreign to n, or the Hybridization of Cultures, Todorov Todorovs work. In his chapter on Dura n.78 discusses the hybrid character of the 16th-century Dominican friar Diego Dura
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n, who recognized that Amerindians existed between their own customs and a belief Dura in the Christian God, shared in both Indian and European ways of life and, consequently, understood both cultures and could translate the signs of the one into signs of the other.79 While Todorovs discussion of hybridity differs from that of Gruzinski, for n, his complication of the Spanishexample, in its use of syncretism to describe Dura 80 Indian binary remains crucial in recent scholarship. Furthermore, as the survey of recent scholarship above shows, Todorovs general theme of language and communication in the conquest remains a central concern in the study of early colonial Latin America. In addition, while many students of the conquest have looked down upon Todorovs work for presenting a moral argument (i.e., the peril posed by conquest), current research often puts forth a morality of its own, whether it is the desire to give a voice to populations that traditionally lacked one, to recognize the equality of all cultures,81 or to tell a cautionary tale of the abuses that often result from colonial situations. While recent work has rightly sought to illuminate the essential part played by Native Americans in the conquest and in the early Latin American world, one wonders to what extent recent scholarship has overstated the agency and independence of Native American communities in an effort to revise the work of earlier scholars, who, in turn, had overemphasized the inuence of the European conqueror. While we need not call ourselves moralists, we would do well to recognize that the agenda informing our research are not so radically different from that which produced Todorovs Conquest. The necessary effort to study the Native American side of the conquest, however, has revealed another important gap (or a gorge, perhaps) in the scholarship produced over the last twenty years. An overwhelming amount of the sources that have made recent research possible exist because of the extensive bureaucracy established by Spaniards, often in collaboration with Native Americans. The part played by the Spaniards themselves (e.g., inquisitors, missionaries, governors, bureaucrats), however, has received little attention over the past 20 years, as a result of the effort to study the signicance of Native Americans in New World societies. Very recently, however, young scholars have begun to demonstrate an interest in examining the hierarchy that played a crucial part in producing colonial situations.82 Students of colonial Latin America are now more engaged than ever in the study of Native American languages, and thus, the years to come have the potential to bring forth yet even more important discoveries about New World societies. Given the interests of young scholars, it seems likely that these advances in knowledge about Native American cultures will be made alongside a new generation of scholarship examining Spanish colonial institutions. The most erudite work will, perhaps, attempt to bridge the gap between these two approaches. Short Biography Daniel I. Wasserman Soler is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Virginia. He received a masters degree from Virginia in 2008 and his bachelors degree from the University of Chicago in 2006. He has received grants from the U.S. Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Council, the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and the Mellon Foundation. His dissertation is a study of the Spanish Empires language policy in the 16th century. Comparing Catholic evangelization efforts in different parts of the Spanish Empire, it examines the question of what language(s) could be used to teach Catholic doctrine.
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Notes
* Correspondence: University of Virginia, PO Box 400180 Randall Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA. Email: diw7b@virginia.edu. The author would like to thank Brian Owensby, Patricia Seed, Camilla Townsend, and the anonymous readers from Blackwell-Wiley for their helpful advice in improving this article and Trey Proctor, Kivmars Bowling, Melisssa Dragon, and the Blackwell-Wiley staff for their friendly administrative support. 1 Seville, Archivo General de Indias, Indiferente General, 418, L. 3, F. 316R 316V. 2 Ibid., 424, L. 21, F. 67V 69. Charles (i.e., Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire and Charles I of Spain) sent a decree to Diego de Mendoza, his ambassador in Rome, asking, among other things, that the pope grant graces and indulgences to the religious who evangelized in native tongues. Charles sent a similar letter directly to the pope. 3 Ibid., Audiencia de Santa Fe, 533, L. 1, F. 126V 127. 4 Ibid., Indiferente General, 427, L. 30, F. 298V 299V. 5 Ibid., 744, N. 8. 6 n, La contradictoria legislacio n For more on this topic in the context of evangelization, see J. R. Lodares Marroda n Alconchel and J. J. de Bustos Tovar (eds.), Actas del VI Congreso lingu stica americana (15001770), in J. L. Giro Internacional de Historia de la Lengua espan ola (Madrid: Arco Libros, 2006), 223542. 7 rico Nacional, Co dices, L. 739, 3640. Madrid, Archivo Histo 8 Furthermore, this essay will not be able to discuss the substantial body of scholarship on subelds within linguistics, such as language contact, semantic change, and speech practices. For more, see, for example, the extensive work of the linguist anthropologist William F. Hanks and the collaborative work of the linguist Frances Karttunen and the historian James Lockhart. 9 T. Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. R. Howard (New York: Harper Perennial, te de lAme rique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982). 1992). The original title is La Conque 10 Ibid., 251. 11 Ibid., 252. 12 A. Pagden, Foreword, in T. Todorov (ed.), The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), xi. 13 Todorov, Conquest, 252. 14 Ibid. I thank Camilla Townsend for underscoring the importance of this point. 15 Ibid., 723. 16 Ibid., 75. 17 Ibid., 2479. 18 Ibid., 251. 19 Ibid., 45. 20 Pagden, Foreword, xii. 21 See Matthew Restalls assessment of Todorovs study in Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 85. Some authors do not refer to Todorovs research even when it addresses themes relevant to their work. See for example, W. D. Mignolo, Signs and their Transmission: The Question of the Book in the New World, in E. Hill Boone and W. D. Mignolo (eds.), Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 220270. 22 Pagden, Foreword, xiixiii. 23 I. Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 15171570 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 24 Ibid., 456. 25 Ibid., 556. 26 Ibid., 1278. 27 Ibid., 1278. 28 Todorov, Conquest, 2489. In the process of learning about and subsequently attempting to eliminate the strangeness of the external other, Todorov argues that Europeans made a surprising discovery: they found an Other within themselves. That is, rather than continuing to equate the Other with wild beings living in the forest, westerners discovered the beast that existed inside them. 29 L. M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1989). 30 Ibid., 114. 31 Ibid., 184. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 188. 34 Ibid., 185. 35 Ibid., 1889.

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Language, Communication, and Conquest 501

Ibid., 192. S. Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th18th Centuries, trans. E. Corrigan (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1993). The original title is La colonisation de limaginaire: te s indige `nes et occidentalisation dans le Mexique espagnol, XVIe-XVIIIe sie `cle (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). socie 38 Ibid., 1. 39 Ibid., 283. 40 Ibid., 2. 41 Ibid., 2. 42 Ibid., 89. 43 Ibid., 20. 44 Ibid., 144. 45 Ibid., 4. 46 Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization, trans. D. Dusinberre e me tisse (Paris: Fayard, 1999). (New York: Routledge, 2002). The original title is La pense 47 S. MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 48 Ibid., 56. 49 Ibid., 4. 50 Ibid., 11. 51 Ibid., 867. 52 Ibid., 13. 53 Ibid., 845. 54 Ibid., 285. 55 Ibid., 63. 56 Ibid., 767. 57 Ibid., 79. 58 M. Restall, The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 15501850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 59 Ibid., 1. 60 Ibid., 2. 61 Ibid., 301. Another recent work focusing more fully on Native Americans as active legal communicators is B. P. Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 62 F. E. Karttunen, Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 63 Ibid., xiv. 64 A. Megged, Exporting the Catholic Reformation: Local Religion in Early-Colonial Mexico (New York: Brill, 1996). 65 Ibid., 162. 66 Ibid., 3. 67 Ibid., 2. 68 Ibid., 3. 69 Mignolo, Signs and their Transmission. Mignolo notes that this article is a revised version of the second chapter in his Darker Side of the European Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 70 Ibid., 222. 71 Ibid., 2237. 72 Ibid., 227. 73 Ibid., 262. 74 Ibid., 22930. Mignolo cites D. Diringer, Writing (New York: Praeger, 1962) and The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval, and Oriental (New York: Dover Publications, 1982). 75 Diringer, Writing, 84. Cited in Mignolo, Signs and their Transmission, 229. 76 Mignolo, Signs and their Transmission, 234. The description by analogy system, which Mignolo describes here, has been discussed in greater length in the rst chapter of Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 1750. 77 See Pagdens general point in his Foreword, ixxiii. See Todorovs explanation in his Conquest: Indians and Spaniards practice communication differently. But the discourse of difference is a difcult one. As we have already seen with Columbus, the postulate of difference readily involves the feeling of superiority, the postulate of equality that of indifference, and it is always hard to resist this double movement, especially since the nal result of this encounter seems to indicate the victor explicitly enough: are not the Spaniards superior and not merely different? But the truth, or what we regard as the truth, is not so simple. Let us start with the assumption that on the linguistic or symbolic level, there is no natural inferiority on the Indians side: we have seen, for instance, that in
37 36

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Columbuss period, it was they who learned the Others language; and during the rst expeditions to Mexico, it is again two Indians, called Melchior and Juan by the Spaniards, who serve as interpreters (63). 78 Todorov, Conquest, 202218. 79 Ibid., 2112. 80 I thank Patricia Seed for encouraging me to add this point to my discussion. 81 I thank Camilla Townsend for underscoring this point. 82 See, for example, M. A. Nesvig, Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); K. L. Hossain, Arbiters of Faith, Agents of Empire: Spanish Inquisitors and their Careers, 15501650, Ph.D. diss. (Johns Hopkins University, 2007); and K. L. Hossain, Was Adam the First ramo, Diego de Simancas, and the Origins of Inquisitorial Practice, Archive for Reformation Heretic? Luis de Pa r Reformationsgeschichte, 97 (2006). History Archiv fu

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2010 The Author Journal Compilation 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

History Compass 8/6 (2010): 491502, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00681.x