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Tongues of Fire: Language and Evangelization in Colonial Mexico

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-7993243

1527-1900

Byron Ellsworth Hamann,

Latin American history and culture

Titled in reference to the biblical story of how Christ's apostles received the gift of universal fluency, Tongues of Fire is the result of a four-decade research project on early modern evangelization in Oaxaca, Mexico. Intended as a Dominican-dominated complement to the Franciscan-focused works of Louise Burkhart on central Mexico and William Hanks on Yucatan, Farriss's book is constantly in dialogue with those other regions and studies, and often with the Andes as well.Divided into four parts, plus an introduction and conclusion, the book moves from broad institutional-social contexts to focused linguistic analysis. Part 1, “Language Contact and Language Policy,” reviews early attempts to convey the Gospel without actually learning local languages, via gestures and didactic images (chapter 1), indigenous interpreters (chapter 2), and lingua francas from Latin to Nahuatl (chapter 3). Part 2 then turns to the challenges of “evangelization in the vernacular”: studying Oaxacan languages with the help of indigenous collaborators, field schools, and published grammars (chapter 4), and evaluating missionary competence in preaching and confession (chapter 5). Part 3, “The Means and the Message,” shifts from ecclesiastical institutionality to indigenous targets, highlighting collaborations with elite converts in the process of teaching doctrine (chapter 6), as well as the difficulties of translating and preaching basic Catholic concepts such as sin and its effects, or the perils of idolatry (chapter 7). These issues are explored further in part 4, “Lost and Found in Translation,” which introduces early modern theories and practices of translation (chapter 8), presents a series of (mis)translation case studies including heaven and hell, sin, and the Trinity (chapter 9), and explores the importance of rhetoric and poetic speech in both Renaissance Europe and indigenous Mesoamerica (chapter 10). The splendid conclusion, titled “Doctrinal Legacies,” reveals how the often-awkward translations of missionary literature nevertheless became fossilized in practice, creating linguistic precedents repeated throughout the early modern period. Like the language of the King James Bible, translated phrases were taken up not only in later missionary texts but also by indigenous people, in wills and petitions and even spoken courtroom testimonies (p. 291).Tongues of Fire has many strengths, including a regional focus on Oaxaca's many languages (as opposed to just one, which is usually the case in Oaxacan scholarship). The main text and notes thus provide an up-to-date survey of primary and secondary literature on the early modern histories of not only Zapotec and Mixtec but also Chatino, Chinantec, Netzicho, and other less studied tongues. The notes also present an excellent guide to Oaxacan documents in archives from Mexico, the United States, and Europe, and the main text demonstrates how much archival sources can reveal when read carefully and creatively—as when Farriss uses court records to gauge Nahuatl fluency among Zapotec speakers in the late 1520s and 1530s, or to gain a rough timetable for when Dominican missionaries learned Mixtec well enough to translate directly into Spanish (pp. 70–71, 75). Farriss also finds the unexpected and illuminating in early modern published sources, such as the often-cited (but seldom fully read) missionary histories of Agustín Dávila Padilla, Antonio de Remesal, and Francisco de Burgoa. My favorite example is when Farriss gathers references from all three authors about the use of indigenous page boys to carry ecclesiastical clothing (p. 311n55). Although Farriss's discussions of missionary translations (above all from Spanish to Zapotec) are usually presented in summary (as opposed to providing the indigenous-language missionary text in parallel with a literal English translation), this is because such focused analyses can be found in the appendixes of her 2014 book Libana: El discurso ceremonial mesoamericano y el sermón cristiano, which triangulates sixteenth-century Spanish texts, their (mis)translation into Zapotec, and a retranslation of the Zapotec into present-day Spanish.Farriss's introduction opens by speaking about outer space, arguing that the languages and customs encountered by Europeans in the early modern Americas were so alien to Afro-Eurasian sensibilities as to seem from another planet (p. 1). This is a recurring theme throughout the book—indeed, the first footnote cites Douglas Vakoch's 2011 edited collection Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (see also pp. 2–3, 11, 85, 175, 285, 292). Such extraplanetary comparisons are actually faithful to early modern imaginations: in a manuscript from late 1508, Leonardo da Vinci wondered what the earth would look like if seen from the moon or from a star; in the epic Orlando Furioso of 1516, poet Ludovico Ariosto sent one of his knightly protagonists to the moon, transported in Elijah's fiery chariot.And so with its insistence on the Americas as alien, Tongues of Fire offers a critique of James Lockhart's famous concept of “Double Mistaken Identity.” Lockhart was struck by the extensive similarities between European and Mesoamerican civilizations; in contrast, Farriss argues that “Iberians had so little in the way of culturally specific elements in common with Mesoamericans that the overlap in their repertoires of associations was infinitesimal” (p. 5). But do Farriss's many examples of Catholic (mis)translations—confirmation as “the bishop placing a mark”; the vale of tears as a “place for crying”—disprove Lockhart's broader claims about mutually intelligible Ibero-American parallels, in practices ranging from social hierarchies to tax systems to religious organizations to ritual calendars?