Dissertation Research: Ritual specialists, evangelization, and local socio-religious hierarchies in late colonial

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This project involves an anthropology graduate student from the University of Chicago conducting an ethno-historical study of 17th and 18th century religious practitioners in Mexico. Consulting archives in Mexico as well as in Spain, France and Italy, the student will develop an interpretive model of the late colonial acquisition and transmission of knowledge about calendrical lore and ritual oral texts. The study will examine the social transformation mechanisms of ritual practices from 1611 to 1819 in some Nahua and Zapotec communities via a comparative analysis of social (elite/non-elite) and spatial (local/regional/inter-regional) domains based on unpublished colonial documents. The study will test the hypothesis that the social reproduction of Nahua and Zapotec ritual practices in non-public local domains influenced the emergence of local Christian cults and related socio-religious hierarchies in the early 17th century. The possibility that these practices constituted an indigenous cultural response to growing population recovery and to integration into a regional economic and cultural domain will also be tested. The data will be drawn from a comparison between relatively integrated Nahua settlement and relatively autonomous Zapotec settlements in central and northern Oaxaca with ethnographic research in the municipality of Cuetzalan, Puebla. The new knowledge from this project will advance our understanding of how peripheral communities were integrated into a national hierarchy through the blend of indigenous and imported religious customs, a general process ongoing today.