Overview

In Tongues of Fire, Nancy Farriss investigates the role of language and translation in the creation of Mexican Christianity during the first centuries of colonial rule. Spanish missionaries collaborated with indigenous intellectuals to communicate the gospel in dozens of unfamiliar local languages that had previously lacked grammars, dictionaries, or alphabetic script. The major challenge to translators, more serious than the absence of written aids or the great diversity of languages and their phonetic and syntactical complexity, was the vast cultural difference between the two worlds. The lexical gaps that frustrated the search for equivalence in conveying fundamental Christian doctrines derived from cultural gaps that separated European experiences and concepts from those of the Indians. Farriss shows that the dialogue arising from these efforts produced a new, culturally hybrid form of Christianity that had become firmly established by the end of the 17th century.The study focuses on the Otomangue languages of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, especially Zapotec, and relates their role within the Dominican program of evangelization to the larger context of cultural contact in post-conquest Mesoamerica. Fine-grained analysis of translated texts reveals the rhetorical strategies of missionary discourse. Spotlighting the importance of the native elites in shaping what emerged as a new form of Christianity, Farriss shows how their participation as translators and parish administrators helped to make evangelization an indigenous enterprise, and the new Mexican church an indigenous one.

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9780190884109

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Reviews

A subtle treatment of intercultural communication in early and mid-colonial Oaxaca that will also illuminate wider discussions of New Spain, colonial Spanish America and beyond. The simultaneity of evangelization in indigenous languages and broader processes of Hispanicization is explored, illuminating both the miracle and the impossibility of 'translating' core Christian beliefs and practices in new settings. -- Kenneth Mills, J. Frederick Hoffmann Professor of History, University of Michigan Farriss's new book offers an extraordinary history of communication as it unfolded between European Christians and a Mexican indigenous culture, covering every aspect of the processDLfrom the earliest gestures to the textbooks that were written to the subtle changes that eventually occurred in the mindsets of both Zapotecs and Spaniards. This is a work that scholars of early Mexico must read if they have any interest in religion or language contact or indigenous culturesDLand who these days could fail to take an interest in at least one of those?! -- Camilla Townsend, author of Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive In this rich and deeply researched book Nancy Farriss makes a major contribution to the historical analysis of colonial Mexico. Drawing on decades of research on Oaxaca, the Valley of Mexico and Yucatan, this work is both broad in scope and tightly focused on the intersection of language and Christian evangelization. Highly readable and erudite, this book would make the core of a superb seminar and it merits close reading by all who work on colonial history of the Americas. --William Hanks, author of Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross

In this rich and deeply researched book Nancy Farriss makes a major contribution to the historical analysis of colonial Mexico. Drawing on decades of research on Oaxaca, the Valley of Mexico and Yucatan, this work is both broad in scope and tightly focused on the intersection of language and Christian evangelization. Highly readable and erudite, this book would make the core of a superb seminar and it merits close reading by all who work on colonial history of the Americas. * William Hanks, author of Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross * Farriss's new book offers an extraordinary history of communication as it unfolded between European Christians and a Mexican indigenous culture, covering every aspect of the process -from the earliest gestures to the textbooks that were written to the subtle changes that eventually occurred in the mindsets of both Zapotecs and Spaniards. This is a work that scholars of early Mexico must read if they have any interest in religion or language contact or indigenous cultures-and who these days could fail to take an interest in at least one of those?! * Camilla Townsend, author of Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive * A subtle treatment of intercultural communication in early and mid-colonial Oaxaca that will also illuminate wider discussions of New Spain, colonial Spanish America and beyond. The simultaneity of evangelization in indigenous languages and broader processes of Hispanicization is explored, illuminating both the miracle and the impossibility of 'translating' core Christian beliefs and practices in new settings. * Kenneth Mills, J. Frederick Hoffmann Professor of History, University of Michigan *

Author Information

Nancy Farriss has dedicated a half century to studying the history of the church in Mexico and the history and religion of the indigenous populations of Yucatan and Oaxaca. She is currently retired from teaching colonial Latin American History and Ethnohistory at the University of Pennsylvania and divides her residence between Philadelphia and Oaxaca.

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