Rethinking Zapotec Time

Rethinking Zapotec Time makes several significant contributions. It is a major synthesis of documentary evidence from the Zapotec mantic and ritual manuals that is both revisionist and encyclopedic. David Tavárez’s work has succeeded in mining the manuals' content to understand local historical processes and to link them as part of a longue durée in the production of knowledge by Zapotec peoples that goes back more than a thousand years. The book also sheds new light on highly debated issues concerning Mesoamerican calendrics and synchronology with European time, as well as oncontested interpretations of obscure passages in the Codex Borgia and other divinatory manuscripts.

— Javier Urcid, Brandeis University, co-author of The Lords of Lambityeco: Political Evolution in the Valley of Oaxaca during the Xoo Phase

This book introduces participants in a 'republic of letters' in the Zapotec language who, in the 1600s, created something new through their combination of ancestral knowledge and new knowledge from the Spanish realm. With its focus on actors outside the colonial political hierarchy, the book gives extraordinary insight into the lives of residents of colonial Indigenous towns that were locally administered, often only lightly overseen from distant political and religious centers. David Tavárez’s understanding of Zapotec history and cultural achievement is without parallel. The analysis of Zapotec literacy as 'anti-colonial discourses' contributes to  an important global reconsideration of Indigenous lives under colonial power.

— Rosemary Joyce, University of California at Berkeley, author of Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology

Rooted in the exceptional linguistic skills and erudition of David Tavárez, this study of Zapotec-language calendric texts and ritual songs not only explains the workings of northern Zapotec pre-Hispanic and early colonial timekeeping, it reveals the multifaceted intellectual traditions of colonial indigenous ritual specialists. They fostered intense communal efforts to maintain sacred beliefs and local practices, sometimes leading to dissent within communities and suppressive efforts from Catholic officials. Nonetheless, the Zapotec sacred survived—transformed in some ways—until today, a story Tavárez brilliantly details.

 

— Susan Kellogg, University of Houston, co-editor of Género y Arqueología en Mesoamérica: Homenaje a Rosemary A. Joyce

This is a superb study of both the Indigenous secret republics of letters and their Indigenous rivals. It is also a brilliant analysis of Zapotec divinatory colonial practices.

— Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin, author of How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World