LITMIR.BIZ

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by Spaniards, mestizos, and Indians that reduce pictography to limited form of documenting information and specify that only alphabetical writing can be historical. As Mignolo has argued, the reproduction of phonetic sound has defined the criteria for tracing the evolution of forms of inscriptions from pictography to alphabetical writing; only alphabetical writing constitutes true writing (Mignolo, 1989, 1995). On a second level, alphabetical writing exerts violence by means of glosses that are written on the margin of precolonial and colonial pictographic texts. Beyond the dismissals of pictographic writing by historians, one finds that colonial authorities most often recognize the knowledge inscribed using pictographs. We find the use of pictographic documents in Indian and Spanish courts throughout the colonial order. If on an ideological level alphabetical writing represents a more evolved stage for some indigenous and Spanish members of the colonial elite, in the courts pictography often carried more weight. As Barbara Mundy has shown, we can observe the force of pictography in land-grant or mercedes maps drawn by native painters who were commissioned to establish the boundaries of wastelands that could be claimed and appropriated by people not associated with the indigenous communities (Mundy, 1996: 181—211; also see Gruzinski, 1993). There is a rhetorical weight to pictography that, in this instance, authenticates the legality of land claims. Disputes between indigenous communities would also be settled by means of pictographic documents. I have also argued that the production of the Codex Mendoza (Berdan and Anawalt, 1992) in the years corresponding to the implementation of the New Laws of 1542 makes the documentation of precolonial tributary patterns all too appropriate for legitimizing the encomienda as a system that continues precolonial patterns of tributaries (Rabasa, 1996).

In the Codex Mendoza and the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (Quiñones Keber, 1995), the Spanish religious and secular authorities ordered the production of these pictographic texts with the intent of not just creating a record of information regarding indigenous social patterns, religious beliefs, and history, but also to document systems of writing. There are ample alphabetical documents in Spanish and in indigenous languages that record detailed information about Indian life – we have spoken of Sahagún’s projects — a fact that should make suspect the production of pictographic texts if it were only for the purpose of recording information. The Spaniards charged with supervising these projects knew well that pictography contained information that alphabetical writing could not record. This makes the relationship between pictography and alphabetical writing more complex. We may mention, in passing, that khipus in the Andean region were used throughout the colonial period, and continue to be used even today in indigenous communities. This leads to another modality of writing violence that is implemented not by the denial of the pictography as a form of writing, but by the glosses that were written in codices like the Mendoza and Telleriano-Remensis in spaces the tlacuilos left blank for this purpose. The glosses were often written by different hands that included Spaniards and indigenous as well as mestizo scribes. In the case of the Telleriano-Remensis one can actually draw a difference between those glosses written by native scribes with a handwriting that approximated the typography of print and those written by missionaries in which scribbles and scratches destroy the aesthetic if not the epistemological integrity of the pictorial text.

Let me briefly call attention to fol. 46r of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (Plate 2.1) that offers a complex and troubling view of the colonial order. My contention is that supervising missionaries faced a disconcerting representation of their institutions and evangelical practices that led the missionaries to take over the production of the manuscript. In soliciting the tlacuilos to “tell the story of how they were conquered,” the missionaries found themselves in the position of being observed by the observed. This page poses a dramatic instance of the observer-observed in that the tlacuilo managed to represent a most vulnerable aspect of the Christian theological edifice, one that perhaps was commonly accepted as a long tradition of debate between the different orders and philosophical traditions but that brought about a crisis when articulated by an Indian painter. The depiction of a Dominican friar imparting baptism on a willing Indian leaning over the baptismal font makes manifest the centrality of the proper indoctrination of Indians before baptism favored by the Dominican order and in particular by Bartolomé de Las Casas. We have already spoken of the preference of the Dominicans for an evangelical practice that emphasized the understanding and the formation of an intellectual habitus in the process of exposing Indians to Christian truths. Now, observe that on the right-hand section of this folio we find a Franciscan holding a doctrine, perhaps a confessional manual, that would have laid down the articles of the faith that Indians were required to accept as true simply on the grounds that they were informed that these tenets of the church were true because they were revealed by God. The Franciscans preferred multitudinal baptisms that would then be followed by the implantation of the doctrine and confession. In practice, once baptized one had the obligation to accept the Christian dogma. So, the whole process of conversion comes down to the practice of leading neophytes to will and desire to live according to the Catholic dogma.

      Plate 2.1 Codex Telleriano-Remensis, fol. 46r (Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France)

      Earlier on we read passages from Sahagún that illustrated this position among Franciscans. Declarative sentences call for a willing Indian subject. Confessional manuals were thus designed to lead the subject through the Ten Commandments, the theological and cardinal virtues, and, once examined, the subject would express repentance and contrition. The tlacuilo lucidly depicts these two attitudes that, on a deeper philosophical level, imply incompatible philosophical traditions. Universality on these grounds is a desired end rather than an established fact. It is a horizon in which the different traditions debate but also know that it is futile to pursue an agreement when the backgrounds, that is, the absolute presupposition from which and against which philosophical doctrines makes sense of the world, are radically heterogeneous. They presuppose different understandings of the self and culture that lead to different ethnographic practices. Elsewhere, I have discussed these differences in more detail (Rabasa, 1998). The tlacuilo of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis manifests a particularly critical acumen in depicting the dominant evangelicals and their philosophical traditions from and against a background that remains unintelligible to missionaries.

      Epilogue: Ignorantiam Invincibilem

In the introduction to this chapter I mentioned that in the sixteenth century one finds most lucid critiques of empire among Spanish, mestizo, and Indian intellectuals. The tlacuilo of Telleriano-Remensis made manifest with exceptional acuity the limits of empire when he responded to the request, “tell me the story of how I conquered you” by providing a “snapshot” of the observer. This snapshot reminded the missionary that he had been observed all along in ways that eluded and continued to elude his gaze. The tlacuilo exposed a blind spot that further deepened the crisis missionaries faced when they realized that the truths of Indian life would remain inaccessible regardless of how willing informants might be to convey the secrets of their cultures: the missionary would have to assume the background from which and against which an indigenous subject would not only make sense of their own world but of that of the missionaries. This dwelling in multiple worlds would entail a perspectival distance that underscored the truth that Indian worlds were articulated in their specific languages and backgrounds. Minimally, this crossing over would force the missionary to reflect in and on Nahautl terms. Is this what the project of the nahuatlization of Christianity entailed? Only by learning to debate and feel the world would the evangelical mission of converting Indians by appealing to the understanding or by working on the transformation of affect ever begin to leave a mark. If willing to entertain the necessity of a two-way street, the missionaries would have come to the realization that their understanding and affect also would be transformed in the process.

In closing I would like to briefly mention Alonso de la Vera Cruz’s treatise on just war and dominion, Relection de dominio infidelium & justo bello (A discussion on the dominion of unbelievers and just war) — a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Mexico in the academic year of 1553—4.³

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