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"Before the Spanish conquest and well into the eighteenth century, Mesoamerican peoples believed that "time" and "space" were contained in earthly and heavenly receptacles that were visualized metaphorically. This circumscribed space contained the abodesof the dead. There, deities and ancestral spirits could be revived and the living could communicate with them. In Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica, Amos Megged uncovers the missing links in Mesoamerican peoples' quest for their collective past. Analyzing ancient repositories of knowledge, as well as social and religious practices, he uncovers the unique procedures and formulas by which social memory was communicated and how it operated in Mesoamerica prior to the Spanish conquest. He also explores how cherished and revived practices evolved, how they were adapted to changing circumstances, and how they helped various ethnic groups cope with the tribulations of colonization and Christianization. Megged's volume also suggests how social and cultural historians, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists can rethink indigenous representations of the past while taking into account the deep transformations in Mexican society during the colonial era."--BOOK JACKET.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Primers of Mesoamerican social memory; 2. The sources and their applications; 3. Binding and transcendence; 4. In search of harmoniousness; 5. Dispersal and fragmentation; 6. Rites and times of foundations; 7. A new cult, a new temple; Epilogue: a Popolocan memory tale.
About the author
Amos Megged is Associate Professor in the Department of General History at the University of Haifa. An ethnohistorian of colonial Mexico, he is the author of Exporting the Catholic Reformation: Local Religion in Early Colonial Mexico and editor, with Stephanie Wood, of Comparative Studies in Mesoamerican Systems of Remembrance.
