{"title":"“You Here, Don’t Do It This Way”: Allegory and Domestic Dwellings in Bernardino de Sahagún’s Nahuatl Sermons of the House","authors":"B. Alcântara, Pedro A. Muñoz","doi":"10.1215/00141801-10999129","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Bernardino de Sahagún is well known for having headed a major research project about the Nahuas of Central Mexico in the sixteenth century. However, many years before this project began, Sahagún wrote several sets of sermons in the Nahuatl language. This article analyzes eleven of these sermons, composed during the 1540s by this zealous Franciscan, possibly with the help of Nahua students and graduates of the Colegio de Tlatelolco. These sermons develop one shared allegory, “the House of the Soul,” by comparing the building elements of an ideal dwelling with doctrinal and moral topics and by contrasting the ways the Nahuas live their lives and build their homes to the ways the Spaniards do. In the approach adopted in this article, the rhetorical and doctrinal features of these sermons are examined, and the information they contain about Nahua households compared with other sources of the period is highlighted.","PeriodicalId":51776,"journal":{"name":"Ethnohistory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Ethnohistory","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-10999129","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Bernardino de Sahagún is well known for having headed a major research project about the Nahuas of Central Mexico in the sixteenth century. However, many years before this project began, Sahagún wrote several sets of sermons in the Nahuatl language. This article analyzes eleven of these sermons, composed during the 1540s by this zealous Franciscan, possibly with the help of Nahua students and graduates of the Colegio de Tlatelolco. These sermons develop one shared allegory, “the House of the Soul,” by comparing the building elements of an ideal dwelling with doctrinal and moral topics and by contrasting the ways the Nahuas live their lives and build their homes to the ways the Spaniards do. In the approach adopted in this article, the rhetorical and doctrinal features of these sermons are examined, and the information they contain about Nahua households compared with other sources of the period is highlighted.
期刊介绍:
Ethnohistory reflects the wide range of current scholarship inspired by anthropological and historical approaches to the human condition. Of particular interest are those analyses and interpretations that seek to make evident the experience, organization, and identities of indigenous, diasporic, and minority peoples that otherwise elude the histories and anthropologies of nations, states, and colonial empires. The journal publishes work from the disciplines of geography, literature, sociology, and archaeology, as well as anthropology and history. It welcomes theoretical and cross-cultural discussion of ethnohistorical materials and recognizes the wide range of academic disciplines.