Synopsis-- James Lockhart, Of Things of the Indies

The twelve essays in this volume date from 1969 to 1999, and highlight the progression of seminal historian James Lockhart’s work from Social History to New Philology.

Several of the essays date to Lockhart’s early career, such as “Encomienda and Hacienda” and “The Social History of Early Latin America,” the latter of which Lockhart wrote in 1972 to use in teaching graduate level historiography of the conquest. Other chapters are distillations of material from Lockhart’s books. Chapters 9-12 are published here for the first time, offering fresh insights into Lockhart’s theory and methodology, which is interdisciplinary in nature but owes much to history and linguistics.

Throughout the volume, Lockhart emphasizes the importance of convergence of Spanish and indigenous ideas and cultures. Where there was the greatest convergence between cultures, people proved the most receptive to acculturation. Lockhart writes, “In all of these matters, the basic determinants are the fit of European and indigenous culture and the contact between the two populations” (331). Lockhart makes the point that reception was not entirely one-sided; indigenous culture lent Latin American culture much of its distinctive flavor.

The essay on “Double Mistaken Identity” illustrates the way that convergence and accommodation worked. Because of the congruence between Mesoamerican and Iberian cultural forms, each group found much that seemed familiar in the other. Lockhart explains, “At the heart of the interaction was a process I call Double Mistaken Identity, in which each side of the cultural exchange presumes that a given form or concept is functioning in the way familiar within its own tradition and is unaware of or unimpressed by the other side’s interpretation” (99). For example, Lockhart considers the role of witnesses to official documents. Spanish practice dictated that three men witness a document’s authenticity. The Nahuas readily adopted the Spanish juridical form, but retained their own meaning. They preferred multiple witnesses of both genders who “not only attested to … formal legality … but actually assented to the justice of the proceeding” (109), infusing the custom with Nahua ideas about law.

Much of the book deals with Lockhart’s intense study of Nahua linguistics. He discusses three stages of Nahua language and cultural acquisition, which he discerned from patterns in Nahuatl documents. Stage 1, from Contact to c. 1540, is characterized by little cultural change; Stage 2, c. 1540 to 1650, involves the massive loan of nouns to Nahuatl from Spanish; and Stage 3 finally witnesses large-scale bilingualism (209). Cultural developments seem to parallel those of language, and the sequence occurs, with some variation, across regions.

It is crucial to understand that, in all of this, Lockhart sees both indigenous and Spanish actors responding rationally and pragmatically to the situations they confronted. For example, sedentary versus migratory peoples logically reacted differently to the Spanish presence because it affected them differently. There was much more convergence between sedentary indigenous groups and the Spanish, and their way of life would not change abruptly under Spanish rule. Migratory groups, however, organized their society very differently and were able to launch surprise attacks on the Spanish precisely because they were not tied to a single place. Likewise, the Spanish chose to establish a presence among sedentary peoples who lived in proximity to rich mineral deposits. The second most powerful group in a region tended to ally with the Spanish (like the Tlaxcalans against Tenochtitlán), because that was the best strategy for maintaining their independence. As Lockhart explains, “most groups and most members of those groups were simply thinking of the greatest good and largest quotient of independence they could attain within the situation as they had always known it, not of resistance to an outsider” (308).