David Carrasco - Böcker

This unique reference source is the definitive guide to the civilizations of ancient Mexico and Central America. Exploring 700 years of history - before, during, and after the European conquest - the Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures is a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible introduction to an extraordinary cultural legacy. With 500 original articles by leading experts from many fields, the Encyclopedia synthesizes a wealth of knowledge about the archeology, history, language, literature, religion, and social life of Aztec, Olmec, Maya and other cultures. The articles incorporate the recent explosion of new scholarship, from new archaeological finds to new translations of classic texts. The scope of the Encyclopedia is wide; from the earliest settlements to the tenacious legacy of pre-Conquest culture in the colonial and postcolonial life of Mesoamerica. Featuring a rich selection of maps, line drawings and photographs, and a carefully designed network of cross-references, blind entries, extensive bibliographies and an index, this unique resource serves students, and scholars, specialists and nonspecialists alike with unrivaled effectiveness.

This Very Short Introduction employs the disciplines of history, religious studies, and anthropology as it illuminates the complexities of Aztec life. Readers meet a people highly skilled in sculpture, astronomy, city planning, poetry, and philosophy, who were also profoundly committed to cosmic regeneration through the thrust of the ceremonial knife and through warfare. Davíd Carrasco looks beyond Spanish accounts that have colored much of the Western narrative to let Aztec voices speak about their origin stories, the cosmic significance of their capital city, their methods of child rearing, and the contributions women made to daily life and the empire. Carrasco discusses the arrival of the Spaniards, contrasts Aztec mythical traditions about the origins of their city with actual urban life in Mesoamerica, and outlines the rise of the Aztec empire. He also explores Aztec religion, which provided both justification for and alternatives to warfare, sacrifice, and imperialism, and he sheds light on Aztec poetry, philosophy, painting, and especially monumental sculpture and architecture. He concludes by looking at how the Aztecs have been portrayed in Western thought, art, film, and literature as well as in Latino culture and arts. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Examine the fascinating details of the daily lives of the ancient Aztecs through this innovative study of their social history, culture, and continuing influence, written from the perspective of the history of religions.Utilizing insights from the discipline known as the history of religions, as well as new discoveries in archaeology, pictorial manuscripts, and ritual practices, Daily Life of the Aztecs, Second Edition weaves together a narrative describing life from the bottom of the Aztec social pyramid to its top. This new and surprising interpretation of the Aztecs puts a human face on an ancient people who created beautiful art and architecture, wrote beautiful poetry, and loved their children profoundly, while also making war and human sacrifice fundamental parts of their world.The book describes the interaction between the material and the imaginative worlds of the Aztecs, offering insights into their communities, games, education, foodways, and arts, as well as the sacrificial rituals they performed. The authors also detail the evolution of the Aztec state and explores the continuity and changes in Aztec symbols, myths, and ritual practices into the present day.

A master class from four renowned Harvard professors—a physician, a theologian, an anthropologist, and a historian—on living wisely and well in uncertain times.The Practice of Wisdom is a sweeping exploration of the pursuit of beauty, goodness, and meaning amid uncertainty and change. Written by distinguished Harvard professors Davíd Carrasco, Arthur Kleinman, Stephanie Paulsell, and Michael Puett, and based on the authors’ acclaimed Harvard course, this resonant volume encourages us to understand wisdom not as a destination but as a way of being in the world.Spanning eras and cultures, The Practice of Wisdom encounters the vastness of the human drama, as diverse characters meet illness, upheaval, and moral trial through acts of imagination, faith, courage, and reflection. The authors draw from rabbinic tales and Confucian rituals; Christian art and Islamic pilgrimage; Aztec philosophy; Hindu temple architecture; Latin jazz; African dance; modern works of poetry, painting, and film; and their own deeply personal stories, revealing how the practice of wisdom joins body and mind, individual and community.At the heart of the quest for wisdom lies the image of the labyrinth, evoking both difficulty and grace: the turns through caregiving and bereavement; solitude and ritual; the eradication of self; and moments of revelation, spiritual and otherwise. The Practice of Wisdom concludes with a conversation with Wendy Doniger, the renowned scholar of Hinduism, whose reflections illuminate an enduring and ever-unfinished art of seeking.

What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time.Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity.Morrison’s essay is followed by a Series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, Language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the Contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.

This biography of Mexico's award-winning archaeologist, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, is based on a series of interviews conducted by David Carrasco and Leonardo Lopez Lujan, respected Mesoamericanists in their own right. Born in 1940 Mexico City, Matos Moctezuma's father was a diplomat from the Dominican Republic and his mother was a Mexican national. Thanks to his father's career, Eduardo was exposed to other cultures throughout Latin America and he learned to appreciate all that each had to offer. Carrasco and Lopez Lujan demonstrate Eduardo's determination to recover Mexico's cultural past. In addition to secondary archaeological projects, he recently supervised the Teotihuacan Project, where he conducted important excavations at the Pyramid of the Sun, and he is currently general coordinator of the Templo Mayor Project. He served as director of the Templo Mayor Museum (1987-2001) and the National Museum of Anthropology (1985-1987). Matos Moctezuma has received many awards during his career, including the first H. B. Nicholson Award for Excellence in Mesoamerican Studies from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

The life of celebrated Mexican archaeologist Moctezuma tells of a man rising to the challenges of life and a man who has eloquently spoken to the the importance of understanding the roots of civilization. This biography of Mexico's award-winning archaeologist, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, is based on a series of interviews conducted by Davíd Carrasco and Leonardo López Luján, respected Mesoamericanists in their own right. Born in 1940 Mexico City, Matos Moctezuma's father was a diplomat from the Dominican Republic and his mother was a Mexican national. Thanks to his father's career, Eduardo was exposed to other cultures throughout Latin America and he learned to appreciate all that each had to offer. Carrasco and López Luján demonstrate Eduardo's determination to recover Mexico's cultural past. In addition to secondary archaeological projects, he recently supervised the Teotihuacan Project, where he conducted important excavations at the Pyramid of the Sun, and he is currently general coordinator of the Templo Mayor Project. He served as director of the Templo Mayor Museum (1987-2001) and the National Museum of Anthropology (1985-1987). Matos Moctezuma has received many awards during his career, including the first H. B. Nicholson Award for Excellence in Mesoamerican Studies from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest is the culmination of an international research project and series of conferences, organized by the Moses Mesoamerican Archive, focused on the sixteenth-century pictorial manuscript known as the ""Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2"". Painted on bark paper and measuring 109 X 204 centimeters, this extraordinary document contains over seven hundred images and symbols relating the story of the emergence of ancestors at Chicomoztoc (Place of Seven Caves), their migration to the sacred city of Cholula, their foundation and settlement of Cuauhtinchan (Place of the Eagle's Nest), their community's history and claim over the surrounding landscape, and many other occurrences along the way. Dating from around the 1540s, barely two decades after the fall of the Aztecs, the mapa recently underwent extensive physical analysis, conservation, and a systematic photographic survey. These rare images - including sixteen full-size sections and a nearly quarter-size facsimile - accompany fifteen richly illustrated essays that explore the meanings and uses of the document, its complex narrative, and the social and ritual memory of an indigenous community struggling to hold its own in the turbulent atmosphere of early colonial Mexico.

The History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a new abridgement of Diaz del Castillo's classic ""Historia verdadera de la conquista de Nueva Espana"", offers a unique contribution to our understanding of the political and religious forces that drove the great cultural encounter between Spain and the Americas known as the 'conquest of Mexico.' Besides containing important passages, scenes, and events excluded from other abridgements, this edition includes eight useful interpretive essays that address indigenous religions and cultural practices, sexuality during the early colonial period, the roles of women in indigenous cultures, and analysis of the political and economic purposes behind Diaz del Castillo's narrative.A series of maps illuminate the routes of the conquistadors, the organization of indigenous settlements, the struggle for the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, as well as the disastrous Spanish journey to Honduras. The information compiled for this volume offers increased accessibility to the original text, places it in a wider social and narrative context, and encourages further learning, research, and understanding.

Exploring the Yoruba tradition in the United States, Hucks begins with the story of Nana Oseijeman Adefunmi's personal search for identity and meaning as a young man in Detroit in the 1930s and 1940s. She traces his development as an artist, religious leader, and founder of several African-influenced religio-cultural projects in Harlem and later in the South. Adefunmi was part of a generation of young migrants attracted to the bohemian lifestyle of New York City and the black nationalist fervor of Harlem. Cofounding Shango Temple in 1959, Yoruba Temple in 1960, and Oyotunji African Village in 1970, Adefunmi and other African Americans in that period renamed themselves ""Yorubas"""" and engaged in the task of transforming Cuban Santería into a new religious expression that satisfied their racial and nationalist leanings and eventually helped to place African Americans on a global religious schema alongside other Yoruba practitioners in Africa and the diaspora.Alongside the story of Adefunmi, Hucks weaves historical and sociological analyses of the relationship between black cultural nationalism and reinterpretations of the meaning of Africa from within the African American community.Part of the Religions of the Americas Series

Charles H. Long's groundbreaking works on Africana religious studies serve as the backdrop to With This Root about My Person. The volume features twenty-six essays by a diverse group of students and scholars of Long. Revitalizing an interpretive framework rooted in the Chicago tradition, the essays in this volume vigorously debate the nature of religions in the Americas. In doing so they wrestle with the foundations of the study of religion that emerged out of the European Enlightenment, they engage the discipline's entrenchment in the conquest of the Americas, and they grapple with the field's legacy of colonialism. The book demonstrates tremendous breadth and depth of scope in its skillful comparative work on colonialism, which links the religions of the Americas, Melanesia, and Africa. This seminal work is an important addition to the Religions of the Americas Series and a valuable contribution to the field to which Charles H. Long has for so long been devoted.

First published in 1991, Waiting for the Dawn is the result of a year-long interdisciplinary study of Mircea Eliade’s scholarly, literary, and autobiographical works which took place at the University of Colorado in 1982. With a preface by Davíd Carrasco that takes into account recent developments in Eliade scholarship, this important work is back in print after renewed interest in Eliade thanks to Francis Ford Coppola’s screen adaptation Youth without Youth (2007).

A result of four years of cooperative research between the University of Colorado and the Templo Mayor Project of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, Aztec Ceremonial Landscapes (formerly available as To Change Place) offers new interpretive models from the fields of archaeoastronomy, history of religion, anthropology, art history, and archaeology. Included are contributions by such noted experts as Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Davíd Carrasco, Alfredo López Austin, Doris Heyden, Richard F. Townsend, Anthony Aveni, Henry B. Nicholson, Elizabeth Boone, Felipe Solis, and Johanna Broda, with a new introduction by William Fash.

"Like J. Eric Thompson, Carrasco has applied an informed imagination to identify some of the ways that ideas could lie behind material form."- American Anthropologist"A must for both professional and serious non-professional students in Mesoamerica. Those who are interested in complex society and urbanism in general, as well as students of comparative religion, will find it stimulating. Most importantly, for anyone interested in the history of ideas, the book illuminates the tremendously powerful impact and role of a complex deity/mythico-historical figure in shaping one of the world's great pristine civilizations."- Queen's Quarterly

For more than a millennium the great Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan (c. 150 B.C.E. - 750 C.E.) has been imagined and reimagined by a host of subsequent cultures, including our own. Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage engages the subject of the unity and diversity of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica by focusing on the classic heritage of this ancient city. This new volume is the product of several years of research by members of Princeton University's Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project and Mexico's Proyecto Teotihuacán. Offering a variety of disciplinary perspectives - including the history of religions, anthropology, archaeology, and art history - and a wealth of new data, Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage examines Teotihuacan's rippling influence across Mesoamerican time and space, including important patterns of continuity and change, and its relationships, both historical and symbolic, with Tenochtitlan, Cholula, and various Maya communities.The contributors to Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage offer a wide range of individual interpretations, but they agree that Teotihuacan, more than any other pre-Hispanic center, was a paradigmatic source that formed the art and architecture, cosmology and ritual life, and conceptions of urbanism and political authority for significant parts of the Mesoamerican world. This great city achieved the prestige of being the site of the creation of the cosmos and of effective social and political space in Mesoamerica through its capacity to symbolize, perform, and export its imperial authority. These essays reveal the different ways in which Teotihuacan's classic heritage both fed and fed on the dynamic interactivity of the entire area. Whether or not a paradigm shift in Mesoamerican studies is taking place, certainly a new contextual understanding of Teotihuacan and the diversities and unities of Mesoamerica is emerging in these pages.

Updated with a new chapter by David Carrasco describing how the Aztec world has been re-imagined by modern Mexican American communities and Chicano scholars, 'Moctezuma's Mexico' is a lavishly illustrated volume that provides an in-depth historical profile of the Aztec empire on the eve of its fateful encounter with the Europeans. Beginning with an exploration of Aztec history and cosmovision, the authors and two other prominent scholars-Anthony Aveni and Elizabeth Hill Boone-examine Aztec ceremonies, astronomy, myths, rhetoric, and moral philosophy, as well as controversies in recent Aztec scholarship using poetry, sculpture, painting, and the archaeological record. With nearly 150 full-colour illustrations, 'Moctezuma's Mexico' is an important and handsome book that will appeal to scholars and students of Mexico's indigenous past.