Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History

This volume offers an illuminating overview of the work of a pioneering and highly distinguished scholar of early Latin American social and cultural history and philology. Known for the originality of his approach and the variety of his research interests, James Lockhart has gone from studying social history using career pattern methods to an ethnohistory emphasizing indigenous-language philology, all the while stressing general interpretation, synthesis, historiography, and the development of analytical concepts and categories. The present volume illustrates all these interests and activities within the covers of a single book; the reader can see not only common threads running through the individual essays, but also the close relationships between types of scholarship all too often seen as utterly distinct. The old and new of the subtitle is meant literally; the first piece was written in 1968, the last in 1998. Some are already well known, while others have appeared in quite obscure venues. Four of the twelve chapters are published here for the first time. They elucidate the reading of texts for social and cultural purposes, expound on aspects of Nahuatl historical linguistics, discuss the problematic nature of the concept of resistance in Western Hemisphere culture encounters, and review the author s experience with the scholarly disciplines, which involves a certain amount of intellectual autobiography.