La conversión de los indios de Nueva España : con el texto de los Coloquios de los Doce de Bernardino de Sahagún (1564)

by Christian Duverger, Jos' Luis Cuevas

Christian Duverger aclara por qué en la Nueva España el cristianismo pudo ser introducido con éxito y relativa los primeros religiosos franciscanos, compenetrados por la cultura y la sensibilidad indígenas, sustituyeron ritos y prácticas sólo mediante un sincretismo evidente que hizo posible un cristianismo popular no siempre ortodoxo.

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Christian Duverger nació en 1948 en Burdeos, Francia. Tiene un doctorado de la Universidad de París (Sorbona). Es profesor de la cátedra de antropología de Mesoamérica en la Escuela de Estudios Superiores en Ciencias Sociales. Se ha dedicado al estudio de las culturas precolombinas y ha realizado trabajos, en México y en América Central, en el ámbito de la arqueología y la antropología.

Fue consejero cultural de la embajada de Francia en México. Durante su estancia en ese país fue colaborador del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia y profesor de la Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia y Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. También ha sido profesor en la Universidad de Guadalajara, Jalisco, México.

Actualmente es director del Centre de Recherches sur l’Amérique Préhispanique (CERAP) que es un centro de investigaciones que usa recursos e investigadores de dos prestigiosas Universidades francesas: la École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) y la Universidad de París - Sorbonne (Paris IV). El Dr. Christian Duverger actualmente realiza investigaciones con el CERAP en el sitio arqueológico de Monte Albán en el estado de Oaxaca.

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be truthful, I read the translation into Spanish. Duverger's book is concerned with the Franciscan experiment in Mexico, as the order carried its mission to the conquered aboriginal peoples of New Spain while trying to maintain the standards of its founder. It was a time of great intellectual discovery: most of what we know about the Indians' languages and cultures we owe to the work of the Franciscans. They were themselves pulled in opposite intellectual directions, repelled by the gods and human sacrifice but convinced that they needed to understand those whom they sought to convert. Bernardino de Sahagun, the greatest of them, devoted much of his life to Indian education and copying Indian traditions--although his book was not printed in his lifetime--and believed that tepidemics were growing worse because of the loss of Indian medical knowledge. Yet even he could see the Indian culture as diabolic. (He was no friend to the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe either, as Duverger demonstrates). It was a Franciscan, the first Archbishop, whose excesses in prosecuting idolators led to prohibiting the Inquisition from examining Indians. The fervor of the Franciscans could not be sustained; over time, they came to share the mission with Augustinians and Dominicans and lost their long quarrel with the secular clergy. Faced by large numbers of people to be Christianized, they championed mass conversions, which were later judged to be ineffective. They were unsuccessful in efforts to educate Indians to become priests, and they were ineffective, as were others, even at time the Crown, in curbing the excesses of the Spanish landowners. The most ambitious, and over the long run, most effective of the missionary efforts was by Vasco de Quiroga, who modeled Michoacan after More's Utopia (the Indians of the area are still famed for the crafts he encouraged them to take up), but that falls outside a study of Franciscans. The Mexican edition of this book includes the "Colloquies", a debate between the defeated Indian nobles and the Franciscans that took place shortly after the Conquest. Not all of it survives, but the list of chapters of what the Franciscans tried to teach the Indians reveals much about the Spanish cosmology of the time: full of angels, including fallen ones, and devils. But what is most striking is the response of the Indians; the heartbreak of the Conquest and the loss of everything they had and believed can still be detected through the courteous debate with people who were, after all, representatives of the victorious Deity:"You have said that we do not know the Lord of the sky and earth who gave us life. You say that those who we worship are not gods. This manner of speaking is new and disturbing to us. We are frightened by such talk because our father ancestors who gave us life and ruled over us did not tell us such a thing; in the past, they gave us this custom that we have of worshiping our gods and they believed in those gods and worshipped them all the time that they lived on earth; they taught us the way that we should honor the gods; and all the ceremonies and sacrifices were taught to us by them; they told us that this is how we live and that the gods deserve that we are theirs and that we serve them and that is the way it has been since the innumerable centuries before the sun began to shine and there was day; they told us that these gods who we worship gave us everything necessary to the life of our bodies: corn, beans, chia, and so on...."

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

C’est un livre fascinant. C’est vraiment dommage que la méthode de conversion religieuse mise en place par les premiers 12 moins franciscains n’a pas été suivie toute au long del « virreinato » et par le clergé d’aujourd’hui car le Mexique serait un autre pays.