EthnoCODICES · Oracles of the Other World: Using Ethnography to Study Depictions of Human Remains in Mexican Precolonial Codices
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-09-01 → 2020-08-31
- EU contribution
- €146,462
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Oracles of the Other World: Using Ethnography to Study Depictions of Human Remains in Mexican Precolonial Codices
This project investigated the depictions of human remains on Mexican precolonial codices, in particular on Codex Laud, one of the pictorial manuscripts of the so-called Borgia Group. My aim was to explore a different reading of these images in relation to the oracular character of these books that were used by daykeepers and diviners as manuals in prognostications and ritual prescriptions. After a codicological analysis made on the original Codex Laud, housed in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK, it was revealed that this 500 year old manuscript was thoroughly planned in its manufacture and graphic contents. Moreover, the identification of different moments of color application helped to identify better its division of chapters in combination with unique cycles of the 260-day calendar which were arranged in particular layouts and arrangement of signs. In my analysis of the graphic contents of Codex Laud, still in progress, I make use of ethnographic data and insightful theories related to metaphors and metonyms. I suggest that the scenes of skulls, hearts, limbs, eyeballs, and other human remains in the codex refer to the “Other World”, the world of the dead, and its oracular capacities. The support of this idea comes mainly from the ethnographic data that I gathered from indigenous communities of the South of Mexico in which the worldview of death, festivities of the Days of the Dead and the ways of communication with ancestors is very active and strong. Here, the Other World is a partly-natural, non-human and oneiric world, inhabited by ancestors, divinities and other beings, to which people and calendar-diviner experts recur and mutually communicate. In that sense, the divinatory codices were a sort of oracular portal to access it, to find answers to difficult and anxious moments in life, such as diseases, dreams, bad fortune, and warnings of danger, as well as receiving solutions to revert or diminish adversity. I think Codex Laud worked as a concise and abbreviated manual of signs which concretely gave information on the prognostications and prescriptions of unique divisions of the 260-day calendar in close relation to the life on This and the Other Worlds. This view contrasts with other narratives that are often read from historical colonial sources which tend to connect literally the descriptions of bloodshed precolonial rites with scenes of dismembered bodies and human sacrifices of codices. This research offers other factual interpretative options for such images.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This project investigates the depictions of human remains on Mexican precolonial codices, especially those of the so-called Borgia Group, which were used by daykeepers and diviners as manuals in prognostications and ritual prescriptions. My aim is to explore a different reading of these images in relation to the oracular character of these books, with special focus on Codex Laud due to its intriguingly abundant depictions of human limbs, hearts, skulls, skeletons and deities of death. To achieve this, I will carry out a two-step methodological approach. First, I will develop an ethno-iconological research base, which entails conducting ethnography; in this case, in an indigenous Mixe community, in the south of Mexico. I will document the various forms of social and spiritual relationships between the living and the dead, paying special interest to the role of ancestors in divinatory sessions and the discourses held during rituals, such as those held during the Days of the Dead ceremonies. Secondly, with this new empirical data, I will analyze the images of human remains depicted on codices by applying the methods recently developed by Dr. Katarzyna Mikulska at the Institute of Iberian and Ibero-American Studies, in the University of Warsaw. Her novel approach combines the ethnographic data with a cognitive and semiotic perspective, and a profound examination of metaphor construction. With all of this in mind, my specific aim is to answer the following inquiry: are there other factual resources for interpreting the meaning of human remains as a means of metaphoric communication pertaining to the cult and world of ancestors rather than the literal reading of dismembered human bodies? Answering this question will enable me to deepen the understanding of the visual culture around mortality and ancestorhood in ancient Mexico, which is frequently loaded with connotations of violence and emphasis of human sacrifices as described in Spanish colonial chronicles.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIWERSYTET WARSZAWSKI · WarszawaCoordinatorPoland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union