Sahagun and the Transition to Modernity (review)

Sahagún and the Transition to Modernity. By Walden Browne. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. xii + 260 pp., foreword, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth.)

Boiled down to its reducible minimum, Browne's thesis is that Sahagún was not the father of modern ethnography. Although on the surface his methodology has similarities with modern ethnographers and anthropologists in general, it was a similarity that did not go much beyond the surface. Browne argues convincingly that Sahagún was very much a man of his epoch and that he was much more a medieval scholar than an early modern one. For Browne, Sahagún provides an example of "how medieval ways of knowing in general gave way to the modes of thought associated with modernity" (8). Browne posits that the medieval worldview with regard to knowledge was that it is preexisting and a complete whole, divinely ordained. Medieval scholars, then, sought to reveal the fullness of this knowledge and to prevent it from being eroded through loss of the memory of it. For the scholar of the modern era, knowledge is nearly infinite and dependent upon the observer.

This work is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the construction of the persona of Sahagún by those who followed him. The second part takes a closer look at Sahagún's own worlds, intellectual and physical, and his response to them. In the first part Browne traces the construction of Sahagún as a model for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of a scholar who conforms more to modern ways of thinking than to medieval. As is well known, Sahagún only published one work in his lifetime, the Psalmodia christiana. In many ways he was largely unknown to all but a few until his rediscovery in the nineteenth century, precisely at a time when Mexicans were searching their history for those characteristics that made them unique among other nations. Moreover, scholars in Mexico, especially anthropologists, sought to legitimize their own standing. Sahagún as a "father" of modern anthropology provided them with a wonderful image upon which to build. Browne pulls no punches when he regards this image of Sahagún as either an irresponsible anachronism or a hollow statement that says nothing substantial about Sahagún's method.

In the second part, Browne undertakes a detailed analysis both of Sahagún's method and of the ways of thinking that guided him. Important in this part of the book is a look at Sahagún's relationship to other Franciscan writers, especially Motolinia. While Motolinia held that the conversion had been a remarkable success, Sahagún did not perceive it that way. At the same time he was hard-pressed to rationalize the different explanations for the failure of the conversion. Principal among them were questions of whether the Franciscans had failed, the natives had failed to learn, or for some reason the natives were incapable or unwilling to learn. Browne then analyzes the problems of mimesis and exemplarity in Sahagún. These concepts reach deeply into the native response to the Europeans and into Sahagún's response to the conversion. The tension arose when natives were counseled to imitate the Spaniards, yet in so doing either fell short of the mark or merely manifested those differences that made them unique. Similarly, Sahagún sought examples among the Nahua and their culture to use as teaching points in his complex devotional opus. Yet in order to do that he had to destroy the native culture and then reconstruct it according to European models, thus extracting the valuable moral examples. Lastly, Sahagún was caught between the medieval notion of a complete corpus of divinely established knowledge, which needed to be revealed and passed on, and the realization that the natives of the New World did not conform clearly to any known patterns. In the end, he was forced to compile his information, organize, reorganize, and revise many times...