Sahagun and the Transition to Modernity (review)

Sahagún and the Transition to Modernity. By WALDEN BROWNE. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 260 pp. Cloth, $34.95.

There is much that is good in this book. The author's stated intent is "to estrange the reader from Sahagún" (p. 7), replacing the familiar image of Bernardino Sahagún (ca. 1499-1590) as a kind of early modern ethnographer of indigenous central Mexico with a more historicized image of a late medieval Spanish friar obsessively groping his way towards a very limited understanding of a strange new world.

In the first part of the book, Walden Browne takes issue with several "myths" of Sahagún scholarship. He argues persuasively that Sahagún was a victim not of government persecution but of government inefficiency. Sahagún's multivolume magnum opus, the Florentine Codex, he suggests, "was not confiscated by the bureaucratic government of Philip II so that it could be destroyed" (p. 34). It was appropriated so that it could be filed with a growing mass of centralized data. It was then lost for two centuries. Browne also insists that Sahagún was not, as many Mexican scholars have claimed, "the father of modern anthropology" (p. 54). Nor was he a "Renaissance humanist" (p. 80), studying the pre-Christian cultures of Mexico much as European humanists studied the classical cultures of Europe.

In fact, Browne maintains, Sahagún's methodology was not so much chosen as thrust upon him by the conjunction of a medieval mind and a foreign culture that refused to align itself with a medieval Christian scheme of things. The first generation of Franciscans was idealistic, inclined to misread apparent similarities between Mexican and European religious customs and to assume conversion to Christianity was easily accomplished. Sahagún saw the differences. "The crisis that drives all of Sahagún's work," Brown proposes, "is his realization that the easy fit between Christian and Nahua customs, as reported by [Fray Toribio de] Motolinía and the rest of the first twelve Franciscans, was nothing more than a dream" (p. 110). Gathering volumes of information from elderly Nahua informants, Sahagún spent years arranging and rearranging his material into a structure modeled on such encyclopedic medieval works as Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica. To the degree that he failed to reduce the Nahua world to a medieval Christian scheme of things, he inadvertently contributed to "the disintegration of the medieval world view" and the transition to "a modern view of the world" shaped not, as has been assumed, in Europe but in the Americas (pp. 8-9).

Although much of this sheds fresh light, some of it smacks a little of attacks on straw men. Those who are more familiar with Sahagún's work than with his reputation will have realized long ago that Sahagún ushers us into a world that baffles efforts to explain it in European terms. And anyone who has done graduate work recently will share the postmodern recognition that mediation of another's words subjects them to distortion. Inga Clendinen noted a decade ago (1991) that "Sahagún's works have fallen out of favor with scholars . . . on the grounds that they are too highly mediated, too distanced from Indian actuality" (see her Aztecs, p. 9). Browne is sometimes belatedly suspicious rather than full of fresh insight.

My main complaint, however, is that Browne too often buries his insights in fashionable jargon and abstruse digressions. The book is published as part of the Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory. Written more simply and published in a less rarified context, it might have made an excellent cautionary introduction to Sahagún. As it is, it is too demanding for undergraduate students and offers less than it pretends to advanced scholars of the cultural collisions of colonial Mexico.

MAX HARRIS, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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