Bernardino de Sahagun: First Anthropologist (review)

León-Portilla has chosen Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún as his topic and produced an illuminating and well-reasoned biography. This edition is in fact a translation by Mauricio J. Mixco of León Portilla's book, first published in Spanish in 1999, as part of the worldwide commemoration of Sahagún's five-hundredth birthday. The basic premise of the work is that Sahagún represents the first example of a cultural anthropologist, or ethnographer, who through participant observation and the use of questionnaires to study a culture in depth. León-Portilla is very thorough in his study and does a very good job in summarizing what is known about Sahagún's life and career, as well as adding a great deal himself.

The book is organized chronologically into eight chapters. León-Portilla traces the life of Sahagún from his birth in the city of Sahagún in 1499. Very little documentation relates to the early life of the friar, and most of what we know is conjectural. León-Portilla recognizes this and analyzes the assumptions made by others on the basis of the best evidence we have today. In fact both Sahagún's birth place and birth date are conjectural, the one based on his name, the other on comments he made about his age, and comments recorded by others. Sahagún attended the University of Salamanca, joined the Franciscan Order, and was one of the second wave of friars to arrive in New Spain. He quickly made a name for himself as one adept in languages, and within a few years was serving as a translator of Nahuatl for the Order. He served in the famous Colegio de Santacruz Tlatelolco where he educated sons of the Nahua nobility. Upon his assignment to the village of Tepepulco he began his systematic collection of information about the Nahua, their history and culture prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. León-Portilla traces the development of the corpus of Sahaguntine materials, and also provides us with insight into Franciscan politics, and the political and social pressures that came to bear on Sahagún. The later years of Sahagún mix the tragic with the hopeful. Pressures at court forced Sahagún to discontinue work on his project, due to fears of his work encouraging natives to maintain the old ways. Others feared his efforts to translate parts of the Bible into Nahuatl for use in the celebration of the mass. Nevertheless, even with the confiscation of his papers, Sahagún continued to work on his projects. In short, it is a fascinating life story.

There are two aspects of the book that might raise some concerns. The application of a modern concept, anthropologist, to an early modern figure will disquiet some readers. Sahagún, in the strictest sense, could not have been an anthropologist because the discipline did not exist, nor had any of the theoretical or methodological underpinnings been developed. Nevertheless, given this caveat, León-Portilla does a good job of demonstrating the similarity of Sahagún's method with that used by modern ethnographers. Secondly the book suffers from some unfortunate bits of translation and editing. On page 129, there is a reference to a work by León-Portilla called Vision of the Vanquished. While the Spanish title of the book was Visión de los Vencidos, the English title was Broken Spears. Unfortunately neither the English nor the Spanish version made it into the book's bibliography. On several occasions the translator has rendered the Spanish title alcalde as the English "mayor." While in modern times the word for mayor is translated as alcalde, in the colonial period there was no such office as mayor. An alcalde was a judge. The term legajo, referring to a bundle of...