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Latin American Research Review 38.3 (2003) 261-274



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Encountering People, Creating Texts:
Cultural Studies of the Encounter and Beyond*

Susan Kellogg
University of Houston


The Conquest of America: the Question of the Other. By Tzvetan Todorov, foreword by Anthony Pagden, trans. by Richard Howard. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Pp. 274. $19.95 paper.)
Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old tnd New in Early Latin American History. By James Lockhart. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. 397. $70.00 cloth.)
Grammar of the Mexican Language With qn Explanation of Itts Adverbs. By Horacio Carochi, S.J.; translated and edited by James Lockhart. (Stanford: Stanford University Press and University of California at Los Angeles, Latin American Center Publications, vol. 89, [1645] 2001. Pp. 516. $65.00 cloth.)
Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico. Edited by Stuart B. Schwartz. Bedford Series in History and Art. (Boston and N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Pp. 271. $35.00 cloth.)
Sahagun and the Transition yo Modernity. By Walden Browne. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Pp. 260. $39.95 cloth.)
Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico And Florida and the Legacy Oof Conquest. By José Rabasa. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. 359. $64.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.)
An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians. By Rámon Pané; Introduction, notes, and appendixes by José Juan Arrom; translated by Susan C. Griswold. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Pp. 73. $13.95 cloth.)[End Page 261]
From Viracocha to the Virgin of Copacabana: Representation of the Sacred at Lake Titicaca. By Verónica Salles-Reese. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Pp. 208. $13.95 paper.)
Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas. By Roland Greene. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 289. $47.00 cloth, $18.00 paper.)
From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire. By Pete Herman Sigal. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Pp. 320. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)
Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain, and Puebla, Mexico, 1560-1620. By Ida Altman. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. 254. $46.00 cloth.)
Época Temprana De Leon Viejo: Una Historia De La Primera Capital De Nicaragua. By Patrick S. Werner. (Managua: Asdi and Instituto Nicaragüense de Cultura, 2000. Pp. 177.)
Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain. Edited by Susan Schroeder. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Pp. 200. $50.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.)
Time, History, and Belief in Aztec And Colonial Mexico. By Ross Hassig. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Pp. 220. $40.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.)
The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries. By Kevin Terraciano. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. 514. $65.00 cloth.)

The historiography of the encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples, subsequent conquests, and the early colonial period is an impossibly huge one. 1 There are, however, dominant interpretations within this literature, shaped by a small number of paradigms. While these paradigms (material, social, and cultural) were not wholly linear in their chronological development, they have waxed, waned, and interpenetrated. It is nonetheless the case that recent literature in this area, as exemplified by many of the works under review here, has largely turned away from the social history focus that dominated from the 1960s on, towards a cultural focus that privileges textual analysis across the variety of disciplines contributing to this area of study. 2 This cultural [End Page 262] focus represents neither a single interpretation, methodology, nor type of source. But a theme that unifies recent cultural approaches is that many of its practitioners tend to invert Clifford Geertz's culture-as-text approach, adopting a text-as-culture approach, with texts often treated as the virtual equivalent of a culture or worldview. 3

Two scholars whose work contributed powerfully toward this move away from the social towards the cultural and the linguistic but who could scarcely share less...

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