101
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    1
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Book: found
      Is Open Access

      The Rain Gods’ Rebellion : The Cultural Basis of a Nahua Insurgency

      University Press of Colorado
      history, history of the Americas, social & cultural anthropology
      The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, SHMP

      Read this book at

      Buy book Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this book yet. Authors can add summaries to their books on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          "The Rain Gods’ Rebellion examines Nahua oral narratives to illuminate the cultural basis of the 1977–1984 rebellion against the local Hispanic elite in Huitzilan de Serdán, Mexico. Drawing from forty years of fieldwork in the region, James M. Taggart traces the sociopolitical role of Nahua rain gods—who took both human and divine forms—back hundreds of years and sheds new light on the connections between social experiences and the Nahua understanding of water and weather in stories. As Taggart shows, Nahua tales of the rain gods’ rebellion anticipated the actual 1977 land invasion in Huitzilan, in which some 200–300 Nahua were killed.The Rain Gods’ Rebellion reveals how local culture evolves from the expression of unrest to organized insurgency and then into collective memory. Taggart records a tradition of storytelling in which Nahuas radicalized themselves through recounting the rain gods’ stories—stories of the gods organizing and striking with bolts of lightning the companion spirits of autocratic local leaders who worked closely with mestizos. The tales are part of a tradition of resisting the friars’ efforts to convert the Nahuas, Totonacs, Otomi, and Tepehua to Christianity and inspiring nativistic movements against invading settlers. Providing a rare longitudinal look at the cultural basis of this grassroots insurgency, The Rain Gods’ Rebellion offers rare insight into the significance of oral history in forming Nahua collective memory and, by extension, culture. It will be of significance to scholars of Indigenous studies, anthropology, oral history, and violence studies, as well as linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists."

          Related collections

          Author and book information

          Book
          9781607329497
          9781607329503
          9781607329565
          1 May 2020
          1 May 2020
          3 February 2020
          10.5876/9781607329565
          8ec10ca3-eeba-41fb-b758-0c07944d7f9e
          20.500.12854/34274

          Distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial NoDerivatives License, which permits noncommercial use and distribution in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited, and the original work is not modified.

          History
          Funding
          Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

          history,history of the Americas,social & cultural anthropology

          Comments

          Comment on this book