/lit/ - Literature

>>15657664

>>14787764
While it's true we lost an immeasurable amount of records and culture due to the mass destruction and supressoon of Mesoamerican books, culture, etc, we have a lot more left then most people think

here's hundreds of colonial era documents in both spanish and nahuatl (aztec) describing Aztec society and history in great detail. Sahagun's history for instance is like 2000+ pages of detailed information on daily life, government organization, culture, and general society; from judicial systems to merchantry to medicine, while Duran's history is a similar work but detailing their history, down to specific statements made by specific political officials, see pic. There's enough that there's been entire books written about specific political officials, like "Allure of Nezahualcoyotl" and "Tlaclelel remebered".

As far as other civilizations, For the Maya there's dozens of cities with surviving stone inscriptions detailing important political events, such as births and deaths of rulers, alliances, wars, etc which can be pretty informative when cross referenced, and the Mixtec have 8 surviving books which gives similar political historical going back 800 years across dozens of cities. Others like the Purepecha (who are really underrated), Totonacs, etc are in much more precarious spots with only a few colonial era aztec-esque sources and that's it, but even just that + archeology can tell quite a bit.

Would it be great if we had hundreds of surviving pre-contact books, or better yet, Mesoamerican society survived and modernized a la Japan while keeping their culture in more then a few rural areas? Yeah, that'd be a game changer, modern society and media would be way different with having a whole other pillar of high culture to pull from beyond the West and East, but we still know and can learn a ton even without that. The problem is moreso public awareness (even history majors aren't taught jack shit about these cultures or about these sources) and many not having english translations, and that ones that do are all still under copyright.

>>14757463
>>14755126
>>14755159
That segregation is dumb as fuck though. Maybe not so much in reference to "Classics" specifically, but in terms of generalist literature and history courses it sure as fuck is.

>>14755180
>>14756461
There's a difference between focusing on the material most relevenant to your culture in question, but it's another to have a totally western-centric education to the point where the average person going through schooling is barely educated on history and cultures outside of those areas. The whole relevancy argument even has some flaws itself: It's really impossibly to objectively say that X or Y event from centuries or thousands of years ago was more relvenant then the other to modern day society outside of specific obviously massively influential examples due to butterfly effect: For all you know, yes, a random war between two kingdoms in Medivial Thailand might be more influential or as much so as many of the minor conflicts and events we teach about European history.

Honestly the situation isn't too bad in reference to the Near East or East Asia, with South/Southasia being ignored more then it should be, but the real issue is the Americas: There's fucking hundreds of complex civilizations across Latin America and contrary to what people think (since, again, none of this gets fucking taught), we DO have records on a fair amount of them: There's hundreds of documents writen in the Aztec language surviving to this day from the 16th century for example, from poetry to detailed historical records to specifics on their judicial systems and the like, etc; see pic.

It's especially bullshit since the Conquest of Mexico itself is one of those giant, insanely influential events which paved the road for modern European global cultural supremacy with it's success causing the exponential snowballing of colonial efforts elsewhere in the Americas and the world in general; and that Conquest was frankly as much if not moreso the results of the kings and armies of Mesoamerican states as it was the Spanish: The political context, norms, and histories of those socities is EXTREMELY relevant to global society and history, and NOT teaching about it leads to people losing out on understanding a great deal of the factors of why events played out how they did and operating based on flawed frameworks of modern history and related topics as a result.

Pretty much every World History textbook ever will devote, at most, like half a page on these socites before going "and then they got conquered, moving on" with no specific information about their societial practices, the rules of specific kings, wars, etc. The average history major would be totally unable to tell you the name of ANY Mesoamerican or Andean (the civilizations down in Peru and such, the most famous being the Inca) politician, general, poet, etc beyond Montezuma II.

>>14555414
>>14555153
whoops, the rest of my post got cut off

My bottom line is that, is your lack of interest due to a lack of existing foundational knowledge that there IS interesting and cool stuff there, or have you already given it an honest shot?

Another example, most people don't realize we have sources like pic related for Mesoamerican history/mythology

>All these people willing to read and immerse themselves in Classical European, Catholic, East Asian, Buddhist/Hindu, and Persian literature and theology

>Nobody ever talks about Mesoamerican history, theology, or philsophy despite there being like hundreds of colional era manuscripts on the Aztec even if other civilizations are more lacking in sources

So, this is a tangentially somewhat off topic post, but why is Buddhism and Eastern philosophy in general so prevalent in literature and philosophy while American (as in the Americas, not as in USA) intellectualism and philosophy and literature is literally who tier?

Like, yes, most cultures in the Americas were tribes and chiefdoms without written records or highly developed intellectual institutions, but there were two major cradles of highly developed civilization in Mesoamerica and in the Andes the former of which outright developed full written languages, and both had theolgians, philsophers, poets, etc.

The Spanish did burn most of their records, but many cultures/civilizations in those areas have some collections of poetry and conquest/early colional period literature left, while the Aztec in particular have outright hundreds of manuscripts and documents, to the point where there's been entire books written solely on specific Aztec politicians and philosophers, such as "Tlacaelel Remembered: Mastermind of the Aztec Empire" and "The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl: Pre-Hispanic History, Religion, and Nahua Poetics"; and some of the colonial period sources, often made by collaborations of both Spanish firars and Mesoamerican scribes, nobles, etc; are litterally hundreds to thousands of pages long and are stupidly detailed: Duran's History for example, see pic, detailed Aztec History and quasi-mythical-history down to enough detail to have the specific names and statements of various soldiers, merchants, kings, etc.

Why is all of this basically non-existent in the awareness not just of the general public, but even historians, intellectuals, etc? To some extent it's understandable since

>Less sources, as mentioned
>The cultures were historically subject to a lot of propaganda making them out to be primitive savages
>Asia has had historical contact with the West (the current dominant culture) for thousands of years allowing a greater level of respect and shared cultural exchange wheras Mesoamerican/Andean civilization is a much more recent source of contact
>Ethnically indigenous Mesoamerican and Andean people are largerly imporvished and stuck in rural areas today, with the borader Mexican, Guatamaa, Peruvian, etc populations having their national identitity more rooted in their mestizo nature, wheras eastern cultures very much still culturally identitfy with their medivial and ancient civilizations and their cultural products
>Many of the works remain untranslated

But I still think the sheer degree to which nobody gives a shit is a bit baffling even with this in mind. In fact I don't think even modern Latin American philsophy and literature is really given a shit about either.

Thoughts? What can be done to correct this and push Ancient/classical/medieval Amerindian literature and philosophy?
Also happy to to give suggestions and answer questions for anybody wanting to get into the subject.

1/2

You might want to look into works about Mesoamerican geopolitcs and the Spanish conquest, it was basically every faction trying to stab each other in the back and manipulate each other to their own political advantage, and then the Spanish just sort of were the last ones standing due to dieases and the fact that Mesoamerican gepoloiitcs was based on hedgemonic and indirect influence rather then direct imperalism, so mesoamerican states willingly joined the spanish under the assu,ption that they'd just be furthering their own political standing in accordance with native political networks and not realizing how spanish imperalism would play out.

I did a post about mesoamerican geopolitcs here: https://pastebin.com/h18M28BR
Sadly, I don't have one specific book that encmpasses all of this to suggest off the top of my head but there's a bunch of resources i've gatherted here: >>>/his/7005774 ;

If I had to pick some that deal with this at least partially, then it'd be

>Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica
>7 Myths of the Spanish Conquest
>Aztec Warfare: Imperial expansion and Political control (this is probably your best starting guess)
>Aztec Imperial Strategies By Frances Berdan, Richard E. Blanton, Elizabeth Hill Boone, Mary G. Hodge, Michael E. Smith
>The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest
>Tlacaelel Remembered by Susan Schroeder
>Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens by Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube,

And then primary sources such as

>Diego Duran's "The History of the Indies of Neww Spain"
>Sahagun's Florintine Codex/"General history of the things of New Spain"
>Bernal Diaz's "A true History of the Conquest of New Spain"
>Cortes's Letters

though keep in mind that primary sources have bias issues, you REALLY need to make sure you have good tranlations, have a version with annotations (I had a list of what the good translations/versions were but I need to locate it), and remember what the potential biases oif each work is. You are better off not starting with them even if they have a lot of the really fun juicy details you might want, see pic.