Of
the critical readings featured on this web-page, Louise M. Burkhart's analysis
of the relationships between European and Nahua performance traditions strikes
me as the most sophisticated. The picture below represents "The Harrowing of Hell." Painting by an indigenous artist in the Franciscan open
chapel at Tizatlan, Tlaxcala. Drawing by Ellen Cesrski.
Of
the critical readings featured on this web-page, Louise M. Burkhart's analysis
of the relationships between European and Nahua performance traditions strikes
me as the most sophisticated.
Like Max Harris, Burkhart acknowledges the highly collective modes ofceremonial behavior that underpinned religious life in the pre-conquest indigenouscultures of central Mexico. Yet rather than focusing on the overlaps or similarities between Spanish and Native American modes of performance after the conquest, she explores the enduring qualities of Nahua ceremonialism from a different angle.
In her 1992 essay, "Pious Performances: Christian Pageantry and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico," Burkhart states her central objective: "I examineNahua ceremonialism after the conquest, in the context of the early colonialchurch. I am not looking for continuities, real or imagined, between specificrites or between specific pre-Columbian deities and Christian saints. Rather,I am interested in how the general praxis orientation of Nahua religion informedthe Nahuas' ways of becoming and being Christian as well as informing theways in which their Christianity was described and interpreted by thefriarswho presided over their religious life" (361-2).
The first thing that impresses me about Burkhart's essay is herapproach to pre-conquest modes of ceremonial behavior. On the one hand, sheacknowledges that "the scale of both human sacrifice and the conspicuousconsumption of luxury goods was escalated by the Mexica in the glory daysof their imperial enterprise" (361). On the other hand, she debunks traditionalunderstandings of the ceremonial/performative activities cited above. Inshort, Burkhart calls into question the Spaniards' interpretations of theseindigenous performance activities as imperial abuses on the part of the Mexicas.As such, she also calls into question that Spaniards' justifications forthe conquest of "New Spain." She does so by reminding readers that "the intenseceremonialism that impressed European observers was not an artifact of empirebut a pervasive feature of life in central Mexico" (361).
For the Nahuas, Burkhart writes, "contact with the sacred was established
through ritual and the collective carrying out of certain actions at prescribed
moments in a calendrical sequence or life cycle" (361). She explains thesocial
significance of these ritual actions from a perspective that willbe familiar
to Performance Studies students. This is to say that Burkhartfocuses on the
actual, practical changes effected or accomplished by performativeacts such
as ritual: "Ritual acts produced, in the here and now, fleetingbut authentic
manifestations of the sacred forces upon which all life depended.Through
rituals, men and women laid themselves open to the power of the gods;the
frame of the ritual worked to channel and limit this dangerous contactby
directing the sacred force into persons, images, or other objects invested
with a god's regalia, which served as conduits for the sacred manifestations"
(361).
A second thing that impresses me about Burkhart's method is her restraint
withrespect to looking for links between European and indigenous performance
cultures. I know from experience how tempting it is to look, with twentieth-century
eyes at a sixteenth-century phenomenon, and to perceive present-day resemblances
or resonances. From the outset, Burkhart cautions her readers to steer clear
of that anachronistic tendency. She is particularly careful about investigating
the 'parallels' that Spanish friars perceived between the Christian religion
and certain ceremonial practices of the Nahua religion.
Another compelling aspect of this theorist's work is the sense of agency that she acknowledges as present in Nahua culture, performance and literature. Unlike Richard Trexler, Burkhart does not poition the vanquished peoplesof colonial Mexico as mere puppets who were forced to act out the Spanishfriars' degrading imaginings of what it meant to be "Indian." This reluctance,onBurkhart's part, to conceive of the Nahuas as passive victims of Spanishideologyand drama does not mean that she fails to recognize the profoundpower imbalances that structured indigenous performances in early colonialMexico. Rather,Burkhart seems to have a clear grasp not only of the broadpolitical pictureafter the conquest, but also of the intricate details informingSpanish andNahua encounters.
Her grasp of pivotal differences between the colonizers and the colonized in especially insightful at the level of language--at the level of linguistic differences that imply starkly different cosmologies. Burkhart is proficient in English, Spanish, and Nahuatl. This rare trilingualism allows her performs extensive English translations of the 16th-century religious dramas thatindigenous scholars translated from Spanish into Nahuatl at the bequest ofthe Spanish friars. The friars requested such translations so that the 'commonpeople' of New Spain might better understand the Spanish-imported religiousdramas that they witnessed, or in which they participated. In carrying outthesetranslations from Nahuatl and Spanish into English, Burkhart underscorestheprofoundly complicated value system and world view that underpin thatNahuatllanguage. Ironically, the Spanish language and cosmology seem simplein comparison.
A third aspect of Burkhart's work that interests me is how she deals with the notions of "resistance" and/or "subversion" that both Trexler and Harris tackle in their own texts. Whereas Trexler seems overly hasty in undermining the potential for indigenous resistance in the military dramas that the Spaniards imposed, Harris strikes me as jumping the gun with respect to celebrating indigenous subversion. Harris frequently makes mountains of indigenous resistance out of a few, select, idiosyncratic details. Burkhart, meanwhile, acknowledges both of these possibilities (indigenous subversion and indigenous submission), but proceeds more cautiously with her thesis. Her thesis is that the forms of religious theatre introduced to colonial Mexico by Spanish friars provided the Nahuas with many, subtle opportunities to challenge the Spanish-imposed ideals of Christianity. In short, the indigenous peoples of colonial Mexico studied the Spanish practices taught to them, but at the same time developed their own ideas of what it meant to be a "good Christian." Here is one example of how Burkhart approaches the topic of native resistance to Spanish discourse and ideology:
"The Nahuas' formal conversion to Christianity, characterized by massbaptisms and other enthusiastic displays, quickly became legendary as a "spiritual conquest." The chronicles of the friars, on which this legend depends, predictably glorify the achievements of the evangelizers while representing the native people as passive and childlike recipients of the Word. However, if we invert the rhetorical flow of their propaganda so as to grant agency to the native people, we can see that the Nahua, by selectively responding to the devotional practices presented to them by the friars, exerted considerable control over the creation of their church" (362).
Burkhart's overall analysis of the devotional "options" that the Spanish friars presented, and that the Nahuas selectively incorporated into their understanding of Christianity, is rich and informative. She points out how the Spanish friars quickly realized that preaching "fire and brimstone" got them nowhere with the native populations. But, if the friars set the catechism to music and invited the natives to sing and dance, or put on a Christain pageant with native actors in costume, then suddenly the churchyard could not contain them all.
There are, of course, problems with Burkhart's argument that I need to address. For instance, she goes as far as to claim that the indigenous peoples "manipulated" the Spanish friars "into presiding over a church founded not upon abstract Christian theological or moral tenets, but upon an exuberant pageantry" (363). Did the defeated peoples of early colonial Mexico really have the means to manipulate the Spaniards? I doubt it. Or at least if they did, then the Spaniards quickly grew paranoid that this was the case andused edicts and ordinances in effort to curb that perceived "dissembling"and "manipulation."
Nevertheless, Burkhart's approach is generally very useful and challenging. It is interesting to think about the primary,16th-century texts pertaining to religious theatre from the perspective that the Nahuas did have some sense of agency with respect to translating and performing these play texts.