Dear Member of the Society of Americanists:

We are pleased to invite you to the Society of Americanists’ upcoming lecture, which will take place on Thursday, May 21, 2026, at 6:00 p.m. in Room 2 of the Quai Branly Museum.

 

David Tavárez, professor of anthropology (Vassar College, United States), will present:

From Idolatry to the Republic of Letters: Cosmology and Resistance in Colonial Mexico

In 1702, following the repression of a revolt in a yeche (Zapotec community) in New Spain, the Bishop of Oaxaca offered amnesty to the idolaters in exchange for collective confessions. To avoid any conflict, 68 Zapotec communities denounced their ritual specialists, handing over sacred songs and 102 ritual calendars in the Zapotec language. These texts, composed by specialists using the Latin alphabet, contain cosmological and cosmogonic narratives and ritual protocols that resemble those of ancient pre-Columbian texts. Sent to the Council of the Indies as proof of the failure of the Dominican Order’s evangelization projects, this corpus remained forgotten until the 1960s. This lecture presents these exceptional archives, which, as the largest corpus of indigenous calendars from the colonial Americas, offer a better understanding of Mesoamerican cultural history and its conceptions of the order of time and the cosmos. Drawing on two decades of archival research and fieldwork, this presentation examines the resistance and adaptation of indigenous populations in the face of the colonization of time. This extraordinary corpus demonstrates that, toward the end of the 17th century, indigenous authors briefly established a “republic of letters” that, while deeply rooted in the ancestral understanding of the universe and in Zapotec political interests, also maintained intellectual ties with other bodies of knowledge circulating in the Atlantic world.

 

The lecture will be given in French.

 

For your information, the upcoming lectures will take place:

–    On June 4, featuring a presentation by Annabel Villalonga Gordaliza on the MQB’s Pinart Teotihuacan collection.

–    On September 17, featuring a presentation by Stephen Houston titled “Rhythms of Recall: Maya Writing and the Ancestors Beyond Living Memory”