Note

I’m breaking my own rule of not publishing anything connected to my academic work here, but I think the following RSA presentation is short and essayistic enough to merit publication in my “Alacena de minucias”. Originally delivered at the “Archival Dead-Ends” pannel at RSA 2025, Boston.

Anomaly and Harmonization

• The topic of my remarks today is the perplexing presence of what is regarded as an anomaly in the archive, and more importantly, the unintended effects that historical scholarship’s typical responses to those perceived anomalies leave in their wake.
  • In the case of historical (or ethnohistorical) studies on New Spain and Precolumbian Mexico, such anomalies typically take the form of discordant variants and hapax legomena that tend to undermine or unravel the coherence of well-rounded narratives.
• The tension between anomaly and harmonization appears already in some of the early documents of Mesoamerican history. In fact, it could be argued that it was precissely the encounter with radically discordant views about the past in central Mexico that unsleashed the writing of history in the sixteenth-century.
• Thus, for example, in Motolinía’s 1541’s Epístola proemial, one of the foundational documents of Mesoamerican history and to which our host Giuseppe Marcocci has dedicated wonderful pages, the Franciscan friar noted: “los viejos de esta tierra son varios en declar las antigiiedades y cosas notables de esta tierra”, by which he means that their views about the past differ considerably.

• At the same time, this early text offers perhaps the first clear effort at unifying and harmonizing contending traditions of the past in central Mexico. Written in haste, and hence, thankfuly, falling to accomplish its goal, this precious document allows us to perceive the challenges faced by historiography when encountering the chrystal-like structure of Meosamerican social memory.

• However, the archival anomaly that I have selected today appears elsewhere, in one of the earliest sources to describe the so-called “myth of the white gods”, that is, the purported identification of Hernán Cortés with a powerful returning Nahua deity.
  • This is source is a still understudied epistolary exchange between Antonio de Mendoza, the newly appointed viceroy of New Spain, and the royal chronicler Fernández de Oviedo in Santo Domingo.
  • As I’m sure everyone knows, most sixteenth-century sources would claim that Cortés was identified with the returning Quetzalcoatl, a rumor or canard fostered by the conquistador himself.
  • However, in one Antonio de Mendoza’s letters to Oviedo (written in the early 1540s), we find a considerably different version:
    • “When Cortés and the Spaniards arrived, the natives of the land greeted him, thinking that he was Orchilobos [Huitzilopochtli], that according to their reckoning had departed four hundred years earlier.” (Quando vino Cortés con los españoles, los de la tierra lo resçibieron, pensando que fuesse Orchilobos [Huitzilopochtli], el qual en su cuenta dellos avia quatroçientos años que era partido.)
• Faced with this perplexing hapax, modern historians proceeded in a way not entirelly disimilar to Motolinía.
  • H. B. Nicholson, for example, characterized this account as a “puzzlingly aberrant account” while Michel Graulich referred to it as the “ancient and perplexing version of the [Quetzalcoatl] myth recorded by Oviedo”; in both case glossing over the fact that the account was recorded by Mendoza and not by the royal chronicler.
  • Anthropoligists working on the cosmovisión paradigm predominant in the second half of the 20th-century fare no better: by favouring the idea of the fully self-coherent system, they tend to dismiss anomalies, in the words of Suzanne Gillespie, as mere “mythical excrescence.”

• In either case, anomalies are readily dismissed as noise or errors (Motolinía attribute them to man’s faulty memories), and re-absorbed by dominant narratives by a critical sleigh of hand that to all intent and purposes says: donde dice Huitzilopochtli, léase Quetzalcoatl

• Now, the problem that I encounter constantly in my own work on the sixteenth-century political theology of the Aztec pantheon, is the incredible capacity of harmonizations to become re-inscribed in the archive, and excert a spooky temporal inversion through which the end results tend to retrospectively define the starting point, making anomalies, for example, practically invisible.
• And the fact that sixteenth-century historiography is already rife with harmonizations leads to a peculiar phenomena perhaps best described by chaos theory: according to a principle known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”, even minimal differences in the initial state of a complex system can cause trajectories to diverge exponentially, leading to vastly different future outcomes.

• In the case in point, the harmonization of anomalous variations tends, perhaps paradoxically, to enforce the hegemony of dominant narratives, which in the case of central Mexico also means the colonial consolidation of Tenochca political hegemony by historiographic means.

• So the question remains: what kind of approaches and methodological tools can we use to do justice to anomalous variation and perhaps even to embrace all its disrupte force?
  • What do we do with anomalies, one-offs or hapax legomena?
• I would like to suggest one modest, and not very fashionable response, inspired by the work of two of the most profound modern readers of Claude Levi-Strauss: Suzanne Gillespie and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. As you can already guess, this is a response unabashedly derived from structural anthropology.
  • According to what we can call the “principle of relative importance”, in mytho-historical accounts , the degree of variance is, as a rule, proportional to relative significance. In other words, the greatest the tendency to variance that a certain theme exhibits, the greater the importance that this theme holds for a social group.
• This approach has the advantange of placing anomalies and hapax legomena on the same footing as dominant or recurrent version of a theme, and as index of transformations and structural equivalencies, might offer us a vantage point from which to encounter the archive beyond the complacency of harmonizations.