Mixtec political ideology: Historical metaphors and the poetics of political symbolism. (Volumes I and II).

This thesis presents a reconstruction of the political ideology of the Mixtec people of Oaxaca, Mexico, on the eve of the Spanish Conquest. The reconstruction of political ideology is primarily drawn from the analysis of linguistic data and iconographically rendered genealogies and myths, supported by ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and archaeological information. The theoretical orientation of the analysis focuses on (1) the structure and organization of Mixtec political ideology, (2) the semiotic structure of Mixtec political ideology, and (3) the ideological support and regulation of Mixtec segmentary political organization. The structure and communication of Mixtec political ideology are shown to be based on the concept of the sacrificial act: its location and personnel, the spiritually heated offering, and the product of the sacrifice. This tripartite conceptual structure is reflected in a wide range of media including the symbolic and narrative structures of iconography, the metaphorical structuring of elite referential and ritual terminologies, and a system of ideological poetic values associated with the morphological structure of the lexicon. The phonological characteristics of the poetic system emphasize particular distinctive features, rather than complete phonemes. This structuring effectively crosscuts the multiple dialects of Mixtec; and the poetics of sacrifice functioned to integrate a shared ideological framework within a politically segmented context. The analysis of sixteenth-century Mixtec language data has illuminated important, previously unrecognized semantic and grammatical structures. The numerous relationships between these reconstructed linguistic structures and the symbolic structures within the indigenous Mixtec genealogical records are taken as an index of the methodological effectiveness of the techniques utilized. Given the traditionally problematic nature of ideological reconstruction in archaeological research, these methods represent an effective means to establish a set of general ideological parameters in the absence of comparable ethnohistoric data.Ph.D.ArchaeologyCultural anthropologyLinguisticsNative American studiesUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161937/1/8821602.pd