Paper short abstract:

Examining Spanish and Tarascan documentos (1530-1680), three cultural concepts present in indigenous documents --quahta (‘house’), minguare (‘dominion’) and siruqua (‘linage’)— are identified through misunderstandings concerning property and kinship based rights associated with these concepts.

Paper long abstract:

In Central Western Mexico the Tarascan State was 'pacifically' occupied by the Spanish but the process of colonial state formation involved interactions between two very different cultural ensambles operating in equally contrasting forms of organizing social power. The differing concepts of property, kinship based rights and obligations, and nobility produced numerous misunderstandings between the Tarascan ruling class and the Spanish. These misunderstandings often have been treated historiographically as strategic deceptions or textual distortions or confusions but may well point to important cultural concepts in contact and in conflict. The linguist Michael Silverstein has developed the idea of cultural Concepts as an analytical tool in pragmatic discourse analysis. Silverstein has proposed that such cultural concepts can be identified in their indexical evocation in discursive interactions and, also, in their denotation in words.* In this paper we will argue that cultural concepts can also be identified through the misunderstandings registered in documents during the first Century and a half of colonial state formation in Mexico under the Spanish Empire. By examining both Spanish and Tarascan documentos from this period (1530-1680) we present three cultural concepts present in Tarascan indigenous documents --quahta ('house'), minquare ('dominion') and siruqua ('linage')—and examine the misunderstandings concerning property and kinship based rights associated with these concepts.

* Michael Silverstein, 2004, "Cultural" Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus, Current Anthropology, Vol. 45, Núm. 4, 621-651.