The second article in part 3, "
Preconquest Consciousness," by E.
It opens with a historical summary covering the
preconquest period (to 1520), the colonial period (to 1810), independence, and the twentieth century (after 1910).
The author holds that the 1902 Bailundu uprising marked the first pan-Ovimbundu attempt to expel the Portuguese, and that its suppression destroyed the
preconquest kingdoms.
His specific contribution here is to show how formulaic expressions of Christian Mixtec piety in testaments followed an unorthodox course: the Christian God and Mary were apparently conceived of as dual deities in the spirit of
preconquest male and female creator pairs.
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Preconquest Americans had been creatures of monstrous and subhuman status, so fabulously different from Europeans that even their heads, wrote Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, were not like the heads of "other men." They were not, in fact, heads at all, he continued, "but rather hard and thick helmets, so that the most important piece of advice the Christians gave when fighting in hand to hand combat with them was not to strike them on the head, because that broke the swords.
Dividing his book geographically and chronologically, the author offers by way of prologue descriptions of two contemporary Mexican festivals and then devotes subsequent sections to discussion and description of rituals and festivities in medieval Spain,
preconquest central Mexico, Mexico under Spanish rule in the sixteenth century, and, finally, Spain in the sixteenth century.
In an earlier article in this journal I criticized the work of Henry Dobyns and Robert Euler, arguing that their analysis of
preconquest Pai (Havasupai and Hualapai) Indians over-formalized Pai social and political structures.
Instead, it unleashed a flood of litigation that set individuals, communities, and the new co-operatives against one another, often reigniting conflicts that dated back to colonial or even
preconquest times.
He claimed that "the Pai studies should not be so readily dismissed as sources of
preconquest information" without offering evidence to support the assertion.
Go down there and live along the canyon to the river."(9) Braatz's vocabulary strikes us as incompatible with
preconquest Pai demographic characteristics.
However, the Handbook of North American Indians volume ten contains separate and distinct summaries of each group's
preconquest sociopolitical organization--Hualapais with three subtribes headed by three official subchiefs and Havasupais with less-formal structures--suggesting they were separate tribes before conquest.