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John Monaghan
Department of Anthropology
University of Illinois at Chicago

Paper excerpt:

    In Kopytoff’s formulation the critical element is the variable uses to which an object is put over the course of its existence.  The Codex Tulane for example, a pre-Columbian style Mixtec manuscript composed in the town of Acatlan, Puebla, would have the following chapters in its biography: First its beginning as a genealogy  painted for Mixtec rulers in the mid sixteenth century to support their claims before colonial officials.  Then would come its use as a map by a town in its own court case.  This would be followed by its purchase by curio hunters who smuggled it to the United States where it was originally an object of ethnological curiosity.  Finally we would come to its final chapter, when it becomes a work of art displayed in a museum and studied by people like ourselves.  One complication in this is that the uses to which an object is put may not be readily transparent or exclusive.  Nonetheless the biography metaphor  highlights the importance of  transitions, as in the critical life passages people make as they age.  In the case of the Codex Tulane what this focuses attention on are not only the periods when it is put to new uses, but also on social processes, since it is the Codex’s  implication in collective enterprises that endows it with significance.  This paper focuses on are the middle chapters of the biographies of Mixtec illuminated manuscripts like the Codex Tulane, when they were annotated by indigenous farmers.  It will suggest that the people who are writing over these earlier texts are motivated by of a great transformation of a vast swath of rural southern Mexico from a landscape dominated by noble estates and large ranches to one populated by independent land-holding communities.  It will then argue that the significance of the jottings lies not only in the way local people use it to update documentation to be presented in court, but in their need to place the changes they were experiencing into a locally understandable context.