David Tavárez, Historian and Linguistic Anthropologist

David Tavárez
SPEAKERS
Will Bachman, David Tavárez

Will Bachman  00:02
Will Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and if you visit 92 report.com that’s the numbers 92 report.com you can see the full transcript of this episode, the show notes, as well as every episode, and you can sign up for the newsletter for the show. Now, I’m very happy to welcome to the show. David Tavares, David, welcome to the show.

David Tavárez  00:31
Thank you for having me, Will. It’s a pleasure, David,

Will Bachman  00:35
tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

David Tavárez  00:41
Oh, wow. It’s been a long journey, you know, but basically, I guess I will start by saying that I’m originally from Juarez, Mexico, you know, it’s a border town, and I guess I ended up at the Harvard because I wanted to a lot of people in my community, you know, I’m come from a family of school teachers thought that the only thing they could do if they were going to do better in life, would be to become engineers and work for a factories on the border. So I saw that having read James Joyce and having thought about how he fled Ireland, right? His conditions were more extreme. Of course, he was talking about the old saw, that it’s her Faro, which, you know, relates to the political condition in Ireland. So I think I am more of an intellectual. What is the right word? It’s an intellectual migrant, in the sense that I decided that the kind of things that I wanted to do were not really accessible to me in terms of higher education in Juarez, Mexico. So I actually started college at Grinnell. Grinnell College in Iowa was there a couple of years then I, although it’s a wonderful institution, I got a little tired of the corn fields and the solitude, and I started applying for a transformation. So I went into that mode. I got into Harvard, had a great time. I can go back and talk about that a little later, but I guess suffice it to say that in the summer of 1992 I have completed a degree in anthropology and what is, what was then called the visual and environmental studies vs which has since changed the name. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be a social scientist or a filmmaker. So in terms of my path, I mean, I I had several ideas in mind. The first step, I think, was to think about graduate education. I actually was thinking about the Writers Workshop in Iowa, I got into the writers workshop because, actually, I worked with somebody called Jayne Anne Phillips wonderful, wonderful writer who was there around the same time that John Coetzee was actually teaching fiction at Harvard. So I guess she encouraged me to do that, and I guess I thought it over for a little bit, and I actually heard about this opportunity to do an internship at the American University in Cairo. So I actually opted for the more adventurous path. So I spent a year in, well, actually 10 months in Cairo following my graduation, so which I also supplemented that summer by writing about the Baltics for the LET’S GO Europe series. I guess some people might not be familiar with let’s go Europe. But that was a wonderful paperback that was put out by harvesters year after year. So they would, you know, find volunteers, who the, you know, get some, you know, I guess, very modest stipend to travel. Very

Will Bachman  04:11
modest. Yes, I did the Great Lakes after, you know, after senior year. And I remember, I think I got 50 bucks per day, and that was not including Smiths. That was it 50 bucks a day to travel around to the Great Lakes. So you did the Baltic region, alright? I

David Tavárez  04:32
did not be a Lithuanian Estonia, a It was fun. You know? It was really interesting. They were just opening up. This was 1992 and then immediately after, I went to Egypt, and I was in something called the Adnan center for TV journalism, which was run by a very colorful character, a who was a Jewish convert to Islam and had the. Really good time interviewing people like Omar Sharia for the Benetton, people who were through town. And basically one of my jobs was just to interview people as they came through town and have the Egyptian producing journalism camera side of things trained while I was interviewing people, and I did a few other things, but I mean, something that obviously stands out is that I was able to travel to the Middle East, through Jordan, Israel, Syria, you know. And I got to see sites like, you know, Palmyra, or the market in Aleppo, that unfortunately, have since been reduced to a devastation, right? They’ve been devastated by ISIS so, so I had, and of course, this was 1992 1993 you know, the conditions were calmer at that point. And then, you know, I tried my hand in journalism. I was a freelancer for a couple of years. And then I really decided, well, I think what I want to do is go back to what I thought I was going to do, which was, you know, focus on language, culture, history. So I began a PhD at the University of Chicago in 1994 not before actually getting to the NYU film school and also deciding not to go that in that direction. So, so at that point, you know, I felt that I knew what I wanted to do, which was to work on indigenous history, and my attention was drawn to a couple of languages that are still spoken, you know, in Mexico that have a great store of texts that begin, I guess, for now, what which is the language of the Aztecs in the 1530s there’s tons and tons of different texts, and it’s actually one of the best known indigenous languages of the Americas. But then the other was Zapotec, which is still spoken by about half a million people across Mexico and the US, in contrast with now what which has about the 1.4 million speakers. And I guess I got into the question of what it was that indigenous people did when Christianity came to Mexico, and I found some very interesting documents. Yeah, they are covid in this and Seville that had been a actually identified by at least one other scholar before, but that had not been studied in full. So I got drawn into that, particularly into a large corpus of documents which are written in northern Zapotec, which are mostly calendars, about 100 of them. And by counts, I mean cosmological manuals, where people actually were trying to figure out how this particular system of time keeping, which was divination cycle for them, intersected with eclipses, with Christian time, with current occurrences and how, how to manage time and the ancestors. And this corpus also has a large number of ritual songs that were written in Zapotec by in alphabetic script, by literate ritual, especially so that, you know, became one of the main things that I did. And, you know, after graduating from the U of Chicago, I guess, just to give you a very quick run of, you know, my professional career, I got a position at Bard College, which is in upstate New York, great school for the arts. And I was there in Latin American and Iberian studies. And then after that, I decided to move to Vassar, which is just down river in Poughkeepsie, New York, great institution that went co-ed in 1969 that is quite selective, that has an incredible vibrant student body, and I guess I’ve liked it so much that I’ve been here at Vassar. I currently live in Rhinebeck, New Year, which is about 30 miles away from Poughkeepsie, where Vassar is, and I have been in the anthropology department. I’m a full professor advisor for 20 years. And I think I mean something that I really enjoy this again, meeting bright minds, where they’re beginning to get into particular kind of effervescence, where, you know, students get really creative, get really interested in a lot of things that have to do with language, culture, history, which is what I continue to do. And I guess, to cut a very long story short, so you can ask me more questions. I you know my I guess early grads. Dream of working with these documents and making sense of these indigenous worlds has come to fruition through a number of different works. You know, the My first book was called The Invisible War, which was about how indigenous people in central Mexican particularly those who spoke Nahuatl and Zapotec, confronted the church in colonial Mexico, and to a certain degree, got away with a continuing to work with their ancestral beliefs, even though they also embraced Christianity and kept, you know, the two side by side. So it was a book that was translated into Spanish. Well, I actually just did another version of it in Spanish was published in Mexico. So this is basically 2012 2013 I’ve also worked with other scholars on a book on great, probably the greatest, indigenous historian of colonial Mexico, somebody called Chimalpahin, who also a took version of the conquest of Mexico, is written by Hernan Cortes chaplain, and made it his by transcribing it and then doing a lot of different comments and saying, Well, actually, he’s wrong on this thing. You know, I’m going to correct this fellow and adding a lot of things. So this is came out as “Chimalpahin’s Conquest,” my first book, what was Stanford University Press.  Stanford. It also came out in Mexico a little later, 2010 2011, and I, you know, going back to what I was talking about in terms of a the calendars and songs from zapad people in Oaxaca, Mexico. I ended up writing something called Rethinking Zapotec Time, which just came out in 2022, and that’s, you know, basically compiling two decades of work. It was happily funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship that I got in 2017 18. And, you know, it’s, I’m proud, because it’s a thick volume. Actually, it’s right here, and it’s unwell in terms of praise, it’s got a prize for best subsequent book from the Native American Indigenous Studies Association, Best Book in the social sciences, honorfici mention, from the Latin American Studies Association, and Best Book from New England Council of Latin American Studies. So a it’s, it’s really a labor of love, it in the sense that it’s just trying to understand the world of this ritual specialist and the Christians they confronted and how they managed to not only survive, but also share ancestral beliefs and knowledge with other people in their communities in the basically At the close of the close of the 17th century, early 18th century. So and I mean, I’ve written other books, I’ve said it, or I have something that looks at indigenous Christianity throughout the Americas. You know, from Mexico to Brazil to Peru, a different parts of the Americas. I am currently just finished with something called the Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language, which is interesting in the sense that is one of these series at Oxford edits, and it’s about 24 chapters by different people, mostly anthropologists, but also historians and the scholars of religions. It was kind of a different thing for me to do in terms of my previous work, but, you know, basically, I guess in that, in the, you know, closes of articles, book chapters that I’ve written, I really try to focus on language, culture, ritual practices, a the kind of ways in which indigenous people flourish as intellectuals starting the 16th century, not today, but actually from the 16th century onwards, which is a history that is less known, that I, you know, like to emphasize and talk about and how they have embraced different ways of resisting but also accommodating to colonial and post colonial hours in in Latin America.

Will Bachman  14:35
Wow. First of all, congratulations on all the the acclaim for your rethinking Zapotec time, and what an amazing array of topics you’ve been working on, I’d love to hear I mean, many of these things I want to hear more about. Can you tell us about some of the misconceptions people have, or some things that you’ve discovered? Maybe we could start with the. The the work that you did around the want reaction to the bar I think it Barto Bartolome de la casa is the the Chronicle from the, you know, Spaniards perspective, and then getting it from the indigenous perspective. Tell us about, like, you know, some of the kind of key takeaways for that, and how that maybe is different than what we learned in grade school or even college about the kind of Spanish invasion and takeover of the Aztecs. Yeah,

David Tavárez  15:37
well, I think, of course, it’s nice for you to mention bartome las Casas. He’s usually the person that people in Christian Catholic circles point out and say, well, not everyone was bad, right? And this is obviously in reaction to what in history has been called the Black legend, which comes from protests and sources, you know? I mean, you know, the first time that people heard about the conquest of Mexico, a in English, right? Usually can be traced to the work of Boston Historian William H Prescott, who wrote about the conquest of Mexico, the conquest of Peru. This was a best seller in the 1840s so much that the soldiers that invaded Mexico around 1846 1847 brought copies right to understand the country they were invading, which might not be so far from other adventures today. But the bottom line is that you know this thinking is, of course, that focusing on you know whether the Inquisition and the church were as terrible as I guess Protestant historiography had them be right. And I think when you look at that, I think it’s more a question of survival and resilience in the sense that there was, of course, a lot of coercion in terms of making people go away from their ritual practices, the religion, what they believed in. There was also a generational change where the new converts were actually quite gung ho in terms of what they were doing. And actually, one of the things that I’m working on right now focuses on those, as opposed to, I doubt there’s focus on the people who were very what is the right word, the fervently Christian so much that they decided to along working with Franciscan. So we’re talking about indigenous now. We’re speaking intellectuals in the 1540s 1550s that have been educated by Franciscans sit down with them and decide to not only translate different bits and pieces of the Bible, right, which were used for sermons, but to do a full scale scholarly commentary on a couple of books, which is, we have only two The Proverbs of Solomon and Ecclesiastes. So these were done with the idea that there would be a new class of people who would be enlightened, indigenous rulers, who are Christian, who learn from Christian books. Right? This is why they’re focusing on the Proverbs on Ecclesiastes, because these are admonitions that go back, actually, to ancient Egypt, right? In the case of Proverbs of Solomon, like this, where the classical patriarchal ammunitions on how to be a good, not only good person, good people, but perhaps also good prince or a good elite member, if you were male. So they pick up on that. And actually, you know, working on this with another Nawa scholar to put out translation of the Proverbs of Solomon as they were understood by these indigenous Christians. So that’s one part, of course, that people are sometimes surprised, not only that there were idolaters and Christians in indigenous world, but they are also different shades in terms of what indigenous Christians were up to. So this particular group, for instance, are true Franciscan influence, followers of Erasmus of Rotterdam, and they focus on one of the things that Erasmus talked about in books like Enchiridion, the Manual of a Christian Knight, was, let’s give knowledge of the Bible to commoners and shopkeepers, but let’s do it through allegories, right? So they, you know, the Nawas who are trying to make sense of the Proverbs, or in our audience, see some of the allegories, and do a lot of different juicy, interesting allegories to try to communicate what it is. So it’s, it’s really a question of not just, you know, taking the black legend, disagreeing it, saying that, you know, Las Casas was a great guy or not. I mean, they’re more interesting questions, at least for me and other people, lay beyond that in terms of, like, capturing the complexity of how being Christian, even though it was. Imposed on you worked, what it was like to be in that colonial world, right? So that’s, you know, that’s, that’s one of the things that I focus on.

Will Bachman  20:11
I’m curious give us a sense of how much is there written in the what, prior to pick a date, like 1800 if it was all printed up in books, would that be like one book? Would it be a shelf of books? Would it be like, you know, fill up an entire, you know, public school library of books? Like, how much content is there and is some of it still not reviewed by scholars? Is there stuff in, you know, archives that has never even been worked on, you know, just give us a sense of how much is out there. No,

David Tavárez  20:52
that’s, that’s a good question, I mean. And of course, now, what is one of the languages that are is known most, you know, in terms of its works, is, in terms of producing works, is probably the most voluminous in terms of indigenous languages of the Americas before the 20th century. But you know, just to give you a sense of what that would be like by the early 17th century, or more than 100 works in now, what mostly, of course, religious right, mostly printed, but also some very considerable manuscripts. So a by the end of colonial period, we have a 1000s of works, and most of them are actually what a you know, earlier scholars like James Lockhart called mundane literature, which means that they’re mostly petitions, wills, meaning testaments, other a documents that tell us a lot about indigenous people’s lives in the period. So of course, you know, nobody has done all these 1000s of Testaments. And I think, and this is, you know, something that I think, for people interested in literature and thinking about possible comparisons, you know, one of them, of course, would be a certain areas of Greek and Roman literature, in the sense that you have a lot of different production, but then there you have a lot of gaps, right? And things that can be reconstructed only from later a translations, right? And you know, if you think about people like Shakespeare and Cervantes, there are some really weighty texts, like something called the Mexican songs, Cantares Mexicanos, which feature very difficult language. They’re mostly songs that were composed in the last quarter the 16th century, and they go back to the past, the ancient past. They’re very lyrical. They’re very sometimes hard to understand. We have a song that’s probably the most famous of it, called the Chalcacihuacuicatl, the Song of the Women of Chalco, which features warriors from a polity that was defeated by the Aztecs that come back and actually dress up as women and taunt in sexual ways and in very mocking ways the very emperor who has just conquered them. So you have lots of different works that, you know, and I guess I’m thinking about, you know, Golden Age literature, because they’re, you know, roughly equivalent. We also have translations of Calderon de la Barca, for instance, which is another that has been worked on. People know about it. So it’s very vibrant. There’s lots of diversities. And in terms of diversity, in terms of what exists, and a I think there’s a lot of a lot of works to to to get to understand better and what is really exciting. For instance, I’m working with somebody called Abelardo de la Cruz, who’s a native speaker of now, what comes from Veracruz in Mexico, got his PhD in anthropology. And so now we’re dealing with generations of indigenous scholars that are coming back. And you know, some of them are interested in history, some of the religions, some of them are writers, some of them published fiction and poetry. So you part of the work, I think that unites people who are interested in digital in indigenous intellectuals is like goes from the 16th century to present. There’s lots of convergences, right? It’s not just about the ancient Aztecs, but it’s also about how lots of different indigenous communities thrive the not only physically, but also intellectually, through colonial times, and how they continue to thrive in spite of, you know, post colonial legacies.

Will Bachman  24:50
Tell us something about the Zapotec conception of time. And I know you just, you just told me you wrote a. Whole book on it. But what are, you know, two or three things about the Zapotec conception of time that you think it would be would be interesting to share?

David Tavárez  25:10
Oh, well, very quickly a so you have a this calendar, this count of 260, days, each of which have a particular meaning. And then when the 260 day count ends, it continues again with day one. So it’s eternal, but at the same time. And this is something that other people in Mesoamerica did. The Zapotecs, whose work I study, were very keen on trying to talk about a time space continuum in the sense that they’re talking about time and space at the same time, because every day that pass was a day that had some sort of divinatory meaning, but also was a day that moved you to particular region up or down the cosmos. And they had this notion of the cosmos as having three main domains, sky, earth and Underworld. But then there were other domains that were beyond underworld, that were had to do with ancestral time, with how time had been founded, that had their own lords and rulers. So for them, time is really almost like the way in which we may think about Earth and the cosmos, right? This very root in notions of geography and cosmology as they understood it, right? Because they talk as you go up and down every day. You also come across trees, come across ravines, gullies, mountains, so you’re moving and climbing through time, right? And it’s it affects everyone, right? So everyone is kind of taken on this eternal journey through space and time, and this is what actually allows you to communicate with ancestors. Because, of course, ancestors are located in certain parts of this time space continue, right? So I guess, you know, I’m of course not going to claim that they, you know, had a notion of the time space continuum that dates back for us to Einstein and to quantum physics, right? But they had a sense that time and space were two domains that were very much interdigitated, very much close to each other, and to some degree, and this is, I guess, the larger philosophical take undistinguishable from each other,

Will Bachman  27:32
amazing. I’d love to turn back to college and hear if there are any courses or professors that have continued to resonate with you, maybe also touch a bit on you know, what you did in ves and how that’s played a role?

David Tavárez  27:49
Yep, sure. I mean, I at Harvard had the the opportunity of working with Miklos dancho, the Hungarian director, a who was hired by vs to teach advanced film courses. I did a student film as I say, almost went to film school at NYU, then decided to what I’m doing. But I you know, still, there are some colleagues of mine, former vs students like Laura Colella, Bill Brown, who have continued to in this kind of adventurous path, right in terms of doing experimental film. And of course, there’s Darren Aronofsky, who has not done that starting in the hallway direction, which I got to know briefly, also a vs. And of course, for those of you who know about it, you know that vs, for the most part, focus on the experimental, the artistic. So people who are going to go to Hollywood didn’t necessarily, you know, study vs study film at the Harvard, but that was, that was a great formative part, right? In terms of anthropology, I one of my main mentors was Rosemary Joyce a Mayan is who then she was on this five, seven year positions at Harvard that are infamous for not giving you tenure. So she ended up at Berkeley. She became, you know, a great, well recognized archaeologist at UC Berkeley. I kept in touch with her over the years. She blurbed my Rethinking Zapotec Time book. So it’s great to sometimes have those connections. John Womack, historian of Latin America, was there. I took classes with him a and he’s one of the, you know, kind of great historians of revolutionary Mexico whose work everyone knows, there was an exchange with MIT. So I got to take classes with Noam Chomsky (at MIT). So I enjoyed that it was introduction to linguistic theory and advanced label, which was more about philosophy, right and language philosophy. I. Uh, thinking about what language is as a faculty. And then, of course, him being chumps, he had a reaction from everyone, right, from, you know, Quine to a, basically, you know, any, any of the major philosophers of language, or people who work with language. But that was very enjoyable, too. And let me think of what else so those people you know, really, I think, to some degree, informed as a scholar, I have to say that I never took any classes with somebody that I should have taken classes there Stanley Tambiah, very well known anthropology, anthropologist of Southeast Asia who worked on religion and ritual. And you know, well, you know, remember great class also with Steven J Gould, for instance. I never, never, for whatever reason, end up taking class with Tambiah, which I regret to this day, whereas my wife actually did a she is also a class of 92 graduate. She studied history. She’s now after careers in a finance and corporate writing and academia. She’s now the director and field office for our state senator, Michelle Hinchey. So a that’s, you know, again, something that I I should mention, because, of course, some of us meet or a better halves at Harvard as a result of Harvard connections. And for us, it started as undergraduates and basically been more or less together ever since we got married, the you know, five years after graduation. But we’re, you know, have a 14 year old daughter, and, you know, we see friends, of course, from our common circle friends. But that’s also another thing that I guess you know, binds me to to the Harvard experience.

Will Bachman  32:03
That’s wonderful. Congratulations. And what is the name of your wife? I’d love to have her on the show. Oh, Elizabeth, Elizabeth

David Tavárez  32:10
nay, Weinberg, Elizabeth Tavares. So you might find her by Weinberg, but now she goes by Elizabeth W Tavarez, also class of 92.

Will Bachman  32:20
Class of 92. Alright? Hello. Elizabeth. I’m curious your training as a filmmaker, to what degree has that shaped your approach to the anthropology that you do, even if you’re not making films, has it somehow given you a more visual perspective or different kind of storytelling perspective, or I’m curious if that has shaped your approach in some way? Yeah, well,

David Tavárez  33:01
I think is on that in the sense that I never, like I work with ritual specialists. I have, you know, dozens and dozens of hours of interviews and the practice that they do. I never, because I’ve been focused on text so much, I really haven’t had time to work in a documentary, something that I would like to I think it comes out in in different ways, and primarily in terms of, like, thinking about how you can place students in the past in terms of thinking about certain, you know, movies, certain creations that allow you to do that, right? So, I mean, Jan, she is, of course, known for both psychological and historical dramas. But, you know, I definitely, you know, I guess one of the ways of that has influenced me. It’s like thinking, Well, you know, let’s see Aguirre, the Wrath of the God, by Herzog, right. Let’s see the mission. Let’s see a Strawberry and Chocolate, a great film about a gay people and belonging in Cuba, by the great, late director Tomas Guitiérrez Alea, just thinking about the fact that I often have to introduce students and audiences to worlds that are seem very remote. There’s obviously lots of ways of approaching that a through different experimental means. You know, for instance, I just wrote for the American Historical Review, a review of a comic book about the conquest of Mexico, which is actually quite, quite interesting, right? But there’s lots of interesting work being done, like there’s this, you know, Native American. You. A artist, a visual artist called Skwenatti that about five, seven years ago, did like different studies about how to go back in the past. And, you know, one of the places that he did was Tenochtitlan, you know, the Aztec capital for the conquest and got into human sacrifice, but from a definitely tongue in cheek, even kind of ironic perspective. So there’s lots of things that you can do, I think, to you know, work with film and the visual arts and do the kind of things that I do.

Will Bachman  35:36
Wow. What incredible world. David, for listeners that want to find out more about your writings, get some links where, where would you point them online?

David Tavárez  35:47
Yeah, I’ll share that with you too. But, I mean, I have a site at Vassar. They can look me up@vassar.edu have a site with the Guggenheim Foundation that describes, you know, my fellowship in the work that I did a I published with Stanford University Press and University of Texas press and other presses. So you can find me there. You can find links also through my a personal website, which is vassar.edu A and you know, there’s other sites I mentioned in passing, because a lot of academics use it, they’re not necessarily the most reputable sites, because they try to monetize your work, but they’re out there. So, you know, people will find you in academia.edu, or  researchgate.com, but if you’re also going to, you know, look for academics talking about stuff that they really like. There’s actually a perfect academic Twitter. I’m on Twitter and X. I mean, I keep on calling it Twitter on x, and there’s a nice community, mostly, I think, devoted to a young and mid career academics sharing ideas, sharing their publication. So I’m on x as well, and for those over 50, I’m on Facebook. But