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The Moche culture (A.D. 200‑800) has left one of the richest iconographies in the history of ancient Andean civilizations. Due to the lack of written sources for the pre‑Hispanic period of Andean South America, the first information about the religious beliefs and rituals of the people from the north coast came from early colonial time. These written sources provide revealing information about the concept of the principal god and even a supreme creator in the Moche pantheon, named Ai Apaec in muchic or yunga language. Actually, the understanding of Moche religion is based not only on the historical perspectives but also on information produced during the extensive study of its iconography. Despite the numerous studies about the Moche pantheon of gods and goddesses, the problem of number and identity of the deities still poses innumerable questions and obstacles. This article offers a reassessment of the character of symbolic organization of Moche religion, based on iconographic analysis of the famous portrait vessels (huacos retrato) from the collection of the Larco Museum in Lima, Peru.
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The aim of this paper is to present civil and religious festivals, as well as theatrical representations, performed in the sixteenth‑century New Spain, as examples of the convergence of elements introduced by the Spaniards and those already existing in the indigenous culture. Taking as a starting point a schematic presentation of such activities as dances, song performances, jugglers’ shows, mock battles and evangelization theater, our objective is to signal that due to the presence of certain pre‑Hispanic patrons for all these endeavors it is risky to qualify the indigenous contribution as superficial and limit it to the audiovisual elements. The issue is much more complex and the adoption of the native perspective, apart from that of the Spaniards, may reveal the profundity of the convergence of features proper to the Old and New World and help to unveil the perception and reception of the sixteenth‑century Mexican performances by its native inhabitants.
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The extensive corpus of colonial Nahuatl texts lights on almost every sphere of colonial life and cross‑cultural interactions between the Europeans/Spaniards and the indigenous world. This corpus contains rich language data related to contact‑induced change that reveal a simultaneous, prolonged use of neologisms and loanwords, a widespread “Nahuatlization” of foreign terms as well as adoption of Spanish ideas and cultural stereotypes. The linguistic phenomena discussed in the present paper focus on lexical change, neologization, meaning change, borrowing and the creation of calques. These language innovations reveal the nuances of the complex process of cross‑cultural translation, the receptivity of European influence, the domestication of the new and the survival of traditional language resources.
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This paper shows the results of the research on how Nahuatl words with geographical referents were dealt with in the Diccionario de Autoridades. The study also attempts to assess the degree of integration of these words into eighteenth‑century Spanish and whether they correspond with definitions present in the first academic work.
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The analysis of the pictorial content of the veintena section of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s Primeros Memoriales may lead to new conclusions about the artists and the process of creating these illustrations. Comparing the illustrations with the description of the festivals in the Primeros Memoriales and the Florentine Codex, identification of scenes and persons and their attributes depicted in the illustrations may also shed interesting light on the affiliation of the manuscript, whose provenance is still under discussion.
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In describing the New World, its inhabitants and their cultures, the authors of the chronicles of America embraced a task which could only be fulfilled from the authors’ own cultural viewpoint: in the first place, they could only understand the New World they were exposed to by reference to the world they already knew; on the other hand, in order to attain their communicative goal, these authors had to describe every fact, object or cultural feature by reference to the common knowledge framework shared by them and their eventual readers. This process of cultural contextualization (or cross‑cultural description) decisively determined the emergence, contents and development of the “European” vision of the New World. This paper focuses upon some of the most outstanding features which built up the stereotypical, European image of the American Indians and their culture, claims that the core of this stereotype may be traced back to the most ancient chronicles and the process of cultural contextualization here outlined, and puts forward a methodological approach to analyze the cultural process by which this stereotype arose and developed.
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Upon the discovery and colonization of the Americas, sixteenth‑century Spaniards had to face the process of interpretation of the new reality. To do this, they drew on a specific kind of writing, the chronicles of the Indies, and used specific social imaginary, a way of conceptualizing which comes from Spanish and, more broadly, European cultural traditions. A Hispanic chronicler wrote about the Indians and about himself. The aim of this paper is to analyze one of those texts, the Relación Breve – written by one of the soldiers of Cortés and a Dominican friar, Francisco de Aguilar – in order to define his cultural tradition and his way of addressing the “Other”, an indigenous world. My study shows that the text by Aguilar is a mixture of medieval and Renaissance discourse; the author exposes his judgment about the native inhabitants of the Americas based on his viewpoint of a soldier or of a friar.
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The cultivation and veneration of corn is central to all Mesoamerican cultures. Long before the Spaniards arrived indigenous people worshiped corn and pleaded for each harvest to be as good as the preceding one. Today’s Nahuas consider corn sacred and never permit it to lie on the ground: it must always be protected and sheltered. The Nahuas of Chicontepec, Veracruz continue to dance and pray to the corn deity, Chicomexochitl “Seven Flower”. This paper reveals the continuity of ritual practices and symbolism relating to the worship of maize in Nahua culture from prehispanic times to the present. It is based on the sixteenth‑century written sources, recent anthropological studies, and my own fieldwork associated with the Chicomexochitl ritual.
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Dr. Leopoldo Zea (1912‑2004) was a prominent Mexican philosopher, specialist in Latin America, promoter of the Iberoamerican integration, institution‑maker and ideologist of the independence of the then‑ called “Third World”. This essay reviews his first newspaper articles, from his beginnings in 1933 to the end of the 1950s, where he developed his main concerns and positions with respect to the nacional and international issues of his times.
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The philosopher José Gaos said that in universal history the thought of Spanish language has its place and its historic location is presented with the attitude assumed by Spain to modernity, which makes the thought of the Renaissance and the reform have resulted in the grandeur of colonial thought and has had a creative participation in the Counter. However the thought of decadence and independence was born of contact with modern Renaissance science and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, positivism, krausismo and philosophies that represent the latest reactions against modernity. José Gaos was a great exponent of the philosophical doctrines, so that the best way to present the leading ideas of the methods of work of the Seminar for the Study of Thinking Countries Spanish Language was used to cull the fundamental ideas by the thinkers of Latin America and their assumptions, which are always relevant references to their texts.
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The aim of this article is to discuss the limited applicability of the “standard” post‑colonial method in the analysis of the Brazilian literature and culture. A new, trans‑ colonial paradigm is proposed instead, focusing on emerging idiosyncrasies rather than on the process of critical deconstruction of the European discourses and ideologies. In a comparative perspective confronting the studied case with other situations in the world, the article presents particular circumstances that shaped the trans‑ colonial pattern of development of the Brazilian culture. The factors and phenomena taken into the account are: the proportions of economic and cultural strength between the colony and its metropolis, the dynamics of the identity search that followed the moment of formal independence, the peculiarity related to the predominance of a non‑printed (oral or handwritten) culture and finally the emergence of cultural distinctiveness alien to Eurocentric canons.
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The paper explores the parodic and non parodic image of the collective identity in some exemples of 20th century and contemporary Spanish‑American fiction. From the middle of 19th century to the middle of 20th many essays and novels tended to reinforce the idea of a Latin American citizen rooted in the continental soil and ideologically independent both from the former metropolis and from United States. On the contrary, in the second half of 20th century, when the model of identity shifted from a set of idioscyncrastic and patriotic characteristics to a bunch of heterogeneous attributes, the Spanish American novelist began to include in their fictions an authocritic and ironic attitude towards Latin American cultural myths and stereotypes. The analysis takes into account authors such as Arturo Bryce Echenique, Roberto Bolaño, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Juan Villoro and Yuri Herrera.
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This paper refers to Latin American identity problems. This subject is directlyconnected to the organization of different original ethnic groups inorder to fight for a fair treatment. However, discussing Latin American unityimplies ruling out some historical factors that might divide us. I assert thatonly if we recognize the ruling system of this native peoples, as well as theirinstitutions, we will be able to build a respectful relationship between LatinAmericans.
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The new Latin American economic, political and social conditions as well as the greater weight of migration ininternational context make for the fact that it has become essential for governments to politically and sociallyaddress the issues, as current migration dynamics is increasingly visible. It is necessary that public policies and national, bilateral and multilateral measures are based on the integration between the countries of the region and adjusted to the new Latin American realities. This paper explores migration policies of the Andean Community atthe start of the new millennium. The paper addresses the main agreements and legal instruments thateach of the Andean countries has developed.
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Currently the directions for the development of modern civil procedural law such as optimization, facilitation, forwarding proceedings promoting the increase of the civil procedure efficiency factor are of peculiar importance. Their results are occurrence and functionality of simplified proceedings system designed to facilitate significantly hearing some categories of cases, promotion of their consideration within reasonable time and reduce legal expenses so far as it is possible. The category “simplified proceedings” in the native science of the procedural law is underexamined. A good deal of scientists-processualists were limited to studying summary (in the context of optimization) as a way to improve the civil procedural form, summary proceedings and procedures functioning in terms of the mentioned proceedings, consideration of case in absentia as well as their modification. Among the Ukrainian scientist who studied some aspects of the simplified proceedings are: E. A. Belyanevych, V. I. Bobrik, S. V. Vasilyev, M. V. Verbitska, S. I. Zapara, A. A. Zgama, V. V. Komarov, D. D. Luspenuk, U. V. Navrotska, V. V. Protsenko, T. V. Stepanova, E. A. Talukin, S. Y. Fursa, M. Y. Shtefan others. The problems of the simplified proceedings were studied by the foreign scientists as well, such as: N. Andrews, Y. Y. Grubanon, N. A. Gromoshina, E. P. Kochanenko, J. Kohler, D. I. Krumskiy, E. M. Muradjan, I. V. Reshetnikova, U. Seidel, N. V. Sivak, M. Z. Shvarts, V. V. Yarkov and others. The paper objective is to develop theoretically supported, practically reasonable notion of simplified proceedings in the civil process, and also basing on the notion of simplified proceedings, international experience of the legislative regulation of simplified proceedings, native and foreign doctrine, to distinguish essential features of simplified proceedings in the civil process and to describe them. In the paper we generated the notion of simplified proceedings that shall mean a specific, additional form of consideration and solution of civil cases that is based on the voluntary approach to its use, characterized by the reduced set of procedural rules and ends with rendering a peculiar judicial decision. Moreover, the most common features of summary proceedings are highlighted. Simplified proceedings as a specific form of consideration of dispute regarding civil law and as a special way to optimize legal proceedings is provided with a set of peculiar features that distinguish them among the other proceedings. Therewith, the analyzed features shall be defined as basic, in other words, such features peculiar to the certain kind of proceedings during its development and direct application to the civil procedural law.
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