Re: Totally OT: Shameless Plug
- From: "t(nospam)kavanagh" <"tkavanag"@(nospam)indiana.edu>
- Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 19:19:59 -0400
Tom McDonald wrote:
t(nospam)kavanagh (nospam) wrote:
Kavanagh, Thomas W.
2006 "Los Comanches: Pieces of an Historical Folkloric Detective Story,"
Pt 1. New Mexico Historical Review, 1-37.
1. When will it be available?
Hard copy now; unfortunately not online.
2. Can you give us a little somthin' somthin', a taste of the story?
"The New Mexican folk drama Los Comanches memorializes a historic
confrontation between the Comanches and the New Mexican Spaniards. Or
does it? Ever since the text was published in 1907, researchers have
dated the folk drama Los Comanches to the eighteenth century. However,
scholars have also acknowledged that the history associated with the
play is "somewhat confused." This essay is an attempt to untangle some
of that confusion.
To unravel this confusion, one must be a detective, seeking the
earliest documentary sources to answer the basic questions: Who knew
what and when did they know it? Who had the story wrong? Who are the
usual suspects?
Part 1 of this essay will trace the historical growth of some of those
confused threads. The structure is chronological, not in the sense of
establishing the sequence of the original historical events, but,
rather, in the sense of establishing the sequence of knowledge and
publication ?the history of the history. The basic question centers on
how authors of documents relating to the history gained knowledge of the
events they recorded. Was the information first hand? If not, where did
the author get it? In the absence of citations, can lines of influence
from one source to another be established?
A more textual analysis of the play itself is the focus of part 2. The
central question in part 2 is whether there might be an entirely
different story behind Los Comanches? Although scholars have claimed
that the play was composed soon after the events it portrays and that it
was intended as a dramatization of eighteenth-century Comanche?New
Mexican relations, this claim is more often asserted than demonstrated.
Focusing on a few overlooked details of the text, part 2 will suggest
two conclusions. First, these details suggest a later time frame for the
composition of the Los Comanches text--first decade of the 19th century.
Second, textual details, along with evidence of the probable author of
the original play, indicate that the original context of the play was
not the localized eighteenth-century relations between Comanches and New
Mexicans in their far corner of the Spanish empire, but that the context
of the play addressed much greater threats to Spanish sovereignty and
authority at home in Iberia."
Like I said. Totally off-topic in an archaeology ng.
.
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