Europe and America in Contact: Revising and Reversing a History of Indigenous Cultural Disempowerment

The talk focuses on a project funded by the European Research Council and carried out by interdisciplinary teams based at the University of Warsaw and the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas (IDIEZ) in Mexico. By studying change in both language and culture, the ethnohistorian Dr. Justyna Olko (University of Warsaw) and the philologist Dr. John Sullivan (IDIEZ) aim to reconstruct and understand the exact trajectories, mechanisms and implications of cross-cultural contact and transfers in the Nahua world. As they work simultaneously with modern and older Nahuatl, the major innovation they propose is to view the process of cross-cultural communication in its full historical depth, through the colonial and postcolonial eras up to the present day.

Introduction: Prof. Dr. Viola König (Ethnologisches Museum SMB).