This volume offers an illuminating overview of the work of a pioneering
and highly distinguished scholar of early Latin American social and
cultural history and philology. Known for the originality of his
approach and the variety of his research interests, James Lockhart has
gone from studying social history using career pattern methods to an
ethnohistory emphasizing indigenous-language philology, all the while
stressing general interpretation, synthesis, historiography, and the
development of analytical concepts and categories. The present volume
illustrates all these interests and activities within the covers of a
single book; the reader can see not only common threads running through
the individual essays, but also the close relationships between types of
scholarship all too often seen as utterly distinct.
The "old and new" of the subtitle is meant literally; the first piece
was written in 1968, the last in 1998. Some are already well known,
while others have appeared in quite obscure venues. Four of the twelve
chapters are published here for the first time. They elucidate the
reading of texts for social and cultural purposes, expound on aspects of
Nahuatl historical linguistics, discuss the problematic nature of the
concept of resistance in Western Hemisphere culture encounters, and
review the author's experience with the scholarly disciplines, which
involves a certain amount of intellectual autobiography.
The tone of the volume is generally colloquial, for nine chapters
originated as lectures and attempt to interpret for a wider audience the
author's research as represented in his monographic books. Previously
published pieces have been revised or expanded to a greater or lesser
degree. Their subjects include the transition from encomienda to
hacienda, the evolution of social history in Latin American studies, the
economic rationality of Spanish procedures, the changing role of
merchants in Spanish America, the editing of Nahuatl texts, the author's
concept of Double Mistaken Identity, and the process of cultural contact
in three major Latin American areas.
