Academic literature on the topic 'Tarasco Indians'

Resumen La práctica de compartir alimentos en el Michoacán del siglo xvmesoamericano es descrita con amplitud en el documento llamado La Relación de Michoacán, una famosa obra literaria del siglo xviescrita por un fraile franciscano a partir de testimonios de informantes indios, hacia 1540. En ella se describe con riqueza y profusión de detalles cómo los tarascos ofrecían alimentos a sus huéspedes o a sus pares de otros señoríos en todo tipo de reuniones y, con gran énfasis, en los contextos ceremoniales. Es nuestro propósito dar a conocer y analizar algunas de las prácticas recogidas en nuestra fuente documental, referidas expresamente a comidas rituales en las que la comida se comparte. Palabras clave:Michoacán, tarasco, comida ritual, alimento compartido, Nueva España Abstract The practice of sharing food in Michoacán in the Mesoamerican 15thCentury is amply described in the document called La Relación de Michoacán, a famous literary work of the 16thCentury written by a Franciscan monk, based on Indian informants around 1540. In the document there are richly and profusely described details of how the Tarascans offered food to their visitors or equals from other communities in all types of reunions, and with great emphasis on ceremonial context. It is our intention to show and analyze some of the practices recovered from our documental source, with reference expressively to ritual food which is shared. Key words: Michoacán, tarasco, ritual food, shared food, New Spain

This article describes several cases of domestic violence among the Purépechas, Tarascan Indians of Michoacan, noting that the victims were, as usual, the wives, but also their fathers, which is a more uncommon feature. It examines the forms, situations, spaces, and justifications of domestic violence, and the authorities response to these incidents. The article stresses the importance of the changes in the concept of family authority, as well as the unusual independence of women among Purépechas and the consequences of male migration in the late colonial years.

A partir del análisis de dos casos ejemplares y de observaciones de campo en diferentes pueblos purépechas, se argumenta sobre el valor antropológico, las interacciones y usos peculiares del libreto de pastorela. El libreto se relaciona con tres manuscritos antiguos en lengua tarasca, y con los que se utilizan en otras danzas y otros rituales indígenas, donde la palabra escrita es importante –y no solamente la palabra hablada o representada en imágenes, como establecieron los estudios clásicos– para el desenvolvimiento, sentido y alcances del ritual. El corolario es una reflexión sobre el poder de un objeto –el libreto–, para desafiar distinciones binarias: objeto-sujeto, material-inmaterial, y lo que se ha esta­blecido como eficacia, causas o efectos del ritual. Abstract: Based on the analysis of two exemplary cases and on field observations in different Purépecha villages, we examine the anthropological value, interactions and peculiar uses of the Christmas play script scenario. This scenario is related to three ancient manuscripts in Tarascan language, and to those used in other dances and Indian rituals, in which the written word –and not only the spoken word or the word represented in images, as established in classic studies– is important for the development, sense, and significance of the ritual. The corollary is a reflection on the power of an object –script scenario– to challenge binary distinctions: object-subject, material-immaterial, and to prompt us to rethink what has been established as efficacy, causes or effects of the ritual as anthropological problems. Résumé : À partir de cas concrets et d’observations de terrain menées dans différents villages purépechas, cette étude aborde la valeur anthropologique, les interactions et les usages particuliers donnés au livret de pastourelle. Ce dernier est associé à trois anciens manuscrits rédigés en langue tarasque et aux autres textes utilisés dans le cadre de danses et de rituels autochtones où la parole écrite joue un rôle important – contrairement à ce qu’établissent certains classiques, la parole ne se limite pas à l’oralité ou à la représentation en images – dans le déroulement du rituel, pour son sens et sa portée. En corollaire, l’article développe une réflexion sur le pouvoir de l’objet – ici, le livret – pour interroger les distinctions binaires : objet/sujet, matériel/immatériel, et pour repenser en tant que problèmes anthropologiques ce qui avait été pris pour de l’efficacité, les causes ou les effets du rituel.

Abstract Besides the ubiquitous patolli—a race game played on a cruciform gameboard—the Aztecs had obviously a few other board games. Unfortunately their names have not been recorded. We owe to Diego Durán, writing in the last quarter of the 16th century from local sources, some hints of what appears to be a “war game” and a second, different race game that he calls ‘fortuna’. A close examination of some Precolumbian codices shows a rectangular design with a chequered border, together with beans and gamepieces, which has correctly been interpreted as a board game. Many similar diagrams can be seen carved on stone in temples and public places, from Teotihuacan (c. 4th-7th century AD) to late Toltec times (9th-12th century AD). Of this game too we do not know the name. It has tentatively been called quauhpatolli (“eagle- or wooden-patolli”) by Christian Duverger (1978)—although this seems to have been the classic post-conquest Nahuatl name for the game of chess—or “proto-patolli”, and more concretely “rectángulo de cintas” (rectangle of bands) by William Swezey and Bente Bittman (1983). The lack of any representation of this game in all Postcolumbian codices, as painted by Aztec artists commissioned by Spanish scholars interested in the Aztec culture, is clear indication that the game had disappeared before the Spanish conquest, at least in central Mexico. No Aztec site shows any such gameboard. Fortunately this game had survived until the 20th (and 21st!) century but located in the Tarascan country, now the state of Michoacán. It was discovered, unchanged, in a Tarascan (Purepecha) village by Ralph L. Beals and Pedro Carrasco, who published their find in 1944. At that time Beals and Carrasco had no idea the game was attested in early codices and Teotihuacan to Maya and Toltec archaeological sites. In Purepecha the game is called k’uillichi. There is evidence of an evolution that led to a simplification of the game: less tracks, less gamesmen (in fact only one per player, while k’uillichi has four), and less ‘dice’. From a “complex” race game, the new debased version turned to be a simple single-track race game with no strategy at all. It is possible that this process took place in Michoacán. (A few examples of the simplified game were found in some Tarascan villages.) Also it seems the widespread use of the Nahua language, which the Spanish promoted, led to calling the game, and/or its dice, patol. As it was, patol proved to be very appealing and became very popular in the Mexican West, finally reaching the Noroeste, that is, the present North-West of Mexico and Southwest of the United States. This seems to have been a recent trend, since its progress was observed with much detail by missionaries living in close contact with the Indians along what was called the ‘Camino Real’, the long highway that led from western Mexico to what is now New Mexico in the U.S. The Spanish themselves seem to have helped the game in its diffusion, unaware of its presence. It is clearly with the Spaniards that the patol game, sometimes also called quince (fifteen), reached the American Southwest and settled in the Pueblo and the Zuñi countries. It is there that some newcomers, coming from the North or from the Great Plains, and getting in contact with the Pueblos in the 18th century, found the game and took it over. The Kiowas and Kiowa Apaches are noted for their zohn ahl (or tsoñä) game, while the Arapahos call it ne’bäku’thana. A careful examination of zohn ahl shows that it has kept the basic features of an ancient game that came—in Spanish times—from Mexico and may have been popular in Teotihuacan times. Its spread northward—through the Tarascan country—is, hopefully, well documented.

The purpose of this study was to identify the needs of the Purhepecha children, also referred to as Tarascan, and their families living in the Eastern Coachella Valley located in California. A questionaire was developed by the author in order to identify the population's specific needs. Ultimatley, it is with hope that the Purhepecha people's needs will be understood as relevant to their language and culture, and make these needs public for other professionals working with this population.

Social, political, economic, and environmental factors converge in developing countries to stimulate high rates of deforestation. Forest conversion reduces biodiversity, contributes to carbon loading of the atmosphere, alters the global water balance, and degrades the quality of life for rural people. Mexico is the fifth most biologically diverse country in the world and temperate and tropical forests in Mexico are rapidly disappearing with environmental and cultural repercussions for people and ecosystems. This study examines changes in the forest landscape surrounding two communidades indigenas in Michoacan, Mexico over a 15-year period. The research area includes communal forest, pasture, and agricultural land within the adjacent municipal boundaries of two Purepecha Indian communities: Sevina and San Francisco Pichataro. The economies of both villages depend in part on wood products manufacturing with timber harvested in local mixed-pine forests. As a result, forest landscapes surrounding the towns are at risk for potentially rapid land cover change and environmental degradation.

Les trames de soi cherche à expliquer comment, dans le contexte de l’adoption de l’Autonomie Indigène Originaire Paysanne (AIOC), les habitants de Tarabuco, localité des Andes méridionales boliviennes « se trament » entre différents politiques du monde afin de s’approprier une nouvelle catégorie juridique, celle du sujet de droit « Indigène Originaire Paysan ». Ce nouveau sujet est dépositaire du droit à l’autogouvernement, nouveau régime destiné aux populations indigènes ayant été proclamé par la constitution bolivienne de 2010. Afin d’y accéder, les habitants de cette municipalité sont astreints à s’auto-définir en démontrant leur connaissance d’eux-mêmes, de leur histoire et leur culture. Pris en étau par l’injonction d’identification, ces acteurs (syndicat paysan, ayllus et habitants de la ville) sont entrés en conflit pour défendre différentes visions de ce que doit être l’ethos tarabuqueño. Cette ethnographie montre qu’entre les univers de sens de ces individus en conflit, il existe cependant tant de discontinuités que de convergences. Ces dernières se situent dans le partage de significations liées à des pratiques sociales que l’adoption de l’AIOC pousse à redéfinir, à transformer, ou à écarter, en vue de la production d’un « sujet indigène » doté d’une culture et d’une nature objectivables, et ce à l’ère de l’injonction de décolonisation promue par l’avènement de l’Etat Plurinational
In 2010 was approved, in Bolivia, a brand new Constitution giving the right to the indigenous people to self-government according to each nation and indigenous people customs. The right to self-government was incorporated within the framework of the Peasant-Native-Indigenous Autonomy (PNIA). Nevertheless, The municipalities need to respond to the identity and identification criteria proposed by the PNIA in order to have access to a certain number of rights offered by the new dispositive. The Wefts of the Self aim to explain how the inhabitants of a small municipality located in southern Andes, weave themselves between different cosmopolitics in order to internalize a brand new legal category: subject of law “Peasant Native Indigenous”. Indeed, several and strong struggles appeared between different social organizations inside the Tarabuco Municipality, the peasant union, the indigenous communities and the neighbor’s assemblies. These conflicts had interrupted the conversion process. The three different social organizations fight over the values and norms that should regulate the incoming society. However, this fieldwork demonstrate that despite the conflicts the three social organization members share a underlying universe of meaning which the adoption of the PNIA force to redefine, transform or remove in order to produce a “indigenous subject” fitted with objective culture and nature. This phenomenon takes place under the decolonization injunction promoted by the coming Plurinational State. This work will contribute to understand how the State withdrawal in favor of indigenous people, in terms of decentralization of prerogatives, goes along with a normative redeployment through forms of identity categorization and assignment. And, subsequently, how local actors deal with these forms of categorization and assignment in the design of values and norms of their incoming society

Music was the first mass-market industry to be completely restructured by digital technology, and today we can have access to thousands of tracks stored locally on our smartphone and millions of tracks through cloud-based music services. Given the vast quantity of music at our fingertips, we now require novel ways of describing, indexing, searching and interacting with musical content. In this thesis we focus on a technology that opens the door to a wide range of such applications: automatically estimating the pitch sequence of the melody directly from the audio signal of a polyphonic music recording, also referred to as melody extraction. Whilst identifying the pitch of the melody is something human listeners can do quite well, doing this automatically is highly challenging. We present a novel method for melody extraction based on the tracking and characterisation of the pitch contours that form the melodic line of a piece. We show how different contour characteristics can be exploited in combination with auditory streaming cues to identify the melody out of all the pitch content in a music recording using both heuristic and model-based approaches. The performance of our method is assessed in an international evaluation campaign where it is shown to obtain state-of-the-art results. In fact, it achieves the highest mean overall accuracy obtained by any algorithm that has participated in the campaign to date. We demonstrate the applicability of our method both for research and end-user applications by developing systems that exploit the extracted melody pitch sequence for similarity-based music retrieval (version identification and query-by-humming), genre classification, automatic transcription and computational music analysis. The thesis also provides a comprehensive comparative analysis and review of the current state-of-the-art in melody extraction and a first of its kind analysis of melody extraction evaluation methodology.
La industria de la música fue una de las primeras en verse completamente reestructurada por los avances de la tecnología digital, y hoy en día tenemos acceso a miles de canciones almacenadas en nuestros dispositivos móviles y a millones más a través de servicios en la nube. Dada esta inmensa cantidad de música al nuestro alcance, necesitamos nuevas maneras de describir, indexar, buscar e interactuar con el contenido musical. Esta tesis se centra en una tecnología que abre las puertas a nuevas aplicaciones en este área: la extracción automática de la melodía a partir de una grabación musical polifónica. Mientras que identificar la melodía de una pieza es algo que los humanos pueden hacer relativamente bien, hacerlo de forma automática presenta mucha complejidad, ya que requiere combinar conocimiento de procesado de señal, acústica, aprendizaje automático y percepción sonora. Esta tarea se conoce en el ámbito de investigación como “extracción de melodía”, y consiste técnicamente en estimar la secuencia de alturas correspondiente a la melodía predominante de una pieza musical a partir del análisis de la señal de audio. Esta tesis presenta un método innovador para la extracción de la melodía basado en el seguimiento y caracterización de contornos tonales. En la tesis, mostramos cómo se pueden explotar las características de contornos en combinación con reglas basadas en la percepción auditiva, para identificar la melodía a partir de todo el contenido tonal de una grabación, tanto de manera heurística como a través de modelos aprendidos automáticamente. A través de una iniciativa internacional de evaluación comparativa de algoritmos, comprobamos además que el método propuesto obtiene resultados punteros. De hecho, logra la precisión más alta de todos los algoritmos que han participado en la iniciativa hasta la fecha. Además, la tesis demuestra la utilidad de nuestro método en diversas aplicaciones tanto de investigación como para usuarios finales, desarrollando una serie de sistemas que aprovechan la melodía extraída para la búsqueda de música por semejanza (identificación de versiones y búsqueda por tarareo), la clasificación del estilo musical, la transcripción o conversión de audio a partitura, y el análisis musical con métodos computacionales. La tesis también incluye un amplio análisis comparativo del estado de la cuestión en extracción de melodía y el primer análisis crítico existente de la metodología de evaluación de algoritmos de este tipo
La indústria musical va ser una de les primeres a veure's completament reestructurada pels avenços de la tecnologia digital, i avui en dia tenim accés a milers de cançons emmagatzemades als nostres dispositius mòbils i a milions més a través de serveis en xarxa. Al tenir aquesta immensa quantitat de música al nostre abast, necessitem noves maneres de descriure, indexar, buscar i interactuar amb el contingut musical. Aquesta tesi es centra en una tecnologia que obre les portes a noves aplicacions en aquesta àrea: l'extracció automàtica de la melodia a partir d'una gravació musical polifònica. Tot i que identificar la melodia d'una peça és quelcom que els humans podem fer relativament fàcilment, fer-ho de forma automàtica presenta una alta complexitat, ja que requereix combinar coneixement de processament del senyal, acústica, aprenentatge automàtic i percepció sonora. Aquesta tasca es coneix dins de l'àmbit d'investigació com a “extracció de melodia”, i consisteix tècnicament a estimar la seqüència de altures tonals corresponents a la melodia predominant d'una peça musical a partir de l'anàlisi del senyal d'àudio. Aquesta tesi presenta un mètode innovador per a l'extracció de la melodia basat en el seguiment i caracterització de contorns tonals. Per a fer-ho, mostrem com es poden explotar les característiques de contorns combinades amb regles basades en la percepció auditiva per a identificar la melodia a partir de tot el contingut tonal d'una gravació, tant de manera heurística com a través de models apresos automàticament. A més d'això, comprovem a través d'una iniciativa internacional d'avaluació comparativa d'algoritmes que el mètode proposat obté resultats punters. De fet, obté la precisió més alta de tots els algoritmes proposats fins la data d'avui. A demés, la tesi demostra la utilitat del mètode en diverses aplicacions tant d'investigació com per a usuaris finals, desenvolupant una sèrie de sistemes que aprofiten la melodia extreta per a la cerca de música per semblança (identificació de versions i cerca per taral•larà), la classificació de l'estil musical, la transcripció o conversió d'àudio a partitura, i l'anàlisi musical amb mètodes computacionals. La tesi també inclou una àmplia anàlisi comparativa de l'estat de l'art en extracció de melodia i la primera anàlisi crítica existent de la metodologia d'avaluació d'algoritmes d'aquesta mena.

El tema de este trabajo es el análisis e interpretación etimológica de los nombres de los dioses tarascos registrados en un documento del siglo xvi. La ausencia casi total de información sobre los atributos, funciones o características de la mayoría de los dioses de la cultura tarasca da una importancia particular al análisis lingüístico como base para la interpretación de la religión registrada en la Relación de las ceremonias y ritos y población y gobierno de los indios de la provincia de Michoacán en adelante Relación de Michoacán—, obra cuya autoría se ha asignado a fray Gerónimo de Alcalá y en la que se compila y traduce la investigación llevada a cabo sobre «que hera la vida que tenian en su ynfidilidad que hera su creencia quales heran sus costumbres y su governagion de donde vinieron».

Urban spaces are negotiated by women living with mental disorders in a variety of ways. Often, this population lives on the fringes of the city, invisible, rarely occupying mainstream spaces. Reintegration of women with mental disorders is a long and arduous process. In India, women living with mental disorders experience long-term institutionalization and abandonment by the family. They are often admitted to the hospital in their late 20s/early 30s and despite becoming asymptomatic are unable to get out of the institution given the absence of their family. As a result, they grow old in the institution, with no skills to fend for themselves, no roof above their head, and no identity beyond ‘madness’. This chapter describes Tarasha, a community-based project working with women surviving mental disorders. Tarasha links shelter, livelihoods, and psycho-social issues to facilitate women’s recovery and reintegration, negotiating urban spaces in order to reduce stigma and discrimination.

Abstract The four contributors to this Round Table present quite different perspectives on the question of how to engage philosophically with issues relating to musical interpretation. Peter Kivy, a philosopher in the analytical tradition, encapsulates briefly some arguments he has made at greater length elsewhere, suggesting that semantic interpretations of non-texted instrumental music are ill-founded. In this forum, he seeks to show how these arguments may be used to refute the interpretative enterprise of some ‘New Musicologists’. Ruth Katz draws both on her experience of a German hermeneutic tradition in interpretation and on her knowledge of Nelson Goodman’s theory of language in order to defend the idea that some musical content may be established by the traditions of a community, rather than encoded in (and extracted from) notational forms. She is implicitly more sympathetic towards some attributions of ‘meaning’ to music than Kivy, although she emphasizes the need to establish the criteria by which judgments of content are made. Eero Tarasti comes from a tradition in French structuralist semiotics strongly influenced by the theories of Algirdas Greimas. He has formerly been committed to a view which reads semantic content from musical structure, without extensive reference either to the historical context of composition or to the subjective position of an interpreter, but in this paper he modifies his position in response to his recent readings in existentialist philosophy. Finally, Lewis Rowell, a musicologist and ethnomusicologist with extensive experience in interpreting Indian musical philosophies, considers how established means for forming common musical values may be compromised in contemporary and future music when familiar categories such as ‘composer’, ‘genre’, and ‘work’ are put in question.