Kelly McDonough - Indigenous Science & Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them

Speaker

Kelly McDonough, University of Texas at Austin

Title

Indigenous Science & Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them

Abstract

This book talk draws from Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them (University of Arizona Press, 2024), which argues that Nahuas, native speakers of Nahuatl (common language of the Aztec Empire and more than 2 million people today), have long been rigorous observers and problem-solvers engaged with the world around them, despite persistent framings of Indigenous knowledge as static, mystical, or outside the bounds of science. Drawing on archival sources in Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin alongside interviews with contemporary Nahua scholars, artists, and farmers, the talk traces Nahua science and technology across case studies including astrological and natural philosophy in the Florentine Codex, health and healing in the 1577 Geographic Surveys, sophisticated water management, adoption and adaptation of alphabetic writing, and narrative cartographies. Pairing colonial-era analysis with present-day voices, it considers how Nahua epistemology has shaped, and continues to shape, environmental knowledge, communication, and cultural survival from the sixteenth century to today.

Biography

Professor McDonough's research centers primarily on the identification and analysis of how Nahuas in Mexico produce, record, and disseminate knowledges. This broad research goal encompasses theories and methods of multiple disciplines and fields including Colonial Literary and Cultural Studies; Critical Indigenous Studies; ​Ethnohistory (Nahuatl Studies); Science and Technology Studies; and Digital Humanities. In her first book,The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico, she presented case studies drawn from the past 500 years to show various forms of Nahua intellectual production, systematically debunking the erroneous racialized discourse that refused to see Nahuas as intellectuals. In her second book, Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World around Them (2024), she  continued her work in Nahua intellectual history, addressing how Nahuas have explored, understood, and explained the world around them, in pre-invasion, colonial, and contemporary time periods. In this book, she fucuses on Nahua theoretical and practical inquiry related to the environment, as well as the dynamic systems and networks in which Nahuas create, build upon, and share knowledges, practices, tools, and objects to meet social, political, and economic needs. Attention to these overlooked/obscured knowledges provide a better understanding of Nahua culture past and present, as well as the entangled local and global histories in which they were, and are, vital actors. She has also recently been involved in two collaborative digital humanities projects: the digitization of the “Fondo Real de Cholula” judicial archive in Mexico and, along with Dr. Albert Palacios (LLILAS-Benson), Dr. Patricia Murrieta-Flores (Lancaster University, UK), and Dr. Javier Pereda (Liverpool John Moores University, UK), as Co-PI for the "Unlocking the Colonial Archive: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Indigenous and Spanish American Historical Collections" project.  

Cost: FREE

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