puristlove

I recently planted some Colobrina <sp?> seeds which I had been in possession of for over three years. There were five seeds, three germinated, one survived to become a very healthy seedling. This was with no special conditions at all. Just regular potting soil, daily water, and Southern US sunshine.

I have access to Project Muse. First, the paragraph where the plant in question is mentioned: European mannerist "hybridity" was transformed into "mestizaje" in the hands of the Indians who paired pagan centaurs and sibyls with deities of their own. Behind the frescos of the Casa del Dean in Puebla, for example, lie grotesque designs that promiscuously blend pagan and Indian iconographies. One design, for example, brings Ocyroe, a female centaur who, according to Ovid, foretold the future glories of her father Chiron, together with ozomatli, a monkey Nahua deity and a sacred calendrical sign. In the grotesque art of the Casa del Dean, Ocyroe pulls down branches of the local hallucinogenic plants poyomatli (Quararibea funebris) and ololiuhqui (Turbina corymbosa) for ozomatli's consumption. In the foliage, animals, and mythical creatures of the grotesque at the Casa del Dean there are subsumed at least three narratives: a Roman pagan myth of prophesy, a Renaissance Catholic allegory of virtues and vices, and a Nahua plot of ritual intoxication by the divinity. These three narratives cannot and should not be dissociated for purposes of identity analysis. The grotesque in the Puebla fresco is an entirely new mestizo product, different from all the traditions that went into its making. Severing the Nahua narrative to find the authentic, submerged Indian voices distorts the meaning of the Puebla frescoes. And, below the article in its entirety: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 2002 The Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. CR: The New Centennial Review 2.1 (2002) 267-276 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Access provided by Middle Tennessee State University [Access article in PDF] Book Review Renaissance Mess(tizaje): What Mexican Indians Did to Titian and Ovid Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra SUNY-Buffalo/Charles Warren Center, Harvard University -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- La pensée métisse. By Serge Gruzinski. Paris: Fayard, 1999 What do modern filmmakers and artists have to contribute methodologically to the well-worn subject of the "conquest" and "discovery" of the New World? What could a study of Mexican sixteenth-century frescos by a French historian possibly have to add to current debates on "multiculturalism," cultural studies, and identity politics in the United States? La pensée métisse is Serge Gruzinski's most recent attempt to study the process of occidentalisation that took place within the indigenous communities of Central Mexico after the Conquest, particularly in the sixteenth-century. Gruzinski has made a name for himself by exploring the changes brought about by the Conquest to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, particularly changes overlooked by a scholarship long fixated on chronicling economic and demographic transformations. His work has not sought to identify the "Indian traditions" that through dogged resistance survived Europe's assault, "traditions" purportedly waiting for the modern anthropologist and enthnohistorian to make them visible. Unlike many U.S., European, and Latin American scholars who approach the past of the indigenous peoples of the Americas looking for the "non-Western" voices of [End Page 267] subalterns buried amidst "Western" records of domination, Gruzinski has throughout his career looked for the "West" in the "Other." Gruzinski's first book, Les Hommes-dieux du Mexique (1985), for example, traced the transformation of a particular form of Mesoamerican religious sensibility, the ixiptla, that assumed that the sacred seized individuals, making them divine, a view of the embodiment of the sacred in the world not to be confused with pagan avatars or Judeo-Christian incarnations. Gruzinski identified many man-gods who appeared in Central Mexico between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries to challenge the Catholic clergy. Although written within the paradigm of resistance studies, the book showed in exquisite detail the changing nature of the discourses wielded by these challengers, who as the colonial period unfolded came to share with their clerical enemies similar mental landscapes and religious languages. 1 In La Colonisation de l'imaginaire (1988), Gruzinski chronicled other aspects of the process of massive transculturation witnessed in colonial Mexico, particularly in the sixteenth century. 2 His focus this time was the hundreds of "painted" codices to which scholars have usually turned to document the prehispanic past. With the exception of a handful, most of these codices, however, are not prehispanic but colonial, drawn at the request of Spanish patrons, litigants in colonial courts, and self-aggrandizing indigenous elites determined to carve out for themselves a niche in the new colonial polity. Through a skillful and creative handling of these sources, Gruzinski demonstrated that the incorporation of alphabetical writing to the store of ideographic and pictographic scripts of Central Mexico was a negotiated, convoluted, and, most important, richly creative process. As new genres and new scripts arrived, new conceptions of the self, time, and space came into being. The arrival of "Western" forms of representation of sounds, images, space (maps), and time (historical narratives) suddenly collided with those that had been available, and the indigenous peoples of Mexico came away transformed forever. Gruzinski's L'Amérique de la Conquête peinte par les Indies du Mexique (1991) offered a synthesis of the same themes through a stunning visual compilation of many of these codices. 3 Gruzinski has maintained unabated his emphasis on illustrated colonial documents and on chronicling processes of cultural transformation. In La [End Page 268] Guerre des images de Christophe Colomb à Blade Runner, 1492-2019 (1990), he studied the indigenous appropriation of colonial Christian religious iconography. 4 In L'Aigle et la Sibylle (1994), Gruzinski turned to a long overlooked genre of colonial images, namely, the frescos decorating the walls of dozens of sixteenth-century Mexican clerical buildings, some 300,000 square meters in all. 5 Given their extent, beauty, and complexity it is puzzling that up until Gruzinski, these frescos had scarcely been noticed by the scholarly community, even of Mexico. L'Aigle et la Sybille was Gruzinski's first sustained scholarly reflection of the importance these frescos held for understanding the occidentalisation of sixteenth-century indigenous religious and aesthetic sensibilities. Like L'Amerique de la Conquete, the book itself is a work of art, a tribute to the complexity and beauty of the images produced during the Renaissance in Mexico. It is a stunning visual selection, particularly of frescos at the Augustinian convents of Actopan and Ixmiquilpan (both in the state of Hidalgo), the Franciscan monastery of Tecamachalco (state of Puebla), and the house of the dean of the cathedral chapter of the city of Puebla (La Casa del Dean). A handful of images from the Florentine Codex, one indigenous map from the Relación geográfica de Cholula (1581), a song from a compilation of Cantares Mexicanos (chants performed during ritual dances in the early colonial period), and the frescos studied in L'Aigle et la Sybille are the material upon which Gruzinski builds his La pensée métisse, a book deliberately written to rattle conventions and stereotypes and to challenge the whole industry of "cultural studies" as understood in some circles. Although never explicitly stated, it is plausible to argue that the principal target of Gruzinki's critique is the discipline of Mesoamerican ethnohistory as is currently practiced in the United States. This discipline has lately lavished attention on thousands of wills, town council minutes, religious documents, and court records written in alphabetical scripts in indigenous languages by the natives themselves. Although the editing, glossing, and interpretation of these documents is a most welcome development, it has paradoxically led to an interpretation of the colonial period that considers Spanish and Indians as two self-centered communities that, due to persistent cultural misunderstandings, developed largely in isolation. James [End Page 269] Lockhart, a distinguished colonial historian at UCLA, and his many disciples have deployed these indigenous colonial documents to argue that, notwithstanding important, obvious demographic shifts, the impact of the Conquest on sixteenth-century indigenous communities remained negligible. The deepest cultural behavior of these communities as revealed in the structure of their language, land-holding patterns, household settings, and corporate identities changed very slowly, and in the sixteenth century it was modified only slightly. 6 Moreover, ethnohistorians who privilege indigenous sources express some doubt that the Indians might have perceived the Conquest as an earth-shattering event. The historical narratives of certain colonial Maya polities, for example, reveal that age-old invasions by local ethnic rivals rather than the arrival of the Europeans were the episodes around which colonial Mayan historical memories and periodizations were in fact organized. 7 The Eurocentric narratives that have traditionally cast the Spaniards as gods in the eyes of the Indians have come tumbling down; so too have approaches that do not treat Indians and Spaniards as two separate communities. By seeking to reconstruct obliterated "Indian" voices long buried by a scholarship that has privileged "European" sources, these historians overlook stories of irreversible transformation, mongrelization, hybridity, and mestizaje. Gruzinski sees this tendency to study the Indians and Spaniards (and blacks) as separate groups as unfortunate, a fashion that is becoming dominant largely due to the global power of the "American empire," whose universities and presses command undue respect. At the core of this tendency lies the new discipline of cultural studies, which, for all its talk of "hybridities," has perversely contributed to reifying and essentializing "identities." 8 According to Gruzinski, cultural studies and its discursive entourage of multiculturalism and "political correctness" have merely recycled old-fashioned formulas first put in circulation by "third-world" ideologues (11). Moreover, multiculturalism has contributed to worsening the American and European tendency to exoticise Latin America. By seeking to reconstruct the "Indianness" of the Indian population, the submerged voices of the subaltern drowned by the dominant European discourse, ethnohistorians have made alterity and difference their focus. [End Page 270] The United States seems to be a society condemned to oscillate between "universalist" and "pluralist" conceptions of the polity, without the tools to understand processes of mongrelization. On the one hand, universalists, as David Hollinger has suggested, have traditionally held the Anglo-Protestant experience as the norm. Through acculturating and assimilationist schemes, they have sought to do away with diversity that purportedly threatens the civic unity of the "nation." Although they have encouraged the cultural transformation of minority religious and ethnic groups, universalists look askance at the novelties and disorder that seem to come along with processes of mestizaje. Minorities should simply embrace mainstream values wholesale to maintain intact the alleged original "Western" values of the nation. On the other hand, pluralists have understood "America" as a composite of culturally diverse groups, each distinct and separate. If in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, pluralists understood diversity in religious terms (Catholic-Jewish-Protestant), now they do so in ethno-racial ones. For them whites, blacks, Hispanics, Indians, and Asians make up the nation, a tapestry of separate and distinct ethno-racial identities. Currently pluralists seem to have won the debate. 9 The shift from "species" to "ethnos," the embrace of multicultural diversity in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, has paradoxically contributed to the rigidification of identities. Multiculturalism just as much as Anglo-universalism has a very difficult time grappling with hybridities, that is, with the experience of groups and individuals who cannot be pigeonholed neatly into any of the categories of the ethno-racial pentagon. It is not surprising that with the turn to multiculturalism, U.S. historians have set out to find these groups with their reified identities in the Latin American past. But why have historians and anthropologists, independently of whether they subscribe to the tenets of political correctness and multiculturalism, failed to see the Indians of Mexico, for example, as active participants in the arts and sciences of the Renaissance? For Gruzinski the problem lies in the tools of analysis of these two disciplines. Social phenomena characterized by hybridity and mestizaje are rendered invisible by such categories as "culture," "identity," and "causation." Culture conveys wholeness, identity finality, and causation orderly direction. Processes of mestizaje, however, [End Page 271] are characterized by incompleteness, fluidity, and unpredictability. 10 So according to Gruzinski, scholars should turn to other disciplines for inspiration. Gruzinski, for example, makes good use of chaos theory, equating the study of mestizaje to the analysis of cloud formations. Art is another field from which Gruzinski draws insights. La pensée métisse is full of references to film makers, photographers, and writers whose narratives either challenge stereotypes and expectations or offer models on how to represent hybridity and mestizaje (which Gruzinski considers two separate and distinct analytical categories: hybridity as the disorderly mixture of conventions held by a group and mestizaje as disorder elicited by contact across group boundaries). Mario de Andrade (1893-1945), the founder of the modernist movement in Brazil, provides Gruzinski with the tools to process his own personal experience at Algodonal, a village on the banks of the Amazon. "Sou um tupi tangendo un alaúde" ("I am [an Indian] Tupi playing a lute"), Andrade once remarked in a poem. Like Andrade, who managed to hold two (or more) "identities" at once without suffering from schizophrenia, the inhabitants of isolated Algodonal dwell in several worlds, comfortably mixing the practices of the Amazonian Indians (fishing, hunting) with those of formerly enslaved Africans (performing capoiera, a form of martial arts) while at the same time watching soap operas during the evening on their satellite-TVs. The exoticising expectations of outsiders are tested when exposed to the mestizo world of Algodonal. To interpret sixteenth-century Mexican frescos, Gruzinski turns to the films of the British director Peter Greenaway. Prospero's Books (1991), Greenaway's adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest, allows Gruzinski to see transparently the hybrid nature of the Renaissance and to reflect on the importance of the mannerist decorative arts and of the emblematic tradition to sixteenth-century Mexico. The grotesque was the trademark of Renaissance Mannerism, blending carelessly foliage, flowers, fruits, animals, and persons in bizarre designs. Renaissance Mannerism was also characterized by the gluttonous and open-ended exegesis of classical texts. The allegorical, emblematic reading of Ovid's Metamorphosis, in which pagan deities were transformed into allegories for Christian virtues, was typical of this approach. The openness to hybridity of the Renaissance kept [End Page 272] many manifestations of Indian paganism from going underground and even allowed them to be flaunted inside Christian temples. European mannerist "hybridity" was transformed into "mestizaje" in the hands of the Indians who paired pagan centaurs and sibyls with deities of their own. Behind the frescos of the Casa del Dean in Puebla, for example, lie grotesque designs that promiscuously blend pagan and Indian iconographies. One design, for example, brings Ocyroe, a female centaur who, according to Ovid, foretold the future glories of her father Chiron, together with ozomatli, a monkey Nahua deity and a sacred calendrical sign. In the grotesque art of the Casa del Dean, Ocyroe pulls down branches of the local hallucinogenic plants poyomatli (Quararibea funebris) and ololiuhqui (Turbina corymbosa) for ozomatli's consumption. In the foliage, animals, and mythical creatures of the grotesque at the Casa del Dean there are subsumed at least three narratives: a Roman pagan myth of prophesy, a Renaissance Catholic allegory of virtues and vices, and a Nahua plot of ritual intoxication by the divinity. These three narratives cannot and should not be dissociated for purposes of identity analysis. The grotesque in the Puebla fresco is an entirely new mestizo product, different from all the traditions that went into its making. Severing the Nahua narrative to find the authentic, submerged Indian voices distorts the meaning of the Puebla frescoes. Greenway's Pillow Book (1995) allows Gruzinski to think of how the turn from "hybridity" to "mestizaje" should be represented. The film by the British director recounts the life of Nagiko, the daughter of a Japanese calligrapher who uses the bodies of her male lovers as paper. A film of the audio-visual complexity of Pillow Book cannot be easily summarized. It shuttles back and forth in time and space. In the mixture of her calligraphies and lovers, Nagiko embodies several worlds and languages. Nagiko is as thoroughly mestizo as the film itself, equally at home with "Asian" and "European" conventions and audiences. Gruzinski also finds the films of Wong Kar-wai analytically powerful models of how to represent the phenomena of mestizaje, particularly Kar-wai's Ashes of Time (a Kung-fu action film that draws on the genre of westerns, turning Chinese warriors into Mexican bandits and Texan cowboys) and Happy Together (the story of [End Page 273] Hong-Kong gay émigrés struggling to survive in Buenos Aires, blending in the process traditions and landscapes). The films by Wong Kar-wai are part of a larger trend among Hong Kong artists, whose everyday experience of mestizaje allows them to break aesthetic conventions and explore new territories. An explosion of creative power seems to be behind both the sixteenth-century indigenous painters of Mexican frescos and the art of contemporary Hong Kong filmmakers. In a thesis that resembles the one put forth by Ann Douglas in Terrible Honesty (1995), Gruzinski endows mestizaje with unlimited creative virtues. According to Douglas, New York temporarily witnessed the blurring of ethno-racial identities in the 1920s. Black and white intellectuals came together to construct a distinct collective American intellectual culture, deliberately different from Europe's and whose most remarkable product became the Harlem Renaissance. Mongrelization in Manhattan generated products of extraordinary beauty and originality. 11 Mestizaje did the same for sixteenth-century Mexico as dozens of frescos, codices, maps, and ritual songs subtly altered indigenous and European genres, traditions, and conventions. For Gruzinki mestizaje is to be celebrated. It first began as a phenomenon that affected the indigenous masses of sixteenth-century Mexico; now it is a global occurrence sweeping over the great metropolis of the world, including Paris and Hong Kong. Thus for Gruzinski, the study of sixteenth-century Mexico is not an antiquarian exercise but an activity that should shed abundant light on contemporary predicaments and challenges. Five centuries of ceaseless mongrelization in Latin America have much to teach to contemporary France. Gruzinski finds in sixteenth-century Mexico Indians who are astute readers of Ovid, good disciples of Titian (1490?-1576), and avid consumers of Renaissance grotesquerie because he seeks to shock his audiences (both European and U.S.), so used to thinking of Mexico as a land of poor disenfranchised "non-Western" others. This is an important aspect of Gruzinski's work that should not go unmentioned. In a previous book, Histoire de Mexico (1996), Gruzinski had already sought to shake his French audiences out of their condescending stereotypes. The book is an unconventional history of [End Page 274] the city of Mexico that follows zigzagging periodizations, going back and forth in time. 12 Only a short section is devoted to the prehispanic past of the city, to the history of Tenochtitlan. Another section is devoted to the different processes of mongrelization witnessed in Mexico City. Finally, and more important for the purpose of this review, at least one third of the book recounts the "Western," vibrant intellectual history of the city: its various Mannerist, Baroque, Enlightenment, Victorian, Fin-de-siècle, and Modernist phases. The reader is offered an unambiguous reminder of Mexico City as a world-class center of intellectual innovation: an equal to Vienna in the Baroque, a match to New York and Paris in the 1930s and 40s. Audiences who have only had access to tragic, exoticising narratives of the Mexican past should find Gruzinski's recent new books shocking and refreshing. U.S. students and academics will benefit greatly from approaches that find mestizo Mexico as a place of extraordinary creativity, full of breathtaking Renaissance frescos, beautiful Baroque musical traditions, and outstanding nineteenth-century operas, all of them every bit as "Mexican" as the pyramids of Teotihuacan and subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Teaches history at SUNY-Buffalo. He is the author of How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford 2001). He is currently a fellow at Harvard's Charles Warren Center. Notes 1. Serge Gruzinski, Les Hommes-dieux du Mexique. Pouvoir indien et société coloniale, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions des Archives contemporaines, 1985). It has been translated into English as Man-Gods in the Mexican Highlands: Indian Power and Colonial Society, 1520-1800, translated by Eileen Corrigan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989). 2. Serge Gruzinski, La Colonisation de l'imaginaire. Sociétés indigènes et occidentalisation dans le Mexique espagnol, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). It is also available in English as The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th-18th centuries, translated by Eileen Corrigan (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1993). 3. Serge Gruzinski, L'Amérique de la Conquête peinte par les Indies du Mexique (Paris: Flammarion/Unesco, 1991). It is available in English as Painting the Conquest: Mexican Indians and the European Renaissance, translated by Deke Dusinberre (Paris: Flammarion/Unesco, 1992). 4. Serge Gruzinski, La Guerre des images de Christophe Colomb à Blade Runner, 1492-2019 (Paris: Fayard, 1990). The English translation goes under the title Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492-2019), translated by Heather MacLean (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 5. Serge Gruzinski, L'Aigle et la Sibylle, Fresques indiennes des convents du Mexique (Paris: L'Imprimerie nationale, 1994). 6. James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest. A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992). 7. See, for example, Mathew Restall, Maya Conquistador (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). 8. Paul Gilroy has put forth a similar critique of cultural studies in England for its readiness to identify and pigeonhole a "Black" identity. See his The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 9. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 10. Gruzinski's critique of the concepts of "culture" and "identity" resembles that put forth some years ago by James Clifford in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 11. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). Many thanks to David C. Engerman, who led me to this book. 12. Serge Gruzinski, Histoire de Mexico (Paris: Fayard, 1966).

Beautiful pics. Not to hijack your thread, but I planted some seeds sold to me as Ma Huang about six weeks ago, and what has grown is long and grasslike, in segments that split at the end and then the next segment grows up from between those little splits but there is no branching,and I thought Ma Huang was a shrub, like the plants in your picture. is this just a stage it goes through? I can probably post a pic if necessary.

How does one get to the species pages often referenced? I've searched both the store and the forums pages for a link and been unable to find them

Why are freshly dried leaves not preferrable? Does some sort of change occur in kratom leaves like with heimia and sceletium?

is it lago at all? this lagochillus calculus benth that was talked about a while back, for instance?

As licorice tea has been touted in the past as a "safe" potentiator of mescaline containing cacti (not on this board, but certainly in other places), this information is certainly interesting. A PMA/mescaline mix doesn't sound safe at all, especially if licorice also contains mild maois.

grow well outdoors in cold areas?

During a really bad depressive episode, I found Effexor to be extremely helpful. It worked much more quickly than SSRI's like zoloft and paxil(three days compared to a couple of weeks), with less sexual side effects. I have used sceletium to help moderate mild depression/anxiety and it does work. I find I need to smoke a small dose about twice a day to get steady relief. I've read a number of reports about small doses of salvia used daily to help with depression. Of course, none of this gets to your problem: PTSD, and I don't know a whole lot about treatment of that. But I would assume if the doctor was treating it with an anti-depressant, other drugs that have an anti-depressant/anxiety effect might be of use to you.

anyone ever tried coleus in combination with an MAOI...? Personally, my bet is it is just a psychedelic looking plant, not a psychedylic

if there are literally only a dozen l.i. specimens left, what exactly is the stuff that popped up on the internet about a month ago?

me three, if any of you meet with success please let me know.

It goes at least as far back as Albert Hoffman's LSD: My Problem Child, where he talks about the myth and how it arose out of an incident where someone actually sold strychnine as crystal LSD. Outside of Hoffman's book, this incident has never been confirmed, but the rumor has lived forever.