A sophisticated, state-of-the-art study of the remaking of Christianity by indigenous societies, Words and Worlds Turned Around reveals the manifold transformations of Christian discourses in the colonial Americas. The book surveys how Christian messages were rendered in indigenous languages; explores what was added, transformed, or glossed over; and ends with an epilogue about contemporary Nahuatl Christianities.

In eleven case studies drawn from eight Amerindian languages—Nahuatl, Northern and Valley Zapotec, Quechua, Yucatec Maya, K'iche' Maya, Q'eqchi' Maya, and Tupi—the authors address Christian texts and traditions that were repeatedly changed through translation—a process of “turning around” as conveyed in Classical Nahuatl. Through an examination of how Christian terms and practices were made, remade, and negotiated by both missionaries and native authors and audiences, the volume shows the conversion of indigenous peoples as an ongoing process influenced by what native societies sought, understood, or accepted.

The volume features a rapprochement of methodologies and assumptions employed in history, anthropology, and religion and combines the acuity of of methodologies drawn from philology and historical linguistics with the contextualizing force of the ethnohistory and social history of Spanish and Portuguese America.

Contributors: Claudia Brosseder, Louise M. Burkhart, Mark Christensen, John F. Chuchiak IV, Abelardo de la Cruz, Gregory Haimovich, Kittiya Lee, Ben Leeming, Julia Madajczak, Justyna Olko, Frauke Sachse, Garry Sparks

David Tavárez, a professor of anthropology at Vassar College, is the author of Rethinking Zapotec Time Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico and The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico, and a coauthor of two volumes, Painted Words, and Chimalpahin’s Conquest. He has also published more than sixty peer-reviewed articles and chapters on Latin American history, linguistic anthropology, and Mesoamerican studies. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, his research has also been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the John Carter Brown Library.