An Ethnographic Approach to Cultural and Linguistic Contacts in Nahua Pictorial Texts of Colonial Period (and an Application of WRITING Model to a Latin Epigraphic Case Study)

This contribution, to quote a famous statement by Dell Hymes (1971), is theoretical – meaning it is ‘programatic’. This nature emerges from the fact that it has been devised originally in the study of a specific scriptorial tradition (namely, Aztec writing), but it strives to deal with general questions, all relevant for the many scripts variously touched upon in this conference – and about almost all of which I have no specific expertise. Therefore, I’m confident that my approach to contact and mixing of writing, in the light of the ethnographic model of analysis introduced in the following pages and based on Hymes’s SPEAKING model, could be fruitfully employed to virtually any written text and script as cultural product. However, I will try to sketch in the last section a tentative application to an “unusual” grassroot epigraphic text in Latin: I hope this exercise will show how the context of situated reading-in-time is a key feature of the very understanding of many (often hybridized) written texts.