An interview with Julia Madajczak, author of “Nahua Fasting in a Series of Don’ts: An Interpretation of the Precontact Nezahualiztli Practice”

Julia Madajczak is an assistant professor of history at the University of Warsaw, in Poland. She has participated in and directed numerous research projects regarding the Mexican Nahua language, culture, and history. She edited and coauthored Fragments of the Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Census from the Jagiellonian Library: A Lost Manuscript (Brill, 2021) and coauthored Loans in Colonial and Modern Nahuatl (De Gruyter, 2020). You can read her article “Nahua Fasting in a Series of Don’ts: An Interpretation of the Precontact Nezahualiztli Practice“–which just won this year’s James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize from the Conference on Latin American History—in HAHR 104.3.

Interview by Rebeca Martínez-Tibbles

1. How did you come to research Nahua language, culture, and history?

As a kid, I was a fan of the “Aztecs,” reading and watching everything I could find on Mesoamerican cultures. I went to study archaeology at the University of Warsaw, and one of the first announcements I saw there was about launching the Basic Nahuatl course taught by Justyna Olko. Right away, I put my name on the list, and this is how it started. Ever since completing that course, all I wanted to do was to study the history of the Nahua through their language.

2. Can you elaborate on the methods you used to analyze the Nahua concept of nezahualiztli? What philological, linguistic, and anthropological tools did you employ in this study?

I start many of my research projects with a philological analysis of Nahuatl sources, and the nezahualiztli project was no exception. I gathered all the attestations of the verb zahua and its derivatives that I could find and conducted a contextual analysis of them, dividing my material into “pre-Hispanic” and “Christian” contexts. It was then that I realized that the rituals included in the precontact nezahualiztli form a series, as understood by Danièle Dehouve. She is the author of a method derived from cognitive linguistics that, in my opinion, closely matches the cumulative character of Nahua cultural expression. Dehouve’s method allowed me to see all the components of nezahualiztli in one flash, and when I imagined the person practicing it (naked, dirty, with long, tangled hair, etc.), I realized that this is a dead person, as imagined by the Nahua in their alphabetic texts and graphic codices. I then corroborated this intuition based on my general knowledge of Mesoamerican sources with some insights from classical anthropology (mostly phenomenology and structuralism). In studies like this, which aim to deconstruct a Christianized discourse on certain aspects of Nahua culture, I find it helpful to draw inspiration from theoreticians who have worked on non-European or pre-Christian data.

3. How did the misinterpretation of Nahua rituals using Christian terminology affect the understanding of nezahualiztli over time?

I think it produced two significant effects. Firstly, the friars who were the first to describe nezahualiztli focused on those aspects of this ritual that most resembled their own religious practice: abstinence from eating and sex. They called nezahualiztli “fast” (ayuno in Spanish), and this term overlooked all the other important components of nezahualiztli, such as abstinence from bathing, washing clothes, or interacting with other people. Once the rich and complex series of rituals became reduced to just two aspects that reproduced the Christian practice of fasting, it was easy to assimilate nezahualiztli with fasting in function. Hence, the overwhelming use of the terms “penance” and “mortification” in relation to the abstentions included in nezahualiztli, as witnessed in both historical sources and the works of modern scholars. The entire process demonstrates how the choice of terminology in our writings can either conceal or reveal substantial aspects of the cultures that we are studying. Here, the terms “fasting” and “penance” suggest that the focus of nezahualiztli was a sort of Christian-like penitence for sins or ascesis, whereas, in reality (at least according to my hypothesis), it was a form of entering into contact with gods and the dead before rituals that required the presence of supernatural forces.

4. How do you believe a deeper understanding of nezahualiztli contributes to the broader knowledge of Nahua culture and spirituality, particularly in terms of the relationship between humans and deities?

I will pick up my last thought from my answer to the previous question: the understanding of nezahualiztli allows us to change our perspective on what was crucial for the precontact Nahua. By now, I have completed several works that attempt to peel away the layer of Christian concepts from precontact cultural phenomena. Each time I began by analyzing a concept that seemed to revolve around sin, purification, or penance, and almost every time, I ended up in the realm of communication, exchange, and mediation. I have a growing sense that the Nahua’s most significant concern was to maintain contact with the world of gods and the dead, because this contact was essential for any enterprise (including the preservation of the world) to succeed. My study on nezahualiztli reveals one of the ways in which such contact with the supernatural could be achieved and some of the reasons why it was sought.

5. Is the research in this article part of a larger project? If so, would you mind discussing this project further?

Thank you for this question! The article is part of a recently completed team project titled “Metaphors as a Key to the Pre-Hispanic Nahua Worldview: A Multidisciplinary Approach,” financed by the National Science Center in Poland. The team consisted of me as the director and three amazing Polish scholars: Agnieszka Brylak, Katarzyna Mikulska, and Katarzyna Szoblik. Together, we have conducted several case studies on various aspects of Nahua culture, including ritual bathing, otherworlds, the role and meaning of the ocean, selected gods and supernatural beings, and, of course, nezahualiztli. Some of our texts have already been published, and the PDFs or metadata are available on our academic social media platforms. I believe the focus on conceptual metaphors and the extensive use of cognitive methods has yielded results that potentially alter our understanding of both Nahua beliefs and the ways we tend to read or interpret our sources. If it sounds interesting to you, please check out our work on Academia and ResearchGate.

6. Read anything good recently?

Yes! I have recently finished a very inspiring book by Danièle Dehouve, El imaginario de los números entre los antiguos mexicanos. This scholar is absolutely phenomenal, and I always find her publications innovative and original in terms of ideas. This particular book has opened my eyes to the essential role of counting in Nahua (and, more broadly, Mesoamerican) ritual, revealing how far it exceeded the most obvious calendric context. In terms of nonacademic literature, the best of my recent reads was The Captive Mind by the Polish Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz. Although he describes how the communist ideology trapped the minds of 1950s Polish artists, his analysis works shockingly well for the capitalist world; I highly recommend it to any content creator.