History as science

By Joel Thurtell

Brace yourselves!

Readers of joelontheroad.com will need to get used to a new kind of “content.”

I’ve been fairly quiet recently, at least as far as blogging.

While I’ve followed the recent antics of Matty, I haven’t had time to aim my loose cannon the Morouns’ way.

Except when I realized mainstream reporters were neglecting an important part of the story, which is Matty Moroun’s takeover of the supposedly public Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority.

Don’t relax, Matty. My eye is on you still.

Besides, Jack Lessenberry and Curt Guyette of Metro Times, Dave Battagello of the Windsor Star and that indefatigable cataloger of all things Moroun, Gregg Ward at the Detroit-Windsor Truck Ferry, are doing a great job of shining light on the Morounopoly.

What have I been doing?

Working on my Tarascan project, doing research in an area — Michoacán, México — and about a people — the Tarascans, or Purépecha — pretty much unknown to most of us gringos.

This would have been my PhD dissertation in history at the University of Michigan, had I kept working on it.

What happened? Long story, but short answer: The Peace Corps come a-knockin’.

Forty years later, I’m studying my notes and thinking and re-thinking problems I faced with what turned out to be a very complicated research project requiring computer analysis of historical data.

UM’s IBM mainframe computer proved to be a hurdle I could not jump.

But my new laptop computer is far more powerful than that old mainframe, and I’m pushing myself to surmount the frustrations that led to the demise of this project in 1972.

I’m getting to the point where I’m composing essays in my head about my Tarascan project.

That’s why I warn you — brace yourselves.

The essays are migrating from my brain to my fingertips, on to the keyboard and instantly to the screen.

So, I’m going to be writing about not only the Tarascans, but about a branch of historical inquiry that is marginalized by conventional historians, even though it is capable of enlightening us about the past in ways that traditional history cannot.

What I mean by “conventional” history is simply story-telling about the past that is based on literature in the broadest sense. Writing of any nature qualifies as “literature,” which means I accept an inventory of personal property, a letter, a newspaper article or ad, a tax roll, and any other document as a form of literature.

Thus, it would seem, people who did not write do not have history.

They are fair game for archaeologists.

Not so fast.

In areas where people who write come into contact with people without literature, it is possible to learn about the non-literary people through the writings of explorers or colonists who get to know the non-writing culture.

There is a word for this kind of history that is seen through the lens of foreign observers: protohistory.

According to Wikipedia:

Protohistory refers to a period between prehistory and history, during which a culture or civilization has not yet developed writing, but other cultures have already noted its existence in their own writings. For example, in Europe, the Celts and the Germanic tribes may be considered to have been protohistoric when they began appearing in Greek and Roman texts.

Protohistoric may also refer to the transition period between the advent of literacy in a society and the writings of the first historians. The preservation of oral traditions may complicate matters as these can provide a secondary historical source for even earlier events. Colonial sites involving a literate group and a non-literate group, are also studied as protohistoric situations.

My area of interest is primarily Michoacán, a western state of Mexico that formed a large part of the Tarascan empire in the 16th century that was independent from and at war with the better-known Aztec empire centered at what is now known as Mexico City.

Anyone who seriously studies the colonial history of México will come upon the many descriptions of pre-hispanic Indians written by Spaniards who took part in conquering the native people, administering the new colony or — and this is huge — converting the Indians to the Roman Catholic faith.

For the protohistory of the Tarascans, a book known as the Relación de Michoacán is a major source for understanding how the Tarascans lived and died in the time before Europeans showed up.

Known to historians by the shorthand “RM,” the Relación was written by a Franciscan friar who interviewed Tarascan nobles a few years after the Spaniards arrived in Michoacán in 1521.

For conventional historians, the RM — and other so-called Relations — is the Holy Grail. Not without flaws, it is replete with descriptions and paintings that relate how Tarascans and other Indian people lived in the time before Fernando Cortés arrived in what soon would be called New Spain and who achieved what we call the Spanish Conquest.

Useful as the RM is, it is far from a complete description of the daily life of Tarascans.

Its evidence is filtered through the mental lens of the Spanish cleric who compiled it.

Moreover, because the interviews were with noble Tarascans, the book emphasizes the customs of people at the top of society.

The neglect of commoners’ lives is not unusual anywhere or any time in history.

But neglect of the lower classes is important for me to keep in mind as I increasingly suspect that the populations of interest to me were by no means Tarascans of noble ancestry.

Incidentally, I did not choose to focus on non-noble segments of Tarascan society. Rather, that focus was imposed on me by the nature of my sources.

Historians rarely have control over the creation of their sources. Certainly a historian like me who is almost five centuries removed from the Spanish Conquest has no say in how records are put together.

But once I get my hands on them, I do have a say in how they are interpreted.

How I got access to the parish registers and just what it was that I was shown are areas again where I had little control. That I will discuss later, too.

Now that I’ve mentioned parish registers, I am taking a deep breath before pronouncing the words “quantification” and — dare I say it — “history as science.”

In an earlier essay, I described my Tarascan project as a “natural experiment.”

What I meant by “natural experiment” is that it is possible to apply scientific method to the study of long-past phenomena.

It is not a chemistry experiment, whose conditions the experimenter controls in a laboratory.

For me, the lab is the world of colonial-era Tarascans, Spaniards as well as people of other ethnic persuasions as defined by the customs and laws of Spain at the time.

In that world were Spanish priests whose bishops headed by the pope in Rome mandated the keeping of detailed records of the souls entrusted to the church’s worldly care.

The birth and subsequent baptism into the Roman Catholic faith of a child in Spain or any of its dependencies had to be recorded in minute detail.

The newborn baby’s soul was the responsibility of the church.

Marriages were also recorded carefully, as they amounted to the joining of two families under the supervision and protection of the church.

Baptism and marriage were bedrock institutions.

Not only did priests keep meticulous records, but they protected the records.

Indeed, it appears that the priests took better care of their parish registers than they gave themselves credit for at those times when I went knocking on their notarial office doors in quest of their leather-bound books written on sheepskin.

Did the priests blow some smoke in the gringo historian’s face? More about parish duping later.

What I was allowed to see, and to work with for months, were four separate runs of parish baptismal registers in the Basilica church in Pátzcuaro and in the church at Cuanajo, an Indian village in a mountainous area southeast of Pátzcuaro.

The long and short of it is that I never was shown any matrimonial registers.

That severely limited me, in that they standard family reconstitution I had planned simply can’t be accomplished without marriage registers.

I have just learned that marriage registers exist in Pátzcuaro.

As i said, I have to work with what I was given.

It turns out that was I was given was quite a lot.

Anyway, sometimes a shut door can open new possibilities.

Because I don’t have marriage records, I am forced to place my attention almost wholly on my registers of baptism.

I say “almost wholly” because I do have annual tallies of marriages and burials. I can therefore graph year-by-year changes in mortality, which will become important when I begin trying to correlate social changes I measure from the registers with ups and downs in the death rate.

Because I can’t do a classic family reconstitution (whereby I piece together a kinship network as it changes through time), I have to find some other way of making my data tell a story.

Believe me, there are a lot of data points in a typical baptism entry.

In 1971, cheap and fast photo-reproduction like FedExOffice did not exist in western México. I hired a printer in Morelia, Michoacán to run off paper forms with headings for all the pieces of information I was seeing in the priests’ handwritten records.

Here is what you find in a typical baptism register:

Date of baptism.

Date of birth

Place of baptism

Name of priest officiating

Christian name of baby

Baby’s race: Indian, Spanish, mestizo, negro, mulatto, morisco.

By the way, these brief priestly entries of race were part of the Spanish method of social control, whereby social status was assigned based on ancestry. At the top were Spaniards from Spain, followed closely by people of Spanish ancestry born in the New World. Spaniards and Indians were allowed their respective nobilities. Indians could enhance their standing by marrying Spaniards. Mixed races had lower social standing. Mulattos were the descendants of a sub-Saharan African (negro) and a Spaniard. Moriscos were children of a Spaniard and a mulatto. The lowest place in the social order was taken by negros, who originally were slaves brought from Africa to the New World to work for Spanish landowners known first as encomendaros and later as hacendados..

See what I mean?

Class and race.

We learn a lot by reading baptism registers.

They are a window looking straight back in time.

Those terse clerical notations of race represented far more than the stroke of a priest’s pen.

They assigned high, median or low status and essentially pigeonholed people, determining at what socio-economic level a child would start out in life.

A friend who is a conventional historian complained to me that research based on parish registers was labor-intensive and low-yield work.

He was right about the labor. I spent a lot of hours in a cold, poorly-lit room transferring data from the old books to my paper forms. Nowadays, I’m spending more time fine-tuning my digital, Microsoft Access form so it precisely reflects the layout of my paper forms and fully accommodates my data.

But low-yield?

I beg to differ.

Once I enter my data into computer form, the wonder of MS Access will enable me to ask plain-English questions of those 17th and 18th century records.

While I don’t have marriage registers, my baptism registers do contain information about marriages. They tell me the names of a child’s parents, where they lived, the race of the mother and father and, in the case of negros, whether or not the person was a slave.

Why, in some cases, we even learn the name of the slave’s master.

Each entry tells us who the parents chose to be godfather and godmother for their child.

Godparenthood — in Spanish, compadrazgo — is a Spanish Christian institution that was imposed on the Indians.

What can we learn about the concerns and aspirations of parents as we study whom they selected to be the church-recognized surrogate parents for their children?

The baptism registers list the surnames of the parents.

Does the nature of that godparent choice change over time?

See what I mean?

There is a treasure trove of interesting data lurking in those surnames.

For over time, the pre-hispanic system of naming children would be supplanted, mostly, as Indians adopted Spanish surnames.

The use of Tarascan surnames survived for a very long time, and indeed there are people today who bear Tarascan surnames.

But there were aspects of the Tarascan name-giving system that were unique — unlike the Aztec system and certainly quite foreign to the Spanish system.

Systems like this can actually be measured and tracked through time. Changes can be correlated to other phenomena, such as increases in death rates due to epidemics or, maybe, spikes in the prices of commodities like corn and wheat.

The behavior of long dead Spanish priests as they methodically wrote down information in a uniform way has given us an amazing gift: information that can be quantified, a fancy way of saying it can be counted.

Counting can be done by a machine such as my MacBook Pro laptop computer.

Soon, I will be learning things about colonial México that will surprise me, I expect, and certainly would astound those priests who so religiously wrote down the details of life as they went about their duties.

In a future essay, I’ll explain how — thanks to the parish registers and my paper data forms — I already have a lens into the prehispanic history of the Tarascans.

I’ll also discuss how the lack of marriage registers obliged me to think about my data in a non-standard way, and how my unconventional way of getting to two outlying villages (by walking) caused me to perceive basic differences in the towns’ personalities ca. 1971, and how that perception raised a fundamental historical question that has become the leitmotif of my research and now directs the focus of my work.

I have another aim — I’m going to show that abandoning this project 40 years ago was not such a bad idea, after all.