The Conquest of Mexico

The Conquest of Mexico is a brilliant account of the Spanishconquest of Mexico, written from a new and unfamiliar angle. Gruzinski analyses the process of colonization that took placein native Indian societies over three centuries, focusing ondisruptions to the Indian's memory, changes in their perception ofreality, the spread of the European idea of the supernatural andthe Spanish colonists' introduction of alphabetical script whichthe Indians had to combine with their own traditional - oral andpictorial - forms of communication. Gruzinski discusses the Indians' often awkward initiation intowriting, their assimilation of Spanish culture, and theirsubsequent reinterpretation of their own past and recovers thechanging Indian perceptions of the sacred and their 'absorption' ofelements from the Christian tradition. The Conquest of Mexico is a major work of culturalhistory which reconstructs a crucial episode in the Europeancolonization of the New World. It is also an important contributionto the study of the relationship between memory, orality, imagesand writing in history.