Since Time Immemorial

Yanna Yannakakis is Associate Professor of History at Emory University, author of The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca, and coeditor of Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, both also published by Duke University Press.

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction  xiiiPart I. Legal and Intellectual Foundations: Twelfth through Seventeenth Centuries1. Custom, Law, and Empire in the Mediterranean-Atlantic World  232. Translating Custom in Castile, Central Mexico, and Oaxaca  45Part II. Good and Bad Customs in the Native Past and Present: Sixteenth through Seventeenth Centuries3. Framing Pre-Hispanic Law and Custom  734. The Old Law, Polygyny, and the Customs of the Ancestors  109Part III. Custom in Oaxaca’s Courts of First Instance: Seventeenth through Eighteenth Centuries5. Custom, Possession, and Jurisdiction in the Boundary Lands  1396. Custom as Social Contract: Native Self-Governance and Labor  1717. Prescriptive Custom: Written Labor Agreements in Indian and Spanish Jurisdictions  199Epilogue  229Notes  237Bibliography  273Index  305

"Aimed at a scholarly audience, Yanna Yannakakis' Since Time Immemorial explores how Spanish authorities and indigenous elites navigated the ambiguous boundary between custom and law in16th-century Mexico. Deeply reasoned and argued, this book should be of interest to both history majors and experts interested in the legal framework of Spanish Mexico." - Noah Zachary (World History Encyclopedia) "Yannakakis has written a sophisticated and eminently readable text that could serve as an introduction to legal historical methods as well as a longue-durÉe study of Mexican Native communities. It is an exemplary model for thinking about law from the bottom up without losing sight of imperial foundations or a historically romanticizing a Native past." - Karen B. Graubart (Colonial Latin American Review) "Since Time Immemorial shows persuasively how preconquest custom shaped the laws governing the Indigenous world of postconquest Mexico. But it equally demonstrates the complex ways that traditional customs were manipulated to refect new realities as well as how new customs contributed to the evolution of legal practices in colonial society." - Jeremy Baskes (Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe)