Leonhard Schultze-Jena y sus investigaciones sobre ritualidad en la montaña de Guerrero

Abstract

This article refers to the life and research of the German scholar Leonhard Schultze-Jena who combined the studies of Anthropology with Geography, Biology and other specialized fields of study and who in the 1920s and 1930s undertook several field trips to Mexico and Guatemala. Among his numerous publications, the book Among the Aztec, Mixtec and Tlapanec of the Sierra Madre del Sur of Mexico, written in German and published in 1937, is of particular interest for research on the Montaña region of Guerrero. The book contains relevant information on the habitat, the life and culture of the Nahua, Mixtec and Tlapanec peoples of La Montaña; it also registers texts in the three indigenous languages that constitute ethnographic documents of great importance. The article further discusses the importance that Schultze-Jena’s work has for the study of pre-Hispanic religion, and proposes that such rituals of petition for rain as well as offerings with counted bundles and involving small stone idols, represent the continuation of a pre-Hispanic tradition that can be compared to the evidence of certain codices.