The “Woman in Fragments”: a Reading of a Pipil Myth
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
The mythology of the Pipil people, one of the pre-Columbian civilizations in Mesoamerica, is not very well known. No pre-Hispanic codex or colonial chronicle has collected and preserved their myths. In 1930, Schultze-Jena collected their myths in Pipil language and, in more recent years, Rafael Lara Martinez translated them into Spanish and studied Pipil cosmology. The present study wishes to contribute to the popularization of the extant corpus of Pipil myths. Following a short introduction, aimed at providing a geographical and historical contextualization of the Pipils, the paper will analyse the relation between hegemonic and indigenous cultures. The paper will then proceed to offer an interpretation of the myth of the “woman in fragments” by emphasizing its specificity in comparison to other Mesoamerican cultures, and suggesting its continuity ―rather than its rewriting― in a contemporary novel by the Salvadoran writer Claudia Hernández.
Article Details
Copyright
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright.
- The texts published in this journal are – unless indicated otherwise – covered by the Creative Commons Spain Attribution 3.0 licence. You may copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work, provided you attribute it (authorship, journal name, publisher) in the manner specified by the author(s) or licensor(s). The full text of the licence can be consulted here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/deed.en.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).