Arthur James Outram Anderson (November 26, 1907 – June 3, 1996) was an American

anthropologist An anthropologist is a scientist engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists study aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values ...

specializing in Aztec culture and

translator Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''trans ...

of the

Nahuatl language Nahuatl ( ; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller popul ...

Early life

He was born on November 26, 1907. In the 1970s he began working with James Lockhart and Frances Berdan on colonial-era local level

Nahuatl Nahuatl ( ; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller popul ...

texts, which are the core of the

New Philology New Philology can refer to: * The nineteenth-century intellectual movement in philology Philology () is the study of language in Oral tradition, oral and writing, written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary ...

Career

He was renowned for his and Charles E. Dibble's translation of the Florentine Codex by fray

Bernardino de Sahagún Bernardino de Sahagún ( – 5 February 1590) was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participated in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain (now Mexico). Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, he jour ...

, a project which took 30 years. The two also published a modern English translation of Book XII of the Florentine Codex, which gives an indigenous account of the conquest of Mexico. Anderson translated and wrote an extensive introduction to fray

's ''Psalmodia Christiana (Christian Psalmody)'' He also edited and published translations of formal linguistic texts by eighteenth-century Mexican Jesuit Francisco de Clavigero (1731-1787) outlining rules of the Mexican (

) language. Two publications on which he collaborated were ''Beyond the Codices'', and ''The Tlaxcalan Actas''. With Susan Schroeder, he translated and edited writings of seventeenth-century Nahua historian Chimalpahin. In 1994, a

festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the h ...

entitled ''Chipping away on earth: studies in prehispanic and colonial Mexico in honor of Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble'' was published.

Death

Anderson died of a

cerebral hemorrhage Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), also known as hemorrhagic stroke, is a sudden bleeding into the tissues of the brain (i.e. the parenchyma), into its ventricles, or into both. An ICH is a type of bleeding within the skull and one kind of stro ...

on June 3, 1996.Schroeder (1997): p. viii.

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References

External links

Biography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Anderson, Arthur J. O. 1907 births 1996 deaths American Mesoamericanists English-Nahuatl translators Scholars of the Aztecs 20th-century Mesoamericanists 20th-century American translators 20th-century American anthropologists