Magnus Pharao Hansen

My article with Christophe Helmke, “The Language of Teotihuacan Writing”, is out in Current Anthropology 66(5):705–739.

The question of what language, if any, was recorded by the signs painted on the murals and ceramics of Teotihuacan has been contested for decades. We argue that these signs do constitute writing; that the system shares basic principles with other Mesoamerican scribal traditions, including the reading of logograms on the rebus principle; and that it employs a further principle we call double spelling. We argue that the script encoded a specific and identifiable language — a Uto-Aztecan language immediately ancestral to Nahuatl, Cora and Huichol — and we offer new readings of several Teotihuacan glyphs.

Rather than reading the signs through 16th Nahuatl, we reconstructed a form of the language that would have been contemporary with the script itself and worked from there. Reading the glyphs through modern Nahuatl would be something like reading the Jelling runestones with modern Danish: related, but not the same language.

If the argument holds, it has several major implications for how we understand Mesoamerica. The conventional account has speakers of Nahuan languages arriving in central Mexico after the fall of Teotihuacan. A Uto-Aztecan language at Teotihuacan itself would instead suggest continuity, and make later Nahua populations the descendants of the city’s inhabitants rather than newcomers to an abandoned landscape.

The article was covered widely in the international press, including in The New York Times and El País.

My book Nahuatl Nations: Language Revitalization and Semiotic Sovereignty in Indigenous Mexico is out with Oxford University Press, in the series Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language.

The book is a linguistic ethnography of the political relations between the Indigenous communities of Mexico that speak Nahuatl and the Mexican nation that claims the language as a national symbol. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in several Nahuatl-speaking communities in central Mexico, and on ethnohistorical and sociolinguistic material, it traces how those relations have been shaped over time and how they play out today in Nahua towns, in regional educational institutions, and in the Mexican diaspora in the United States.

Its central argument turns on the concept of semiotic sovereignty: a community’s capacity to govern its own semiotic resources, its language among them. I argue that Indigenous languages remain vital for as long as they are used as languages of political community, and that they protect that community by restricting outsiders’ access to participation in it. Where the Mexican state seeks to expropriate Indigenous semiotic resources to improve its brand abroad, communities can deploy those same resources in resistance to state domination.

I have been interviewed for the University Post about my new ERC-funded research project.
“He taught himself ‘Elvish’ as a child. Now he is to solve an ancient enigma in Mexico”

The Research project SUAHIST which has received a Starting Grant by the European Research Council from 2024-2029. I will be the PI, working together with a team of specialists in the Náayeri and Wixárika languages. https://ufm.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2023/fem-danske-forskere-far-en-af-eus-fineste-forskningsbevillinger

Summary: “A thousand years before Europeans arrived in the Americas, a vast region, covering what is now North-western Mexico and the US Southwest, was inhabited by speakers of languages belonging to the Uto-Aztecan language family. Often described as nomads in a hostile periphery between the cultures of Mesoamerica and the Puebloan cultures of the US Southwest, this project instead puts the speakers of Southern (SUA) Uto-Aztecan languages at the centre, seeking to recover aspects of their language and world-view, and their historical interactions with other regions. The project brings to bear the full scope of methods of contemporary comparative historical linguistics to investigate the history of SUA peoples: It combines qualitative methods of historical linguistics and narratology with quantitative lexicostatistical and phylogeographic methods to analyse the historical relations between SUA languages, and to analyse developments of SUA mythological traditions. Integrating a component of language documentation, the project also works with indigenous scholars and communities to contribute to ongoing efforts of indigenous language maintenance.”

My new article “Becoming Autonomous: Indigeneity, Scale and Schismogenesis in Multicultural Mexico” is out in the September 2018 issue of Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

I’ve been used as a source for inside commentary on Wikipedia’s problems with accuracy and bias:

In March, my commentary was used in an article by The Southern Poverty Law Center on the way that some White Nationalists try to influence Wikipedia’s content to reflect their world view. This is something I have a lot of experience dealing with on Wikipedia’s pages about race, and race and intelligence.

In July, I was asked for comments about the accuracy of Wikipedia by a journalist from the Poynter Institute who was interested in how hoaxes and vandalism may stay on Wikipedia articles for years. This was made relevant by the decision of Youtube and Twitter to combat conspiracy theories and fake news by using links to wikipedia articles together with content promoting fake news or pseudoscience.