tokatlas
Teacher account

Twenty-seven books, one afternoon

From Latin America and the Caribbean·An enduring case

Diego de Landa burned Maya codices in 1562 as works of the devil, and only a handful of pre-conquest Maya books survive anywhere today. Much of what scholarship knows of Maya writing was reconstructed centuries later, partly from Landa's own notes. The destroyer became, involuntarily, a key source.

The concepts this raises

Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.

PowerKnowledge and Society
The capacity to shape what counts as knowledge, who is heard, and what gets funded, published or taught. Power is not only censorship; setting an agenda, controlling a platform or being granted authority all change the knowledge that a community ends up with.
CultureThe Knower's Lens
The shared practices, language and inherited assumptions of a community of knowers. Culture supplies the questions that seem worth asking and the answers that seem obvious, so its influence is hardest to see from inside it.

Where it sits in the knowledge framework

Ethics
The ethical questions internal to the knowledge itself: what may be investigated and how, what obligations the knowledge places on those who hold it, and the ethical constraints the discipline imposes on its own practitioners.

Areas of knowledge

Themes

The same ideas, somewhere else

Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.