Issue of Sacrifice

[micc]

Carnale get a life and quit pontificating.  your search for acceptance
by the Euro-american academe is causing your to spout out things that
really don't make sense.


truly yours,

mario




maestas at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu wrote:
>
> Neither prehistoric archaeology nor historical ethnographic material are
> reliable even in the best of cases and are usually made up of narratives
> that are based more on assumptions of what we do not know rather than what
> we do know.  In any case, there is not one archaeological or historical
> ethnographical piece of material that is not under contention because of
> the necessarily interpretive process that must go into it to make sense of
> it, while at the same time making a mess of it.  Basically, my point is
> that the scientific humanities of archaeology, anthropology and history
> need to be recognized as the interpretive attempts that they are and not
> as reliable sources of truth.  It surprises me how "matter of fact"
> rhetoric spews forth when it should always be qualified by "according to
> an interpretation".  For example, your interpretation of sacrifice may
> mean to make something sacred but you have yet to explain what it means to
> make something sacred and how the drastic and dramatic act of taking life
> can be anything less than sacred for any human being who has not
> desensitized and dehumanized themselves to the value of human life.
>
> To provide a contrast, it is useful to bring human sacrifice back home and
> consider the place that ritual death has become relatively commonplace in
> the US through serial murder, terrorism and mass suicide.  How many of
> us think of these activities as human sacrifice as they go one in or
> around most urban centers in the US?  Maybe some of us can feel better
> about them if we do not sloganize them and sensationalize them as brutal
> cases of human sacrifice and instead think about them as isolated
> and unrelated incidents.  However, if we apply the analytic of human
> sacrifice as sacred killing practices according to a less than fully
> understood belief system, anything from the Oklahoma City bombing to
> adolescent vampirism can be seen as human sacrifice.  The important
> point here is that we do not understand human sacrifice either in the
> Valley of Mexico 1500 or in the US 2000 well enough to sloganize it.
>
> On a more personal note, I reacted to the statements of human sacrifice
> because they emotionally concern me as a Chicano who has been insulted and
> affronted by the scholastic treatment of ritual death in the Valley
> of Mexico as sensationalized Aztec human sacrifice. I want to make you
> aware that you cause pain each time you refer to Aztec human sacrifice as
> something to refer to matter of factly.  When the Aztec Exhibit came to
> Denver, Colorado it portrayed the heritage of Mexican people as
> bloodthirsty and brutal, which created an environment in  which I and many
> Chicanos and Mexicanos were asked "Did your ancestors really do that?"
> Such exhibits and the consequent attitudes that I still hear every so
> often are reckless and hurtful and not productive to intelligent
> discussion so I ask you to please stop while at the same time
> apologizing for inciteful comments that I have made in reaction to them.
> I think that instead of sloganizing and sensationalizing human sacrifice
> as has been done through the Aztec Exhibit we can look at other ways in
> which killing and ritual killing makes sense or not to us as part of our
> world and take that complexity in order to respect the likelihood that we
> can never understand the role that it played for the people in the Valley
> of Mexico.
>
> On Tue, 27 Jul 1999, Michael Mccafferty wrote:
>
> > >
> > > Note also that European war practices before the present century generally
> > > did not target civilians (during the actual battles).  Noncombatants were
> > > eliminated (if they were) by other means (displacement, starvation,
> > > terrorism, and so forth).  The Spaniards did not *directly* kill all tha
> > > many Nahua, and most of those were warriors.  Disease and societal
> > > collapse did the bulk of the work of native depopulation.
> >
> > Plus, there is both prehistoric archaeological and reliable historical
> > ethnographic material showing that at least in North American the killing
> > of women and children was one way of warring.  So much of the
> > current discussion about this sort of thing reminds me too much of the
> > Japanese attempts to hide the facts of their World War II atrocities from
> > the modern generation.  Humans are humans.  Sheesh happens.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Michael McCafferty
> > C.E.L.T.
> > 307 Memorial Hall
> > Indiana University
> > Bloomington, Indiana
> > 47405
> > mmccaffe at indiana.edu
> >
> > *******************************************************************************
> > "Glory" (what a word!) consists in going
> > from the me that others don't know
> > to the other me that I don't know.
> >
> > -Juan Ramon Jimenez
> >
> > *******************************************************************************
> >
> >
> >