ixtlahua/debt

[Carlos Santamarina Novillo]

Yes, I think too that the “metaphysical considerations” had obscured the social
reality about human sacrifice. I think that about this issue is very appropriate
the use of  pike’s terms emics (the native sources’ reasoning) and etics (the
scholar’s conclusions), as in many other cases.
I am very interesting about teteuctin as teteo, or rulers as gods. Can you
specify your sources about the divine consideration of rulers? Thank you
                                                                - Carlos
Santamarina <carloss at ui.boe.es>

"John F. Schwaller" ha escrito:

> Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 09:22:05 -0700
> Subject: Re: ixtlahua/debt
> From: richard haly <Richard.Haly at colorado.edu>
> To: Frances Karttunen <karttu at nantucket.net>, <nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu>
>
> I can likewise take issue with most representations of sacrifice as
> debt-payement to gods when concepts such as debt, payment, and gods go
> unexamined. From my research, nextlahualiztli makes most sense as payment to
> the rulers (likewise teotl). When people say that the Aztecs thought the
> Spaniards were "gods" - teules- it makes them (the Aztecs) seem pretty
> credulous when we think of "gods" in any Judeo-Christian manner.
> Nonetheless, when one considers that they called their own rulers "gods" and
> treated them as such - not looking in to the brightness of the face of the
> emperor/sun - then any debt-payment to gods can be a debt-payment to
> rulers. All sacrifice phenomena - and all festival and pilgrimage phenomena
> as well - make much more sense when one tries to understand them in this
> world and not in some metaphysical or "religious" way. (Religious is in
> quotation marks because most people think religion is about "spiritual"
> stuff and not "material" stuff because that is what their own religions have
> told them. That is not the case in a culture of embodied ancestors -
> Mesoamerica, for one.) Sacrifice is much more like kula-exchange among
> Trobriand islanders. An explanation of sacrifice whose dynamics do not rely
> on metaphysical language or a transcendent agent has a greater chance of
> making real sense.
>
> Richard
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