Too much About human sacrifice.

[ECOLING at aol.com]

I have absolutely no question that human sacrifice was
practiced by Aztecs and by others, including for that matter
Europeans, and that it was part of religious cosmology
as well as part of real power politics, just as it is for us
(compare the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, central to Christian
religion, especially visual in Catholic churches).

The problem with this thread is that it represents an
ever-recurring distortion of the nature of any society
to focus only on what is controversial or sensational,
and since there are living descendants of the Aztecs,
I believe it is a violation of their human rights as well.
Painting them thus.  Inevitably it does so.

This is just one case of the general problem of the news
and entertainment media, their biases and distortions.
We have it massively in our own culture, and it simply
becomes several steps more evil when it is projected onto
the culture of "others", because then there are fewer constraints.

I believe very strongly that mis-defining "news" as
"sensational entertainment" is a strong CAUSAL FACTOR
in undermining civil society, by exposing people to much
gratuitous violence whether physical or mental,
which does affect how they behave towards everyone else
around them (including towards me, and it also affects me
if I am not careful to avoid it).  That does not mean we have
to pretend it does not exist.  It does mean we have to be
very conscious about when and how we present it
(as distinct from discussing facts about it).

So what to do instead?

Look at the famous National Museum of Anthropology
in Mexico City.  I used to think this is a magnificent museum,
and the setting is really grand.  However, after extensive eduction
on Mesoamerica, I now see that the most important things are MISSING.

It now appears to me as a collection of war trophies,
many ugly to any non-Aztec, treated as isolated objects without
much explanation.  This presentation will inevitably do great damage
to the rights of the descendants of the Aztecs and of others.

The great migration of Aztec history is present,
true, in an illustration, but not emphasized or explained,
or made the centerpiece of some halls, with parallels from the
pictures in other books, to show how we can attempt to cross-match
and establish a history.  I did not see the histories of Culhuacan,
or the other chronicles prominently displayed and connected one to
another.

The great astronomy of the Maya and of many others is not explained
in any real detail, where it should be CENTRAL,
so the viewer should come away in AWE of the cultural achievements
of the peoples of Mesoamerica, should feel that it is WE who are
somehow lacking in education since most of us do not know even
a tiny fraction of the knowledge recorded in those documents.

One could easily come away completely ignorant that the Aztecs
had great botanic gardens and zoos, before the Europeans had them.

The great histories of the Mixtec are not presented and explained
with anything like the detail or flash that they deserve.

And so on and so on.

Aren't these other things ENORMOUSLY more important
than this hyping of human sacrifice?

Isn't it really also more interesting,
UNLESS the unconscious purpose is to focus on what
makes us today think we are superior to those folks then?

We are probably NOT more intelligent,
even if we have more knowledge about some things than they had
(and less knowledge about others).
We are still the same species.
We are just lucky that our ancestors built a foundation for
us from which we can start, which we do not have to re-establish
ourselves (and therefore become lax, and let it fall apart
when we are not careful).

Best wishes,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics