New book

[John F. Schwaller]

Philip P. Arnold.  _ Eating Landscape: Aztec and European Occupation of
Tlalocan._ University Press of Colorado, 288 pages, 14 b&w; illustrations,
1999


ISBN: 0-87081-518-0 Hardcover $45.00=20

How do people meaningfully occupy the land? In sixteenth-century Mexico,
Aztec and Spanish understandings of land formed the basis of their cultural
identities. Their distinctive conceptions of land also established the
traumatic character of cultural contact.=20

As Philip P. Arnold maintains in Eating Landscape, central to Aztec
meanings of land were ceremonies to Tlaloc, god of rain, fertility, and
earth. These ceremonies included child sacrifices for rain and corn,
priestly auto-sacrifices at lakes, mountain veneration, and ancestor
worship. What unifies these ceremonies, contends Arnold, is the Aztec
understanding of food. By feeding deities of the land, human beings could
eat. Seeing the valley of Mexico as Tlalocan (the place of Tlaloc) and
characterizing it as an "eating landscape" illustrates an Aztec mode of
occupying land.=20

At the same time, Arnold demonstrates that the very texts that open a
window on Tlaloc ceremonies were created by Spanish missionaries.
Particularly important was Sahag=FAn's Florentine Codex, which&--;as was the
case with the work of other ethnographers&--;was intended to destroy Aztec
ceremonies by exposing them through writing. Using texts to reveal a
pre-Columbian past, therefore, is problematic. Arnold therefore suggests an
alternative reading of the texts with reference to the material environment
of the Valley of Mexico. By connecting ceremonies to specific water
courses, mountains, plants, and animals, Arnold reveals a more encompassing
picture of Aztec ceremonies, revealing the gap between indigenous and
colonial understandings of land. Indigenous strategies of occupying land in
Mexico focused on ceremonies which addressed the material conditions of
life, while colonial strategies of occupying land centered around books and
other written materials such as Biblical and classical texts,
ethnographies, and legal documents. These distinctive ways of occupying
Tlalocan, concludes Arnold, had dramatic consequences for the formation of
the Americas.=20

Filling a gap in the coverage of Aztec cosmology, Eating Landscape brings
hermeneutics to archaeology and linguistic analysis in new ways that will
be of interest to historians of religion and archaeologists alike.=20

University Press of Colorado=20

>>From the press:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/7500/17134.ctl