Me: Twenty Seconds to Immortality

Tue Apr 20 22:58:37 UTC 2004

Dear Ruben,

Thanks very much for your thoughts (or thoughtful food. . .).  I wasn't
myself arguing for ecological disruptions, but had heard the argument made
some years ago.  The Rwanda case is very interesting on this regards, and
answers my honest question on this.

And yes, I can see that numbers are significant and would not want to deny
that.  What was behind those rather quickly made remarks, however, I hope
was not all that naive.  The area of Aztec studies has been and often still
is dominated by questions about sacrifice (how it was done, who did it, to
whom, and how many. . .so on), and specifically on human (even though many
other types of sacrifice occurred).  It's not unusual for studies on
sacrificial rituals to ignore all sacrifice but human; making no effort to
account for a fuller picture.

My question was more one of frustration around the seemingly continual
expectation that that is what we apparently must study, if we study the
Aztecs; that apparently there is little else of interest.  Of course, many
of us do study other things.  Still, these studies are limited to an
audience that is quite small; primarily other specialists who are also
deeply into this stuff.  Moreover, a large part of the historiography of
Aztec studies in both the ancient and recent past has focused heavily on
sacrifice.  And, in the minds of many non-specialists out there, the
out-standing issue is sacrifice.  I'm raising the question of why?  What
does it say about us that we focus on human sacrifice?

Just still throwing things out there...

Regards,
Kay

At 03:24 PM 4/20/2004 -0700, Archaeology Institute wrote:
>Nahua language and culture discussion <NAHUAT-L at LISTS.UMN.EDU> writes:
> >Moreover, has anyone considered the ecological issues in
> this?  Somewhere many years ago, I heard somebody claim that the disposal
> of 80, 400 bodies (the number Duran gives for that famous example),
> >or even 11, 520 bodies (the number Cook came up with) would have really
> messed up the delicate ecology of the Basin of Mexico.  I.e., what did
> they do with all the bodies?  Bernard Ortiz de
> >Montellano suggests that only some people ate only certain parts of
> those bodies (the thigh apparently was big); what happened to the
> rest?  And, what did it do to the environment, if it really
> >happened?
>
>Last I checked, the ecology of Rawanda was little effected by the
>genocidal massacre of some 800,000 civilian non-combatants in a period of
>little more than eight weeks...and with machetes and garden
>tools, no less.  Media footage of the massacre and its aftermath make
>clear that many of the victims were simply left where they died, or were
>tossed into rivers where they polluted the waters with a
>crimson hue until such time that the hundreds of thousands of rotting
>corpses washed out to sea, or were consumed by the wildlife of the
>region.  So, I must necessarily differ with your perspective
>on the decimation of the ecology...particularly as I understand that human
>remains are largely biodegradable.
> >
> >
> >I tend to agree with some of the other respondents to this, that it's
> good to treat our sources with a very heavy dose of suspicion and
> caution.  Not only because they themselves come from authors
> >who presume certain realities, but also because we ourselves come from
> situations that presume certain realities.
>
>Good point!  It is precisely this line of thinking that will continue to
>parody any and all thinking on any and all matters of the human
>spirit...and the carnage that generally follows.  Where does
>that leave anthropology, history, ethnohistory, etc?  While I think that
>critical theory and post-modernist critiques have their place in the
>academy, I must confess that as the product of an
>impoverished family from an "oppressed" minority ethnic group, such
>critiques generally fall short in their efforts to go beyond hegemonic
>discourse analysis...and into the realm of how it is that
>people like my family and I were able to put food on the table.  Such
>discursive networks have little utility for the vast majority of the
>world's population, which is hungry, poor, and uneducated in
>the niceties and frivolities of post-modern thinking.
> >
> >My question, I guess, is why are we still concerned with the numbers of
> sacrifice?  The sources are rich with a huge number of wonderful issues
> and topics; why is this still a burning question at
> >least 60 years later.  By the way they burned and decapitated people,
> and shot people with arrows, among other things too, why are we so hung
> up on the heart extractions?  Is this really, really
> >important for our understanding of Aztec sacrifice or, more generally,
> of Aztec worldviews, or does the question itself say something important
> about ourselves?
>
>These too are good questions, but do suggest a degree of naivette about
>what you yourself bring into question about what is significant, and what
>is not, in the world of scholarship.  Why would
>anyone care about the total number of human beings slaughtered in the
>Rawanda genocide...after all, it would seem that by your argument, such
>considerations (of genocide), have no place in the
>conflict ridden tribal zone of the academy.  I would also counter by
>reframing your question by asking: "why are we still concerned with the
>numbers..." of people in Tenochtitlan, or the quantity of
>debitage on an archaeological site...or the number of atoms in an atomic
>bomb?  Like you, I simply put these thoughts out there as food for
>thought...or for the Gods, as the case may be!
>
>Best Regards,
>
>Ruben G. Mendoza, Ph.D., Director
>Institute for Archaeological Science, Technology and Visualization
>Social and Behavioral Sciences
>California State University Monterey Bay
>100 Campus Center
>Seaside, California 93955-8001
>
>Email: archaeology_institute at csumb..edu
>Voice: 831-582-3760
>Fax: 831-582-3566
>http://archaeology.csumb.edu
>http://archaeology.csumb.edu/wireless/
>
>
>
>
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