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History Of The Conquest Of Mexico, The Aztecs (part eight) The Postclassical Era Book: Chapter 17: The Americas On The Eve Of Invasion Author: Prescott, William H Date: 1992
Analysis and Conclusion
Analysis: The "Troubling" Civilizations Of The Americas
From the first encounter with the peoples of the Americas, European concepts and judgments about civilization, barbarism, morality, power, politics, and justice were constantly called into question. The American Indian societies had a number of religious ideas and practices that shocked Christian observers, and there were aspects of their social and familial arrangements that also clashed with European sensibilities. Those sensibilities were often influenced by religious and political considerations. Many of those who most condemned human sacrifice, polygamy, or the despotism of Indian rulers were also those who sought to justify European conquest and control. In contrast, not long after the Spanish conquests in the 16th century, defenders of Indian rights came forward to argue that despite certain "unfortunate" habits, Indian civilization was no less to be admired than that of the ancient (and pagan) Romans and Greeks. Not only conquest and power were involved in the ways Europeans viewed and used Indian cultures. Occasionally, European thinkers, such as the French writer Michel de Montaigne in his essay "On Cannibals" (1580), might ironically contrast Indian cultures with European society in order to point out the deficiencies of Europe. By the 18th and 19th centuries, aristocratic whites in Mexico, Brazil, and Peru extolled the glories of the Indian past as a way of criticizing the colonial present. For them, Indian civilization became a justification and metaphor for American liberty.
For Western civilization, evaluating and judging non-Western or past societies has always been a complex business which has mixed elements of morality, politics, religion, and self-perception along with the record of what is observed or considered to be "reality." That complexity is probably just as true for Chinese, Persian, or any culture trying to understand the "other." Still, Western society seems to have been particularly troubled by the American civilizations with their peculiar combination of neolithic technology and imperial organization. At times this has led to abhorrence and rejection - as in the case of Aztec sacrifice - but at other times, it has led to a kind of utopian romanticism in which the accomplishments of the Indian past are used as a critique of the present and a political program for the future.
The existence of "Inca socialism" is a case in point. While some early Spanish authors portrayed Inca rule as despotic, others saw it as a kind of utopia. Shortly after the conquest of Peru, Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a Spaniard and Indian noblewoman, wrote a glowing history of his mother's people in which he presented an image of the Inca Empire as a carefully organized system in which every community collectively contributed to the whole and the state regulated the distribution of resources on a basis of need and reciprocity. In the 20th century, Peruvian socialists, faced with the problems of underdevelopment and social inequality in their country, used this view of Inca society as a possible model for their own future. Their interpretation and that of historians who later wrote of Inca "socialism" tended to ignore the high degree of hierarchy in the Inca Empire and the fact that the state extracted labor and goods from the subject communities to support the nobles who held extensive power. The utopian view of the Incas was no less political than the despotic view. Perhaps the lesson here is that what we see in the past often depends on what we think about the present or what we want for the future.
But if Inca socialism or despotism was a matter that has fascinated students of the past, Aztec religion has caught the imagination of historians and of the general public. It causes us to ask how a civilization as advanced and accomplished as this could engage in a practice so cruel and, to us, so morally reprehensible. Perhaps nothing challenges our appreciation of the American civilizations more than the extensive evidence of ritual torture and human sacrifice, which among the Aztecs reached staggering proportions - on some occasions thousands of people were slain, usually by having their hearts ripped out.
First, we must put these practices in some perspective. Cruelty and violence can be found in many cultures and to a world that has witnessed genocide, mass killings, and atomic warfare, the Aztec practices do not stand in such marked contrast to what our own age has witnessed. Certain customs in many past civilizations and in present cultures seem to us strange, cruel, and immoral. We find Aztec human sacrifice particularly abhorrent, but we should be aware that such practices were found among the ancient Canaanites and the Celtic peoples and that the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament, while its message is against such sacrifice, reflects what was a known practice. Human sacrifice was practiced in pre-Christian Scandinavia and in ancient India. Although by the time of Confucius, human sacrifice of wives and retainers at the burial of a ruler was no longer practiced in China, the custom had been known and the issue of suttee, the Hindu ritual suicide of the widow on the funeral pyre of her husband, raged in India in the 20th century. The Aztecs were certainly not alone in the taking of human life as a religious rite. Whatever our moral judgments about such customs, it remains the historian's responsibility to understand them in the context of their own culture and time.
How have historians tried to explain or understand the extent of Aztec human sacrifice? Some defenders of Aztec culture have seen it as a limited phenomenon, greatly exaggerated by the Spanish for political purposes. Many scholars have seen it as essentially a religious act central to their belief that humans must sacrifice that which was most precious to them, life, in order to receive in return the sun, rain, and other blessings of the gods that make life possible. Others have viewed Aztec practice as the intentional manipulation and expansion of a widespread phenomenon that had long existed among many American peoples. In other words, the Aztec rulers, priests, and nobility used the cult of war and large-scale human sacrifice for political purposes, to terrorize their neighbors, and to keep the lower classes subordinate. Another possible explanation is demographic. If central Mexico was as densely populated as we believe, then the sacrifices may have served as a kind of population control.
Other interpretations have been even more startling. Anthropologist Marvin Harris has suggested that Aztec sacrifice, accompanied by ritual cannibalism was, in fact, a response to the lack of available protein. He argued that in the Old World human sacrifice was replaced by animal sacrifice, but in Mesoamerica which lacked cattle and sheep, that transformation never took place. The Aztec Empire was, as Harris called it, a "cannibal kingdom." Other scholars have strongly objected to Harris's interpretation of the evidence. But it is clear that the shadow of human sacrifice shades all assessments of Aztec civilization.
These debates ultimately raise important questions about the role of moral judgments in historical analysis and the way in which our vision of the past is influenced by our own political, moral, ethical, and social programs. In thinking about the past and about societies other than our own, we cannot, and perhaps should not abandon those programs, but we must always try to understand other times and other peoples in their own terms.
Conclusion: American Indian Diversity In World Context
By the end of the 15th century, two great imperial systems had risen to dominate the two major centers of civilization in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Both of these empires were built on the achievements of their predecessors, and both reflected a militaristic phase in their area's development. These empires proved to be fragile - weakened by their own internal strains and the conflicts that any imperial system creates, but also limited by their technological inferiority when challenged by Eurasian civilization.
The Aztec and Inca empires were one end of a continuum of cultures that went from the most simple to the most complex. The Americas contained a broad range of societies, from great civilizations with millions of people to small bands of hunters. In many of these societies religion played a dominant role in defining the relationship between people and their environment and between the individual and society. How these societies would have developed and what course the American civilizations might have taken in continued isolation remains an interesting and unanswerable question. The first European observers were simultaneously shocked by the "primitive" tribesmen and astounded by the wealth and accomplishments of civilizations like that of the Aztecs. Europeans generally saw the Indians as curiously anachronistic. In comparison with Europe and Asia, the Americas did seem strange - more like ancient Babylon or Egypt than contemporary China or Europe - except that without the wheel, large domesticated animals, the plow, and to a large extent metal tools and written languages, even that comparison is misleading. The relative isolation of the Americas had remained important in physical and cultural terms, but that
isolation came to an end in
1492 - often with disastrous results. Main Page
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