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.
