BONDS OF BLOOD: GENDER, LIFESTYLE, AND SACRIFICE IN AZTEC CULTURE - KENNETH LOPARO

One of the better Aztec books I’ve read. Typically, when you’re dealing with books about the Aztecs (not the correct term, too long and pedantic to get into here) they typically only tell the story of the Spanish conquest and then throw in some really lurid stuff about human sacrifice. This book does a good job of investigating the sources (and does a good job of explaining exactly where these sources are from and when they were written) to paint a picture of what life, on the day to day and the birth-to-death scales, actually looked like. This ends up being really fascinating. I learned about the school system of the Aztec world, along with their ideas about childbirth and coming of age. There was stuff in there about aging and death (both the regular and sacrificial kind) and stuff about the organization of neighborhoods. I learned that slaves could sell themselves into debt with money they got to spend before they were enslaved. Families could rotate who was enslaved to make money and give people a rest. Manumissions were common and slaves were free if they could escape the market and make it to the temple, only the master or his sons were allowed to chase. The most fascinating parts might have been the section about Aztec sexuality and gender. Precolombian genders are always a bit tricky to study. The societies that housed them are gone and transformed and the Western sources are filtered through a lens of Western bias and bigotry. This isn’t to endorse the popular-in-certain-lefty-corners idea that there was no bigotry or homophobia or gender essentialism in non-Western spaces, that’s ahistorical, noble-savage nonsense. The reality is, of course, quite complex. Loparo locates a handful of Nauha words and types of people that one could graft onto male homosexual, female homosexual, hermaphrodite, transgender, gender nonconforming, intersex or a handful of other modern terms. Very interesting to see how non christian, non western societies dealt with the obvious reality of these people. I would have liked to know a bit more about the economics and political structure of the Aztec world, though this is obviously beyond the purview of this book. I’d maybe not suggest this as a first book about the Aztecs to read but it’s very good.

-Note on the human sacrifice thing. Obviously this was widespread, gruesome and brutal. There’s a reason that it’s the one thing everyone knows about the Aztecs. The image of thousands of people getting their hearts torn out of their chests on the tops of stepped pyramids is a very compelling and memorable image. And, despite it being Spanish propaganda to emphasize this, to make them seem brutal and barbaric, it was a very important part of mesoamerican life. And while I don’t agree with the idea of killing for the gods, I would like to offer this angle to look at this practice with. The Aztecs had an empire, and empires, from Rome to England to us now here in the 21st Century USA, are built on blood. Right now there are half a dozen active (or very recent) wars and/or genocides, from the Congo to Yemen to Sudan to Gaza and beyond all carried out by the US or its proxies. This isn’t incidental or a tragic oversight, it’s the system working as designed. And you can hide this fact, like we do in America, where you don’t see the coffins from our troops come home, let alone the mangled and burned bodies of our victims, or you can foreground it and remind everyone exactly what type of society they lived in. On a similar note, the need for captives actually makes war less brutal and all-encompassing since only brave warriors make suitable sacrifices, there is no benefit in burning down towns and killing women and children. Fewer Mai Lais. So while it certainly makes sense to balk at the brutality of these acts, please don’t for a second think you don’t also live in an empire, one much, much vaster than that of the Aztecs, and, likewise don’t also worship (even if you don’t realize it) at the altar of a god dripping with blood. The difference is aesthetic, not of kind.