Aztecs: An Interpretation

by Inga Clendinnen

Book Overview

Inga Clendinnen creates a vivid and dramatic picture of life in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, once the nerve centre of the Aztec tribute empire. She explores the worlds of Aztec women, of priests... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521400937
• ISBN13: 9780521400930
• Release Date: August 1991
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 414 Pages
• Weight: 1.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Definitive book, about a canibalistic people

Here in Brazil, I read this excellent and definitive book, about the aztecs and their end.Are you a believer in frauds such as the good savage? Oh, this book goes to the primary sources about Mexico's conquest. Cortez was lookink for to exterminate the aztecs.Cortez was the leader of an indian war.The mexican indians together with smallpox wiped out an Aztec Empire canibalistic and genocidal, in an act of revenge.A terrible revenge, but not an unmotivated revenge.Cortez wasn't an opressor of indians, but their liberator.This conclusion is clear showed in this book by its author , the australian Inga Clendinnen. Todorov and other false historians lies for you.This book tells you what really happened, during Aztecs' fall.

aztecs, an interpretation

This is an excellent study. the product was received as advertised, good condition and on time.

A Philosophical Approach to the Aztecs

Inga Clendinnen, an Australian historian, observes the Aztec culture through a metaphysical lens, searching for their own sense of meaning and reality. She begins her book with an overview of more practical matters, such as government at the neighborhood level, sanitation management and tribute demands made on subjects of the empire. But then she launches into more philosophical terrain. This is not the book to read as an introduction to the Aztecs, because she assumes the reader's familiarity with their myths, and her writing can be slow going and very academic. For example, in writing about how each of their gods represented a range of sacred forces, rather than one or two specific powers, she writes, "The inimitable insights of the ritual zone were expanded through the liberating explosion of boundaries and distinctions painfully drawn and expensively sustained in the mundane world." If you can digest this style, you will be rewarded with evocative pictures she paints for us, such as a festival that ended with warriors scooping up white feathers and chalk dust from a bowl and tossing them up in the air; the white powder that rained down on them marked them for death. She reminds us that Western religion transmutes bread and wine into flesh and blood, but the Mexica religion did the opposite, by transmuting human flesh and blood into sacred maize (corn) and sacred water (blood). In other words, humans are a sort of vegetable in the great order of things. Their obsession with "feeding the gods" with these men/vegetables led to a society that placed the highest accolades on warriors and a near fixation on battle, in order to procure sacrificial victims. This in turn caused them to harden themselves to bloody violence and hardship from a tender age. They were a tough bunch, but Clendinnen reminds us, everything they thought and did was suffused with a sense of the sacred.

A definitive study

Inga Clendinnen has written a definitive guide to the Aztecs that attempts to view this somewhat enigmatic peoples in a manner that doesn't attempt to classify the ritualistic society that emerged from the Mexica Empire, but rather understand the roles of each social strata within the microcosm. There is an inevitable tendency to look at the religious perspective, focusing acutely on the human sacrifice and also on the Spanish conquest but the author shifts away (whilst having an opinion on the role of the victim) from these well-trodden paths to discussing the greater mores and individual experiences of the society.There is an extremely interesting chapter discussing the roles of wives, in particular the ascribing of fertility and maternal aspects and the circumscribing of any 'political' role. This, in turn, leads to a further discussion on the role of the mother and the 'growing' eidetism that permeates cultural perception.The text concludes with a brief chapter on the final destruction of Tenochitlan rounding off a work that brilliantly analyses Aztec ceremony and the individual's place within this society at the end of an Empire.

To understand the Aztec Civilization

A lot of books are available about Precolumbian civilizations, especially mesoamerican; Aztecs and Mayas are the most learned of all. BUT, we read always the same informations for a long time. Inga CLENDINNEN gives us "An Interpretation" : what kind of civilization has rizen on the plateau of Mexico-Tenochtitlan ? How to explain Aztecs's power in a region where so many people had developped cities and values such as Olmecs (in TEOTIHUACAN) or Toltecs (in TULA) ? We discover first the City and its meaning. Then, we enter the mentality of the peoples who entertain LIFE by their Death (the Victims), their Work (Warriors, Priests, Merchant) or their personal place in the society (Males, Wives, Mothers). Third, we enter the Sacred and we begin to understand how the Rituals may consolidate the society with the Fear of others... before being the plea of a revolt of vassal populations. AZTECS were strong by their military organization but weak by their believes : an entire world fearing the sun could not been able to born another day, organizing war to provide their temples with victims to their Gods, such a world had to find its limits. When the Spaniards came with their "magic"... Aztecs resist, but only two years. The Death of the Empire is to find in its structures self. The same, with other contexts, explains the fall of the Ancient Indian Worlds, facing the Spaniards, the French or the Englishmen. Understanding how to be strong meant to become weak, for Native Americans old civilizations, may permit the Renaissance of New Indian worlds; but here, I go beyond the Interpretation of the Author. The Book tells us how to enter in Aztecs Civilization Construction, as we visit an Architecture, a Mecanism... Thanks to Inga CLENDINNEN for this initiation (please, excuse the bad english of a natural french writer).