This mind-blowing article is a book review of Inga Clendinnen's "Aztecs: An Interpretation". The Aztecs really are hard to love, but even understanding the simplest things about their culture requires some comprehension of their deepest foundations, because in many ways those foundations are very different from our own.
Thinking about culture as a largely collective and continuous act of creation, one wonders how and why any culture develops the way it does; what truths it holds dear; what virtues it praises; what vices it damns; what metaphysical stage all of these play upon.
From a circumstantial perspective, without defending the morality of either the Aztecs or the Spanish, there was just this vast cultural divide between them.
While what happened when they met was inevitable, there is still a ton of stuff you can learn watching a car crash in super-slow motion from all angles. As a "clash of cultures", this one was pretty intense. This article provided good insight on some of the contours of that impact, not from a military/physical perspective (that's been done and is easier), but from a psychological/cultural perspective. I'm getting the book.
On that subject (following a recommandation on HN) I started reading the Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo [0]. It is an account from a conquistator that was a member of the expedition that discovered the Aztec written in a surprisingly modern style and full of nuggets.
Oh wow, that bought back memories. My aunt got that book when I was quite young (about 7 or 8), and she started reading me from it. At the time I was going through a phase when I was fascinated by Aztecs and the Conquistadors and I absolutely loved that book - I remember hearing the unpronounceable names of the gods (and trying to memorise them to impress my peers at school), the gory sacrifices, the battles and the mundane bits of everyday life. It's one of the books that I blame for starting a lifelong fascination with history.
Many, many years later I found the book again in a charity bookshop; I bought it, read it from cover to cover and enjoyed it just as much; this time around however I was older and had a better understanding of the events described.
Thank you for the wonderful trip down memory lane.
Sorry for the tangent, but this is one of the biggest missing ingredients in science fiction and fantasy today, in my opinion. It is really, really captivating to get into the head of someone who thinks differently from you at a very fundamental level. But so much of what I see is just mindlessly regurgitating our modern assumptions. What I'd really love to see is fiction that takes this level of depth and applies it to hypothetical cultures. It seems to be that could be really awesome.
Thinking about culture as a largely collective and continuous act of creation, one wonders how and why any culture develops the way it does; what truths it holds dear; what virtues it praises; what vices it damns; what metaphysical stage all of these play upon.
From a circumstantial perspective, without defending the morality of either the Aztecs or the Spanish, there was just this vast cultural divide between them.
While what happened when they met was inevitable, there is still a ton of stuff you can learn watching a car crash in super-slow motion from all angles. As a "clash of cultures", this one was pretty intense. This article provided good insight on some of the contours of that impact, not from a military/physical perspective (that's been done and is easier), but from a psychological/cultural perspective. I'm getting the book.