The European Invention of Aztec Human Sacrifice
Maarten Jansen, Professor, Archaeological Heritage, Leiden University; Gabina Aurora Perez Jimenez, Researcher, Heritage of Indigenous Peoples, Leiden University
Piano Lounge, Green College, UBC
Wednesday, February 28, 5-6:30 pm
In the series
Living with the Dead: Cultural Heritage, Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Communities
European perspectives and Christian prejudices have profoundly influenced perceptions and interpretations of the ancient cultures of Mexico and Central America since the beginning of the Spanish conquest nearly 500 years ago. The sanguinary image of human sacrifice by heart extraction, followed by cannibalism, is omnipresent in the historical chronicles about the Aztec civilization and still dominant in contemporary scholarship. Sensationalist representations, propagated by popular scientific works, as well as by novels and films, have impacted the public at large until the present day. A critical analysis of the early colonial texts, however, provokes serious doubts about their veracity. It is time for a re-examination of such engrained stereotypes, not only to gain a better understanding of the indigenous cultural heritage, but also to assess how western ideas about other peoples in general are still under the spell of colonial propaganda.
Maarten Jansen is full professor of ‘Heritage of Indigenous Peoples (with focus on the Americas)’, specialized in the visual art, history and living culture of Mesoamerica. He is head of the department Archaeological Heritage and participates in the Research MA & PhD tracks ‘Archaeological Heritage in a Globalising World’ and ‘Religion and Society (in Native American Cultures)’. Teaching at Leiden University since 1980, he founded there the successful specialization in the archaeology and culture history of the Americas. His own work focuses on diverse aspects of Mesoamerican cultural heritage in past and present, including iconography, history, and ethno-archaeology, and involves research among the Mixtec people (Ñuu Dzaui) in Southern Mexico. Together with Dr. Ferdinand Anders (University of Vienna), Mrs. Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez (investigator / teacher of Mixtec language and culture, Leiden University) and other colleagues, Jansen has produced a series of interpretive studies of religious and historical pictorial manuscripts from ancient Mexico.
Gabina Aurora Perez Jimenez was born in the traditional indigenous community of Yuku Shoo, which belongs to the municipality of Chalcatongo, in the Southern Mixtec Highlands, State of Oaxaca, Mexico. She grew up as a monolingual speaker of the Mixtec language (Sahin Sau), who started to learn Spanish in school. From 1975 onwards she became actively involved in research on Mixtec history and oral tradition, particularly in the interpretation of pictorial manuscripts (codices), working together with Maarten Jansen. Since 1980 she has been living in The Netherlands, while also returning regularly to Mexico. In the Netherlands, she participated in the emancipatory movement of Mexican indigenous teachers for bilingual-bicultural education, and was a representative of this movement in several sessions of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations of the U.N. in Geneva (in the 1980s and early 1990s). From 2001 onwards she worked at Leiden University as researcher in the projects Mixtec City-States, Sahìn Sàu: an Endangered Language of Southern Mexico, and Keeping the Days: Time and identity in Middle America (funded by NWO, the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research) and over the past years in the project Time in Intercultural Context: the Indigenous Calendars of Mexico and Guatemala (funded by the European Research Council). She is author of a course-book and a dictionary of the Mixtec language and of several articles on the situation of indigenous peoples in Mexico, as well as co-author of various books and articles on the interpretation of ancient Mixtec pictorial manuscripts and texts.