This two-volume set offers an unabridged English translation of the original, Cuerpo humano e ideología, which was first published in 1980. The University of Utah deserves strong praise for a generous production that includes extensive photographs of codicil pages and detailed illustrations of anatomy with corresponding terms in Nahuatl. Volume II is devoted entirely to nine appendixes that offer extensive vocabularies, lengthy translations of original texts, and separate bibliographies on the hot-cold polarity in Nahua thought and on nagualism.
The book brings together López Austin’s longstanding interest in Nahua religious belief and political culture with his work on Nahua medicine. His goal is to show how ideas about the physiological and animistic characteristics of body parts were integral to a broader Nahua ideology and world view, and how this ideology, in turn, structured and legitimated the social hierarchy. He relies principally on sixteenth-century works by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and Fray Alonso de Molina to document the nomenclature of Nahua anatomy, and uses ethnographic associations to clarify and support his interpretation of terms and concepts.
This is an extraordinarily ambitious work, encyclopedic in scope, that showcases López Austin’s impressive command of both the ethnohistorical sources on Central Mexico and the broader ethnographic literature on Mesoamerica. In its style of discourse, it is also a highly individual work, that reflects on and renews debates inspired by the author’s celebrated earlier studies. Some sections of the book will likely engage specialists more than other readers. For example, López Austin’s painstakingly detailed explanation of the etymology of key terms and his defense of his own translations, along with the material in the appendixes, will be of particular interest to Nahuatl linguists. And sections on the animistic concepts of the tonalli and nagualism, and the humoral theory of hot and cold, which make extensive references to a specialized ethnographic literature, also will interest a narrower audience.
In chapters on Nahua ideas about the origins of life on earth; about age, gender, and sexuality; about death; and about the body and the spirit world, scholars in a variety of disciplines will all find something to fascinate them. López Austin’s view of the centrality of concepts about the human body is compelling, and, for anyone who studies the social and cultural history of native peoples in Mesoamerica, his book, with its rich detail and subtle analysis, offers important new insights.
