This book is fun. It resuscitates a host of old debates like a soap opera. Was Aztec cannibalism really an adaptation to protein scarcity in an overpopulated valley of Mexico? Was the ease of the European conquest due to poor Aztec nutrition and health care? Is contemporary Mexican folk belief solely derived from European ideas, with no significant debt to the Aztecs? Was it a blessing that the Aztecs were wiped out? A multitude of controversies is assembled in this dramatic, thoroughly entertaining defense of the Aztecs; and in the process Ortiz de Montellano presents a public health and food-production system that far surpassed anything in Europe at the time, replete with advanced irrigation and sewage systems, botanical gardens, medical research, and agricultural secrets that could benefit the contemporary Third World.
The author argues that the Aztecs expanded the valley’s carrying capacity far beyond its population size by an ingenious system of food production and the use of superior food sources. Indigenous medical theory gave rise to an inventory of remedies that are demonstrably effective. This theory’s peculiar character rendered it superficially similar to the Galenic theory popular in Europe at that time and thereby amenable to both syncretism and anthropological misunderstanding. Thus much of contemporary Mexican folk belief remains consistent with the Aztec medical world view.
There are costs. The population argument is somewhat tautological. Medical beliefs are Boasian culture traits disembodied from their sociopolitical context. The book’s aim, however, is not to demonstrate how ideas were transformed in cultural history, but to illustrate the durability of things Aztec for simple reasons of efficacy. Contemporary Mexican folk beliefs constitute the best of both Aztec and European heritages that work—a syncretism. This syncretism is a product of mestizoness, in which the half-Indian, half-Spaniard tried to accommodate both cultures—a concept that politically isn’t very convincing. And these beliefs are further categorized according to the ethnocentric typology of magical, natural, and supernatural, a scheme, the author allows, that does not fit the facts.
But the reader forgives the author for these transgressions in light of the astonishing image of Aztec sophistication he provides, the engaging excursion through past controversies, and the wealth of obscure particulars that titilate the imagination, like the fact that semen and opossum tails contain prostaglandins that stimulate contractions, or that the same type of algae once collected to make a cheeselike commodity is currently being consumed in Chad. Perhaps many of these old Aztec resources could contribute to the health of the contemporary world.