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Susan Kellogg's history of the Aztecs offers a concise yet comprehensive assessment of Aztec history and civilization, emphasizing how material life and the economy functioned in relation to politics, religion, and intellectual and artistic developments. Appreciating the vast number of sources available but also their limitations, Kellogg focuses on three concepts throughout - value, transformation, and balance. Aztecs created value, material, and symbolic worth. Value was created through transformations of bodies, things, and ideas. The overall goal of value creation and transformation was to keep the Aztec world-the cosmos, the earth, its inhabitants-in balance, a balance often threatened by spiritual and other forms of chaos. The book highlights the ethnicities that constituted Aztec peoples and sheds light on religion, political and economic organization, gender, sexuality and family life, intellectual achievements, and survival. Seeking to correct common misperceptions, Kellogg stresses the humanity of the Aztecs and problematizes the use of the terms 'human sacrifice', 'myth', and 'conquest'.
List of contents
1. Introduction; 2. Living in the Aztecs' cosmos; 3. Communities, kingdoms, 'empires'; 4. Creating value: producing, exchanging, consuming; 5. Sex and the altepetl: gender, sexuality, and Aztec family values; 6. Resilience: Part I: Aztec intellectual life; 7. Resilience: Part II: trauma, transformation, tenacity.
About the author
Susan Kellogg is Professor Emerita at the University of Houston. An expert on Aztec history and culture, she is the author of Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500-1700 (2005) and Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America's Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present (2005). In 2022, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Ethnohistory.
