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Overview
The 16th-century conquest of Mexico and its effects are best understood as cultural manifestations of animal behavior patterns which humans share with other primates. While Nahuas and Spaniards can be distinguished on the basis of learned cultural differences, such differences only exaggerated particular expressions of the universal behavioral patterns they shared. Brutality and benevolence were used in the same way by both to establish hierarchy and cultural bonding. After the conquest, a new Mexican synthesis could be constructed because of these commonalities.
Alves explores the formation of that synthesis by examining such aspects of material culture as food, clothing, and shelter—especially as they manifest such universal primate tendencies as hierarchy, reciprocity, benevolence, brutality, xenophobia, curiosity, and territoriality. Alves proposes that humans are historically best understood by using current advances in the fields of primatology and ethology. This groundbreaking book will be of great interest to Latin Americanists, historians, and anthropologists.
"Cultural anthropology of the conquest and the establishment of the colonial system in the 16th century. Explores basic human sentiments - wonderment, hatred, brutality, compassion - using both the Aztec and the Spanish prisms. Food, justice, benevolence, and gender are the venues used to examine the behavior of indigenous and Spanish peoples"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
Synopsis
The first use of human ethology to re-examine the Conquest of Mexico.
Booknews
An attempt to return history to the path of the sciences, presenting a hypothesis drawn from historical evidence. Focuses on Spaniards and the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and cross-cultural bonding in the midst of imperialistic violence. Relates the brutality inherent in the Aztec and Spanish empires to the construction of patriarchal regimes and male hierarchies, and looks at women's tasks as the potential origin of cross-cultural communication. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.