Eating Landscape: Aztec and European Occupation of Tlalocan (review)

In this book, historian of religion Philip Arnold attempts to provide new ways to think about Aztec religion and to critique the ethnographic enterprise by focusing on the writings of sixteenth-century cleric Bernardino de Sahagún. The work is mainly an interpretation of four Aztec rituals dedicated to the deity Tlaloc and described by Sahagún in his monumental Florentine Codex. Arnold tries to thread his way through the minefield of competing philosophical and theoretical approaches to his subject, but just as he criticizes Sahagún's writings for creating a "(no)place" (225) that obscures Aztec realities, he comes to occupy a methodological "no place" himself that obscures any contribution to Aztec or cross-cultural studies. He borrows from cultural ecology but denies its central premise. He tries to ground religion in "materiality" (19, 241–9) but denies materialism. He analyzes texts but rejects textual studies. He wants to use scientific information but sees it as a limitation on self-conscious reflection, and among other positions, he tries to take a stance between neo-Marxism and hermeneutics. Almost every statement is so qualified that it is difficult to know where the author stands on any issue or just what he has contributed to scholarly debate.

In interpreting the Tlaloc rituals, Arnold tries to avoid the deficiencies of previous studies by taking a practice-oriented approach. He insists that Aztec religion was danced out rather than thought out and so presents the rituals as performative events rather than expressions of theology. In his view, Mesoamerican researchers need to develop a "hermeneutics of occupation" (1) in which they concentrate on the different ways that Aztecs and Spaniards "meaningfully occupy the land" (2). This approach literally grounds the investigation in the common landscape that has such different meanings for Aztecs, Spaniards, and people of today.

Thus, although the book contains many interpretations of Aztec symbols, it has a deeper purpose. The goal is to get beyond what the author argues is the unreliable surface ethnographic information that Sahagún reports. He claims that Sahagún violated Aztec reality and perpetrated "violence" (234) on his subjects through his ethnographic writings but that, in so doing, he unwittingly revealed differences in Aztec and Spanish relations to the landscape. Arnold thus exerts pressure on our own scholarly conventions and unconscious cultural predilections in advocating that we redirect our effort "away from the fiction of revealing [the Aztecs'] world as they understood it to one of creating an interpretation of their world in such a way as to heighten a contemporary self-consciousness about our world" (228; emphasis in original).

In my view, what the book promises is dubious, and it promises far more than it delivers. The work repeats tired postmodernist mantras that ethnography is an arm of imperialism, scholarship is fiction, and objectivity is a chimera. Arnold basically relies on interpretive, hermeneutical, and phenomenological approaches that not only obscure understanding of Mesoamerican religion but also cause him to fall victim to many of the very practices he decries. The book is filled with statements based largely on the author's imagination and intuition. What Arnold's scheme seems to do is exempt researchers from the need to marshal evidence. The result is a work filled with speculation in which the author is overbearing in his presence and the Aztec people as a historical group fade into the background.

In the concluding chapter, the author states that the Aztecs lived in a world in which everyone was either eating or being eaten and that this brutal circularity is how we should understand the Tlaloc rituals (236). According to him, sacrifice for the Aztecs was a necessary precondition of living meaningfully in the landscape. For the Spaniards, however, the precondition was the massacre of human beings. These and many additional insights come from looking through...