“To Kill” or “To Sacrifice?” Sahagún and the Translation of Mortal Violence

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Spanish accounts from sixteenth-century colonial New Spain tell us that the Aztecs “sacrificed” humans, a notion that has been corroborated and expanded by scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including archaeology, anthropology, history, and religious studies. One question that has tended to escape critical scrutiny is whether a corresponding semantics of “sacrificial” killing may be found in accounts written in the Aztec language Nahuatl or whether the notion of Aztec human sacrifice should rather be seen as a figment of Spanish colonial translation. To explore this issue, I examine narratives of Aztec as well as of Spanish mortal violence in the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún’s book on the conquest. As I show, a comparison of the Nahuatl texts with the Spanish translations illuminates how missionary translation practices augmented the semantics of “sacrifice,” creating a conceptual distinction between Aztec and Spanish mortal violence that is absent in the Nahuatl source language.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37824.0