O canibalismo asteca: Releitura e desdobramentos

Abstract

Aztec cannibalism has been the object of numerous interpretations that have characterized it in ecological, cultural or symbolic terms, or as a piece of colonial propaganda. A revision of the most widely known Spanish, Indigenous and Mestizo sources shows that this quest for wide-ranging explanations has been reductionist. The complexity of the sources, in which cannibalism, depending on its qualification, emerges as a heterogeneous, prescriptive or nefarious object, endowed with extensive sociological meaning and pointing towards divergent versions of cosmology, has been largely overlooked. The article also proposes a comparison between Aztec cannibalism and its equivalent along the Brazilian coast and in Amazonia, which attests to its coincidence in a transformational cosmology.