Molly Bassett
Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Georgia State University
Encounters with bundles: Theory and method in the study of Aztec religion
Abstract:
One of the most persistent stories of the Encounter between Cortés and Moteuczoma is that Aztecs identified the conquistador and company as teteo (gods). The earliest written accounts of Spaniards being called gods date from the 1540s, and scholars differ on the story’s historical likelihood and its authors’ possible motivations. Scholarship on this point offers a window into how the theories and methods we use to study religion in and around Contact help (and hinder) our ability to make sense of pre- and post-Contact cosmology and concepts of being. In an effort to move “beyond Cortés and Moteuczoma” I take up a line of thought advanced by Native American Studies scholar Dian Million, who asserts that “story is Indigenous theory.” I argue that tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles) can be Indigenous theory and method in the study of Aztec religion. As Million explains, “narratives are our desire to link one paradigmatic will to knowledge to discursive and material projects that have consequences.” Stories that feature sacred bundles narrate Aztec ways of knowing and being in the world: the first sacred bundles were wrapped just after dawn at Teotihuacan, and sacred bundles accompanied the Mexica and other groups on migration journeys. As manufactured objects, bundles demonstrate how Aztecs fashioned elements of the natural and made worlds into highly animate entities. Tlaquimilolli are wrapped up in method, including negotiation, exchange, and transformation. In conversation with scholarship concerning whether Cortés was a god, I intend to demonstrate the limits of interpreting Aztec religion without considering Indigenous theory and method while illustrating the potential of the bundle as an interpretive model.
Molly Bassett is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her first book, The Fate of Earthly Things: Aztec Gods and God-Bodies (U. Texas), was published in 2015. She is currently at work on a second book tentatively titled The Bundle: Unwrapping Aztec Religion, an examination of the quimilli (bundle) and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundle) as models for theory and method in the study of Aztec religion.