Progress, Technology, Nature: Life and Death in the Valley of Mexico

Abstract: In the “history of the Aztecs” scholarship, recent debates reveal how work seemingly aligned with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist objectives can nevertheless reproduce the view that western science and technology are the primary means of improving human life. This corresponds to a type of performative postcolonial analysis that remains caught up in the power dynamics it seeks to dismantle. The essay’s goal is to show that in order to understand, compare, and contrast the technological differences between Mesoamericans and early modern Spaniards, it is necessary to attend to the different ontological configurations that undergird their respective sociocultural renderings of “nature.”