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bahareads's review
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Pete Sigal investigates the writings (indigenous and Spanish) on sex and sexuality in Nahua culture. He looks at the persistence and gradual change of indigenous knowledge regarding what the West calls sexuality. Sigal reads the sources against each other to envision the Nahua commoner's connection between sexual discourse with everyday experience and material well-being. There are pictorial texts and alphabetic texts. He adds to the historiography of people who suggest that the colonized can influence the colonizer.
Sigal asked himself if he could write the early colonial Nahua history of sexuality, which I loved. Throughout the entire book, he lets readers know the limits of his knowledge and the extent of the sources. He uses sources from before the Spanish conquest as well as after. Sigal engages in theoretical and methodological conundrums and sexual cosmology, rituals and ways in which sexual acts enter public discourse. His core methodological intervention is using Talzolteol and 16th-century Nahua commoner to argue to read beyond notarial archives to understand Nahua sexuality & focusing on priests and friars & relationships with the Nahuas. He also looks at gods and goddesses' influence on Nahua fertility rights. Nahua deities may be beyond our concept of gender and sexuality. He analyzes ritual production on large and small scale. He uses the category "homosexual" to the idea that that identity existed for the Nahuas at the Spanish Conquest. He works with the category "sex" to challenge the reader to find sex in Nahua discourse.
I LOVED this book. I have no knowledge of the Nahua people but Sigal makes it so easy. There's a lot of theory, which could have been made super-duper complicated but it's all very readable. TFATS forces the reader to try and think outside of their Western mindset. It made me grapple with not imposing your thinking onto your historical subjects.
Sigal asked himself if he could write the early colonial Nahua history of sexuality, which I loved. Throughout the entire book, he lets readers know the limits of his knowledge and the extent of the sources. He uses sources from before the Spanish conquest as well as after. Sigal engages in theoretical and methodological conundrums and sexual cosmology, rituals and ways in which sexual acts enter public discourse. His core methodological intervention is using Talzolteol and 16th-century Nahua commoner to argue to read beyond notarial archives to understand Nahua sexuality & focusing on priests and friars & relationships with the Nahuas. He also looks at gods and goddesses' influence on Nahua fertility rights. Nahua deities may be beyond our concept of gender and sexuality. He analyzes ritual production on large and small scale. He uses the category "homosexual" to the idea that that identity existed for the Nahuas at the Spanish Conquest. He works with the category "sex" to challenge the reader to find sex in Nahua discourse.
I LOVED this book. I have no knowledge of the Nahua people but Sigal makes it so easy. There's a lot of theory, which could have been made super-duper complicated but it's all very readable. TFATS forces the reader to try and think outside of their Western mindset. It made me grapple with not imposing your thinking onto your historical subjects.
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