“ENCLOSURES WITH INCLUSION” VIS-À-VIS “BOUNDARIES” IN ANCIENT MEXICO

Amos Megged

doi:10.1017/s0956536121000043

Abstract

AbstractRecent in-depth research on the Nahua Corpus Xolotl, as well as on a large variety of compatible sources, has led to new insights on what were “boundaries” in preconquest Nahua thought. The present article proposes that our modern Western concept of borders and political boundaries was foreign to ancient Mexican societies and to Aztec-era polities in general. Consequently, the article aims to add a novel angle to our understanding of the notions of space, territoriality, and limits in the indigenous worldview in central Mexico during preconquest times, and their repercussions for the internal social and political relations that evolved within the Nahua-Acolhua ethnic states (altepetl). Furthermore, taking its cue from the Corpus Xolotl, the article reconsiders the validity of ethnic entities and polities in ancient Mexico and claims that many of these polities were ethnic and territorial amalgams, in which components of ethnic outsiders formed internal enclaves and powerbases. I argue that in ancient Mexico one is able to observe yet another kind of conceptualization of borders/frontiers: “enclosures with inclusion,” which served as the indigenous concept of porous and inclusive boundaries, well up to the era of the formation of the so-called Triple Alliance, and beyond.

Highlights

This article proposes that what will be named here “enclosures with inclusion,” which functioned both as a metaphor and a social reality, substituted, in effect, physical, geographical, as well as social boundaries, in pre-Aztec and Aztec central Mexico, well up to the coming of the Spaniards
The article aims to add a novel angle to our understanding of the notions of space, territoriality, and limits in the indigenous worldview in central Mexico during preconquest times, and their repercussions for the internal social and political relations that evolved within the Nahua-Acolhua ethnic states
Examining the semantics of the powerful representation of unity within diversity in Mesoamerican cosmology in general, and in abundant Teotihuacan murals in particular, we find that the motif of entwined serpents may well have been an important symbol of transcendence across time, combined with a supernatural state reached through a shamanistic journey into otherworldly abodes. (One is able to see this kind of a metaphor represented within the frameworks of ritual enclosures, in the Codex Borgia, pp. 29–32.) In Nahua iconography, otherworldly forces are often represented by the figures of snakes

Summary

Introduction

This article proposes that what will be named here “enclosures with inclusion,” which functioned both as a metaphor and a social reality, substituted, in effect, physical, geographical, as well as social boundaries, in pre-Aztec and Aztec central Mexico, well up to the coming of the Spaniards.

Results

Conclusion