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Human Sacrifice In Aztec Culture

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The Aztecs people of Central Mexico have been a controversial culture studied by many archeologist and anthropologist a like. The Aztec had an empire in central Mexico when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s. The Aztecs had a very controversial practice not seen in many cultures around the world and that is human sacrifice.
To understand the practice of human sacrifice one must look at the reasons why the culture did such practices. There are three main ways of examining a cultural practice from a anthropological perspective. These ways are cultural relativism, ethnocentrism and critical cultural relativism. The purpose of the examining the human sacrifice the way of critical cultural relativism is the best and superior way to look at foreign …show more content…
The political benefit of this custom was to keep the population in check in the Mexico among the triple alliance and rival kingdoms to sacrifice captives taken in war to keep the populations in check. It is estimated that the Aztecs would sacrifice up to two hundred and fifty thousand people a year in the empire. Also it allowed the elites in Aztec society to sacrifice enemies of the empire the use of sacrifice by capturing military age males in the providence helped keep the empire rebellion free and helped keep the control of the central Mexico valley region. This served and economic purpose as it allowed the high elites in Aztec society to keep control on the protein lacking population of the Aztec Empire. This meant for people to get more access to protein or meat. Another economic benefit is that if you sacrificed a slave if you were a business owner to ensure his business prospered. This practice had a huge military purpose as it served in shortening the enemies of the Aztec army by taking a large number of captives and mass sacrificing them to the Gods. This sacrifice and conquest lead to the weakening the chances or revolt or rebellion due to the fact most of their military age men were sacrificed to the Gods. The military after each major military campaign would sacrifice the captives in mass to celebrate …show more content…
Thought not isolated human sacrifice has occurred in multiple cultures around the world but not to the extent of the Aztec empire. Using critical culture relativism, we can explain this phenomenon as it was at the center of their independent religious system. Unlike most religions around the world the Aztec developed their own religious system based on their own creation. This us of human sacrifice was a core part of their religious customs and had even holidays based around it. This would be citizen this custom as we can exam their customs and old world customs using this technique and determine it to be wrong. Using this technique, the Aztec empire participated on a unseen scale in the old world. No ancient civilization from old world had practiced ritual sacrifice on the scale the Aztecs

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