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This fascinating, richly illustrated book explores basic
Precolumbian beliefs about the soul among ancient Mesoamerican
peoples. It focuses on the Central Mexican Aztecs-called the
Mexica-who believed in multiple souls that animated the body, gave
humans their shared and individual characteristics, and survived
the body after death. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including
visual representations on Precolumbian monuments, colonial Spanish
chronicles, early medical and travel accounts, and modern
ethnography, Jill McKeever Furst argues that the Mexica turned not
to mental or linguistic constructions for verifying ideas about the
soul but to what they experienced through the senses. According to
McKeever Furst, Mexica definitions and characterizations of the
souls were influenced by their observations of human
physiology-including birth, temperature changes in the body, normal
aging, and the processes of death and dying-and by their
experiences with their environment, specifically the lands near
lakes that provided them with unusual visual and olfactory
sensations (one of the souls is based on the odor of marshes).
Providing as supporting evidence native beliefs about the soul in
the ideologies of other Uto-Aztecan speakers ranging from the
United States to Central America, McKeever Furst challenges
deconstructionist theories that cultural phenomena are purely
mental constructs.
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