Invited talk given at the Berliner Antike Klleg at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

Abstract: From the foundational work of Miguel León-Portilla (1956) and Alfredo López Austin (1980) to the more recent work of James Maffie (2013), scholarship on Aztec thought and philosophy has relied, at least partly, on sources written in the Nahuatl language in the colonial period, such as the Florentine Codex (Historia General de las cosas de Nueva España). Throughout this vein of scholarship, the analysis of the meanings of Nahuatl terms takes on a central role as evidence for interpretations and descriptions of indigenous Aztec thought. Using concepts in the indigenous language as a key to understanding indigenous thought, is both a necessary, and often also a highly useful, way of accessing indigenous webs of meaning without imposing western categories of meaning onto indigenous thought. However, this method also has its pitfalls since it challenges scholars, who are not necessarily trained in linguistic or semantic analysis, to find way of approaching the study of meaning in a rigorous and principled way. In this talk, I analyze some linguistic arguments made by scholars of Nahuatl thought, and show how they sometimes rely on problematic argumentation such as folk etymology, exoticization, mistranslation, lacking grammatical analysis, and argument by dictionary. I propose some principles that may be useful to follow when trying to use Nahuatl terminology in proposing arguments about how to understand indigenous Nahua concepts.
Works Cited:
• León-Portilla, Miguel. 1956. La filosofía náhuatl. Instituto Indigenista Interamericano.
• López Austin, Alfredo. 1980. Cuerpo humano e ideología. Las concepciones de los antiguos nahuas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
• Maffie, James. 2013. Aztec philosophy: Understanding a world in motion. University Press of Colorado.