Of Enemies & Venison by Lou Manuel Arsenault

Of Enemies & Venison: First Materials for an Aztec Cosmotechnic

Afterword: Victor G. García Castañeda

A new future for Mexico depends upon unearthing what colonialism has buried below the ground. 

Situated deep within the ontological turn, this book brings together the philosophical anthropology of Descola and Viveiros de Castro, with the discourse that runs, through Heidegger, towards the world-building technics of Yuk Hui. Through a detailed study of the sacrificial and symbolic practices of Warfare & Hunting, Lou Manuel Arsenault uses these philosophies as tools to uncover a Cosmotechnic of the Aztecs.

In the cosmology and way of life of Nahuatl-speaking populations of the Valley of Mexico and the surrounding regions during the post-classical period, Warfare & Hunting were inseparable ritual practices within which the distinction between beings—Human, Jaguar, and Deer, or Aztec, Mimixcoa, or Mother and Enemy—became blurred. Articulated here as an Aztec Cosmo-Technique of identification, it is argued that these ritual practices enacted a world with its own destiny, one which was trampled by colonial violence. Yet this destiny—Batalla’s “Deep Mexico”—lies dormant, buried underground, buried in the literature, and in the archaeological record; this book works to unearth it.


About the author
Lou Manuel Arsenault is Quebeco-Mexican Ph.D candidate at Institut national de la recherche scientifique, in Montréal. Working on the relationship between technology and our ways of thinking, his questioning here shifts to the civilizational terrain of Western technology’s domination over the rest of the world and its possible alternatives.