Peter Sigal: Sex and Norms
Scholar finds common themes in old European, Central American cultures
Friday, October 21, 2005
Durham, N.C. -- The Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl can give an exotic impression of
the indigenous American society’s sexual mores.
“She’s a highly sexual goddess, primarily worshipped by commoners,” said Peter Sigal, a new associate professor of history at Duke who studies sexuality in colonial Latin America.
In a depiction from c. 1570, the fertility goddess -- whose name literally means “trash goddess” -- holds a pot with the head of a child died in birth and a hand, explained Sigal, whose latest book is Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America. She is wearing skins of a human and an animal sacrificed to her and carries a backpack decorated with moon glyphs that signal her status as a lunar goddess.
Despite this foreign mix of symbols surrounding fertility, Sigal said the sexual norms for the Aztecs, as well as the Mayas in Central America, share much in common with our own. Digging through documents in Nahua, the language of the Aztecs, and Yucatec, the language of the Mayans, Sigal has researched the societies’ understanding of human sexuality in medical instructions, religious texts, political histories and petitions.
“There were pre-colonial concepts of marriage but for both groups; the higher-level nobles could be polygamous,” he said. “They also had a concept of divorce.
“It’s clear that adultery was prohibited in both Mayan societies and Nahuas societies,” he said. “What’s unclear is whether that prohibition was taken seriously -- what would really happen to someone when committed adultery.”
“A lot of other things we find are not terribly dissimilar from the [colonizing] Spaniards,” he said. “So for example, the Nahuas had a concept of confession.”
In fact, Sigal said colonial Spanish attitudes toward sexuality were in some ways more similar to those of indigenous societies than to modern United States.
“Neither the Nahuas nor the Spaniards would have understood our commodification of sex or our sense of a strict division between heterosexual and homosexual identities,” he said.
At Duke, in addition to teaching courses on Latin American colonial history, Sigal wants to help strengthen the Program in the Study of Sexualities.
“Sex in some sense was very important to all of the societies I study, and it’s very important to us today,” Sigal said. “I try to think about why there’s that trans-historical sense of the importance of this stuff.”
