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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2301903" data-attributes="member: 4937">Environmental determinism has been really big since Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and while I don't at all disagree that the environment plays a huge role in the development and collapse of civilizations, I think you cross a line when using environment to explain away the development of cultural traditions.  In particular, the closing lines of the article is utterly offensive to me:So, under population pressure widespread kidnapping, murder, and cannibalism - as the author himself puts it maintaining foreign populations as livestock - are acceptable and rational responces?  That is taking a desire to be non-judgemental just a little bit too far.  The ecological pressures that the Aztecs faced were not unique, yet the particular culture that the Aztecs developed was unique.  A great many other cultures faced problems of overpopulation and undernutrition, and most of the world's poor in every culture of the time was forced to live as virtual vegetarians, but by and large they did not turn to widespread cannibalism as a solution.  Europes peasants were living off of little more than grains.  China's peasants were living off of little more than rice.  Both cultures suffered continually from widespread malnutrition.  Yet Central America possessed at that time a variaty of potential vegetable food crops that exceeded the variaty of virtually anywhere else in the world, and had the author admits at least one domesticated food animal (the turkey).The fact is that allow various cultures are faced with different challenges, how they react to those challenges is as diverse as the human imagination.  The fact that the Aztecs derived some benifits from their cannibal empire in no way renders the statement that the Aztecs had "a maniacal obsession with blood and torture" untrue.  IMO, the Aztec's culture is an extreme example of the development of social and cultural disfunctionality.  It's not at all clear to me that any environmental need to persist in a cannibalistic practice the developed in Central America is not caused by earlier social decisions to accept cannibalism as an acceptable practice.  In other words, I wonder if the writer of the article is guilty of confusing cause and effect.  Were the Aztecs cannibals because of a lack of suitable domestic food animals, or was there a lack of suitable domestic food animals because they had temporarily solved protein problems by turning to cannibalism rather than attempting domestication?  Whatever the case may be, it doesn't render the decision to develop a cannibal empire "acceptable".</blockquote>

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