Sacred and Profane

Marcy Norton shows us a slightly different perspective when examining colonization of the new world by the Spanish. Contrasting the Coe’s book, that was more about the cacao, it’s adaptation to old world tastes, and proliferation across the globe. Norton does provide a revisionist view of the cultural exchange between the Spanish and the Native people. Like most military members, or travelers in general really, when visiting a foreign place and learning of the local customs and curtsies we bring them home to share with family and friends and I think it is likely the conquistadores did the same thing. Norton evidences this in relating the account of the cultural exchange between the emissaries of Moctezuma and the Spaniards by the missionary Duran. Additionally, earlier in the chapter Norton points out Cortez’s diplomatic skills and that he recognizes that in order to get what he came for he needs to be as respectful as possible as not to offend the local people.

I believe it is possible, that recognizing that chocolate and tobacco were take by the upper class members of the local noble society the conquistadors, many of whom aspired to be nobleman, may have adopted the use of these products as a way of projecting their own desire to be perceived as Noble in the eyes of their countryman. Akin to “see only the highest and most respected natives consume this and so we are granted the right too, because we are noble”.

 

As promised in class he is a copy of the Wordle produced when I input the complete text into the topic-modeling tool.

Topic modeling is a way to potentially extract the probability of finding different topics/discourses in a select text or a large corpus (which requires a different tool like MALLET)

Here is the link if you want to test it out for you self.

http://www.wordle.net