Sex and Conquest

Richard Trexler’s Sex and Conquest and Pete Sigal’s From Moon Goddesses to Virgins offer two very (very) different looks about how sex played a part in the Conquest.  When the Spanish encountered the cultures of the New World a fare amount of cultural shock occurred, to say the least.  However, the strict moral code that the Catholic faith brought across the Atlantic did not conform to any conception of how the native people of the Americas acted.  For this weeks topic I think it was important to read both of these books.  While the topic of the books was the same the way in which the authors approached it was radically different.  And if we had not read both it would have been hard to understand how historians have approached the topic of sex.

In reading the books it became clear that I found Sigal’s approach more appealing.  In Sigal’s book he took a more well rounded look at sex in both the native culture as well as during the conquest.  Allowing the reader to compare and contrast how aspects changed and what was lost by the Spanish enforcement of acceptable behavior.  Trexler outright acknowledges in his book that he did not want to dive into the historical background of aspects of native traditions and rituals.  As an anthropologist I like to have the details picking up a story in the middle right before everything changes is not how I like to learn about culture.

But don’t get me wrong Trexler was not all bad.  But he had a motive for writing the book he wanted to examine how power and dominance are expressed through sex. For a good third of the book Trexler looks at other cultures and how sex and violence occur.  The rest of the structure of the book made me feel like he could have plugged in any culture instead of the Americas.  But maybe that is the point that this form of violence exists in every culture and he used this book to not only look at how this has occurred but the implications it can have for current times as well.

Sex is a part of human culture no matter what part of the world or time period.  However, humans express their cultural rituals in various ways.  As we have seen in these two works the native people of the Americas developed sexual rituals that were bizarre to Spanish causing them to react violently.  By reading these two works we can see how Trexler analyzes the darker side of sex and violence.  While Sigal takes a more positive look incorporating the evolution of the traditions from there incorporation in the culture to their evolution during the contact period. However, by reading both books at the same time we not only see how things occurred in the past but the different tones the topics can take on based on the message the author is trying relate.