Lenny Bruce. In a series of articles he authored in “Playboy,” later published in his 1967 posthumous book, “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People,” Bruce observed, “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”
THEN
- (Cooper 1976) looks at the socio-religious foundations of western execution
- state sanctioned homicide (Camus) felt that it continued because it happened outside of the view of common citizens
- (Turnbull 1978): key is in the RITUAL
- (Lofland 1978) modern executions are emotionless, sterile and cold, and appear human on the surface, but deny the DEATH and strip the accused of the opportunity to die with dignity or courage
NOW
- but what about now that executions are reported and even televised?
- PDF FACTS
- What matters
- race of the VICTUM
- race of the DEFENDENT
- CLASS (marginal members of society)
- Mental capacity
- Who did the Aztecs sacrifice:
- war captives
- children of the poor
- women
- slaves
- Techniques: USA
- hanging
- firing squad
- electric chair
- deadly gas
- lethal injection
- techniques Aztecs
- beheading
- burning
- flights of arrows
- coronary execution
DEATH WATCH: Dead Man Walking
Post mortem: Reasons
- aztecs: ritual and religious reasons were official explanation for the killings
- USA: more pragmatic reasons given
- punishment for crime
- deterent
- lower cost of execution to life sentence
- justice for victims families
- "social hygiene" clean up the gene pool
- "eye for an eye" (religious)
- "Society is in order, law reigns and god is in heaven"
- universal impulse to do something in times of stress?
- modern capitol punishment is an institutionalized magical response toto a percieved "disorder" in American culture and society and in the world at large. a solution which has a special apear to "beleaguered, white, God-fearing men and women of the working class" In certain aspiring politicians they find their "sacrificial priests".
other explanations
human sacrifice among the Aztecs as cannibalism (cultural materialism)
- Harner said that the “typical anthropological explanation is that the religion of the Aztecs required human sacrifices,” but that “this explanation fails to suggest why that particular form of religion should have evolved when and where it did” (Harner).
- Instead, he said that the Aztec’s environment–specifically, their increasing population and decreasing amount of wild game and lack of domesticable herbivores (for protein). While there were fish and water fowl,
- Harner believed the poor did not have access to these, and instead had to rely on scant insects and rodents. He also said the while maize and beans can provide all eight of the essential amino acids, they must be eaten in great quantity and at the same time to gain the reward, which was not always possible.
- The human body, then, which craves what it lacked, turned toward human meat.
- Ironically! cannibalism was, for the most part, reserved for the elite classes, which also generally had the most access to other forms of protein. However, he stated that “even nobles could suffer from famines and sometimes had to sell their children into slavery in order to survive.”
- because the humans sacrificed normally were prisoners of war and war is how one could rise to elite status (by brave fighting and obtaining many POWs), the poor were easily rallied to fight–should the obtain POWs, they would not only be able to attain protein for themselves, but they would also find themselves in a new social class.
- Montellano refuted Harner’s hypothesis: Because human sacrifices (and thus, occurrences of cannibalism) were highest at times of harvest and not during times of scarcity and also because the rate of cannibalism was highest in Tenochtitlan, which not only practiced intense, productive agriculture but also received food tributes, cannibalism among the Aztecs cannot be explained by ecological/dietary circumstances.
- He stated that because protein deficiencies have the most impact on children and adolescents, and because those fighting in wars were adults who would not gain so many benefits from an extra protein ration, “75 percent of the population was supposed to be motivated to fight and die in the expectation of a possible future reward that could only be of real dietary value to their children.”
- the ideology of the Aztecs prompted them to cannibalize their victims. “The acquiescence of the sacrificed victims to their fate [of sacrifice] … is also explainable in terms of their religious ideology” (Montellano).
- Just as Aztec ideology said that whether a man received rewards in the afterlife depended on his being either sacrificed to the gods or killed in battle, it said that sacrificial victims were sacred.
- “eating their flesh was the act of eating the god itself”
- That they desired to achieve this union with god through consumption is also promulgated in their consumption of psychotropic plants.
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