11 Tis Land Is My Land Identity and Confict on the Western Frontier of the Aztec Empire JAY E. SILVERSTEIN Imperialism and colonialism are terms used broadly to describe the character and mechanics of expansionistic states. Empire refers to a state that embraces a doctrine of military, economic, or ideological incorporation of foreign lands, while colonialism refers to a process of incorporation predicated on establish- ing control of land and people through the transplantation of imperial agents within a foreign territory. In Western thought, empires have an assumed posi- tion at the top of the sociopolitical complexity hierarchy. “Old World” super- states are so fundamental to the genesis of the concept of empire that our termi- nology derives from the Roman terms imperium and colonaiae (see chapter 1). Colonists ofen viewed themselves as representing a benevolent or at least a superior society enlightening or entitled to exploit a lesser people. Military and political achievement generates positive feedback between imperial expansion and self-aggrandizing displays and rhetoric that create a supporting cosmic rationale to explain military and political success. Because of this, dispropor- tionate emphasis is carried in the archaeological and historical record of the dominant class of a society, resulting in history with an elite emic bias. Historically, Greece, Rome, and modern Europe have served as the intel- lectual core of most of Western academic thought about empire, and for the most part we have not escaped this “core” bias in our heuristics. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, scholars have begun to address this bias through anthropological archaeology, which opens the study of empire to include the periphery. Tus the discourse on imperial and colonial relationships has ex- panded its theoretical framework for modeling cultural interactions between superstates and smaller polities to include the agency of those outside the core. New perspectives that include “peripheral” peoples and models of cultural Frontiers of Colonialism, edited by Christine D. Beaule, University Press of Florida, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uhm/detail.action?docID=4873560. Created from uhm on 2019-01-23 01:28:53. Copyright © 2017. University Press of Florida. All rights reserved.