The Question Concerning Technology in Meso-America
The question concerning technology in Mesoamerica arrives at a moment when technological universalism tightens its grip: Artificial intelligence systems trained on urban and metropolitan datasets claim universal applicability; biotechnological patents threaten the botanical diversity developed across millennia and plunder indigenous knowledge deposited in non-human species; “smart” agriculture displaces cultivation practices even older than the territorial ordering of plowing during the Conquista; drone warfare operates through remote terminals transforming the act of killing into videogame aesthetics; facial recognition infrastructure turns the public space into a panoptic surveillance architecture that is currently employed to hunt immigrants in the United States… The urgency of Arsenault’s investigation intensifies when we recognize how contemporary warfare has been captured by Silicon Valley’s theo-political ambitions. Peter Thiel’s Palantir—named for Tolkien’s seeing-stones that grant omniscient surveillance—operationalizes a libertarian eschatology where algorithmic warfare becomes crusade against supposed chaos, where predictive policing and targeted drone strikes implement a technological sovereignty that recognizes no cosmological limits, no moral orders beyond optimization, no obligation to the entities it calculates and destroys. This is Prometheanism in its most virulent form: war as pure informatics, violence extracted from all ritual constraints, killing reduced to data processing.
Against this security landscape where AI-enabled target selection, autonomous weapons systems, and total information awareness, Lou Manuel Arsenault’s study of Aztec warfare and hunting techniques opens a necessary ground in the study of technology by demonstrating that technical diversity persists not as a museum artifact, but as a living challenge to our monotechnological present. What Arsenault accomplishes in this book goes beyond a mere historical reconstruction. By tracing how identification dynamics between hunter and prey, warrior and enemy, shaped technical choices—for example, the way lassos are prioritized over more lethal devices, encirclement over annihilation, ambush designed for capture rather than killing—, Arsenault reveals cosmotechnics as a plural and internally articulated space of practices, rather than as the expression of a single, homogeneous doctrine. More than tactical compromises, these are cosmological necessities where technology expresses an ontological commitment about the nature of entities, their relations, and the structures that bind cosmos to moral order. The lasso and the obsidian blade carry worlds within them, just as the coa and the comal do. Mesoamerican technical thought encompasses nurture and violence, cultivation and sacrifice, the patient cycles of agriculture and the sudden reversals of hunting, each domain articulating shared relational ontologies through distinct material practices.
This work matters because it refuses comfortable ecophile interpretations. While pre-Columbian agricultural technologies, such as the milpa and the chinampa, may translate readily—although stripped from their cosmological weight—into contemporary ecological discourse and consumption practices within “green” capitalism, in his study on hunting and war, Arsenault confronts what resists such recuperation: the sacrificial core, the blood debt, the cosmic hunger requiring continuous satisfaction through technical mediation. We can see how identification with a prey marked for death cannot be packaged for eco-tourism. This refusal to sanitize these practices preserves something crucial: the recognition that non-Western technical systems may organize practices modernity categorizes as violent without thereby replicating industrial warfare’s impersonal destructiveness, its bureaucratized annihilation, its technological sovereignty operating through total mobilization.
This work, supported by the theoretical architecture Arsenault constructs through Descola’s ontological turn, Simondon’s speculative theory on technical objects, and a careful reflection on mimesis, provides rigorous grounding for claims that might otherwise remain gestural. Analogical ontology—a cosmos of entities sharing attributes yet requiring continuous mediation, as described by Descola—clarifies how technical choices express metaphysical commitments. The hunter who fasts to attract deer’s favor, who dons animal skin and mimics calls, acts within a world where boundaries between self and other remain open, where recognition of prey as subject enables the very identification that makes hunting ethically viable. Mimetic practices reveal something Simondon’s framework of abstraction and concretization didn’t fully capture. Where domestication abstracts maize from wild teocentli, creating dependency requiring human intervention, mimetic hunting preserves animal subjectivity even as it pursues death. The hunter does not dominate but identifies, does not extract resources from a standing-reserve but enters relations requiring mutual transformation. Perhaps plants lend themselves more readily to abstraction—their sessile nature, their malleability through selection—while animals, especially those constructed by the West as analogous to humans, demand recognition that complicates instrumentalization. As cosmotechnical thought posits, different metaphysical densities generate different technical possibilities.
Yet we must resist romanticization. Arsenault demonstrates that Aztec warfare, while operating through different principles than modern warfare, remained warfare: organized violence serving political ends, expanding empire, consolidating tributary networks. The identification ethic that limited casualties also sustained a sacrificial economy requiring continuous provision of captives. The critical task becomes distinguishing between technical systems that, however violent by modern humanitarian standards, maintained cosmos-moral unity and preserved forms-of-life, and those that, under guise of progress or development, systematically destroy technodiversity itself.
This distinction grows urgent as identity politics has become the dominant grammar for minoritized resistance. Contemporary struggles over transgenic maize in Mexico, over territorial autonomy for indigenous communities, over defense of traditional knowledge against “biopiracy” (dixit Vandana Shiva), mobilize identity categories the State readily recognizes and capital easily appropriates. Post-revolutionary indigenismo in Mexico instrumentalized indigenous culture as a national symbol while perpetuating structural classism and racism. Today’s multicultural celebrations risk similar recuperation: autochthonous practices frozen into folkloric performance, technology emptied of cosmological content, diversity preserved as an exotic spectacle rather than living practice.
The deeper danger lies in how identity politics reproduces sovereignty’s logic. Claims to cultural authenticity require policing boundaries determining who legitimately belongs, who may practice which techniques, and which knowledge remains pure versus contaminated. Blood lineages, linguistic competency, or adherence to tradition become criteria for inclusion that mirror biopower’s management of populations. The State that today celebrates indigenous heritage deploys tomorrow’s violence when indigenous territories obstruct extractive projects. Or, on the other hand, recognition within existing political orders trades autonomy for visibility and technical diversity for representational inclusion.
Nevertheless, refusal of naïve identity politics cannot mean abandoning defense of minoritized communities against imperial violence. The contradiction requires rejecting essentialist identity while defending specific practices, challenging nationalist appropriation while supporting territorial autonomy, critiquing tradition-as-frozen-essence while honoring cosmological commitments that shape technical engagement. Perhaps the resolution lies in understanding cosmotechnics as continuous individuation rather than preserved heritage. The farmer planting a milpa today does not repeat ancestral practice unchanged but individuates it, adapting to climate shifts, negotiating with markets, synthesizing knowledge without subordinating to capital’s monotechnological imperatives. Such individuation requires material conditions the Promethean stance obscures. Prometheanism underwrites both technological universalism—the myth that techne progresses through mastery over nature, that fire stolen from gods belongs to humans alone—and ostensibly critical positions that simply reverse valorization while maintaining the same metaphysical structure. Against this, Mesoamerican cosmotechnics teaches that technique never belonged to humans alone but emerged through continuous negotiation with non-human agencies. Maize requires human intervention to reproduce; humans require maize to flourish. Hunters identify with prey whose favor must be courted. Warriors recognize enemies as potentially reversed positions in analogical cosmos where today’s victor becomes tomorrow’s sacrifice. These are not mystifications but acknowledgments of interdependence that Promethean mastery systematically denies. Defending technodiversity means defending the conditions for such interdependence to persist: land outside capitalist property regimes, time beyond wage labor’s domination, communities of practice resisting State management, protection from patent enclosures and corporate appropriation. This is concrete rather than symbolic, material rather than representational. It is real.
Arsenault’s anarchist commitments push toward State abolishment, toward destituting power, toward civilizational transformation that would permit plurality of cosmotechnics to flourish beyond sovereignty’s homogenizing force. We should keep asking, even at risk of never reaching an answer, whether such transformation remains possible, whether pragmatic engagement with existing structures might be temporarily necessary while working toward their transcendence, whether the State will collapse or must be actively dismantled. What seems certain is that cosmotechnics cannot fully flourish under conditions that subordinate all technical activity to capital accumulation and State management.
This study of Aztec warfare and hunting arrives, then, as a political intervention. It demonstrates that technical diversity existed, that it expressed genuine alternatives to Western modernity’s trajectory, that colonial violence destroyed not just populations and territories but entire systems of technical-cosmological engagement with the world. It shows that fragments persist, not as frozen relics, but as living practices capable of individuation. And it insists that future technical diversity requires defending these practices against ongoing imperial violence while refusing the identity categories through which such violence increasingly operates. The lasso and obsidian blade, the fasting hunter and disguised warrior, the captured enemy who becomes sacred offering, belong to the difficult work of imagining futures where multiple cosmotechnics coexist, where technical practice serves cosmos and moral order rather than capital’s valorization or State’s sovereignty.
The question concerning technology in Mesoamerica forces a break with any notion of techne as an abstract, universal faculty unfolding identically across cultures. It directs attention to concrete ensembles such as milpa agriculture, chinampa hydrosystems, hunting practices, and sacrificial warfare, showing that each technical configuration is inseparable from specific cosmologies that bind human and non-human actors in reciprocal obligations. Rather than treating Mesoamerican tools and infrastructures as “primitive” variants on a single developmental line culminating in European industrial modernity (or, worse, Silicon Valley’s theocratic fantasies), this question asks how those practices articulate distinct cosmotechnics, where cosmic order and moral order are unified through technical activity. In this sense, thinking technology from Mesoamerica is a critical operation that decenters Western Gestell, that reveals the contingency of our own monotechnological present, and opens space for technodiversity as a condition of any serious response to our current ecological and geopolitical crisis.
—Victor G. García-Castañeda
Torreón, México
February 2026
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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