Let Me Tell You A Story: History, Political Theory, and Mesoamerica

• In Event: History and Theory in the Construction of Modern Politics

Abstract

This article attempts to use a novel method- creative non-fiction (or story-telling) to make a
serious point about History, Political Theory, and Mesoamerica. Since Mesoamerica is a
politically-sensitive topic and because any attempt to apply Political Theory to the history of
ancient Mesoamerica may be met with implicit biases, the novel use of creative non-fiction-style
story-telling (where all of the facts are portrayed accurately and cited) has been employed before
the formal theorization is presented. This combines one of the strengths of traditional Political
Theory, the use of the thought experiment with actual historical and archaeological data. The
names of places and persons are not only present in the citations throughout the paper, but the
second half of the paper analyzes the story, revealing all of the missing labels and data. This is a
natural experiment, in which the psychological biases of the reader are tested. Since the labels
can confound the natural sympathies of the reader towards the argument, I have simply taken
those out in the first half of the paper, only to bring them back in the second half of the paper.
Thus, the paper is of two clear halves, in order to make the argument both from the theoretical-
narrative and historical-empirical perspectives.

Author

• Christopher Binetti, None