Material agency in the Andes

Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2009

The Andean World, eds. Kathleen S. Fine-Dare and Linda J. Seligmann. London and New York: Routledge, 2019

Material studies in the Andes, as elsewhere, have tended to concentrate on specific classes of objects (natural features of the landscapes, textiles, knotting systems, basketry, ceramics, stonework), and to pre-assign these classes to natural or cultural domains, overlooking their possible relations, and indeed the technical basis in common between all man-made things. This is at odds with the regional theories of Aymara and Quechua speakers, who perceive these objects as part of a common world. To understand these other ways of being in the world, experienced by native speakers, recent material studies are now going beyond earlier epistemological approaches, comparing ways of knowledge, towards ontological ones, comparing ways of being in the world. Seeking more symmetrical relations between humans, other animals, plants, and things, and an ontology of relations closely allied to animism, these new approaches show that the interrelations between these entities are ontologically more fundamental than the entities themselves. The relational ontologies examined in the Andean case include those between humans and humans, humans and plants, humans and animals, and humans and material things.

Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2014

This study argues that people and things, through their interactions with each other, embody different agential capacities and that scholars should evaluate how they are variably effective at structuring the actions of others and at shaping society. This is attempted here through a study of dismembered body parts that, as I argue, remained socially and politically active even in their dismembered state. As such, we can begin to analyse them as embodying a categorically different kind of agency — post-mortem or secondary agency — while remaining cautious of overzealous attempts to claim that everyone and everything has agency of equivalence. Definitions of agency are examined and its definition within this article is explicitly formulated, drawing especially on ideas from Gell (1998), Robb (2004), Sewell (2005) and Latour (2005). Through a case study from the Peruvian Andes in which approximately 240 individuals were dismembered, I suggest that the primary agency once embodied in those living persons was transformed into secondary agency (Gell 1998) as the person-cum-corpse was remade into smaller body parts. These body parts and their placement in a ritually significant locale, had profound effects on the living, particularly as it related to the ways that those dead-body objects extended social relations and social hierarchies, making them more durable.

Iberoamericana, 2008

At the heart of the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas’s final book, an unfinished and posthumously published novel entitled The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, there is a strange scene of industrial epiphany. A factory owner, Don Angel, is showing a visitor, Don Diego, around one of the fish processing factories that dominate the coastal boomtown of Chimbote. The two find themselves in the very bowels of this technological beast, where Don Diego experiences something like a techno-affective rapture of cyborg transformation. This is an extraordinary scene in many ways, perhaps above all for the fact that it plays such a crucial role in a work by what is perhaps Latin America’s most famous indigenist writer, who is usually taken to pit an Andean spiritual cosmovision squarely against the bleak rationality of Western modernity. But I take this instance of a delirium at the heart of the machine as both entryway and key to the whole of Arguedas’s writing. I offer another Arguedas from the one presented by the critical canon: an Arguedasmachine that “nobody has observed.” This Arguedasmachine is hard at work fabricating a techno-indigenism that both separates and presses together the various elements of Peruvian culture, much like the cyclones and centrifuges of Don Angel’s factory, but it finally breaks down by becoming fully immanent to the affective flows on which it operates.

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 1999

Journal of the Anthropology Society of Oxford (JASO)-online, 2011

As a significant sub-discipline within anthropology, material culture studies have been at the forefront of ground-breaking theories regarding the relationships between people and things. A whole genre of object biographies have been produced, based on article on the 'social life of things ' (cf. Saunders 1999. Daniel Miller's (1987) interpretation of Hegel's dialectical materialism led to a serious discussion of how people and objects mutually reinforce and create each other. While Kopytoff's theory has been widely criticized for its passive, semiotic approach , Miller's notion of 'materiality' (1987, 2010) moved away from the meanings of objects to focus on how they act within the field of social relations. As more anthropologists and archaeologists engage with material culture studies, however, the assumptions on which this sub-field have been based are being called into question. Rival's edited volume (1998) includes ethnographic accounts attempting to reconcile the symbolic and material aspects of person ̶ thing relationships. Ingold (2007b) adopts a more radical view, bypassing a discussion of symbolism and critiquing 'materiality' for being an abstract category. His phenomenological approach calls for an analysis of the material substance and affects/effects of things. Instead of analysing the 'thinginess' of things, as is the case in materiality studies, Ingold advocates an exploration of how things are 'thingly'; that is, how they emerge in the world of both people and things (Ingold 2007b: 9). In this sense, things are not essential, unchanging entities but are instead contingent (Holtorf 2002) on time, space, and their relationships with other emergent things and people. This brief summary of material culture studies reveals that the basic relationships under analysis, those between people and things, are by their very nature complex and unfold over time. As anthropologists, how are we to make sense of this 'mess' (cf. Hicks 2010: 71) of things and people? In this article, I will argue that a better understanding of people ̶ thing relationships must begin from an expanded Miller, Maize as material culture? 68 notion of 'material culture.' Within material culture analyses, the materials most commonly investigated are manufactured objects. Miller (2010) studies cell phones and saris, Latour (1993b, 2000) researches trains and keys, and many other authors have analysed everything from knapped bottle glass artefacts (Harrison 2003), to potsherds (Holtorf 2002), to rubbish (Shanks 2004). Although Ingold (2000, 2006, 2007a, 2007b) has produced theoretical writings on non-manufactured materials such as trees and the weather, he has yet to write an ethnographic account of such materials in the lives of particular people. While the relationship between people and manufactured objects is undoubtedly important, in certain communities other materials also take on a central role. This article will focus on indigenous Amazonian encounters with things, including artefacts, animals, spirits and plants. Human ̶ plant relationships will be given a particular emphasis, as these engagements are understudied and not usually included in the domain of 'material culture studies' (an important exception is Rival ed. 1998). It will be shown how a more complete theoretical understanding of the relationship between people and all sorts of things can be found in the rich ethnographies of Amazonia.

Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 33, Pre-Columbian States of Being (Spring,1998), pp. 18-27

The article critically appraises the ontological turn in archaeological research, especially approaches that draw inspiration from nonrepresentational and non-anthropocentric theories. A comparison of the Late Formative center of Jatanca (300-100 BCE) with the neighboring Moche site of Huaca Colorada (AD 650-850) in the Jequetepeque Valley of Peru will then demonstrate how radical transformations in architectural construction point to fundamental changes in how communities perceived and experienced the material world. The markedly different traditions of place making certainly suggest significant shifts in the meaning and political effects of built environments. Nevertheless, the article concludes with the important caveat that the pronounced architectural differences do not necessarily translate to major shifts in ontologies and constructions of personhood but more likely to transformations in ritual practices and political organization. Therefore, the comparison reveals the dangers of assuming that distinct materialities correspond to distinct ontologies or even distinct "materialisms." Ultimately, the author argues that a focus on the materialities of place making, as opposed to generic interpretations of ontology, permits a more effective means of reconstructing historical process within the specific Andean context.