XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
Article
Seeing like an archaeologist: Viveiros de Castro at Chavı´n de Huantar
Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0) 1–21 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1469605315575425 jsa.sagepub.com
Mary Weismantel Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Abstract This article juxtaposes Viveiros de Castro’s theory of ‘perspectivism’ with carved stone monoliths from the Peruvian site of Chavı´n de Huantar to explore the interactions between humans, animals, and things in Pre-Columbian material culture. Using insights from new work on animal/human relations and the ethnography of shamanism and hunting, it illuminates aspects of the iconography, scale, and style of the stones that were previously opaque. Finally, it challenges archaeologists to address the limitations of perspectivism, notably its abstraction and ahistoricism, avoiding the retrogressive return to romantic primitivism that sometimes mars the ontological turn, thus transforming perspectivism into a better means of political engagement with indigenous Americans present and past. Keywords Chavı´n de Huantar, Vivieros de Castro, perspectivism, Andean archaeology, animal/ human, shamanism, hunting
A confounding image confronts me on my laptop screen (Figure 1).1 In bold black and white, it shows a figure that is part human, with an upright stance and human torso, arms, and legs. But it is also part bird: the feet end in talons instead of toes, Corresponding author: Mary Weismantel, Northwestern University, 840 Michigan Ave., Apt. #21, Evanston, IL 60202, USA. Email:
[email protected]
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
2
Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)
huge wings sprout from the shoulders, the upturned head wears a curved beak like a mask. It might almost be a human in the costume of a bird of prey, except that the face underneath the mask resembles a jaguar, with a fanged mouth, animal nostrils, and small round ears. And folded into this already-complicated body are still more, smaller bodies and body parts representing still more species: little openmouthed faces with inhuman features at the ankles, tiny snakes atop the head and wings; and a big row of crocodilian teeth marking the spine. This populous body immediately brings to mind Donna Haraway, who describes our bodies as multi-species organisms formed through inter- and intraaction between different kinds of individuals, bodies, and species (2006: 111). But while Haraway’s writings on ‘multi-species cosmopolitics’ have inspired many futurist works of art, this is not one of them.2 Instead of a sci-fi vision of the future, this is an artifact with both a recent and an ancient past. Its recent past began in 1962, when archaeologist John Rowe published it in a museum catalog (Rowe, 1962, 19673). That black and white drawing was a modern copy of a PreColumbian design; the original can be found at the archaeological site of Chavı´ n de Huantar in the central Andes of Peru (1200–200 BCE), where it is incised onto the surface of a granite pillar. This human/non-human body looks utterly fantastic to modern eyes, but similar images of multi-species beings were ubiquitous in the Pre-Columbian Americas. In every possible medium—stone, textiles, clay, paint, tattoos—and at every scale, from tiny hand-held objects to enormous monoliths, indigenous Americans created bodies that fused human features with those of birds, jaguars, snakes, and even plants. This article is about these Pre-Columbian things in the shape of bodies that are both animal and human. My focus here is the Falcon Pillar, but the questions I ask at Chavı´ n can be asked almost anywhere in the America, wherever fragments of the vibrant material culture of earlier Americans survive. Up until the end of the twentieth century, European and EuroAmerican attitudes towards Pre-Columbian artifacts were limited by our own cultural traditions and their conceptions of the non-human. In recent decades, however, intellectual and cultural changes in our attitudes towards other species and an explosion of academic work on animal/human interactions enable us to bring fresh eyes to these ancient bodies (Weismantel and Pearson, 2007). The crowded body in Figure 1 seems unrealistic to viewers accustomed to modernist ontologies in which a unitary self inhabits a unitary, homogeneous body. But our perceptions may be changing, as scientists as well as posthumanist writers tell us to think of our bodies as composed of many other bodies, including the thousands of tiny creatures in our gut, as well as the body parts of animals and plants that we daily ingest (Gane, 2006; see also Barad, 2012). From a twenty-first century scientific perspective, the multi-species bodies at Chavı´ n begin to look less fantastic: in time, we may even come to see Pre-Columbian representations as more accurate approximations of our biological selves than the conventional modernist body. But the topic of this article is not representations of bodies; it takes up a more archaeological question, which is the interaction between people and things.
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
Weismantel
3
Figure 1. Roll-out drawing of the left Black and White Pillar. Originally published in Rowe (1962). Available online at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ANTH/emeritus/rowe/pub/chavin/ ch9.html. Used with permission.
To think about this pillar as a material thing in the world, rather than just a representation of something else, enlarges and complicates Haraway’s multi-species assemblage in ways she does not envision. When a person encounters this artifact in animal form, a physical and perceptual relationship between two bodies is established. The human looks and sees the animal/artifact looking back; this exchange creates a new, unstable assemblage that incorporates not only the human/bird/ jaguar body but also the perceiving human body. This topic—the exchange of looks between humans and non-humans in indigenous South America—takes us beyond Haraway to the brilliant theorist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, whose writings about an ‘Amerindian’4 relational ontology that he calls ‘perspectivism’ have attracted so much attention in recent years. The relationship between human and non-human species is central to his theories, and so too is the act of looking (2012a: 74). I have argued previously that attention to the act of looking can provide contextual information about the stones (Weismantel, 2013a, 2013b, 2014, in press). This article builds on that work by showing how a close reading of Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism might provide
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
4
Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)
insights into aspects of the stone’s iconography, scale, and style that were previously opaque. When I bring Viveiros de Castro to Chavı´ n and look at the stones with him, the effect is revelatory. The illumination works both ways: the juxtaposition of ancient stones and new ideas gives us a new orientation from which to approach the archaeological data; and it also changes our perspective on perspectivism itself. Viveiros de Castro’s ideas have had an impact far beyond anthropology, notably in conversations with Phillippe Descola and the celebrated French intellectual Bruno Latour (2009). But non-anthropological audiences use his work to different ends than an anthropologist might: Latour, for example, finds Viveiros de Castro’s accounts of how Brazilian natives think stimulating—but only as an exotic foil to debates within Western philosophy. My goal here is very different: I want to reanthropologize his work, which began with ethnographic and ethnohistorical data, by bringing it back to its South American context, and into immediate contact with indigenous cultural and material practices—in this case, with the worship of the great carved stones of Chavı´ n. I am not alone in this move: ethnographers who work with indigenous hunters have also been quick to see the value of perspectivism, which has helped them re-think the ontologies of human–non-human relations within their own work. But like me, they are aware of the limitations that arise from its idealist emphasis on categories of thought, and have re-worked it through a more materialist focus on how people actively engage with the world through practical endeavors. Danish anthropologist Rane Willerslev, for example, uses his own immersive ethnographic work with Siberian hunters to replace Viveiros de Castro’s ‘‘abstract model’’ of perspectivism, which he finds too ‘‘detached from the real experiences of people in a life-world’’, with one closely based on actual encounters between species in the context of the hunt (2004: 630). In addition to Viveiros de Castro, then, we’ll bring Willerslev and his descriptions of the phenomenology of the indigenous hunt along to Chavı´ n too. I end this article with a challenge. Ethnographers have taken perspectivism and moved it from a static and idealist concept to an active one grounded in lived experience. Can archaeology do the same, and develop a perspectivism as deeply grounded in archaeological data, methods, and questions as Willerslev’s is in ethnography? An archaeological perspectivism will be materialist and historical. It will be materialist in seeing humans as actors and makers who co-create the world together with other beings and things, rather than standing back to think and observe. And it will be historical in its deep temporal perspective on the indigenous Americas, in contrast to the oddly timeless ‘Amerindian’ world evoked by Viveiros de Castro. A materially and historically situated use of perspectivism that juxtaposes it with the very specific social and political realities of a particular place such as Chavı´ n is more likely to realize Viveiros de Castro’s avowed aim of decolonizing anthropology by avoiding the retrogressive return to romantic primitivism that sometimes mars the ontological turn. Instead, an archaeological perspectivism can produce
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
Weismantel
5
forms of scholarly practice that are aware of and responsive to the historical contingencies and power relations that shape indigenous lives in the present, as well as in the distant past. In sum, this is an opportunity for archaeology to take an active stance in making theory: rather than treating perspectivism as something we can respectfully cite, we can transform it into a better method of doing anthropology, and a better means of political engagement with indigenous Americans present and past. To begin, let us look briefly at the history and material record of Chavı´ n de Huantar, and of this carving.
The site Chavı´ n de Huantar is located in the north-central Andes of Peru at an altitude of 3150 m. The temple complex sits at the junction of two rivers and comprises a tightly interconnected set of monumental buildings and terraces set into a steep mountain valley. Debate has arisen over its chronology (Burger and Salazar, 2008; Kembel, 2008; Rick, 2008), but Chavı´ n was unquestionably thriving as a monumental temple site between 850 BCE and 500 BCE, and its occupation almost certainly extends far back into the preceding Initial Period (1800–900 BCE) (Kembel, 2001: 252–253 and passim; Lumbreras, 1993). Chavı´ n is one of the most famous archaeological sites in Peru. Today, it is a World Heritage site that attracts national and international tourists, students, and roving archaeologists. Ethnohistoric documents tell that it attracted pilgrims from across Peru in the sixteenth century, and archaeological evidence suggests a similar role in the first millennium BCE. There are other, larger sites coeval with and much earlier than Chavı´ n, but the architecture, art, and dramatic highland setting of this site set it apart. Much of the site’s fame rests on its elaborately carved monoliths, such as the Tello Obelisk, Lanzo´n, Raimundi Stela, Yauya Stela, and the Black and White or Falcon pillars. The carving discussed here is found on one of these two pillars, which stand 2.3 m high, and form part of a portal made of finely finished granite (Fux, 2013: 158 (Figure 105)). The portal was erected in its current location during the last phase of monumental construction at the site, sometime before or ca. 750 BCE. It is a focal point for the site; it frames the entrance to an impressive building fac¸ade, and anchors a visual axis through the largest plaza (Kembel, 2001). However, this may not be its original location: Kembel believes that the pillars may have been moved from a smaller, more intimate space in which the carved designs would have been more easily seen (2001: 244). In their current setting, the carvings are partially hidden by the abutting walls, and the incisions are so shallow as to be almost imperceptible from even a short distance (Weismantel, 2014: 615). Ambiguities surround the placement and perceptual interfaces of all Chavı´ n’s monolithic carved stones. This adds to the challenge in answering the question raised by this unique site: why did people come here, traveling great distances to
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
6
Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)
enter into the presence of these objects? To understand this powerful pull, we can start by looking more broadly at the presence of multi-species bodies in the PreColumbian Americas.
Seeing animals Pre-Columbian scholars are accustomed to seeing objects that put animal heads on human torsos, animal snouts on human faces, animal teeth in human mouths. But ordinary people—the students in our classes, or tourists at archaeological sites— find them strange. They ask questions about them and we don’t always have good answers. Our research has provided more information about animals in the prehistoric diet than in the prehistoric imagination (Hill, 2003). The truth is, we haven’t been that interested in the question: after all, anthropology is a science of the human. This lack of theoretical attention may be especially pronounced in the America, where (with the possible exception of the southern Andes) domestication was not a fulcrum of social complexity, as in Eurasia. Nevertheless, Pre-Columbian imagery is full of animals and animal– human hybrids—almost as though there were an inverse relationship between the relative unimportance of other species as domesticates and their enormous significance in the collective imagination. Of course, animals show up in art the world over—but with a key difference in the relations of power envisioned between species. In European art from classical Greek statuary to French nineteenth century oil painting, great men show their power by their mastery over animals. In iconic images, Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte mount rearing horses, Saint George spears the dragon, and Santiago (St James) tramples a Moor—a non-European reduced to the status of a mere animal.5 The Pre-Columbian Americans are different: here, gods and humans are depicted as great and powerful because they are like animals: winged like a bird, muscled like a great cat, coiled like a snake. This contrast between Europe and the Americas is reminiscent of Tim Ingold’s distinction between societies where human–animal relations take the form of ‘relations of domination’, and others where they are ‘relations of respect’ (2002). His formulation, which rests on domestication as a key variable, does not fit neatly onto the Andes. At the site of Chavı´ n, camelid husbandry was a significant part of the local economy, and may have gradually replaced deer hunting over the life of the site (Burger and Miller, 1995). Nonetheless, the depictions of animals express an attitude of respect and awe, and even a desire to merge with other species. We can look for explanations at several levels. Throughout the America, there is a panNative American ethos of sacred reciprocity between predator and prey; in South America, this takes the form of cosmologies in which predation is a central theme. In the steep local ecology, an economic strategy of Andean verticality integrated wild and domestic spaces and species rather than making them conceptually distinct, so that the presence of domesticates did not cause the kind of fundamental shift that Ingold describes.
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
Weismantel
7
This difference between mastering and becoming animal is part of the deep history of the Americas, where it shaped the trans-Atlantic encounter. Consider, for example, two coeval images of female deities. In Europe, the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception crushes a snake under her foot—an image brought to the Americas in Spanish Baroque art. In Aztec Mexico, the head of the great Mexica goddess Coatlicue is formed of two enormous serpents. Even her name, Coatlicue, refers to her skirt of live snakes—the emblem of her divinity. To European Christians, deities in animal form were literally diabolical: the Mark of the Beast. In post-conquest Mexico, the snake under the Virgin’s foot came to represent the defeat of indigenous polytheism, and the statue of Coatlicue was entombed underground until the twentieth century. Not that the secularism of the modern era was any less anthropocentric. Science—including anthropological science—was shaped by Enlightenment thinkers like Descartes, who glorified human rationality by contrasting it to the brutishness of beasts. Early anthropologists then merged the hierarchies between species and races into an evolutionary master theory. They placed the world’s religions into a racialized hierarchy, with ‘animism’ at the bottom and ‘monotheism’ at the top. The lower races, who were closer to beasts themselves, worshipped animals and plants; the more evolved races worshipped God in human form. Savages looked down the evolutionary ladder to find the sacred; civilized men looked up, towards true divinity. In the twentieth century, anthropologists rejected this racist vision. They insisted vehemently that all humans are alike, with identical mental capacities; but in insisting that savages were not animals, they reinforced the boundary between species. This created a certain awkwardness around animism: racial prejudice still tended to creep into descriptions of the religious practices of indigenous peoples as ‘ecstatic’ (and animistic) shamanism rather than a ‘rational’ (humancentered) priesthood. It was only at the end of the last millennium that this relentless anthropocentrism began to be challenged by posthumanist philosophy, which seeks to dissolve the boundary between humans and other animals. In the 1980s, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze attacked Enlightenment humanism, and celebrated the idea of ‘becoming-animal’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). More recently, in Italy and the United States, feminist scholars Rosi Braidotti (2013) and Donna Haraway (2006) offer futuristic visions of mergers between humans, animals, and machines. Their goal is to dismantle the longest-standing dualities of Western thought: not only between animal and human, but male and female, mind and matter, nature and culture. It is in this context that Viveiros de Castro attracted global attention by asserting that ‘Amerindians’ in South America possess an ontology of the kind that these twenty-first century Western philosophers are struggling to invent. The nineteenth century concept of animism is back, but with new meaning: now, instead of signifying racial backwardness, animism looks like a vibrant alternative to the discredited anthropocentrism of the West.
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
8
Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)
This is the moment, then, for us to try to answer those naı¨ ve questions that amateurs ask: Why does this statue have animal eyes, and what are we supposed to see when we look into them? Viveiros de Castro’s writings are an obvious starting point.
Seeing like a shaman At the core of Viveiros de Castro’s theory is the concept of ‘‘Amerindian perspectivism’’, which asserts that reality is differently constituted depending on one’s perspective (see also Bird-David, 1999). Humans, animals, and spirits, the living and the dead each perceive a different reality. These multiple realities are all there is: there is no transcendent deity, no single godlike perspective that trumps the limited vision of individuals and species. To explain these ideas, Viveiros de Castro returns over and over to one primary encounter: the exchange of looks between a man and a jaguar. (In his masculinist world, it is always a man.) In his telling, the fact of being human is not fixed: it is a question of perspective. As the two look at one another, each perceives the other as animal, and himself as human. The man knows himself to be a human being—the unique possessor of culture and language—and he perceives the jaguar as wild. But the jaguar knows that he is the true human, who lives in a community, has speech and wears clothing; to a jaguar, we are the ones who appear as beasts. Amerindians assume that every species knows this: they understand that their own cultural traits—their clothing, adornments, and tools—will appear as bodily traits to outsiders. When I juxtaposed this ethnographic information with the pillar, I started to make sense of aspects of the carving that were previously opaque. We see a body that is human in its underlying proportions and upright posture, and that wears its non-human features—beak, wings, talons, snakes—like outer coverings or masks. According to Viveiros de Castro, in Amerindian ontologies the manifest form of each species is a mere envelope (a ‘clothing’) which conceals an internal human form, usually only visible to the eyes of the particular species or to certain trans-specific beings such as shamans. This internal form is the soul or spirit of the animal: an intentionality or subjectivity formally identical to human consciousness, materialisable, let us say, in a human bodily schema concealed behind an animal mask. (1998: 470–471)
If we apply this idea to this carving, it tells us that we are seeing the animal as it sees itself: as a human being adorned with an exterior costume or mask that renders it beautiful, powerful, and non-human. But. . . when we look at this being, whose eyes are we seeing it with? A member of its own species would see it as human; a member of another species would see it as an animal. Here, it appears as both at once, as though we are seeing it from both perspectives simultaneously. According to Viveiros de Castro, this is seeing as a
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
Weismantel
9
shaman sees: ‘‘Shamans possess two simultaneous bodies, one human, the other animal. They can alternate their points of view by manipulating their sense of sight’’ (Vilac¸a, 1998: 25–26 quoted in Viveiros de Castro 2012a: 75). This proposition offers us a new and specific idea of what drew people to Chavı´ n, and what happened between the people and the stones once they got there. Every description of the site calls it a ‘pilgrimage site’, ‘religious site’, or ‘temple’—a place of worship. But when we talk about people coming to ‘worship’ the stones, what exactly do we envision them doing? Viveiros de Castro offers us a hypothesis: Chavı´ n was sacred because the stones created a space where one could experience this simultaneous/alternating vision. The stones did not just offer images that represented a shamanic vision; by offering an encounter with a body both like and unlike their own, the stones actually materialize shamanic looking as a bodily, sensory experience. Of course, an encounter at Chavı´ n is unlike the relatively simple human/jaguar encounter Viveiros de Castro envisions: to look at one of these carvings is to see a body composed of many bodies and many species. This multiplicity evokes ethnographic descriptions of powerful shamans who have acquired multiple bodies and souls from others. As befits such a famous holy place, the stones do not embody an ordinary encounter with an ordinary being; instead, they bring us into contact with superhuman beings who have incorporated, ingested or become not just one but many others. The Obelisk Tello, for example, features a pair of giant caymans; built into and around their reptilian bodies are dozens of other species—fish, birds, humans, and plants. According to Viveiros de Castro, modern indigenous people like the Ye’kuana wish to see with ‘anaconda eyes’ (de Civrieux 1985: 65–66, quoted in Viveiros de Castro, 2012a: 31); the caymans at Chavı´ n incorporate a multitude of bodies with many different kinds of eyes, and can see simultaneously with all of them. An encounter with the Obelisk lets a perceptive viewer shift between these multiple embodied perspectives, and so positions us, too, as powerful shamans. This close focus on the interaction between human and animal/artifact and on seeing and being seen enriches our understanding of what happened at Chavı´ n. Twentieth-century anthropologists favored textual analogies to explain PreColumbian visual culture: for them, the carvings were like books or spoken myths that stored religious information (Lathrap, 1973; Rowe, 1962). These analogies help minimize the intellectual differences between the West and the non-literate cultures of the Americas, but they miss some of what the stones do: they communicate as much through physical interaction as through symbols or images (Weismantel, 2013b, 2014). The stones do not just represent animal/human relations; they enact an animist ontology of seeing and knowing across species. To see what the stones have to say, then, we need to pay attention to how they make us look at them.
Seeing like a predator The quote cited above, in which an indigenous shaman speaks of his vision as a rapid, sometimes uncontrollable oscillation between seeing like a human and seeing
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
10
Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)
like another animal such as an anaconda or a jaguar, helped me make sense of another baffling aspect of Chavı´ n stones. On monoliths such as the Falcon pillars or the Tello Obelisk, the systematic inconsistencies between the scale of the object and the complexity and shallow execution of the designs seem almost perversely designed to impede looking (Weismantel, 2013a, 2013b, 2014, in press). But what if we thought about these aspects of scale and style, not as obstacles, but as affordances that cause us to have a particular kind of viewing experience? In looking at the stones, the viewer is drawn close to see the details, and then pushed away to bring the whole into view. In other words, the stones force the viewer into a way of looking that oscillates—like the oscillating vision described by the shaman. This oscillating looking is alien to modern viewers, who are used to the immobility required to look at books and screens. I initially thought that indigenous Andeans, too, would find the interactive looking at Chavı´ n very different from their ordinary perceptual experiences (Weismantel, 2013b, 2014: 619–620). Archaeologists have usually explained the strange visual and auditory characteristics of the site by reference to shamanic visions or to the ample evidence for hallucinogens (i.e. Burger, 1992: 157; and Lubman, 2002). However, before we assume that something looked or sounded strange, we should pause to consider how Pre-Columbian people experienced perception in ordinary life. Their quotidian sensory experiences might differ substantially from our own taken-for-granted perceptual worlds. According to researchers on human sight, the rigid constraint imposed by reading is anomalous. Oscillation between perspectives is actually how people see as they move through the world. We don’t see by standing still; we make constant small movements of the head and eyes that allow us to differentiate figure and ground, and to see in three dimensions. The artificially stable form of sight demanded by books, movies, and electronic devices is not something that people at Chavı´ n would have ever have experienced.6 Rather than a different kind of seeing, then, what Chavı´ n might have offered was an unusually intense visual experience—one that could heighten awareness of ordinary vision, and provoke reflection. The exaggerated movements required to see the carvings could make viewers more conscious of the oscillation intrinsic in all forms of looking; for animists, this would be reminiscent of the relational oscillation achieved through shamanic vision. Ordinary looking allows us to orient ourselves spatially in the world; shamanic vision allows us to orient ourselves relationally, to see as others see, and to see ourselves as we are seen (Weismantel, 2014). We could then bring this parallel between ordinary and extraordinary vision to think about quotidian and extraordinary interactions between humans and animals. In the America, the quintessential interaction with an animal is the hunt. Viveiros de Castro tells us that shamanism is intimately related to hunting,7 and even states that ‘‘Amerindian’’ philosophy is a ‘‘venatic ideology’’ (1998: 472; see also Lau, 2013: 76–78). This suggests that the origins of shamanic vision can be found in the act of hunting. However, Viveiros de Castro treats ‘venatic’ seeing as
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
Weismantel
11
an abstraction; he is not interested in the instrumental action of actual hunters, whether human or animal. We can think of this as a question of scale. Viveiros de Castro began by working closely with ethnographic and ethnohistoric texts, but he has gradually withdrawn from this close focus to a wider lens (1992; Ramos, 2012: 480). Like Levi-Strauss, he now views the America from a distance: he makes broad, sweeping generalizations and illustrates them by quoting anonymous shamans from different tribes, different countries, different decades, and different centuries. Ethnographers like Carlos Fausto (2012), Eduardo Kohn (2013), and Fernando Santos-Granero (2009) have since brought his concepts into more immediate contexts. Walking, talking, and eating with indigenous Americans, they see perspectivism in action, not as a philosophy but as a tool—even a weapon, one that kills animals. These ethnographically grounded perspectives let me see that the stones at Chavı´ n materialize a predator’s perspective. The people of Chavı´ n ate the meat of domesticated camelids on a daily basis, but in their carvings, they did not portray a domesticated world of farmers and their herds. Instead, they merged human bodies with the predatory bodies of jaguars or pumas, birds of prey, snakes, and caimans. For them, as for Amazonians, the act of hunting was an important way to think about the world—and to be in it. The stones do not just portray predators; they portray the experience of animal predation itself. Of the multiple perspectives on the body, one is a predator’s perspective on its prey—a perspective that positions the viewer, too, as a predator. In his 1962 article ‘‘Form and Meaning in Chavı´ n Art’’, John Rowe drew attention to a ubiquitous aspect of Chavı´ n art: the ‘tooth row’. A major axis of the skeleton, such as the spine, the pelvis, or the wing bones of a bird, is transformed into a long row of teeth—the sharp teeth of a predator, perhaps a cayman. (On the pillar shown in Figure 1, the spine is a tooth row.) Rowe saw the tooth row as a visual metaphor, in which one body part—the jaw—substitutes for another—the spine. But he didn’t ask why the spine is visible in the first place. The body we see here looks alive: it’s still standing, and it has eyes and a nose and even feathers. And yet we can see parts of its skeleton. In addition to seeing this creature as both human and animal, we are seeing it simultaneously from inside and out—and as alive and dead. But when we look at this body, whose eyes are we seeing it with? We see a wing covered in feathers—and the bone beneath it. This is the bird’s wing as it is torn apart; this is what wild animals see as they devour their prey. It’s what humans see, too, when they hunt. They glimpse the animal from multiple perspectives: first, at a distance, alive, and intact; then close up, alternating stillness and motion; then dead and dismembered, ready for the cooking pot—and finally, reduced to bits of meat being swallowed by human mouths. So here we have an inside-out, living-dead jaguar/human/bird that we see from too many different perspectives to ever achieve a coherent whole. Oddly enough, this incoherent picture resembles the way indigenous hunters taught Willerslev to
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
12
Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)
see (2004). His teachers insisted that a hunter’s vision must never come to rest in a single perspective. It is always multiple and in motion. He learned to become his prey: to sing to it, coax it, mimic it, even woo it like a lover. To do so, he altered his appearance, his smell—and his thoughts. A hunter must not let his murderous intentions show, or the animal will either run away or attack him. Yet at the same time, he must constantly envision the animal’s death. If he ceases to keep this goal in mind, he may lose his perspective as a hunter and turn irrevocably into his own prey. This is the danger of becoming animal. On a long expedition, Willerslev and his companion tried to assume the sensory and mental qualities of wolves. But when his partner felt their wolfing become too strong, he insisted that they go home to eat and sleep among their own kind until their identity assumed a more stable form. Willerslev describes this struggle to simultaneously be animal and not-animal as a dizzying oscillation that reaches an ecstatic peak. ‘‘[A]ll techniques and skills of hunting are directed towards this single moment when distance and proximity coincide in a double perspective, when human and non-human, self and other, lose their polarity and swim in and out of focus’’ (2007: 32). This is a powerful way to think about the stones: as places that re-create that ecstatic moment when a hunter achieves this oscillating perspective. But instead of an ordinary meeting with an ordinary animal, Chavı´ n offered encounters with far more dangerous beings. To look at one of the monoliths is to look at an animal that is also a stone: something incredibly ancient and surrounded by an aura of power and history. The stones are like and unlike an animal, simultaneously alive and made. In seeing them not only as images or animals but as objects with a distinctive material history, we are seeing like an archaeologist.
Seeing like an archaeologist The work of archaeology is inherently materialist: we study interactions between humans and the things they make. An archaeological perspectivism, then, would expand beyond interspecies interactions to encompass the vital materiality of things (a move urged by some ethnographers (Santos-Granero, 2009)), especially made things: artifacts and the built environment. The analysis presented here, for example, approaches the encounter between human and non-human animals through a third actor: a monolithic carved stone. A materialist perspective suggests further directions at Chavı´ n. In this article, I have suggested that the pillar embodied the oscillation between predator and prey observed by ethnographers; it may also have shimmered between two forms of life, distinct but intimately related: animal and artifact, or biological body and stone. In the Andes, stones are often imbued with life (Dean, 2010; Janusek et al., 2013); the stones at Chavı´ n carried an additional layer of meaning in the biomorphic images engraved on their surfaces. In addition to the oscillation between seeing and being seen, then, animist viewers would also experience a shifting awareness of the ontological dualities inherent in a powerful object that is both animal and stone.
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
Weismantel
13
This promising area for future research could enrich our analyses of artifact/ animals throughout the Pre-Columbian Americas, as well as our conceptualization of perspectivism. In concluding, however, I want to focus on an even more critical intervention. The work of archaeology is inherently historical: we study social change over the long term. In contrast, Viveiros de Castro’s ‘Amerindian’ perspectivism is profoundly ahistorical—surprisingly so, since change is at the heart of his model. The desire for transformation is what causes indigenous hunters and shamans seek out encounters with someone radically different. To do so is dangerous: to learn to see like someone else is to begin to change in ways one cannot control, and even to risk annihilation or absorption by a more powerful entity (Weismantel, 2013a). ‘Amerindians’ take this risk because in their eyes, stasis and homogeneity are even more fatal (Viveiros de Castro, 2012b). A similar desire for risky encounters is what made Chavı´ n: travelers came to the site to see and be seen by enormous, ancient and powerful beings, and to experience transformative change. The archaeological record shows that over time, their actions slowly, collectively, irrevocably changed the site, as evidenced by the exotic artifacts they left behind as offerings and the increasingly cosmopolitan architecture of the temple complex (Burger, 1992; Rick, 2005: 82; Sayre et al., in press). It is this larger societal change over time that is absent from Viveiros de Castro’s model. Individual jaguars and humans seek, hunt, kill, and even become one another—but in the end, each community remains intact and unchanged, and every individual must either return home or die among strangers. To me, this stasis is perspectivism’s fatal flaw. On the one hand, it promises to open up new worlds, in which animals are persons, stones are alive, and whites listen to natives. In his most expansive moments, Viveiros de Castro envisions his theory as having a kind of shamanic power to transform anthropology itself into an unending encounter between radically different ontologies leading to a ‘‘permanent decolonization of thought’’ (Holbraad et al., 2014). But instead of this rosy future, the pervasive ahistoricism of his model may condemn him instead to repeat discredited anthropologies of the past. Viveiros de Castro could certainly benefit from reading some archaeology to replace his static vision of ‘Amerindians’ with a dynamic view of the PreColumbian past. However, while cultural anthropology is hampered by an artificially timeless ‘ethnographic present’, archaeologists carry their own conceptual baggage: an artificially rigid unilineal evolution. Despite superficial differences, these models have a shared origin in twentieth century anthropology, when the influential notion of ‘culture areas’ (Kroeber, 1931) posited a sharp divide between Amazonia’s stateless societies and Andean civilizations. This dichotomy continues to inform standard archaeological models of South America, which picture Amazonia as a relatively uninteresting region of evolutionary stasis, while the Andes is prized as ‘‘a ‘culturally precocious region’’’ that witnessed the rise of a pristine state (Stanish, 2001: 41 quoted in Kojan and
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
14
Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)
Angelo, 2005: 387). Its influence can also be seen in Viveiros de Castro’s conceptualization of the continent. Consider his odd definition of the word ‘Amerindians’: citing Levi-Strauss, he claims a pan-American universality for this term, yet specifies that it excludes Mesoamerica and the Andes—the areas with the largest indigenous populations (2012a: 64). Like his archaeological counterparts, he too sees the Americas as divided into the peoples with history and those without (Costa and Fausto, 2010: 99; Wolf, 1983). By bringing Viveiros de Castro into the Andes, I want to challenge us to move beyond this artificial opposition between regions, and between ahistorical stasis and unilineal evolution. In its place, a growing number of researchers are arguing for a more dynamic understanding of the interaction between geography and temporality, in response to emerging evidence about the continent and its deep history (i.e. Heckenberger and Go´es Neves, 2009; Kojan and Angelo, 2005; Roosevelt, 1994). The image of Amazonia as evolutionarily static is no longer supported by the archaeological data. In an overview of research on the region, Heckenberger and Go´es Neves state unequivocally that Recent studies challenge scientific and popular stereotypes of ecological and cultural uniformity, notably of small, dispersed human settlements living in virgin tropical forest wilderness. These studies reveal dynamic change and variability, including complex social formations and large-scale transformations of the natural environment. (2009: 251)
In the Andes, too, evidence of variability and regional dynamisms complicates the picture of homogeneous unilineal evolution. But this evidence can be overlooked if a priori theoretical assumptions are imposed too rigidly on rich and ambiguous data. The history of interpretation at Chavı´ n is a case in point. The long-held hypothesis that it was the capital of an early Andean state is now widely acknowledged to be erroneous. Nevertheless, data from the site has consistently been interpreted to support a single evolutionary model: the rapid emergence of a small ‘‘theocratic’’ elite who relentlessly concentrated power in their own hands. For example, monoliths like the pillar, which combine human and animal attributes, are interpreted as remnants of an earlier shamanic tradition now ‘‘perverted’’ by an ascendant leadership who deliberately manipulated a credible ‘lay public’ (Rick, 2005: 80). Like Viveiros de Castro’s overly abstract conceptualization of hunting, this is partly a question of scale. In the Andes as a whole, significant transformations in power and complexity occurred during Chavı´ n’s very long history. But at the level of the site, we need not demand that every aspect of the material record demonstrate the same unilinear process. Instead, a more flexible model might allow various testable hypotheses about the relationship between religious and political power, as Swenson has recently suggested in a study of Late Formative sites on the North Coast (2014). This variability between specific sites could then provide a basis for more nuanced theorizing about macro-level developments.
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
Weismantel
15
Such an approach seems especially suited to Chavı´ n, a site unlike many others. Typically, monumental sites were political centers that dominated their hinterlands, but Chavı´ n drew travelers from many different regions and polities, many of them elites in their home communities. We might consider, then, whether the material evidence might support more complicated pictures, in which diverse social actors enacted multiple kinds of power relationships at various spatial and temporal scales. My analyses of the carved stones suggest such a variable sacred landscape. In the larger, more public areas of the site, power dynamics might have been equitable and dialogic, as visiting groups exchanged interpretations of their experiences with the stones; or solitary and meditative, as individuals sought religious transformation through one-to-one engagement with sacred objects (2013b, 2014). This does not preclude the possibility that elsewhere, inside the smaller circular plaza or the interior galleries, interactions may have conformed to the previous model of allpowerful religious figures who manipulated the perceptual environment and controlled the meaning of the sacred. In sum, a closer analysis of the material and perceptual affordances of the stones, coupled with more open-ended models, might allow a richer discussion of the possibilities for religious experience and political action at this exceptional site. At a larger scale, such alternative readings could contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Andean state societies, suggesting regional variability, the uneven nature of political control or even a more heterarchical reading of Andean prehistory. The reasons for embracing dynamic models of indigenous South American life, now and in the past, go beyond the purely scientific. Static anthropological models that downplay human agency also have implications for the role we play as researchers in the societies where we live and work. Viveiros de Castro’s ahistorical image of the Indian in the jungle relies upon stereotypes of Amazonia that are pernicious as well as inaccurate. Their origins lie in colonial ideologies that defined the inhabitants of this region as ‘‘culturally primitive, historically stagnated, and closely tied to the natural world’’ (Kojan and Angelo, 2005: 387). The modern legacy of these beliefs is a pervasive racism in which ‘‘social inequality. . . has. . . been carefully disguised and reworked into a failure on the part of the indigenous communities to [progress towards modernity]’’ (395). The Indian’s failure to be modern finds its echoes in Viveiros de Castro’s writings, which consistently treat the words ‘‘Amerindian’’ and ‘‘modern’’ as opposites (2012a: 48, 63; see also Skafish, 2014), seemingly oblivious to the contemporary realities of his homeland, where indigenous people live in urban areas as well as forests, and hold ‘modern’ jobs as politicians, sex workers, environmental activists, and Evangelical missionaries. Not so in Viveiros de Castro’s Brazil, where Indians are never citizens, never consumers, never part of the nation-state or the world economy. They are frozen in an ahistorical paradise (Fabian, 2014; Starn, 2011: 192–193; Trouillot, 1991).
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
16
Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)
This return to romantic primitivism, also found in Ingold, positions the ‘Amerindian’ as a primitive figure outside of Western modernity, and the anthropologist as a modern-day shaman—or hunter—who boldly enters into the jungle to seek knowledge from the Indians, just as they seek knowledge from the animals. The goal is not exchange and mutual transformation; instead, this hunter extracts cultural capital from the natives to enrich the metropole (Todd, 2014). The Indian, like the jaguar, remains behind, unchanged and unchanging. Archaeologists in recent decades have become increasingly aware of the politics of their practices in the field, but like Viveiros de Castro, they may not always be as sensitive to the political implications of their theories. Once again, we can pose the question of perspective: when we look at Pre-Columbian societies through an evolutionary lens, whose eyes are we seeing with? The relentless focus on state power has produced an archaeology that, in James Scott’s memorable phrase, ‘‘sees like a state’’ (1998). By representing the prehistory of modern nations like Peru as a time of monolithic, highly centralized states where elites violently imposed their will on subject populations, archaeology serves the interests of contemporary states in two ways. It naturalizes the exclusion of indigenous people from political participation by representing them as inherently incapable of democracy. And it naturalizes modern state violence by representing torture and repression as ubiquitous characteristics of ancient states. It is no accident that the autocratic Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori christened a controversial and violent counter-terrorism initiative ‘Chavı´ n de Huantar’, creating an evocative link between his own use of naked state power and the ancient Peruvian past (Silverman, 2002). These politics are not intrinsic to the work we do; quite the contrary. I end with two brief counter-examples that show what can happen if ethnographers let Indians into modern history, and when archaeological objects escape from the theoretical confines of seeing like a state. A recent article by ethnographer Marisol de la Cadena (2010) uses Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism; but rather than representing Indians as incapable of engaging modernity, she documents indigenous activism in Peruvian environmental politics. As indigenous ontologies become part of contemporary national discourse and may shape actual state praxis, she sees the possibility of permanent transformative change for all parties—Indians, non-Indians, and even mountains. Finally, consider another Pre-Columbian monolith mentioned above: the Mexica goddess Coatlicue from the Templo Mayor. In Mexico, this statue sits in the national archaeological museum, and is closely identified with the authoritarian power of the modern state. But in the United States, outside of the control of archaeologists, it has become a countercultural symbol reproduced and re-imagined by dozens of artists, writers, and activists. Made popular by the Chicana feminist queer writer Gloria Anzaldu´a, Coatlicue has become a sci-fi avatar and popular tattoo. She is a vibrant fragment of the Pre-Columbian past embedded in an emerging future that is multiracial, pan-American, and defiantly democratic.
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
Weismantel
17
Conclusions Viveiros de Castro has given us a powerful research tool. Bringing perspectivism to Chavı´ n de Huantar produced new insights into relationships between humans, animals, and things in the indigenous Americas, and suggested potential new avenues for research into relations of power at the site. But it also revealed limitations in his version of the concept, creating an opportunity for others to expand and reconfigure it. Ethnographers have found it too ‘‘detached from the real experiences of people in a life-world’’ (Willerslev, 2004: 630), while archaeologists may find a lack of materiality and history. I ended this article by challenging readers to create an archaeological perspectivism; in order to do so, they may need to reconfigure their own models as well. Some authors describe an emergent South American archaeology that is charting varied trajectories of sociohistorical change across regions; others paint a more pessimistic picture in which rigid evolutionary frameworks continue to dominate. In this article, I advocate open-ended research strategies that do not foreclose any unexpected surprises the material record may reveal—surprises that may provide insights into how power works and how societies change. I also advocate for us to look reflexively at our research and writing and its implications for our own societies. Viveiros de Castro wants his work to contribute to the ‘‘ontological self-determination of the world’s peoples’’ (Holbraad et al., 2014), but in the context of contemporary Brazil, his project falls back into an extractive research model linked to colonial and neocolonial extractive economies. Similarly, archaeologists must ask themselves whether their work, too, may inadvertently support destructive racial and political regimes. Perspectivism is all about how encounters across difference create transformative change. Perhaps bringing Vivieros de Castro into the Andes can do the same, provoking a process in which, by encountering, interrogating and re-inventing perspectivism, archaeology might also transform itself. Acknowledgment The author thanks Dante Angelo, without whom this paper would never have been written; my colleagues Amanda Logan, Mark Hauser, Shalini Shankar, and Jessica Winegar for comments on earlier versions; two generous and perceptive reviewers, Andrew Roddick and Edward Swenson; and Lynn Meskell for her support.
Notes 1. There are multiple versions of this image online. The original can be seen at http:// www.lib.berkeley.edu/ANTH/emeritus/rowe/pub/chavin/ch9.html. 2. The paintings of Lynn Randolph, for example, have been used to illustrate Haraway’s work; see http://www.lynnrandolph.com/ModestWitness.html. 3. According to Rowe, the original drawing was made by Janet Smith, based on rubbings and drawings made by Rowe and, earlier, by Fred Ayres (Rowe, 1967: note 1), republished online at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ANTH/emeritus/rowe/pub/chavin/ index.html#fig3.
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
18
Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)
4. The word ‘Amerindian’ appears in quotes throughout this article because I find it problematic for reasons partially addressed below. 5. Animals play very different roles in the lesser traditions of European art, such as fairy tales, architectural gargoyles or heraldic imagery. 6. Nor would they have experienced visuality as separate from the other senses; their interactions with the pillar, for example, might well have been as much tactile as visual. Moving around the object, touching it and seeing it would have been kinesthetic and synesthetic, active and interactive (Weismantel, 2013a, 2013b). 7. This notion is widespread in Amazonian ethnography (Fausto, 2010: 99).
References Barad K (2012) Nature’s queer performativity. Kvinder, Køn og forskning. Women, Gender and Research 1–2: 25–53. Bird-David N (1999) ‘‘Animism’’ revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology. Current Anthropology 40(S1): S67–S91. Braidotti R (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burger R (1992) Chavin and the Origins of Andean Civilization. London: Thames and Hudson. Burger, Richard L. and Lucy C. Salazar (2008) The Manchay Culture and the Coastal Inspiration for Highland Chavı´ n Civilization. In: William J. Conklin and Jeffrey Quilter (eds) Chavı´n Art, Architecture, and Culture. Los Angeles: Costen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, pp.85–106. Costa L and Fausto C (2010) The return of the animists: Recent studies of Amazonian ontologies. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 1: 89–109. Dean C (2010) A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. de la Cadena M (2010) Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond ‘‘Politics’’. Cultural Anthropology 25: 334–370. Deleuze G and Guattari F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fabian J (2014) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fausto, Carlos (2014) Too many owners: mastery and ownership in Amazonia. In: Brightman, Marc, Vanessa Elisa Grotti, and Olga Ulturgasheva (eds) Animism in rainforest and tundra: personhood, animals, plants and things in contemporary Amazonia and Siberia. New York: Berghahn Books, pp.29–47. Fux P (ed.) (2013) Chavı´n: Peru’s Enigmatic Temple in the Andes. Berlin: Scheidegger and Spiess. Gane N (2006) When we have never been human, What is to be done? Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory Culture and Society 23(7–8): 135–158. Haraway D (2006) Encounters with companion species: Entangling dogs, baboons, philosophers, and biologists. Configurations 14: 1–2. Heckenberger M and Go´es Neves E (2009) Amazonian archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropolology 38: 251–266. Hill E (2013) Archaeology and animal persons: Toward a prehistory of human-animal relations. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4(2013): 117–136.
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
Weismantel
19
Holbraad M, Pedersen M and Viveiros de Castro E (2014) The politics of ontology: Antropological positions. Cultural Anthropology Online. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/461-the-politics-of-ontology (accessed on 24 February 2014). Ingold T (2002) From trust to domination: An alternative history of human-animal relations. In: The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. New York: Routledge, pp. 61–76. Janusek J, Williams PR, Golitko M, et al. (2013) Building Taypikala: Telluric transformations in the lithic production of Tiwanaku. In: Tripcevish N and Vaughn KJ (eds) Mining and Quarrying in the Ancient Andes: Sociopolitical, Economic, and Symbolic Dimensions. New York: Springer, pp. 65–97. Kembel SR (2008) The architecture at the monumental center of Chavı´ n de Huantar: Sequence, transformations, and chronology. In: Conklin W and Quilter J (eds) Chavı´n: Art, Architecture, and Culture. Los Angeles, CA: Costen Institute of Archaeology, pp. 35–84. Kembel SR (2001) Architectural sequence and chronology at Chavı´n de Huantar, Peru. PhD dissertation, Stanford University. Kohn E (2013) How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kojan D and Angelo D (2005) Dominant narratives, social violence and the practice of Bolivian archaeology. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3): 383–408. Kroeber AL (1931) The cultural area and age area concepts of Clark Wissler. In: Rice SA (ed.) Methods in Social Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 248–265. Lathrap D (1973) Gifts of the Cayman: Some thoughts on the subsistence basis of Chavin. Variation in Anthropology 91–105. Latour B (2009) Perspectivism: ‘type’ or ‘bomb’? Anthropology Today 25(2): 1–2. Lau GF (2013) Alterity in the Andes. London: Routledge. Lumbreras Luis (1993) Chavı´ n de Huantar. Excavaciones en la Galerı´ a de las Ofrendas (Materialien zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Archa¨ologie). vol. 51. Miller George R and Richard L Burger (1995) Our father the cayman, our dinner the llama: Animal utilization at Chavin de Huantar, Peru. Washington, DC: American Antiquity. pp.421–458. Ramos AR (2012) The politics of perspectivism. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 481–494. Rick J (2005) The evolution of authority and power at Chavı´ n de Hua´ntar, Peru. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 14: 71–89. Rick J and Lubman D (2002) Characteristics and speculations on the uses of Strombus trumpets found at the ancient Peruvian center Chavı´ n de Hua´ntar. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 112(5): 2356–2366. Rick John W (2008) Construction and Ritual in the Development of Authority at Chavı´ n de Huantar. In: William J. Conklin and Jeffrey Quilter (eds) Chavı´n: Art, Architecture, and Culture, Los Angeles: Costen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, pp.3–34. Rodriguez Kembel S (2008) The Architecture at the Monumental Center of Chavı´ n de Huantar: Sequence, Transformations, and Chronology. In: Conklin WJ and Quilter J (eds) Chavı´n: Art, Architecture, and Culture. Los Angeles. CA: Costen Institute of Archaeology, pp. 35–84. Roosevelt AC (1994) Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present: Anthropological Perspectives. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press.
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
20
Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)
Rowe John H (1967) Form and meaning in Chavı´ n art. In Peruvian archaeology: Selected readings Palo Alto: Peek Publications, 72–103. Rowe J (1977[1962]) Form and meaning in Chavı´ n art. In: Rowe J and Menzel D (eds) Peruvian Archaeology: Selected Readings. Palo Alto, CA: Peek Publications, pp. 72–103. Santos-Granero F (ed.) (2009) The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press. Sayre M, Miller M and Rosenfeld S (in press) Isotopic evidence for the trade and production of exotic marine mammal bone artifacts at Chavı´n de Hua´ntar, Peru. Archaeological and Anthropolical Sciences. Scott JC (1998) Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Skafish P (2014) Anthropological Metaphysics / Philosophical Resistance. Cultural Anthropology. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/464-anthropological-metaphysics-philosophical-resistance (accessed on 24 February 2014). Silverman H (2002) Touring ancient times: The present and presented past in contemporary Peru. American Anthropologist 104(3): 881–902. Starn O (2011) Here come the Anthros (Again): The strange marriage of anthropology and Native America. Cultural Anthropology 2(2): 179–204. Swenson ER (2014) The materialities of place-making in the ancient Andes: A critical appraisal of the ontological turn in archaeological interpretation. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 1–36. Todd Z (2014) An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘Ontology’ is just another word for colonialism. http://zoeandthecity.wordpress.com/2014/10/24/anindigenous-feminists-take-on-the-ontological-turn-ontology-is-just-another-word-forcolonialism/ (accessed on 24 February 2014). Trouillot M-R (1991) Anthropology and the savage slot: The poetics and politics of otherness. Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present 17–44. Viveiros de Castro E (1992) From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. Translated by Catherine V. Howard. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Viveiros de Castro E (1998) Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 4(3): 469–488. Viveiros de Castro E (2012a) Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere. HAU: Masterclass Series 1: 45–168. Viveiros de Castro E (2012b) Immanence and fear: Stranger-events and subjects in Amazonia. D Rodgers trans. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 27–43. Weismantel M (in press) Encounters with dragons: The stones of Chavı´ n. RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics. Weismantel M (2014) Slippery and slow: Chavı´ n’s great stones and kinaesthetic perception. In: Promey S (ed.) Sensational Religion: Sense and Contention in Material Practice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Weismantel (2013a) Inhuman eyes: Looking at Chavı´ n De Huantar. In: Watts C (ed.) Relational Archaeologies: Humans, Animals, Things. London: Routledge, pp. 21–41. Weismantel (2013b) Coming to our senses at Chavı´ n de Huantar. In: Day J (ed.) Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology. Carbondale: The Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, pp. 113–136.
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
XML Template (2015) [25.3.2015–4:11pm] [1–21] //blrnas3.glyph.com/cenpro/ApplicationFiles/Journals/SAGE/3B2/JSAJ/Vol00000/150005/APPFile/SGJSAJ150005.3d (JSA) [PREPRINTER stage]
Weismantel
21
Weismantel M and Pearson S (2007) Towards a social history of animals. In: Animals in History. London: German Historical Institute/Rowman and Littlefield. Willerslev R (2004) Not animal, not not-animal: Hunting, imitation and empathetic knowledge among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(3): 629–652. Willerslev R (2007) ‘To have the world at a distance’: Reconsidering the signiEcance of vision for social anthropology. In: Grasseni C (ed.) Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards. New York: Berghahn, pp. 23–46. Wolf E (1983) Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Author Biography Mary Weismantel is professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. She is the author of two ethnographic books on indigenous South America, and has published articles on Moche ceramics, as well as on Chavı´ n de Huantar.
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on May 13, 2015
