ABOUT THIS BOOK

Reframing the study of Indigenous visual culture, this volume explores how images and objects generate affect and relation in non-Western contexts, foregrounding alternative modes of material engagement and meaning-making.

While traditional approaches to Indigenous visual culture have often centered on iconography and representation, this volume turns toward other ways that images and objects act in the world. Indigenous Visual Cultures in Latin America explores how material productions function not merely as signs that point elsewhere but as agents that help shape relationships, environments, and affective experience.

Spanning Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Amazonia from 1500 BCE to the present, the chapters examine how meaning may reside in materials themselves; how making is a form of exchange between maker and matter; and how visual forms participate in configuring relations among humans, ancestors, deities, and place. These works are not passive containers of meaning, but charged presences—generative forces within ongoing worlds. Attuned to Indigenous ways of knowing and being, the volume invites readers to think beyond the frame, beyond the image, and beyond representation itself.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Tamara L. Bray is a professor of anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She is the author or editor of several books including The Archaeology of Wak’as: Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes, Visual Languages of the Inca, and, most recently, Objects of Empire: The Ceramic Tradition of the Imperial Inca State.

Carolyn Dean is a distinguished professor emerita of art history and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dean’s research focuses on Inka (Inca) visual culture. Her books include Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Los Cuerpos de los Incas y el cuerpo de Cristo: El Corpus Christi en el Cuzco colonial), and, most recently, Inside Abstraction: Interpreting Inka Visual Culture.

REVIEWS

This volume digs deep to seed an exciting new approach to the arts and cultures of Indigenous Latin America. Its chapters encourage a refreshed kind of theoretical regimen that moves away from traditional frames (e.g., iconography, Cartesian binaries, and Western epistemologies). And they combine to offer novel considerations of materiality by privileging natively held beliefs and practices centered on making, objects-subjects, and their social relations. This compact volume succeeds because the contributors find value in the region’s heterogeneity and an openness to Indigenous knowledge and perspectives. It is a volume well worth visiting and revisiting.

— George Lau, University of East Anglia, author of An Archaeology of Ancash: Stones, Ruins, and Communities in Andean Peru

The diverse contributions to this volume bring focus to the important issue of representation in Indigenous arts of Latin America, seeking to upend Euro-American approaches to reading images that often predominate in scholarship.

— Andrew James Hamilton, Art Institute of Chicago, author of The Royal Inca Tunic: A Biography of an Andean Masterpiece

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Chapter 1. Blurring Binaries (Tamara L. Bray and Carolyn Dean)
Chapter 2. “Is It a Peccary?” or “What Is a Peccary?”: Species Identity and Mimetic Representation in First-Millennium Northwest Argentina (Benjamin Alberti)
Chapter 3. Material Witnesses: The Matter of Presence in Inka Visual Culture (Carolyn Dean)
Chapter 4. An Amoxtli (Much More than a Book): The Descripción de Tlaxcala and the Construction of Complex Beings (Federico Navarrete Linares)
Chapter 5. (Re)collecting the Gods (Molly H. Bassett)
Chapter 6. Pattern and Relational Ontologies in Indigenous Amazonian Aesthetics (Els Lagrou)
Chapter 7. Thinking Beyond Binaries: Comments (Elizabeth DeMarrais)
Contributors
Index