The Earthly Production of Fleshy Subjects in the South-Central Andes

Summary

A specific range of human subjects, or fully socialized, moral persons- rigorously categorized according to age, sex, kinship, and so forth -are, of course, the most critical ‘things’ that any society seeks to produce. I investigate the production of prehispanic human subjects in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the South American Andes. To understand the emergence of the Middle Horizon center of Tiwanaku at around AD 500, I investigate the deployment of innovative spatial, material, and iconographic technologies that sought to create entirely new sorts of moral persons at the beginning of the Andean Middle Horizon. Indeed, those subjects produced the Middle Horizon that we archaeologically apprehend. I argue that Tiwanaku’s emergence correlated with the production of emergent moral subjects who subscribed to a novel, redemptive set of relational but also consumptive and even predatory practices. Becoming and remaining a fully moral Tiwanaku person was supremely contextual and fraught: it required continual return to a monumental landscape that emphasized both 1) the consumptive practices required to be a fully Tiwanaku subject and 2) the ritual violence required for that existential transformation.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Archaeological Approaches to Subjectification

Keywords

Spatial Coverage