Sacrificial Landscapes and the Anatomy of Moche Biopolitics

Summary

Power in Moche society was fundamentally biopolitical, expressed through the violent deconstruction and reconstruction of bodies, including animate places. An examination of Moche architecture reveals that North Coast populations envisioned built environments as living organisms that were biologically dependent on human communities. The erection and renovation of Moche ceremonial architecture played an instrumental role in the generation of life and the harnessing of vital forces. Therefore, Moche religious structures cannot be interpreted simply as the “house of gods” or as arenas for ritual performance, for they seem to have served as powerful media for the cycling of biological energy underwriting Moche political ecologies. Archaeological evidence will be mobilized that Moche monumental architecture were perceived as metabolizing bodies that sympathetically channelled the life-giving powers of mountain peaks. The data suggest that temple mounds were literally fed, sacrificed, and renewed to maintain covenants with natural landforms and related ecological forces. The concept of biopolitics has been applied by Agamben, Foucault, and others to describe the insidious working of power in our postmodernist world. However, an investigation of Moche religious ideology reveals that violence as arbiter of life has long played a central if variable role in the reification of social difference.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Powerful Places in the Ancient Andes

Keywords

Spatial Coverage