(Cross-)Boundary Objects as Imperial Agents: Imagined Communities in the Late Precolumbian Andes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Communities of Practice in the Ancient Andes: Thinking through Knowledge Transmission and Community Making in and beyond Craft Production" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper builds out from the community of practice literature, inflecting it with more emphasis on the agency of objects as active members of such constituencies, and expanding, as well, on Anderson’s notion of imagined communities. In it, I aim to think through the more common elements of the imperial Inca ceramic assemblage as (cross-)boundary objects that contributed to the construction of an imagined, transregional community linked through shared culinary practices. Ceramic vessels comprise a medium that was ready-to-hand for Andean peoples for millennia, and one that operated in a realm distinct from that of spoken language. I will investigate the idea of imperial Inca vessels as agents of their own reproduction and dissemination, and as objects around which the illusion of shared identity and imagined communities of practice could have coalesced in the late precolumbian era.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Communities of Practice in the Ancient Andes: Thinking through Knowledge Transmission and Community Making in and beyond Craft Production   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32286