Heads of State: Icons, Power, and Politics in the Ancient and Modern Andes

Heads of State: Icons, Power, and Politics in the Ancient and Modern Andes
ISBN-10
1315427559
ISBN-13
9781315427553
Series
Heads of State
Category
Social Science
Pages
293
Language
English
Published
2016-07-01
Publisher
Routledge
Authors
Denise Y Arnold, Christine A Hastorf

Description

The human head has had important political, ritual and symbolic meanings throughout Andean history. Scholars have spoken of captured and trophy heads, curated crania, symbolic flying heads, head imagery on pots and on stone, head-shaped vessels, and linguistic references to the head. In this synthesizing work, cultural anthropologist Denise Arnold and archaeologist Christine Hastorf examine the cult of heads in the Andes—past and present—to develop a theory of its place in indigenous cultural practice and its relationship to political systems. Using ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork, highland-lowland comparisons, archival documents, oral histories, and ritual texts, the authors draw from Marx, Mauss, Foucault, Assadourian, Viveiros del Castro and other theorists to show how heads shape and symbolize power, violence, fertility, identity, and economy in South American cultures.

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