eBook - ePub

The Mountain Embodied

Name: The Mountain Embodied
Author: Matthew C. Velasco

Head Shaping and Personhood in the Ancient Andes

Matthew C. Velasco,

English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

The Mountain Embodied

Head Shaping and Personhood in the Ancient Andes

Matthew C. Velasco,

About this book

A study of the ancient practice of Andean head shaping and its cultural connotations.

In the late sixteenth century, Spanish conquerors in Peru's Colca Valley encountered the Collaguas and Cavanas, Indigenous people who undertook a striking form of body modification: Collaguas bound the heads of infants and children so that their skulls grew narrow and elongated, and Cavanas so that their skulls became wide and squat. Head shaping resulted in craniums that resembled two specific mountains associated with the groups. For Europeans, shaped skulls immediately and durably became a marker of territorialized ethnic difference.

The Mountain Embodied offers a more nuanced story. Having studied hundreds of samples of human remains, bioarchaeologist Matthew Velasco argues that reducing head shape to a mere ethnic marker is a colonial invention. Instead, the social significance of head shaping was protean and intersected with other structures of difference, such as gender, kinship, and status, influencing experience within the community. Head shaping, then, was one factor in the construction of a locally embedded kind of subjectivity. An outsider could deduce group identity from head shape, but for practitioners, head shaping reflected something else: nothing less than personhood itself.

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Yes, you can access The Mountain Embodied by Matthew C. Velasco in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Latin American & Caribbean History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.