Material Meaning in the Ancient Americas

Catalog description

This class examines the materials and technologies used to make art in the Ancient Americas to understand how worldviews are expressed in matter. It covers a wide sweep of indigenous empires (Maya, Aztec, Inca, Olmec, Chavin, Moche) and media (jade, gold, feathers, ceramic, paper, flint, obsidian, shell, and bones). It considers Indigenous categories of art and materials—as expressed in language and the facture of objects themselves—as a way of decentering traditional art historical categories of “art” and part of a decolonizing practice. By moving to center Indigenous categories we will be moving away from normative Euro-American theory, which posits that to make the work of art, human minds exert their will over inert matter, and human beings are radically separate from their environment. One approach to understanding Indigenous objects within the contexts of their origin are theories, sometimes called “eco-criticism” or the “new materialism” that posit new ways of understanding human animals, the environment in which they are immersed, and the objects that are the result of that integration. By the end of class, we will be able to explore whether the most radical of those ideas, and the most radically decolonial of them, perspectivism, can be extended to the work of art.