Maya Figurines: Intersections between State and Household

6. Figurative Performances

186 CHAPTER 6 FIGURATIVE PERFORMANCES Perhaps more than other types of visual media, figurines are characterized by a remarkable flexibility of meaning in that they are small and extremely portable and thus can be arranged, rearranged, and divorced from other objects (including other figurines), spaces, and people whose interactions indexically create signification. This chapter more closely examines how small figurative representations come to life as part of diverse social practices,¹ thus underscoring the critical role of mimetic images as a process and a component of lived experience. I argue that the performative nature of Late Classic Maya figurines is best characterized by their informality: they probably “worked” as both ritual and playful media and in a range of social contexts where their meanings and roles may have shifted. For example, in addition to activities in and around the household, figurines may have been a part of large-scale ceremonies and social gatherings where their visual efficacy was less important than their auditory capabilities. Moreover, multiple social groups, including women and children, had access to figurines and perhaps directly manipulated them. This relative informality and flexibility in their use provides a critical vantage point for thinking about Maya society as creatively produced and multiauthored. As such, they bring into focus the power of the ordinary in the shaping of state and household. ritual, entertainment, and play One of the enduring questions of figurine studies is what their “function ” was. Figurines from throughout Mesoamerica and beyond are often asserted or assumed to have been either toys (e.g., Ruscheinsky 2003; Spence 2002; Winter 2002: 69) or ritual items (e.g., Hendon 2003; Marcus 187 figurative performances 1996, 1998b, 2009; Moholy-Nagy 2003; Schlosser 1978; Stockett 2007: 100–101). The question of a single function has always been a source of dissatisfaction, however, partly because the notion of function often entails a means to an end and a behavioral endeavor that is transposable (a figurine in one context is used and has the same meaning as a figurine in any other context). The diversity of figurine forms, even those from the same period and cultural region (as discussed in chapter 5), suggests that a single function cannot be attributed to all small figurative forms made of clay (see also Blomster 2002: 171; Hendon 2010; Lesure 2011). Furthermore, such conflating practices ignore how objects take on different meanings and uses as a component of human practice. As Victor Turner (1982: 23) observes, “When symbols are rigidified into logical operators and subordinated to implicit syntax-like rules by some of our modern investigators, those of us who take them too seriously become blind to the creative or innovative potential of symbols as factors in human action.” The large range of contexts in which archaeologists have recovered figurines suggests that “human actions” incorporating these small figurative objects cross-cut elements of ritual, entertainment, and play. Thus far my attention to figurine deposition contexts as cues to figurative performances has concentrated primarily on either broad regional categories (such as sites or geographic regions) or household contexts, with attention to social status affiliations. Indeed primary and secondary refuse contexts from residential zones are the most common loci for the recovery of figurines (figs. 6.1, 6.2, 6.3; appendices 5.1, 5.2) (Ashmore 2007; Hendon 2003; Inomata 1995: fig. 7.14; Ivic de Monterroso 2002; Moholy-Nagy 2003; Triadan 2007; Willey 1972, 1978). As mentioned earlier, discarded locations do not necessarily represent “original” use contexts. Nonetheless, midden locations help provide some parameters for the general locations where they may have been visible or audible and who had access to such objects. On another level, their discard with other household trash remains was part of their use lives and speaks to the relative value of these small figurative works in comparison to carefully cached, inherited, and curated items, such as Annette Weiner’s (1985, 1992) inalienable possessions. To augment this focus, I explore rare in situ evidence from households of rapidly abandoned sites, caches, burials , caves, and public architectural spaces. With the exception of burials from the island of Jaina, it is striking that figurines are such infrequent components of cache and burial contexts. FIGURE 6.1. Rank 3 architectural group from Chäkokot, a small farming village east of Motul de San José, showing (above) simple architectural foundation of Group E2C’s Structure 1 and (below) the distribution of figurines from...