Maya Figurines: Intersections between State and Household

2. Materiality and Mimesis

31 I recognize that the concepts of state and household have no inherent fixity of meaning, organization, or composition but rather are socially and historically constitutive through a series of practices and their effects (Hendon 1996, 2010; Patterson and Gailey 1987; Pauketat 2000a; Sharma and Gupta 2006; Trouillot 2001). While boundaries among various social realms are sometimes arbitrary and porous, they are also drawn and redrawn through both habitual behaviors that are taken for granted and purposeful, strategic actions. These practices have effects in that they create representations (e.g., architecture, artifacts, iconography): material references for socialization, interpretation, and critique that feed into the production of further practices. In this sense physical objects and landscapes are not merely backdrops for the workings of state power and everyday household affairs but are the media through which these social entities and their participants take on meaning and crystallize in form. In this chapter I explore concepts of materiality and mimesis as interpretative frameworks for thinking about the production of social relations . More specifically, how do material objects play a role in reflecting and defining states, households, and other social formations? Materiality highlights the social as emerging from human-object relations such that a study of an artifact or art object’s meaning ultimately derives from an understanding of its context. At the same time, I would not like to lose sight of the object itself and its signifying capacity embedded in its form (its raw material, imagery, shape, and so forth), which influences where, how, and by whom it was produced, viewed, and experienced. Particularly helpful in thinking through this relationship between people and things is the concept of mimesis. Mimesis stresses imitation, emulation, and reproduction as ways in which social identities are formulated on previous models, but it also allows for deviations and creative “plays” on CHAPTER 2 MATERIALITY AND MIMESIS 32 maya figurines those models that reconfigure and comment on power relations. I draw upon ethnographic and archaeological materials from various cultural regions and time periods to help illustrate these ideas below. materiality Critical to the concept of materiality are two underlying premises. First, the material world recursively influences social experience and, as such, mediates social relations. Second (and related to the first point), meaning is not automatically attached to material objects or landscapes but is produced from the context-dependent interactions between people and things. While the use of the word “materiality” is relatively new (DeMarrais et al. 2004; Meskell 2005; Miller 1998, 2005), the idea of a recursive relationship between humans and the material world has roots in early scholarly thinking deriving from both economic and semiotic formulations. In Karl Marx’s (1973, 1990) political economic treatises, for example, he explores the recursive relationship between humans and nature through the process of production. In making things, we make ourselves. Through labor humans engage with and change the natural world and, in turn, simultaneously change themselves (objectification). Labor thus is an embodied process in which humans realize their own existence. It also creates new material conditions, however, such as the presence of monumental architecture or the installation of agricultural irrigation systems that affect subsequent productive processes and other human-nature, human-human engagements (Patterson 2003: 13–16, 2009: 57–63). Although Marx was particularly interested in production as a critical component in the making of class relations, we can also appreciate how different forms of production are integral in identifying other types of social formations. For Jeanne Lopiparo and Julia Hendon, household-based crafting of ceramic figurines, whistles, and vessels was a way of reproducing household identities within the politically decentralized political landscape of the Ulúa Valley in Honduras during the Terminal Classic period (Hendon 2010; Lopiparo 2003, 2006; Lopiparo and Hendon 2009). Households at sites CR-80, CR-103, CR-132, and CR-381, for instance, engaged in molding ceramic figurines and firing the figurines at the last three of these sites. These productive activities were part of a larger cycle of domestic activities that included the use of these items in household rituals and the ritual destruction of both figurines and figurine molds. 33 materiality and mimesis The destruction of these items and the production tools to make them coincided with the interment of existing occupational surfaces over which new domestic buildings were constructed. Despite the use of molds for production, the types of figurine imagery created...