Mesoamerican Figurines: Small-Scale Indices of Large-Scale Social Phenomena

1. Approaching Mesoamerican Figurines

1 Approaching Mesoamerican Figurines Katherine A. Faust and Christina T. Halperin Mesoamerican figurines have allured archaeologists, art historians, and aficionados , as well as the general public, since their first appearance in excavated contexts, publications, museum exhibits, and private collections. One of the most striking aspects of figurines is their iconic quality, in which images of humans, supernaturals, and animals are depicted in the round and in small-scale form. As the volume title suggests, figurines include but go beyond such iconic referencing by serving as indices for the social processes of the ancient peoples who produced and used them. They contribute to our understandings of ancient Mesoamerican political economies, the production of gendered ideologies, ritual and religion, and mechanisms of social practice and change. These social roles speak to a growing scholarly discourse that underscores the significance of “bottom-up” and heterarchical models as a complement to “top-down” models typical of those used to interpret prestige goods and large-scale monumental art. Despite their analytical potential and a long history of appeal, figurines remain underrepresented in academic research. While they are often depicted on the covers of books, these small-scale objects are rarely the principal foci therein. In fact, the present compilation of texts represents the first attempt to situate Mesoamerican figurines at the forefront of political , social, economic, and religious analyses within an edited volume. This oversight is all the more striking given that figurines are among the most abundant classes of artifacts known in this culture area. That the ancient people of Mesoamerica produced figurines of clay, stone, and other media by the millions testifies to their important status within the social and cosmological worlds of their producers. This volume underscores the centrality of figurines to Mesoamerican peoples. It brings together figurine research from multiple temporal periods and regions throughout this vast culture area. Spatial and chronological foci include Preclassic period figurines from the Basin of Mexico, Oaxaca, Katherine A. Faust and Christina T. Halperin 2 Chiapas, Veracruz, Tabasco, and Morelos, Mexico; Classic and Terminal Classic period figurines from the Maya area and the Ulúa Valley, Honduras ; Postclassic period figurines from Santa Isabel, Nicaragua, the Basin of Mexico and the northeastern Gulf Coast, Mexico; and contemporary figurines made by Nahuatl speakers of northern Veracruz, Mexico. The aim of the volume is not to provide a regional study of all Mesoamerican figurine traditions but rather to present some recent case studies that highlight different approaches and theoretical frameworks. These range from functional analyses, stylistic and distributional comparisons, and semiotic investigations to theories of embodiment, cultural aesthetics, gender, social practice, and mass media. Together the chapters reflect an increasing emphasis on holistic analysis, which considers how multiple avenues of inquiry can productively merge to arrive at a better vantage point of the past. As Jeffrey Blomster (2002: 171) has stated, “Attempts to apply only one interpretation to figurines as an artifact class homogenize the wide variety of objects classified etically by archaeologists as ‘figures’ and neglect the multivalent emic meanings dependent on the specific audience, temporal, and spatial context.” Thus, it is our hope that the volume not only serves as a resource for inquiring about Mesoamerican figurines but also draws attention to the diversity of ways in which one can go about making such inquiries. In order to situate the following chapters, we provide a brief background on Mesoamerican figurine studies. We begin this exploration by discussing human responses to and preoccupations with figurative representations, which help explain the contradiction of why figurines have been such a source of fascination while also remaining peripheral to scholarly research. We then review some of the major approaches that scholars have taken in investigating figurines. While these trends can be categorized in a number of different ways (for example, Lesure 2002; Thomas 2002), we look specifically at the construction of typologies and culture histories, iconographic interpretations, functional approaches, the investigation of political-economies , and analyses incorporating agency, practice, and dialectics. Finally, we briefly comment on how the authors contributing to this volume use figurine data to broaden our understanding of how Mesoamerican societies expressed, maintained, resisted, and changed their social worlds. Figural Representations: Engagement and Reflexivity Regardless of the methodological approach adopted in figurine analysis, we simultaneously harbor a philosophical vision of the world that is based on Approaching Mesoamerican Figurines 3 disciplinary and personal histories. Our intent in the following discussion is to explore some of...