COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SEMINAR

ON THE ARTS OF AFRICA, OCEANIA, AND THE AMERICAS

Mary Weismantel

Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University

Playing with Things:

Engaging the Moche Sex Pots

Thursday, October 15, 2020

6.30pm, EDT (New York)

via ZOOM\

What happens if we consider Indigenous works of art from the ancient Americas as non-human persons who inhabit a different temporality than ours, rather than as (dead) artifacts that tell us about the (dead) past?  In this talk, I ask the question, “Can a pot tell a joke?” as a way to engage with some ceramic vessels that were made a thousand years ago by Moche artists in South America.

Despite their colonized status as objects in museum collections, these clay bodies with human genitalia are unruly things, capable of interacting with us in a variety of bodily, sensory and communicative modes.  Researchers who treat these vessels as passive resources to be mined for information are never going to ‘get the joke’, but we might get it (a little) if we recognize the pots’ potential to become our active, sometimes intimidating interlocutors.

Please fill out this form to register for the session:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeG0FVo28_vH5mT75zZs71KV9lP76JCPRBduTDnPG-XaM4qwg/viewform

Email km3522@columbia.edu with any questions.