Joan Neuberger, Author at Not Even Past

Writing Chinese History

Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: The Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919-1937 (University of California Press, 1978)
Central to the Marxist historiography in China, according to Dirlik, is historical materialism that serves as a paradigmatic theory shaping the interpretations of premodern and modern China. This book traces the introduction of historical materialism and the rise of Marxist history writing in China to a series of debates on the nature of Chinese society and revolution in the early twentieth century.

Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (Columbia University Press, 1984).
A review of American studies of modern Chinese history, focusing on the impacts of different interpretive frameworks on history writing, including “China’s response to the West,” “tradition and modernity,” and “imperialism.” The book ends with an elaboration of “China-centered history” as a new approach to understanding the Chinese past.

Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 1997)
Beginning with a discussion on how the modern nation-state and its powerful ideologies influenced the ways histories are written and understood, the author questions the notion of a progressive, linear history narrating an inexorable drive toward enlightenment. Instead of a single narrative of national history, or the upper-case of history, on the basis of “retrospective constructions to serve present needs,” Duara proposes a “bifurcated history” to reveal that “the past is not only transmitted forward in a linear fashion, its meanings are also dispersed in space and time.”

Jonathan Unger, ed., Using the Past to Serve the Present: Historiography and Politics in Contemporary China (Sharpe, 1993)
A collection of essays that discuss the writings of individual historians and the debates of historical issues in the Mao and post-Mao eras.

Reinventing Modern China

By Huaiyin Li

Since the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals and political elites have written about China’s “modern history” with various, often conflicting, explanatory narratives. Looking back over the last century shows that historical writing on “modern China” has evolved primarily in response to the historians’ present concerns.

Chinese soldiers marching past peasants. Chinese Stamp, 1952 (Wikipedia)

To write about modern China was to trace the historical roots of the country’s current problems in order to legitimize their solutions rather than seeking to reconstruct the past as it actually happened. From the 1930s through the 1990s, two master narratives rivaled each other to dominate history-writing in China. One is the narrative of revolution, which tells modern Chinese history as the grand process of Chinese people engaged in a century-long struggle against feudalism and imperialism, beginning with the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century and culminating in the Communist Revolution in the 1920s through 1940s.

Cultural Revolution poster- Propaganda Group of the Revolutionary Committee of the Shanghai No. 3 Ink Factory, 1969 (Wikipedia)

This historical narrative centers on the economic and social changes brought about by the encroachment of foreign capitalism. It accentuates the worsening livelihood of the peasantry, the vulnerability of the emerging modern economic sector, and subsequently the necessity of a political revolution for China’s healthy development. It exalts collective violence against feudal and imperialist forces and downplays the role of reformist elites and foreigners in China’s progress. In this telling, modern Chinese history lead inevitably to the Communist revolution and China’s transition to socialism.

A Chinese school for girls Che-foo China c. 1902

A school for girls in Che-foo, China, 1902 (Wikimedia Commons)

The other dominant narrative is the history of modernization, which is diametrically opposite to the revolutionary account. It sees modern Chinese history as the long-term transformation of China from an insulated, backward civilization into an industrialized and democratized society under the positive influences of the West and the reforms by enlightened elites. It necessarily leads China to the establishment of a capitalist system and Western-style democracy.

Governor General Li Hongzhang (L) and Commissioner Lin Zexu (R)

These two competing narratives give rise to contradictory accounts of individual events and assessments of historical figures. While Governor-General Li Hongzhang, for instance, was depicted in the modernization historiography as an open-minded statesman who was committed to China’s “self-strengthening” by borrowing from the West, the same person was denounced by the revolutionary historians as a traitor who was preoccupied with the aggrandizement of his own clique at the expense of China’s national interest. On the other hand, Commissioner Lin Zexu appears in the revolutionary narrative as a patriot because of his heroic acts of confiscating and destroying the opium from English traders, but the same figure is depicted in the modernization histories as an unrealistic, arrogant mandarin who cared more about his personal reputation than the security of the country.

Historians Fan Wenlan (L) and Jiang Tingfu (R)

A fundamental problem with history writing in modern China, as these instances suggest, is the politicization and teleology found in both the revolutionary and modernization literatures. For the leading historians in twentieth-century China, whether affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party or the Nationalist Party, writing about the nation’s recent history was not for the purpose of reconstructing the past as it actually happened, but “using the past to serve the present” (gu wei jin yong). Historians reinterpreted the past in order to legitimize the agendas and goals of the political forces they favored. This was true for Fan Wenlan, the most famous historian of the Chinese Communist Party, and Jiang Tingfu, a leading Nationalist historian, in the 1930s and 1940s. It was also true for almost all of the Chinese historians in the Mao era, despite the resistance of a few who adhered to the principle of “objectivity” in history-writing at the cost of their lives during the Cultural Revolution. It was even true in the 1980s and 1990s, when modern China was reinvented to render support to the reform and opening up policies of the post-Mao leadership.

Since the late 1990s, Chinese scholars have increasingly lost their interest in the grand narratives revolution and modernization and instead have shifted their attention to social and cultural histories, in particular, the history of the subaltern. In the absence of a master narrative, historical writing has become increasingly “fragmented” (sui pian hua). The in-depth study of historical events at the micro level is often achieved without making sense of the new findings in larger contexts of historical developments and theoretical debates.

Three shots from the films made in the 1980s about Long Bow village: a bride, preparations for Lunar New Year, and a Catholic village doctor. One Village in China

To overcome the problems of teleological and fragmented history, I propose a new approach to rediscovering modern China, which I term as a “within-time and open-ended history.” It is “within time” because it looks at a specific event in modern China from the point of view of the time when the event was taking place, when different possibilities for the development of the event existed simultaneously, and when participants in the event were not as conscious of its results as were historians of a later period. It is “open-ended” because it rejects the teleological historiography of revolution or modernization, in which the “ending” of the history was clearly defined on the basis of ideological assumptions. Historical representation can be closer to the realities of the past only after we overcome the results-driven, teleological approach inherent to twentieth-century Chinese historiography; and it can be more meaningful only after we put the fragmented pieces of the past back into a larger whole.

Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing
University of Hawaii Press, 2013

For more reading on Chinese history click here.

Episode 64: Monumental Sculpture of Preclassic Mesoamerica

The Preclassic period of Mesoamerican history (1500 BC – 200 AD) has left fascinating historical clues about what life was like in the form of monumental sculptures hewn out of boulders commonly called “pot bellies” (barrigones in Spanish) due to their distinctive shape. Yet, despite the fact that writing emerged during this time, the pot bellies lack any sort of description of historical context. Who built them and why?

Professor Julia Guernsey from UT’s Department of Art and Art History has recently published a book in which she combines the methodology of history, art history, and archaeology to offer a new look into this mysterious period at the beginning of recorded history in the Americas.

Episode 63: Ezra and the Compilation of the Pentateuch

The authorship of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament–known as the Torah or the Pentateuch–has been traditionally attributed to Moses. This raised some questions, however: would the most humble of men really describe himself as such? During the Enlightenment, scholars identified four distinct authors of the Pentatuch, creating the long-standing “Documentary Hypothesis.” In the past twenty five years, a new trend in Biblical Studies has begun to challenge this long held view.

Guest Richard Bautch from St Edward’s University in Austin is one of the scholars taking a new look at the Biblical Prophet Ezra and his relationship to this critical text. In this episode, we discuss current thinking about the formation of the Pentateuch during the time of Ezra.

Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia

It may sound strange to many readers, but when I was growing up as the son of upper middle-class civil servants in India in the 1960s, I was hardly aware of the existence of caste distinctions. We had returned from Italy in 1963 and I went to a private, Anglophone school whose privileged students belonged (I now realize) to various religions and castes. But at that time I was hardly aware of this. I now realize this arose from a conscious effort on the part of many of the Indian middle class of that era to shake off deep-rooted distinctions in order to build a new national community without invidious distinctions. On the other hand, our own class privilege by contrast to the acutely visible poverty of many around us could not escape my attention. When I enrolled in the University in the 1970s, the reduction or elimination of economic inequality was the issue that most agitated thinking people and the sources of class hierarchy was what preoccupied historians. Caste or religious distinctions – in so far as they were examined, were thought to be relics or survivals of a bygone social order or stratagems to divide working people in order to facilitate their exploitation.

This strain of thought dominated Indian intellectual life until the late 1980s and was undermined by three historical developments. One was the evident maintenance of social distinctions such as caste even as modernization broke down older taboos. It was clear that these were more than vanishing relics of a bygone era. Secondly, the collapse of the Soviet bloc alongside the astonishingly rapid and successful adoption of capitalist markets in China – the country that had gone furthest in suppressing markets and private property, demonstrated that the dominant Marxist ideas did not measure up to historical reality. Finally, in the 1990s, Indian politics was dramatically altered by the rise of caste-based political parties that eclipsed class-based organizations in elections, both in the States and the (federal) Center.

A number of scholars and commentators now turned to the West to understand these phenomena and found two related sets of ideas at hand. One was that caste was based on a religious ideology descended from ancient times (many added a racial dimension to it.) The other was that communities that lived distinct from the Hindu caste order were surviving aboriginal peoples, analogous to the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia. I found both these ideas unsatisfactory if measured against historical evidence. I began by studying “tribal” or “aboriginal” peoples, the results of which I published in 1999 as Environment and Ethnicity in India c.1200-1999. This book showed how tribal communities were in fact shaped by ecological settings and political networks (something that researchers were establishing for the native peoples of the Americas too.)

That book led me to explore the work Fredrik Barth, a famous expert on the Afghan borderlands who did path-breaking work across Southwest Asia starting in the 1950s. A little-read but brilliant essay of his showed how a caste system – marked by occupational segregation and social exclusion – functioned for century in the Swat valley of what is today northern Pakistan even though the population was 99% Muslim. He showed how this served the interests of the dominant landowning class even though it had no religious sanction. I also went back to a book published by the Cambridge anthropologist Susan Bayly in 1989 where she showed how Christian communities in South India – converted centuries ago – still maintained caste exclusions into the twentieth century. I also found studies showing caste practices among Indian Muslims.

A little research uncovered the fact that the very word “caste” was not found in any Indian language. It was spread world-wide by the Spanish and Portuguese empires of the sixteenth century. They applied the concept of “caste” to various ranked ethnic groups in Spanish Mexico and to various communities the Portuguese encountered in India. Thus the viceroy in India wrote to the King of Spain in 1630 that he had met the Mughal officer Daulat Khan (a Muslim name) who was of the “casta Abexim” or Abyssinian caste. But the Iberian peoples had a racial or genetic idea of caste while Indian society thought more in terms of behavior and purity. Racial caste can never be gained or lost: but Indian society admitted temporary exclusion and readmission as well as permanent expulsion. But branco or mestic̨o were permanent categories like white or black in the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, a number of sociologists pointed to aspects of U.S. society that could be analyzed in terms of a caste structure.

Finally, I found historical studies of the practice of caste in Sri Lanka, a mainly Buddhist country. Quite amazingly, the Dutch who ruled much of the island before the British captured it from them in 1796 regulated and enforced the caste system there. This was not because the Dutch Reformed Church prescribed it: rather, it was because they exacted taxes and forced labor from their subjects on the basis of their caste occupations such as cinnamon peeler, rice farmer, carpenter etc. None of these obviously could be thought of as the results of a religious ideology like Hinduism.

800px-Seventy-two_Specimens_of_Castes_in_India_(66) — A page from the manuscript “Seventy-two Specimens of Castes in India,” an album compiled by the Indian writing master at an English school established by American missionaries in Madura, and given to the Reverend William Twining. Each illustrated portrait is captioned in English and in Tamil, and the title page of the work includes English, Tamil, and Telugu. (Via Wikimedia)

It became clear that modern states and social and political interests played a major part in the reproduction of caste structures. In India, caste identity worked to mobilize voters. But this modern form of identity broke free from older taboos such as touching or eating beef. A graphic example came to mind: some time in the early 1980s, some shrewd if unscrupulous merchants began marketing an exceptionally cheap margarine (hydrogenated vegetable oil) in North India. Millions bought cans of this useful cooking fat. Then it came to light that the vendors had bought low-cost beef tallow on the world market, imported it under the pretext of soap-making and then sold it to millions of unsuspecting Hindus as a pure vegetarian product. There was a media furor for a few months, warehouses were sealed, the firm prosecuted and then everyone forgot about the fact that untold millions had ingested the fat of a sacred animal. Millions did not rush to seek penances and purifications. In 1857, the mere rumor that Indian soldiers were to be issued ammunition greased with pork and cow fat had driven tens of thousands of them into a desperate rebellion where vast numbers perished. In the 1980s, there was barely a ripple. Yet this was supposed to be a society (if the “religious” theories of caste discrimination were true) that held religious purity as its highest value and organized its economic and social life accordingly. Even if food taboos had fallen however, social discrimination and resentment persisted. Caste-based or ethnic political parties have won large votes in the elections year after year. No mainstream political party can now ignore the caste, religious, or linguistic affiliation of the voters in the constituencies where it is running.

So how then can we understand the long life of “caste”? I suggest that we stop looking at the many different classifications in human society and instead focus on what is common to tribes, ethnic groups, racial groups and castes: they are “bounded communities” and they all distinguish their members from those of other communities or ethnic groups. Understanding begins by looking at how membership is decided: who gets in the club? Who is kicked out? Clubs admit members on many different criteria – what is important is that they all have ‘boundaries’ determined by rules of membership. Let me end with a provocative quote from Fredrik Barth: we should study “the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses.”

Sumit Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia

Notes From the Field: Trinity College, Cambridge and the Accidents of Research

You never know. You might be out jogging when your best idea slips into your head. Or one of those random archival documents that you don’t even remember copying turns out to have a key piece of evidence scribbled nearly illegibly along a crumpled margin. Renowned historian Eric Foner just published a book based on a happenstance comment from a student about a rare document she saw in the Columbia University archive.

I was reminded of the accidents of research recently as I was dining at High Table in Trinity College, University of Cambridge. I am fortunate to have a visiting scholarship here this semester to finish a book on the great Russian cinema pioneer, Sergei Eisenstein, and his film about the sixteenth-century tsar, Ivan the Terrible.

Eisenstein's working script for "Ivan the Terrible," with production notes in his hand. — Eisenstein’s working script for “Ivan the Terrible,” with production notes in his hand.

And yes, the Trinity dining hall looks just like the one at Hogwarts, with long tables and benches for students running the length of the hall and a more formal High Table along the width. It does, however, have only an ordinary, though impossibly high, ceiling made of wooden beams rather than one that reflects the weather, and while there are plenty of candles, they don’t float in the air. And then there’s Henry VIII. A large copy of Hans Holbein’s famous portrait of Henry, who founded Trinity, watches over diners, as imperious as ever, from above High Table at the end of the hall.

Henry VIII, by Hans Eworth, after Hans Holbein, the Younger

What’s the connection between the accidents of research, a Soviet film about a bloody tyrant of the past –- a film that was commissioned by Joseph Stalin, bloody tyrant of the then-present — and Trinity High Table?

In 1947, when Eisenstein was reflecting back on Ivan the Terrible, which he had recently finished, analyzing the way he tried to convey ideas by triggering all the viewer’s senses, he chose to talk about an unforgettable scene, in which Ivan is mourning his murdered wife, Anastasia, and questioning his own political ambitions. Eisenstein emphasizes Ivan’s doubts and despair by placing him in a dark, shadowy chamber lighted by tall black candles and by using disorienting camera movements and jarring editing. He further conveys Ivan’s inner divisions with sound. From one corner, a priest reads a psalm about isolation, doubt, and loss of faith, while from the other, Ivan’s deputy reads a list of the royal servitors who have abandoned or betrayed the tsar. After listening for a while to this gloomy polyphony and slumping in various anguished positions all around his wife’s casket, Ivan suddenly leaps up. With his energy and determination returning, he reasserts his commitment to seize absolute power and found the modern Russian state: magnificent and ominous at the same time. It’s a powerful scene, where the resolution of Ivan’s inner conflict is made that much more impressive by the wracking pain of the divisions that preceded it.

Writing later about the sensory impact of the scene, Eisenstein suddenly recalled this:

“It was Cambridge.
In 1930.
In Trinity College.
In the huge Tudor dining hall….
On that memorable evening of the late dinner in Cambridge, the voice of the rector [reading a prayer in Latin before the meal] was repeated in response by the voice of the vice-rector.
Candles. Vaults. Two old men’s voices resounding in the boundlessness of the dark hall.
The strange text of the prayer.
The gray heads of the two old men.
The black university gowns. Night all around.
I thought about all this least of all when I was writing the scene of Ivan over the coffin of Anastasia in the screenplay of Ivan.
But now I think this episode of the film is definitely connected with the vivid impressions of that evening long ago in prewar England.”

I had a much more convivial and probably less dramatic dinner than Eisenstein seems to have had.

But you never know.

With thanks to my colleagues, Dominic Lieven and Emma Widdis.

The quoted passage is from Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature. Translated by Herbert Marshall (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 311.

You can watch the scene from Ivan the Terrible here: Ivan Grozny (1:19:39)

Photo of the script is from Ivan the Terrible: A Screenplay by Sergei M. Eisenstein, transl. Ivor Montagu and Herbert Marshall (New York, 1962), p. 308.

Episode 61: The Fatimids

Around the first millennium of the Christian era, a small group of Ismaili Shi’i Muslims established a dynasty that rapidly conquered North Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. At the height of their power they conquered Egypt, where they founded the city of Cairo, and their Imam-Caliphs had their names read out in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, rivaling the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. And yet, despite three centuries of rule by a powerful Shi’i empire, North Africa remained—and remains—Sunni with nary a trace of its Shi’ite past.

In this episode, guest Shainool Jiwa from the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London illuminates an often overlooked chapter in the history of Islamic sectarianism, one in which religious differences were used to unify diverse populations under the rule of a minority government, rather than to divide and alienate them.

Sculpture and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica

By Julia Guernsey

I had long been aware of the enigmatic sculptures known colloquially as “potbellies”or, in Spanish, barrigones, with their unusual features, often enormous bellies and recurring facial features. They visually dot the landscape of southeastern Mesoamerica, especially along the Pacific coast and slope of Mexico and Guatemala, as well as throughout the highlands of Guatemala. Although they are less common in other regions of Mesoamerica – in the Maya lowlands of Guatemala, for instance, or further northwest in Mexico – they nevertheless make occasional cameo appearances.

The mysterious potbellies fascinated me for several reasons. They are huge: some are hewn from massive boulders up to several tons in weight. They are unusual, with their bulging paunches, tightly closed eyes with puffy lids, and swollen cheeks. They are abundant, with over 130 known and they appear at sites of all different scale, from enormous cities that politically dominated regions to smaller subsidiary sites within their political orbit. They are also early, having made their first appearance in Mesoamerica by 300 BC.

Santa Leticia El Salvador potbelly640 — Potbelly monument from the site of Santa Leticia, El Salvador (Photo by Michael Love).

But, unlike the elegantly carved stelae (or tall stone monuments) that date to the same period and often render complex narrative scenes concerning mythology and rulership, the potbellies are simple. Giant, often, but simply carved, the boulders from which they are rendered are still readily discernible and lend their sheer weight and enormity to the visual impact of the sculptures. Although they had always intrigued me, I had long focused on the narrative stelae and their relationship to expressions of kingship.

3.2 takalik abaj stela 5 jg photo — Late Preclassic Stela 5 from the site of Takalik Abaj, Guatemala, showing two elite individuals standing on either side of an early hieroglyphic inscription (photo by Julia Guernsey).

It was hard for me to imagine that the massive potbellies, which sometimes appear without “bellies” or any bodies at all and, instead, take the form of disembodied heads with the same closed eyes and jowly features, had much to tell me about the rise of the earliest state-level societies in Mesoamerica, which also appeared around 300 BC. Nor, with their utter lack of hieroglyphic writing, could they reveal much about early script traditions, whose regular appearance in stone coincided with these other events. And that was my primary interest: how the imagery and themes of sculpture were critical to formulating the messages of political authority that went hand in hand with the rise of state formation in Late Preclassic Mesoamerica (300 BC to AD 250).

View of Monte Alto Monuments in the town square of La Democracia, Guatemala — Monte Alto Monuments in the central square of the town of La Democracia, Guatemala, where they were relocated from the archaeological site of Monte Alto in the 1960s (photo by Julia Guernsey).

I began fieldwork at the site of La Blanca, Guatemala, in the early 2000s, with the hope of finding earlier sculpture that dated to the Middle Preclassic period, or between 900-600 BC. My goal was to learn more about the sculptural traditions that pre-dated the Late Preclassic period, so that I could better understand how the forms and themes of sculpture changed with the advent of state formation. Sculpture was still rare at this point in history, and particularly in this region, so I was anxious to find and document more, so that I could better understand its range and purposes. La Blanca, located 30 km from the Pacific coast in Guatemala, near the border with Chiapas, Mexico, pre-dated state formation. It was probably what we refer to as a chiefdom. It was large and had many of the hallmarks of Mesoamerican civilization, such as a 25 meter tall pyramid and many other mounds, but it lacked the centralized political and administrative systems that characterize early states. With great expectations of exploring the role of sculpture in this earlier period, I eagerly spent the summer at La Blanca, where my colleague Michael Love, a professor at California State University who directs the La Blanca Archaeological Project, had arranged to have a team of archaeologists use ground penetrating radar to help locate monuments. But none were found. That’s not a good thing if you are an art historian who works on sculpture.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — Fragmentary, Middle Preclassic ceramic figurine heads with puffy facial features from the archaeological site of La Blanca, Guatemala, now in the Shook Collection archive, Department of Archaeology, Universidad del Valle, Guatemala (photo by Robert Rosenswig, courtesy of Marion Popenoe de Hatch).

So I reluctantly began to think more broadly about what constituted sculpture for ancient Mesoamericans. What we did have at La Blanca were thousands of palm-sized ceramic figurines that are typically found in households, and that we believe were part of domestic ritual and practices of ancestor veneration. And they were everywhere. All individuals appear to have utilized figurines for ceremonies, regardless of their social rank. Both commoners and elites engaged in the same patterns of figurine use and the figurines were concrete evidence of these rituals, often conducted in the privacy of their homes. In other words, they were markedly different from the sculpture I usually look at, which is monumental, made of stone, and located in public plazas and ceremonial centers. Their context was different, their patterns of use were different, their production and distribution were different, and there were lots of them. I was definitely outside my art historical comfort zone. Albeit a bit hesitantly, I nevertheless dived in.

I quickly realized that, of the more than 5000 figurines at La Blanca, we had close to a hundred (mostly fragmentary, as we usually find them) that bore the same set of features as the potbellies and monumental heads: closed, puffy lidded eyes and jowly cheeks. At first I was confounded by this, as the ceramic figurines all came from secure archaeological contexts that dated to 900-600 BC. But the stone potbellies and massive heads only appear around 300 BC. What also intrigued me was the fact that the figurine tradition in this region waned drastically by 300 BC, when the first state-level societies emerged. In other words, with the rise of states and newly centralized political and administrative systems, the ritual activity that had characterized households during the Middle Preclassic period changed dramatically. Instead, during the Late Preclassic, the public site centers – lined by pyramids and filled with massive stone sculpture – became the new focus of ritual, carried out under the aegis of rulers. Household ritual and its attendant figurine use virtually ceased. Ironically enough, it was the disappointment of not finding monumental Middle Preclassic sculpture at La Blanca that led me to begin to think more broadly about other forms of sculptural expression, like the ceramic figurines.

potbelliescover — Left: Monte Alto Monument 4 as it now stands in the town of La Democracia (photo by Julia Guernsey). Right: Nearly complete Middle Preclassic (c. 800 BC) ceramic figurine from 2004 excavations at La Blanca, Guatemala with puffy facial features (photo by Michael Love).

I began to realize that the transition of this set of very consistent attributes – closed eyes, swollen lids, and puffy faces – from small-scale ceramics to monumental stone sculptures spoke volumes. These changes in sculpture, and the contexts in which they were used, were related to the other key social dynamics that characterized this period, such as state formation. Late Preclassic rulers appropriated the imagery and themes previously used in the domestic sector in the form of figurines and their associations with ancestors and moved them into the large, public plazas where they could proclaim their power as rulers and lay claim to their own privileged history and lineage. This imagery, which was ancient and powerful and about kinship, became a formidable tool when moved out of the hands of all and into the domain of rulers alone. The jowly facial features, the bloated bodies, and the closed eyes invoked not only dead or long-gone ancestors, but potent lineage. I also came to realize that this appropriation by newly emerging political elites attests to the complex relationship between lineage and political authority during this period.

In studying the relationship between the earlier domestic figurines and the later public potbellies and their counterparts – the massive disembodied heads — I was able to show how sculpture in ancient Mesoamerica articulated political and social issues in an era of incipient state formation. The potbellies – and their counterparts — the massive disembodied heads – quite literally gave form to the dynamics of state formation and the assertion of political legitimacy at the dawn of the Late Preclassic period in ancient Mesoamerica.

Julia Guernsey, Sculpture and Social Dynamics in Preclassic Mesoamerica

For an introduction to Mesoamerica, you can listen our interview with Ann Twinam on 15 Minute History: The Precolumbian Civilizations of Mesoamerica.

Want to read more about sculpture and Mesoamerica? Look here.