Heads of state : icons, power, and politics in the ancient and modern Andes
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Heads of state : icons, power, and politics in the ancient and modern Andes
Left Coast Press, c2008
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 257-279) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The human head has had important political, ritual and symbolic meanings throughout Andean history. Scholars have spoken of captured and trophy heads, curated crania, symbolic flying heads, head imagery on pots and on stone, head-shaped vessels, and linguistic references to the head. In this synthesizing work, cultural anthropologist Denise Arnold and archaeologist Christine Hastorf examine the cult of heads in the Andes-past and present-to develop a theory of its place in indigenous cultural practice and its relationship to political systems. Using ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork, highland-lowland comparisons, archival documents, oral histories, and ritual texts, the authors draw from Marx, Mauss, Foucault, Assadourian, Viveiros del Castro and other theorists to show how heads shape and symbolize power, violence, fertility, identity, and economy in South American cultures.
Table of Contents
- Part I The Ethnography of Andean Head Taking and Power
- Chapter 1 Heads in Small-scale Polities
- Chapter 2 The Captured Fetish, the Mountain Chest, and Sacrifice
- Chapter 3 Drinking the Power of the Dead
- Chapter 4 The Nested Power of Modern Andean Hierarchies
- Part II The Archaeology of Andean Head Taking and Power
- Chapter 5 Heads and the Consolidation of Andean Political Power
- Chapter 6 Heads and Andean Political Change from an Archaeological Perspective
- Chapter 7 Central Andean Political Developments
- Chapter 8 Conclusions
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