Augustine et al, The Social Ontology

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J.M. Augustine, A. Guengerich, A. Kolata, D. Pacifico, T-A. Shih

Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago

1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637

The Social Ontology of Cultural Objects: Or, What Things Are and What Things Do

Introduction

By its nature, ontology posits a totalizing scheme; a conceptual framework upon whichall other possibilities are predicated. When we speak about ontology are we speaking about it asa broad metaphysical framework that can be universalized? Do our Andean cases undermine

Cartesian ontological categories, thereby forcing us to reevaluate the fabric of being? Or can wespeak of ontologies in the plural and take a comparative approach to ontology? Might ontologicalframeworks differ between cultures and produce different sets of relationships—active and/oridealized—between various categories of being? The starting point from which we begin tointerrogate these conundrums poses the following question: what are the stakes of investigatingontological categories of the material? We choose to interrogate the relationship betweenontology and materiality because what things are--in practical and cultural terms--has pragmaticconsequences that affect their ability to do social work.

That is, there are significant social stakes in the way people conceive of objects. As

others have noted (see, for example, Descola 2005; Latour 2006), anthropologists tend to treat"the social" as if it were an a priori phenomenon. Thus they have analyzed the ways in whichsocial configurations produce other sets of relationships and cultural logics, including ontologies.However, this process can be productively turned on its head, and ontological configurations can be understood as affecting the types of social relations that emerge in various settings. In otherwords, we posit that the ontological status of materials is not an epiphenomenal problem, but infact it speaks to the foundations of sociality.

We approach the way that the ontological status of material objects can affect socialitythrough two heuristic models. The first heuristic addresses the metaphysical "excesses"

embodied in things - that is, the qualities of material objects that exceed their "brute facticity"and enable them to be active, valuable, beautiful, affecting, and powerful. Within the field ofontology, there are multiple ways to model these metaphysical excesses. This heuristic presents acontinuum along which most cultural ontologies could be located with “supplementalontologies” at one end and “fetishistic ontologies” at the other. From the perspective of asupplemental ontology, the metaphysical excesses of the material world are properties that are


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fundamentally projected onto objects by active, sentient subjects. This perspective is perhaps best characterized by the Cartesian separation of mental and material, which is predicated on astrict ontological distinction between subject and object. Such an attitude is also manifest inmany strains of 20th century anthropology—including Boasian schools (see Linton 1936;Kroeber 1948) and later structuralist turns (Levi-Strauss 1976)—that consider meaning and value

to be fundamentally mental in origin, yet detectable through traces of material phenomena.

From the perspective of a fetishistic ontology, the metaphysical excesses of materialthings are immanent within the materiality of objects themselves. Such an attitude partiallycharacterizes some ethnohistorical cases from West Africa (see Pietz 1987; Graeber 2005) and--as we argue below--certain Andean settings as well. In our first case study pertaining to thisheuristic, we explore the ways in which potentiality--in the form of camay--was understood to bean intrinsic quality of all material substance in the Late Inca Empire and Early Colonial Periodthrough a discussion of bodies, interment, and the social space of colonial churches.

Furthermore, with our second case study, we present the possibility that power was conceived invery material--seemingly fetishistic--terms within the Moche polity

Our second heuristic considers the ways in which non-Western ontologies canreconfigure the relationships between social subjects and material objects. We identify two suchconfigurations: objects that are themselves subjects, and objects that materialize social subjects.This heuristic is deployed in our third and fourth case studies to explore the idea of "the double"of the Inca king and the ontology of quotidian objects in the Andes. The case of the Inca's doublesuggests a configuration in which multiple material objects may participate in a singular subjectin order to perform political work. Looking at quotidian objects in the Andes, we see that the

circulation of subsistence goods can be critical in constituting collective subjects such as thearchetypical ayllu.

The greatest analytical potential lies in the realization that cultural ontologies are unlikelyto fall neatly into one category or perfectly demonstrate a particular ontological configuration.The heuristic categories we present exist in tension because of the difficulty inherent in parsingout and locating the exact emergence of the “metaphysical excesses” that confront us in practiceand in analysis. Clearly cultural objects, things, exist in multiple forms, at multiple scales (fromsmall-scale, individual cultural objects such as ceramic vessels, or tunics to entire socio-naturallandscapes) and perform multiple functions. But such objects do share some commonalities, or

attributes in terms of what they do, how they function, and the forms of sociality they support.

There are a number of ways cultural objects are efficacious. First, objects are affect-laden in that they create and evoke senses of sentiment, desire and emotional investment. Assuch they contribute to the creation of individual value, as we will see in the case of quotidianobjects treated below. Objects are normative, that is they help create and transform social norms


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(e.g. think of the example of churches, universities, huacas, etc.). As such they contribute to theconstruction of collective value. We explore this dimension by examining conflicts over the bodies of the deceased and also the role of objects in the creation of communities in the Andes.Cultural objects are also political precisely because they produce, reflect, and embody socialvalues, individual and collective, and such social values can in turn become integral to the

production of hierarchies--a theme we explore in the context of Moche politics, in whichmaterial substances and objects were deployed in various political performances. In theirrepresentational dimension, cultural objects signify, or point to their own meaning-system,rarely, if at all, as individual objects, but rather as assemblages or broader relational systems ofobjects. As such, cultural objects can often be understood as metonymic forms that referencethemselves as well as the broader class of things to which they belong or to which they relate. Inthis sense, cultural objects of the sort we are considering (huacas, mallquis, etc.) gain culturalefficacy and do social work precisely because they have the power to represent and form socialnetworks: they become the material focus of collective patterns of sociality, habitual social

practices and collective action.

A Brief Intellectual History of the Social Ontology of Cultural Objects

The ontology of things has long been a concern of analytical philosophy (think here, forexample, of Lucretius’ long poem, De Rerum atura) and, recently the focus of considerablenew reflection by metaphysicians, aestheticians, sociologists of knowledge and anthropologists,among others. The braided streams of thought on the subject of cultural objects are intricate, branching and they flow in different directions. However, in the interest of reducing conceptualcomplexity to clarity, we can define a distinct epistemological duality in the approach to the

theoretical puzzle of what things are and what things do.

The "supplemental ontologies" approach, still dominating analytical philosophy andmetaphysics and retaining a deep commitment to the physicalism of the Enlightenment,compartmentalizes the social world, and the cultural objects in it, into two distinct domains: thematerial and the mental. This is the standard subject/object dichotomy articulated by Decartes,among others. In a thoroughgoing Cartesian analysis, social reality consists of physical thingsand the meanings imposed or projected onto them by (willful, originally self-conscious) acts ofreason and the force of the mind. Here the social world is divided into a semantically neutralsubstratum of “brute facts,” or “merely physical objects” upon which cultural meanings and

functions are bestowed by acts of cognitive imposition (Searle, 1995). As Marcoulatos(2003:246) notes, from this perspective, physical objects “ontologically support the imposedorder of meanings, yet they are not infused by it… [T]hey are simply the vessels of socialsignificance, which is usually construed as the outcome of the self-determining activity of aconsciousness, dispersed from an inalienable center of intellectual awareness towards the periphery of the world.” In this conception, individual physical objects, and materiality writ


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large, have no autonomous powers of agency, no capacity to generate meaning, social impact orcultural value as things-in-themselves: they are ineluctably dependent on the human mind fortheir social reality.

But this reductive bifurcation into the material (brute physicality) and the mental (the

signifying force) presents an ontological conundrum: cultural objects remain stubborn facts,ordered physical structures of atoms, that humans cannot simply modify at will, even with themost powerful efforts of the mind. That is, cultural objects are neither merely physical materialsnor solely mental projections: they are entities that depend jointly on both dimensions of socialreality. Roman Ingarden (1989: 260) deploys particularly apposite examples of cultural objects,specifically churches and flags, to drive home this essential point. A church or a flag: “has a realobject as its bearer (its ontic foundation), but goes beyond that real object in the propertiesconstitutive of, and essential to it. The real thing that serves as the ontic foundation of such anobjectivity is not, however, the sole foundation of its being, for the subjective attitude and the

appropriate acts of consciousness which create something like a ‘church’ or ‘flag’ forms itssecond and perhaps far more important ontic foundation.”

Importantly Ingarden here delimits the dual existence conditions of cultural objects: first,they have a material basis (an ordered arrangement of atoms, molecules, substances), and secondthey have a specific chain of signification generated by social beliefs and practices thattransforms “mere” material substance into a recognized cultural object. So, in the case of achurch,

“[A]s long as it is… carried out in the appropriate attitude (by the ‘priest’ and

‘believers’), the ceremony is performed in acts of consciousness which, to be sure, of themselvesdo not and cannot bring about real change in the real world, but which do call into being a certainobject that belongs to the environment surrounding the ‘believers,’ namely what we call a‘church,’ or a ‘temple,’ and so forth. A determinately ordered heap of building materials is precisely what a ‘church’ is not, although this heap serves as its real basis (its bearer) and formsthe point of departure of the act of consecration” (1989: 259).

Places of worship are particularly apt examples of cultural objects that cannot beconveniently dichotomized in a hierarchical relationship of the material and the mental in whichthe latter over determines and furnishes the significance conditions of the former. As

Marcoulatos (2003:254) observes, places of worship (and other symbol and value laden publicand civic architecture) “materialize a whole way of relating to the world, not as if it were firstconceived as a world-view (i.e. a system of ideas) and then conveyed in another ontologicalmedium (i.e. an architectural form), but rather as if both aspects -- roughly speaking, the textualand the objectified --of the specific sociohistorical manner of relating to the world co-emerged ina process of reciprocal formation.” Here the ontological status, the existence conditions, of these


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cultural objects flows dynamically across the subject/object boundary in a relational interplay inwhich structured social space (the church, the palace, the university, the museum, etc.) as both physical and conceptual entities conveys meaning and value in the process of socialization. Suchcultural objects attain a kind of quasi-subjectivity from the reciprocal interplay betweenintersubjective acts of attribution of meaning (mental acts) and the historically acquired, semi-

autonomous sense of meaning derived from the structuring of habitual praxis (theunselfconscious kinetic acts of everyday life).

In this analysis, the static Cartesian subject/object bifurcation cannot resolve theontological status of cultural objects, such as churches, flags, shrines, gardens, irrigated terraces,cultigens and the endless other instances of things cognized, recognized and produced byhumans. These cultural objects have specific and historically contingent spatio-temporalcoordinates; and the material stuff of which they are made is potentially subject to renovation,degradation and destruction. They remain stubbornly, objectively real, independent of the

capacity of the human mind to impose conditions of specific cultural significance. Furthermore,the potential material persistence of cultural objects over long periods of time (think of, forinstance, massive public architecture that endures over centuries) opens the possibility of entirelydifferent chains of signification from those originally present at the moment of production ofthese enduring cultural objects. That is, the specific social reality of a cultural object depends onits relationship to a distinct perceiving community. When the perceiving community disappears,loses its faith in present social conditions, or otherwise changes, so too does the reality ofcultural objects: their specific signifying power may be lost or transformed beyond socialrecognition, even though their material form remains substantively the same. For instance, theGreat Mosque of Cordoba, in time, becomes a Catholic church, and subsequently becomes a

tourist destination/museum, or simultaneously remains all three from the frame of reference ofdistinct perceiving communities. Multiple perceiving communities transform or even cognitivelyand socially, if not materially, destroy cultural objects by deploying distinct chains ofsignification.

In other words, the logic of recognition and signification is constitutive of these culturalobjects, but not exclusively so. Therefore, if cultural objects cannot be reduced to brute facts, andthey are also not merely mental projections exclusively dependent on the mind, humanintentionality and the subjective authorizing force of social consensus, how then should weconceive of an inclusive theory of cultural objects? This question opens up reflection on the

second approach to the ontology of things.

An alternative to the categorical dichotomization of the material and the mental, of objectand subject, recognizes that this bifurcation is intuitively compelling, but nevertheless phenomenologically unconvincing. The material and the mental are never mutually exclusivecategories, in which one (the material) is subtended to the other (the mental). This alternative


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perspective rejects the over-determination of mental projection on material objects: culturalobjects are not merely the social product of a specific, imposed or projected mentalité. Culturalobjects are the interpenetrating product of cognitive forces of individual and collectiveimagination coupled with deeply physical, embodied processes of production framed in acollective social consensus of significance. From this perspective, cultural objects, and the force

of their agency, are understood and experienced as physical realizations of a social imaginary. Inother words, the dual constitutive aspect of cultural objects specifically demands that we takeaccount of the interpenetration of the subject and the object. Here, objects acquire subjectivequalities, but only in reference to a specific perceiving community, and not as universalreferents.

That is, cultural objects, say in the Andean cultural context, huacas, mallquis, huauques,ushnus, and other such physico-conceptual entities, acquire a palpable, quasi-subjectivecharacter. They are loved, loathed, feared, envied, invoked and always propitiated: in short, they

become infused with a human-like character of personhood. They become a particularly powerful form of kin and kith, while, at the same time, retaining a necessary and sociallyacknowledged distance from everyday familial intimacy. These Andean cultural things aresimultaneously subjectified objects and objectified subjects. They are kin to be engagedmaterially in expressions of reciprocation, and, at the same time, existentially otiose entities,acknowledged and responded to by human communities, irrespective of specific lineageaffiliations. These particular Andean cultural objects fluidly move across the boundaries ofspecificity and generality, subject and object. They are open-ended, interactive and potentiallytransformative at the same time as they are mundane emblems of cultural continuity. Perhaps paradoxically they are simultaneously the guarantors of the traditional and the potential

wellspring of radical innovation.

Here we can clearly recognize that such (Andean) cultural objects contain and express ina co-constitutive dynamic discursive and non-discursive, cognitive and non-cognitive forms ofsignificance. In the latter, non-discursive mode of significance, cultural objects such as huacas,mallquis and huauques can be conceived as non-reflective social presences. They exist (as thingsin themselves) notoriously and tangibly in the social landscape and, as such, possess anhistorically constructed signifying autonomy. Why this is so can be explored by consideringwhat such cultural objects do. That is, what efficacy do cultural objects have, and what influencedo they exert over the human communities that recognize, produce and valorize them?


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Cases in Metaphysical Excess

Potentiality as Excess

Our first case study poses a single animating question: why, during the Middle Colonial

Period, were Christian Indians, properly buried on church grounds, clandestinely disinterred bytheir kin and moved to indigenous huacas, shrines in the Andean sacred landscape, or tomachayes, native burial grounds? To examine this question, we draw on Aristotle andAgamben's formulation of "potentiality" to derive an ontology of Andean bodies. We concludethat the persistence and forms of mortuary idolatries involving Christianized bodies during theMiddle Colonial Period challenges the presumed universality of Western ontologies of the bodythat see a radical distinction between living and dead bodies.

A 1656 document produced by the extirpation of idolatries visitador Bernardo de Noboain the highland pueblo of Santo Domingo de Pariac charges the residents with the removal of

Christian bodies from the parish church to machayes, or traditional burial grounds. (Duviols2003). Though ostensibly converted, the Andean cult of ancestors persisted in this community,and indigenous bodies, considered huacas, continued to be venerated. In the Andean cult,mummies of ancestors were to be kept in the domestic space, where they could be easilyconsulted, or else they were to be transported to machayes, which were often away from Spanishtowns and closer to the rural places where Indians lived and worked. Widespread ransacking ofIndian bodies buried in Christian cemeteries was a problem in the Audiencia of Lima during the16th and 17th centuries. Polo de Ondegardo notes that Indians commonly disinterred their dead,taking them from old churches and graveyards to huacas, mountains and plains, old sepulchers

and houses, where their kin and associates gathered to give them food and drink, and to performsongs and dances for them (Polo de Ondegardo, 194). The church attempted to halt this practice,which was considered idolatrous, by requiring that the doors of the churches and, moregenerally, that church grounds remain closed at night and that burials occur only during the day.The burial of baptized Christians outside of consecrated ground occurred with enough frequencythat the First Council of Lima addressed this practice by stipulating punishments for offenders.Those participating in the removal of bodies would be jailed for three days and given fifty publiclashes. When burying Christian Indians, priests were instructed to examine the faces of thedeceased to make sure another body had not been substituted. Offerings were not to be placed inthe burials of Christian Indians (Gose 2003: 157).

Some scholars suggest that the early Colonial church assumed the universality of theCatholic understanding of “conversion” and imprecisely interpreted Andean worship of aChristian god as evidence that older religious beliefs had been renounced (Gose 2003,MacCormack 1990). The difficulty of conversion was further compounded by Spanish relianceon Andean ayllus to meet the tasks required of colonization. Andean kin groups often had a great


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deal of experience with assimilating the religious deities introduced by invading outsiders. AsGose notes, ayllus tended to resolve the problem of intrusive religions by entering into reciprocalworship of ancestral deities with outside groups. (Gose 2003: 142). Ayllu leadership that was notonly legitimate in the eyes of the Spanish, but also an instrument of Spanish interests, sometimeshad the unintended consequence of enabling the continuity of Andean religious practice. For

Gose, Andean subjects stubbornly continued to disinter their properly buried Christian ancestors because it was not inconsistent with Andean modes of religious belief and practice in whichadherence to one tradition did not entirely exclude the other (Gose 2003: 142). Gose builds hisexplanation for the persistence of mortuary idolatry around a central structural contradiction inthe Spanish colonial project. In the Andes, religion was not institutionally separate from the stateor the ayllu, and because of its institutional weakness, the colonial state relied on the ayllu andAndean political authorities to indirectly meet the goals of the colonization. As a result, the statewas dependent on the power of the descent group –a corporate body whose membership wasdefined through the mutual performance of ritual tasks, and which further did not view

abandonment of Andean religious practice as necessary to Christian conversion -- to realize itsevangelizing goals.

Although Gose succeeds in explaining how, for converted Andeans, Christian worshipcould be imbricated with features of Andean religious practice without self-consciouscontradiction, his description fails to account for why interred Andean bodies themselves weresuch contested sites in the struggle over conversion. How can we explain the imperative fornative Andeans to move their deceased, baptized ancestors from church burials to traditional burial sites? What quality of the body buried in a machay allows it to be incommensurate with a body buried in a church? What is it about the body that its ontological status can change

dramatically through movement from one burial context to another, so much so that it is in asense “inactivated” in one context, and “reactivated” in the other?

We propose than an Andean ontology of the body begins, crucially, with a notion of the physical body that itself harbors potentiality. Agamben notes that Aristotle, in De Anima,distinguishes two types of potentiality (Agamben 1999: 179). Generic potentiality refers to thecapacity to develop something in the future. However, it is the second type of potentiality,“existence as potentiality,” which refers not to the potential for bringing into actuality somethingfor whom one has knowledge or ability, but rather, crucially, to the potential not-to-do or not to bring into actuality that interests Aristotle (ibid).

Agamben uses the metaphor of sight to elaborate this important clarification of the modeof existence as potentiality. He clarifies that even when we do not see (that is, when our vision is potential), we are nonetheless able to distinguish darkness from light. As such, the principle ofsight requires the potential for seeing both darkness and light. Agamben concludes “the greatness – and also the abyss—of human potentiality is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential


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for darkness” (ibid 1999: 181). Through this move, he underscores that the potential for acting,above all, is a moral choice. This choice is made especially meaningful given that the obverse ofthe potential to act -- and, indeed, that which within Aristotle's logic is prior to the potential toact -- is the potential not-to-act.

Among Andean bodies of the Late Inca Empire and Early Colonial Period, the dynamicsof potentiality--for both action and inaction--reveal a set of conditions in which seeminglyinactive bodies (i.e. dead bodies) continued to be reservoirs of potentiality. This phenomenonrelates directly to the Andean concept of camay that diverges significantly from Christian andEnlightenment models of human interiority and subjectivity. The first Christians missionaries toarrive in Peru were particularly concerned with identifying an Andean concept analogous to theimmaterial, transcendent soul, and with the production of Quechua catechisms during the earlycolonial period, there were debates over whether various Quechua expressions could adequatelysubstitute for the soul (Durston 2007:213-214). Ultimately, this debate was abandoned and the

term anima —the Latin word for soul as opposed to the Spanish alma, which was less adaptableto Quechua phonology (Durston 2007:214)—was deployed in most contexts from the late 16thcentury onwards because, as Durston notes, “it was probably…considered that the concept ofsoul was too important to be translated with an adopted term” (Durston 2007:345n37). Centralamong the terms considered possible Quechua concepts of the “soul” was camaquen, “theagentivized form of the verb cama-…followed by the third-person possessive” (Durston2007:213-214). The verb cama- has been defined/described variously—but not exclusively—as“the activity of animating or strengthening living beings” (Durston 2007:213), “to charge with being, to infuse with species power” (Salomon 1991:16), and “the energizing of extant matter”(Salomon 1991:16). The latter of these three is perhaps the most satisfactory definition, because

the verb cama - seems to refer to a potentiality latent in all beings/matter—not exclusive to“living things”—that can be active or dormant, depending on the circumstances. As Taylor notesin reference to the Huarochirí manuscript, “nothing that existed was truly inanimate onward fromthe moment when it realized the functions that corresponded to its true nature” (Taylor 2000:5[authors’ translation]). Thus, we propose that camay —the infinitive/substantive form of the verbcama-—is like energy that fluctuates between potential and kinetic forms.

Furthermore, camay does not refer to an immaterially transcendent substance that canexist outside of or beyond matter. Recalling Pels’ apt characterization of fetishism, camay isspirit of matter, not spirit in matter (Pels 1998:91). As such, we concur with Salomon’s

observation that there does not seem to have been a native Andean ontological distinction between “spirit” and “matter”. Duviols has argued to the contrary and posited that camaquen andthe term upani —from the root upa, meaning dumb/mute—reflect Andean notions analogous toan immaterial soul (Duviols 1978). However, we disagree with the bases for his conclusion. Hecites three main lines of evidence: 1) definitions of camaquen and upani presented by 16th and17th century clerics, 2) the survival of the camaquen of “idols” after their physical destruction


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(Duviols 1978:134), and 3) 20th century ethnographic work conducted in the Cuzco region(Duviols 1978:136). Regarding the first line of evidence, as has been noted above in relation toDurston’s analysis of Quechua catechisms, early colonial clerics actively sought indigenousAndean notions of the immortal soul. In such a context, their identification of camaquen as beingan immaterial substance reflected this desire above all. The story of the burnt idol—in this case amallqui or Andean mummy—furthermore does not negate the possibility that camaquen wasinherently material. There are multiple ethnohistorical accounts that record how after Spanishextirpators had incinerated or demolished a mallqui or huaca, individuals often attempted torecover and preserve its ashes or rubble (see de Arriaga 1968:83-89), which were recognized as possessing the same material power of the destroyed body/stone. Finally, Allen has arguedconvincingly that—contrary to the ethnographic case cited by Duviols (1978:136)— contemporary Quechua concepts of death “[reveal] a conceptual system in which body and soulare essentially interdependent and unanalyzable” (Allen 1982:182).

Chroniclers' accounts abound with descriptions of the cult of the veneration of the kingsand the bodies of the dead. For the Spanish, this practice was especially vexing because theyunderstood that the corporeal body was no longer whole without a soul, while in indigenousAndean practice, as Cobo noted, the dead body would be embalmed with great care andworshipped “as soon as the soul had left the body” (Cobo 1990 [16xx]: pp 38). Cobo was particularly appalled that native Andeans “worshipped the bodies of the dead in spite of believing that these bodies would not live again nor serve any useful purpose” (Cobo 1990[16xx]: pp 38).

What is going on here? We posit that the imperative to return interred, revered ancestors

to native machayes was underlain with an understanding of a soulless, deceased body thatnonetheless continued to harbor potentiality in the form of camay. Still, while it remains buriedin the church, it remains inert and, crucially, outside of the social. We can understand theancestor’s body in the church is a body that is kept in privation; it is missing a quality, that of potency, which is normally there. The moral stakes for the living descendant not to actualize this potentiality are not-for-nothing: the body buried in the church represents the potential or,damningly, the preference of living descendants not-to-act. The revered ancestor's body that doesnot become a mallqui thus remains outside the realm of sociality. Taken outside of the social, itceases to exist.

Aristotle posited that what is sometimes darkness and sometimes light is one in nature(Aristotle 1986: 94) Critical to Agamben’s formulation of potentiality, however, is the necessary binary of its actuality. Human potentiality to act, for example, requires a prior – the potentialitynot-to-act: it is both the existence of one and the other, and the tension between the opposingforces from which meaning is formed. Agamben writes, “the greatness – and also the abyss – ofhuman potentiality is that it is first of all potential not-to-act, potential for darkness…radical evil


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is not this or that bad deed but the potentiality for darkness” (Agamben 1999:180-181.) Radical(versus banal) evil is thus the annihilating, opposing will that chooses the potential not to act,despite the possibility of acting. For Andeans, the deceased body continues to exist in potentiality. Choosing not to realize the social potentiality of the deceased body is in effectchoosing darkness (ibid 1999: pp 181-182). Thus presented, the stakes for the descendants of the

deceased were not entirely abstract: by framing the activation of camay latent in the physical body of a deceased ancestor as either choosing to act – and more crucially – to not-to-act betterforegrounds the imperative that underlay Andean mortuary idolatry.

The Excess of Radical Objects

In attempting to situate various categories of being within a cultural ontology, we mustcontemplate the hierarchies embedded in such schemas. Within naturalistic ontologies (cf.Descola 2005) derived from the Enlightenment, a fundamental hierarchy was established between persons and things, predicated on the perceived activity and passivity that characterizedeach of the two respectively. From this same intellectual milieu discourses engaging the fetishemerged, as 16th and 17th century encounters between Dutch merchants and West Africans gaverise to tales of “religions” wherein the ontological and hierarchical separation of persons andthings was not recognized (Pietz 1987). Fundamentally, the fetish presented an object in whichthe dichotomous elements of spirit and matter, mental and material, or interiority and physicality(cf. Descola 2005) were collapsed inward on each other.

To clarify this point further, Pels characterized fetishism as “animism with a vengeance”,contrasting animism’s “spirit in” matter with fetishism’s “spirit of” matter (Pels 1998:91). From

the perspective of Enlightenment intelligentsia, fetishism reflected mental aberration and naivetyamong “primitive peoples”, and as such, it was often cited as the earliest form of religiousthought within evolutionary models (Pietz 1993:131-132; Comte 1875; Spencer 1875; Tylor1866). However, beyond these initial encounters, it became increasingly apparent that themetaphysical excesses of objects qua fetishes were not irrelevant or indeed alien to Westernsensibilities and practices1.

Of the many revelations to be gleaned from the fetish, the twin themes most relevant tothe current discussion are the power of materiality and the materiality of power. Again, thisspeaks to the seemingly stable ontological hierarchy that exists between the world of persons and

the world of inanimate objects. Due to their liminal ontological status in relation to such ahierarchy, fetishes are able to become powerful objects—in some instances effectively

Marx’s commodity fetishism is perhaps the strongest example of how fetishism is not alien to

capitalist modernity, but in fact endemic in the social relations that characterize it.


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embodying “power” itself—and to imbed themselves within social hierarchies. Perhaps the bestillustration of this phenomenon comes from the West African cases that initially sparked thedebates surrounding the fetish. As Graeber (2005: 420) notes, within these contexts “power wasseen to take on material substance or tangible form.” For example, the Tiv considered social power—that is “the ability to impose one’s will on others”—to be a fatty yellow substance,

referred to as tsav, that grows on human hearts (Graeber 2005:416). Similarly, the BaKongorecognized a bodily substance called kindoki, which was the basis for the power of chiefs andwitches (Graeber 2005:418). In these contexts in which power was understood to befundamentally a material quality of the human body, material objects could also embody powerand become threatening or menacing things under the proper circumstances. This is best evidentamong the so-called market fetishes—which often incorporated human blood and/or some part ofthe human body in their matrices—that acted to bind individuals to agreements; it wasunderstood that someone who violated an accord protected by such a fetish— akombo —would be“struck down” by that object (Graeber 2005:416-417).

This point draws our discussion back to Andean cases that may provide further insightsinto the power of materials and the materiality of power. In particular, the Tiv akombo —anobject that can strike down a person—evokes a scenario not unlike the “Revolt of the Objects,”as depicted in Moche iconography and the 17th century Huarochirí manuscript. We focus hereon the Moche example, but both are relevant. In the Moche case, the “Revolt of the Objects”may be seen as reflecting a mythical time of chaos or reversal during which order was restored by the personage of the “Rayed Deity”—or “Warrior Priest” (Quilter 1990). Beyond the evidentinterplay of chaos and order, it is interesting that the revolt at issue is enacted by objects and not by persons. When considered against the broader realms of Moche material culture, iconography,

and political practice, the theme of revolting objects relates to: (1) the radical presence of certainclasses of Moche materials, and (2) the possibility that within the Moche polity, power wasunderstood in deeply material terms, perhaps analogous to the African examples.

Regarding the “radical presence” of Moche materials, we are referring here to thoseobjects—particularly portrait vessels, ceramic effigies, and the so-called “sex pots”—that bothaesthetically and practically encroach on the ontological territory of persons. In aesthetic terms,these ceramic forms are rather unique within the Andes.2 The detailed—even graphic— depictions of human faces and sex acts that are embodied in these vessels have an affectivequality that is unlike anything else from the Moche corpus as the distance between representation

and that which is represented is seemingly collapsed. The problem of distinguishing between the body represented and the body of the ceramic vessel resonates in practical terms. Ceramic

There are, however, analogous forms elsewhere, such as the wakos retratos known from

Tiwanaku (Janusek 2003)


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“effigies” were smashed alongside sacrificed humans at the Huaca de la Luna (Bourget 2001:41-45). It remains unclear whether these destroyed vessels were representations of victims or perhaps considered victims themselves; however, in practical terms, the destruction of human bodies and ceramic bodies were parallel and possibly analogous activities. This practicalambiguity in the distinction between persons and things is furthermore evident in certain classes

of Moche “sex pots.” Among these pots—that typically depict sex acts between persons—thereexist examples in which the spout, or even the entire vessel itself, takes the form of an erect penis(Bourget 2001). Hypothetically if one were to drink from such a vessel, it might be construed asengaging in sexual relations with an object (depending on one’s definition of “sexual relations”).

Building on the insights gained from the West African contexts outlined above, we canalso explore the possibility that power was considered a material substance within the Moche polity. Much of the literature on Moche politics has emphasized the role of Moche rulers as“mediators between worlds”, who established their legitimacy through relationships with a

supernatural/mythical realm that was inhabited by deities and radically distanced from theearthly realm of humans (see Bawden 1995, 1996; Swenson 2003:268). However, there isemerging space for critiques of this model of Moche power. Burials have been excavated inwhich the interred individuals wore costumes that corresponded to “supernatural” personagesknown from Moche fineline drawings on ceramics (Alva and Donnan 1993; Quilter 2002:162),suggesting that many of the “deities” depicted in Moche iconography were, in fact, persons inthe world. When considering the performative aspects of Moche elite culture, there is aconsistent emphasis on the release, marshalling, and mobilization of bodily fluids. The “sex pots” are one such example in which the cycling of bodily fluids—semen and breast milk— played a central role in elite material culture (Weismantel 2004).

In a more overtly political context, the spectacles involving human sacrifice were a keydomain wherein power was performed and rule enacted. Swenson (2003) has analyzed Mochesacrifice by drawing on Bloch’s theoretical conceptualization of “rebounding violence.” Fromthis perspective, “rebounding violence” manifests the “aggressive and ‘rebounding’ consumptionof vitality” typically situated at the ritual point of return from a state of liminality (Swenson2003:273). The “vitality” that was consumed in Moche human sacrifice, however, was not anabstract quality but a fundamentally material substance—human blood. The archaeological dataon Moche sacrifice reveal that victims were dismembered after their death and their body partsrearranged and manipulated (Quilter 2002:168). As such, these sacrifices involved the release

and mobilization of copious amounts of blood. Additionally, chemical analysis of ceramicgoblets used in the ceremony known as the "Presentation Theme" confirmed that participantsactually ingested human blood in these events (Bourget 2001). Based on these cases, Moche power was evidently intimately related to bodies, and particularly bodily fluids, setting up the possibility that power itself was understood to have been a fluid substance.


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Cases in Reconfiguring Subject and Object

Objects, Bodies, Extended Subjects

In addressing the way in which the ontological configuration of objects conditions their

capacity to perform certain actions, we must explore the implicit pairing of the ontologicalcategory of object and subject. The Enlightenment dichotomy between objects and subjects hasreceived well-deserved critique in the literature on materiality. Here we seek to enrich thiscritique from a different angle. We suggest that a particular ontological understanding shared bya number of Andean groups such as the Inka, Lambayeque, and Checa characterizes subjects astranscending material bodies, both human ones and those which would normally be considerednonhuman "things:” objects. The Cartesian model posits the "body" as a material form in which asubject, the ego, is contained. However, in these Andean models, multiple physical forms that aWestern ontology would consider to be merely material "objects" constituted bodies as well inthat they were characterized by subjectivity equivalent to human bodies. In fact, both human andnonhuman bodies were, at times, able to participate in a single subjectivity, an ontological premise that allowed for culturally specific forms of socio-political action. This premise isillustrated strikingly in the example of Pariacaca and Chaupiñamca in the Huarochirí Manuscript,deities who exist at times in the form of five material bodies. (The Western influence on thecolonial Checa authors of the document, baffled by an increasingly obsolescent indigenousontology, may be observed in the note prefacing one of the chapters: “We already speculated onsuch matters as whether Paria Caca, when he was born from five eggs, was made up of brothers,or whether the others were Paria Caca’s sons” [Salomon and Urioste 1991:92].)

Here we explore the role of the Inka's "double" known from Spanish chronicles (van deGuchte 1996, Gose 1996). The form of the double perhaps most familiar to Western ontologywas the inkap rantin, the “Inka's substitute:” humans (in particular, brothers and half-brothers ofthe king) who fulfilled roles structurally prescribed as the duty of the king himself, such asleading military forays and religious ceremonies, or serving as sub-rulers of the four quarters ofTawantinsuyu (Gose 1996). However, rather than serving as mere delegates representing the person of the Inka, these human bodies, as recipients of the same treatment as the Sapa Inkahimself, comprised distinct material bodies subsumed in the same ontological subject.

The best known form of the double is the huauque, nonhuman objects that were

considered “brothers” of the king and, like the inkap rantin, were treated as the king himself.These were most commonly described by chroniclers as statues made of gold, stone, or bundledcloths. These figures occasionally contained bodily fragments of the king, such as his hair andnails, allowing human and "thingly" bodies to actually interpenetrate (Cobo 1999). Although primarily anthropomorphic, they occurred in a number of diverse forms, such as fish or birds, or,in one instance, the huauque of the ruler Manco Capac was said to be the mountain Huanacauri.


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It is likely that a related practice based on the same ontological construction was the green stonestatue that purportedly accompanied Ñaymlap, the legendary founder of the Lambayequedynasty, and may also have been a form of royal huauque (van de Guchte 1996). While thematerial forms of the huauque differed, each played a similar role as an object of worship thatstructurally stood in for the king himself; like the king, the huauque owned land, possessed a

retinue of servants, and led battles (van de Guchte 1996; MacCormack 1991).

Other, even less humanlike objects, also participated in the subjectivity of the Inka, suchas the ushnu, the stone structure located in the center of plazas throughout Inka plannedsettlements. Recognized archaeologically as involving some sort of large natural stone, a platform, and/or a drain complex, the ushnu is described in the ethnohistoric record as the seat ofthe Inka when conducting an audience. The ushnu continued to be reverenced and receiveofferings of animals and chicha in the king's absence (MacCormack 1991, Hyslop 1990,Zuidema 1979). As such, the ushnu may be understood as also comprising part of the king's

subjectivity— a component whose clearly non-human "thingly form,” we might note, challengesthe Western ontological distinction between material forms as "bodies" versus "things"depending on their association with an acting subject. Occurring within provincial centers, butlimited to Cuzco itself within the imperial heartland, the ushnu appears to have fulfilled distinct political roles that varied according to a settlement's relationship within the Inka politicalhierarchy. As a last example of the concept of extended subjectivity, we note the royal mallqui,which allowed the king to continue to exist even after the corporeal death of his primary human body. In this capacity, this material form extended royal subjectivity and personhood across timeas well as space.

At this point, we can observe how the particular work that "objects" do is an outgrowth oftheir ontological configuration. Apropos of this issue, Peter Gose's discussion of the political roleof Inka oracles concludes that the extensive network of substitutes for the Inka helped tomaintain control of a state in which political legitimacy relied on cultivating personalrelationships with each individual in Tawantinsuyu. As Gose (1996: 21) writes: “[B]y workingthrough the multiple embodiments of 'substitutes,' statues, and mediums, a ruler extended hisinfluence in space and time and delegated enough power to govern effectively.” The Inkaontological configuration of material objects vis-à-vis their associated subjects made it possiblefor the king to maintain effective control over a heterogeneous empire. Additionally, the uniquecharacteristics of each of these material forms allowed him to act in contextually-appropriate

ways; as ushnu in the provincial capital of Cajamarca, the actions required of him would differfrom those he ought to perform as mallqui in the company of other mallquis advising oraffirming the role of the living Sapa Inka.


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Quotidian Objects, Extended Subjects

Our investigation into the social ontology of objects is not limited to cases that strike the21st-century, Western eye with an aura of the exotic, such as huauques and mallquis. Indeed,these objects provide rich opportunity to discover differing ontologies of materiality because

they are already at the borders of our ontological domains. The liminal quality of Andeanmummies draws attention to the categorical borders they threaten. At the same time, we assertthat those objects frequently identified as utilitarian, quotidian, or prosaic have too often beenoverlooked as unsophisticated, "brute facts," even though they may reveal the unexpected aboutontological categories. Here we look at the role objects play in the construction of community inthe Andes.

One promising heuristic is that of the "biographical object" (Hoskins 1998). Articulatingthe “biographical object” approach with Nancy Munn’s (1986) “intersubjective spacetime” leadsus to conclude that objects are a critical element in the creation of collective subjectivity, asexemplified by the ayllu. The role of objects in creating Andean communities is an ontological puzzle because the objects involved are in part subjects (possessing camay) and constituents ofsubjects (communities) at the same time. In Biographical Objects, Janet Hoskins investigates"ordinary household possessions that might be given an extraordinary significance by becomingentangled in the events of a person's life and used as a vehicle for a sense of selfhood" (Hoskins1998:2). Drawing on the work of Violette Morin, she argues things can be divided into twocategories: biographical objects and public commodities. Biographical objects are formed whenthe person/object interaction results in a personalization, localization, and individualization of anobject (Hoskins 1998: 8). Unlike a public commodity, the biographical object shows time. It

grows old and tattered and anchors the owner to a specific time, place, or event. In the aging ofthe object, Hoskins explains, the possessor sees her own age (Hoskins 1998:8). Significantly, theform of production – mechanical, mass, domestic – does not determine the class of an object.Rather, one’s disposition toward and interaction with the object that determines its status. Theconstruction of selfhood is facilitated by curation of these objects.

The Andean case material may present a critique of the Morin-Hoskins conceptualization.Biographical objects, as described by Hoskins, compose the biographies of individualizedsubjects. This is the very form of subjectivity that Gose (1984) specifically argues isinappropriately applied to Andean culture. For instance, he proposes that standard interpretations

of Andean sacrifice use a gift-oriented model, one that neutralizes the violence of sacrifice andalso implies individual personhood (Gose 1986:298). Instead, Gose privileges a collectiveselfhood created by the sacrifice of children. Gose (1986:10) concludes that sacrifice in theAndes is a distinct negation of the object fetish that effectively rejects the framework ofindividuality implied by commodity exchanges. No one doubts that objects were exchanged in


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the ancient Andes. If these exchanges did not imply or create individuation, what did theycreate? The Andean subject, according to Gose, is the collectivity.

Generalizing from Gose’s research, we can conclude that various forms of socialinteractions involving objects limit individuation and create solidarity. Significantly, each

instance of interaction requires objects to be the medium of social production, to effect and tomark the subjects and their relations. Nancy Munn's theory of "intersubjective space-time" helpsexplain how objects can be constituent elements of subjects rather than property thereof. Munn(1986: 11) proposed that in Gawa value is created by trading objects, and that the creation ofvalue through social interaction also creates the spacetime in which these actions take place andthe subjects who enact them. Rather than yoking the recipient with debt and servitude, exchangeinstead extends actors across space and time, bringing them closer through the objects they trade.In contrast to Gose’s assertion that exchange carves society into individuals, Munn suggests thatthrough exchange subjectivity is extended beyond the individual body. If subjectivity is

extendable in this way, however, the objects are much more than media, but in fact constituent parts of amoeba-like subjects extending across time and space.

This concept of extended spatio-temporal subject is well established in literature fromMurra's (1980) writings on the Inkas to Goldstein's (2000) study of diasporic Tiwanakucommunities. Ethnographic research supports this conclusion as well. Enrique Mayer, forexample, describes how several modes of exchange solidify social relationships through theinterchanging of food, labor, and goods (Mayer 2002: 109-111, 144). For Munn, the subject isthe individual. However in the Andes we see evidence for collective social subjects extendingacross space with their subunits united by recurring interactions. What we suggest here is that

through the exchange (and subsequent possession) of even quotidian items, collectivesubjectivities in the Andes were forged and maintained across time and space. These objects are biographical because they are the material embodiment of the group's collective life. In theirindexical capacity, these objects come to express an ideology - in its broadest sense, as a systemof ideas - in which interrelationships between people and groups are themselves an end to be pursued. The exchanges in which they acquire objects are a means towards that end (amongvarious ends tied up in the action of exchange) and objects are first the medium, then theenduring reminder, and finally party to those relationships and their initiation.

Archeologically this perspective has import in our interpretation of material culture.

Hayden and Cannon (1983) suggested that one aspect affecting discard patterns of householditems in the Maya Highlands is their potential value. Furthermore, they conclude that mostobjects archaeologists encounter are in a state of provisional discard; broken, but kept near athand (yet out of the way) because of their value even in a broken state (Hayden and Cannon1983:166). Considering the biographical potential of objects, we might focus less on theexchange value and more on the affective value embodied in our archaeological assemblages.


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Following Allen (1998:23) we might consider the way that utilitarian artifacts indicate theformer owners' being (qasqa), defined as a position in an actively balanced web of socio-ritualentanglements involving things ranging from quotidian objects to people to mountains.

We can consider these quotidian items - as biographical objects – in terms of the

framework suggested above. Objects tied up in creating collective subjectivity are, in ourterminology, affect-laden. They have a value that is defined not only by their exchange value, butalso by their critical role in establishing social relationships. They are also representational ofsocial relationships, in commemorating the social encounters in which they were acquired,embodying that relationship by marking future obligations, and in their weathering indicating thetemporality of these bonds. In their representational capacity they also become normative.Society coheres by virtue of the medium of these otherwise unexceptional objects. In this sense,the pursuit and maintenance of social relationships, facilitated by cultural objects, becomes acollective value generated and sustained by a multitude of subjects in the matrix of a particular

social environment. Yet they are much more than media: they become part of the very societythey create.

From a Western normative perspective, objects imbued with "sentimental" value arearchetypical of the ‘supplemental ontologies' defined above: their value is a projection of thehuman mind. This familiar ontology is challenged by the role objects have in creating Andeanforms of sociality and collective subjectivity. As Allen (1998) notes, seemingly inanimateobjects possess camay and so demand a host of distinct practices and dispositions towardsotherwise mundane things. We cannot assert with any certainty that quotidian objects becamesubjects themselves, as we suggest of Moche effigies and sex pots. However, tied up in the

extension of intersubjective space-time and possessing camay, quotidian objects blur the boundaries between supplemental ontologies and fetishistic ontologies and highlight thedifficulty in distinguishing objects-as-subjects from objects-creating-subjects.

Conclusion

From the initial premise that what things are affect what they do, we have presented twoheuristics that explore the pragmatic stakes of cultural ontologies. The first addresses the waysthat the "metaphysical excesses" of materials are reconciled in practical ontologies by contrasting"supplemental" and "fetishistic" ontologies. We presented two Andean cases that tend toward the

fetishistic pole--that is an ontology in which metaphysical excesses are understood to beimmanent within materiality itself. In the example of Early Colonial Period, metaphysical excessqua potentiality--or potential for (in)action--was considered an inherent characteristic ofmaterials generally and the body in particular, which affected the relationships between livingand dead, and the stakes of interment. Within the Moche polity, we propose that metaphysicalexcess in the form of power was understood to have been a property of certain material


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substances, particularly bodily fluids, which affected the ways that politics were performed and power relations were established.

In our second heuristic, we explored how alternative ontologies may reconfigure the prevailing Western analytical divide between subject and object. We claim that the ontological

status of material objects not only may allow them to create distinctive forms of subjectivity, buton occasion they may also combine to create compound subjects. In the example of the Inka'sdouble, we point out how a number of material forms, both human and nonhuman, participatedin a collective subjectivity. Our study of quotidian objects, on the other hand, demonstrates howthe exchange of nonhuman material artifacts, as congealed into social biographies, creates acollective form of subjectivity in the ayllu while those very objects share in the subjectivity theyfacilitate.

Our two heuristics not only speak to the same overriding premise regarding the practicalimplications of ontologies, but they also overlap and converge. The supplemental ontology thatis predicated on a strict division of mental and material in turn produces the conditions wherebysubject and object can be radically opposed. Under conditions that tend toward a fetishisticontology, objects can become subjects and act within the social world along with human beings.In this sense, subjectivity itself may be considered a form of metaphysical excess.

The examples that we discuss likely reflect a number of ontologies that existed in pre-Columbian and Colonial societies, rather than a monolithic "Andean ontology." Because of theways in which these diverse cases speak to each other and illuminate a theoretical understandingof how the ontological status of material things affects the social work they perform, the

heuristics we propose possess a rich potential for application in a variety of other ethnographiccontexts and intellectual conversations. We designed our analytic to be flexible with the hopethat this flexibility will make possible its portability beyond the Andes. The analytical paradigms, key interpretive categories and analogical tools we suggest can perhaps play a role inexamining cultural ontologies within, and beyond, the disciplinary confines of anthropology.Ultimately, we believe that the development of an Andean “theory of things,” embedded in ageneral theory of materiality, can serve as a means to develop a more robust ontology of theworld-that-is.


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Documents

Augustine et al, The Social Ontology