Heads and Bodies: Fragments and Restoration

Jeanne Cannizzo

The body as a site for anthropological theorizing has a long history, although the actual focus

of inquiry has shifted through the decades, ranging from

variations in body size and physiology, the aesthetics of comportment, and body decoration, enhancement or mutilation to the potency of effluvia and other tangible as well as invisible body fragments.1

Always there has been cross-cultural comparison, implied or explicit – and the recognition that

ideational systems, whether political, religious, or economic, among others, define or at least

shape, along with gender, age, class, and ethnicity, the culturally specific and historically

particular body. Then there are

specialized realms of knowledge and power – including the nation-state, the military, magic, clinical biomedicine, and scientific knowledge and research – [which] expose diverse constructions of the body, its potential for fragmentation, and ultimately, its commodification.2

The ethnographic record is littered with a myriad references to the ritual use of parts of the

body or partial bodies to attack and protect. ‘Body fragments can harbour the ability to harm or

heal, charged with powers that exceed those of the bodies from whence they came.’3

The collection of pottery fragments, some hand-modelled, some produced in moulds, I want to

explore here – nine bodiless heads and one headless body – are all from ancient Mexico, and

range in date from about 1000 BC to AD 1000. They were a gift to me, when I was eighteen or

nineteen, from my mother who bought them in a junk shop for about 50 cents each.

The exchange of gifts was first examined in ethnographic detail by the French sociologist

Marcel Mauss in The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, which

appeared in the 1920s but was not published in English until 1954. Based upon his

understanding of the Maori concept of hau (the spirit of the gift which demands the gift be

returned to its owner), he generated a much broader theory about the spirit of the donor which

clings to the gift, in an endless cycle of the obligation. Although this idea is not applicable

universally, and indeed Mauss’s understanding of the original Maori practice has been

challenged,4 it has an enduring appeal to me, for, as Mauss wrote,

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Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together.5

The second idea to consider before turning to the collection is what many scholars have called

the affinity between anthropology and art ‘as discursive arenas for comprehending or

evaluating cultural activity’.6 Indeed a growing number of artists have become ‘ethnographers’

or at least they have used the ethnographer’s defining methodology of participant observation

in their critical practice. Ethnography is both a process and a product – as a process it involves

an anthropologist who ‘observes, records, and engages in the daily life of another culture …

and then writes accounts of this culture, emphasizing descriptive detail’.7 That descriptive

account is ethnography as product. Artists such as Sophie Calle, whose work Birthday

Ceremony deals with gifts in a rather Maussian way, Mark Dion, Jimmie Durham, Renee

Green and her ‘Import/Export Funk Office’, Nikki S. Lee and her variously located ‘projects’,

James Luna, Lan Tuazon and The Anthropologist’s Table of 1999, and Fred Wilson have all

been described as working in this ethnographic mode or representing it artistically. Susan

Hiller actually has a PhD in anthropology. While she rejected what is now considered an

outdated view of participant observation as ‘objective’ by a more recently reflexive discipline,

her work continues to have an ethnographic sensibility. Many of her works undertake the most

basic task of the anthropological project – to make the strange familiar and the familiar

strange. Exploration of categories and the frontiers of classificatory systems are still germane

to both Hiller’s work and the discipline.

All this work has stimulated a few theorists, both art historical and anthropological, to write

about the ‘artist as ethnographer’.8 But there are very few ‘ethnographer as artist’ productions,

possibly since Hal Foster 9 accused us of ‘artist envy’ in which ‘the artist becomes a paragon

of formal reflexivity, sensitive to difference and open to chance, a self-aware reader of culture

understood as text’. But, he continues,

is the artist the exemplar here, or is this figure not a projection of a particular ideal ego – of the anthropologist as a collagist, semiologist, avant-gardist? In other words, might this artist-envy be a self idealization? 10

He does acknowledge that the use of participant observation by artists suggests a sort of

ethnographer-envy. I like the notion of us emerging from our respective spheres, in the manner

described by Mauss in reference to persons and things, to try to gain a fuller understanding of

my mother’s gift.

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The fragments

Looking at the pieces themselves, it is clear that they are unlikely to have all been made for the

same purpose. Nor is it likely that these purposes would have remained constant over time and

within different sites and cultural contexts. Contemporary scholars, like earlier ones, have

suggested a number of different functions. A few have wondered whether these figurines

might have been toys or amusements and served purely secular purposes. Most scholars have

speculated on ritual or ceremonial uses – for example, as votive offerings, rather in the manner

known from cultural practice in churches in the Greek islands and archaeological finds from

Classical sites. Other ritual uses might have been in rites of passage, or those rituals marking

transitions – for example from child to adult, from unmarried to married, etc. At some sites

figurines acted as burial offerings, or were buried during human interments. Most of the

fragments have been recorded, however, not in burials but in household middens (garbage

piles) or in association with family living compounds rather than cemeteries and major

ceremonial architecture. This leads many contemporary scholars to posit that these figurines

featured in private, intimate, domestic rituals. Archaeologist Joyce Marcus, basing her ideas on

Zapotec cultural practices as described by Spanish sources in the sixteenth century and more

generally on ethnographic accounts from around the world, speculates that one of the roles of

women in the pre-Columbian villages of the Valley of Oaxaca was to keep in touch with

female ancestors:

For this purpose, women made small solid figurines which provided a venue to which the spirits of those ancestors could return. While these figurines were not realistic portraits in our Western sense, they apparently represented specific individuals when addressed during rituals. In many cases the social persona (gender, age-grade, marital status, or social rank) of the ancestor was reflected in the body position, hairstyle, costume or ornaments worn by the figurine. Such figurines were arranged in scenes so the ancestors could participate in rituals conducted by their descendants. Later the figurines were discarded, often after being deliberately broken or defaced so that they could not be used by anyone alien to the household. Such rituals seem to have become less archaeologically visible with the rite of the later Zapotec state, though the ethnohistoric sources suggest that they never fully disappeared.11

So my mother’s gift to me becomes even more appropriate.

Olmec style head (fig. 1) This head is in the Olmec style.

The origins of Olmec culture have intrigued scholars and lay people alike since Tres Zapotes Colossal Head 1, a gigantic stone human head with vaguely Negroid features, was discovered in Veracruz 140 years ago. Since that time, Olmec culture and art have been attributed to seafaring Africans, Egyptians, Nubians, Phoenicians, Atlanteans, Japanese, Chinese, and other ancient wanderers. As often happens, the truth is infinitely more logical, if less romantic: the Olmecs were Native Americans who created a unique culture in southeastern Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec.12

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The assignation of a specific ethnicity, with its linguistic implications, to the people who

created and then used, inhabited, or worshipped at particular sites and then buried their dead

there, is difficult. Certainly there is no question that the current ‘Indian’ or indigenous peoples

of Mexico are the descendants of the originators of all the glorious ruins and the wonderful

array of artefacts that have survived. However, current populations living in the vicinity of

sites may not be the same as those in the distant past. Thus, the word ‘Olmec’ is sometimes

used to describe ‘the inhabitants of Mexico’s south Gulf coast lowlands during the period

1500–400 BC’,13 and the same word has been used to describe the style originated by the so-

called ‘mother culture’ of Mesoamerica. This head, from about 500 BC, exhibits some of the

features which, in earlier literature, is sometimes called ‘baby-face’: a round face, closed or

nearly closed eyes, broad nose, droopy mouth, and ‘forelock’.14

Canine head (fig. 2) The circle around each eye is distinctive and appears on a few other

pieces – for example a whistle, from Aztec houses in rural Morelos, which also has an open

long snout and circled eyes.15 If it is an Aztec piece, and figurines are not as common in Aztec

sites as in those of earlier peoples, it would be among the latest in my collection in date, for the

Aztecs do not reach the Valley of Mexico until about AD 1200. It probably was originally an

adornment for a pot 16 and never had an independent existence.

The peoples of ancient Mesoamerica did not have large domesticated animals like cattle or

horses, but they did certainly have dogs; canine bones some three thousand years old have

been found in the Tehuacan Valley in Mexico. The eating of dog flesh and the ritual sacrifice

of dogs is confirmed both through archaeological sites and in historical documents. Numerous

canine effigies are found in human burials in many sites in Mesoamerica and may be an

expression of a longstanding belief in the region that dogs accompany or ease the human

passage to the underworld. Today there are two breeds – the Chihuahua and the Mexican

hairless – which both have pointy snouts. The Mexican hairless has pointed ears which stand

up straight and is also an ancient pre-Hispanic breed. However, hairless dogs sweat through

their skin and thus rarely open their mouths and expose their tongues. This beast clearly does,

and thus is more likely to be a coyote, a wild dog which features in murals at Teotihuacan – it

is also associated with the underworld and the dead.17

This may not be a canine at all, of course, but, perhaps, a bat – a creature mythologically

associated in this area with not only the underworld, fertility, and the night but also blood and

decapitation. A find in 1990 in the basin of Mexico of a huge sculpture some two metres high

is described as having a head with ‘batlike features with an animal snout, upper and lower

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incisors exposed, a slightly slit tongue, a nasal appendage between the eyes, two large circular

ears’.18 Most bat depictions have rounded ears, but some of the other features do seem to fit

this head. The person who made it placed his or her thumb at the lower part of the neck or

shoulder, and my own fits this ancient faint impression perfectly. This kind of connection with

human creativity and endeavour always creates a frisson of excitement for me – a gift from the

past.

Gulf Coast head (fig. 3) The style of this head is very similar to one drawn by Covarrubias,19

where he identifies it as ‘Huaxtec’. Huastec culture, found on the Gulf Coast, was produced by

peoples who lived in well-organized independent polities and were associated, at least

linguistically, with the Maya. Although arising earlier, the Huastec flourished from the twelfth

or thirteenth century up to the first European contacts in the sixteenth century.20 The hairstyle

or headdress is quite characteristic of the Gulf Coast and if it is not Huastec it may be

somewhat older, that is, AD 250–800.

The archaeological record makes clear that pottery and settled village appear at about the same

time in human history and this is so in Mesoamerica. Before the European conquest, the

potter’s wheel was unknown. Stoneware, porcelain, and vitreous glazes were also unknown.21

So my collection is made up of earthenware, fired at low temperatures. Both hand-modelled

and mould-made figurines are found in Mesoamerica over long periods of time. The Aztec

mould-made ones were probably mass produced by specialists for distribution over wide areas,

but many earlier examples are assumed to have been hand made for local consumption

whether produced by specialists or not.22

‘Cinder’ face (fig. 4) Whatever the origins and functions of such heads and fragments, the

intensity of their manufacture suggests great demand and high consumption. Marcus, working

on village sites in the Valley of Oaxaca, has estimated that if

new figurines were manufactured for each ancestor ritual, and if each ritual required the creation of a scene …, over a 20-year period each household might need hundreds of figurines. If a village had 10–20 households, this could result in thousands of figurines.23

Why are there so many heads and so few bodies found in these archaeological sites? And why,

beyond what might be expected from their circumstances of preservation and discovery, are so

many of the figurines in fragments, not whole but broken? Perhaps for some there never were

bodies. This is unlikely in the case of most of my figurines because that the ‘neck’ ends rather

abruptly and, in some cases, rather roughly. Then again, it is possible that bodies existed but

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were in some perishable material – wood, cloth, or even bread dough.24 Many sites in

Mesoamerica are located in places unfavourable to the survival of organic materials, but at El

Manati, an Olmec site, a cache of some forty life-size carved busts of tropical cedar was found,

confirming suspicions that wood was an important medium for cultural expression in this area.

Ethnographically, the use of dough (as well as stone, wood, and clay) to make figurines has

been recorded for the Aztec, and the use of these effigies was noted by Spanish observers who

suggested that such figurines were kept on household altars where they ‘became the focus of

ritual offerings during certain calendrical ceremonies and when household members were

away at war’.25 The use of cloth figures hung from tree branches in cornfields may have

ensured agricultural fertility. Infants were also given figurines at birth, which seem to have

served as amulets.26 So the earthenware heads might have entered the archaeological record

while their bodies in organic materials have not.

And what about fragmentation? Anthropologists are interested in bodily fragmentation,

whether material or ideational, as it leads us directly into the centrality of ethnographic

classification as we ask, ‘what do such deconstructions say about body boundaries, the

integrity of the self, and the shifting social worth of human beings?’27

Is there just accidental breakage through use, or is it deliberate? Certainly structural weakness

in the clay bodies, particularly where the appendages join the body, might be responsible.

There is another possibility, one for which there is no direct archaeological evidence in the

sites in question here, although there are plenty of ethnographic examples cross-culturally. As

mentioned earlier, archaeologists working in Oaxaca have suggested that figurines were

ancestral representations, created and used by women in rituals that resulted in the defacement

or destruction of the pottery images.28

A late manifestation of a generalized cultural aesthetic or perhaps ritual preference for

dismemberment might also be considered. The patron deity of the Aztec capital of

Tenochititlan was the god of war. In a key myth he defeats his sister’s army in battle. Her body

was then cut into pieces and rolled down a mountain. In real life, when the Aztecs captured

enemy warriors, they were sacrificed in a re-enactment of this myth – decapitated,

dismembered, and thrown down the steps of the temple dedicated to the war god. They landed

at the foot of the steps, where rested a large disc carved with the dismembered body of the

female deity defeated by her brother the god of war.29

Head with plumed headdress (fig. 5) This figure is wearing a huge plumed headdress which

overwhelms the tiny face. The use of the feathers of exotic birds, and the trade in these

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materials, is well documented in the archaeological record, in ethno-historic records, and

through objects brought to Europe after contact, although, of course, actual feathers do not

survive. It probably dates from the Classic period, from AD 250–800 or so on the Gulf Coast.

As one of the greatest scholars of Mesoamerican archaeology has written:

Few objects from antiquity appeal as immediately to the contemporary beholder as do human figurines – miniature representations in clay, wood, stone, and bone, of the people who were the bearers of long-extinct cultures. Opposed to the much larger, more hieratic works of public art which were designed to impress upon their contemporaries the awesome power of politicians and gods, these smaller creations (very often masterpieces in their own right) apparently had a more private, more humble meaning to our ancestors.30

Bird head (fig. 6) This ‘bird’ effigy is almost identical to one dated 850–700 BC from a site

known as Fabrica San Jose in the Valley of Oaxaca.31 The archaeologist Joyce Marcus, writing

of sites of this age in the area, notes that, based upon Zapotec cultural practice as observed by

the Spanish in the sixteenth century, living birds were believed to predict the future, may have

played a role in divination, may have been funerary sacrifices, and were believed to carry

messages between the worlds of the dead and the living. Thus, she argues, bird figurines might

have been made to accompany ancestral figurines made for ritual acts.32

The bird head could also have originated from the Valley of Mexico, dating from AD 650–

750, perhaps even from Teotihuacan.33 Such are the uncertainties of identification with neither

archaeological context nor informants’ comment. But we might consider the general

development of such figurines which have emerged in their millions from the great city-state

of Teotihuacan. They first appear about 150 BC, when they were all hand made and initially

all female; unusually, a significant number of males appear suddenly. Whether male or female,

however, the figurines have been found in residential contexts, not associated with burials or

the great pyramids. The introduction of moulds about AD 250 increased production for a

growing population in the city.34 A multiplicity of styles exists, both within the city-state over

time and in comparison with the figurines found from other sites. The terms pre-Columbian,

pre-Hispanic, and pre-conquest have all been used to describe the general time-frame for these

objects but all these terms are also considered problematic for various reasons. Some scholars

use ‘Mesoamerican’, a more geographical term covering Mexico and Central America, to

indicate period as well as a certain similarity in cultural practices.

Head with braid (fig. 7) This head may exhibit the signs of cranial deformation, which was

considered a sign of nobility at the time of the Spanish conquest.35 However, this form of

bodily modification was probably of some antiquity in Mesoamerica and not, at least in earlier

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periods, always restricted to the upper classes. What is probably a hair braid is clearly

modelled down the back of the head. It is probably from the ‘Preclassic’ period, about 300 BC.

Some scholars when giving dates use BC and AD while others prefer BCE – before the

Christian (or Common) Era. There is no single chronology accepted by all scholars, although a

general schemata would be: the Paleo-Indian (c. 25,000 BC – 7000 BC); the Archaic (7000–

2000 BC); then the periods which most concern us here today, the Preclassic period (2000 BC

– AD 250), the Classic period (AD 250 – 900 or 1000), the Postclassic period (AD 900 or

1000 – 1521), followed by the Spanish conquest and colonization.36

Body fragment (fig. 8) These ‘flaring’ thighs are usually associated with the site of Tlatilco,

now within the confines of Mexico City, but in the 1930s a separate entity and the site of a

brickyard, whose workers dug up graves and figurines by the bucketful every day; these were

sold on to collectors, including the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and tourists. In the early

1940s the artist, travel writer, and anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias began excavations at

Tlatilco which he, as a life-long socialist, interpreted as a village composed of aristocratic

Olmecs who immigrated from the Gulf Coast and came to rule the local peasantry.37 Scholars

continue to argue over whether this site represents an Olmec colony or an Olmec centre.38 In

his book The Indian Art of Mexico and Central America Covarubbias writes:

Hundreds of complete figurines and thousands of fragments have come out of the earth at Tlatilco in a most varied range of styles; most of them are of women with small breasts, short arms, slim waists, and large, bulbous legs; some are standing, some seated, others carrying babies on their hips or caressing a small dog held in their arms.39

Representations of males are ‘considerably rarer’. This body is probably female, wearing what

might be a pubic apron, but just what came above the legs is slightly unclear. Certainly some

Tlatilco figures are noted for ‘grotesque’ elements – double heads, or two heads with three

eyes, multiple heads, mouths, and noses, and two heads with three eyes have all been found.

‘A distinctly macabre streak appears in the art of the inhabitants of Tlatilco, possessed by a

psychological bent that delighted in monstrosities.’40 Tlatilco, meaning in Nahuatl ‘the place

where things are hidden’, was settled about 1300 BC, functioning as the capital of a small

chiefdom.41

An alternative placement for this body fragment might be in the Valley of Oaxaca during the

San Jose phase, 1150–850 BC, where ‘figurines of women with slender waists, legs shaped

like inverted bowling pins’ were found at sites such as Tierra Largas.42

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Monkey/skull (fig. 9) This may be a human skull, but it could also be an animal effigy,

perhaps a monkey. Monkeys are not uncommonly represented in Mesoamerican art forms,

where they are frequently associated with musical instruments and whistles. If an animal

effigy, it probably dates from the Classic period of about AD 250–800. If it is interpreted as a

human skull, then we might look at later periods or to the Aztec, who are noted for the

presence of so-called ‘skull racks’ holding battle trophies in the ritual precincts of their

capital.43 Depictions of the human skull are common in their art forms.44 The Aztecs are

reported to have called their small clay figurines ‘tepictoton’ – the little modelled ones.45

Ball player (fig. 10) This figure is strongly modelled and it is quite clear that the clothing is

both elaborate and bulky. There is fugitive paint – white clearly visible on the ear flares, and

bitumen or asphalt, which was used as paint,46 has been applied on the shoulders. I think this

figure is a ball player. Of great antiquity and very widespread, the Mesoamerica ballgame had

several forms. The oldest, possibly invented by the Olmec, was a form of handball, played on

an open field with a small rubber ball. In a later version a much larger rubber ball was

propelled around a specially constructed court by hip action. Many depictions of ball players

show them costumed with head, chest, and groin protective padded clothing. Some of these

games were clearly associated with the wider mythological and religious concerns of those

who played them, and losers were sometimes sacrificed. Recently it has been suggested that

men did not actually play in such bulky, restrictive clothing; the costumed representations

might be of rulers/warriors dressed as if for the ballgame.47 There were also less ritually

charged games. In 1528 two simply dressed Mesoamerican ball players, brought to Spain by

Cortes that year, were depicted by Christoph Weiditz demonstrating moves.48 Weiditz saw

them performing for Charles V in Toledo. Diehl illustrates fragments of a San Lorenzo ball

player 49 and the head of a ball player wearing a headdress and large ear ornaments from

Tlapacoya, a site in the Valley of Mexico associated with Tlatilco culture, which closely

resembles this one.50

To make the transition now from my role as professional ethnographer to that of amateur artist,

I would like to pass around some images 51 in which I have transformed, graphically, the

fragments into whole figures – which in turn ‘embody’ a new set of cultural meanings and

perceptions.

Graphic bodies of imagination

The later peoples of the Valley of Mexico valued the material remains of earlier inhabitants,

including those from other cultures, sometimes uncovering objects and depositing them in

caches in their own ritual sites. Such acts of cultural appropriation may have been

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accompanied by a reinterpretation of meaning or the assignation of new significance.52 I have

continued in this vein by using my own holiday snapshots, a form of ‘vernacular photography’,

suggesting a certain (spurious of course) authenticity, all taken on the Gulf of Mexico, into

which I have inserted some of the pre-Columbian heads, attaching or ‘returning’ them to the

casually posed bodies of my husband and friends (fig. 11), (fig. 12).

In an even more explicitly ‘Maussian moment’, I have ‘given’ my mother and my father two of

my favourite Mexican fragments, exchanging them for the parental heads in a photograph

taken the night my parents became engaged in 1945, in the dying days of the Second World

War. The setting is the officers’ club in an American naval base in the Caribbean (fig. 13). I

have also returned the ‘gift’ to the original donors, the people who all of those hundreds of

generations ago created the figurines, by appropriating the bodies of the present for the use of

the ancient heads, suggesting a fictive or at least imagined or imposed cultural intimacy and

personal rapport.

New bodies

In the 1960s, about the time my mother gave me her gift, two children living on the isthmus of

Tehuantepec were out looking for a stone to use for cracking palm nuts. They discovered an

ancient monumental sculpture in ‘greenstone’, or nephrite, of a young man, seated, with a half-

human, half-jaguar ‘baby’ on his lap. The children’s parents, believing the sculpture to be of

the Virgin Mary, dug it from the ground and installed it in their house where their neighbours

joined them in venerating this ancient Olmec sculpture. Its fame spread to a nearby village,

whose inhabitants borrowed it for a festival, adorning it with paper flowers and moving a

statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint of the state of Mexico, so that it might have

pride of place on an improvised altar.53 This exercise of agency, demonstration of human

innovation, and capacity for appropriation seems to me to provide an excellent precedent for us

today.

Losses and gains/conclusions

What have we come to know or understand through the act of cultural restoration, through the

creation of a new body or head for an old fragment? Has anything more than some sort of

postmodern pastiche been created? At one level, that would be enough – just playing around

both with the ideas here and the heads and bodies. But something else has happened. ‘Art

continues to be the space in which difference, identity, and cultural value are being produced

and contested.’54 And anthropology continues to be the way of looking at the world in which

we live that most illuminates difference, identity, and cultural value – it is, to use Hal Foster’s

description, ‘the science of alterity’.55 He outlines certain attributes that make it attractive to

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artists – including the anthropological concern with context as well as content, a certain

reflexivity, and the centrality of culture, however it is defined.

In producing these new works using ancient fragmented figures, so that they are no longer

‘embedded’ in their original context, we have approximated, without the historicity and

cultural specificity, what the original artists did when they fashioned these heads and bodies

from the earth of ancient Mesoamerica. These fragments of the past have been relocated in our

own time, incorporated into our own cultural practices so that they are no longer positioned as

‘the other’, and by putting these fragments ‘in motion’56 we have added another facet to their

social lives as things. We, collectively, have been busy constructing social identities – fictive

identities manifested in their new bodies – and, in doing so, we have indulged in a bit of

fragmentation and its consequence, displacement, in a bit of self-making of our own, as

theorists and practitioners, artists and ethnographers.

Notes1 Lesley Sharp, ‘The Commodification of the Body and its Parts’, Annual Review of

Anthropology, vol.29, 2000, p.3; Enid Schildkrout, ‘Inscribing the Body’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol.33, 2004, pp.319–44.

2 Sharp, ‘The Commodification of the Body’, p.2.3 Sharp, ‘The Commodification of the Body’, p.7.4 J. Parry, ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift, and the Indian Gift Man’, MAN (N.S.), vol.21, pp.453–

73.5 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.

D. Halls, foreword by Mary Douglas, New York, W. W. Norton, 1990, p.20.6 George Marcus and Fred Myers, eds., The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and

Anthropology, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995, pp.5–6.7 George Marcus and Michael Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Chicago,

Chicago University Press, 1986, p.18. 8 For example, Miwan Kwon, ‘Experience vs Interpretation: Traces of Ethnography in the

Works of Lan Tuazon and Nikki S. Lee’, in Alex Coles, ed., Site-Specific: the Ethnographic Turn, London, Black Dog Press, 2000, pp.74–91; Susanne Kuchler, ‘The Art of Ethnography: the Case of Sophie Calle’, in Alex Coles, ed., Site-Specific: the Ethnographic Turn, London, Black Dog Press, 2000, pp.94–110.

9 Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’, in George Marcus and F. Myers, eds., The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995, pp.302–9.

10 Foster, ‘Artist as Ethnographer?’, p.304.11 Joyce Marcus, ‘Women’s Ritual in Formative Oaxaca: Figurine-Making, Divination,

Death and the Ancestors. Prehistory and Human Ecology in the Valley of Oaxaca’, Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, vol.11, no.33, 1998, p.5.

12 Richard Diehl, The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization, London, Thames and Hudson, 2004, p.13.

13 Diehl, The Olmecs, p.13.14 Clarence Weiant, An Introduction to the Ceramics of Tres Zapotes, Veracruz, Mexico,

Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 139, Washington, US Government Printing Office, 1943, pp.90–91.

15 Michael E. Smith, The Aztecs, Oxford, Blackwell, 2003, p.83.

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16 Michael Coe and R. Koontz, Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs, London, Thames and Hudson, 2002, p.179.

17 See Benson on canines in David Carrasco, ed., The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Mesoamerican Cultures: the Civilizations of Mexico and Central America, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p.136 for a picture of a stone sculpture of a plumed coyote with its mouth open.

18 See Hinojosa entry in Carrasco, The Oxford Encyclopaedia, p.83.19 Miguel Covarubbias, The Indian Art of Mexico and Central America, New York, Alfred

A. Knopf, 1957, plate 86.20 See Wells entry in Carrasco, The Oxford Encyclopaedia.21 Richard Townsend, The Aztecs, London, Thames and Hudson, 2000.22 Mary Parsons, Aztec Figurines from the Teotihuacan Valley, Mexico, Anthropological

Papers 45, Museum of Anthropology, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 1972.23 Marcus, ‘Women’s Ritual’, p.312.24 Kathleen Berrin and E. Pasztory, eds., Teotihuan: Art from the City of the Gods, London,

Thames and Hudson, 1993.25 E. Brumfiel, ‘Figurines and the Aztec State’, in Michael Smith and Marilyn Masson, eds.,

The Ancient Civilizations of Mesoamerica: a Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 2001, p.471.26 Brumfiel, ‘Figurines and the Aztec State’.27 Sharp, Comodification of the Body’, p.3.28 Marcus, ‘Women’s Ritual’.29 Kay Read and J. Gonzalez, Handbook of Mesoamerican Mythology, Oxford, ABC-CLIO,

2000; Townsend, The Aztecs; Coe and Koontz, Mexico.30 Coe in Joseph Albers, Pre-columbian Mexican Miniatures: the Joseph and Anni Albers

Collection, London, Lund Humphries, 1970.31 Marcus, ‘Women’s Ritual’, p.275, fig.16.43e.32 Marcus, ‘Women’s Ritual’, p.22.33 Berrin and Pasztory, Teotihuacan, p.248, fig.129.34 Berrin and Pasztory, Teotihuacan, p.222.35 Joyce Marcus and K. Flannery, Zapotec: How Urban Society Evolved in Mexico’s Aoxaca

Valley, London, Thames and Hudson, 1996.36 Read and Gonzalez, Handbook; Julia Hendon and Rosemary Joyce, Mesoamerican

Archaeology: Theory and Practice, Oxford, Blackwell, 2004; Coe and Koontz, Mexico.37 Coe on Covarubbias in Carrasco, The Oxford Encyclopaedia.38 Diehl, The Olmecs, p.154.39 Covarubbias, The Indian Art, p.24.40 Coe and Koontz, Mexico, p.49.41 Parson, Aztec Figurines <query>; Coe and Koontz, Mexico; Diehl, The Olmecs.42 Marcus, ‘Women’s Ritual’, p.58, fig.8.18.43 Townsend, The Aztecs.44 See Coe and Koontz, Mexico, p.183 for the death god in an elaborate sculpture.45 Albers, Pre-columbian Mexican Miniatures.46 Philip Drucker, Ceramic Sequences at Tres Zapotes, Veracruz, Mexico, Bureau of

American Ethnology Bulletin 140, Washington, US Government Printing Office, 1943, p.79; Mary Ellen Miller, The Art of Mesoamerica from Olmec to Aztec, London, Thames and Hudson, 1993, fig.70.

47 Orr in Carrasco, The Oxford Encyclopaedia, Read and Gonzalez, Handbook.48 Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land, New York, Pantheon Books, 1975, fig.48.49 Diehl, The Olmecs, p.92, fig.55.50 Deihl, The Olmecs, p.163, fig.11.51 I would like to thank two artists for their inspirational help with this paper. Olivia Irvine

suggested passing out the modelling material to the audience and Susan Chaplin helped me produce the graphic images and modelled a new head for the one body in my collection.

52 Miller, The Art of Mesoamerica.53 Diehl, The Olmecs, p.57.

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54 Marcus and Myers, The Traffic in Culture, p.11.55 Foster, The Artist, p.305.56 A. Appadurai, ed,. The Social Life ofThings: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

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