Cultural anthropologist Mary Weismantel’s book Playing with Things: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots (2021) was awarded the 2022 ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award for the best book in Latin American Art History.
Weismantel is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern, and is affiliated with the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research.
“Rather than treating the sex pots as representations of human bodies, I write about them as actual bodies engaged in physical, phenomenological and metaphorical interactions with other bodies and substances — human and non-human, living and dead, fleshly and mineral — including animate mountains and mobile bodies of water,” explains Weismantel. “This is an optimistic project that addresses questions of indigeneity and temporality. Indigenous political movements are mobilizing the pre-European past to envision a decolonized future, making Pre-Columbian objects like the Moche sex pots or the archaeological site of Tiwanaku an increasingly vital presence.”
Recently, Weismantel joined the Global Lunchbox Podcast to discuss her book.
According to the book description:
In Playing with Things, Weismantel shows that there is much to be learned from these ancient artifacts, not merely as inert objects from a long-dead past but as vibrant Indigenous things, alive in their own human temporality. From a new materialist perspective, she fills the gaps left by other analyses of the sex pots in pre-Columbian studies, where sexuality remains marginalized, and in sexuality studies, where non-Western art is largely absent. Taking a decolonial approach toward an archaeology of sexuality and breaking with long-dominant iconographic traditions, this book explores how the “pots play jokes, make babies, give power, and hold water,” considering the sex pots as actual ceramic bodies that interact with fleshly bodies, now and in the ancient past. A beautifully written study that will be welcomed by students as well as specialists, Playing with Things is a model for archaeological and art historical engagement with the liberating power of queer theory and Indigenous studies.
“In Playing with Things: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots, Mary Weismantel offers a lively and intensely readable account of what these Moche vessels can teach us, both about the world in which they were created and about their modern investigation. Through sensitive applications of queer and Indigenous theory, Weismantel demonstrates how these ‘acolonial’ objects challenge modern sexual binaries and resist the confines of museum display,” stated Claudia Brittenham, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, at the Association for Latin American Art business meeting where the award announcement was made.