Scorned Subjects in Colonial Objects

Abstract

Focusing on colonial Spanish America, we explore scorned subjects—indigenous things that were identified as vital, sentient subjects by the people who made and used them but reclassified as “objects” by European friars, priests and settlers. Attending to key examples of scorned subjects in central Mexico and the Andes, we consider how European ontology and epistemology, manifested in the actions of colonial-era missionaries and persisting in present scholarship, shade our interpretations of sacred indigenous things. Of particular concern is how perceptions of the indigenous sacred shifted under changing colonial conditions. Our research suggests that rather than stubbornly requiring traditional pre-Hispanic materials to provide a physical presence, the indigenous sacred was often more supple than colonial authorities supposed. The implications of this arrangement, we find, open new questions about the relationships among materiality, colonial history and the indigenous sacred in the Americas.

Keywords:

• Andes
• Aztec
• iconoclasm
• idolatry
• Inka
• Mexico
• Peru
• Spanish America

Notes

1 See Kopytoff (1986, 90) for a different articulation of this position.

2 The scholarship on how extirpation campaigns and conceptions of idolatry marked the Americas is vast, and increasingly nuanced. Here we underscore the point that concepts of idolatry were neither uniform nor homogeneous; even so, their practices consistently implicated the visual and material qualities of subject-objects.

3 See Bassett (2015a, 88–147) on the qualities associated with teteo and teixiptlahuan.

4 Generally the visual features of teixiptlahuan allowed Mesoamerican viewers to identify the hosted teteo (Boone 1989, 4). The link between visual similitude and identity seems to have been important throughout Mesoamerica. For the pre-Hispanic Maya, for example, the act of creating a resemblance seems to have transferred a “vital charge” or “living spark” from the prototype to the image (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006, 74).

5 For writing on Taki Unquy see, for example, Brosseder (2014), Castro-Klarén (1989), Curatola (1977), Duviols (1977), Millones (1990, 2007), Mumford (1998), and Stern ([1982] 1993).

6 Mundy (2014, 516) argues that this image simultaneously conveys rupture and continuity since fire resonates with both central Mexican ideas about destruction-as-creation and Christian world beginnings. On the iconography of elements burned, see Brotherston and Gallegos (1990, 132–135).

7 A recently excavated sculpture of Tlaltecuhtli extends these associations, linking this teotl to imperial rulers (Matos Moctezuma and López Luján 2007).

8 The installed cross may well have signaled the triumph of good over evil (Hamann 2011, 328–329). If the Tlaltecuhtli image wore a skull on her belt (as many do), the skull would have been excised when the stone was re-cut. In planting the cross into a space once marked by a skull, the re-worked sculpture could have referenced Calvary-Golgotha. On Tlaltecuhtli images with central cavities as part of the original iconography, see López Luján (2010).

9 In her study of the Codex Borgia and Mexica thinking about the sexual reproduction of maize, Ellis notes that Quetzalcoatl’s association with wind arises primarily from the role that wind plays in plant—and specifically maize—reproduction by carrying “male” pollen to the plant’s “female” silks.

10 The verb kamay means to grow, produce, or create (Anonymous [1586] 1951, 20–21; González de Holguín [1608] 1901, 49; and Santo Tomás [1560] 1951, 246). For a discussion of kamay, see Salomon (1991, 16), Taylor (1974), and Ziółkowski (1996, 27–29).

11 A later will of doña Ysabel, dated 24 November 1665, confirms the indigenous items were intended for an illegitimate indigenous heir rather than any legitimate mestizo children (ARC-N: Lorenzo Messa Andueza, n.d. 1665, Leg. 199, Fols. 1159r-1176v). The second will also included an inventory and identified other indigenous things including women’s clothing (acsos, llikllas, nanacas), and four large pre-Hispanic storage jars (urpos del tiempo del ynga), which were left to Joana.

12 Cohen-Suarez (2016, 16) suggests that, because of their resonance with cloth that once covered wak’as, textile murals in colonial churches in Andean towns may have heightened worshippers’ sense of the relationship between the body of the church and the body of Christ. William Taylor (2016) enlists (and expands) the European medieval term brandea (sacred burial cloths) to understand the transfer of saintliness in New Spain. Although parallels across cultures of belief are evocative, they should not be too firmly drawn. For instance, the buying and selling of brandea [sacred burial cloths] in colonial Mexico strikes us as quite different from pre-Hispanic venerating gestures. We thank Jennifer Hughes for pointing us to Taylor’s analysis, and Brigitte Buettner for helping us understand the term’s medieval origins.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carolyn Dean

Carolyn Dean is Professor of Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Spanish American Visual Culture in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and researches both pre-Hispanic and Viceregal Andean Inka visual culture. Her recent publications focus on Inka rockwork and non-figural motifs, exploring native ontologies.

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Dana Leibsohn

Dana Leibsohn is Priscilla Paine van de Poel Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Smith College, and researches colonialism in the Americas. Her recent publications have addressed trans-Pacific trade and histories of indigenous image use in New Spain. The authors are collaborating on a book that considers indigenous contributions to, and interventions in, the cosmopolitan visual culture of Spanish America.

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