My dissertation traces the life of forest materials from Amazonia into the Andes and beyond to illuminate how the Inkas of the Andean highlands (Western South America) imagined Amazonia and its inhabitants before and after Spanish colonization (c. 1400–1825 C.E.) and, conversely, how Amazonian peoples understood the Inkas and other “invaders,” including colonizing Spaniards and modern tourists. Interaction between the highlands and Amazonian lowlands has been little studied in general, with most interest focused on the realm of political relations and trade. Although the field of visual studies has largely ignored this subject, there is ample visual evidence that Amazonia played a significant role in the Inkas’ imaginary as a place of both subversion and refuge. Likewise, while there is limited Amazonian artifactual and ethnohistorical documentation from the periods in which the Inkas and later Spaniards attempted to control forest peoples, there is sufficient material to suggest a general Amazonian approach to unknown and possibly hostile others. Briefly, as will be discussed in the second half of this dissertation, the Amazonian strategy was to integrate unknown peoples into their relational cosmology. Ideally, and whenever possible, the integration was accomplished through “friend-making,” a process that intended to forestall hostility and foster mutually beneficial relationships.

My study of cross-cultural exchanges between the Inkas and neighboring Amazonian peoples engages with the multi-sensorial aspects of forest materials in the form of wooden drinking vessels (keros), exquisite boxes to hold herbs and sweets (coqueras), and Amazonian textile designs (kené) by living artists to help us understand the ways the Inkas and Amazonian cultures adapted to one another, creating and reinforcing each other’s alterity across time.

Inka Borders and the Power of Volatility: on the Fringes and Edges of Textile and Territory

Inka elites of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries used certain textiles as indices of identity that registered value and status to viewers but also used textiles to make material and evident how they understood certain relationships in spatial terms. My dissertation revolves around how Inka textiles articulated ideas of space, serving as critical materializations of how they organized space and, relatedly, how they conceived edges of their territory as well as other border spaces. The Inkas used textiles to express relationships that existed in physical terms but also that existed across socio-cultural or spiritual networks. With particular attention to textile borders, I discuss how the Inkas visualized border spaces as volatile but productive. Textile border areas may be seen as expressions of elusive ontological border areas; for example, those spaces that existed between natural and supernatural entities or that divided one cultural reality from another. Alternately, textile borders may be expressions of larger physical border areas, such as the spaces that existed between enemy territory. In this, I suggest the Inkas saw borders as fruitful places of encounter and engagement rather than as areas of separation and enclosure.

Examining textiles as media through which the Inkas materialized notions of space and border, I situate Indigenous textiles as valuable archives that relay information and knowledge beyond what written accounts transmit. After Spanish invasion, Inka history was mostly recorded through the colonizing power’s documentary means. The written word was assumed to be the authoritative language of history. Yet, the material format of Indigenous Andean textiles has long been understood to carry embedded meaning and, specifically in relation to ideas of space, has been recognized as deeply entwined within a discourse of landscape and land use. My dissertation finds its impetus here, therefore, asking how we can use textiles to think historically about Indigenous ways of inhabiting space and negotiating changes and interactions across space. I conclude that we can use textiles as communicative modes that complement histories told in the colonizer’s mode, providing an understanding of the pre-contact Andean space even within, for example, discourses of territoriality.

Chapter 1 discusses the value of interactive, relational frameworks in an Indigenous Andean worldview and how relationships are made material through forms such as wak’as and, significantly, textiles. To put into perspective how the Inkas used textiles to express aspects of the inhabited space, I look at various textile examples across Andean history wherein the fabric space—and particularly references to border areas and articulation of borders in this space—serves as a materialization of religious, socio-political, and/or territorial relationships.

Chapter 2 reviews textiles as a medium that could transmit for the Inkas ideas and experiences of the lived space or environment— through their material and formal and design qualities— and that as such served as metonyms for Inka territory. The chapter looks at tokapu motifs on men’s garments but also more closely at the detail of zigzag embroidery at the selvedges /edges of Inka unkus/tunics and suggests they communicate something about the way the Inka state perceived the “edges” of its empire. The underlying premise here is that textiles showcase how, for the Inkas, border areas are inherently active zones where exchange between interior and exterior interests is to be expected and perhaps even integrated into a state ideology of productive tension—as if the flux boundary space energizes the state’s territorial extremities.

Chapter 3 expands on Chapter 2’s discussion of how an Inka ideology of space played out in male textile garments by bridging to how the Inkas expressed the relationship between textiles, the inhabited space, and ideas of border through women—namely through women’s roles as weavers (the akllakuna) and through their bodies as tribute subjects. Conscripted to serve the state in ways that essentially made visible Inka control over outside communities and their resources, akllas were an expression of the Inka body politic. The chapter points to examples of textiles associated with women’s wear that are legible within an Inka discourse of conquest closely interlaced with women’s roles wherein women visualized Inka claim to new territories.

Chapter 4 discusses how if in the pre-contact context both men’s and women’s woven garments were able to express a wearer’s place of origin or extended notions of land use and border spaces or territorial edges, then it is likely these messages carried into the post-contact period. Because Indigenous textiles were heavily invested with communicative meaning in the pre-contact period, it is plausible that this continued into the colonial period and that a visual rhetoric of textiles exercised an Andean relationship to space, particularly to the inhabited space within the context of early colonial territorial dispossession. This chapter considers the possibilities that certain motifs on colonial era Indigenous textiles and ascertained in colonial representations of textiles helped convey Indigenous authority in ways that would have had significant meaning to elite Andeans, namely in associations with a past defined by autochthonous Andean (Inka) rulership and in connotations of Indigenous access to (their) land.

Over the last century, art museums in the United States have mounted dozens of exhibitions of Colonial Latin American art, but their reasons for doing so have changed over time. Most of the exhibits from 1920-1959 played an important role in international diplomacy as the U.S. government attempted to influence Americans’ attitudes about Latin Americans, and vice versa, for economic and political gains. However, government interest largely waned in the 1960s and ‘70s, leaving a power vacuum that was filled by individual art collectors, who became the tastemakers of the era. This was financially unsustainable, though, and by the 1980s and ‘90s, major conglomerates began to convert their fiscal power into charitable goodwill by sponsoring crowd-pleasing blockbuster exhibitions. Yet for all these shifts, the most rapid changes in American society came after the turn of the millennia with the rise of the internet and an increase in international terrorism. As technology and social pressures have combined to make the past more accessible and desirable, there has been an increase in the number of museum exhibitions and reasons for their existence. The last two decades have seen exhibits produced on behalf of national governments, wealthy art collectors, and corporate entities, but now they tend to be more driven by scholarship and academic interests, as well.

While this project is interested in tracking and documenting these changes over time, its focus on the relatively small number of exhibitions of Colonial Latin American art in the United States over the last hundred years serves a greater goal; the questions it asks are more philosophical. What role does the museum play in society? What happens to public opinion when trusted and authoritative institutions forward specific visions of culture and cultural production? Whose voice is really being heard and assimilated? Although I cannot offer definitive answers to these questions, this project does ultimately suggest that museums do not simply reflect popular notions about other cultures, but in fact play major roles in constructing those opinions. Even though the vast majority of the population will never see any given exhibition—let alone read every label, peruse all wall text, or study every item displayed—museums, often subtly, sometimes overtly, exert influence by drawing attention to specific cultures and histories, and by privileging particular perspectives. The ways influence has been manifested in and through museum exhibitions are the topic of this study; also under consideration are the consequences of the kind of work museums have done and might possibly do in the future.

Living Time, Performing Memory: Maya Ceremonies of Foundation and Renewal is concerned with how Maya notions of cyclical time were practiced, looking specifically at how the past, present, and future coexisted in particular moments. Ceremonies of renewal that took place at certain foldings of time, such as period endings and royal accessions, were crucial occasions when the proper rituals had to be re-enacted in order for the world to continue. Rulers and elites not only performed these rituals, but also left objects that functioned as memory markers to recall actions of the past into the present. This project looks at primary sources in the form of carved stelae, reliefs, painted ceramics, murals, and the built environment from the Preclassic to the Postclassic Maya period. The sites of Palenque and Copán serve as case studies for how rulers performed and recorded their embodied remembrances of time-renewal ceremonies. Small portable objects offer insight as to additional characters who participated in these rituals, which enriches the traditional focus on the role of the ruler.

Through the case studies and a close analysis of the primary materials, this study expands on the notion of cyclical time in Maya culture as was previously understood to one that includes a vision and practice of a coexistence of times, or what I call timefulness. Rulers and elite created these moments of timefulness through elaborate ceremonies in order to renew time and thus, guarantee their future. These ideas of reaching for the past in a way that propels Maya people towards the future, and not as a sense of nostalgia, challenges current Western ideas that place modern-day Maya as always stuck in the past. Thus, this project enlightens our understanding of ancient Maya philosophies and practices as well as how these ideas endure amongst their contemporary descendants.