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Women's Work Ley (Fig CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 34, Number 3, June 1993 Cll991 by The Wenner·Gren Foundation for AnthropologIcal Research. All nghts reserved 001 !·PO¥93/H03-OOOJ.SJ..So In 1982, while conducting excavations at the Terminal Classic site of Cerro Palenque, in Honduras's Vlua Val­ Women's Work ley (fig. I), I encountered a pail of cached figurines in the centlal platform of a small Iesidential group lIoyce 1991:48, 95-96, 107, II4-15). Both wele fine, mold­ made, hollow human figures. They had been bUlied, ap­ Images of Production and parently standing upright, in small pits east and west of an exotic stone slab. The eastern figurine depicted a per­ Reproduction in Pre-Hispanic son dressed in a bird·feather costume with a bird-head Southern Central America helmet, holding a conch-shell horn. This figule Wale eaI spools and a rectangulaI bead collaI above a bale chest. The lower portion was too eroded to reconstruct, but the lack of breasts indicated that the figule depicted was by Rosemary A. Joyce male. The paired western figurine was better preserved. It depicted a woman wearing an ankle-length skirt, ear spools, and rectangulaI plaque pendant. HeI exposed chest was malked by clearly modeled breasts. Her left hand was Iaised, grasping her hair. On her head was bal­ "''hat interests prompted the production of human images in the indigenous cultures of Central America? This question is ex­ anced a two-handled, necked jar identical in proportions plored here by counterposing three diverse yet interconnected tra­ and profile to examples recovered in excavations in the ditions of human representation: those of the Classic Lowland group, forms probably used to contain liquids. Maya, the Honduran Ulua-Polychrome makers, and the Lower The pairing of these figurines suggested that they rep­ Central American cultures of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Disjunc­ tions in the contexts of use and disposal of human images dem­ resented a duality, the interdependent members of the onstrate different selective gender stereotypes in these three tradi­ household which made its home in the residential tions and indicate that the contrast between the household and group. Debris from around the central platform con­ the public arena is of varying concern. When these images are tained a suite of artifacts-censers} decorated jars} and placed in local developmental chronologies it becomes apparent obsidian blades-characteristic of apparent sites of rit­ that the production of public representations of stereotyped male and female actions that are disjunctive (varying in media or in ual at Cerro Palenque. The artifacts and caches rein­ the contrasts selected for emphasisl is associated with episodes forced the identification of this central platform as a of intensification of social stratification. The production of hu­ household shrine based on analogy with Maya sites such man representations in these societies may be a means through as Mayapan IProskouriakoff 1962, Smith 1971:108-9). which the negotiation of men's and women's social status took The placement of the figurines in this location indicated place during times of change. that they carried significant symbolic weight. ROSEMARY A. JOYCE is Associate Professor of Anthropology at A consideration of Honduran figurines with similar Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass. 02138, U.S.A.). Born in themes and comparison with others in neighboring 1956, she was educated at Cornell University (B.A., 1978) and Classic Maya and Lower Central American societies the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Ph.D., 19851. allow me to suggest an interpretation of the nature of She has been Assistant Curator (1985-86) and Assistant Director these figurines and the significance of their carehil {1986-891 of the Peabody Museum at Harvard and curator of the reinstallation of the museum's Latin American gallery in 1992 placement. In each of these areas, a subset of human and of an exhibit on pre-Columbian archaeology at Heritage Plan­ figurines represents women actively engaged in the tation, Sandwich, Mass., in 1991. Her fieldwork includes survey work that sustained the household. Differences in the and excavation in the Ulua River valley and the Department of precise nature of men}s and women's contributions Yoro in Honduras. Her research interests center on social com­ plexity in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and Central America. highlighted by human figures in different media illumi­ Among her publications are "The Ulua Valley and the Coastal nate the interplay of gender, labor} and social stratifica­ Maya Lowlands: The View from Cerro Palenque," in The South­ tion in neighboring Classic Maya} Honduran} and Lower east Classic Maya Zone, edited by Gordon R. Willey and Eliza­ Central American societies. Production of human im­ beth Boone (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Foundation, ages, waxing and waning through time} may have heen 1988), "The Construction of the Maya Periphery and the Mayoid Image of Honduran Polychrome Ceramics," in Reinterpreting the one response to tensions in social relations within Prehistory of Ceneral America. edited by Mark Miller Graham households undergoing social stratification. (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, in press), Cerro Palenque: Power and Identity on the Maya Periphery (Austin: University of Texas Press, 19911, and the editing of Tatiana Proskouriakoff's Representation and Social Life Maya History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 19931. The pres­ ent paper was submitted in final form 3 Xl 92. Treating the production of anthropomorphic images as a cultural means of responding to and shaping the condi­ tions of social existence is a semiotic enterprise that requires confrontation of the nature of representation, the status of these particular representations as signs, and my approach to their interpretation. I ~ttempt what 255 2561 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 34, Number 3, fune 1993 Yucatan (J Honduras ~. ~~ Nicoya Atlantic Watersh Lower Diquis Central America FIG. I. Map showing places discussed. Regions are named in italics; specific sites are marked with black boxes. The Ulua Valley includes the sites Cerro Palenque, Travesia, Playa de los Muertos, Las Flores Balsa, Santa Rita, and Santa Ana; the Comayagua Valley is the location of the walled hilltop site Tenampua. Only selected rivers are shown. Sperber 11992:631 has called "an epidemiology of repre­ or can be 'naturalized/ are a good deal more labile Ithan sentations/' which (fis not about representations but symbols, 'arbitrary' signs], and lend themselves with about the process of their distribution.II Sperber argues panicular ease to totalizing cultural ideologies." The that representations begin as mental constructs which, careful selection of attributes for depiction in these im­ when given material form, become public and in turn ages is less obvious because they appear to be chosen may be transformed into new mental representations by merely 10 eslablish resemblance. The seleclion of fea­ others who encounter them. The spread of each series tures to be incorporated in human images is a means by of representations through social networks affects the which stereotypes of natural or essential human behav­ spread of other representations. The beginning point of ior may be promulgated. In order to approach the rela­ my analysis, then, is the stipulation that the anthropo­ tionships between the inaccessible mental constructs of morphic images I discuss are such representations. makers and users of these human images and the public These representations are iconic, suggesting aspects representations to which we do have access, I assume of human appearance and behavior through resem­ that no detail is simply natural or accidental, the selec­ blance, and, as Michael Herzfeld 11992:68-691 notes, tion of attributes being part of a dialogic process of con­ "iconic relations, ' , , because they either 'look natural' stI"Uction of human identities. JOYCE Women's Work 1257 In order to explicate some of the possible associations ity lin ritual action, in work, and in public representa­ that these representations may crystallizel I treat each tions) as a recurrent pattern. From the regional perspec­ image as a distilled narrative, in Roland Barthes's tive, "we can compare cultural patterns that exist on a (19770:73) words a "pregnant moment": /lIn order to tell strictly local scale with further·flung patterns of essen­ a Story/ the painter possesses only one moment ... [the tially the same type" and "discover some correlations imagel will be a hieroglyph in which can be read at that would, after all, permit a degree of interpretation a glance ... the present, the past, and the future, Le. that does not depend upon verbal exegesis" (Herzfeld the historical meaning of the represented gesture." In 1992:791. I suggest that topical emphases on the inter­ Barthes's analysis, single still images imply a sequence play of gender, productive labor, ritual, and warfare as of actions preceding and following the depicted mo· aspects of the formation and maintenance of households ment, and "all images are polysemousj they imply, un­ and wider social networks are permissible interpreta­ derlying their signifiers, a 'floating chain' of signifieds, tions of the relationships of gender imagery in different the reader able to choose some and ignore others" representations within and among these cultures. (1977c:38-391. The signs united in a narrative are bound in a relationship of "double implication: two terms pre­ suppose one another," transforming chronological or­ Gender Imagery in Honduran Ceramics der to a logical binding "capable of integrating back· wards and forwards movements" through the narrative In the Vlua Valley of Honduras, ceramics were the pre­ !1977b:10I, 120-221· These metonymic links, sequences ferred medium for depiction of the human form. The of actions that lead up to and away from the image, earliest images of human beings are Middle Formative rather than the metaphoric symbolism of the elements figurines of the Playa de los Muertos culture (Agurcia of each image, are the focus of my analysis (for the dis­ 1978).
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