7
Can Tools Have Souls?
Maya Views on the Relations between Human and Other-than-Human Persons
Julia A. Hendon
When my co-editor and I began talking about the ideas that led to this book, we found ourselves returning to A. Irving Hallowell’s foundational work on personhood: “While in all cultures ‘persons’ comprise one of the major classes of objects to which the self must become oriented, this category of being is by no means limited to human beings . . . But in the social sciences and psychology, ‘persons’ and human beings are categorically identified” (Hallowell 2002 [1960]:20, original emphasis).
As discussed in the introduction to this volume, Hallowell’s insights form one beginning point for the anthropological interest in the self, personhood, and identity. Theoretical approaches that focus on material or relational ontologies, animism, the social life of things, symmetrical relationships, and related topics have turned this interest into a prominent focus in recent decades. My chapter is a way for me to bring together two interests—object-based agency and crafting—that have dominated my research in recent years. I accept the applicability of personhood beyond the conflation with human beings that Hallowell rightly decries. This perspective also requires me to move beyond the common assumption in the social sciences that objects are “mere receptacles for human categories” (Latour 1993:52). The idea of objects as agents has become an important theoretical strand in anthropology. My interest in object-based agency has led me to the broader concept of objects as persons, not just person-like entities. I have emphasized the relational and intersubjective nature of personhood for both humans and objects, taking object to mean primarily manufactured items—things made by human beings—in the cultural and historical setting of the Mesoamerican societies of Mexico and Central America before and after European colonization (Hendon 2010, 2012; Hendon et al. 2014). The Mesoamerican world is replete with other-than-human persons. This approach to personhood is based on a philosophical framework that does not restrict personhood to the living, the human, and the corporeal. My other research interest centers on crafting as a social process. Using such types of crafting as weaving and making clay figurines, I have argued that the making of things contributes to an embodied sense of self and plays a key role in the creation of a relational and intersubjective personhood for both humans and objects. Objects exercise agency as part of this kind of relational personhood (Hendon 2006, 2010; Joyce et al. 2014).
This chapter gives me the opportunity to shift focus somewhat. Rather than consider the end result of crafting, I concentrate on items used to make something or to carry out some task—in other words, the tools or implements or equipment required for the task.1 A crafter’s sense of self develops in part through enskillment, the process of becoming proficient in the manipulation of materials and the use of tools resulting in an enhanced understanding and ability to create things recognized as well made (or not so well made). A large part of being skilled and expert at one’s craft is being adept at understanding the interplay among raw material, end result, and those tools of the trade in use in a particular cultural or historical context (Bleed 2008; Hendon 2006; Ingold 2001, 2013; Keller 2001; Mauss 2006; Portisch 2010).
I expand on these issues by first discussing some of the culturally embedded perspectives on personhood and agency in Mesoamerica. The second part of the chapter examines a range of sources that include indigenous literature, ethnographic studies, documentary sources, visual imagery, and archaeological finds. I deliberately keep my focus narrow. My goal for this chapter is to see how rich and detailed an understanding I can develop for Mesoamerica. If we are serious about the idea that multiple ontologies exist within and across cultures or as a consequence of particular historical trajectories or forms of identity, then I argue that such an in-depth approach has as much value as efforts to compare cross-culturally in search of universally “non-Western” perspectives.
I then turn to what these sources tell us about implements in particular, with special emphasis on those that are important to crafting. I demonstrate that the equipment vital to the technologies of crafting has or has the potential to have the same qualities of personhood—including agency, animacy, possession of a soul, the ability to form relations with others, and intersubjectivity—that Mesoamerican ontologies consider human beings have the potential to possess. Such potential is not always realized for humans or for other kinds of objects (Hill, this volume). I consider, therefore, when and how personhood does emerge in humans and tools. Finally, I discuss the broader implications of a focus on tools for the understanding of questions of both personhood and crafting in Mesoamerica.
By considering information from a diverse range of Mesoamerican groups, I hope to discern common cultural threads that represent distinct understandings of ways of being and ways of acting in the world. Before the Spanish conquest, these understandings reflected the long-term processes of cultural, political, and economic contact among societies in the region, processes that allow modern scholars to refer to the area as Mesoamerica (Clark and Pye 2000; Joyce 2004). As part of the colonization process, these understandings came into dialogue with the beliefs and perspectives of the invaders, a dialogue that has continued ever since and been marked by extreme differences in power and control.
My willingness to take such a long-term perspective does not mean I consider indigenous peoples to be “timeless” or “outside of history” and thus living exactly as their ancestors did. My perspective is quite the contrary (see Hendon 2010). Engaging with a diversity of sources and historical moments reflects my conviction that it is possible to identify a set of philosophical and ontological beliefs about the nature of the world that have informed Mesoamerican cultural understandings and which are reflected in their interactions with one another, the post-conquest dominant society, and the natural and human-built world in which they live (Hendon 2010, 2012).
Ways of doing things and ways of being in the world intersect in interesting ways with the materiality of traditional technologies. Central to the perspective adopted in this chapter is the recognition that it is practices as much as or even more so than abstract structures that provide the means by which people in Mesoamerica developed an understanding of self and society (see Alberti 2012). John Monaghan (1995:13) calls such understandings “theories of social action.” In a discussion of John Watanabe’s work on the Mam-speaking Maya of Santiago Chimaltenango, also known as Chimbal, Monaghan credits Watanabe with highlighting “the open-ended, emergent, and creative dimensions of communication as opposed to the constraints it places on actors. Thus we can see that although the institutional forms traditionally associated with the Maya have disappeared from Chimaltenango . . . the people of Chimbal remain Maya and continue to be a community even though they are not the Maya of the past” (Monaghan 1995:13; see also Watanabe 1992).
Mesoamerican Understandings of Personhood and Agency
People in Mesoamerica have found many ways to express their understanding of how the world came to be, how it works, why “volitional beings” (Astor-Aguilera 2010:71) exist, and how they should live. This understanding is often identified by outsiders as religious in nature, but the separation between religion and other aspects of society is artificial: “It is not at all clear that a discrete category of ritual action ever existed” in Mesoamerica (Monaghan 1998a:48). That is to say, the desire to bracket off some set of activities as religious and others as economic, political, quotidian, or social does not allow us to appreciate fully the perspectives of the people we are studying. Miguel Angel Astor-Aguilera (2010:3) has discussed the same issue, writing that “Mesoamerican cosmologies are more about a daily social way of life revolving around conceptions of self, personhood, and a sense of place relating to what is both visible and invisible” than they are about “what one could term codified religion founded on classifications based on binaries of the sacred and the profane.”
Personhood and the self in Mesoamerica before and after European colonization are not limited to the individual human being/body. Further, there is not just one self per person, however that person is materialized. One’s identity or being is not predicated on assumptions of a bounded, autonomous individuality that is restricted to the living, human beings, or tangible entities (see, e.g., Astor-Aguilera 2010; Gossen 1996; Houston and Stuart 1989; Monaghan 1995; Pitarch Ramón 1996; Vogt 1969, 1976; Watanabe 1992). Since these elements of the self can be separated from the physical being to form connections and relations with other individuals, groups, natural forces, and the dead, they exist across time and space beyond the boundaries of a particular body or lifespan. Indeed, these essences must be fixed or tethered through ritualized practices involving objects and places (Astor-Aguilera 2010). Tethering can be undone as well, so that the essence of personhood becomes disconnected from a human being, an object, a place, or an animal.
Important aspects of the definition of personhood in Mesoamerica are the passage of time, one’s relationship with the landscape one inhabits, the kinds of actions one engages in, the relationships one is part of, and the way those actions contribute to social memory (Hendon 2012). Concepts that have been translated as “destiny,” “co-essence,” or “soul” connect to Mesoamerican views on the spatial and temporal ordering of existence. These concepts thus lie at the heart of a Mesoamerican understanding of personhood. A person’s destiny is tied to the temporal system because it is shaped by day of birth, as determined by the indigenous calendar systems that were the basis of measuring time before the Spanish conquest (Monaghan 1998b; Tedlock 1992).
Although day of birth is important, it is not determinative. Persons must also work to achieve or mitigate their destiny through appropriate behavior. This shared understanding of the consequences of temporal positioning forms part of how Mesoamerican peoples define themselves in both space and time. The daily movement of the sun makes visible the passage of time and provides a way of orienting the body. The sun becomes responsible for and linked to the destinies associated with the diurnal periods defined through its movements. The interaction between temporality and human action means that destiny is both “part of the body and subject to an outside power—the internal and external complexly intersecting” (Monaghan 1998b:139, original emphasis).
Co-essences/souls are the multiple parts or elements of selfhood that from a Mesoamerican perspective are not necessarily circumscribed by the physical body (Astor-Aguilera 2010; Gossen 1996, 1999; Guiteras-Holmes 1961; Monaghan 1998b; Pitarch Ramón 2011; Vogt 1965, 1969, 1976; Watanabe 1992). As something that is independent of the body, souls may be shared, linking an individual with other beings, not all of which are human, animate, or alive (by Western standards). The concept of co-essences or souls connects entities that seem to be completely separate because they belong to different phenomenal categories or states of existence. These entities can be linked together through a shared temporal position determined by when they were born or came into existence. It might be assumed that personhood defined in this way necessarily restricts itself to biological beings that come into existence through a literal birthing process. As discussed below, giving birth and being born are not restricted to biological entities or to a particular set of physical processes. Co-essences can also be material objects. Mesoamerican concepts of personhood are not “based on an absolute assumption of human uniqueness” (Monaghan 1998b:144).
One of the trickiest parts of understanding and describing other-than-one’s-own ontologies is the need to de-anthropocentrize the discussion. Or, as Rosemary Joyce and Susan Gillespie put it, to no longer “perpetuate the separation of humans and objects” (Joyce and Gillespie 2015:8). Among those who have addressed this issue for Mesoamerica, Astor-Aguilera has provided the most explicit analysis that is worth quoting at length. Astor-Aguilera defines nonhuman persons as “indigenous cultural composites of multiple invisible beings, some named and some not, that communicate through various objects” (Astor-Aguilera 2010:100). He goes on to write that “the human body . . . is no different from other sorts of material objects. A person within my Maya consultants’ world view is simply an object that has sentient agency tethered to it. Persons can be and are attached to things other than humans” (Astor-Aguilera 2010:103). Jill Furst (1995:64–70), in her exploration of Aztec concepts of the soul, notes that one of the primary animating forces (tonnalli) is implanted in infants by deities through breathing and drilling into the child before birth, processes that would seem to be ways of tethering features that create agency and personhood.
In his collection of Tzotzil Maya dreams and stories from the municipio of Zinacantán (Chiapas, Mexico), Robert Laughlin found that “it is believed that an individual’s possessions are representative of himself, have acquired his soul. Corn, too, shares its soul with the farmer, his family, and his farm tools” (Laughlin and Karasik 1988:9; see also Laughlin 1976). Evon Vogt (1969:370–71), writing about the same municipio in Chiapas, elaborates further on this point: “The phenomenon of the soul is by no means restricted to the domain of human beings. Virtually everything that is important and valuable to Zinacantecos possesses a soul: domesticated plants . . . houses and household fires; wooden crosses erected on sacred mountains, inside caves, and beside waterholes; saints whose ‘homes’ are inside the Catholic churches; musical instruments used in their ceremonies; all the various deities in the Zinacanteco pantheon.”
Thus, objects can do more than acquire a trace of a person’s co-essence. They have souls in their own right and enter into relations with other souls. As Vogt (1969:371) observes, “The most important interaction going on in the universe is not between persons nor between persons and material objects, but rather between souls inside these persons and material objects.” This analysis is supported by other discussions of souls, who possesses them, and how they relate to personhood (e.g., Gossen 1999; Pitarch Ramón 2011; Watanabe 1992).
Personhood develops through participation in social interactions and relations that make up a local theory of production (Monaghan 1998a) and sustain a “shared ‘way of being’ ” (Watanabe 1992:90). Participation provides evidence of one’s moral status and social identity. Attempts by Spanish religious authorities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to define personhood as a property of individuals possessed of an integral body, mind, and soul continually run up against indigenous willingness to use the same words for all these supposedly separate phenomenal classes, indicating a philosophical perspective that conceptualizes them as similar. Brian Stross (1998:31) states that “Native Mesoamericans . . . attributed a soul to all living things and considered all of nature to be alive.” This is a good starting point, as it places us firmly in an alternative ontology. The next step is to consider how, given this ontological starting point, animate entities become persons. In other words, is being animate enough to make a human being or an object or an animal or a natural force a person? Personhood is not restricted to human beings but it is not extended to all, either. This raises the question I now turn to: When and how do objects become persons?
“Being alive . . . or being human, for that matter, is not enough to be considered a person” (Astor-Aguilera 2010:207). Participation in appropriate actions and socially recognized relations creates persons (Astor-Aguilera 2010; Gillespie 2001, 2008; Monaghan 1998a; Nash 2015; Watanabe 1992). Objects, animals and plants, and other nonhuman entities may become persons in their own right not only by being infused with a human being’s essence. Like people, they are part of the ordered existence created by beliefs about time and space (Monaghan 1998b). They are born/made (in effect, crafted), exist for a period of time in one form, and then come to an end or transform into something else. This sequence is analogous to the human life cycle, and such an analogy can be discerned in how people in Mesoamerica interact with their material possessions. People and objects, the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate, the corporeal and the non-corporeal are transformed into persons through their connection to systems of measuring time and making landscapes that exist above and beyond any individual lifespan or period of existence. As noted earlier, social relations are also integral to the transformation of an entity, whether human or not, into a person.
Aztec visual imagery and written documents produced after the conquest by, among others, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún illustrate the ways infants and children could become persons (Eberl 2013; Furst 1995; Joyce 2000b). Examples of rhetoric recorded in the Florentine Codex,2 for example, refer to a newborn as raw material. The midwife repeatedly refers to the newborn in this way: “O precious necklace, O quetzal feather, O jade, O armlet, O turquoise” (Sullivan 1994:141).
As discussed by Rosemary Joyce (2000b), these speeches emphasize the importance of transformative processes that apply equally to the human body as to the piece of turquoise or lump of jade or bird feathers. Children’s bodies are pierced, cut, smoothed, molded, and polished. Furst (1995) has discussed the way Aztec deities help imbue a person with tonalli through use of a fire drill applied to the human body. Markus Eberl (2013) demonstrates further the transformation and manipulation of children’s bodies through an analysis of images of codices in the Borgia Group, a set of pictorial texts created before the conquest in the Mixteca-Puebla-Tlaxcala area of Mexico (Boone 2006; Jansen 2006a, 2006b; Nicholson 2006). They contain sections on the rituals children were subjected to, often at the hands of deities. It is tempting to read these written and visual texts as metaphors, but to do so misunderstands the Mesoamerican ontologies they reflect. Children are transformed into persons by their parents, midwives, priests, other adults, and deities through actions that require certain tools.
Descriptions of rituals associated with the birth of a child or with later moments in a child’s life cycle emphasize the presentation of gender-specific tools to babies or older children. The Florentine Codex and the Codex Mendoza3 depict in words and images how the Aztec midwife would give a miniature set of weapons to an infant boy and a miniature set of spinning and weaving tools to an infant girl (Berdan and Anawalt 1992 3:57v–60r, 70r). Bishop Diego de Landa’s sixteenth-century account of Yucatec Maya life includes a description of the presentation of tools to children that represented the crafts they would practice as they grew older. This presentation took place in a particular month in a highly ritualized context, thus connecting social identity and time (Tozzer 1941:159; see also Joyce 2000a).
Like the human body, objects in Mesoamerica are not merely a means to an end. As social persons or potential social persons, they have the capacity for agency. They are nonhuman actors that help shape the relationships of which they are a part through their properties, their purpose, and their connections to social institutions, projects, or relations above and beyond the individual interactions in which they participate. Agency, from this perspective, is not about intentionality or a particular state of being, such as being human or even alive. Objects, like people, function as agents because their properties cause things to happen and induce people to relate to them in certain ways and based on the outcome of what they do, in some context and in relation to some other (human or not) (Miller 2010).
Part of the process of becoming a person for humans and nonhumans occurs through shared participation in the productive actions that bring the objects into being—that is to say, crafting. The Maya of the Guatemalan town of Santiago Atitlan, for example, believe that “weavings are not just woven but in fact born” (Prechtel and Carlsen 1988:123) through the movements of the woman’s body and the loom to which she is attached. Childbirth and weaving become part of a series of linked actions describing the ordering of space and time: “As is true with the weaving of cloth (and the birthing of humans), the rising of the sun allows for the world to be regenerated” (Prechtel and Carlsen 1988:126). I have argued previously that figurines made out of clay during the ninth to eleventh centuries in the lower Ulúa River valley and Copán River valley of Honduras became persons through the conditions of their production, their involvement in ritualized activities tied to the celebration of life-cycle or seasonal events in the life of the household, and their burial—sometimes intact and sometimes broken—in association with domestic spaces (Hendon 2010, 2012). These objects are relatively easy for us to accept as person-like because they look like people (and were clearly designed to do so). But equally important are the ways they enter into relationships with people, other objects, and places—ways that are central to the social reproduction of the self and for the creation of social memory. When these characteristics are taken into account, it becomes possible to see how personhood extends beyond the person-like in terms of appearance to other kinds of materials such as textiles.
The Personhood and Agency of Tools
The discussion presented so far makes a strong argument that the Mesoamerican perspective on personhood encompasses a wide range of beings and states of being. My efforts to think about how and when tools might become persons has been made more difficult by the fact that I have found far more discussion of souls or co-essences in terms of human beings and animals than other kinds of material objects (e.g., Gossen 1974, 1996, 1999; Guiteras-Holmes 1961; Vogt 1965, 1969, 1976; Wagley 1949). Vogt mentions houses, musical instruments, and such religious objects as crosses and saints’ statues (Vogt 1976:19, 1998). In discussing funerary rituals, Vogt (1976) and Stross (1998) note that items associated with the deceased may be broken or marred in some way to make it possible for the souls of these objects to go with the soul of the human person with whom they were associated. Stross connects this ontological perspective to archaeological finds of smashed objects or objects with holes drilled in them in locations that would render the object difficult or impossible to use for practical purposes.
Because of my focus on crafting, however, I am interested in developing a more precise understanding of implements and equipment as persons and agents. Tools are fundamental aspects of the material world in which people live. Discussions of technologies of crafting, farming, and others have tended to privilege the functional aspects of these implements, but a robust literature exists that reframes technology as a set of relationships between people and between people and the materials with which they work; as transformative processes that change both people and materials; as bodies of knowledge that must be transmitted from experts to novices; as the result of choices affected by the combination of cultural values, resource availability, and the physical properties of those resources; and as embodiments of values and beliefs (see Franklin 1999; Hendon 2006; Ingold 2001; Killick 2004).
Tools, or at least certain kinds of implements, appear in some examples of Mesoamerican visual imagery in association with figures usually referred to as gods or deities, which are often personifications of natural, creative, and ancestral forces. In addition to the Borgia Group codices already mentioned, several Maya codices can be cited. The Madrid Codex, generally believed to date from the end of the Late Postclassic period in the fifteenth century (Vail and Aveni 2004), contains almanacs in which deities are shown engaging in a variety of actions, including weaving, carving, painting, and planting over the course of some defined period of time connected to the Maya timekeeping systems (Anders 1967; Hernández and Bricker 2004; Vail 2004; Vail and Bricker 2004). Productive, creative, and destructive actions are featured also in the Dresden Codex (Hendon 2006; Thompson 1972), another surviving manuscript created before the Spanish conquest. Thunderstorm/Ch’a Chaak, for example, fishes with a net, hunts, rows, and drums in the almanacs devoted to him (Tedlock 2010:213–28). Action is implied through the Ch’a Chaak’s holding of an ax. Female deities in the Madrid and Dresden codices, as in other visual imagery, often wear spindles in their headdress (Hendon 1999, 2006; Tedlock 2010:161–64).
These sources establish the importance of creative action or crafting. To get a better sense of tool agency and personhood, however, I turn to written and oral sources that flesh out the ways tools become persons through their actions, interactions, and associations. Let me start with the third creation attempt in the Popol Vuh, a K’iche’ Maya text that has survived in an eighteenth-century transcription (Tedlock 1993). The creator deities have failed twice in their efforts to make creatures that can speak and thus pray to them. The third time, they make people out of wood, but these manikins lack the necessary spirit and soul to be persons that can engage in the efficacious actions necessary to a way of being in the world. Animals and objects rise up and attack the wood people, voicing their dissatisfaction with their treatment.
Then came the small animals and the large animals, and sticks and stones struck their faces. And all began to speak: their earthen jars, their griddles, their plates, their pots, their grinding stones, all rose up and struck their faces . . . And the grinding stones said: “We were tormented by you; every day, every day, at night, at dawn, all the time our faces went holi, holi, huqui, huqui, because of you . . . But now that you are no longer men, you shall feel our strength. We shall grind and tear your flesh to pieces,” said their grinding stones. (Recinos 1950:91)
The griddles and pots add their voices to the complaints before turning the tables on the wooden people: “Pain and suffering you have caused us. Our mouths and faces were blackened with soot; we were always put on the fire and you burned us as though we felt no pain” (Recinos 1950:92). Finally, the three hearthstones that supported the cooking pots “hurled themselves straight from the fire against their heads causing them pain” (Recinos 1950:92).
Potters in Amatenango del Valle, Chiapas, related a variant of this story to June Nash (2015) in which the unresponsive and inanimate humans were made of clay instead of wood. Here the story has a gentler, more positive ending. Once given a heart, an organ central to Maya concepts of animacy and identity (Pitarch Ramón 2011), the clay humans become able to act and interact like true persons.
In other stories, a hoe can work on its own but is reluctant to do so. It must be whipped to convince it to do what it can (Gossen 2002:81–83). A rope bleeds when cut (Burns 1983:74–78). Ritual healers have a sacred mesa, or table, that communicates and a chain that hears (Oakes 1951:150–52). A clay pot that can turn stones into tamalitos only does so when it chooses to. It provides food for a poor woman who engages in appropriate actions through prayers and offerings. But the pot withholds its transformative abilities when stolen, turns itself to stone when threatened with violence, and verbally dresses down its abusers. Afterward, it disappears (Sexton and Rodríguez-Mejía 2010:105–7). In other tales, a pot talks and fills itself with beans and tortillas, a bell talks and moves, flutes have souls, or a magic wand talks (Laughlin and Karasik 1988:85, 186, 191, 207–8, 214). More widely discussed in the anthropological literature are the communicating crosses that emerged at various points in Chiapas and Yucatan (Astor-Aguilera 2010; Burns 1983; Reed 1964).
Studying how people in Highland Guatemala used manos and metates, Michael Searcy talked to Q’eqchi’, K’iche’, and Poqomam Maya women and men. Although he was interested in these grinding implements as functional items, he discovered that they were agents capable of causing things to happen and harming those who mistreated them. Although these grinding stones do not physically assault transgressors as in the Popol Vuh, they can affect human fertility and reproduction, cause sickness, or break, rendering them unusable by others. He concludes that they have the ability to “control their own destiny” (Searcy 2011:95).
I noted earlier that the Maya living in Santiago Atitlan told Martin Prechtel and Robert Carlsen (1988) that textiles are born, not made. Terms used to describe looms further support their personhood and suggest that looms are also born rather than made. Looms have a mouth, a head, ribs, a heart/umbilicus, and a butt. Warping boards, used to set the warp threads in order before they are threaded on the loom, also possess a heart, a head, a foot. The loom sticks are described as embodiments of female deities associated with midwifery and childbirth. Although Prechtel and Carlsen do not describe it this way, the association they note seems to match the process Astor-Aguilera calls tethering—aspects of the Ixoc Ahaua deities are tethered to the loom sticks, giving the sticks a soul and making them persons. Warping boards, the loom, and weaving itself have features that are person-like (e.g., head, heart).
Past Perspectives
Depositional practices provide one way for archaeologists to infer the personhood of objects and people (Joyce and Pollard 2010; Mills and Walker 2008). Items related to crafting or making have been found in caches, which are contexts in which objects and sometimes incomplete human skeletal remains come to rest. These contexts are not trash or production sites but settings that bring together objects and other materials in patterned, structured ways that give insight into their life cycle, biography, and itineraries (Hendon 2000; Joyce and Gillespie 2015).
Household settings provide a rich source of examples, perhaps because crafting is so intertwined with daily life in Mesoamerica and because domestic settings were important places for the kinds of actions described earlier that create ways of being and doing. One can find many examples in the published literature that I will not attempt to summarize here to keep this chapter to a reasonable length. I use my own research and that of colleagues working in the Lower Ulúa River valley in north-central Honduras and in the Copán valley in the western mountains of the country near the border with Guatemala during the sixth to eleventh centuries AD. Jeanne Lopiparo’s work at farming settlements along the Ulúa riverbank revealed an ongoing process of rebuilding houses, burials of humans, and deposition of a wide range of crafted objects and tools used to create those objects. Molds for creating figurines and other items of clay were one prominent element of these deposits (Lopiparo 2003; Lopiparo and Hendon 2008; Hendon et al. 2014). At the hilltop site of Cerro Palenque in the same valley, I found a deposit designed to mark the termination of one building and the initiation of a new building placed over the old one. This deposit contained obsidian tools, a small hacha (a woodworking tool), broken pots, and human bone (Hendon 2010). Earlier excavations at the same settlement by Rosemary Joyce (1991) uncovered obsidian or chert bifaces and manos placed in the fill of buildings. Moving further west into the mountain valley of Copán, home to a Maya kingdom, we see similar practices, including the placement of tools such as obsidian blades, polishing stones, and grinding stones in caches in association with domestic and public spaces (Aoyama 1995; Diamanti 2000; Gerstle and Webster 1990; Gonlin 1993; Hendon 2000, 2010, 2012; Hendon et al. 1990; Willey and Leventhal 1979; Willey et al. 1994).
Concluding Thoughts
The personhood of tools comes through despite the greater focus on humans and animals in the ethnographic literature. Rather than follow the approach that claims that the whole world is animate or that objects become persons through their association with people, I would argue that personhood is assigned to or conferred on a range of entities. Making the effort to avoid anthropocentrism, I would argue that what we are seeing here is a process of intersubjectivity in which personhood develops for all actors through the associations and relationships they enter into. To use Astor-Aguilera’s analysis, souls are tethered to human bodies and to implements through practice, particularly practices connected to crafting and other forms of production. As persons, they are part of actions and interactions that make their personhood manifest.
Notes
1. These terms are essentially synonymous in common English-language usage. There is a tendency to consider “equipment” as referring to the whole suite of physical resources needed, including tools or implements. Here, I use them interchangeably.
2. The Florentine Codex was compiled in the late sixteenth century by Bernardino de Sahagún and his students (Dibble 1982).
3. The Codex Mendoza was produced in the sixteenth century by Aztec scribes/artists at the request of the Spanish viceroy (Berdan and Anawalt 1992).
References Cited
Alberti, Benjamin. 2012. “Cut, Pinch, and Pierce: Image as Practice among the Early Formative La Candelaria, First Millennium AD, Northwest Argentina.” In Encountering Imagery: Materialities, Perceptions, Relations, ed. Ing-Marie Back Danielsson, Fredrik Fahlander, and Ylva Sjöstrand, 13–28. Stockholm Studies in Archaeology. Stockholm: Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, University of Stockholm.
Anders, Ferdinand. 1967. Codex Tro-Cortesianus (Codex Madrid). Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt.
Aoyama, Kazuo. 1995. “Microwear Analysis in the Southeast Maya Lowlands: Two Case Studies at Copan, Honduras.” Latin American Antiquity 6 (2): 129–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/972148.
Astor-Aguilera, Miguel Angel. 2010. The Maya World of Communicating Objects: Quadripartite Crosses, Trees, and Stones. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Berdan, Frances F., and Patricia R. Anawalt, eds. 1992. The Codex Mendoza. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bleed, Peter. 2008. “Skill Matters.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 15 (1): 154–66. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-007-9046-0.
Boone, Elizabeth. 2006. “Fejérváry-Mayer, Codex.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures, ed. Davíd Carrasco. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Accessed February 5, 2018. http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195108156.001.0001/acref-9780195108156-e-230.
Burns, Allan F. 1983. Epoch of Miracles: Oral Literature of the Yucatec Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Clark, John E., and Mary E. Pye. 2000. “The Pacific Coast and the Olmec Question.” In Olmec Art and Archaeology in Mesoamerica, vol. 58, ed. John E. Clark and Mary E. Pye, 217–51. Studies in the History of Art. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art.
Diamanti, Melissa. 2000. “Excavaciones en el conjunto de los Patios E, F, y M, Grupo 9N-8 (Operación XV).” In Proyecto Arqueológico Copán Segunda Fase: excavaciones en el área urbana de Copán, Tomo IV, ed. William T. Sanders, 21–341. Tegucigalpa, Honduras: Secretaría de Cultura, Artes y Deportes, Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
Dibble, Charles. 1982. “Sahagún’s Historia.” In Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Introduction and Indices, trans. Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 9–23. Santa Fe, NM, and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and University of Utah.
Eberl, Markus. 2013. “Nourishing Gods: Birth and Personhood in Highland Mexican Codices.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 23 (3): 453–76. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774313000437.
Franklin, Ursula M. 1999. The Real World of Technology, rev. ed. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.
Furst, Jill L.M. 1995. The Natural History of the Soul in Ancient Mexico. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Gerstle, Andrea D., and David Webster. 1990. “Excavaciones en 9N-8, conjunto del patio D.” In Proyecto Arqueológico Copán Segunda Fase: excavaciones en el área urbana de Copán, Tomo III, ed. William T. Sanders, 25–368. Tegucigalpa, Honduras: Secretaría de Estado en el Despacho de Cultura y Turismo, Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
Gillespie, Susan D. 2001. “Personhood, Agency, and Mortuary Ritual: A Case Study from the Ancient Maya.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20 (1): 73–112. https://doi.org/10.1006/jaar.2000.0369.
Gillespie, Susan D. 2008. “Aspectos corporativos de la persona (personhood) y la encarnación (embodiment) entre los Mayas del Periodo Clásico.” Estudios de Cultura Maya 31: 65–89.
Gonlin, Nancy. 1993. “Rural Household Archaeology at Copan, Honduras.” PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, State College.
Gossen, Gary H. 1974. Chamulas in the World of the Sun: Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gossen, Gary H. 1996. “Animal Souls, Co-essences, and Human Destiny in Mesoamerica.” In Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities, ed. A. James Arnold, 80–107. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Gossen, Gary H. 1999. Telling Maya Tales: Tzotzil Identities in Modern Mexico. New York: Routledge.
Gossen, Gary H. 2002. Four Creations: An Epic Story of the Chiapas Mayas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Guiteras-Holmes, Calixta. 1961. Perils of the Soul: The World View of a Tzotzil Indian. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.
Hallowell, A. Irving. 2002 [1960]. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View.” In Readings in Indigenous Religion, ed. Graham Harvey, 18–49. London: Continuum.
Hendon, Julia A. 1999. “Spinning and Weaving in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica: The Technology and Social Relations of Textile Production.” In Mayan Clothing and Weaving through the Ages, ed. Barbara Knoke de Arathoon, Nancie L. González, and J. M. Willemsen Devlin, 7–16. Guatemala City: Museo Ixchel del Traje Indígena.
Hendon, Julia A. 2000. “Having and Holding: Storage, Memory, Knowledge, and Social Relations.” American Anthropologist 102 (1): 42–53. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2000.102.1.42.
Hendon, Julia A. 2006. “Textile Production as Craft in Mesoamerica: Time, Labor, and Knowledge.” Journal of Social Archaeology 6 (3): 354–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469605306067841.
Hendon, Julia A. 2010. Houses in a Landscape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hendon, Julia A. 2012. “Objects as Persons: Integrating Maya Beliefs and Anthropological Theory.” In Power and Identity in Archaeological Theory and Practice: Case Studies from Ancient Mesoamerica, ed. Eleanor Harrison-Buck, 82–89. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Hendon, Julia A., William T. Fash, and Eloísa Aguilar Palma. 1990. “Excavaciones en 9N-8, Conjunto del Patio B.” In Proyecto Arqueológico Copán Segunda Fase: Excavaciones en el área urbana de Copán Tomo II, ed. William T. Sanders, 110–293. Tegucigalpa, Honduras: Secretaría de Estado en el Despacho de Cultura y Turismo, Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
Hendon, Julia A., Rosemary A. Joyce, and Jeanne Lopiparo. 2014. Material Relations: The Marriage Figurines of Prehispanic Honduras. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Hernández, Christine, and Victoria R. Bricker. 2004. “The Inauguration of Planting in the Borgia and Madrid Codices.” In The Madrid Codex: New Approaches to Understanding an Ancient Maya Manuscript, ed. Gabrielle Vail and Anthony Aveni, 277–320. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Houston, Stephen, and David Stuart. 1989. The Way Glyph: Evidence for “Co-essences” among the Classic Maya. Washington, DC: Center for Maya Research.
Ingold, Tim. 2001. “Beyond Art and Technology: The Anthropology of Skill.” In Anthropological Perspectives on Technology, ed. Michael B. Schiffer, 17–31. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture. London: Routledge.
Jansen, Maarten E.R.G. 2006a. “Borgia, Codex.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures: The Civilizations of Mexico and Central America, ed. Davíd Carrasco. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10.1093/acref/9780195108156.001.0001.
Jansen, Maarten E.R.G. 2006b. “Vaticanus B, Codex.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures: The Civilizations of Mexico and Central America, ed. Davíd Carrasco. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10.1093/acref/9780195108156.001.0001.
Joyce, Rosemary A. 1991. Cerro Palenque: Power and Identity on the Maya Periphery. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Joyce, Rosemary A. 2000a. Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Joyce, Rosemary A. 2000b. “Girling the Girl and Boying the Boy: The Production of Adulthood in Ancient Mesoamerica.” World Archaeology 31 (3): 473–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438240009696933.
Joyce, Rosemary A. 2004. “Mesoamerica: A Working Model for Archaeology.” In Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice, ed. Julia A. Hendon and Rosemary A. Joyce, 1–42. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Joyce, Rosemary A., and Susan D. Gillespie. 2015. “Making Things out of Objects That Move.” In Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice, ed. Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie, 3–19. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.
Joyce, Rosemary A., Julia A. Hendon, and Jeanne Lopiparo. 2014. “Working with Clay.” Ancient Mesoamerica 25 (2): 411–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536114000303.
Joyce, Rosemary A., and Joshua Pollard. 2010. “Archaeological Assemblages and Practices of Deposition.” In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, ed. Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, 291–309. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keller, Charles M. 2001. “Thought and Production: Insights of the Practitioner.” In Anthropological Perspectives on Technology, ed. Michael Brian Schiffer, 33–45. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Killick, David. 2004. “Social Constructionist Approaches to the Study of Technology.” World Archaeology 36 (4): 571–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/0043824042000303746.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Laughlin, Robert M. 1976. Of Wonders Wild and New: Dreams from Zinacantán. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 22. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Laughlin, Robert M., trans., and Carol Karasik, ed. 1988. The People of the Bat: Mayan Tales and Dreams from Zinacantán. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Lopiparo, Jeanne. 2003. “Household Ceramic Production and the Crafting of Society in the Terminal Classic Ulua Valley, Honduras.” PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.
Lopiparo, Jeanne, and Julia A. Hendon. 2008. “Honduran Figurines and Whistles in Context: Production, Use, and Meaning in the Ulua Valley.” In Mesoamerican Figurines: Small-Scale Indices of Large-Scale Social Phenomena, ed. Christina T. Halperin, Katherine A. Faust, Rhonda Taube, and Aurore Giguet, 51–74. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.
Mauss, Marcel. 2006 [1947]. “Technology.” In Techniques, Technology, and Civilisation, ed. Nathan Schlanger, trans. Dominique Lussier, 97–140. New York: Durkheim Press/Berghan Books.
Miller, Daniel. 2010. Stuff. Cambridge, MA: Polity.
Mills, Barbara, and William H. Walker, eds. 2008. Memory Work: Archaeologies of Material Practice. Santa Fe, NM: School of Advanced Research Press.
Monaghan, John. 1995. The Covenants with Earth and Rain: Exchange, Sacrifice, and Revelation in Mixtec Sociality. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Monaghan, John. 1998a. “Dedication: Ritual or Production?” In The Sowing and the Dawning: Termination, Dedication, and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethnographic Record of Mesoamerica, ed. Shirley B. Mock, 47–52. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Monaghan, John. 1998b. “The Person, Destiny, and the Construction of Difference in Mesoamerica.” Res 33: 137–46.
Nash, June. 2015. “Mayan Artisan Production: Creation of the World and Re-Creation of Another World.” In Artisans and Advocacy in the Global Market: Walking the Heart Path, ed. Jeanne Simonelli, Katherine O’Donnell, and June Nash, 19–41. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.
Nicholson, H. B. 2006. “Borgia Group of Pictorial Manuscripts.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures: The Civilizations of Mexico and Central America, ed. Davíd Carrasco, 1:98–101. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10.1093/acref/9780195108156.001.0001.
Oakes, Maud. 1951. The Two Crosses of Todos Santos: Survivals of Mayan Religious Ritual. Bollingen Series 27. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pitarch Ramón, Pedro. 1996. “Animismo, colonialism y la memoria histórica Tzeltal.” Revista Espanola de Antropologia Americana 26: 183–203.
Pitarch Ramón, Pedro. 2011. “Los dos cuerpos mayas: Esbozo de una antropología elemental indígena.” Estudios de Cultura Maya 37: 149–78.
Portisch, Anna Odland. 2010. “The Craft of Skillful Learning: Kazakh Women’s Everyday Craft Practices in Western Mongolia.” In Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation between Mind, Body, and Environment, ed. Trevor H. J. Marchand, 59–75. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Prechtel, Martin, and Robert S. Carlsen. 1988. “Weaving and Cosmos among the Tzutujil Maya of Guatemala.” Res 15: 123–32.
Recinos, Adrián. 1950. Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya. Trans. Delia Goetz and Sylvanus Morley. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Reed, Nelson. 1964. The Caste War of Yucatan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Searcy, Michael T. 2011. The Life-Giving Stone: Ethnoarchaeology of Maya Metates. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Sexton, James D., and Fredy Rodríguez-Mejía. 2010. The Dog Who Spoke and More Mayan Folktales/El Perro que habló y más cuentos mayas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Stross, Brian. 1998. “Seven Ingredients in Mesoamerican Ensoulment: Dedication and Termination in Tenejapa.” In The Sowing and the Dawning: Termination, Dedication, and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethnographic Record of Mesoamerica, ed. Shirley Boteler Mock, 31–39. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Sullivan, Thelma. 1994. A Scattering of Jades: Stories, Poems, and Prayer. Ed. T. J. Knab. New York: Touchstone.
Tedlock, Barbara. 1992. Time and the Highland Maya, rev. ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Tedlock, Dennis. 1993. Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices and Visions of the Living Maya. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
Tedlock, Dennis. 2010. 2000 Years of Mayan Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Thompson, J. Eric S. 1972. A Commentary on the Dresden Codex, a Maya Hieroglyphic Book. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
Tozzer, Alfred M. 1941. Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 18. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology.
Vail, Gabrielle. 2004. “A Reinterpretation of Tzolk’in Almanacs in the Madrid Codex.” In The Madrid Codex: New Approaches to Understanding an Ancient Maya Manuscript, ed. Gabrielle Vail and Anthony Aveni, 215–52. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Vail, Gabrielle, and Anthony Aveni. 2004. “Research Methodologies and New Approaches to Interpreting the Madrid Codex.” In The Madrid Codex: New Approaches to Understanding an Ancient Maya Manuscript, ed. Gabrielle Vail and Anthony Aveni, 1–30. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Vail, Gabrielle, and Victoria R. Bricker. 2004. “Haab Dates in the Madrid Codex.” In The Madrid Codex: New Approaches to Understanding an Ancient Maya Manuscript, ed. Gabrielle Vail and Anthony Aveni, 171–214. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Vogt, Evon Z. 1965. “Zinacanteco ‘Souls.’ ” Man 65: 33–35. https://doi.org/10.2307/2797520.
Vogt, Evon Z. 1969. Zinacantan: A Maya Community in the Highlands of Chiapas. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674436886.
Vogt, Evon Z. 1976. Tortillas for the Gods: A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vogt, Evon Z. 1998. “Zinacanteco Dedication and Termination Rituals.” In The Sowing and the Dawning: Termination, Dedication, and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethnographic Record of Mesoamerica, ed. Shirley Boteler Mock, 21–30. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Wagley, Charles. 1949. The Social and Religious Life of a Guatemalan Village. Memoir 71. Menasha, WI: American Anthropological Association.
Watanabe, John M. 1992. Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Willey, Gordon R., and Richard M. Leventhal. 1979. “Prehistoric Settlement at Copan.” In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, ed. Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, 75–102. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Willey, Gordon R., Richard M. Leventhal, Arthur A. Demarest, and William L. Fash. 1994. Ceramics and Artifacts from Excavations in the Copan Residential Zone. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.