Mary Weismantel: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots
Channel: The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory
Date: 2022-06-29

In the Things in Theory conversation series, 3CT fellow Shannon Lee Dawdy engages scholars from different disciplines who work at the intersection of material culture studies and contemporary theory. What role do objects, architecture, and landscapes play in social and political life? What happens when we take things seriously?

Here, Dawdy speaks with Mary Weismantel, a cultural anthropologist who writes about indigeneity in the Americas, with a focus on Andean South America (Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia). Throughout her career, Weismantel has pushed the boundaries of ethnography through a consistent engagement with materiality and the nonhuman.

In her new book, Playing with Things: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots (University of Texas Press, 2021), Weismantel moves into the ancient past. More than a thousand years ago on the north coast of Peru, Indigenous Moche artists created a large and significant corpus of sexually explicit ceramic works of art. These works depict a diversity of sex organs and sex acts, and an array of solitary and interconnected human and nonhuman bodies. To the modern eye, these Moche “sex pots,” as Weismantel calls them, are lively and provocative but also enigmatic creations whose import to their original owners seems impossible to grasp. Her book refutes this assumption, and shows us the pots, not merely as inert objects from a long-dead past but as vibrant Indigenous things, alive in their own human temporality, who have much to teach us about what it means to be human, to have a body and to have (a) sex.

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Recorded November 4, 2021. All rights to the words and ideas expressed in this video are retained exclusively by their authors. If you would like to reuse a segment of this video, please contact the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory to request permission.