William A. Saturno
National Endowment for the Humanities and Weatherhead Resident Scholar
Affiliation at time of award:
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of New Hampshire
PROJECT:
Let There Be Kings: Creation Mythology and the Origins of Maya Divine Rule
When William A. Saturno relates the tale of the San Bartolo murals’ serendipitous discovery in 2001, his voice still carries a tinge of wonder. Sent by a colleague to find carved stone stellae, Saturno was seeking shelter from the sun in a looters tunnel when he noticed the murals. “Pure happenstance,” he admits. “Brilliantly painted in a rich array of colors, the murals are extremely refined and detailed, and offer a broad new corpus of iconographic information concerning mythology, cosmology, costume, and deity attributes,” wrote Saturno. As thrilling as the murals promised to be, however, he would wait two years before beginning excavation. “Never in the history of Maya archaeology have murals been excavated in a way that preserved them appropriately,” Saturno explains. “Focusing on mural conservation concerns, we planned for two years so that conservation would not be an afterthought but fully integrated into the excavation.”
The San Bartolo chamber measures nine and one-half meters by four meters, a brilliant open space with elaborate depictions on all four walls. Involving more than forty interacting figures, the creation myth shows the Maize God and his son Hunahpu directing the construction of the four-sided world and participating in the original coronation of kings. Saturno’s book, Let There Be Kings: Creation Mythology and the Origins of Maya Divine Rule, will be the first definitive monograph on these murals by a scholar involved in their initial discovery and subsequent excavation.
Tamara L. Bray
National Endowment for the Humanities Resident Scholar
Affiliation at time of award:
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
Wayne State University
PROJECT:
Material Practice and Imperial Design in the Ancient Andes
Long unappreciated due to its seemingly repetitive nature, this pottery is found high and low throughout the Inca realm. So uniform is it in appearance that it was once suggested that “a whole jar could confidently be reconstructed from a single sherd.” In Bray’s study, Materializing Ideology: Form, Function, and Style of Imperial Inca Pottery in the Service of the State, she investigates the possibility that the imagery noted on the ubiquitous culinary equipment of the Inca may have been “visually communicating the Inca origin story underpinning state claims to legitimacy.” Further, the forms and functions of the pots and their uses in the central practices of food, feasting, and reciprocity in Inca imperial politics reveals “the unique power of material symbols to silently communicate, condition, and compel desired actions and behaviors.”
By insinuating symbols of political authority into everyday practices, the Inca established an inconspicuous presence asserting social facts “which, if stated explicitly, could run the risk of controversy, protest, or refusal,” observed Bray. Her study engages the concept of “material agency,” or the power of objects to “extend the agency of those who produced them, and to participate in systems of social relationships.”
Rosamel Millamán Reinao
Katrin H. Lamon Resident Scholar
Affiliation at time of award:
Professor and Director
Escuela de Antropologia
Universidad Catolica de Temuco, Chile
and Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Anthropology
Graduate Center
City University of New York
PROJECT:
The Mapuche in Chile and their Forms of Collective Autonomy
Micaela di Leonardo
National Endowment for the Humanities Resident Scholar
Affiliation at time of award:
Professor
Department of Anthropology
Northwestern University
PROJECT:
The View From Cavallaro’s: History, Power, and Public Culture in New Haven
Jean M. Langford
Salus Mundi Resident Scholar
Affiliation at time of award:
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of Minnesota
PROJECT:
Critical Spirits: Southeast Asian Memories and Disciplines of Death
In Critical Spirits: Southeast Asian Memories and Disciplines of Death, Langford explores how the refugees’ resistance to contemporary practices in U.S. medical and mortuary institutions relates not only to cultural differences but also to wartime memories that link violence and medicine. “During war, when hospitals were partisan and prisoners had no rights, spirits were trusted protectors,” says Langford. Medical inadequacy, desecration of burial sites, and hauntings by those who died violent deaths recur as themes in refugees’ wartime memories.
“Refugees often experience modern disciplines of death as procedures in which their lives are devalued, their ancestors violated, and their spiritual practices disallowed,” Langford says. The refugees in her study, who identify as Lao Loum, Hmong, Kmhmu, and Khmer, were disturbed by many common end-of-life practices in the US such as telling terminally ill loved ones they are dying. The shock of this “truth-telling” may drive the spirit out, weaken the body, and hasten death, many refugees explained.
Disclosure of terminal prognoses, “do not resuscitate” orders, advance health directives, and other bioethical conventions are intended to increase patient autonomy in a context of sophisticated medical technologies that prolong life. However, the refugees’ wartime and diaspora worlds are characterized more by community loyalties to the living and the dead than the generic scenarios of advanced directives. In other words, one person’s “death with dignity” is another person’s nightmare: the inability to fulfill a commitment to the dead.
Circulating narratives of restless, angry, and disoriented spirits aren’t “just quaint little cultural stories or beliefs,” Langford contends. “They are also political commentaries expressing protest, dissatisfaction, discomfort, and political marginality. We need to pay attention to them.”
Caroline Yezer
Weatherhead Resident Scholar
Affiliation at time of award:
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Cultural Anthropology
Duke University
PROJECT:
Memory and Truth in the Shadow of War: Local and National Reconciliation in the Andes
“Villagers repeatedly told me about ways that they had been engañado, meaning both tricked and betrayed, by rebels and the state,” says Caroline Yezer, who conducted over two years of fieldwork in a small highland village in Ayacucho. When Peru initiated a state-led Truth Commission in 2002 to research and document both state and rebel war crimes, the villagers participated eagerly — but the experience proved unnerving.
The Commission’s general survey questions touched on their compromised history and elicited anxiety, suspicion and ultimately, rejection. “Like the simulated military uniforms worn by attacking rebels, people said the whole inquiry was all a ruse, meant to fool villagers into betraying themselves again,” Yezer explains.
These conspiracy theories resonated with Biblically-inspired rumors circulating among growing converts from Catholicism to Evangelismo, or born-again Christianity. In Yezer’s dissertation, Memory and Truth in the Shadow of War: Local and National Reconciliation in the Peruvian Andes, she examines how, for some villagers, Christian Gospel prophesies—rather than the humanitarian rhetoric of the Truth Commission—shaped the recounting of the war. Apocalyptic rhetoric offered villagers a context for both the terrors of the war and the ongoing brutal treatment by the state police aimed at controlling the drug trade and destroying their livelihood.
“As truth commissions become a global standard to mark a nation’s transition from abusive to democratic regimes, we must understand the dissent that may exist alongside them,” observes Yezer. “Anthropology is in an excellent position to show the local meanings behind rejection of official peacekeeping projects. In Peru, challenges to the Truth Commission were not irrational, but alternative forms of testifying to the violence and exclusion of peasants in the Andes today.”