Resumen de Making and marking maleness and valorizing violence: a bioarchaeological analysis of embodiment in the Andean past
The unmarked category of man and claims of innate violence have been tightly linked in the public imagination and in much scholarly work, both in views of the past and the present and in how those temporalities mutually inform one another. However, these notions of the naturally violent man eschew the evidence showing how social, political, and other processes interact to make and mark gender and connect narratives about violence with gender and other aspects of identity. Drawing on examples from the pre-Hispanic and early Spanish colonial Andean world, I explore how (bio)archaeology investigates both overt physical violence and structures of violence that can be hidden yet are deeply impactful. This kind of analysis places the archaeological body at the core, also interrogating how norms about violence become embodied. Through a consideration of this constructive process, I examine the corporal effects of various narratives about violence, gender, and the body in the (pre)historic Andes. These (bio)archaeological and ethnohistoric data are also examined to scrutinize how these stories of past violence are used in the service of normalizing and naturalizing (male) violence today.
