Texto

Gender in Pre-Hispanic America
Cecelia F. Klein, Editor
Jeffrey Quilter, General Editor
Published by
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
Washington, D.C.
© 2001 Dumbarton Oaks

Trustees for Harvard University
Washington, D.C.
Printed in the United States of America
Introduction
CECELIA F. KLEIN
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
T
he idea of holding a Dumbarton Oaks conference on Pre-Columbian
gender was orginally proposed by Barbara Voorhies and Heather
Lechtman at a meeting of the Dumbarton Oaks senior fellows in 1994.
The initial response of the rest of the group was mixed, with much of their
hesitation stemming from fear that a conference on Pre-Columbian gender
would be premature. Since gender studies were still very young in preconquest
American research, some argued, too few Pre-Columbianists were yet engaged
in them. Others knew, however, that substantial numbers of Americanists were
already working on gender issues. As a senior fellow at the time, I spoke with
particular enthusiasm in support of the proposal. As a result, not only did the
committee agree to pursue the project, but I found myself agreeing to serve as
the conference organizer, as well.
My interest in gender issues had been kindled back in the late 1970s by the
discovery of the huge Aztec stone-carved relief of a nude, bound, decapitated,
and dismembered woman named Coyolxauhqui. The relief was found at the
foot of pyramid stairs leading to the temple that housed the principal statue of
the state’s patron war god, Huitzilopochtli. The scene corresponds to colonial
texts that record an Aztec legend in which Huitzilopochtli kills a rebellious
sister, Coyolxauhqui, and then rolls her body down a mountain, where it breaks
into pieces. In several articles (Klein 1988, 1993, 1994), I tried to explain why
the Aztec state would have invested so heavily in a monumental depiction of
this defeated woman and what it might tell us about the rhetorical role of
gender in both Aztec social relations and imperial discourse. In the course of
searching for answers to these questions, I learned of a surprising number of
fellow Pre-Hispanicists who were likewise asking questions about the role and
status of women in the early Americas, both in Mesoamerica and in the Andean
region. This was one reason why I felt sure that Dumbarton Oaks would have
no trouble putting together a quality conference on Pre-Columbian gender.
1
Cecelia F. Klein
Being vastly wiser than I was then, I can now say, however, that at the time
I had no idea how many of my colleagues shared my interest in Pre-Hispanic
gender issues. Had it been feasible, Dumbarton Oaks could easily have ex-
tended this conference for another week, or even longer, without exhausting
the pool of f irst-class contributors. It ultimately became clear to me that, far
from being premature, a conference on gender in the preconquest Americas
was already overdue.
By 1996, the year in which the Dumbarton Oaks gender conference was
held, there had not yet been a follow-up to the pioneering interdisciplinary
symposium, “The Role of Gender in Pre-Columbian America,” organized by
art historians Virginia E. Miller and Mary Ellen Miller for the 1985 Interna-
tional Congress of Americanists in Bogotá, Colombia. The published proceed-
ings of that symposium, which were edited by Virginia E. Miller and appeared
in 1988, still stand alone in their class. While the presenters at the Bogotá sym-
posium had included art historians as well as archaeologists, virtually all subse-
quent conferences on Pre-Columbian gender were lodged in, and featured
presenters from, the social sciences; no art historians were ever involved. Pre-
Columbian art historians, moreover, had organized no gender conferences of
their own. In other words, social scientists and art historians studying precontact
American cultures had gone their separate ways between 1988 and 1996, with
the art historians working in total isolation from one another.
It is not entirely clear why gender specialists in Pre-Columbian art history
were so slow to organize and collaborate with their colleagues in other disci-
plines, although there were still comparatively few trained Pre-Columbian art
historians working on gender in 1996.1 In addition to myself, only the art his-
torians Magali Marie Carrera (1979), Betty Ann Brown (1983), Susan Milbrath
(1988, 1995, 1996), Virginia E. Miller (1988), Andrea Joyce Stone (1988, 1991),
and Margaret Campbell Arvey (1988, n.d.) had written extensively on Pre-
Columbian gender issues at that time. This number contrasts signif icantly with
that of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, both in the United States
and in Latin America, who have worked on Pre-Columbian gender since the
early 1960s.2
1
By “trained Pre-Columbian art historians” I mean scholars with advanced degrees in
Pre-Columbian art history, as opposed to any other discipline. This does not imply, of
course, that scholars trained in other disciplines cannot “do” art history or that their work is
not important to art historians. In fact, some of the most important insights into the rela-
tion of Pre-Columbian art to gender have been provided by archaeologists, anthropolo-
gists, and historians.
2
For a concise survey of the work done on gender in the preconquest Americas up to
1988, see Miller (1988).
2
Introduction
The f irst serious study of the representation and role of women in ancient
America was produced by Tatiana Proskouriakoff, who had served as architec-
tural illustrator for the 1939–40 Carnegie Institution of Washington archaeo-
logical expedition to the Maya area. Although Proskouriakoff herself was trained
not as an archaeologist or an anthropologist but as an architect and draftsman,
her f ield experience and f inancial support had come from the social sciences.
In 1961, Proskouriakoff published the seminal article “Portraits of Women in
Maya Art,” in which she identif ied a number of human f igures in Classic Maya
stone sculpture, which had been previously thought male, as portraits of royal
women. This was soon followed by her studies (1963, 1964) of the inscriptions
of Yaxchilán, which shed further light on representations and roles of high-
ranking Maya women.
Studies of Pre-Columbian gender in Central Mexico were likewise initi-
ated by social scientists. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, anthropologists June
Nash (1978, 1980) and Eleanor Leacock (Leacock and Nash 1977) raised im-
portant questions about the change in women’s status in the process of the
formation of the Aztec state and its expansion. For South America, the earliest
systematic studies of Pre-Hispanic Andean women were also conducted by
anthropologists (although they frequently focused on visual representations),
such as Irene Silverblatt (1976, 1980, 1987), Anne Marie Hocquenghem (1977;
Hocquenghem and Lyon 1980), Patricia J. Lyon (1979), and Alana Cordy-Collins
(1983). Curiously, the only serious study of Pre-Columbian sexuality was pub-
lished in 1971 by a physician, Francisco Guerra, who focused on sexual devi-
ance. One of the pioneers in the f ield of Pre-Columbian gender studies was
Mark Graham, who was trained as an art historian. His 1985 doctoral disserta-
tion on Pre-Columbian Costa Rican stone sculpture contains important ideas
about gender ideology in Central America.
The lag may speak to the traditional reluctance on the part of Pre-Columbian
art historians to insert their f indings and ideas into broader intellectual dis-
courses (see Conkey, this volume). As Dana Leibsohn (n.d.) observed in her
1994 assessment of the state of current research in Mesoamerican art history,
Mesoamerican art historians have not tended to relate their f indings to issues
and problems taken up in other f ields and disciplines. Not only do they publish
very little of their work in journals, but when they do, they often do not
publish in mainstream periodicals. I think it is safe to say that what holds true
for Mesoamerican art historians can be extended to Pre-Columbian art histo-
rians working elsewhere in Latin America.
The explanation of this phenomenon may lie in the history of the f ield,
since Pre-Columbian art history initially derived its main inspiration from the
3
Cecelia F. Klein
school of European art formalism. Moreover, many of its practitioners started

out as artists (Klein 1982a, 1982b, 1989, n.d.). Earlier studies therefore tend to
be descriptive, iconographic, and formalist in nature, rooted in particulars whose
theoretical value was limited to comparisons with Old World forms and subject
matter. When Old World comparisons came to be seen as limited in value, Pre-
Hispanicists trained in the discipline began to distance themselves from many
of the premises and methods of Western art history. The belief was that these
had been inappropriately transferred to non-Western cultures, and that we should
try to understand Amerindian art “on its own terms” rather than apply theo-
retical models developed for and by European culture. Moreover, whereas most
social scientists def ine as their ultimate charge a general understanding of hu-
man behavior, few Pre-Columbian art historians try to place art in this broader
context. The result is that most Pre-Hispanic art historians still eschew broad
questions that transcend geographic and temporal specif icity. Although many
of their f indings have important implications for scholars working in other
disciplines and f ields, Pre-Columbian art historians have seldom attempted to
point out these implications, to explore the links between what they do and
what scholars outside their discipline do.
In putting together the slate for this conference, I therefore invited scholars
who not only had recently made signif icant contributions to studies of Pre-
Columbian gender, but whose work had broad implications of potential inter-
est to scholars working on gender issues in other parts of the world, as well.
That is, it was my intention to bring Pre-Columbian gender studies to the
attention of not only other Pre-Columbianists, but also scholars working in a
variety of disciplines. While many of the presenters had never indicated a par-
ticular interest in “theory” per se, I saw their work as rich in theoretical poten-
tial. By putting them on the same program with several scholars who actively
engaged in theory building, including Margaret W. Conkey, our commentator,
I hoped to stimulate a dialogue across disciplinary lines. I encouraged Conkey,
who works with the archaeology of gender in European prehistory as well as
with gender theory, to share her impressions of our work in order to assess just
where Pre-Columbian gender studies might “f it” within the larger picture of
gender studies in archaeologically known societies. It is representative of the
state of the f ield that, like Conkey, all of the more theoretically oriented schol-
ars who participated in the conference were archaeologists or anthropologists.
To further broaden the discourse on gender, I included among the confer-
ence speakers a historian and an ethnographer.3 My goal in doing so was to
3
The historian was Richard C. Trexler, from the Department of History of the State
University of New York at Binghamton. Trexler decided not to publish his essay, “Gender
4
Introduction
open up Pre-Columbian studies to a greater variety of disciplinary points of

view and make them, in turn, relevant to a greater number of scholars. In line
with this desire for intellectual breadth, I also wanted the essays to deal with
aspects of both Middle and South America and to touch on a range of time
periods. Beyond these ambitions, I was determined that we not be a roster
made up exclusively of women, since gender studies is by no means—nor
should it be—a f ield from which men are excluded. Nor did I want women
and the feminine to be the only subjects of these essays, not only because there
are many other forms of gender that deserve serious treatment, but also be-
cause we should not assume a priori that Pre-Hispanic peoples categorized and
ranked genders in the same way we do. Finally, I was anxious that the confer-
ence not be construed as unilaterally “feminist” in the sense of a monolithic or
formulaic set of working premises. Feminist theory is not unitary, and some
gender specialists, including some women, have been critical of certain forms
of it. It was my intention, rather, to “mix it up” by including presenters whose
theoretical orientation derived from other schools of thought, along with those
who refused to identify with any particular school or platform. The idea was to
generate debate and controversy.
Formulating the above criteria, however, turned out to be far easier than
fulf illing them. I found that the vast majority of Pre-Columbianists—at least,
those known to me—worked on the years immediately preceding and postdat-
ing the Spanish conquest. Most of these scholars concentrated on Central
Mexico, primarily on Nahua (i.e., Aztec) speakers. Nearly all of our gender
specialists, moreover, focused on women; and, not surprisingly, perhaps, almost
all were women! The relatively small number of male contributors in this vol-
ume therefore ref lects the current state of the f ield, in which the ratio of male
to female gender specialists is still very small.
The title of the 1996 conference, “Recovering Gender in Pre-Hispanic
America,” has been modif ied in this volume by the removal of the word recov-
ering. The change was made as a result of objections raised during the discus-
sion at the close of the conference (see Conkey, this volume). It was argued that
“recovering” falsely implied a tangible past that awaited our “discovery” should
we simply dig deeply enough in the right places. In other words, it suggests that
there is a “reality” or “truth” about gender “out there” that is accessible if we
try hard enough—and are lucky enough—to f ind it. Current postmodern
thought postulates that such access is illusory because our individual and cul-
tural perceptions and experiences condition, limit, and indeed construct what
Subordination and Political Hierarchy in Pre-Hispanic America,” in this volume. The eth-
nographer was John Monaghan, whose essay is included here.
5
Cecelia F. Klein
we see and the way in which we see it. They lead us to “f ill in the blanks”
where our information seems weakest and to organize our perceptions in spe-
cif ic, culturally determined ways. Our scientif ic “f indings,” in other words, are
ultimately interpretations or imaginings, as diverse, in the end, as the number
of people who generate them.We therefore can only “envision” the past, whether
individually or culturally, but we cannot def initively “recover” it.
Nonetheless, a number of the scholars represented in this volume still see
themselves as attempting, if not always entirely successfully, to recover some
aspect of the “truth” about past gender practices. For that reason these con-
tributors resist the implication that their hard work has yielded nothing more
than a mere “vision” of the past derived largely from their imagination. They
have noted that, regardless of whether every scholarly act involves interpreta-
tion, there are few of us who do not mentally rank these interpretations, in-
cluding our own. As Michael Ann Holly (1996: 172) puts it,“some descriptions,
explanations, and so on seem to work better than others.” This suggests that we
are still looking for—and identifying—the arguments that seem to us to be the
most “convincing.” No matter what the topic is, what makes an argument ap-
pear sound and thus worth further consideration usually depends on how well
it convinces us that it represents, or at least closely approximates, “the truth.”
The conference from which this volume derives was divided into three
half-day sessions, each focused on a different aspect of gender studies in the
ancient Americas. The f irst session dealt with methodological problems, the
second with Pre-Hispanic concepts of (or ways of thinking about) gender, and
the third with what has been called “gender politics.” Each presenter was in-
vited to participate in a specif ic session and to tackle a particular problem or
issue germane to it. Those divisions have been eliminated in the present vol-
ume because, in the end, the concerns addressed in the essays overlapped to the
point where the distinctions became meaningless: essays that had been assigned
the responsibility of addressing methodology also addressed the politics of gender,
and so forth.
Most presenters in each of the three sessions were chosen because they had
previously tackled aspects of their session’s theme, but given free rein to select
their own topic. Some speakers, however, were drafted to address a particular
question or issue that I thought needed to be covered, in some cases taking on
a pioneering role. This was the case, for example, with Carolyn Dean, who was
asked to develop an essay on Pre-Columbian notions of masculinity, a topic
about which no one had previously written extensively. In turn, I took on the
unexplored questions of whether there may have been more than two genders
in Nahua Mexico and whether preconquest Nahuas viewed ambiguous gender
in the same way that many Mesoamericans do today.
6
Introduction
Besides Conkey, the only presenters who were specif ically asked to address
problems of theory and method were those who participated in the f irst ses-
sion, “Methodological Problems in Recovering Gender.” Contributors to the
subsequent sections, “Pre-Hispanic Conceptions of Gender” and “The Politics
of Gender,” were free to theorize more extensively when revising their essays
for publication, in accord with feedback from the commentator and audience.
Few, however, chose to do so. None of the participants was asked to def ine or
problematize the very notion of gender itself, with the result that the word is
used in different ways throughout this volume. In short, there were no general,
overarching directives that might have focused all the essays on one common
problem. The intention instead was to provide a sample of some of the princi-
pal kinds of work being done in the f ield today—that is, to emphasize a variety
of approaches to Pre-Columbian gender.
A number of the essays in this volume attempt to identify and analyze some
of the most challenging problems that Pre-Hispanicists face when they under-
take to better understand the roles played by gender in remote times. Many of
these problems are the same as those encountered by other students of Pre-
Columbian culture history, deriving from the destruction of material remains,
our unfamiliarity with preconquest record-keeping systems, the slippages that
occur in the course of cultural encounters and translations, and so on. In her
interpretation of gender in the Recuay culture of Peru, usually dated to ca. 200
b.c.–a.d. 600, Joan Gero points out that gender, like climate, is an abstraction,
something that cannot be “seen” or touched. Gero emphasizes that theory is an
important methodological tool for understanding gender when one works, as
she does, in “deep prehistoric time,” without the aid of written documents.
Under such circumstances, we must pull together as many other lines of
evidence as possible—archaeological, ethnographic, linguistic, iconographic, and
anthropological. They are, however, not necessarily of equal value. Elizabeth
Brumf iel points out that, whereas the archaeological record is relatively thin
for the Aztecs of Central Mexico, the colonial written documentation is rela-
tively plentiful. This is a problem because, as Brumf iel points out, although
ethnohistories can complement archaeological data by helping archaeologists
to link material objects with specif ic kinds of activities and ideas, all written
documents have serious limitations. Central Mexican historical texts are par-
ticularly rife with problems: they are narrow in focus, lack historical depth,
typically derive from (and thus ref lect upon) life in the urban capitals (thereby
saying little about life in the hinterland), and are invariably male-centered and
Eurocentric. Moreover, the archaeological record can sometimes contest the
representational accuracy of these written sources. For example, while the ar-
chaeological records reveal that Aztec women’s status and roles changed over
7
Cecelia F. Klein
time, such changes are not noted in the ethnohistories. Instead, the written
records tend to provide static, uniform representations of gender roles and iden-
tities.
Louise Burkhart’s essay explores other problems that arise when these colo-
nial documents are used as sources of information about the Pre-Hispanic past.
Noting that all of the colonial texts were penned by Christians, whether Euro-
pean or native, Burkhart points out that we cannot just “strip away” the obvi-
ous Christian and European inf luences in these sources in order to f ind some
“pure” Pre-Hispanic truth. The very act of drafting these texts was part of a
colonial strategy, conducted in the midst of rapidly changing social circum-
stances. In our efforts to better understand Pre-Columbian concepts of gender,
it is therefore necessary to look at how gender is represented in Christian dis-
course and to appreciate the complex interrelation of native tradition and
Christian teachings that can be discerned in these documents. Burkhart notes
that too much of their content derives from a native perspective to justify
regarding them as ref lections of a truly Christian discourse. Rather, she con-
cludes, they represent a “counterdiscourse” to Christianity, possibly motivated
by a Nahua desire to portray native religion as more Christian than it really had
been, as a means of legitimizing it within the new order. The complex inter-
weaving of Nahua and European elements within this hybrid Christian fabric
highlights the diff iculties inherent in using any colonial text as a transparent
window onto the native concepts of gender.
Some of the problems posed by colonial texts, however, are inherent in
preconquest material as well. Rosemary Joyce argues that the writings of Eu-
ropeans in colonial Mexico are no more limited by political agendas and class
biases than are Pre-Hispanic texts and images. Since Pre-Hispanic graphic records
were themselves means of representing, and thus controlling, desired behavior,
sixteenth-century European observers reported a wider range of native prac-
tices and attitudes than did manuscripts and monuments that had predated the
conquest. These European sources are critical for envisioning Classic Maya
gender roles, for they suggest that Mesoamericans viewed gender as neither
innate nor immutable, but rather as f luid. All gender was derived from an “original
androgyny” manifest in dual-gendered deities and natural forms, such as maize
or the moon, that were thought to change their gender over the course of their
lives.
The way in which Pre-Hispanic peoples def ined and constructed gender is
also taken up by Dean in her examination of Andean notions of masculinity.
Dean notes the Andean emphasis on the performative nature of masculinity,
which contrasts with the understanding of femininity as a state of being. Andean
8
Introduction
women registered their femininity simply by dressing and grooming like women.
The ways in which they otherwise behaved could not compromise their gen-
der. Men, on the other hand, were def ined largely by their actions, by what
they did rather than by how they looked. In the Andes, a mature male was
expected to undertake certain tasks (such as warfare or plowing), marry, father
children, and support his family.This implies that full masculinity was attainable
only at a certain stage in the life cycle. Thus, an unmarried male Inka youth,
like a child, was regarded as sexually unbridled, if not oversexed, as well as
unbalanced, disruptive, and dangerous—in other words, as less than a man. Only
as a man aged did a single gender begin to manifest itself, and only at adult-
hood, once he had entered into a married, procreative state, did it stabilize.
Later, when men lost the ability to reproduce, they came to be viewed again as
essentially androgynous. As among the Classic Maya, then, Andean gender was
not biologically determined at birth, but rather socially constructed and f luid,
stabilizing and destabilizing over time. Andean males therefore “appeared to
move from androgyny to single sex, and back to androgyny” (p. 164).
According to Dean, the creative principle in the Andes was likewise an-
drogynous, but this androgyny represented the absence of sex, making the cre-
ator god a sexless being. This contrasts with Joyce’s characterization of Classic
Maya androgyny as dual-gendered. In my essay, where I focus on Late Postclassic
Central Mexican notions of androgyny, I insist that Mesoamericanists inter-
ested in androgyny have failed to recognize a very important conceptual dis-
tinction. This distinction opposes dual gendered-beings, of the kind discussed
by Joyce (this volume), to beings of a compromised or imperfect single gender.
It would further distinguish both of these from the completely sexless creator
being posited by Dean for the Andes. It therefore appears that there were at
least three different ways to conceptualize androgyny in Pre-Columbian times.
I suspect that ambiguous gender of all kinds was of considerable interest to
Nahuas for the same reason that it was so prominent among the Maya and the
Andeans: in all three cultures, as the essays by Dean, Joyce, and myself reveal,
gender was generally perceived as unstable. In other words, it was not thought
to be solely biologically determined, but rather could be altered at birth and
again within a person’s lifetime by social, cultural, natural, or even supernatural
means.
It is not surprising that archaeology has produced little information regard-
ing Pre-Columbian attitudes toward ambiguous gender and same-sex prefer-
ence since it is diff icult to imagine what kinds of evidence such attitudes might
have left in the material record. In her essay, Mari Carmen Serra Puche points
out, however, that archaeology has done little better with regard to women.
9
Cecelia F. Klein
Serra Puche notes that archaeologists have tended to make ancient Mesoamerican
peoples seem uniform in terms of not just their class and economic status, but
also their age and gender. She presents the results of her recent excavations at
the Tlaxcalan site of Xochitécatl, next to Cacaxtla, as an important corrective
to this failing.
Several of the authors represented in this volume inquire into the ways in
which people used gender to structure their lives and serve their interests, whether
these be of the group as a whole or of its particular factions (e.g., social classes,
ethnic groups).What purposes, in other words, did Pre-Columbian gender con-
structs actually serve? What were their social, economic, and historical effects?
John Monaghan observes that earlier anthropological attempts to answer such
questions have met deserved criticism for having rested on the faulty premise
that all human societies organize gender on the same basis as Westerners.
Monaghan points out that this complicates the process of trying to understand
how non-Western peoples actually use gender. Moreover, as a male ethnogra-
pher, Monaghan recognizes the diff iculty of asking people to discuss a taboo
subject, especially when men are being asked to discuss women and women are
being asked to answer questions about sex that have been put to them by a
man. Using f ield data that he collected in the Mixteca Alta community of
Santiago Nuyoo, Oaxaca, Monaghan therefore undertakes to discern the basis
for Nuyooteco gender distinctions through an examination of cultural taboos.
He shows that Nuyootecos seem to differentiate males and females primarily
not on the basis of their genitalia, but rather on the basis of the pregnant body.
As elsewhere in the Americas, unmarried, barren, and post-reproductive people
are not regarded as fully gendered (see Joyce, Dean, and Klein; this volume).
Monaghan’s explanation for this is that Mixtecs use organic life, including the
body and its processes, as the model for organizing the realm of production,
including institutional acts.
Like Monaghan, Joyce Marcus seeks to understand and explain the distribu-
tion of power among genders. Marcus asks, what are the conditions under
which women are more likely to attain political rule? She addresses this by
analyzing two societies, South African and Egyptian, in which women are known
to have ruled, in order to establish the two ends of a spectrum of female politi-
cal power. Mesoamerican women, she then argues, fall somewhere in the middle
of the spectrum. Her analysis reveals that, although every social arrangement
presents a special case to be studied on its own terms, there are two factors that
seem to have favored acceptance of women rulers in ancient states. The f irst
was parentage and descent; a woman was more likely to rule if her father had
been a king and her dynasty was the highest ranking in the area. The second
10
Introduction
was luck and opportunity, such as occurred when a ruler’s designated male
heirs were killed.
In her epilogue, Conkey comments on the diversity and richness of the
contributions to this volume, as well as their innovative and provocative nature.
She focuses, however, on what she sees as the pressing need for Pre-Columbianists
to use more theory in their work and to point out its implications for, and
relevance to, work in other f ields concerned with gender, history, symbol, and
social practice. Like Leibsohn (n.d.), whose assessment of the f ield was dis-
cussed above, Conkey observes that most Pre-Columbianists working with
gender have not yet learned to reach out and communicate easily with scholars
working in other f ields and disciplines. Such a reorientation toward the general
would, in Conkey’s view, eliminate some of the more specif ic problems that
she f inds in this volume, such as, for example, the tendency to view gender as
some prepackaged, universal, essentialized “thing” that can be “captured” or
“recovered.” Another problem lies with the untroubled “slippage” between past
and present that appears in those analyses of the preconquest past that are
dependent on ethnohistorical and ethnographical support. In the f inal essay in
this volume, I address some of Conkey’s points, as well as several others that
surfaced during the discussion following the conference at Dumbarton Oaks.
The audience response to the conference and to Conkey’s comments was spir-
ited, and debate continued long after the conference had ended and all partici-
pants had returned home. Since many of the issues continue to be controversial,
I have attempted to represent multiple viewpoints. Ultimately, I agree with
Conkey, who in her epilogue concludes that the essays included here represent
a signif icant contribution to Pre-Columbian gender studies. We can expect
them to stimulate future thought on a wide range of issues pertaining to gen-
der in general.
11
Cecelia F. Klein
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1982b The Relation of Mesoamerican Art History to Archaeology in the U.S. In
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Peek, Palo Alto, Calif.
1988 Rethinking Cihuacoatl: Aztec Political Imagery of the Conquered Woman.
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1989 Gaining Respect: Native American Art Studies and the Humanities. Native
American Art Studies Association Newsletter 6 (2): 3–6.
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1993 The Shield Women: Resolution of an Aztec Gender Paradox. In Current

Topics in Aztec Studies: Essays in Honor of Dr. H. B. Nicholson (Alana Cordy-
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Diego Museum of Man, San Diego, Calif.
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219–253.)
n.d. The Effect of the Social Sciences on Pre-Columbian Art History in the
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Leacock, Eleanor, and June Nash
1977 Ideologies of Sex: Archetypes and Stereotypes. In Issues in Cross-Cultural
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Leibsohn, Dana
n.d. State of Current Research: Central Mexico. Paper presented at the Association
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Lyon, Patricia J.
1979 Female Supernaturals in Ancient Peru. Ñawpa Pacha 16: 95–140.
Milbrath, Susan
1988 Birth Images in Mixteca–Puebla Art. In The Role of Gender in Precolumbian Art
and Architecture (Virginia E. Miller, ed.): 153–177. University Press of America,
Lanham, Md.
1995 Gender and Roles of Lunar Deities in Postclassic Central Mexico and Their
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1996 Eclipse Imagery in Mexica Sculpture of Central Mexico. Vistas in Astronomy
39: 479–502.
Miller,Virginia E. (ed.)
1988 The Role of Gender in Precolumbian Art and Architecture. University Press of
America, Lanham, Md.
Nash, June
1978 The Aztecs and the Ideology of Male Dominance. Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society 4 (2): 349–362.
1980 Aztec Women: The Transition from Status to Class in Empire and Colony. In
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Proskouriakoff, Tatiana
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1963 Historical Data in the Inscriptions of Yaxchilan, pt. 1. Estudios de Cultura
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Maya 4: 177–201.
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Cecelia F. Klein
Silverblatt, Irene
1976 Principios de organización femenina en el Tahuantinsuyu. Revista de Museo
Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Peru 42: 299–340.
1980 Andean Women under Spanish Rule. In Women and Colonization:Anthropological
Perspectives (Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, eds.): 149–185. Praeger, New
York.
1987 Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.
Stone, Andrea Joyce
1988 Sacrif ice and Sexuality: Some Structural Relationships in Classic Maya Art.
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202. Palenque Round Table Series 8. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
14
Field Knots and Ceramic Beaus:
Interpreting Gender in the Peruvian
Early Intermediate Period
JOAN M. GERO
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
INTRODUCTION
F
or this volume on gender I was expressly charged with addressing
methodology, and I do so. In fact, both parts of my discussion, the f ield
“knots” and the ceramic “beaus,” concern locating gender in the evi-
dence available to archaeologists, while the essay as a whole offers an example
of how gender can be approached in deep prehistoric time. However, I must
note from the start that the methodology of doing gender research in prehis-
toric contexts is not strictly, or even primarily, concerned with identifying and
inspecting archaeological artifacts and their associations (Conkey and Gero 1991:
11–14). Rather, the methodology for understanding gender in prehistory is
deeply entwined with the process of locating gender in social and political
developments, examining how gender “works”—and is reworked—under dif-
ferent historical conditions, both functionally (as a way to coordinate cultural
activities) and symbolically (as a system of meanings and social identities). In
my view, linking gender to material culture, on the one hand, and to social
processes, on the other, cannot and should not be thought of as separable en-
deavors, material culture being evidential and social processes interpretive. As I
illustrate below, it is not necessary (and sometimes not possible) to f ind empiri-
cal associations between gender and specif ic artifact classes in the archaeologi-
cal record before, or independently from, being able to reach understandings about
the signif icance of gender in the unfolding of prehistoric life. Instead, direct
empirical evidence for prehistoric sex/gender systems, like interpretive social
meanings, itself must always be construed just as all evidence is construed: it is
ambiguous and without meaning until we learn to read it, until the perspective
that we collectively take on it and the assumptions that we collectively make
about it are clarif ied.
15
Joan M. Gero
Often, the assumptions and perspectives that we use to “construe” archaeo-

logical evidence are so entrenched in traditional, disciplinary assumptions that
we do not question them; contemporary everyday semantic orderings may be
applied to otherwise ambiguous data in order to subsume the latter under pre-
existing categories of understandings as, say, when we speak of f inding an
“activity area” or a “household unit” or even an “adaptation.” The construing
assumptions have become so conventionalized and naturalized as to appear to
make the evidence itself seem unambiguous. But gender has only recently
come under analysis in archaeology, and it is therefore especially important to
subject the archaeological evidence relevant to gender inquiries to very careful
theoretical positioning. In doing so, we may well f ind ourselves having to
reexamine other foundational assumptions that we have regularly brought to
bear on more general archaeological evidence.
I start then with three methodological comments about “doing” an archae-
ology of gender for deep prehistoric time. First, we cannot expect to “see”
gender in the archaeological record any more easily than, say, we expect to
“see” climate or ethnicity. Like gender, these are complex, composite abstrac-
tions that do not translate simply and in any straightforward manner into a
single material correlate. Not only is gender not a “thing,” but it is not even a
static set of relationships between f ixed personnel. Gender is constantly nego-
tiated and reconstituted, seizing on tradition, surprising in new assertions, some-
times exaggerated and sometimes played down; it is performed routinely or
strategically. As with other complex manifestations, we bring together different
lines of evidence (“ropes of inference,” in Alison Wylie’s words [1992a]) to
“see” what, after all, may not have even been visible to the people who lived in
remote times—the variability and nuance that we may not comprehend even
in our own sex/gender system.
The second related point, then, is that we cannot require or expect a tech-
nological breakthrough to make this task easy. A technological trick, like the
rumored differentiation of male and female f ingerprints, ideally could associ-
ate males or females with specif ic objects or spaces. In some prehistoric in-
stances, we actually do have reliable gendered links between personnel and
properties, including the tupu pins discussed below. But even in those cases
where a technological breakthrough could offer a secure association between
gender and artifacts, it would not be possible to distinguish between artifact
production, artifact ownership, and artifact consumption or use; such an asso-
ciation would still leave unresolved the nature and meaning of the gendered
association with material culture. Most pressingly, gender attributions cannot
reveal what it means to be male or female, nor do technological breakthroughs
16
Field Knots and Ceramic Beaus
point us toward what we want to know about gender. Even if f ingerprints

were “sexable” (and the central FBI crime labs in Washington, D.C., staunchly
insist that they are not), we would still have little information about the critical
role that gender plays in constituting the social fabric. Therefore, asking good
questions, as well as being clear about the gender theory used to construe
evidence for gender in prehistory, is a fundamental methodological step that
supersedes gender attributions in importance.
Finally, as with other complex phenomena, we need to understand the na-
ture of what we are looking for in prehistory. To reconstruct climate, we must
know about the interaction of relevant factors, variations in climatic states,
how climate change occurs and so on, in order to be able to model what we
reconstruct. I argue that, just as we need to know ecology to study it in the past,
we need to read and understand gender theory before we “see” it in prehistory.
It is by knowing about gender that we devise appropriate analytical categories
and interpretative frameworks as part of a basic methodology, in order to recast
traditional evidence into new “gendered” understandings.
There is no shortcut, then, to locating gender; our insights into prehistoric
sex/gender systems emerge out of observations of patterning in material cul-
ture, together with clues from ethnoarchaeology, ethnohistory, cross-cultural
probabilities, iconography, and inscriptions, all heavily interwoven with under-
standings of known gender processes. Instead of postulating a standardized set
of procedures to reveal gender in deep prehistory, I will review gender patterns
and processes here as I have tied them together for one area of the Peruvian
Early Intermediate period, approximately 200 B.C.–A.D. 600—in other words,
for a specif ic sociohistoric setting—which already signif icantly conditions the
gender manifestations we can expect to f ind.
THE PERUVIAN EARLY INTERMEDIATE PERIOD

The Early Intermediate period (EIP) is def ined in terms of profound and
far-reaching sociopolitical changes; these included increasingly centralized re-
gional authorities, densely settled populations, monumental architecture at en-
larged scales, spectacular burials, a whole suite of technological innovations,
and, significantly, the explosion of extraordinary labor-intensive crafts that suggest
restricted (specialized) knowledge domains, such as Paracas textiles, Moche met-
allurgy, and the Nazca, Moche, and Recuay ceramics. In some senses, all these
changes, experienced to different degrees in different parts of the Andean world,
are construed as following from the same fundamental underlying process, namely
the consolidation and centralization of new forms of power in the hands of
f irst small-scale and then larger-scale local authorities.
17
Joan M. Gero
Fig. 1 Callejón de Huaylas, Peru.
18
In order to address gender, however, we need to translate these profound

structural transformations into newly initiated social, economic, and political
practices undertaken by individual participants or lineages. Although they may
not have been off icially titled, newly powerful individuals (or maybe lineages)
had to have exempted themselves from reciprocal labor obligations, and ulti-
mately had to have laid claims to the labor or products of their lower-ranking
kin. The broad recognition and widespread acceptance of some people’s insti-
tutionalized rights over other people’s labor, or products of their labor, and the
loss of reciprocal exchanges of labor in favor of nonreciprocal obligations,
require—and indeed imply—fundamental social reorganization, negotiation,
and contestation. How are these overarching changes mediated in local social
arrangements?
It is at this level that gender dynamics become signif icant.The undermining
of traditional kinship ties and the appearance and intensif ication of new hier-
archical power relations, as independent households and communities are trans-
formed into regional polities under civil authority, would necessarily require a
reformulation of social relations at many levels; among these, gender ideology,
gender roles, and gender relations would be profoundly reorganized. How did
gender systems both enable and resist social change? In which areas of prehis-
toric life, and in what order, did gender transformations occur, and how were
they experienced by the men and women who lived them?
These inquiries structured my research in the northern central highlands of
Peru, and more specif ically in the Callejón de Huaylas (Fig. 1), an elongated
intermontane river valley situated at 3,200 meters above sea level, bounded on
the west by the Cordillera Blanca and on the east by the older, lower Cordillera
Negra. At the beginning of the EIP, the Callejón de Huaylas witnessed the
classic EIP changes in burial patterns, site locations, and craft production, which
by late EIP times had become intensif ied, respectively, into wealth-laden buri-
als (Grieder 1978; Wegner n.d.b), large agglutinated villages, and an elaborate,
patronized ceramic tradition known as Recuay. In this archaeological context,
could one f ind women and men engaged in new ruler-to-ruled relationships?
FIELD “KNOTS” IN THE CALLEJÓN DE HUAYLAS

Based on reconnaissance and survey in the central portions of the Callejón,
I began by identifying a series of replicative, regularly spaced EIP ridgetop sites
laid out approximately at ten-kilometer intervals along the low terraces of the
valley (Gero 1991). Comparison between the two best preserved sites, Kotu
and Queyash Alto (Fig. 2), illustrates their many common characteristics. At
both sites, two small stone mounds mark the extremities of a narrow, elongated
19
Joan M. Gero
Fig. 2 Maps showing structural similarities: (left) Queyash Alto and (right)
Kotu.
ridge, and a linear alignment of rooms and courtyards f ills the entire steep-
sided ridgetop. Well-def ined terraces follow the ridge contours along their
long east-west axes. Surface collections from both sites include signif icant quan-
tities of diagnostic EIP white-on-red pottery and, in smaller amounts, Recuay
kaolin wares. These sites, with their formal layout, apparent lack of signif icant
domestic occupation residues, pattern of restricted movement along the ridgetop,
and regular spacing along the valley f loor, suggest public spaces, and I quickly
came to think of them as “administrative centers.”
From these, the site of Queyash Alto was selected for excavation, in order to
identify the activities and practices that we signify today as the “consolidation
of power.” Excavations in 1988 revealed three functionally distinct areas (Fig.
2). On the uppermost northern terrace, a discrete sector of remodeled struc-
tures and superimposed house f loors showed heavy concentrations of domes-
tic remains among hearths and charcoal lenses (Fig. 2, Sector I; Fig. 3). Here
were numerous indicators of a high-status household, including f ine-quality
decorated ceramics, cut spondylous shell, and copper tupu pins. In close associa-
tion with the residential structure was found a dramatic deposit of llama bone,
with f ive split lower mandibles as well as vertebrae (some still articulated), ribs,
20
Fig. 3 Entrance to the Queyash Alto burial chamber dug into bedrock below the lowest
house f loor in Sector I.
and split long bones, suggesting a brief dumping episode of large quantities of
butchered llama. The lowest living levels, with abundant white-on-red pottery,
date the initial occupation of the site to 170 B.C., that is, the earliest phase of
the EIP. Below these earliest f loors, in a hollow dug in the bedrock of the ridge
(Fig. 3), we discovered a superimposed pair of carefully prepared burials, both
females, with at least one infant, interred in a stone box. Diagnostic grave goods
were lacking, and only the lower female was accompanied by recoverable ma-
terials, namely, two stone beads and the remains of a monkey and several cuy.
In contrast, on the actual ridgetop itself, the area associated with the eastern
mound (Fig. 2, Sector II) revealed high densities of large uncharred, open-
necked storage vessels as well as numerous colander sherds generally linked
with the production of chicha. Thus, for at least some part of the site occupa-
tion, this sector served as a production and storage area for maize beer.
But it was the open plaza area in front of the western mound (Fig. 2, Sector
III) that held the greatest surprises. Apart from the stone courses that still de-
f ined the plaza-facing eastern side of the mound, no additional structure could
be associated with the mound. Nothing more than a north-south wall segment,
three and a half meters long, set into a well-def ined foundation trench re-
21
Joan M. Gero
Fig. 4 Early Intermediate period white-on-red straight-sided bowl; fragments of such

bowls were recovered in the feasting area of Queyash Alto. Museo Regional de Ancash,
Huaraz, Peru.
mained from what may have been an earlier structure on the western perim-
eter of the plaza. Along the eastern side of the remaining wall segment, how-
ever, were found numerous overlapping ash- and charcoal-laden pits containing
unburned and calcined fragments of llama long bones, suggesting that the best
cuts of roasted llama meat had been prepared and possibly consumed here.
Appropriately, the tools associated with meat preparation—the chipped and
ground stone bifaces and knives—were also recovered in overwhelming num-
bers from this walled plaza area of the site. In addition, we found many large
sherds of the characteristic early EIP white-on-red bowls, straight-sided and
shallow, with white slip geometric patterns painted around the external perim-
eter; the size, form, and uncharred aspect of such bowls (Fig. 4) argue for their
use as drinking vessels, most likely for chicha, which might have been served
from the large-diameter, undecorated open-necked jars that were recovered in
other sectors of the site. In fact, all three of the ceramic ladles and spoons
excavated at Queyash Alto came from this restricted area of the site, together
with two other unusual serving implements—smooth-edged bone dippers care-
fully cut out from the cranial vaults of llamas in such a way as to leave a
22
convenient handle formed by the butchered llamas’ nose bones. Taken as an

assemblage, these f inds allow us to imagine a sensuous scene of generously
f lowing libations accompanying succulent meals of roast meat, all served at the
most formally prepared and prominently positioned area of the site. When we
note the profusion of panpipe fragments from this same sector, along with a
bone f lute from the eastern mound area, we can make the further assumption
that music was provided to the preparers and consumers of meat and drink at
Queyash Alto. Thus, the excavations in Sector III give new meaning to the
“administrative” function of Queyash Alto: there is ample evidence here to
suggest formalized, ritual feasting.
I have discussed the implications of this EIP feasting elsewhere (Gero 1990,
1992), presenting it as apparently sponsored by an emerging ranked and recog-
nized social authority, possibly a prestigious kin group, which had both the
economic resources and the accepted status to convene surrounding lineages,
to impress them, and, perhaps, to repay and redistribute the products of their
labor. The EIP evidence from Queyash Alto argues that by the time of the site’s
founding, some individuals or lineages had already successfully gained control
of enough agricultural surplus to take on responsibility for redistributing food
and drink; this resident population had also extensively leveled, terraced, and
otherwise modif ied the Queyash ridgetop. The holding of feasts at Queyash
Alto by the time of its earliest occupation further suggests that the ranking of
lineages was already hereditary and passed transgenerationally, perhaps through
some combination of new systems of land-use rights, newly inheritable wealth,
a new monopolization of important outside resources, and, most likely, estab-
lished marriage rules and arrangements (Clark and Blake 1994: 21).
How to Envision Women at Queyash Alto?

At Queyash Alto, women are identif ied unarguably by the recovery of tupu
(or tikpi) pins, metal (in this case copper) clothes fasteners that were widely
used by Andean women and have been commonly recovered from archaeo-
logical sites (e.g., Bennett 1944: 48; Gambini 1983–84: 122 ff, pl. 3.3; Grieder
1978: 119–129; Isbell and Cook 1987: 30; McCown 1945: 306–308, pl. 18;
Rowe 1963: pl. 79; Tschopik 1946: 46). Not only are the bilateral garment pins
clearly being worn by EIP women on contemporaneous Recuay ceramic ves-
sels (discussed below), and reported in use in much the same fashion by Inka
women some one thousand years later (Dransart 1992, 2000; Uhle 1903: 89, pl.
19), but variants of the bilateral garment pins are also associated with early
Sumerian, Mesopotamian, and Greek women (Marcus 1994). In the Andes as
elsewhere, the pins are worn with an untailored garment (in Quechua, the
23
Joan M. Gero
aqsu), a cloth rectangle that is wrapped around the entire body from chest to
shins and then pinned vertically above each shoulder, with the sharp ends of
the pins pointing up. Sometimes an additional pin of different design is used
horizontally to fasten a second draped cloth, the lliklla, across the shoulders,
allowing it to fall down the back like a cape.
At Queyash Alto, f lat disc-headed tupu pins were recovered both in the
northern terrace residential structures and at the ridgetop feasting site. I hardly
mean to suggest here that tupus correspond in any simple way to where women
went; they do not “map” women’s movement on the site. In a more general
sense, however, these pronouncedly female-linked artifacts bespeak women’s
activities at least in these two areas of Queyash Alto.
Women’s presence is also marked by a high frequency of spindle whorls
found in all sectors of Queyash Alto. Of course, a sexual division of labor can
be arranged with either men or women (or both) designated as spinners, and
indeed men do spinning in some areas of the Andes today. The Callejón de
Huaylas region, however, manifests a long record of women undertaking the
spinning, and ethnohistorical references from the region specif ically mention
women as the primary spinners (Silverblatt 1987: 9). Thus, it seems safe here to
assign spindle whorls, at least tentatively, to the women’s domain. Over time in
the EIP, spindle whorls appear in a wider variety of materials, with the purely
ceramic types of the earlier levels supplemented in later levels with those made
of bone and polished stone.
Yet, even though they establish women’s presence at Queyash Alto, the cop-
per tupu pins and the spindle whorls do not directly reveal what is interesting or
meaningful about women’s lives in this dynamic sociopolitical context. Instead,
we must contextualize such artifacts in time and space, in association with their
immediate and not-so-immediate surroundings and in relation to relevant theo-
retical domains, to tie them, along with other artifacts, to aspects of gender in
the EIP.We recall, for instance, that copper was used extensively in the Peruvian
Andes only beginning with the EIP, precisely when Queyash Alto was f irst
occupied, so that owning and displaying the new, technologically sophisticated
copper tupus should be taken to indicate some sort of high status—or access to
relatively rare prestige items—among Queyash Alto women. Moreover, since
both tupu pins and spindle whorls were recovered from Sector I, namely, the
restricted residential area on the northern terrace that was occupied through-
out Queyash Alto’s history, it can be argued that the tupu-wearing women were
associated with an elevated kin group that was closely connected with the site,
suggesting again that these artifacts belonged not to commoners but to elite
women. Other interpretations of the prestigious tupus are more suppositional;
24
perhaps they were worn to mark important stages in a woman’s life cycle (Marcus
1994: 3), helping to construct and objectify the gender-based social distinctions
that maintained the symbolic and practical order in the EIP and at Queyash
Alto.
Women were also uniquely buried below these house f loors (perhaps as
progenitors, or founding mothers of a matriline), lending further support to
the theory of an established, distinguished, hereditary kin group, and one that
might have held women in high regard. But high-status women were also present
at the site of the feasting in Sector III, where their copper tupus and spindle
whorls are counted among the material evidence of the EIP feasting. It is likely
that women were here among the guests; it is also likely that high-status women,
who were members of the feast-sponsoring lineage, were publicly carrying out
traditional roles of food preparation and service, for example, ladling chicha
from large storage vessels into drinking bowls and handing around cuts of
meat.
On the one hand, it is hardly surprising that women are well represented at
an EIP “ceremonial center” or “administrative site,” especially once it is shown
to be a site of feasting. Modern accounts of Andean feasting regularly identify
women with responsibility for food preparation, both in traditional commu-
nity agrarian feasts (Skar 1981: 45) and in the mid-twentieth-century
hacienda-sponsored, redistributive oyanzas where landlords celebrated the har-
vest by taking large quantities of wheat, barley, maize, quinoa, and potatoes
from their storehouses and designating peasant women to prepare chicha and
food for villages of up to three hundred people (Crain 1987: 8). On the other
hand, what is compelling about the Queyash Alto case is that the prestigious
women of the feast-sponsoring lineage were carrying out traditional roles in a
charged and transformational political context, a situation that may not be par-
alleled in traditional communal feasts or in the hacienda-style, pre-land-reform,
oyanza model.
And so we arrive at our f ield “knot,” our conundrum: working back and
forth between empirical patterns and probable underlying processes, we have
found that high-ranking women resided at and participated in political feasts at
Queyash Alto. Yet we have no empirical thread to follow from this premise in
order to answer the next critical questions: what roles did women play in the
ridgetop political feasts, and what meanings would have been attached to their
participation? If indeed Queyash women were prominent players in these new
power negotiations that marked the EIP, was it primarily as traditional food
preparers? Were the elite tupu-owning, house-buried, on-site–spinning women
oblivious to, or excluded from, the politics around them and simply perform-
25
Joan M. Gero
ing as they always had, cooking food for their kin? Or were these women at the
Queyash political feasts “players” in a different sense, shaping—and sharing in—
political outcomes? To loosen this knot, I follow a different inferential thread,
turning to the EIP iconography in the Callejón de Huaylas, namely, the Recuay
ceramic tradition, in search of engendered ceramic “beaus.”
RECUAY ICONOGRAPHY
Recuay ceramics, in use during the entire EIP occupation at Queyash Alto,
are named after the province in the Callejón de Huaylas from which they were
principally collected. The Recuay ceramic style is def ined largely on the basis
of ornate funerary vessels of f ine white kaolin clay, highly decorated by both
modeling and slip painting in red, brown, and black, as well as by the use of
postf ire negative resist techniques. Pottery forms are highly variable and in-
clude necked ovate bottles with f laring or f lat disk rims, eff igy vessels of hu-
mans or animals modeled with varying degrees of representativeness, and
hemispherical bowls with pedestal ring bases painted either with simple geo-
metric patterns or with humans or animals. Long-handled spoons, dippers, and
“poppers” are also well known (Gero 1996: 546; Wegner n.d.a: 1). Virtually the
entire collection of an estimated eleven hundred classic Recuay vessels was
removed from burials in the nineteenth century and has offered no prove-
nience information beyond its mortuary context,1 although excavations at
Pashash in the 1980s revealed in situ Recuay mortuary vessels that were mostly
nonf igurative and represented variants of the classic Recuay forms and motifs
(Grieder 1978). Unfortunately, despite various researchers’ proposals, Recuay
materials still lack a credible chronological seriation; remarkably, these materi-
als exhibit much conformity both in the employment of artistic conventions
and in the presentation of particular subject matter that has persisted for centu-
ries and is manifested throughout a large portion of the northern central high-
lands and beyond (Gero 1996).
Recuay ceramics give material expression to many of the dynamic
sociopolitical changes of the EIP; like the other “mastercraft” traditions that
exploded throughout the Andean world during this period, Recuay ceramics
incorporated a high degree of decorative innovation and technical skill coupled
with a reliance on restricted raw materials (in this case, kaolin clay) for their
production.The very existence of a Recuay tradition thus suggests newly pow-
erful elites who could support and probably control the labor of specialized
1
Most interestingly, Wegner (n.d.b) has documented the 1965 collection of materials
from an undisturbed Recuay tomb that was opened by a schoolteacher in the Callejón de
Huaylas community of Jancu.
26
artisans commissioned to advertise their status, as well as a new set of economic

arrangements based on the elites’ control of productive labor and the f low of
elaborated, conventionalized goods. In this sense, the EIP “art” represents the
material product of a competitive prestige economy in which local elites par-
ticipated and which was based on the conspicuous consumption and display of
work undertaken by patronized artisans.
Similarly, the conventionalized human subjects of Recuay “art” are aspects
of an iconographic system that partake in and underscore the EIP conditions
of increasing power consolidation; in fact, the human f igures represented on
Recuay pots reiterate themes of a locally emergent sociopolitical hierarchy in
their depictions of wealth and position, pomp and ceremony. Even beyond the
specif ic subject matter, the broader iconographic context for Recuay human
images conf irms again the increasing centralization of power in the hands of
local hierarchies. That is, prior to the EIP, there exists in Andean iconography a
dramatic paucity of human depictions, to which the proliferation of human
images in the EIP Recuay and Moche traditions stands in great contrast.2 The
sudden appearance of carefully depicted, well appointed human f igures as the
subject of a ceramic tradition suggests a new perception of what is signif icant
and powerful in the human landscape. Recuay f igures have no supernatural
characteristics: they are neither jaguars nor staff gods. Rather, they command
representational attention for being nothing more than human beings, and one
reason why they command attention is, presumably, their embodiment of un-
precedented degrees of power centralized in single individuals or lineage heads—
for these local humans are themselves powerful.Without ignoring its supernatural
legitimization, we should recognize public EIP authority as overtly and in-
creasingly linked to real world management.
2
We can compare the relative scarcity of human images before and even during the
Andean EIP with the modern proliferation of human depictions in our visual landscapes.
Indeed today a great wealth of common cultural knowledge is predicated on a widely
shared familiarity with portraits of strangers (e.g., sports f igures and movie stars), and our
elites and political leaders f igure prominently among these. But in the relatively image-
poor EIP, images of contemporary human strangers would not have been central either to
a group’s common cultural knowledge or to its public life. In fact, there would have been
fewer political elites, and each would have been kin to a much higher proportion of local
people.
Whenever human images were employed early in these EIP circumstances, highly real-
istic representations (portraits) would have been unlikely to emerge, not because the tech-
nology was lacking or artisans were incapable of suff icient precision, but because realistic
likenesses of specif ic personages had no function in local groups that were both small and
personally familiar with the elite personages. This is not to say that representative portraits
of individuals could not appear under these circumstances, but simply that the situation of
local and limited power legitimation did not require them.
27
Joan M. Gero
The centrality of sociopolitical hierarchy and power consolidation as the

central features of the EIP landscape may even help to explain why Recuay
human f igures are depicted in such depersonalized manners and in such a nar-
row range of conventionalized poses. I would argue that, while processes of
power consolidation were intensifying and assuming new forms in each gen-
eration of the EIP, the lineage heads, local lords, or ethnic authorities who were
f illing (or creating) these positions were probably familiar f igures to local popu-
lations—relatives, neighbors, or acquaintances. Under these circumstances, hu-
man depictions might “represent”—in the sense of “standing for”—specif ic,
known individuals without having to actually reproduce detailed anatomical
features or individual mannerisms of gesture or dress. On the other hand, one
aspect of these local individuals that would not have been familiar was their
newly increased powers and rights to command the labor of others. Thus, as
the emerging elite class strove to expand its authoritative power and its unac-
customed, asymmetrical rights, the development of a visual vocabulary of
power—including the presentation of clothing, adornments, and other power
accoutrements—would have been useful to establish postures, gestures, and regu-
larized actions that symbolized and came to stand for the right to hold author-
ity. A relatively rigid visual vocabulary would be developed, to accompany and
be associated with high rank and its attendant rights, while the individual who
associated him- or herself with these attributes remained generalized.
In this light, it is hardly surprising that Recuay f igures are shown as stan-
dardized, legitimated f igures of power, rigidly codif ied, represented with for-
mulaic faces and bodies, devoid of expression, particularity, or active movement,
but instead arranged in a small repertoire of stately poses and with redundant
regalia that announce and reiterate their authority rather than introducing them
as specif ic individuals. Clearly, it is their power rather than their personhood
that is on display.
The Gender Content of Recuay Ceramics

If the Recuay ceramic tradition ref lects and participates fully in the EIP
intensif ication of local power bases, the iconography of Recuay also offers
fertile ground for interpreting gender.3 Recuay human subjects are directly
3
Generalizations offered here about Recuay iconography are made on the basis of a
personal photographic archive that I began assembling in 1992. It includes images from
published sources and Dr. Raphael Reichert’s yet larger archive, photographs provided by
museums across North America and Europe, and personal photographs of private collec-
tions as well as of Recuay collections at the Museum für Völkerkunde (Berlin), the Linden
Museum (Stuttgart), the American Museum of Natural History (New York), the
28
depicted as female and male and paired with specif ic items of material culture
and dress; each gender exhibits characteristic gestures and relational positions
and is shown undertaking a range of gender-specif ic, everyday and ceremonial,
activities (discussed below, pp. 29–36).The use of iconography thus promises us
straightforward gender attributions; by studying iconographic representations
we can (sometimes) bypass the tricky interpretive steps that archaeologists must
employ in order to attribute gender to more ambiguous classes of archaeologi-
cal data. Instead of using cross-cultural analogy, historical precedent, or statisti-
cally derived probabilities—all of which are mainstays of linking archaeological
materials to gender (Costin 1996)—iconography promises us a “direct look” at
gender, without any intermediary linking arguments.
Iconography also promises to ref lect shared social meanings, including shared
perspectives on gender. If we think of iconography as a conventionalized sys-
tem of representation, we can follow Michael Lynch (1988), who has noted
that conventionalized image-making coordinates the practices and understand-
ings of the producers and consumers of images. The outcome of this coordi-
nated practice is what he calls “consensual seeing,” where communities of
“consensual viewers” are created and delimited by participating in the encod-
ing and decoding of signif icant, communicable information. To accomplish
this, iconographic conventions isolate and simplify signif icant information; they
reduce extraneous detail and eliminate ambiguity to provide a f ixed perspec-
tive on the represented objects and their relations to one another. In effect,
iconographic conventions offer schematized propositions about what is impor-
tant and how it should be viewed (Lynch 1988) and provide critical access
points to understanding how prehistoric gender systems were to be thought
about. In the case of Recuay iconography, the consensual viewing that would
have emerged through the process of stylizing male and female human f igures
would have presumably included shared perspectives on gender ideology and
gender relations. The following analysis is based on my photographic archive,
which currently includes 525 Recuay vessels that directly depict gendered hu-
mans.
Females and males were f irst differentiated in Recuay ceramics by Raphael
Reichert (n.d.: 47–48), who noted that only males wore earspools and head-
dresses, while only females wore the “cowl” (or manta) head coverings and tupu
pins. Females’ mantas generally hang straight across and bisect the forehead,
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and National Museum of the Ameri-
can Indian, the Ethnographic Museum (Göteborg), the British Museum, and the Haddon
Museum (Cambridge, England).
29
Joan M. Gero
Fig. 5 Recuay vessel depicting a fe-

male. Photograph courtesy of the Lin-
den Museum, Stuttgart, cat. no. M32022L.

male with a cup. Photograph courtesy
of the Linden Museum, Stuttgart, cat.
no. M32015L.
30

male holding an infant in outstretched
arms. Photograph courtesy of the Mint
Museum of Art, Charlotte, N.C., cat.
no. 68.2.4.
then falling loosely on both sides of the face, covering the ears and sweeping
back onto the shoulders (Fig. 5). Tupu pins are positioned bilaterally on the
upper chest and either painted, often as a variant of an “anchor” form, or mod-
eled as funnels (Figs. 6, 7). Reichert further points out that females are uniquely
associated with checkerboard motifs as clothing designs, and have facial deco-
ration, often in the form of dots between the mouth and the chin (n.d.: 49;
Figs. 6, 7). Likewise only females hold infants in outstretched arms before them
(Fig. 7).
Males are most prominently identif ied by their headdresses, which can vary
greatly. Unadorned helmets (either plain or vertically striped), brimmed or
double-brimmed hats, and simple turban forms (Fig. 8) contrast with extremely
exaggerated modeled headgear that sometimes features a bilateral pair of small
animals (birds or snakes; Fig. 9), or centrally positioned animal heads, or even
entire animals (foxes?) with tails curled around the back of the headdress. In
addition to the animal motifs, there are also combinations of plumes (Fig. 10),
half-circles (Fig. 11), or bilateral representations of open hands (Figs. 10–12),4
4
The paired hands on headdresses might be thought of as representations of severed
trophy hands or warriors’ spoils of war. However, they do not occur regularly on the male
31
Joan M. Gero
Fig. 8 Recuay vessel depicting a male chewing coca and wearing simple
turban headgear. Photograph courtesy of the Linden Museum, Stuttgart,
cat. no. M32021L.
Fig. 9 Recuay vessel depicting a male under a f lat disk rim, f lanked by
two felines. Photograph courtesy of the Linden Museum, Stuttgart, cat.
no. M32053L.
32
Fig. 10 Recuay vessel depicting a

ceremonial scene, with a principal
male prone on his stomach, sur-
rounded by four females, two with
cups and two with shells(?).
Smithsonian Institution, National
Museum of Natural History, cat.
no. A552753.
any of which might be aff ixed to an underlying turban. Circular earspools,

which are usually f lat but occasionally tubular, similarly identify males, and
males more often than females wear necklaces depicted as dotted strings of
white beads (Figs. 9, 10, 13). Males are frequently shown wearing a tunic gar-
ment that hangs to the knees and ends in a fringed hem represented by an
appliqué strip that is typically painted with black triangles (Figs. 9, 11, 13); this
design never appears on women’s tunics, although it may be shown along the
edge of a woman’s manta (Fig. 5). Males uniquely carry a square shield and/or
a club (Fig. 14) and play musical instruments such as panpipes and flautas. Also,
solo males are frequently paired with larger, painted or low-relief animals that
have fully sculpted heads (Fig. 9), especially birds, felines, or snakes, while women
are seldom paired with animals or musical instruments and never with clubs or
llamas.
f igures carrying clubs and shields, but appear more frequently on males with ritual para-
phernalia such as cups. Moreover, the seeming interchangeableness of paired hands with
paired animal paws on headdresses (and indeed, the indistinguishableness of these elements
in some cases) suggests that the hands may rather refer to representations of shamanistic
power points. This bilateral hands motif is also well known from Recuay stone statues.
33
Joan M. Gero

male holding a ceremonial cup.
Photograph courtesy of the Mu-
seum für Völkerkunde, Berlin, cat.
no. VA 48270.
Fig. 12 Recuay stone statue with

the bilateral hand motif on the
male’s headdress, similar to ceramic
eff igy vessels. Museo Regional de
Ancash, Huaraz, Peru.
34
Fig. 13 Recuay vessel depicting a male

wearing a double-hemmed garment. Pho-
tograph courtesy of the Linden Museum,
Stuttgart, cat. no. M32028L.

male with a club and shield. Photo-
graph courtesy of the Museum für
Völkerkunde, Berlin, cat. no. VA
48880.
35
Joan M. Gero
Although both females and males wear unshaped garments, these seem to
be structured differently: the Recuay female is shown in an unsewn, pinned,
and belted aqsu (Figs. 6 and 7), while the male wears a side-sewn, unbelted
tunic, most clearly seen on standing males, where the unique appliqué hem
piece is accentuated. Some fully modeled males with llamas wear a double
tunic, the outer garment shorter than the inner one, and others wear an addi-
tional garment with another hem riding high over their bellies in a big arc (Fig.
13).
Other iconographic traits, however, are not gender-related. Both females
and males, clearly distinguished, carry cups or bowls (Figs. 6, 10, 11, 21) as well
as other distinctive items that are sometimes diff icult to identify. Both are shown
with their knees pulled up in a seated squat, exhibiting geometrically decorated
arms and legs; this ornamentation is better interpreted as painted or tattooed
stripes than as clothes in patterned textiles (Fig. 6), since shaped sleeves and
pants are unknown. Most surprisingly, the textile designs represented on cloth-
ing are not gender-specif ic; although frequencies vary, all the textile designs on
men’s clothes also appear on women’s, including wavy lines, vertical zigzags,
step frets, polka dots, crosses, and diamonds. (The reverse, however, is not true:
the checkerboard pattern worn by women is never seen on men.) The two
genders are likewise associated with the same animal designs of the Recuay
textile repertoire, namely cats, birds, and snakes, as well as the distinctive Great
Crested Being motif (Bruhns 1976), which frequently appears both on cup-
bearing and infant-bearing females (Fig. 15) and on males carrying clubs and
shields or f lanked by pairs of felines (Fig. 9).
Despite these overlaps, the unambiguous marking of female and male cat-
egories in Recuay human representations is itself noteworthy. Individuals are
shown with headdresses or with mantas, with earspools or with tupu pins; they
have painted (tattooed?) faces or necklaces. It is signif icant that Recuay con-
ventions do not subsume gender under a social category of “powerful person,”
but instead retain it as an independent critical marking of social personhood.
Redundant, non-overlapping sets of distinguishing characteristics “upgrade”
(Lynch 1988) gender to a central social trait, as dim heterogeneous differences
are conventionalized into invariable and clearly marked structural features that
are easily identif ied. This is all the more apparent if we consider that Recuay
women and men most likely did not continuously display the gender signif iers
shown on the ceramics. Many of these may have been reserved for public
occasions—as social personhood was formally reaff irmed and reconstituted in
ceremonies or public aggregations—and would then have been worn only by
select (elite) individuals. Yet the Recuay iconography makes gender distinc-
36
Fig. 15 Recuay vessel of a fe-

male with the prominent Great
Crested Being motif displayed
on her garment. Photograph
courtesy of the British Museum,
Christy Collection, cat. no. 96-
1230.
tions contrastive and consistent, segregating and creating bounded uniformity

between male and female populations, constituting and framing the ideology
of gender as a signif icant phenomenon.
Although my archive represents roughly f ive and a half times as many indi-
vidual males as individual females, the human eff igy vessels ultimately depict
individuals of either gender as richly garbed and associated with important
ritual paraphernalia. Solo females are as decorous as males and display a parallel
but different repertoire of standardized postures and gestures that signify women’s
arenas of authority. There seems little doubt that both females and males are
represented as powerful individuals in their own right and not, for instance, for
their associations with their spouses. In fact, pairs of Recuay individuals occur
only in ritual scenes of copulation (my archive has thirty-one at this time),
where males and females are both dressed in the most elegant clothing, some-
times with closely corresponding textiles and ornamentation. Couples may be
lying on top of the vessels, alone or surrounded by ceremonial witnesses as in a
copulation ceremony (Fig. 16); or they may be shown as a pair of interlocking,
full-relief eff igy vessels in seated positions (Fig. 17), in which case the female,
associated with the lipped container vessel, is usually taller than the male, repre-
sented by a vessel with a pouring spout.
These copulation scenes, however, leave us wondering about the absence of
eff igy vessels depicting human couples in any other social or representational
37
Joan M. Gero
context. If we are ultimately to understand the status of EIP women in shaping

political outcomes, we need to pay close attention to the representation of
“associational power” in kin or household groups. Examination of 325 solo-
male vessels and 60 solo-female vessels, and the absence of a single non-copu-
lating paired male–female representation, suggest a domestic “decoupling” of
power, with a “wife” neither deriving status from, nor sharing status with, a
“husband” (or vice versa). Instead, the solo pots suggest that rights and author-
ity were held individually, being passed down hereditarily—perhaps through
the familiar Andean bilateral patterns that are ethnographically documented
today—and/or accruing from direct control over distinctly held resources. In-
spection of other classes of Recuay vessels offer us hints about what these
gender-specif ic rights and resources may have been.
One large and clearly signif icant subcategory of eff igy vessels is represented
by forty-seven vessels with full-relief individual males standing beside full-
relief llamas (Figs. 18, 19), often holding the independently sculpted llama by a
rope and thus indicating a relationship of ownership or control between the
“llama man” and the domesticated llama. These f igures can be contrasted with
Fig. 16 Recuay vessel depicting a copulation scene, with the principal male and female
surrounded by four female ceremonial onlookers. Photograph courtesy of Raphael X.
Reichert.
38

copulation scene with the male and fe-
male in a seated position and elaborately
dressed. Photograph courtesy of the
Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin, cat.
no. VA 4775.
the solo eff igy males in low relief who are f lanked by pairs of non-llama
animals also in low-relief but with sculpted heads (e.g., Fig. 9) that show one of
the forty-one pots with f lanking felines; there are also ten examples of f lank-
ing birds, six of f lanking snakes, and two of unidentif ied mammals. The low-
relief eff igy male f lanked by a pair of wild animals, one on each shoulder,
suggests a quite different relationship, more akin to an identity-sharing or an
ideological pairing relationship between man and animal.
Although we can identify several different male personages in the Recuay
corpus (Gero n.d.), none is as distinctive as the llama man who is set apart not
only by artistic rendering but also by his headgear, garment designs, and textile
patterns. Llama men wear predominantly (but not exclusively) two different
kinds of headgear that are not generally worn by other Recuay males: the
upward-expanding fez (Fig. 18) and the tricornered hat (Fig. 19), in contrast to
the types of headgear associated with other solo males, such as the turban,
followed in popularity by the helmet and the brimmed hat. Like the turban,
either of the llama man’s two headgear variants can support a number of dif-
ferent, interchangeable, sometimes highly visible elements including the unique
enormous hemispherical crescent with short, radial grooves (Fig. 18) or the
39
Joan M. Gero
Fig. 18 Recuay llama man holding a young

llama and wearing a double tunic, notched
earspools, and “fez” with enormous half-circle.
Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino. Photo
© Jordi Blassi.
double-circle extravaganza (Fig. 19).5 The llama man is also the only wearer of
the unique notched earspools. Like other eff igy males, he may carry a shield or
play a musical instrument, but unlike other males he never carries a cup or
manifests the otherwise common male motif of a pair of hands or paws on his
headdress, and he alone carries a wara, the staff of off ice portrayed as a ba-
guette-like stick with diagonal incisions to suggest cord or yarn wrapping. His
layered tunic is also unique, with a short overgarment worn over a longer inner
garment.The common Great Crested Being motif displayed by both males and
females is absent from the clothes of the llama man.
Recuay depictions of these particularly impressive and well-dressed males
offer an important clue to the wealth of Recuay elites: they suggest that con-
trol over llama herds was the key to male wealth and prestige, and that stratif i-
cation in Recuay society was associated with the accumulation of wealth in
the form of llama herds, introduced to the northern highlands of Peru at the
end of the Early Horizon period, or very close to the beginning of the EIP.
5
Interestingly, there is an inverse relationship between the size of the headgear worn by
the llama man and the size of the llama. The llama’s model size is approximately shoulder
height to the male, but it is comparatively smaller when the headdress is larger, and, con-
versely, when the headdress is smaller, the llama becomes larger relative to the male f igure.
40
Fig. 19 Recuay llama man with a shield, wear-

ing a double tunic, notched earspools, and
unique double-circle headgear. Fundación
Museo Amano. Photo © Jordi Blassi.
In fact, we have seen llama meat distributed at the Queyash Alto feasts; in
addition, the archaeological record from this period manifests a widespread
tradition of ceramic llama f igurines, often crudely made, which are recovered
from the Callejón de Huaylas EIP sites including Balcón de Judas (Wegner,
personal communication, 1989), Chopijerka, Kotu, and both the residential
area and the feasting site at Queyash Alto (Figs. 1, 20). Such small, crude repre-
sentations may have functioned as sacrif icial images or votive icons, believed
important for increasing herd size and health; in fact, two of the llamas from
Chopijerka are clearly marked as female, which seems to have more to do with
emphasizing the fertility of the animal than it does with artistic accuracy. Robin
Burke (n.d.: 65–72) reviews a number of ethnographic accounts where crude
animal representations known as illas or conopas (often llamas) play a part in
ceremonies concerned with the fertility of animals, with women centrally in-
volved in all aspects of the rites. Taken together, the use of votive miniatures in
the EIP, the use of such objects today to ensure herd strength, the feasting
evidence from Queyash Alto, and the reiterated representation of the f inely
dressed Recuay llama man all argue for a critical role that llamas must have
played in the EIP economy. The exclusive association of males with llamas in
Recuay iconography may suggest an exclusively male control over these criti-
cal resources.
41
Joan M. Gero
Fig. 20 Recuay llama f igurines from

Chopijerka in the Callejón de
Huaylas, collected by George
Neumann. Smithsonian Institution,
National Museum of Natural His-
tory, cat. nos. 431311 and 431312.
In contrast to the domain of the llama men are several arenas in which
females are exclusively depicted. Small-scale females, for instance, are consis-
tently shown on Recuay vessels that represent architectural models. Here it is
always females who guard or protect rooftops and entrances (Fig. 21), almost as
background to other prominent social dynamics. To understand this position-
ing, we need to go beyond the idea that these architectural models are literal
representations of the ways in which houses were planned, constructed, and
occupied (see Furst 1975). Rather, we might view these house forms as visual
tropes for lineages or descent groups; in other words, the house forms corre-
spond, in some essential way, to the people who occupy them, and referents to
these “models” are easily transposed between house and lineage, as in the well-
known “House of Windsor.” Seen in this light, the “background” females, al-
though diminutive, hint at an important ideological role. These rooftop and
doorway f igures appear to embody a kind of spirit with female aspects, associ-
ated with the stability and continuity of the descent group, perhaps the matriline,
or with some female-related central feature of hearth and home. Moreover,
since these females are placed so casually in the backgrounds of the depicted
scenes, it is tempting to suggest (and I am certainly speculating here) that women’s
role as protector or progenitor of hearth and home may have been an older, less
contested ideology than the llama man’s emerging central economic role. In
42
Fig. 21 Recuay architectural vessel de-

picting a female on the roof; below, a
male is f lanked by two females. Photo-
graph courtesy of the Dallas Museum
of Art, the Eugene and Margaret
McDermott Fund, cat. no. 1970.23.MCD.
any case, it is not so farfetched here to recall the contemporary females buried
beneath the house f loors at Queyash Alto who are associated very directly with
household continuity.
Yet an even closer female parallel to the llama men is found in the class of
f ifteen Recuay vessels showing solo women who hold infants in outstretched
arms (Fig. 7), with the infants lying horizontally across the main f igures’ arms
or held at arms’ length rather than being cuddled against the chest. The reiter-
ated portrayal of these elaborately decorated females presenting (offering?) small
children argues for an important and specialized arena of female power, linking
human procreation with divine oversight. Assuming that these are not “merely”
mothers but rather participants in some kind of sacred or priestess practice is
only part of how we might read these images. The exceptional clothing of all
the infant-bearing females, the elaborate textile designs on their garments, and
the elevated, decorated pillbox hats that rise above the normal manta suggest a
very high rank and special recognition for these women. Indeed, the EIP
worldview, arising out of kin-based society and conceptualized in the same
deeply personalized, relational terms by which it was lived, would have judged
direct female intervention with the gods to ensure birth—and thus the very
survivability of the lineage—to be as powerful, critical, and honorif ic as the
male-associated abilities to accumulate llama wealth or take prisoners. There is
43
Joan M. Gero
Fig. 22 Recuay vessel depicting a cer-

emonial scene, with principal male sur-
rounded by f ive smaller females. The
females wear differently patterned belts.
Photograph courtesy of the Institute of Art
of Chicago, Gaffron Collection, Buckingham
Fund, cat. no. 55.2247.
ultimately no reason to evaluate these signif icant f igures as any less powerful
than males in their respective arenas of authority.
A f inal important class of Recuay vessels combines males and females in the
densely populated “ceremonial scene” representations, where a larger central
male (and never a female), standing, seated, or supine, is surrounded by two or
more smaller f igures that are usually female (Figs. 10, 22). Reichert calls the
smaller f igures “attendants,” presumably because they surround the central male,
sometimes facing him and sometimes looking forward as though in a proces-
sion, often bearing cups, bowls, or other objects. Reichert’s term connotes gen-
der hierarchy, implying—perhaps too easily—that the females are of lower status
or subordinate to the male, as his mere attendants.6 However, as Reichert him-
6
The size differential and the placement of f igures in the ceremonial scenes indeed
suggest that the larger, central, and inevitably male f igure has a more signif icant, prestigious
status than the smaller surrounding f igures. However, this is less a necessary ref lection of
gender hierarchy (that is, of the central male having power over the smaller females) as it is
a representation of a restricted (male) role as a principal ceremony off icial, with the male
and the females playing different roles. Division of labor, with exclusive male and female
arenas of power, is not to be confused with gender hierarchy.
A different argument suggests that, even if hierarchical importance is implied by the size
differentials and placements of f igures on these vessels, the scene nevertheless contrasts
with, say, Judeo-Christian rituals in which women play no public part whatsoever and are
completely absent from liturgical representations.
44
self notes (personal communication, 1993), the ritual depicted here makes a
stronger case for the interdependence of gender roles, since these females nei-
ther present objects nor attend to the male as much as they participate, appar-
ently indispensably, in the ceremony. Moreover, these “attendants” are reiterated
in solo eff igy vessels (Figs. 6, 11), where individual males and females alike are
shown with similar bowls and cups. Identifying individual women with ritual
cups strengthens the argument that women, like men, played signif icant and
indispensable roles in pouring ceremonial libations.
I want to avoid here any simple equivalency between the specif ic Recuay-
depicted ceremonies and the actual feasts at Queyash Alto. Although we believe
them to have been congruent in chronological time, we cannot say that the
ceremonies depicted on Recuay pots took place in conjunction with the feasts
on ridgetops. These may have been rather different occasions, with different
sociopolitical objectives, and it would certainly be out of line, on the basis of
these ceremonial vessels, to generalize about women’s EIP status or to evaluate
women’s role in shaping political outcomes at feasting sites like Queyash Alto.
However, there is probably some overlap in the meanings inherent in the two
types of events; we note, for instance, that both the ritual portrayed in the
Recuay ceremonial scenes and the evidence of feasting at Queyash Alto make
important associations between household production and the production of
power in an extrahousehold context. The obligatory ritual liquids (chicha beer?)
that women are associated with in the Recuay scenes were probably produced
by women at the household or interhousehold level, just as at Queyash Alto
where chicha brewing and storage were strongly connected with Sector II of
the ridgetop feasting site. Both instances presented an opportunity for EIP
women to participate in ritual or ceremonial activity by extending the context
of domestic food preparation into politically signif icant ritual areas; indeed,
political feasts evolved partly to represent the political community on a familial
scale, and women as political mothers (and food preparers) were central to this
process. Thus, the Recuay ceremonial scenes refer back to and underscore the
productive labor of women that underlay the performance of ritual ( Joyce
1993), again making the liquid bearers not merely “attendants” but rather
coproducers of, and essential participants in, central ritual events.
The multiple-f igure Recuay ceremonial scenes also offer us clear indica-
tions of male hierarchy, most notable in the varieties of headgear that appear in
distinct combinations on various personages. The more elaborately modeled
headdresses, such as turbans with animal paws or entire animals, bilateral hands,
and crescents, occur on solo male eff igy vessels but are also associated with the
centrally placed, principal males of the ceremonial scenes. The principal male
45
Joan M. Gero
may then be surrounded by male f igures in less elaborate hats or helmets, al-
though a simple headdress is never associated with the principal f igure: and,
conversely, male f igures wearing more elaborately modeled headgear never
f lank or surround a principal male. Similarly, while the Great Crested Being
motif is often worn as a clothing design both by solo males and by the princi-
pal males of the ceremonies, it is never shown on the f lanking or surrounding
males.
There are also intimations of female rank differentiation, although these are
less easy to read. Some vessels with ceremonial scenes display small females
arrayed as contrasting pairs, sometimes with the frontal pair wearing different
manta designs from the rear pair or with the females on the right side of the
vessel wearing different textiles from the females on the left (see Fig. 22 for
females differentiated by belt designs). These contrasts, not between individuals
but between groups, suggest a formal differentiation among female personnel
without necessarily indicating any ranking.
Hierarchical differentiation among women is more clearly exhibited by those
females who appear only in copulation scenes or carrying a child and are shown
wearing a special variety of head covering that rises stiff ly above the head as a
short round cylinder or square pillbox, while the manta element of the head-
gear still f lows out from the bottom to cover, as always, the ears and the back of
the neck (Fig. 7). Females wearing this distinctive headgear are invariably clothed
in garments made of more elaborately designed textiles, often including a wo-
ven belt with f igures running its entire length and/or a tunic with Great Crested
Being designs or other motifs clearly shown. Such well-attired females, marked
especially by the elevated pillbox hat, are never depicted on multiple-f igure
vessels with a principal male, but only on solo eff igy vessels or in copulation
scenes; they thus appear to hold a distinctly high female rank. Finally, a unique
pot from the British Museum (Fig. 23) portrays a principal male with three
f lanking females, all of whom face the largest and foremost f igure, that of a
female lying on her back and displaying a full-relief animal (feline cub?) atop
her head-covering manta. This depicted scene is unusual for many reasons, such
as the complexity and asymmetry of the composition of f igures, the presence
of a f igure reclining on her back, the fact of a central (reclining) f igure being
female, and the association of a female with an animal headdress (or indeed
with any headgear that is more elaborate than an elevated “pillbox”).7 This
unusual scene employs no obvious referents to a supernatural world—no mon-
7
Reichert (n.d.: 147) notes the possibility that the animal atop the reclining woman’s
head may represent an animal accompanying the depicted Recuay scene rather than a
unique female headdress.
46
Fig. 23 Recuay vessel depicting a ceremonial scene, with a principal

male, three smaller females, and a disproportionately large female lying
on her back in the foreground. The principal female wears a unique
headdress with a small animal on it. Photograph courtesy of the British
Museum, Christy Collection, cat. no. 1910-7.
47
Joan M. Gero
strous animals or humans partaking of animal parts—so that we are led to think
that this, like the rest of the Recuay canon, still refers to the world of humans.
Perhaps we are being shown a different dimension of reality, possibly a legend-
ary historic event such as the death of a renowned female; in any case, the scene
conveys an unequivocal image of elevated rank for women.
Feminist Interpretive Frameworks for the EIP Data

Both the appearance of the elaborate Recuay ceramic tradition and the
feasting practices at Queyash Alto coincided with—and contributed to—an
intensif ication of hierarchical power relations in the northern central high-
lands of Peru during the EIP. Both the ceramics and the feasting reiterate themes
of power and ritual, intertwined with messages of a complex gender system.
Indeed, it seems likely that the intensif ication of hierarchy and the transforma-
tions in the EIP gender system are mutually determining aspects of the same
process, and neither one is intelligible without the other.
But understanding how women’s and men’s sociopolitical status was de-
f ined and redef ined during the EIP does not primarily arise from an analysis of
artifacts, although we require artifacts to position our questions, correct our
assumptions, and corroborate our interpretations. Rather, we have worked back
and forth between two different data sets and the context in which they were
formed in order to establish some foundational understandings about gender in
the EIP. Now, however, we have another methodological option to draw upon,
namely, turning to accounts of kinship societies like the one represented at
Queyash Alto, in which Andean feminist ethnographers and ethnohistorians
have shown us that women derive authority and social status in part from their
control over the means of production. Andean women in particular have been
observed over several centuries to inherit land directly from their mothers
through the pervasive bilateral inheritance and widespread parallel descent sys-
tems that characterize the Andes (Silverblatt 1987; Skar 1981: 41). Moreover,
Andean women are often reported by ethnographers to exert exclusive control
over the storage and distribution of agricultural products (Skar 1981: 41) as
another form of domestic power. Finally, feminists have demonstrated that in
agrarian kin societies, women’s procreative abilities are often symbolically asso-
ciated and highly valued as a primary means of kin group continuity and social
reproduction (Gailey 1987: 54). Thus, several lines of evidence derived from
feminist studies support reconstructing the early EIP sociohistoric context as
one in which women participated in and contributed to def ining the meanings
and outcomes of cultural life.
At the same time, it is also impossible to ignore the signif icant tensions and
contradictions that women eventually would have had to confront in these
48
roles over the course of the formation of political hierarchy. Abundant ar-
chaeological evidence suggests that the regional EIP context favored intermale
warfare and competition as routes to prestige and power. Therefore, the exist-
ing gender ideology must have come under severe strain, and innumerable
contradictions must have made themselves apparent as political practice be-
came increasingly def ined on the basis of sex-segregated activities (such as
warfare) and accompanied by rituals that celebrated these male practices. We
can easily imagine deep tensions that would develop in maintaining a balance
between the single-sex, power-appropriating male group and the sex-integrated
lineages through which power had been traditionally held and disseminated.
For example, female procreation—once revered because it was key to the re-
production of the primary social group, the lineage—may have been under-
mined as a central organizing value if the lineage no longer played such a
hugely determinant role in the production and reproduction of social organi-
zation. Instead, noble male pursuits like warfare and civic administration would
increasingly crosscut the hegemony of the individual lineage; these alternative
institutions would also increasingly deploy youthful labor, which previously
had been allocated solely for the promotion of and by the kin group. Thus,
women’s symbolic and functional positions in regard to social continuity and
labor processes would be undercut by the new political order.
The EIP processes that produced gender tensions and contradictions were
played out both in feasting and in the selected iconographic themes of Recuay
ceramics; in both contexts, shared and probably shifting power is evident. We
are not well served at this point by framing questions such as: “By the end of
the EIP, was women’s status lower than men’s?” or “Are male and female sta-
tuses equal?” In fact, we are told quite another story here—a story of repre-
sented individuals’ power over undepicted others, a world of depicted feast
hosts and undepicted feast guests. Ultimately, both (some) female and (some)
male elites would have been considered powerful, with women and men in-
volved differentially in distinct arenas of female and male power. A f irst lesson
that can be derived from this is to reconsider how we think about power and
status, and to get rid of the abstracted, homogenized notions that measure
degrees of status and power in different sociohistoric moments like heat on a
thermometer. At Queyash Alto as in the iconography of Recuay, we recognize
the mosaic quality of gendered power as more characteristic of human sex/
gender systems than such monolithic notions as “high” or “low” status; in Eric
Wolf ’s words (1999: 61), “cultural hegemony is not a seamless web of domina-
tion but a panoply of processes of varying intensity and scope.” Certain women
may be able to assert power and hold sway in some arenas of social, political,
and economic life while being devoid of inf luence in others.
49
Joan M. Gero
An even more powerful lesson comes from feminist writings on the nature
of power. Feminist theory has much to teach us about the routine categories of
analysis that we regularly use to focus our research; thus, when we ask whether
men or women “have more power” (and especially when we seem to f ind that
women are perceived as having less of it), we need to recognize that the term
“power” is traditionally def ined as a distinctly masculine notion, one that re-
stricts its meaning in such a way as to effectively preclude women from consid-
eration (Duffy 1986). 8
Classic conceptions of power reiterate two themes. First, they conf late power
with public authority, focusing on legitimized, institutional, sanctif ied forms of
power, that is, power that is often held through authoritative structures (Wylie
1992b: 56)—which is precisely the subject of so many representations in the
Recuay materials. At the same time, such conceptions of power emphasize the
imposition of will on a passive or even resistant opposition that may need to be
subdued or dominated: “To be powerful is to be able to realize one’s will, even
against the resistance of others” (C. Wright Mills, cited in Duffy 1986).
However, feminists (among others) have worked with more subtly under-
cutting issues of power, attempting, for example, to separate its behavioral and
ideological aspects (that is, recognizing that the person who enacts power is not
necessarily synonymous with the person believed to have power) or viewing
such factors as control over the larder and other economic resources as signif i-
cant (gendered) factors in determining decision-making structures. Early femi-
nist investigators pointed to women as the “goal-setters” of society (Rogers
1975) and demonstrated that, as such, women exercised enormous de facto
power, even though such power was kept largely invisible by authoritative struc-
tures. Feminist critics have argued for looking to “covert, informal, non-institu-
tionalized and unrecognized or unauthorized forms of power” (Wylie 1992b:
56), suggesting that if the concept of “having your way,” rather than “realizing
your will,” is taken as the central idea behind power (or perhaps we need a new
word here), then a very different research and very different understandings
about gender and the determination of social arrangements emerge (March
and Taqqu 1986; Rogers 1975). Some researchers propose replacing the term
“power” with a term like “social capital” to suggest the composite social per-
spective—achieved through education, access to networks and information,
and public recognition—that makes it more likely that women’s wills are real-
ized.
8
While Duffy’s (1986) feminist analysis of the concept of power is both innovative and
classic, the longer evolution of notions of power is detailed succinctly by Wylie (1992b).
50
Today, the examination of power takes off where feminists f irst led; it is
widely argued that an anthropological account of power must recognize power
as relational, not only in that it exists in many kinds of relationships (Wolf
1999: 4), but also in that different relationships will shape power differently
(ibid., 67). The notions that power is diffuse rather than manifested in single
individuals, and that it operates on many different levels and in different do-
mains, are coming to be central in anthropology today. What we are still chal-
lenged to do, however, is to demonstrate how these differences are articulated
in specif ic cultural arrangements.
CONCLUSIONS
Not surprisingly, neither a feminist nor a relational account of power is
available to us in Recuay iconography. Since Recuay pots are so heavily con-
ventionalized, they tell a “f ixed-perspective” or “off icial” story, continually re-
iterating and broadcasting a small set of messages about similarity and difference
by obliterating nuance, change, deviance, and the multiple perspectives on so-
cial realities. The very coherence of Recuay gendered depictions, which held
such promise for the unambiguous elucidation of a prehistoric gender system,
in the end obliterates exactly what we want to know about gender, namely,
how it intersects with power at many levels and how it is partaken of differen-
tially by different men and different women!
To add to this frustration, the Recuay representational system and its off icial
story can be understood to be in place precisely because these are messages that
require reiteration in the EIP context, social lessons that suggest a social—and
gender—tension to which the “off icial view” is a response. The reproduction
of elaborate and redundant iconographic themes alerts us to the fact that the
depicted messages are contested ones, requiring reiteration and legitimation.
Yet these very contestations and tensions are excluded and hidden by the con-
ventional representational system that asserts a simplif ied social resolution. The
upgraded, high-contrast male–female presentation of Recuay teaches us to be-
ware of simple iconographic lessons about the ways in which gender func-
tioned in EIP society.
On the other hand, the archaeological data are less self-consciously con-
structed; the f ield “knots” are openly ambiguous. We get glimpses of Queyash
Alto’s autonomous women who are buried under the earliest house f loors,
who leave their jewelry and spinning whorls in their homes and at the site of
feasting, and who prepare and distribute chicha and llama meat for public, po-
litical consumption. Yet the meaning that life held for these women and the
role that their gender played in their cultural identities are no clearer for the
51
Joan M. Gero
evidence having been left unselfconsciously in the ground. Not surprisingly, in

the end the archaeological data, like the iconographic interpretations, require
framing, and the frame that they require is likewise provided by gender theory.
Acknowledgments The research carried out at Queyash Alto was made

possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Univer-
sity of South Carolina Faculty Development Awards, and the Center for Field
Research, with very important logistical support provided by the Peruvian
Instituto Nacional de Cultura and the Museo Regional de Ancash in Huaraz.
Research on Recuay iconography was supported by University of South
Carolina Faculty Development Awards and the American University New Fac-
ulty Award. I am especially obliged to Peter Thiele of the Linden Museum of
Stuttgart, Manuela Fisher of the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde, and to the
many individuals who allowed access to, or supplied images of, Recuay vessels
in their collections. Raphael Reichert generously shared not only images from
his outstanding archive but also insightful enthusiasm for Recuay research.
An earlier version of this essay was given at a UCLA anthropology collo-
quium where valuable comments were offered; some excerpts of the gender
arguments about Recuay ceramics appeared in Gaceta arqueológica andina (1999).
Karen Bruhns and Steve Wegner have continued to enrich my interpretations
of the Early Intermediate period with their critiques, and Margaret Conkey
has made my feminist perspective more focused, for which I am grateful. Ted
Rathbun and Pat Lambert kindly advised me on the burial material. Finally, I
would like to thank Cecelia Klein for her invitation to participate in the Dumbarton
Oaks conference and her support as volume editor, an anonymous Dumbarton Oaks
reader for perceptive critical comments, and Stephen Loring whose sense of adventure
and eye for detail have never let me down.
52
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55
Asking about Aztec Gender:
The Historical and Archaeological Evidence
ELIZABETH M. BRUMFIEL
ALBION COLLEGE
A
nthropological studies of gender address gender roles, gender ideolo-
gies, and gender identities in human social life. Gender roles consist of
the economic, political, and cultural activities of men and women as
well as their status within society. Gender ideologies include the expectations,
associations, and sentiments attached to gender categories. Gender identities
refer to any individual’s aff iliation with a gender category and his or her feel-
ings about that identity. Gender studies have three goals: (1) to describe the
variation in gender roles, ideologies, and identities from one society to the
next; (2) to def ine the child-rearing practices and forms of symbolic action by
which gender roles, ideologies, and identities are produced; and (3) to examine
the interaction of gender with other economic, political, and cultural processes
(Conkey and Spector 1984; Conkey and Gero 1991).
In dealing with past societies, gender studies draw heavily upon archaeology
and ethnohistory. Archaeology analyzes the material remains of past activities,
while ethnohistory interprets the texts left by the members of a culture or by
outside observers. Both sources of information are problematic. Ethnohistorical
sources often describe the activities and attitudes of men and women, but they
inevitably express the viewpoint of the writer, who is sometimes mistaken or
biased, and—because of familiarity, discretion, or ignorance—may not tell us
everything we want to know. Material culture is more democratic. All mem-
bers of society leave material remains of their activities, even if the materials
left by some are at times more striking than those left by others. Material cul-
ture is also more abundant: it is coextensive with human history. Texts are pro-
duced only during limited periods of a culture’s past. However, the archaeological
record is itself riddled with omissions: because of decay and site disturbance,
only a fraction of the material record of human activity is available for study.
Moreover, to move from material objects to the activities and attitudes of the
57
Elizabeth M. Brumfiel
past, archaeologists must use a series of inferences or bridging arguments, so-

called middle range theory.
Ethnohistory and archaeology complement each other. Each may provide
information where the other is silent. On topics where both supply data, ar-
chaeology can be used to correct the errors and biases of literate observers,
while ethnohistory can provide the bridging arguments that link material ob-
jects to past activities and attitudes. It is diff icult to lay down a set of general
procedures for testing the ethnohistorical record or interpreting artifacts. The
historical and archaeological records are different for each region of the world,
and in each region they offer different problems and possibilities for recovering
gender. In all regions, however, gender research should be oriented toward
questions that arise from coherent theoretical approaches to gender.
Political economy supplies one such approach. It studies the organization of
production and exchange that underlies and supports a system of power. Since
the mid-1970s, this approach to gender has generated two large bodies of lit-
erature relevant for the study of gender in the ancient past. The f irst includes
studies of women and work. Literature on this subject explores women’s (often
neglected) participation in the domestic and extradomestic economies, their
strategies for integrating domestic and extradomestic economic activities, the
ways in which women’s economic contributions do or do not translate into
their status and power, the effect of gender ideologies upon the gendered divi-
sion of labor, and the effect of women’s economic activities upon their self-
identities and sense of agency (Hartmann 1976, 1981; Friedl 1978; Tilly and
Scott 1978; Nash and Fernández-Kelly 1983; Gero 1985; Leacock and Safa
1986; Benería and Roldán 1987; Stephen 1991; Tiano 1994).
A second, somewhat smaller, body of literature examines the relationship
between women and the state. State formation has long been regarded as hav-
ing important consequences for women’s status (Engels 1972). Since most pro-
duction in agrarian states is household-based, political leaders invariably intervene
in household economic activity in order to extract goods and labor with which
to fund their administrations (D’Altroy and Earle 1985; Brumf iel 1994). The
state’s demand for goods and labor produces change in the household division
of labor; it also transforms the gender ideologies that order relationships among
household members (Gailey 1985). Gender identities change in response to
these new gender roles and ideologies. In addition, gender relationships may be
altered by the state efforts to break up corporate kinship groups in order to end
their monopoly of important resources. For example, the destruction of cor-
porate kinship groups can leave women exposed to the demands of unreason-
able fathers and husbands (Diamond 1951; Ortner 1978; Rapp 1978; Sacks
58
Asking about Aztec Gender
1982; Leacock 1983; Conkey and Spector 1984; Gailey 1985; Silverblatt 1988).
In this essay, I examine what historical and archaeological data can tell us
about the Aztec gender system when these data are explored from the perspec-
tive of political economy. After reviewing the nature of the Aztec historical
and archaeological records, I turn to a particular class of archaeological data,
ceramic spindle whorls, to investigate how the Aztec state was supported by a
gender-based division of labor and how gender roles, ideologies, and identities
were affected by the expansion of the Aztec state.
AZTEC ETHNOHISTORY
Historical sources concerning native life in Central Mexico are exception-
ally rich. First of all, they include the usual records of discovery, conquest, and
colonial administration produced by the Western empire builders (Cline 1973;
Lockhart 1992). Such documents provide only snapshot portraits of native cul-
tures. They lack historical depth, focus on only a narrow range of topics, and
are uninformed by the native perspective. They are, therefore, of limited value.
Nevertheless, observers like Hernán Cortés (1986) and Bernal Díaz del Castillo
(1956) were sharper than most, and their descriptions of markets, palaces, po-
litical alliances, and rivalries supply information on the institutional context for
Aztec gender systems.
Sources of the second type—sixteenth-century ethnographic documents
such as Bernardino de Sahagún’s (1950–82) Florentine Codex and the Codex
Mendoza (Berdan and Anawalt 1992)—are much more informative.These works
cover a wide range of topics, including the roles of men and women in pro-
duction and ritual, their behavioral norms, and the domains of power of male
and female gods. In addition, these documents are illustrated by native artists.
The illustrations frequently provide information not given in the text, which
can sometimes be used to critique the text itself. For example, the Florentine
Codex shows women weaving, cooking, healing, midwiving, and marketing,
which belies textual statements that recognize only cooking and weaving as
women’s work (Nash 1978: 356). Similarly, the Primeros memoriales (Sahagún
1993) shows women in ceremonial roles that are not mentioned in the text
(Brown 1983).
Illustrations are especially valuable for archaeologists because they suggest
how artifacts were used. From illustrations, archaeologists can extract ideas con-
cerning artifacts’ functions as well as the gendered division of labor. For ex-
ample, the Florentine Codex does not state which members of the household
hunted and which cared for domestic fowl, but it does contain illustrations of
men hunting and turkeys being fed by women (Sahagún 1950–82, 10: f ig. 188;
59
Fig. 1 Man hunting a deer and a rabbit (after Sahagún 1950–82, 10: f ig. 188). Courtesy of
the School of American Research, Santa Fe, N.M., and the University of Utah, Salt Lake
City.
11: f ig. 744; see Figs. 1, 2). This information helped me to interpret archaeo-
logical materials from Aztec Xaltocan. It lent plausibility to the argument that
the decrease in the bones of aquatic birds and the increase in turkey bones at
Xaltocan signaled a shift in the gendered division of labor, with increasingly
less hunting by men and increasingly more turkey-raising by women (Brumf iel
n.d.).
Native histories constitute a third category of ethnohistorical document.
These come in two indigenous forms: illustrated annals (xiuhamatl) and carto-
graphic histories (Boone 1994).They also survive from the colonial era as books
that record the oral narratives accompanying ancient pictorial texts (Gibson
1975). Native historical documents deal with fewer topics than the ethno-
graphic documents; they mostly record migrations, marriages, succession, and
warfare. However, they do lend historical depth to these few topics, especially
political organization. They also provide information on some forms of sym-
bolic action, such as feasting and gift-giving, that were used to negotiate power
and worldview (Brumf iel 1987; M. Smith 1987).
Native histories sometimes contain useful bits of random information. For
example, from Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s (1975–77, 1: 346) account of an
encounter between a Texcocan prince and a commoner woman in the Chalca
countryside, we learn that the woman was out gathering aguamiel (the sap of
maguey plants). To my knowledge, this is the only source that mentions the fact
that women gathered aguamiel. Such information can be used to call into ques-
tion statements of gender ideology that appear elsewhere, such as the Florentine
60
Fig. 2 Woman feeding teopochotl seed to turkeys to fatten them

(after Sahagún 1950–82, 11: f ig. 744). Courtesy of the School of
American Research, Santa Fe, N.M., and the University of Utah,
Salt Lake City.
Codex assertion that “the girl was one who went nowhere” (Sahagún 1950–82,
4: chap. 1, 4).
Most important, when subjected to structural analysis, the native histories
are highly informative with regard to the principles that ordered native gender
systems (Gillespie 1989). Native gender stereotypes are revealed when male or
female characters are repeatedly assigned the same roles in different historical
incidents. For example, Susan Gillespie (ibid.) shows that women in Aztec his-
tory frequently initiate periods of chaos ending with their own sacrif icial deaths
and the establishment of new periods of order.
The corpus of historical documents from Central Mexico is so rich that
archaeology is often dismissed as not very helpful. It is felt that the impover-
ished archaeological record can tell us little that we do not already know from
historical documents. As rich as they are, however, the documents suffer from
certain def iciencies.
First, the documents are temporally limited with regard to gender. They
provide little information on gender norms and practices as they changed over
time. June Nash (1978) has suggested that imperial expansion resulted in the
subordination of Aztec women, but there is little information in the historical
records that can be used to assess this argument. Second, the ethnographic
61
documents are geographically limited. Most of them come from the Aztec and
colonial capital,Tenochtitlan/Mexico City; they may or may not ref lect gender
norms and practices in hinterland towns and villages. Hinterland settlements
differed from political capitals both because they lacked the wealth and sophis-
tication of centers and because, to resist exploitation, they organized them-
selves differently, especially in the areas of kinship, marriage, and gender (Gailey
1987; C. Smith 1995). Third, insofar as we know, writing was an exclusively
male activity in Central Mexico; thus, the documents present the male view of
gender norms and practices. They give voice to male hopes and expectations,
without specifying whether these hopes were shared, contested, fulf illed, or
frustrated by native women (McCafferty and McCafferty 1988). Finally, all of
the documents were produced either by Spanish men or by men of the native
ruling class who themselves interacted with the Spanish men. Thus, the gender
norms and practices expressed in the documents may have been inf luenced by
Western beliefs and customs (Brown 1983; Hill 1997; Burkhart, this volume).
For example, it is possible that recorded versions of the story of the birth of the
Aztec patron deity, Huitzilopochtli, appropriated Spanish concepts of gender
and chastity to explain why Huitzilopochtli’s sister, Coyolxauhqui, was angered
when their mother became pregnant while performing temple service.1
Archaeology can help to remedy the def iciencies of the historical record.
However, the nature of the contribution that archaeology can make to Aztec
gender studies depends on the particular character of Aztec archaeology.
AZTEC ARCHAEOLOGY
Elite Structures
The spectacular f inds at the Aztec Great Temple appear to provide excellent
opportunities for studying gender. Pieces of monumental art recovered from
the excavations present female and male f igures in stereotyped poses and con-
texts, while patterned arrangements of objects in buried offerings at the temple
express the Aztecs’ engendered worldview (López Luján 1994). However, the
construction of both the temple and its contents was guided by the same class
of elite males that supervised the production of native documents, and there-
fore engendered images at the temple tend to reiterate the views expressed in
native histories. In fact, the Great Temple was meant to evoke the memory of
1
A comparison of this list of def iciencies in Aztec documents with the one supplied by
Costin (1995) for the Andean region suggests some of the ways in which the quality of
historical records differs by geographic region, with varying implications for gender re-
search.
62
Huitzilopochtli’s birth, which is recounted in the text and illustrations of the

Florentine Codex and several other historical documents (Matos Moctezuma
1988: 135–145; Hill 1997). This story presents gender roles in highly ideologi-
cal forms. For example, the main antagonist of the story, Huitzilopochtli’s sister,
Coyolxauhqui, is portrayed as a generator of cosmic conf lict, an enemy who is
destined for defeat (Klein 1988; Gillespie 1989). Her role as the antagonistic
and subordinated “other” is commemorated in sculpture at the Great Temple:
Coyolxauhqui’s dismembered body, carved on a large monolith, was placed at
the foot of the stairway leading to Huitzilopochlti’s shrine. The archaeology of
the Great Temple demonstrates that the gender roles communicated in oral
narratives assumed material form in sculpture and ritual here. These material
forms were one means of lending an aura of reality to the elite gendered
mytho-logic (Kus 1982; DeMarrais, Castillo, and Earle 1996).
Although Coyolxauhqui occupies a prominent place in the external adorn-
ment of the Great Temple, women and female symbols are rare in other Great
Temple contexts. For example, although the buried offerings at the Great Temple
are organized according to a plan of binary opposition (López Luján 1994:
138–139), the opposition of male and female aspects in these offerings is muted.
Instead, the opposition centers on heaven and earth, sun and rain, and f ire and
water (the opposing f luids that symbolized war).Warfare was seen as producing
the union of contraries through the incorporation of the defeated by the con-
querors; it therefore served as a metaphor for sexual intercourse and fertility
(Klein 1994; López Luján 1994: 290–291). This was, however, a peculiar repre-
sentation of fertility, where the female principle was displaced by the enemy
male warrior while sexual intercourse was presented as an act of coercive domi-
nance. Such androcentric symbolism seems to pervade the offerings.
In order to recover other views of gender in Aztec culture, archaeologists
must work in nonelite settings. Artifacts and images, f loor plans and burials
from nonelite contexts are the fundamental sources of archaeological data used
to reconstruct gender systems (Costin 1995).
Household Contexts
In the Basin of Mexico, a regional site survey has provided information on
the size, complexity, and location of Aztec settlements (Sanders, Parsons, and
Santley 1979). These data have not yet furnished any information on the Aztec
gender system, but they have established its economic and political contexts.
Potentially, the survey data could be combined with a documentary study of
how the Aztec landscape was engendered through the naming of mountains
and other natural features (e.g., Broda 1991: 89–90; Serra Puche, this volume;
63
Fig. 3 Personif ications of the volcanoes Popocatepetl (left) and Iztactepetl (i.e., Iztaccíhuatl,
right) shaped from amaranth seed dough for ritual occasions (after Sahagún 1950–82, 1: f igs.
25, 26). Courtesy of the School of American Research, Santa Fe, N.M., and the University
of Utah, Salt Lake City.
see Fig. 3). This might enhance our understanding of both the way in which
settlements were located and the way in which individuals came to view the
gender system as part of the natural order.
Intensive surface collection and excavations in the hinterland settlements
surrounding Triple Alliance capitals have yielded large assemblages of artifacts,
many of which are quite informative about the operation of the Aztec gender
system at the household level. Usually (but not always; see Dobres 1995) the
f irst step in studying gender on the basis of artifacts is gender attribution. This
means establishing that certain categories of artifacts were used in tasks per-
formed primarily by men or women, or that certain attributes (for example,
particular design elements) or certain sectors of household and settlement space
were regarded as characteristically male or female. Once the artifacts and con-
texts are thus engendered, they can be employed in three kinds of studies. The
artifacts can be used, f irst, to trace changes in the intensity or the organization
of female and male labor, and second, to study the cultural processes by which
the gender system was generated. Third, artifact decoration can serve as a me-
dium for recovering distinctive male and female views on gender and other
issues.
The f loor plans of residential structures are also valuable sources of infor-
mation on gender. The arrangement of rooms and the distribution of male and
female activities within household space can ref lect the level of control exer-
64
Fig. 4 Ceramic spindle whorls from Huexotla, Basin of Mexico: large spindle whorls for
maguey f iber (top) and small spindle whorls for cotton (bottom). Note that the large whorls
are painted and have molded decorations, while two of the small whorls are plain. Museum
of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
cised by male and female household members (Hodder 1984; Moore 1986;
Small 1987; Hastorf 1991; Hendon 1992). The distribution of facilities for
gender-specif ic work and ritual can suggest the opportunities for men or women
of different households to gather together in order to nurture their separate
male or female views and their collective power ( Jackson 1991).
Burials supply two further important sources of data on gender, i.e., skel-
etons (Cohen and Bennett 1993) and burial arrangements (Robb 1994; Joyce
n.d.). However, since few Aztec burials have been recovered, these data con-
tribute little to the following discussion.
ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

Current limitations of the archaeology of gender include (1) a lack of imagi-
nation with regard to the archaeological situations in which gender might be
“seen,” and (2) a lack of imagination concerning the theoretical questions that
might be asked about gender, questions that go beyond statements of “women
did this, and men did that.” For this reason, I devote the remainder of this essay
to investigating what we can learn about the Aztec gender system by analyzing
65
Fig. 5 Mother holding unspun cotton teaches her four-year-old daugh-

ter to spin. Note the dark-colored spindle whorl on the end of the
spindle and a tortilla above. Codex Mendoza, fol. 58r (after Berdan and
Anawalt 1992).
archaeological data—in this case, spindle whorls—using research questions gen-

erated by the literature on women and work and on women and the state.
Spindle whorls are perforated ceramic disks used to weight spindles during
spinning (Fig. 4). The use of spindle whorls is illustrated in several documents
(Sahagún 1950–82, 8: chap. 16; Berdan and Anawalt 1992: fols. 58r, 68r), and
they are still used in many areas of Mexico today (Parsons and Parsons 1990:
317–332; Berdan n.d.). Mary Parsons (1972) has shown that the spindle whorls
from the Basin of Mexico fall into two categories—small and large.2 According
to Parsons, the small spindle whorls were used for spinning cotton, and the
large for spinning maguey f iber. Parsons’s suggestion is widely accepted (e.g.,
Mason 1980; Smith and Hirth 1988; Brewington n.d.).
Spindle whorls, and textile production in general, were heavily gendered as
female in Central Mexico. Sixteenth-century ethnographic documents pro-
vide pictures of baby girls being awarded spindles to signify their life’s work as
Small spindle whorls weigh 10 grams or less and have hole diameters of 2 to 4 milli-
2
meters. Large spindle whorls weigh more than 10 grams with hole diameters of 6 to 12
millimeters.
66
spinners and weavers. Girls were taught to spin and weave from the age of four,
while boys were taught other crafts (see Fig. 5; also Berdan and Anawalt 1992:
fol. 57r). Sahagún (1950–82, 6, chap.18) reports that girls (but not boys) were
told, “Apply thyself well to the really womanly task, the spindle whorl, the
weaving stick. . . .” Gerónimo de Mendieta (1980: 122–123) states that in noble
families little girls showed their fathers their weaving in order to receive their
praise or reprimand, while little boys presented their fathers with the f lowers
and fruits that their mothers had given them for the purpose (see Rodríguez
1988: 49–50). Female goddesses were portrayed with spindles adorning their
hair and weaving implements in their hands (Sahagún 1950–82, 1: illus. 6, 12;
see McCafferty and McCafferty 1991). Thus, the historical record provides
strong evidence that spinning and spindle whorls were gendered female.
In Central Mexico, women wove to produce clothing (Anawalt 1981; Hicks
1994), which served a number of functions. In the high intermountaine basins
of the Aztec heartland, clothing provided welcome protection against cool
morning and evening air, but it was also worn because of modesty and con-
cerns about pollution (see Monaghan, this volume) and to assert one’s aff ilia-
tion with gender, class, and ethnic groups (Anawalt 1981). Rulers distributed
gifts of clothing to validate social status and to win political allies (Berdan 1975:
126–129; Broda 1976: 41–42). Cloth was demanded as tribute by both local
lords and imperial rulers (Guzmán 1938; Mólins Fábrega 1954–55; Berdan 1975;
Hicks 1982: 238–241), as well as being used as currency in regional markets
(Motolinía 1971: 374). Since cloth was so important in the economic and po-
litical affairs in ancient Mexico, accumulating stores of tribute cloth became a
primary concern of the Aztec state (Fig. 6).
Using a diachronic analysis, we can examine the impact that the creation
and expansion of the Aztec Triple Alliance had on existing gender systems. To
begin with, we might ask how the increased demand for tribute cloth affected
household economic activity. In order to answer this question, we can examine
changes in the frequency of use of small spindle whorls and other implements
used in household tasks.
The appearance of cotton textiles on almost every page of Aztec tribute
lists (see Berdan and Anawalt 1992) leads us to expect that the quantity of small
spindle whorls increased markedly as each province was brought under impe-
rial control. Dramatic increases in the quantity of small spindle whorls did
occur in some areas, but not in others; for example, spindle whorl numbers did
not increase in prime food-producing regions close to Tenochtitlan (Brumf iel
1991). This suggests that households in different regions had different strategies
for acquiring cloth that was to be used as tribute. In many areas, women wove
67
68
Fig. 6 Tribute cloth paid to the Aztec Triple Alliance by the province of Coaixtlahuacan, in the Codex Mendoza (after Berdan and Anawalt
1992). The tribute included loads of cotton mantles bearing designated patterns as well as loads of loincloths, blouses, and skirts. The treelike
element at the top of each bundle designates units of 400. The f ingers attached to the f irst three bundles may specify the required length of
the cloth. Codex Mendoza, fol. 43r (Berdan 1992: 95).
Fig. 7 A thirteen-year-old girl making tortillas. Note the jar

containing soaked corn and the griddle on a three-stone
hearth waiting to receive tortillas. Codex Mendoza, fol. 60r
(after Berdan and Anawalt 1992).
the cloth that their households paid as tribute. However, in prime agricultural
areas close to the Triple Alliance capitals, the production of food surpluses for
sale in urban markets enabled households to purchase the textiles that they
needed to meet their tribute payments. Thus, the impact of the state policies on
household labor, and particularly women’s labor, was variable. It was modif ied
by the character of local resources and the accessibility of markets. While the
ethnohistorical record suggests uniformity, the archaeological record reveals
variation.
Did the state’s demand for tribute cloth create ripple effects in other aspects
of the gendered division of household labor? Apparently so. Cooking, like
weaving, was gendered as women’s work in Aztec culture (see Fig. 7; Guzmán
1938: 94; Sahagún 1950–82, 10: chap. 3; Díaz del Castillo 1956: 73, 138, 205;
Alva Ixtlilxochitl 1975–77, 1: 347; Berdan and Anawalt 1992: fol. 60r). Changes
in the quantities of different cooking vessels reveal that changes in food prepa-
ration routines must have occurred to accommodate the need to acquire cloth.
Within the Basin of Mexico, the numbers of jars decreased while those of
griddles increased, suggesting that food was less commonly stewed and more
commonly toasted under the Triple Alliance rule. In Mexican cooking, stewed
69
foods require less labor than foods prepared on the griddle; however, Blanton et
al. (1981: 71–72) suggest that foods prepared on griddles are drier and more
portable than foods prepared in jars. Drier foods, they argue, become more
popular when household members are drawn away from their homes by the
extrahousehold labor demanded by the state. In the Basin of Mexico, dry griddle-
cooked food may have been preferred by commoners who were cultivating
new, more distant, f ields and carrying the surplus to urban markets in order to
purchase tribute cloth. In regions like Morelos, however, where women wove
more and households marketed less, stewed food retained its popularity and jars
predominated throughout the prehistoric era (see Brumf iel 1991). Thus, ar-
chaeology suggests that the Aztec state caused a general reorganization and
renegotiation of household activities.
In some circumstances, this reorganization might have led to a major alter-
ation in the gendered division of labor. For example, at Cholula, in a mass grave
containing the remains of f ifty individuals, spindle whorls were associated with
both male and female skeletons, suggesting that both men and women engaged
in textile production (Suárez Cruz 1989; G. McCafferty 1992).3 This poses an
interesting series of questions. What economic and political conditions drew
men into “women’s work”? What were the consequences for individuals in-
volved, for the gender system, and for the wider social structure? The investiga-
tion of the social identity and fate of these males who spun seems to offer a
fruitful line of research, warning us that gendered divisions of labor are not
absolute and eternal, even when they are strongly inscribed in a culture.
Increases in the quantity of labor demanded from the household might be
accompanied by decreases in its quality. The functional and formal attributes of
spindle whorls might ref lect the effort invested in cotton cloth production. For
example, spindle whorl weights and diameters vary according to the quality of
the thread being spun (Parsons and Parsons 1990: 316–332; Barber 1991: 52–
53; Keith n.d.; McCafferty and McCafferty 2000). Greater weights and diam-
eters imply the production of a thicker, more loosely spun thread and a
poorer-quality cloth, while smaller weights and diameters imply the produc-
tion of a f iner, more tightly spun thread and a higher-quality cloth.
Data from six sites in Central Mexico show that spindle whorl weights and
diameters either remained constant or declined under Aztec and Spanish rule,
when tribute demands were heavy (Brumf iel 1996). This is surprising since we
might expect that women would produce lower-quality cloth in response to
3
Spinning by males during the mid-20th century has also been reported by the Mexi-
can ethnographer Miguel de Mendizábal (1947: 162) for the Mezquital Valley.
70
the demand for more tribute; yet evidently they did not.The explanation might
involve considerations of gender ideology. Women might have produced high-
quality tribute cloth because skills in spinning and weaving were important
measures of a woman’s status. Alternatively, the quality of cloth could have
been maintained through state coercion (Brumf iel 1996).4
The decorative attributes of spindle whorls may indicate the attachment of
women to their identities as cloth producers. In many regions of the world, the
decorated artifacts serve as sources of gender identity and gender claims to
power (Hodder 1982; 1986: 105–115). Sharisse and Geoffrey McCafferty (1991)
suggest that spindle whorls in Postclassic Central Mexico bore elaborately painted,
molded, or incised decorations because they were an important means of com-
municating female identity and power.
In Cholula, for example, spindle whorl decorations enabled women to identify
with the power of both female deities and the priestesses, midwives, and curers
associated with them (McCafferty and McCafferty 1991). Early Postclassic spindle
whorls in Cholula were sometimes decorated with bitumen, which was associ-
ated with Tlazolteotl, an earth goddess connected with childbirth, the moon,
menses, purif ication, sexuality, witchcraft, and healing (Sullivan 1982). In eth-
nographic documents Tlazolteotl is portrayed with a headband of unspun cot-
ton, spindles (with whorls) in her hair, and bitumen paint around her mouth
(Fig. 8). Thus, women who spun with bitumen-decorated spindle whorls as-
serted their access to the considerable power exercised by Tlazolteotl (Fig. 9;
McCafferty and McCafferty 1991).
The importance of spinning for women’s identity, however, evidently di-
minished as women became more heavily engaged in tribute cloth production.
This is suggested by changes in the quantity and quality of spindle whorl deco-
ration. For example, in the northern and central Basin of Mexico, large spindle
whorls were often decorated, while small spindle whorls were generally plain.
Possibly, women felt that their role as providers of maguey-f iber clothing for
their households was a source of pride and personal prestige, while their role as
producers of cotton tribute cloth for the empire was not. In the southern Basin
of Mexico, Robbie Brewington (n.d.) found that spindle whorl decoration
became simplif ied under Aztec rule. Complex spindle whorls (i.e., painted,
carved, and polished, or painted, engraved, and polished) accounted for 50 per-
4
McCafferty and McCafferty (2000: 46) suggest that thin thread and lightweight cloth
were produced under Spanish rule in order to stint on raw materials and resist tribute
demands. However, demands by Spanish administrators that tribute cloth be “mejor tejidos y
más delgados,” that is, better woven and thinner (Riley 1973: 47) suggest that lightweight
tribute cloth was actually produced in response to Spanish requirements.
71
Fig. 8 The Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl, with a

band of unspun cotton around her forehead and
two spindles stuck in her hair. The lower half
of her face is painted with bitumen (after
Sahagún 1950–82, 1: f ig. 12). Courtesy of the
School of American Research, Santa Fe, N.M.,
and the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
cent of the spindle whorls deposited before Aztec dominance, but only for 23
percent of the whorls deposited during the period of Aztec rule. Conversely,
simple spindle whorls (i.e., plain unpainted or molded unpainted) accounted
for 40 percent of the pre-Aztec whorls and 73 percent of the Aztec whorls. In
Cholula, as the McCaffertys (2000) report, moldmade spindle whorls recovered
from an Early to a Middle Postclassic context were very carefully crafted. In
contrast, moldmade spindle whorls from a Late Postclassic context were poorly
formed, with uneven impressions.Thus, both Brewington’s and the McCaffertys’
data suggest that the signif icance of women’s roles as spinners and weavers
weakened as tribute extraction intensif ied.5
5
Who controlled the production and decoration of these artifacts, with their messages
about gender? Archaeological data suggest that spindle whorls were probably made by craft
specialists (see Charlton, Charlton, and Nichols [1993: 163] for a description of a spindle
whorl workshop). If women did not make their own spindle whorls, then how did the
spindle whorls come to bear decorations that underscored women’s power? Did the craft
specialists share in these conceptions of women’s power? Were the craft specialists them-
selves women? Given the presence of a highly developed market system, did the craft
specialists cater to female customers who purchased spindle whorls according to their own
tastes? The archaeological study of spindle whorl production now being undertaken by
Cynthia Otis Charlton at Otumba may reveal how gender identity formation was affected
by the regional market system.
72
Fig. 9 Spindle whorl with bitumen paint from Santa Cecilia in the
Basin of Mexico. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michi-
gan, Ann Arbor.
Within states, gender systems differ according to class (Fernández-Kelly 1983;

Benería and Roldán 1987; Silverblatt 1987; Ohnersorgen n.d.). Therefore, we
might expect that gender roles, ideologies, and identities were different for
Aztec commoners and nobles. These distinctions might be ref lected in the
spatial distribution of spindle whorls in the houses of elites or commoners.
Both in the Basin of Mexico and in Cholula, spindle whorls are widely distrib-
uted throughout the rooms of commoners’ houses (Evans 1988; McCafferty
and McCafferty 2000). Evidently, female commoners were not conf ined to
particular rooms or work areas; they seem to have enjoyed autonomy within
the domestic sphere. However, space may have been more segregated in upper-
class residences. In a hinterland palace in the Teotihuacan Valley, excavated by
Susan Evans (1988: 118–181), the f loor areas of public rooms at the front of
the palace near the entry (Rooms T–Y) contained fewer spindle whorls than
domestic suites along the back of the palace, and a semi-public dias room in the
middle of the palace (Room L) contained an intermediate number of spindle
whorls (Fig. 10). The number of spindle whorls found on living f loors, twelve,
is relatively small, and their association with these f loors is not certain. Thus,
this single example supplies no compelling argument. However, the low num-
ber of spindle whorls near the entrance to the palace may indicate that women
engaged in spinning were not usually present in the public areas of the palace
73
Fig. 10 Plan of Structure 6, a provincial palace at Cihuatecpan,

Basin of Mexico. The number of spindle whorls found in each
room is noted; most were recovered in rooms at the back of
the structure. Possible sweatbaths were found in rooms A and
K (after Evans 1991: f ig. 3.10).
and enjoyed only limited participation in the administrative activities that oc-
curred in these areas. This appears to have been the case in the Classic Maya
households investigated by Julia Hendon (1992) at Copán, Honduras.
Spindle whorls were present in intermediate numbers along the back of the
palace where two possible sweatbaths (temazcalli) were located. In Aztec cul-
ture, sweatbaths were used to cure both men and women of disease, but women
also visited sweatbaths regularly before and after childbirth (see Fig. 11; Sahagún
1950–82, 1: 70; 6: 155; 8: 48; Boone 1983: fol. 77r; see Houston 1996). Evans
(1991: 88) suggests that, since sweatbaths were not present in every residential
structure at Cihuatecpan, women from several households might have con-
verged at the available facilities, for example, those present in the Cihuatecpan
palace. The patchy distribution of these ceremonial facilities promoted
74
Fig. 11 Midwife massaging a pregnant woman in a sweatbath

(after Sahagún 1950–82, 6: f ig. 25). Courtesy of the School of
American Research, Santa Fe, N.M., and the University of Utah,
Salt Lake City.
interhousehold contacts among women. Sweatbaths might have constituted a

segregated female context where a separate female identity could be nurtured.
Interestingly, however, the documents warn us that this was not an exclusively
female space. Diego Durán (1971: 270) insists that “when women went to
bathe, if they were not accompanied by a man or two, they dared not enter,
considering it ill fortune. In the same way, in our own times, a man dares not
enter if a woman does not accompany him.” Thus, it is uncertain whether the
sweatbath was an institution that nurtured the development of a “backroom
transcript,” a separate women’s world-view (Scott 1992).
CONCLUSIONS
This discussion has focused on spindle whorls, artifacts that were clearly
gendered female in Aztec culture. Would a discussion of male artifacts yield
similar results concerning the status of Aztec men? Perhaps not. In drafting
men into military service or labor on public works, states often establish rela-
tions with men that are not duplicated in their relations with women. Thus,
states introduce asymmetries in female and male ideologies and identities (Nash
1978; Silverblatt 1988; Hastorf 1991), which are sometimes ref lected in the
archaeological record.
For example, in Aztec assemblages there is no category of artifact that is as
signif icant for male identity as spindle whorls are for female identity. It is always
75
dangerous to argue from an absence of evidence in archaeology; in this case,

however, the absence of highly symbolic male artifacts seems to be conf irmed
by the illustrations in ethnohistorical documents where male commoners in
plain clothing work with plain tools. Such male artifacts may be absent because
male ideology was broadcast through the use of larger, more public media such
as temple mounds and monumental sculpture. The absence of household arti-
facts symbolic of male identity might thus suggest that male commoners had
less opportunity than females to construct their own identities and that they
were more absorbed by the system of militaristic achievement promoted by
the Aztec state. If so, then in important ways, male commoners had less ability
to pursue their own interests than did female commoners.
One of the strengths of archaeological data is the ability to recover variabil-
ity in past gender systems. Whereas ethnohistory often gives us a static, norma-
tive view of gender systems, archaeological data reveal how gender roles,
ideologies, and identities varied according to geography, social status, and chang-
ing economic and political conditions. This variation challenges the idea of a
single, genetically determined gender system existing for humans, and it even
calls into question the idea that gender systems are rigidly dictated by culture.
Numerous factors in Central Mexico generated wide variation in gender roles,
ideologies, and identities, and these components of the gender system were not
stable, but changed even as environmental variables and social practices evolved.
Archaeologists can use the spatial, temporal, and social variation in gender
roles, ideologies, and identities to make controlled comparisons of gender sys-
tems and to test new theories of gender system development. For example, in
Central Mexico, spinning as a part of a woman’s role reached its peak impor-
tance (gauged by spindle whorls’ numbers) during the period of Aztec rule
when large quantities of tribute cloth were produced in commoners’ house-
holds. However, spinning as a part of a woman’s identity (as gauged by spindle
whorl decoration) was most salient at an earlier point in time, during the Middle
Postclassic period. This suggests that the importance of an activity in terms of
gender roles does not directly determine its salience in terms of gender identi-
ties. Probably, in determining an activity’s signif icance for gender identity, the
social relations implicated in that activity should carry equal or more impor-
tance than the sheer quantity of labor devoted to it (Hodder 1984:108–109).
As archaeologists explore the complex range of variables that affect gender
systems, they will begin to identify the strategic, and often creative, choices that
women and men made as they navigated ecological and social structures in
pursuit of their goals. Although artifacts are fragmentary and nonverbal, they
have the advantages of being ubiquitous and sensitive to variation. With these
76
advantages, archaeology is sometimes able to recover more of the agency of

past peoples than is history with its reliance upon a documentary record, which
is more articulate but also more limited and normative.
Acknowledgments This essay has benef ited greatly from the comments and
criticisms of Mary Collar, Margaret Conkey, Susan Evans, Cecelia Klein, Bille
Wickre, and the anonymous reviewers of this volume. I am grateful for the
time and intelligence that all of these scholars have generously lent to improve
this discussion. Susan Evans was particularly helpful in specifying which spindle
whorls from Cihuatecpan were found immediately above and below the living
f loors, therefore possibly ref lecting women’s activity areas.
77
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85
Gender in Nahuatl Texts of the Early Colonial Period:
Native “Tradition” and the Dialogue with Christianity
LOUISE M. BURKHART
UNIVERSITY AT ALBANY, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
INTRODUCTION
C
olonial documents are a major source of information about gen-
der in Pre-Hispanic America, but the fact that they were produced in
a colonial context—one of political and economic oppression, Chris-
tian evangelization, and demographic collapse—complicates their use in re-
constructing Pre-Hispanic ideas and practices. In the case of Central Mexico,
this has not stopped many scholars from making uncritical use of such sources
as Sahagún and Durán in their cultural reconstructions. Miguel León-Portilla
has defended this practice by arguing that the Late Postclassic Nahuas were
capable of passing down the exact words of their ancestors through combina-
tions of hieroglyphic writing and memorization (1992b). Even if they were
capable of doing it, this does not necessarily mean that they did so.
There is no simple solution to the problem of using colonial texts. The very
inscription of native culture in these documents was a colonial process, an
attempt to render the natives knowable and known. Indigenous concepts be-
came articulated in this process, both as a counterdiscourse to Christianity and
as a revaluation and reinterpretation of native tradition. Native people who
took over alphabetic writing for their own purposes were living under altered
circumstances; native authorship does not mean that a text is faithful to Pre-
Hispanic models. One can attempt to strip away obvious Christian and Euro-
pean “inf luences,” but one is not then left with some pure Pre-Hispanic
product—and these inf luences can be quite subtle.
In respect to gender, there is also the problem of male bias. It is not simply
that male consultants described native ways of life in a manner that ref lected
their own gendered experience, thus leading to an underrepresentation and
misrepresentation of women’s experience. The entire culture of alphabetic lit-
eracy, of education in European languages, and of text production was not
87
Louise M. Burkhart
only an elite but also a male domain, from the friars who taught these skills
down to the scribes who copied and recopied the documents. True, some in-
digenous consultants were female and some of their words were written down,
but all within a context def ined and controlled by men. The apparatus of in-
scription marginalized women in a manner parallel to and functionally interre-
lated with their exclusion from other domains of formal and public culture in
the colony.
Simultaneously with the production of the codices and other ethnographic
texts there occurred the inscription of Christianity into indigenous languages,
a process that involved many of the same priests and native scholars. In order to
evaluate representations of gender in the ethnographic corpus, it is important
to consider how gender was treated in the Christian texts. These show how
priests sought to alter Nahua ideas and practices related to gender; however,
just as the ethnographic texts are not pure Pre-Hispanic discourses, so the Chris-
tian texts in Nahuatl are not pure European discourses. Indigenous interpreters
sometimes adapted Christian texts into Nahuatl in such a way that native views
of gender were expressed in them. For example, in a Nahua adaptation of a
Spanish Holy Week drama, the native translator rewrites a dialogue between
Christ and Mary so that Mary is accorded more deference and shows greater
foreknowledge of events. The relationship between mother and son is thus
adjusted to show greater gender complementarity and filial obedience (Burkhart
1996).
In the Christian texts as well, men dominated the process of inscription.
However, women were active in the early Nahua church. It is possible that they
may have had indirect inf luence on the production of Christian materials, for
example by exerting preferences for certain types of text and by affecting cus-
tomary usage through their oral performances of Christian or Christianized
discourses.
Although Christianization is only one of the colonial changes that affected
gender roles and ideology in native society, it is one that is relatively accessible
on the discursive level and also provided the rationale for other signif icant
changes. For example, reducciones were said to facilitate indoctrination, early
marriage was to prevent sins of fornication, and restrictions on women’s activi-
ties were to promote chastity.1
In this essay I discuss how certain aspects of gender are represented in colo-
nial Nahuatl ethnographic texts and in Nahuatl-language Christian literature,
On the impact of colonialism on Nahua women’s status, see Kellogg (1995) and Nash
1
(1980).
88
Gender in Nahuatl Texts of the Early Colonial Period
with particular attention devoted to interconnections between the two discur-

sive domains. What can these documents tell us about the ways in which gen-
der was treated in the ongoing dialogue between the native people and their
Catholic evangelizers? I focus on models of proper female and male behavior,
with an emphasis on the female, as the issue of male bias makes this the more
problematic area.
SEX AND THE HUEHUEHTLAHTOLLI

To a large extent, the Christian discourse on proper gendered behavior is a
discourse centering on the control of sexuality. Christian teachings set up sexual
difference as the primary distinction between men and women, while at the
same time exhorting men and women to explore this difference as little as
possible. Virginity is presented as the ideal state for both sexes; barring this,
marital f idelity is the only acceptable choice (see Lavrin 1989 for a discussion
of colonial Mexican views on sexuality). Confession manuals make it clear that
even within marriage sexual contact should be limited to vaginal intercourse
with the man on top (Confessionario n.d.: fols. 16v–17r; Molina 1565: fols. 12v–
14r; Molina 1569: fols. 34r–35r). Sexuality is represented as immoral, polluting,
dirty, the domain of the demons; sexual transgressors are destined for hell.
Through preaching the evils of sex, questioning sexual behavior at confession,
and controlling the marriage rite and the choice of marriage partners, the
priests sought to shift the locus of control over sex from the family and the
native judicial system to the Church.
Friars recorded Nahuatl orations known as huehuehtlahtolli, or “old speech.”
They intended to use these speeches to gain insight into native ideas and values
as well as to obtain linguistic and rhetorical tools that they could employ in
their own preaching. These were contradictory goals, for the texts were ex-
pected simultaneously to document exotic and diabolical customs and to serve
as protosermons. Native orators’ desire to present their traditions in a manner
that might impress the friars or, alternatively, defy their teachings adds yet an-
other layer of ambivalence.
There are two major collections of such speeches. One set was recorded for
fray Andrés de Olmos in the 1530s, probably in Texcoco, emended and edited
by fray Juan Bautista and, presumably, the indigenous scholars on whom he
relied very heavily, and published by Bautista in 1600 (Bautista 1988). The
second is the set collected by fray Bernardino de Sahagún for his Historia general
de las cosas de Nueva España (1950–82); most of these are contained in book six
of the treatise, though some appear elsewhere in the work (see Sullivan 1974
for a listing). These orations are thought to have been f irst collected beginning
89
Louise M. Burkhart
in 1547, but they may have been edited repeatedly prior to the work’s f inal and
extant redaction in the 1570s.
According to Alonso de Zorita (1994: 140), a Spanish judge who used Olmos’s
work in his own chronicle, Olmos asked the elders reciting the texts to “take
out the names of their gods, substituting the name of the true God and of our
Lord.” To assume, however, that the texts are otherwise verbatim preconquest
discourses would be naive. George Baudot (1995: 233–234) credits Olmos with
a subtle reworking of the texts to accord with Christian preaching on sin. In
contrast, in Sahagún’s collection Baudot (1995: 232) f inds a “deep idolatrous
resonance” and believes that these are verbatim transcriptions not adapted by
the friar. Regardless of either friar’s editing policies, however, the native con-
sultants and assistants may themselves have adapted the traditional oral texts to
the colonial situation.
The huehuehtlahtolli orations are often treated as canonical native texts that
gloss the traditional wisdom of the Aztecs. They are used as sources of infor-
mation on many aspects of preconquest culture (García Quintana 1976; Sullivan
1974), whether to illustrate a balanced and harmonious philosophy of life (León-
Portilla 1963, 1992a) or to provide evidence of the systematic subordination of
women (Rodríguez-Shadow 1991). Some of them were directed at control-
ling the behavior of children, including sexual behavior. There is no reason to
doubt that preconquest parents were concerned with controlling their children’s
sexuality; however, the Church’s emphasis on abstinence determined not only
the fact that these speeches were recorded but also, to some extent, their con-
tent.
For example, Sahagún’s collection of huehuehtlahtolli contains a ruler’s speech
to his son exhorting him to chastity; this is the longest and most explicit text on
the subject that speaks, or purports to speak, in a native voice (Sahagún 1950–
82, 6: 113–119). Other huehuehtlahtolli directed at children, both in the Sahagún
and the Olmos and Bautista collections, also warn against premature and exces-
sive sexual activity, but this is the only oration devoted entirely to this topic.
The oration tells of divine reward for virginity and chastity. One has to
wonder, however, whether the gods in preconquest times cared all that much
about a person’s sex life when selecting who would die in battle and conse-
quently go to the heaven of the Sun and who would die of the water-related
causes that sent the soul to Tlalocan, the home of the rain deities. Small chil-
dren go to the garden of Tonacatecuhtli because they are precious and pure; in
context, sexual innocence is implied. It seems that the afterworlds most closely
resembling the Christian heaven were being recast as places of reward for sexual
purity. In turn, the underworld was now characterized in negative terms, as a
90
frightening place of obsidian-bladed winds, as if it were a place of punishment.

The text also argues for delay of sexual relations until marriage, lest the
youth dissipate himself through uncontrolled emission of semen in his tender
years and thus become unable to satisfy his wife later on. The father describes
an old man who, because he abstained in youth, was able to be sexually active in
old age. He also tells of two elderly women driven to adultery, who complain
that men get all used up and are good for nothing. This part does not sound
very Christian, since it does seem actually to condone, not just tolerate, sexual
relations between married adults as well as sexual activity beyond childbearing
years. However, one statement suggests that the Christian idea of the conjugal
debt has been worked into this text. This is the notion that, if one’s spouse
desires sexual relations, one must comply (within reasonable limits), lest the
spouse be driven to commit some unchaste act such as masturbation or adul-
tery (see Lavrin 1989: 73–74). In the oration, the father suggests to his son that
his future wife might desire “earthliness” (tlalticpacaiotl), that is, sexual relations,
“which you owe to your spouse” (inic timaceoalti in monamjc); with him unable
to comply, she will commit adultery against him (mitzontlaximaz) (Sahagún
1950–82, 6: 117).
The instructions addressed to marrying couples in fray Alonso de Molina’s
Spanish and Nahuatl Confessionario mayor, f irst published in 1565 and reprinted
in 1569, explain the conjugal debt. Marriage partners must obey one another
in respect to copulation, lest they fall into deadly sin and offend God. If a man
is driven to extramarital liaisons, his wife will go to the underworld, as will the
man himself—although the text does not actually impute any unchaste acts to
the frustrated wife (Molina 1569: fol. 54r–v).
Further on in the Florentine Codex oration, the wife is described as monacaio,
“your body” or, more literally,“your f lesh.” It was in order to express Christianity’s
dualism of body and soul that this Nahuatl term became a commonly used
word for the body as a whole, as opposed to simply its f leshy parts. In Molina’s
Confessionario, the following statement comes immediately after the explana-
tion of the conjugal debt: “It is necessary that you know that the body of the
man who is someone’s spouse in a sacred way [that is, married by the Church],
it is as if it is no longer his body, it is the possession of the one who is his
woman in a sacred way. And the woman, her body is his possession, it pertains
to the man” (1569: fols. 54v–55r; translation mine).
Similarly, Sahagún in the Apéndice of 1579 tells Nahuas of what St. Paul says
on the subject: “the woman who was married in a sacred way, her body is not
her possession, it is the possession of the man; he [St. Paul] speaks in the same
way in regard to the man who is married in a sacred way, his body is not his
91
Louise M. Burkhart
possession, it is the possession of his wife” (1993a: 100; translation mine). Such
reciprocal ownership of one another’s body would appear to be a Christian
introduction.
The Florentine Codex oration refers to the boy’s future wife as monamic,
“your spouse” or “your match,” rather than mocihuauh, “your wife” or “your
woman.” While admitting that the evidence is somewhat ambiguous, James
Lockhart (1992: 80–81, 270) suggests that the use of namictli as a kin term for
spouses is of colonial origin, a coinage related to the introduction of Church
marriage. Thus, what is being described for this boy is his future marriage in
the Church.
Sahagún’s collection also includes a noblewoman’s oration to her daughter,
about a third of which is devoted to advice regarding chastity within marriage.
The daughter is told to “keep” (moxicpia) the injunction against inf idelity as
“your very f irm commandment” (vel motepitznaoatil) and never betray her hus-
band (the word monamic is used). The mother states, “as the words are said, ‘do
not commit adultery.’” The phrasing suggests an intertextual link to the Chris-
tian catechism, through which Nahuas were taught the ten commandments,
the sixth of which prohibits adultery. If the daughter commits adultery and is
discovered, she will be stoned—the Pre-Hispanic punishment, according to
many sources, but also one found in the Bible. She will disgrace the memory of
her ancestors. Even if her husband does not f ind out, God will see what she has
done. The epithet Tloque Nahuaque, or “he of the near, he of the nigh,” ap-
pears in these texts as a vague reference to an omnipresent and omnipotent
deity—in effect, the speakers are represented as having a god equivalent to the
Christian one rather than any particular native deity. He will bring divine ven-
geance in the form of blindness, paralysis, or impoverishment, and will inspire
the daughter’s husband to be angry with her. Moreover, he will send her to the
underworld; again, the implication is that this is a place of punishment for
misdeeds. But even if “our lord” is merciful—a trait of the Christian god—and
does not make the adultery known, he will still cause the woman’s husband to
be angry with her (Sahagún 1950–82, 6: 102–103).
Are these huehuehtlahtolli Christian sermons in disguise? Certainly not.They
do not present Christian teachings in any direct or systematic way. In contrast
to Christian moralizing, the ruler’s advice to his son does take a positive view
of sexual pleasure, as does the ruler’s address to the daughter in the same collec-
tion (p. 93). There are many other statements in the huehuehtlahtolli that priests
would be unlikely ever to use. In the address to the daughter, for example, it is
only after the ancestors are invoked as arbiters of morality that there is any
mention of divine sanction. We may read speeches such as these as
92
counterdiscourses to Christianity. They do, to some extent, articulate indig-

enous values that we may presume to be of pre-Hispanic origin. At the same
time, however, they represent native culture as being more like Christianity
than it may really have been, and therefore—from the perspective of colonial
Nahuas and their friars—as being more legitimate. They also indicate the ex-
tent to which Christian discourses have worked their way into native expres-
sion.
Elsewhere, Sahagún rejects the arguments put forth in the exhortation to
chastity about the sexually pure receiving divine reward—even though these
probably were, at least in part, a response to Christianity. In the Apéndice, writ-
ten in 1579 (1993a: 91–101), he discusses “how your old men loved pure living
and chastity” but mixed it with many false words (ibid.: 96–97). Sahagún thus
sought to break down the authority of the ancestors. The purity and penances
of native children and any other non-Christians, he claimed, were of no value:
their gods were demons and, since all the people were tainted by original sin,
not even the babies were pure. Purity did not admit one to the Sun’s heaven, to
Tlalocan, or to the home of Tonacatecuhtli. Instead, all went to the under-
world, with the young children to be conf ined in Limbo. Only the purity of
those who worshiped the sole God was valued and rewarded. Abel, son of
Adam and Eve, was the f irst to keep his virginity; likewise the male saints John
the Baptist, John the Evangelist, and Paul received divine favor because of their
virginal status. Sahagún adds that many Christian men and women follow this
lifestyle in the present time. Through this text the friar, well aware that the
Nahuas had their own highly developed concepts of purity and pollution, was
striving to establish a strong distinction between those and his own Christian
views.
The words that the friars used for virgins, regardless of their age, were telpochtli,
“youth” or “young man,” and ichpochtli, “girl” or “young woman”; sometimes
intensif iers were added, but often not. Virginity was expressed by the abstract
noun forms telpochotl and ichpochotl, gender-specif ic terms that, as used by the
Church, def ined sexual inexperience as the essential quality of young man-
hood and young womanhood. The usage in Christian religious contexts, espe-
cially the constant use of the term ichpochtli in reference to the Virgin Mary,
changed the meanings of these words. However, as is also true of other Nahuatl
terms adapted into Christian usage, it is diff icult to guess how quickly, to what
extent, or how pervasively Nahua understandings and associations were shift-
ing.
These changes in usage and meaning probably affected numerous terms
relating to sex. Did “pure living” formerly refer specif ically to sexual absti-
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Louise M. Burkhart
nence or to a broader range of behaviors aimed at moral and/or ritual purity?

Or is the very term a Christian coinage? Did “keeping of oneself ” mean chas-
tity, in the Christian sense of restriction of sexual relations to marriage? Did
“earthliness” refer specif ically to sexual acts, and if so, which ones? The fact
that the meanings of the terms were being contested between two religious
and moral systems further complicates our readings of the indigenous texts.
The Church’s ongoing diatribe against sexuality changed the terms in which
Nahuas expressed the relationship between the sexes. But the denigration of
sexuality applied to both genders. How did gender difference f ind expression
in the dialogue with Christianity?
One difference that may be noted between the two orations discussed above
is the contrast between the notions of preserving male potency and of guard-
ing female chastity. This is consistent with a greater emphasis on female virgin-
ity and chastity in the Christian devotional texts in Nahuatl. Even though male
saints who preserved their virginity are extolled, as is Christ for the same rea-
son, this is less of a def ining characteristic for men than it is for women.
SAINTLY WOMEN
Moralizing about the evils of sexuality was one way in which the friars
sought to affect gender-related behavior. Another was to provide role models
that were considered appropriate to each sex. In order to f ind models of spe-
cif ically female behavior, I discuss here the female saints whose festivals are
included in the two major Nahuatl hagiographic compilations of the sixteenth
century: the Psalmodia christiana, authored by Sahagún and four native scholars
(Sahagún 1583, 1993b), and the Sermonario by the Augustinian friar Juan de la
Anunciación, presumably also prepared with indigenous assistants (Anunciación
1577). I have chosen to focus on female saints because they are so
underrepresented in these books—between the two collections, nine female
saints are included as opposed to forty-three male saints, which speaks of the
relative importance assigned to men and women by the Church. The fact that
there are so few women makes those included even more important.
These narratives are signif icant in the dialogue about gender because they
are presented to Nahuas both as models for emulation and as models of the
female sacred. These saints differ from the Pre-Columbian female deities not
only in character but also in function, as Pre-Columbian deities were superhu-
man f igures with divine powers of their own, and on the whole not models
one presented to one’s daughter to teach her moral behavior.
The principal female saint is, of course, the Virgin Mary. Several of her
festivals are included in these collections: the Conception, Nativity, Annuncia-
94
tion, Visitation, Purif ication, and Assumption. She is described as existing in a

state of total purity. Not only is she a perpetual virgin, with her body intact
even after childbirth, but she is conceived without original sin, commits abso-
lutely no misdeeds during her entire life, and is taken bodily into heaven. She
marries, but she and Joseph share a vow of virginity; his role is to accompany
her and provide for her. In general, she appears in these texts as humble and
obedient in character. However, as a young girl brought up in temple service—
an experience that paralleled that of some preconquest Nahua girls—she re-
fuses the priests’ demand that she marry when she comes of age (Doctrina n.d.:
fol. 104v). Just before the Passion, she seeks to dissuade Christ from going
through with his foreordained suffering and execution (Burkhart 1996). She
also intercedes with Christ on behalf of her devotees, sometimes insisting that
he pardon even very sinful individuals (e.g., Burkhart 1999; Doctrina n.d.: fols.
65v–66v).2
In addition to Marian festivals, both collections observe the days of Ann,
Catherine of Alexandria, and Mary Magdalene. Sahagún’s collection also in-
cludes Clare of Assisi and Martha, while Anunciación covers Agnes, Lucy, and
Monica. Five of these saints are, like Mary, virgins. These virgin saints are by no
means uniformly passive and submissive; indeed, they display more self-deter-
mination than does Mary in the same and other texts. St. Martha, for example,
after fulf illing her Gospel-attested role as host to the itinerant Christ, goes on
to a career as apostle to Marseilles, where she converts the local population,
heals the sick, raises the dead, tames a dragon, and then retreats into the forest
with other maidens to live a penitential life, subsisting on tortillas and water
(Sahagún 1993b: 208–213). St. Catherine, wealthy, highly educated, and heir to
a kingdom, argues theology with the pagan emperor Maxentius, who calls in
f ifty great sages to refute her. She persuades the sages that Christianity is supe-
rior to their pagan philosophy. When as a result the emperor has her beheaded,
milk f lows from her neck, and Christ himself buries her on Mount Sinai
(Sahagún 1993b: 334–339). In addition to describing her martyrdom,
Anunciación’s version includes the story of Catherine’s mystic marriage to
Christ. After she rejects all earthly suitors, Catherine has a vision in which the
Christ child gives her a ring, which is on her f inger when she awakens
(Anunciación 1577: fols. 208v–210r).
St. Agnes, for her part, spurns the marriage proposal of a Roman off icial’s
son. Her suitor’s father orders her to worship the idols; she refuses to do so and
2
I am currently preparing an anthology of Nahuatl texts on the Virgin Mary, in which
these traits are evident. See also Burkhart (1989, 1992a).
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Louise M. Burkhart
speaks against the worship of false deities. He then has her hauled off to a
brothel, but an angel surrounds her with a light so bright that none can look at
her. After Agnes’s prayers save her suitor from a demon, he accepts Christianity,
but she is burned to death by other idolaters (Anunciación 1577: fols. 132v–
133v). In St. Lucy’s case, an idolatrous judge orders her taken to a brothel for
refusing to make offerings to the images of the demons, but it is impossible to
move her body, even with chains. She is tortured with f ire on the spot and then
beheaded (Anunciación 1577: fol. 214r–v).3
Valor is a trait these Early Christian women share with some of the Aztec
female deities—as is dismemberment—but their valor is exerted in defense of
the faith and linked to sexual purity. The old goddesses were sexually ambiva-
lent and were dismembered to symbolize the defeat and humiliation of the
enemies of the Mexica state (Klein 1994), whereas these pure Christian virgins
are extolled for their symbolic victory over paganism. Friars may have seen
these women as appropriate models for Nahua girls and women in that, in
addition to being virgins, they refused to participate in non-Christian worship
or to marry idolaters.
St. Clare, also a virgin, was an early follower of St. Francis and founder of
the women’s branch of the Franciscan order. The text devoted to her in the
Psalmodia (Sahagún 1993b: 236–241) sets her up as a model of chaste and peni-
tential womanhood: she made a vow of virginity; she was cloistered and went
about with bowed head; she lived on water, old tortillas, and crusts of bread; she
cut off her hair and wore coarse garments, including “an itchy mantle called a
hair shirt”; she swept, cleaned, and cooked all day and prayed at night.
Clare’s life is contrasted with a model of womanhood designated for noble-
women. The noblewomen described, however, are indigenous Mexican noble-
women, not those of thirteenth-century Italy.They love meat tamales and other
rich foods; they esteem fancy skirts and blouses decorated with coyote fur and
other materials; they f ix up their hair, paint their faces and teeth, and hang
about the roads and in the marketplace, showing themselves to people and
making people (that is, men) desire them.
This is not, however, a simple dichotomy between Christian and native
discourses on female virtue. The huehuehtlahtolli addressed to noble girls simi-
larly tell them not to dress themselves very fancily, not to use cosmetics, not to
linger in the streets and markets, and not to go around looking at people. In-
stead, they are to be moderate and circumspect in all things and ignore men
3
Anunciación’s account omits the action that got Lucy into trouble, namely, her spurn-
ing of her pagan betrothed and donation of her dowry to the poor (Voragine 1993, 1: 25–
26); the episode of her gouging out her own eyes is also omitted here.
96
who try to f lirt with them (Bautista 1988: 312–325; Sahagún 1950–82, 6: 93–
103). Neither is this simply a dichotomy between Christian behavior and a
traditional native model of bad behavior. The term “sinner women” (tlatlacoani
ciua) used here (Sahagún 1993b: 240) would not have been applied to these
noblewomen outside of a Christian or Christianizing context. Although the
huehuehtlahtolli, with their ideals of marriage and moderation, certainly do not
condone a lifestyle like Clare’s, penitential practices are extolled for both sexes
and girls are told to get up during the night and talk to “our Lord” (Sahagún
1950–82, 6: 95). Noble girls were, reportedly, sequestered away from men (see
below, p. 102–103). And we may note that Clare sweeps, which is a penitential
and housekeeping rite closely associated with native women (Burkhart 1989:
117–120; 1992b: 32–40; on this text see also Burkhart 1989: 138–139; 1992a).
Thus, even when set up as foils for one another, native models muddle the
Christian ones, and vice versa.
As Nahua girls were not permitted to become nuns and generally married
at a young age, married saints may have been more realistic role models. The
two married, noncelibate women in the hagiographic collections, Monica and
Ann, derive their main claim to fame from their offspring. St. Monica is the
mother of St. Augustine. A Christian woman married to a pagan man, Monica
succeeds in converting her husband; her prayers, weeping, and penances even-
tually help to bring about her son’s change of faith as well (Anunciación 1577:
153r–v). Like the virgin martyrs, Monica can serve as a model of religious zeal
in a context of recent or ongoing conversion.
In a similar vein, St. Ann is famous for being the mother of Mary and the
grandmother of Christ. Her cult is based not on the canonical Gospels but on
the apocryphal Gospel of the Birth of Mary and Protoevangelion, which tell
of her long-childless marriage to Joachim and the angel-heralded conception
of Mary. Ann is also notable for another reason: Sahagún (1981, 3: 352–353)
attested to the case of a Nahua community, formerly devoted to the deity
Tocih (“Our Grandmother”), which now had Ann as its patron saint. The friar
suspected that the old goddess was still being worshiped under the cover of the
saint.4
The Psalmodia’s songs dedicated to St. Ann are based in part on an Old
Testament text from the book of Proverbs (31:10–23). The biblical verses de-
scribe a strong and industrious woman, trusted by her husband, who spins
thread and makes f ine clothing, brings her bread from far away like the merchant’s
ships, rises before dawn to prepare food, plants a vineyard, labors at night by
4
The community is Santa Ana Chiauhtempan, near Tlaxcala.
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Louise M. Burkhart
candlelight, provides well for the members of her household, and is generous
to the poor. Part of this text was used as a breviary reading for Ann’s festival;5
this, presumably, is how the Psalmodia’s authors came to connect it with Ann.
But the authors—perhaps the native writers more than Sahagún—translated
the biblical text as a literal description of St. Ann and made a few adjustments
in accordance with the local context. For example, Ann’s house was full of
goods as if it were a house of merchants (oztomecacalli). She sought wool and
cotton, rather than wool and f lax, for her spinning, and “she made many mantles,
because she knew her womanly work very well.” The people of her household
kept many adornments. The f inal verse, “Her husband is known in the gates,
when he sitteth among the elders of the land” (Prov. 31:23), is translated as
“And her spouse, St. Joachim, she dearly loved, she greatly honored. She would
adorn him with many precious mantles, with designs on them” (Sahagún 1993b:
206–207; translations mine).
The Psalmodia’s Ann could be the matron of a Nahua household, a
hardworking woman properly brought up according to huehuehtlahtolli dictates,
with Christian charity thrown in. The wool and the grapevine being Spanish
imports, she could not quite be a preconquest woman. The weaving of mantles
(tilmahtli) was a central economic activity of Nahua women, vital not only for
clothing household members but also for paying tribute and trading for other
goods. Ann as a weaver of mantles is ambivalent: she supports the Spanish
colonial economy but also ensures her household’s economic survival. Here,
native and Christian models of womanhood are not contrasted but subtly
conf lated, to an unusual degree for a Church-sanctioned text.
In Anunciación’s (1577: fol. 171r–v) text, in contrast, Ann serves as a model
for rejecting an aspect of native behavior. Women who are unable to become
pregnant should, like Ann, pray to God rather than consult the native midwives
(titicih), specif ically those who specialize in fertility problems, the tepillaliliah, or
“they who place children for people” (on these practitioners, see López Austin
1967: 111).
Unlike the other female saints, St. Mary Magdalene was neither married
nor a virgin. Anunciación (1577: fol. 167r) describes her as a wealthy and beau-
tiful woman who, deceived by the demon, became enamored of “earthliness”
and the “foul pleasures of the f lesh”; the Psalmodia does not explicitly identify
her misdeeds as sexual in nature. On meeting Christ, Mary Magdalene aban-
doned her sinful life, repented, and became his follower. After Christ’s ascen-
sion she went to France (with her sister Martha) and did the usual apostolic
5
I have found verses 31: 10–12 used in this context in a 16th-century breviary (Breuiarium
romanum 1553).
98
work of converting people and working miracles. But afterward she moved to
a mountaintop and spent thirty years living in a cave in the forest and doing
penance for her sins, alone except for the angels who would come every day to
feed her and carry her in their arms (Anunciación 1577: fols. 166r–167v; Sahagún
1993b: 198–201). Thus, Mary Magdalene serves as a model of repentance and
penance for sin, but her life has little in common with the life experience of
Nahua women or with the native deities associated with female sexuality.
TEACHING SUBMISSION?
Over the course of the early colonial period, women’s status declined, in
part because of the colonial policies that favored early marriage and empha-
sized the nuclear family over consanguineal kinship networks (Kellogg 1995).
One might expect that the Christian texts in Nahuatl would have encouraged
female subordination within marriage, in accordance with Spanish ideals, but
this was not a predominant or pervasive theme compared to the theme of
general disapprobation of sexual excesses. As we have seen, the female saints are
submissive to divine authority and are valued more for chastity than for any
other single quality, but they are not controlled by fathers and husbands.
One complicating factor, I suggest, is that the priests (like other Europeans)
saw all native people as weak, passive, and submissive by nature. Sahagún (1993a:
112), addressing a native audience, compares the Spaniards to the lion (castilla
miztli) and the indigenous people to the rabbit, which cannot succeed in emu-
lating the lion. These animal metaphors have clear masculine and feminine
associations for Europeans. The native people as a whole were also considered
more carnal and less spiritual than the Old World Christians (Burkhart 1998),
and thus more susceptible to temptation, especially toward sexual sins and acts
of idolatry or Devil worship. Laura Lewis (1996) documents various contexts
in which native Mexicans were directly or indirectly feminized and treated as
legally and morally comparable to women; such discourses stripped them of
legitimate power and authority while at the same time ascribing to them illicit
power gained through witchcraft and ties to the Devil—powers more often
associated with women than men in Europe (see also Behar 1989).
The friars’ concern with eradicating polygyny may have led them to see
native men as equally—or more—susceptible to sins of the f lesh as native women,
in contrast to the typical views on gender difference among Europeans. For
example, they preach to men against concubinage (momecatiliztli, “tying one-
self ”). Women’s traditional clothing was notably more modest, by European
standards, than that of men. In this sense, both sexes were constructed as being
morally weaker than Europeans, with women not necessarily seen as weaker
than men.
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Louise M. Burkhart
Thus, some critical ways in which gender hierarchy was constructed in

European discourses collapsed in New Spain under the weight of more salient
hierarchies of power—Spaniard over Indian and Christian over pagan. Femini-
zation of colonized people is, of course, typical of colonial discourses, as Ed-
ward Said and others have noted (e.g., Said 1979; Thomas 1994). If all natives
are by their very nature meek and humble, it is unnecessary to teach such traits
to the women and pointless to try to eradicate them in the men.
Molina’s instructions to the marrying couple, cited earlier, teach mutual
obedience only in respect to the conjugal debt; the woman is not told to obey
her husband in other matters. Preaching against sexual excesses, Sahagún (1563:
fol. 18v) states that spouses must not obey one another in such matters if the
acts entail disobedience to God; the example he gives is mutual touching, pre-
sumably of the genitals.
While wifely submission is not a common topic, there are some examples
of texts that condone it. Some tell of Eve’s punishment in Genesis (3:16), when
God tells her, “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be
to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” In a sermon of Sahagún’s (1563:
fol. 29v), God tells Eve that she will bear many children with suffering and
“your husband will rule over you; you will obey him.” This judgment applies to
all women: “To you it happens as our Lord said.” Adam is also punished, but
with the tilling of the now-cursed earth, not with obedience to his wife—for
it was obedience to her that got him into trouble.
Female obedience within marriage is given further sanction in another of
Sahagún’s sermons, which emphasizes the permanence of the marriage bond.
For women who are married in the Church, the command is to obey their
husbands, and to love and honor them. Sahagún provides the following model
speech for women to deliver to their daughters, a substitution for the tradi-
tional huehuehtlahtolli:
My precious daughter, you little woman, you are going to marry in a
sacred way. And marriage in a sacred way, it is very great, it is a sacra-
ment. It is not like the marriage of long ago, when a woman who was
jealous would leave her spouse; thus she would console herself. But
today when you marry in a sacred way, if indeed you should become
jealous, if indeed your husband beats you, if indeed he aff licts you, in
no way will you be able to leave him. It is necessary that you will
always live with him, you will obey him, you will honor him. He is
your lord, he is your spouse in a sacred way. It is ordained by our
mother the Holy Church. It is also ordained by God. It is a sacrament.
No one at all will be able to break it. May you thus be taught. It will
100
become your command when you marry that never will you leave
him, you will always obey him. And if sometime you become jealous,
you do not obey him, or perhaps you leave him, you will be caught,
you will be locked up, and in the church you will be shamed, you will
be whipped. Our mother Holy Church is the example for women
who have married in a sacred way, as she obeys her husband, our Lord
Jesus Christ. She loves him very much, she honors him very much, and
she looks after her children very well, she takes good care of them.
(1563: fol. 65r; translation mine)
With Christ and the Church presented as the model couple, there was little
room for women to assert independence. The essence of marriage here is the
inviolable bond created by the Church.6
The huehuehtlahtolli teach diligence and chastity. Young men and women
are exhorted to submit to the authority of their parents and ancestors. But do
the orations teach women to be submissive to their husbands? The orations to
the marrying couple in Sahagún’s collection emphasize hard work and respon-
sibility for both partners; marriage is depicted primarily as an economic part-
nership and a union between families. The bride is told to be diligent in selling
the mantles that her husband gives her, so that she will be able to obtain food
and f irewood; the groom is exhorted to go on trading expeditions. Their com-
portment toward one another is not mentioned (Sahagún 1950–82, 6: 130–
133). Here, the essence of marriage appears to be the formation of a household
based on complementary productive activities.
In the Olmos–Bautista collection, however, the mother tells the daughter
that, when she is married, she will attend to how her husband advises and
commands her, and she will obey him, receiving his words with gladness. She is
not to become angry or turn away from him (Bautista 1988: 320–321). Sons do
not receive comparable advice. Rather, the father cautions the son against mar-
rying before he has the wherewithal to support a wife and children (1988: 296–
297). A married son is told by his father to make his wife do housework: spinning,
weaving, preparing drinks, and grinding maize (1988: 356–357). Perhaps
preconquest parents would have also made such statements, but it is possible
that a Christian model of marriage, with an obedient and economically depen-
dent wife under the direct authority of her husband, has worked its way into
6
The bond was not so inviolable as the friars would have liked. According to Zorita
(1994: 125), judges in preconquest times had discouraged divorce and sought to reconcile
the partners. Zorita states that he was informed by friars that divorce became more com-
mon under Spanish rule than it had been previously.
101
Louise M. Burkhart
these speeches.Women’s responsibility for household tasks is not at issue; rather,

it is a question of whether these are represented as a female domain of eco-
nomically productive activities over which women exercise control, or as work
that women do to serve their husbands.
Christian reworking is also apparent in the Bancroft dialogues. These are a
collection of model Nahuatl speeches recorded probably in a late-sixteenth-
century Franciscan context, apparently in Texcoco, and known from a seven-
teenth-century Jesuit transcription (Karttunen and Lockhart 1987). The
collection contains a speech addressed by a male speaker to a couple newly
married in the Church. The bride and groom are told to live prudently, serve
God, and avoid moral error. Addressing the groom, the speaker says, “You are
the head and trunk of the maiden here whom our Lord has vouchsafed to you”
(ibid. 1987: 109).The groom is then told to work hard to provide for his house-
hold. The bride is not told to obey her husband, but she is admonished to be
diligent in household tasks—the canonical ones of sweeping, cooking, spin-
ning, and weaving—“so that you will please your husband whom our Lord has
vouchsafed to you, for as a woman you are to take care of things, watch over
things, and not let things go to ruin in your house and home; and keep yourself
so that you do not live in vice and badly, for this is why you will be loved and
honored” (ibid. 1987: 108–111). There is a clear sense of gender hierarchy here,
and of the mutuality of the conjugal relationship as contracted through the
Church. Whether the author, a Christian Nahua, was writing to please the
priests or transcribing what he really would have said to newlyweds, the dia-
logue with Christianity was affecting what was being recorded as native dis-
course about marriage.
CONCLUSIONS
In the Bancroft dialogues there is a speech attributed to an elderly woman.
She reminisces that children were much better brought up in the old days and
misdeeds such as adultery were more severely punished. After describing the
education of noble boys in a wide range of activities—warfare, hunting, crafts,
singing, oratory, musical instruments, astronomy, reading, and agriculture—she
narrates how noble girls were raised:
Likewise within the houses, where the ladies were in their quarters,
the girls [ichpopochtin] were taught all the different things women do:
sweeping, sprinkling, preparing food, making beverages, grinding
(maize), preparing tortillas, making tamales, all the different things cus-
tomarily done among women; also (the art of ) the spindle and the
weaver’s reed and various kinds of embroidery; also dyeing, how rab-
102
bit down or rabbit fur was dyed different colors. And in the same way
(as with the boys) those who did something wrong or did not take
care were severely punished. And they were all well cared for: no men,
no matter who, entered there; taking care of them was the exclusive
domain of the elderly noblewomen. (Karttunen and Lockhart
1987:152–155)
As for commoners, the girls were raised “at the women’s temple, where the
female penitents were enclosed and fasted” (ibid.: 154–155).7
Is this an accurate description, a nostalgia-tinged exaggeration, or a projec-
tion of new, Christian values into the past? Or is it a counterdiscourse to colo-
nialism, a way of saying “we were better Christians when we were pagans than
we are under Spanish rule”? Knowing that female saints were represented as
cloistered, hardworking, and penitent, that domestic productive tasks were vir-
tually the only activities of preconquest women explicitly sanctioned in Chris-
tian teaching, and that virginity was treated as the most important attribute of
young women, we may reasonably suspect that this account has been framed in
terms of the dialogue with Christianity, regardless of how ethnographically
specif ic or accurate it may (or may not) be.
The same speech describes how the old sacred books discussed “he of the
near, he of the nigh, the creator of people” (ibid.: 152–153), while also dealing
with the false gods about whom people used to be confused before the coming
of the faith. Turning the ancestors into proto-Christians was not an uncom-
mon strategy for colonial Nahuas who wished to assert continuities between
past and present and depict their forebears in a favorable light.
These examples of interconnections between ethnographic and Christian
texts have indicated some of the ways in which gender representations are
complicated by the dialogue with Christianity. In respect to female gender, the
documents ref lect a new emphasis on chastity and virginity, a stress on domes-
tic work and limitations placed on female activity outside the household, a
revaluation of the marriage bond, and the demonizing of women who do not
f it Christian patterns, including medical practitioners. But we also f ind evi-
dence of indigenous constructs working their way into Christian texts as, for
instance, a Clare who sweeps or an Ann who weaves many mantles. Only by
treating ethnographic inscriptions as part of the same discursive universe as
Christian inscriptions—a universe dominated by both elite, literate native men
7
For another description of the cloistering of girls in preconquest times, see Zorita
(1994: 130–131, 136–137).
103
Louise M. Burkhart
and Catholic priests—can we evaluate them as sources of information about

indigenous gender constructs. And while we cannot expect to recover Pre-
Hispanic gender in some pure, essential form, these sources do reveal a great
deal about the negotiation not only of gender but also of ethnicity, class, and
religious identity by native people during the early phases of Spanish rule.
The Nahuatl texts have broader implications for the study of gender in
colonial situations.Wherever the ruling group’s gender-related values and prac-
tices differ signif icantly from those of the subordinate group, the result is not
simply that the colonizers will disapprove of the indigenous expressions and
attempt to alter them. One can also expect indigenous discourse on gender to
undergo what Pierre Bourdieu (1977: 22) calls “regularization” (see also Hanks
1987). That is, the colonized will attempt to represent themselves as being in
line with the values of the dominant group. In the case of a confrontation with
patriarchal Christian Europe, this will most likely lead to an increased emphasis
on female chastity and submissiveness, as seen in the Nahua case. In turn, this
revaluation of indigenous culture, on the part of indigenous people them-
selves, may have the unfortunate result of furthering the process of colonial
hegemony. If European constructs of gender come to be represented as part of
traditional native culture, their adoption is condoned, as it were, from both
sides. The decline in status experienced by Nahua women over the course of
the early colonial period (Kellogg 1995, 1997) may thus have resulted not just
from direct Spanish pressure but also from a growing sense among Nahuas that
this was, after all, the normal order of things.
104
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107
Negotiating Sex and Gender in Classic Maya Society
ROSEMARY A. JOYCE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
T
oday it is of course impossible to directly observe the actions of
members of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies such as the Clas–
sic Maya. And while literate Mesoamerican societies left written records
behind, and all Mesoamerican societies produced some visual representations,
these sources were themselves a means within these societies of asserting limits
on what constituted intelligible action, and thus should not be used as indica-
tions of the actual range of gendered performance in Pre-Hispanic
Mesoamerica.1
Paradoxically, the determination of Mesoamerican ethnohistorical records
by political agendas of control may make the testimony of sixteenth-century
European observers more valuable in establishing the actual diversity in living
practice that exceeded the limits of Pre-Hispanic attempts at discipline. In their
initial encounters with Mesoamerican peoples, Europeans created texts that,
while constrained by European concepts of gender, did not necessarily repro-
duce the same limitations as did native Mesoamerican records. We are already
in a position to critique the kinds of assumptions about gender that are embed-
ded in the European accounts, thanks to active contemporary scholarship in
feminist anthropology and gender studies.
I argue that early European records attest a highly f luid Mesoamerican
ideology of gender, which is not an essential, innate, and immutable quality in
the classic European mode, but rather produced, from an original androgeny or
encompassment of sexual possibilities, by creative action in mythological time
and recreated by social means in individual time ( Joyce 1996).2 The f luidity of
1
I draw here on theoretical concepts from the work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993).
Space limitations prevent my presenting an explication of my use of this work. I refer
interested readers to Joyce (1993a, 1996, 1998, 2001) for those arguments.
2
Compare Kellogg (1988; 1995: 92–93), McCafferty and McCafferty (n.d.); for ethno-
graphic examinations of similar concepts of gender, see Hoskins (1990) and McKinnon
(1991).
109
Rosemary A. Joyce
gender implicit in Mesoamerican ideology is expressed in multiple ways. As

Eva Hunt (1977: 95–109, 139) noted, several conquest-era Mesoamerican dei-
ties were described as sexually f luid, sometimes male, and sometimes female.
She draws particular attention to the association of such ambiguity with cyclic
phenomena, such as the growth of maize (leading to characterizations of maize
as male or female at different stages of growth) and the phases of the moon.
Some Mesoamerican mythologies place a dual-gendered being at the begin-
ning of creation, as the singular parent of subsequent f ixed, dichotomously
gendered supernaturals. The f igure of Ometecuhtli (“Two-Lord”), of Aztec
belief, is the most fully described example (León-Portilla 1963: 99–111). Other
Aztec deities exhibit gender ambiguity beyond the gender dualism of
Ometecuhtli. For instance, Cecelia Klein (1976, 1980: 157–165) has documented
the gender-ambiguous aspects of the earth deity, Tlaltecuhtli, and the rain and
fertility deity, Tlaloc. Contemporary Nahua beliefs ref lect the possibility of
dual-gendered supernatural beings in the form of rayos, lightning bolts, both
male and female, described as “characters who bridge many polarized elements
in the universe and help tie it together into a whole” (Taggart 1983: 66; see also
60–61).
Mesoamerican originary beings may also reassert undivided gender through
overlapping identif ication between paired male and female representations. The
couple identif ied by Jill Furst (1982: 209–10) as Generator Deities in the Vienna
Codex have the same calendar name, 1 Deer, and both wear the headdress of 9
Wind, whom Furst calls the Mexica cultural hero. Painted as paired male and
female but merged by naming, they could be equally conceived of as two
aspects of a single being, 1 Deer. Sixteenth-century texts recording Aztec tradi-
tions of human founders, Oxomoco and Cipactonal, the patrons of the calen-
dar, divination, healing, and midwives, routinely fail to maintain stable
identif ications of these characters as male and female (López Austin 1988: 238).
Similar f luidity of the gender of actors in royal histories of the Mexica has
been documented by Susan Gillespie (1989).
This phenomenon is by no means peculiar to Central Mexico, although
our sixteenth-century documentation is richest for this region. Modern eth-
nographies record the use of terms like “mothers/fathers” (totilme’il ) by spe-
cif ic Maya groups (in this case, Zinacantec Tzotzil speakers) for the corporate
ancestors (Devereaux 1987: 92). Leslie Devereaux (1987) argues that dual gen-
der is necessary for the active role of Maya ancestors in founding lines of
descent, and that, represented as the ancestral collectivity denoting both origins
and authority, the ancestors are not separated into distinct First Mother and
First Father f igures.
110
I have argued elsewhere ( Joyce 1992a, 1994, 1996) that Classic Maya de-
pictions of actors dressed in variations of a beaded net skirt represent perfor-
mances of gender-encompassing primordial characters by Maya rulers. These
costumes have been identif ied as “male” accoutrements because they are worn
by supernatural beings assigned an early mythological date, including the maize
god, the moon god, and the supernatural actor GI named in mythological texts
at Palenque, each of whom has been presumed to be male (Reents-Budet
1991; Stone 1991: 201–202;Taube 1985: 178). It is notable that these characters
include the same categories of supernatural beings—maize and moon gods—
whose gender Hunt (1977: 139) identif ied as cyclical, thus suggesting that they
also share the quality of encompassing multiple possibilities of gender, ex-
pressed as a cycle through time.
Support for the idea that civil authorities actually enacted gender-encom-
passing performances comes from sixteenth-century descriptions of Mexica
society. At the top of the political hierarchy were the tlatoani, whom the Span-
ish recognized as the supreme civil authority, and the cihuacoatl (literally, “woman
serpent” or “woman twin”). The latter person, a male, wore a mixed-gender
costume (Gillespie 1989: 62–63, 133; Kellogg 1995: 99–100).
The existence of Mesoamerican epistemologies of gender as f luid, unfold-
ing over the life course ( Joyce n.d.b, n.d.c), would have posed a challenge to
attempts to represent dualistic heterosexuality as the norm. Judith Butler (1990,
1993) takes the societal imperative of heterosexuality as a driving force behind
constructions of normative gender in Euro-American cultures. As in the Euro-
pean tradition, it does appear that states in Mesoamerica had interests in con-
trolling people by, among other things, controlling their adult sexuality. That
attempts at control were an issue would be evident from the stereotyping of
Mesoamerican human representations alone, even without abundant sixteenth-
century documentation of this intent. The admonitions of Aztec parents to
their children, the disciplining of Aztec children in gendered labor, dress, and
action, and the denunciations of deviation from these norms of decorum, as
found in the Florentine Codex (Sahagún 1950–82), amply testify to the con-
cern of one of Mesoamerica’s most centralized polities with the production of
dichotomous heterosexual adult genders.3
Although the material is somewhat terse and native voices are absent, de-
scriptions of Postclassic Yucatec Maya society provided by the sixteenth-cen-
tury Relación de las cosas de Yucatán of Bishop Diego de Landa (1941) express a
3
See Arvey (1988), Calnek (1974), Clendinnen (1991), Kellogg (1995: 88–91, 162–
186), and Sullivan (1974) for relevant discussions of these sources.
111
Rosemary A. Joyce
parallel concern with the production of heterosexual adult men and women.
However, I suggest that, far from ref lecting a reif ication of concepts of an
essential gender dichotomy, these late Mesoamerican disciplinary practices were
themselves the activity through which authorities and elders attempted to sta-
bilize normative genders against a contradictory philosophical background of
gender f luidity ( Joyce n.d.a, n.d.b, n.d.c; cf. Dean, this volume).
Butler (1993) argues that attempts at controlling gender practices must be-
gin with control of the materialization of the body, that is, with the socially
sanctioned recognition given to physical features, and the modif ication and
discipline of those features according to social dictates. The sixteenth-century
state of affairs in Mesoamerica, in which dress, ornaments, and treatment of
hair all were tightly controlled and linked to adult gender identity and sexual
status, was the f inal sedimentation of approximately three thousand years of
body manipulation. This history is accessible to us archaeologically because the
control was accomplished not only through practice, but also through the per-
manent representation of acceptable practices in images and the production of
imperishable items used in gendered action. The picture that these enduring
media communicate must, of course, be understood to stand in contrast to
largely unrecorded negotiation of gender in day-to-day life. The very abun-
dance of documents that polarize gendered statuses and present them in highly
stereotyped ways is a ref lection not of stability achieved, but of constant rein-
forcement of a state of affairs idealized and desired by those in control of the
production of this imagery.
MATERIALIZING THE BODY: A MESOAMERICAN HISTORY

From Central Mexico to Honduras, between approximately 1200 and 900
B.C., burials began to incorporate body ornaments made of durable materials,
with both forms and materials becoming highly standardized over time. At the
same time, a series of local styles of hand-modeled ceramic f igurines presented
permanent inscriptions of ornamented bodies, many explicitly marked as adult
females. During the same critical interval, at a smaller number of sites, larger-
scale human representations were carved in stone (or, more rarely, painted on
natural rock surfaces outside and inside caves). Unlike the small-scale f igurines,
the majority of the f igures represented in these monumental images are appar-
ently male.
I argue that these three developments are linked inscriptions of practices of
bodily incorporation that, among other things, served as media for the creation
of precedents for the citational performance of gender within emerging cen-
tralized polities with interests in the control of the personhood of their popu-
112
lation.4 Explanations for the production of these items emphasize their utility:
f igurines were used in small-scale life-cycle rituals, perhaps controlled by el-
ders, or in veneration of ancestors or rulers; monumental images, to demarcate
large-scale spatial settings for political rituals and to assert specif ic claims to
political authority; and body ornaments, as luxuries, products of patronized
craft with restricted circulation, and badges of social status.5 However else they
were employed together these media inscribed certain forms of bodily exist-
ence as normative.
These linked Early Pre-Classic practices of inscription provide a history for
the materialization of sex and gender in the Mesoamerican tradition ( Joyce
n.d.d). The inscription of bodily appearance, in both small- and large-scale
permanent media, was a mirror for everyday practices, against which individual
performances could be evaluated as better or worse citations of what was rep-
resented as the norm. The two permanent media of human representation
differed, not only in the preferential presentation of sex and gender, but also in
relation to spatial settings of gendered performance. Figurines, by nature of
their small size, were inherently intimate media, and they are found in refuse
around house compounds. In contrast, monumental images carved in stone and
painted on rock faces, while inherently more visible, were hallmarks of spatially
restricted settings through which their circulation appears to have been limited
and formalized (Grove 1999).
In spite of their different scales and contrasting settings, small- and large-
scale inscriptions of human performance are bound together by an extraordi-
nary common iconographic vocabulary of body ornaments, matched by items
recovered from contemporary burials. Earspools, neck pendants, especially what
appears to be concave mirrors, and strands of round beads at the neck and
wrists are repeated elements of human images and burials. The execution of
this common vocabulary of body ornaments in imperishable materials repre-
sents the further inscription of bodily practices in media that, surviving their
wearers, perpetuated practices of body modif ication and ornamentation. Body
ornaments like these, made of jade or other green stone, became heirlooms in
later Mesoamerican societies, including the Classic Maya. Examples of Pre-
Classic ornaments were selectively retained by the Classic and Postclassic Maya
and the Postclassic Aztec (Benson and de la Fuente 1996: nos. 94, 95, 97). Such
4
The terms inscription and practices of bodily incorporation are drawn from the work of Paul
Connerton (1989). Space limitations prevent an explication of my use of these terms; see
Joyce (1998).
5
See Carlson (1981), Clark (1991), Coe (1972), Cyphers (1993), Fields (1991), Grove
(1973, 1981), Grove and Gillespie (1984, 1992), Hirth (1992), Joyce (1992c), Lesure (1997),
Lowe (1989), Marcus (1999), Pires-Ferreira (1976), Tolstoy (1989).
113
Rosemary A. Joyce
heirloom ornaments exhibited the history of bodily practices and undermined

the contingency of f leeting performances through the evidence of their recre-
ation of long-standing historical precedents.
Even ornaments that were not heirlooms embodied the same weight of
history-as-precedent due to their resistance to change over the millennia of
Mesoamerican history. Naturally occurring iron ore was polished in Early and
Middle Pre-Classic Mesoamerica for use in costume. Among the multiple forms
of ornaments executed in this material, the most standardized was surely the
concave mirror. Examples from La Venta, San Lorenzo, Tlatilco, Chalcatzingo,
the Valley of Oaxaca, and Guerrero all fall within a narrow range of sizes and
share similar optical characteristics (Carlson 1981), even though analysis of
their raw material suggests multiple centers of manufacture (Pires-Ferreira 1976).
All are found in burials in one of two positions, which correspond to represen-
tations in pottery and stone—either as a pectoral ornament, or at the center of
the forehead. While the use of solid iron ore for mirrors was discontinued
following the Middle Pre-Classic period, the mirror itself continued to be
made on the same scale and worn in the same ways. Mirrors made of iron
pyrite mosaic in Teotihuacan style were worn as pectoral ornaments and in
headdresses, as well as at the small of the back (Taube 1992). The Classic Maya
executed mirrors in mosaic of iron pyrite set onto carved slate backs, and pro-
duced other polished obsidian mirrors, which were placed as pectoral orna-
ments or elsewhere on the bodies of buried individuals (Kidder, Jennings, and
Shook 1946: 126–133; Schele and Miller 1983: 9–20;Willey 1972: 141–143; cf.
Carlson 1981). Classic Maya texts suggest that some of these mirrors were
worn on headbands, as their Pre-Classic predecessors had been (Schele and
Miller 1983: 12). The Postclassic Aztec, among others, produced polished ob-
sidian mirrors that are shown worn in the headdress by supernatural f igures in
painted manuscripts and on carved monuments (Pasztory 1983: 83–84, pl. 291).
Perhaps the sharpest illustration of this sedimentation of bodily practices
through specif ic forms of body ornament is provided by earspools, the ubiqui-
tous ornaments placed in pierced openings in the earlobes. From the earliest
Pre-Classic examples to the latest Postclassic, earspools (in the form of tubes)
and f lares (provided with a wider exterior surface), executed in pottery, green
stone, or other materials, were characteristic of diverse Mesoamerican cultures
(cf. Caso 1965: 897–909; Piña Chan 1971: 173–174; Rands 1965: 563–565;
Woodbury 1965: 175–176). Despite variation in ornamentation and materials,
the basic forms remain remarkably similar from the early examples to the late,
and imply continued practices of body modif ication necessary to prepare the
ears for these weighty ornaments. Attention to the Mesoamerican history of
114
ear ornaments reminds us that the stability of this form of ornamentation

stemmed from the use of ear ornaments as media for creating and marking
adult identity. In Pre-Classic burials, earspools were limited to adults—the only
form of ornament restricted by age ( Joyce 1999). Earspools were also one of
the major markers of adult status in Postclassic Mesoamerican societies includ-
ing the Aztec, where the ears of children were pierced in a shared ceremony
and earspools were adopted after taking a prisoner or giving birth ( Joyce n.d.a,
n.d.b, n.d.c).
The body manipulation required by the use of ear ornaments is one of a
set of practices that are evident from the Pre-Classic period through the
Postclassic. Pre-Classic f igurines and monumental images attest to the shaping
of hair into prescribed forms through cutting, shaving, braiding, and binding
with other materials. Hair treatments have a special character as forms of bodily
discipline, since hair persists in growing and must be repeatedly reshaped. Hair
cutting is an archetype of the compulsive repetition of action that, Butler (1993:
114) notes, is a mark of the failure of the imposition of discipline on the
materiality of the body. It is no accident that the loose, wavy hair of women
engaged in the Aztec sex trade was a primary physical sign of their status (Arvey
1988).
The production of disciplined bodily materiality in Pre-Classic Mesoamerica
extended to the shaping of the head itself. In burials from the Central Mexican
site of Tlatilco, a majority of men and women showed evidence of their skulls
having been shaped to approximate a cultural ideal ( Joyce n.d.a). This practice
started in infancy: individuals as young as six months had been subjected to
such treatment.While not all subsequent Mesoamerican societies engaged in it,
the Classic and Postclassic Lowland Maya are notable for the widespread prac-
tice of one mode of cranial modif ication (Romero 1970: 65–67). The Classic
Maya also continued practices of dental inlay and shaping, as well as of tattoo-
ing, which had roots in Pre-Classic Mesoamerican societies ( Johnson 1971:
301; Landa 1941: 89, 91, 125–126; Rands and Rands 1965: 548, 555–556;
Romero 1970: 50–58; Thompson 1946).
Thus, from at least the end of the Early Pre-Classic period, Mesoamerican
societies made attempts to channel bodies into certain shapes. The persistence
of these body practices may have accounted for a large part of their power.
Given an ahistorical status by their continuity with little change, these practices
established a specif ic Mesoamerican history for acceptable bodily appearance
and action. This history underwrote the Classic Maya construction of dichoto-
mous heterosexual adult genders, through which authorities attempted to nar-
row and f ix the f luidity of Mesoamerican gender.
115
Rosemary A. Joyce
Fig. 1 Paired male and female f igures, show-

ing the contrast between the exposure of the
male body and the covering of the female
body. Yaxchilan Lintel 24 (after Ian Graham
and Eric von Euw, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic
Inscriptions, vol. 3, pt. 1, Yaxchilan, 53). Cour-
tesy of Ian Graham. © President and Fellows
of Harvard College.
DICHOTOMOUS GENDERS AND POLITICAL CONTROL

IN CLASSIC MAYA IMAGES
I have previously argued ( Joyce 1992a, 1992b, 1993b, 1996) that Classic
Maya monumental images represent actors with normative, complementary,
paired genders engaged in political rituals that required the assertion of totaliz-
ing qualities like those represented by dual-gendered creators and ancestors. I
do not recapitulate this entire argument here, but rather review the conclusions
I have reached as a basis for further exploration of their implications for the
performance of gender and the materialization of gendered bodies.
It is important to reiterate that these representations were politically motivated
and limited to idealized statuses exemplified by ruling noble families. Thus, not
only are the presented gender statuses normative heterosexual male and female, but
the age of the figures is shown as a timeless young adulthood, regardless of the
biological age stated in the accompanying texts ( Joyce 1996). The kinds of
selections made thus erase any histories that the materialization of these bodies
had in infancy, childhood, and later adulthood. A primary feature of these paired
representations is a systematic de-emphasis of the bodies of social women, viv-
idly contrasted with the display of the bodies of social men (Fig. 1).6 The exposed
6
The use of the term social here, drawn from anthropological practice, indicates that
these are gender statuses, not sexes; obviously, images have no sex and can only be consid-
ered as documents of gender.
116
body parts of social women are those that are indistinguishable in form from
the body parts of social men. In contrast, at its most extreme, the emphasis on
the physical bodies of men is reinforced by the depiction of facial hair on
selected f igures ( Joyce 1996).
Cultural materials in the form of costume covered the bodies of women in
these images, and it was through costume that female f igures were originally
identif ied by students of the Maya. The paired male and female f igures that
have been my focus systematically contrasted in costume in two ways ( Joyce
1992a, 1996). First, women’s costume was elaborated from woven textiles, that
is products of transformative labor in the small-scale, intimate settings of the
house compound, while men’s costume additionally employed a wide range of
products of the forest, notably animal skins and skulls and bark cloth. Second,
women’s costume was repeatedly marked symbolically as a horizontal surface,
like that of the cultivated earth, while the paired male costume was def ined by
symbols of the vertical axis, or World Tree, of Maya cosmology. Both kinds of
contrast are, in terms of Classic Maya society and cosmology, spatially comple-
mentary, with women’s costume being associated with the village and the sur-
face of the earth, and men’s with the encircling forest and the sun’s path across
the sky. The composition of images presenting such paired f igures reiterated
these spatializations of dichotomous gender, especially the high/low axis ( Joyce
1996: 172–176).
While costume marks paired male and female f igures as complementary
halves of one spatial whole, the narratives of monumental images present noble
men and women as cooperative actors in common ritual action ( Joyce 1993b,
1996). By muting any references to distinctive actions by women in particular,
these images assert a uniform set of interests—those of a ruling class. Compari-
son of monumental images with small-scale ceramic f igurines and, to a lesser
extent, painted pottery vessels draws attention to two gestures unique to female
f igures in these paired compositions ( Joyce 1992b, 1993b, 1996). The f irst ges-
ture is that of a woman holding a wrapped cloth bundle. In the second, either
the bundle has been unwrapped to reveal a low, open bowl, or the female
f igure holds an unwrapped bowl.7
The presence among small-scale images of female f igures shown actively
engaged in weaving and grinding corn, as well as women offering bowls with
round maize dough tamales, offers an alternative reading of these gestures of
noble women engaged in joint ritual action ( Joyce 1992b, 1993b).8 While rep-
7
While these gestures were unique to female f igures in such paired compositions, in
other multif igure images male servants sometimes hold similar bowls.
8
Small-scale images were painted on pottery vessels or modeled as f igurines that were
117
Rosemary A. Joyce
resenting support for the actions of a ruling class, monumental images at the
same time reference the control of the products of women’s labor, specif ically
those forms of labor that in later Mesoamerica were stereotypically constitu-
tive of being female. Among the many suppressed meanings that these inscrip-
tions attempt to exclude as precedents for citational performance is women’s
work, and even, as comparison with f igurines that show suckling infants makes
clear, women’s reproductive role.
In contrast, the small-scale media of f igurines and pottery vessels, produced
and employed in the intimate conf ines of house compounds, may have served
the interests of an alternative group striving for political power through con-
trol over the materiality of existence in Classic Maya society—the senior mem-
bers of the residential groups whose labor underwrote Maya society ( Joyce
1993b; cf. Hendon 1991, 1997). Greater explicitness in representing distinctive
human action served the purpose of inscribing how nonruling noble houses
contributed to the success of the ruling ones. It was not only women’s contri-
butions that were made focal by the distinctive features of this medium, in
which individual male warriors, hunters, and musicians were also portrayed.
Here, age also entered into play, with infants, young children, adults, and elderly
f igures all featured.
The diversity of action highlighted in the small-scale medium of f igurines
challenges the hegemony of monumental media, inscribing a plurality of ways
of being that counters the narrowness of stereotypic ruling imagery. Nonethe-
less, like their larger-scale analogues, f igurines were created in the service of a
Classic Maya version of what Butler (1993: 110) calls “the heterosexism of
culture”; in this medium the master narrative begins with f igurines showing a
male/female couple, continues with the suckling of infants and the feeding of
young children, and ends with depictions of old age. No alternative sexuali-
ties—not even the comprehensive dual gender of primordial beings shown in
some monumental images—were allowed to become part of this material his-
tory of Classic Maya gender. Like their counterparts in ruling houses, the se-
nior members of nonruling houses exercised control over, and attempted to
discipline, the materialization of individual bodies, sexes, and genders by their
juniors (cf. Lesure 1997).
used within household compounds. Despite the dominance in publications of examples

from burials, especially those of Jaina style, most documented painted pottery and f igurines
were disposed of in trash deposits associated with house compounds (e.g., Hammond 1975:
371–374; Hendon 1991: 909–910; Willey 1972: 7–8, 1978: 7–9). It is such documented
contexts that frame my discussion. While Jaina-style f igurines in art collections may be the
best preserved examples, the more common, fragmentary mold-made f igurines from the
eastern and western Maya lowlands provide the majority of evidence for my argument.
118
BEING AND BECOMING: BODILY PRACTICES IN CLASSIC MAYA SOCIETY

While for the Postclassic Aztec and the Yucatec Maya we have Spanish
accounts detailing to greater or lesser degree the kinds of practices that were
used to effect the materialization of desired sexes, for the Classic Maya we must
draw on the implications of archaeological data. The later accounts are brief ly
considered here, not to suggest their static applicability to earlier Mesoamerican
societies, but for the guidance these outgrowths of earlier roots can provide
about possible sites of construction of gender in Classic Maya society.
Descriptions in the Florentine Codex (Sahagún 1950–82), depictions in
the Codex Mendoza (1978), and fragmentary references in the Relación de las
cosas deYucatán (Landa 1941) suggest that the enforcement of normative gender
on infants began at or around birth, with rituals of the umbilical cord’s disposal,
f irst bathing, divination, and naming that employed a rhetoric of adult labor
and costume in order to “girl” (Butler 1993: 7–8) or “boy” undifferentiated
newborns ( Joyce n.d.b, n.d.c). Divination and naming imposed on the child an
adult destiny that was already gendered.
Despite the strength of the expression of gender in such initial ritual ac-
tions, both Aztec and Yucatec sources suggest that for the f irst few years boys
and girls were little differentiated in terms of those adult destinies: they neither
wore adult clothing nor undertook the tasks of adults, nor did they participate
in the social and ritual life of the adult community. In each case, this early stage
of undifferentiated existence was formally ended by the beginning of disci-
plinary practices centering on the appearance of the body and everyday ac-
tions. Marked by rituals of transition, this second phase of childhood began a
gradual process of adoption of adult dress, adult names, adult work, and adult
worship. Still more like each other than like adult men and women, children
were formally admonished about their behavior, punished, and encouraged to
learn the skills of adult life. Young adulthood was represented as beginning
with the exercise of abilities to produce dependent human subjects through
engendering children and capturing prisoners in battle. Adulthood was marked
physically by the adoption of new hairstyles and new forms of body decora-
tion, including tattooing, labrets, and ear ornaments.
These late Mesoamerican sources suggest that gendered performance took
shape in the intimate conf ines of the house compound through everyday prac-
tices of labor, discipline, body modif ication, and dress, marked at regular inter-
vals by participation in more visible social rituals of transition to increasingly
constrained forms of bodily materiality. The assertions of stable, dichotomous,
heterosexual genders in large-scale, highly visible settings in Classic Maya sites
are less the location of construction of gender (as lived bodily reality) than
citations of what in fact occurred elsewhere. The formality of gendered per-
119
Rosemary A. Joyce
Fig. 2 Adult and child engaged in ritual, with the child named Chel Te in text.
Yaxchilan Lintel 2 (after Ian Graham and Eric von Euw, Corpus of Maya Hiero-
glyphic Inscriptions, vol. 3, pt. 1, Yaxchilan, 15). Courtesy of Ian Graham. © Presi-
dent and Fellows of Harvard College.
formances in these “public” spaces—with their consistent spatial associations

of male and female as the paired up and down, right and left, east and west, and
north and south halves, their insistence on the extreme differentiation of the
sexed male body from the sexless female body, and their subsuming of indi-
vidual action into stereotyped gesture—already presumes a particular reading
of sex and gender.
Maya household compounds exhibited no patterned variation that could
easily be attributed to segregation of women’s and men’s actions, as Julia Hendon
(1997) has noted in her examination of Sepulturas, the nonruling noble resi-
dential quarter of Copán. Instead, they were settings for a constant intersection
of daily activities through which embodied individual experience was shaped
simultaneously by the crosscutting dimensions of seniority, age, social status,
competence in work, and physical appearance. The bodies that were material-
ized through daily practices may well have manifested these other dimensions
of identity as strongly as they did sex or gender. Sources written later suggest
that we can only understand the production of sexed bodies and genders in
Classic Maya society as a partial result of practices through which other aspects
of being were created.
120
We have little direct evidence in Classic Maya society of life-cycle rituals

like those described in sixteenth-century sources. Monumental inscriptions
and images from a few places (Palenque, Bonampak, Naranjo,Tikal, and Piedras
Negras) have been interpreted as representations of rites of passage in the lives
of the young men who were heirs to rulership at these sites (Bassie-Sweet
1991: 203–204; Miller 1986; Schele 1985: 297; Schele and Freidel 1990: 235–
237, 239–40, 470–471; Schele and Miller 1986: 114, 136–137, 148–150). Nota-
bly, inscriptions and images include references to the adoption of particular
costume ornaments as the core action by the six- to thirteen-year-old boys
who were the foci of these events. Other inscriptions document the use of
different names during youth and adulthood by these same privileged subjects
of monumental art. For example, Yaxchilán Lintel 2 depicts two standing f ig-
ures, one markedly shorter than the other (Graham and von Euw 1977: 15; Fig.
2). The main text contains the titles of a ruler called Bird Jaguar; texts adjacent
to the smaller f igure end with the Yaxchilán emblem glyph and contain pho-
netic signs spelling the name Chel Te. This person has been identif ied as a f ive-
year-old child, presumably identif ied with a childhood name before he adopted
the name Shield Jaguar, under which he ruled (Tate 1992: 107, 138, 224, 275).
Such Classic-period inscriptions suggest practices similar to the changes in
naming throughout one’s life that were recorded in later Maya sources.
Following such tentative hints of practices in Classic Maya society that are
comparable to those recorded in later documents, we can imagine that the
specialized ritual structures identif ied in the many household compounds in
Classic Maya sites may have witnessed sequences of ritual transformation of
infants into children, and children into young adults, using some of the same
media that were employed in the sixteenth century: clothing, personal orna-
ments, body modif ications, and personal names. The one such transformation
for which we regularly recover evidence is the f inal step, from living members
of the group into ancestors, who, as Patricia McAnany (1994) has noted, con-
stituted a continuing living presence within the house compound in subf loor
tombs and graves.
As their deep Mesoamerican history suggests, certain forms of body orna-
mentation were likely to be crucial in these rituals of transformation. Ear orna-
ments, which are common elements in ancestral interments, are highlighted in
images of the ritual of transformation pictured in the Group of the Cross at
Palenque, where the six-year-old male heir is f irst shown engaged in political
ritual (Bassie-Sweet 1991: 203–204; Schele 1985; Schele and Freidel 1990: 235–
237, 239–240, 470–471; Fig. 3; Schele and Miller 1986: 114). As in earlier and
later Mesoamerica, the use of earspools may have particularly marked the tran-
121
Rosemary A. Joyce
Fig. 3 Adult and child engaged in ritual, with the child wearing
long rods in place of earspools. Temple of the Cross, Palenque.
Drawing by Merle Green Robertson, reproduced by permission.
sition to adulthood, otherwise manifest in the discipline of hair, and perhaps,

such additional bodily practices as tattooing. The perishability of hair and skin
themselves is partly countered by the production of imperishable representa-
tions, especially pottery f igurines that feature children, with their hair unbound
and apparently uncut, or represent tattooed skin only on apparent adults. The
preparation of ears for their adult ornaments through piercing, the repeated
cutting and dressing of hair, and the execution of tattooed patterns on skin
would have been reiterated events within the small-scale setting of the house
compound. As children aged into young adulthood, they would have experi-
enced these practices not simply as unique events in the materialization of
their own bodies, but as explicit citations of other occasions they had already
witnessed. Inscribed on the bodies of others, these cultural transformations
would already have been naturalized into existential conditions, the only think-
able ways of being human in these societies.
Such citational performance (Butler 1993: 12–16, 101–119) of different
sexes may have been lodged most closely in the use of specif ic items of cloth-
ing, the boy’s loincloth and the girl’s huipil and skirt, which, as later documen-
tary sources suggest, were adopted earlier in life than any distinctive ornaments
or hairstyles. These items of clothing constituted disciplinary practices for the
122
Fig. 4 Classic Maya f igurine of the weaver. Collection of the Smithsonian

Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (formerly Heye
Foundation). Photograph © Justin Kerr, reproduced by permission.
bodies of children, requiring different ways of dressing, moving, and undress-

ing. Not only was the use of these items of clothing within the house com-
pound ubiquitous as precedent for citation, but the production of clothing
presented the most marked site for differentiation of gender through labor in
the sixteenth century. Girls alone were trained to spin cotton and weave it on
the backstrap loom into lengths of the plain or brocaded cloth that formed
both men’s and women’s clothing; this activity was represented as one of the
stereotyped gendered performances of Classic Maya imagery (Fig. 4). Girls
materialized their own bodies through the action of making the cloth that
would form their social skin, and they were also the originators of the social
123
Rosemary A. Joyce
Fig. 5 Woman holding a shield and a jaguar headdress for a man

dressed in war costume. Yaxchilan Lintel 26 (after Ian Graham and
Eric von Euw, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, vol. 3, pt. 1,
Yaxchilan, 57). Courtesy of Ian Graham. © President and Fellows of
Harvard College.
skin of boys. Echoes of this are heard in monumental and small-scale images in
which women present men with items that will complete their ritual costume.
A pot from Tikal depicts a woman holding out a mask with dangling textile ties
to a lord dressing in formal warrior garb (Gallenkamp and Johnson 1985: 141).
On Yaxchilán Lintel 26 a woman holds a f lexible shield and a jaguar headdress
for a lord also ceremonially dressed as a warrior (Graham and von Euw 1977:
57; Tate 1992: 121; Fig. 5). I argue that such images are more than a ref lection
of the relative status of these men and women—they are citations of the pro-
124
duction of the body as the def ining activity of being female in Classic Maya
society.
Here we can note the importance of women as midwives in Mesoamerica.
In the Aztec Florentine Codex (Sahagún 1950–82, bk. 6: chap. 27), midwives
are described as producing a child by manipulating the pregnant woman, in the
Yucatec Maya Relación de las cosas deYucatán (Landa 1941: 129), as intervening in
pregnancy both physically and through mediation with supernatural powers,
and in the Postclassic Quiche Maya Popol Vuh (Tedlock 1985: 369–370), as the
paradigmatic female Xmucane cooperating in the creation of the f irst humans
with the f irst male diviner, Xpiyacoc. Gary Gossen and Richard Leventhal
(1993) have argued that women in Classic Maya society practiced as specialists
in decentralized rituals. They base their argument primarily on structural mod-
els derived from the repeated description of women as legendary or historical
originators of decentralized, ritually sanctioned social movements in post-con-
quest Maya societies. Leslie Devereaux (1987) offers a similar structural inter-
pretation of the cluster of meanings for Tzotzil Maya me’,“mother,” which also
involves origins. While often regarded as a natural specialization for women,
midwifery has no biological determinants, and its practice in Mesoamerica as a
gendered form of healing has less to do with sex and more with an abstraction
of Woman as the sex that produces social beings.
The decentralized practice of curing and its ritualized component have left
no obvious archaeological signatures in Classic Maya sites. One repeated repre-
sentation in both monumental and small-scale images, however, may relate to
this complex of concepts. On Yaxchilán Lintels 13, 14, 15, 25, and 55, f igures
dressed in huipils, and labeled in captions with the linguistic signs determinative
of noble women, are shown in the presence of supernatural beings in the form
of f loating serpents, from whose mouths emerge human busts (Tate 1992: 88–
91). Years ago Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1973) noted the association of f igures
that she identif ied as women with this specif ic action. The same image is de-
picted on polychrome pottery vessels, where conventions of presentation of
the human form allow the depiction of an exaggerated adult female breast
(Reents-Budet 1994: 328). Contemporary analyses identify these scenes as the
evocation of spirits, perhaps ancestors, and this action is strongly tied to a birth
in more than one instance (Reents-Budet 1994: 338; Tate 1992).
The discipline of training young girls in spinning and weaving was more
than the inculcation of good work habits—it was part of a set of citational
practices through which adult femininity was f igured as the production of
social beings. The practice of ritually and physically assisting in childbirth, the
provision of food to form the body’s substance and of cloth to form the body’s
125
Rosemary A. Joyce
Fig. 6 Frontally posed man and woman reviewing war captives. Detail from copies of the
Bonampak murals, Room 3, by Antonio Tejeda. Photograph by Hillel Burger, courtesy of
the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
social surface, and even (in sixteenth-century Yucatán, at least) the practices of
tattooing, cranial shaping, and inducing the crossing of the eyes were all perfor-
mances of this female gender. They owe relatively little to what we would
recognize as sexuality.
Adult male gender in Classic Maya society appears more strongly tied to
the sexual. There are no images of stereotyped labor by men that would corre-
spond to the small-scale images of food production, weaving, and suckling of
infants by women ( Joyce 1993b). The most distinctive practices implied in
both small- and large-scale images for f igures in male costume are participation
in war and its outcome and the capture and sacrif ice of prisoners, including
costumed dancing. Monumental inscriptions explicitly represent activities re-
lated to warfare as shared by the idealized male/female couple. While the
Bonampak murals have no distinctively female warriors in their battle scenes,
126
Fig. 7 Woman identif ied as a ruler’s

mother standing on a war captive. Naranjo
Stela 24 (after Ian Graham and Eric von
Euw, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscrip-
tions, vol. 2, pt. 1, Naranjo, 63). Courtesy
of Ian Graham. © President and Fellows
of Harvard College.
the scene of judging the prisoners, in Room 2, which is contiguous with the
battle scene, presents a frontally posed woman near a frontally posed ruler as
joint focal f igures (Miller 1986; Fig. 6). Stelae 22 and 24 at Naranjo face each
other on northern and southern sides of a courtyard (Graham and von Euw
1975: 55–57, 63–64; Proskouriakoff 1961: 94). One depicts the enthroned ruler;
the other, a woman, interpreted as his mother (Closs 1985; Proskouriakoff
1961: 94), standing on a war captive (Fig. 7).
Indeed, while the exclusive association of spinning and weaving with fe-
male gender crosses Postclassic Mesoamerican cultural and political bound-
aries, there is no corresponding limitation of the role of warrior to males.
Female warriors are prominent in the Mixtec codices from Oaxaca in scenes
concerning creation, and Sharisse and Geoffrey McCafferty (1994) have ar-
gued that f igures in the battle murals of Cacaxtla are also gendered female.
127
Rosemary A. Joyce
Fig. 8 Man wearing the World Tree loincloth, with a belt

maskette and three celts. Yaxchilan Lintel 7 (after Ian Graham,
Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, vol. 3, pt. 2, Yaxchilan,
27). Courtesy of Ian Graham. © President and Fellows of
Harvard College.
Cecelia Klein (1993, 1994) has suggested that Aztec sources present women
warriors as symbols of the defeated “other,” the f igure of the enemy in its
abjection. At the same time, Aztec midwives addressed women in childbirth as
warriors, and, as the McCaffertys (1988, 1991) note, female deities were pre-
sented as warriors and the tools of female labor as weapons.
Labor, then, does not appear to have served as the ground for citational
performance of male gender in Classic Maya society in the way that it did for
performance of female gender. Instead, maleness seems to be insistently de-
f ined in terms of sexuality ( Joyce 2000). Exposing the body in order to reveal
a lack of signs of female sexuality is a notable feature even in highly formal
portraiture ( Joyce 1992a, 1996). The typifying item of male costume, the loin-
cloth, with its long hanging ends, draws attention to male genitalia as much as
it conceals them. When male f igures are paired with female f igures in monu-
128
Fig. 9 Pictographic sign (Glyph T761) for

male genitalia, used as a title in Classic Maya
inscriptions. Temple 26, Copan (after
Lounsbury 1989: f igs. 6–8). Courtesy of
the University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
mental art, an image of the central World Tree with its branches folded down is
carried on the loincloth. This representation implies the possibility of an up-
ward unfolding of the branches to replicate the normal form of this icon—a
metaphor of erection. That this is not simply a projection of European, post-
Freudian symbolism is suggested by the narrative of the sacred tree in Xibalba,
the supernatural underworld domain, in the Postclassic Quiche Maya Popol
Vuh. There, the decapitated head of one of the Hero Twins—defeated in their
contests with the lords of Xibalba—which has been hung in the tree and trans-
formed into a hanging gourd, impregnates a daughter of the underworld by
spitting on her (Tedlock 1985: 114–115). The Classic-period tree icon is paired
with a mask of a decapitated head on male loincloths, suggesting a probable
earlier history for this later motif (Fig. 8).
Def ined in terms of the possession of a phallus, male adult gender was
inscribed in Classic Maya texts through the use of a pictograph of male geni-
talia as a title (Fig. 9). This pictograph f irst appeared on Late Pre-Classic to
Early Classic jade body ornaments, and continued in use in Late Classic texts at
sites throughout the Maya area, including Copán, Quirigua, Los Higos, Caracol,
and Bonampak ( Justeson 1984: 356; Lounsbury 1989; Schele and Miller 1986:
83, 151; Thompson 1962: 361–362). The prominence of imagery of penis ma-
nipulation in Classic and Postclassic Maya ritual should be viewed in the con-
text of this sexualization of maleness. Classic Maya f igurines and pottery vessels,
as well as Postclassic Maya manuscripts, depict the piercing of the penis to
produce blood in ritual, and some Classic Maya monumental images have been
interpreted as referring to or representing the same practice (Schele and Miller
1986; Stuart 1984, 1988; cf. Fig. 10). Wider Mesoamerican examples of per-
sonal bloodletting by no means give the same prominence to production of
129
Rosemary A. Joyce
Fig. 10 Male f igure (right) posed in the act of genital bloodletting. Yaxchilan Lintel 17
(after Ian Graham and Eric von Euw, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, vol. 3, pt. 1,
Yaxchilan, 43). Courtesy of Ian Graham. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
blood from this particular site, even when they are equally explicit about both
bloodletting and the exposure of genitalia. Postclassic Aztec stone reliefs, for
example, show ritual participants piercing their ears and portray blood f lowing
down to the mouth of the earth (Klein 1987), and Postclassic Central Mexican
manuscripts regularly portray bloodletting from the head. In no other
Mesoamerican tradition do we f ind images of multiple male actors joined by a
rope run through their pierced genitals, a scene pictured on an early page of
the Postclassic Yucatec Codex Madrid (Codex Tro-Cortesianus 1967: 19). And
no other tradition of Mesoamerican culture includes monumental inscriptions
130
Fig. 11 Two nude f igures embracing. Naj Tunich cave, Draw-

ing 18 (after Andrea J. Stone, Images from the Underworld: Naj
Tunich and the Tradition of Maya Cave Painting, f ig. 6–28). By
permission of the University of Texas Press, Austin.
of male genitalia as subjects of stone sculpture, as they are in Terminal Classic

to Early Postclassic northern Yucatec sites such as Chichen Itza, Labna, and
Uxmal (e.g., Pollock 1980: 590).
This phallocentric construction of the male body in Classic to Postclassic
Maya societies suggests an almost homoerotic sensibility ( Joyce 2000). The
composition of Classic Maya images, which served to dehistoricize individual
practices, never presented scenes with groups of women alone, even though an
examination of vocabularies from sixteenth-century Yucatán by John Clark
and Stephen Houston (n.d.) documents the existence of such groups, particu-
larly involved in textile production. But scenes portraying groups of men with-
out women were common, particularly those showing raids, ritualized deer
hunts, and dance performances (see, for example, the themes identif ied on
polychrome Classic vases, in Reents-Budet 1994). The display of the male
body was central to these all-male performances, as was the display of the
products of women’s work to the corresponding all-female performances de-
scribed in the sixteenth-century sources.
Indeed, Andrea Stone (1995: 143–146) has recently suggested that an image
from Naj Tunich cave, previously regarded as a depiction of heterosexual inter-
course, involves two men, one of them marked by hairstyle and ornament as
socially female (Fig. 11). She emphasizes the apparent lack of any identif iable
131
Rosemary A. Joyce
female characters in the texts and images documenting visits to these caves
(Stone 1995: 117, 145, 183–184, 239). Stone suggests that caves constituted an
arena for all-male socialization during which, among other things, sexuality
was openly subject to verbal and physical play, as it is in some performative
settings among contemporary Highland Maya. If she is right, such performances,
whether held in the conf ines of caves or in other locations within settlements,
would have provided one of the major experiences through which male
citational gender was constructed in Classic Maya society—through a male
gaze on male sex.
132
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Andean Androgyny and the Making of Men
CAROLYN DEAN
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ
O
n 19 March 1804, Doña Pasquala Quigua, an indigenous Andean,
completed her last will and testament in Cusco, Peru.1 In the will, she
denounced her second husband as a wastrel, subject to numerous
vices, who squandered the major portion of the wealth she had brought to
their union. Doña Pasquala complained bitterly about her husband’s failure to
generate any income, his inability to father children by her, and the fact that he
kept a mistress for the twelve years of their marriage. Claiming, nonetheless, to
have pardoned his manifold shortcomings, she bequeathed him two Chuncho
dance costumes and a parrot, probably intending its colorful feathers to be used
in the Chuncho headdress.2 “Chuncho” was the generic highland Andean des-
ignation for a number of cultural or ethnic groups native to the montaña, the
heavily forested zone of the eastern Andean piedmont, particularly the region
of the Inka empire known as Antisuyu, to the east of the capital of Cusco
(Steward 1963).3 The montaña dwellers were stereotyped by highlanders, serranos,
as savage cannibals; it was also said that male Chunchos were effeminate. In
leaving Chuncho costumes to her husband, the “forgiving” Doña Pasquala was
apparently offering one f inal insult.4
1
Archivo Departmental del Cusco: Pedro Joaquin Gámarra, leg. 76, 1804, fols. 569r–
571v; my thanks to David Garrett for drawing my attention to this document and to Bruce
Mannheim for an enlightening conversation about it.
2
In Doña Pasquala’s will, the Chuncho costumes are described brief ly in a marginal
note as being blue and green, and the parrot was left “for its plumage” (por sus plumajes).
3
In the Peruvian Andes, the word montaña, as used in the colonial period and today,
refers to the Amazonian piedmont of the eastern Andean cordillera, especially the thickly
forested areas between 500 and 3,000 meters in altitude. This same zone is referred to as the
yungas in Bolivia.
4
My cynical interpretation of Doña Pasquala’s bequest rests on the facts that she repeat-
edly reiterated the misconduct of her second husband, Romualdo Pacheco, in her six-page
document, did not name him as her executor (which was the common practice), and left
other kinds of dance costume to her other heirs, about whom she spoke warmly. For
example, she left “three dance outf its, two with silver ornaments and the other with pieces
143
Carolyn Dean
Fig. 1 Anonymous, Madonna with Indian Worshipers, Bolivia, 1752. Oil on wood panel,
10 1/4 x 7 9/16 inches. Brooklyn Museum, 41.1275.225.
144
In the southern Andean highlands, native dancers dressed as Chunchos were

popular performers during colonial-period festivals, as they are today. A 1752
painting from Bolivia depicts a confraternity of Chuncho dancers devoted to
the Virgin Mary (Fig. 1). While the lone woman, pictured at the far left, wears
clothing typical of an eighteenth-century southern Andean Aymara female, the
three men are dressed in the dance costumes of Chunchos, featuring the elabo-
rate feathered headdresses by which Chuncho dancers can be recognized. The
Chuncho dances performed by highlanders, such as these Aymara, were not so
much imitations of montaña performatory culture as they were creations of
how highlanders believed Chunchos to behave. Through dance, colonial-pe-
riod serranos brought their imagined Chuncho into being as a wild, uncon-
trolled and uncontrollable, alter ego.When the dance was performed, it ultimately
and paradoxically established highlanders as the agents of civilization and as
valuable allies of Spanish colonial authorities, who classif ied montaña peoples as
hostile natives, usually calling them indios de guerra (Dean n.d.b; Renard-Casevitz,
Saignes, and Taylor 1988: 43). In a drawing, the Andean chronicler—and serrano—
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala depicts a dance of montaña dwellers, whom he
identif ies as “Antis and Chunchos” (Fig. 2). In marked contrast to the dances of
the other parts of the empire, in which men’s roles and costumes are distinct
from those of women, males and females act and dress similarly in the montaña
dances. In fact, Guaman Poma says that the men dress like women (todos los
hombres bestidos como muger) and identif ies the dance itself as the “savage woman
dance” (in Quechua, the uarmi auca).
I have argued elsewhere that Chunchos were represented by Andean high-
landers as an abnormal or uncivilized opposite in an effort to establish them-
selves and the serrano culture as the norm for civilization (Dean n.d.b). The
confused gender of Chunchos was part of the stereotype. Although two bio-
logical sexes, female and male, are identif ied, the sexes are transgendered. Spe-
cif ically, Chuncho males look like females while Chuncho females—often
described as warriors—behave like males. In a second illustration of Chunchos
of silver leaf ” (tres libreas de dansante, las dos con chapas de plata y la una con chapas de oja de
plata) to her sobrina política, Doña Josefa de Zuniga, and a “small dance costume or [a cos-
tume] with small ornaments” (librea pequeña o con chapas pequeñas) to her female servant,
whom she described as being like a daughter. To her male heirs, with the exception of her
husband, she left “costume f lounces” (volantes de uniforme). Doña Pasquala apparently earned
a living by renting out costumes and dance regalia, for she owned 600 “colorful feathers”
(plumas de colores) as well as other apparel, including three items of Inka vestment and three
additional Chuncho costumes, which she requested to be rented out to pay for masses and
the costs of her burial. See Lavrin (1994: 169–171) for a description of a standard colonial-
period woman’s testament.
145
Carolyn Dean
Fig. 2 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer

nueva corónica, fol. 322 [324], 1615. “Fiestas de los
Andisuios” (festival of the Antisuyus) (after Guaman
Poma 1988: 297).
by Guaman Poma, depicting a scene of burial, we see how alike the sexes
appear and act: they are coiffed and dressed the same, and both cry (Fig. 3). A
fundamental notion of highland Andean gender operating in the colonial pe-
riod, then, seems to have been the differentiation of the sexes in terms of both
appearance and action, such that gender corresponded to an individual’s bio-
logical sex. More precisely, proper females “looked” feminine while proper males
“acted” masculine. The idea that males must act—that is, that masculinity does
not exist outside of its performance—seems to be key to understanding Andean
gender paradigms.
The juxtaposition of female appearance with masculine behavior resonated
clearly throughout the colonial period, as can be observed both in the early
seventeenth century, when Guaman Poma penned his characterizations of
146

nueva corónica, fol. 291 [293], 1615. “Entiero de
Antisuios” (Antisuyu burial) (after Guaman Poma
1988: 266).
Chunchos, and nearly two hundred years later, when Doña Pasquala composed
her will. Doña Pasquala selected a traditional Andean symbol of alterity that
every highlander at the time would have understood. If she evoked the Chuncho
to accuse her husband of inappropriate action, however, we may well wonder
which of his misdeeds made him most Chuncho-like. Her references to his
inability to sire children may point toward the effeminacy associated with the
Chuncho; certainly, accusing males of being effeminate was—and is—almost
universally an effective slight. In upbraiding her husband for keeping a mistress,
however, Doña Pasquala would appear to contradict this exact point.
My present concern is whether a greater understanding of indigenous
Andean gender concepts can provide a more nuanced reading of Doña Pasquala’s
bequest. Accordingly, in this essay I attempt to identify what made a biological
147
Carolyn Dean
male a man in traditional, indigenous Andean culture, and to discern some of

the ways in which masculinity was conceptualized and expressed. In so doing,
we may understand better the many ways in which—in Doña Pasquala’s mind,
at least—her husband failed to measure up. I also hope to introduce another
perspective to current discussions about gender, namely how notions of gender
(in this case, Andean masculinity) could be, were, and are wielded in the effort
to inf luence and constrain, if not control, the activities of human beings.
GENDER COMPLEMENTARITY IN THE ANDES

As everywhere, Andean gender was (and is) constructed in relation to an
opposite, and no particular construction of gender is ever meaningful without
its complement. Thus, for example, highland men could be contrasted with
Chuncho men; they could also be constructed in complementary alterity to
highland women, and a variety of other binary opposites could be selected.
While gender f inds meaning through contrast in all societies, in the Andean
system, past and present, the complement is recognized as vital, as numerous
scholars have shown (Harris 1978, 1980; B. J. Isbell 1976, 1985, 1997; Platt
1986; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1986; Silverblatt 1987, 1991). Hence, it
is unlikely that in Andean society one would ever hear the rhetorical query,
“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” with its implicit injunction that a
woman should be more like a man. Andean constructions of gender seem to
recognize the fundamental value of contrast, which is always relative, situationally
embedded, and negotiable.5
Andean gender complementarity appears to stem from the notion that the
creative principle in the cosmos is androgynous. The famous depiction of the
Andean universe, drawn by the native Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui
Salcamaygua (1993: 208) in the second decade of the seventeenth century,
illustrates best the complementary workings of the cosmos (Fig. 4).6 In Pachacuti’s
5
Although B. J. Isbell (1997) suggests that, according to Andean conceptualizations,
“female” may be the unmarked gender, it would seem that in the Andes neither sex was/is
the presumptive norm (i.e., “man” does not signify both “man” and “man and woman,” nor
vice versa).While centuries of colonization have surely impacted the way indigenous Andeans
conceptualize gender, in general Andeans have resisted Western gestures that mark one sex
as normative. Ethnographers (such as those listed above) have documented how profoundly
the structures of gender complementarity are embedded in indigenous Andean society. See
Allen (1988: 78–85) for a splendid articulation of f lexible gender complementarity as prac-
ticed by the community of Sonqo in the southern Andes today.
6
Pachacuti Yamqui descended from non-Inka, indigenous nobility in the southern
Andean highlands. Traditionally, his chronicle is dated to 1613. Duviols (in Pachacuti 1993:
18–19) suggests, however, that it might be later in date, closer to 1620. The “cosmological
diagram” with glosses in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara appears on fol. 13v.
148
Fig. 4 Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, Relación de

antiguedades, fol. 13v, 1613 (after Pachacuti 1993: 208).
work, the creative center, Wiraqocha, is an unmarked, unsexed elliptical f igure.

A Quechua text accompanying the creator underscores its ambivalence; it can
be translated as “whether it be male, whether it be female” (1993: 208). Thus,
although Pachacuti himself was Christian and strongly inf luenced by Christian
precepts (Duviols in Pachacuti 1993: 30–58), his understanding of the creator
as androgynous was deeply rooted in the Andean worldview. Unlike the tradi-
tional European androgyne, who is of a known biological sex (usually male)
but co-opts the symbolic value of the so-called opposite sex, the Andean an-
drogynous creator is neither a male who assumes some feminine traits nor a
female who utilizes certain masculine codes. It is perhaps for this reason that
Pachacuti, despite having been exposed extensively to European images of a
light-skinned, bearded, male God, cannot give the creator a face, much less a
body. Without further elaboration, the indigenous author describes the oval
149
Carolyn Dean
creator in his drawing as being made of a sheet of f ine gold, and indicates that
it was placed in the Qorikancha (the Inka’s main temple in their capital of
Cusco) by Manko Qhápaq, the mythical founder of the Inka state. One of
Manko’s descendants, Maita Qhápaq, had various f igures added around it.
Many scholars have discussed and analyzed Pachacuti’s drawing.7 Now gen-
erally referred to as a cosmological drawing, the diagram, supplemented by
text, distinguishes between four hierarchical levels, which are divided into two
complementary columns (Earls and Silverblatt 1978: 318–319). The mediating,
androgynous center is the creator Wiraqocha. The right side (from the perspec-
tive of the creator itself ) is generally associated with masculine concepts and
f igures, while the left is comprised of feminine ones. In the upper right is the
sun, depicted as the great-grandfather of men. Below, Venus as morning star is
glossed as man’s grandfather, and, still lower, the mountains of earth as his
father. On the left (viewer’s right), the moon appears as the great-grandmother
of women. Below,Venus as evening star is woman’s grandmother, and the ocean
her mother. Therefore, not only was the Andean cosmos sexed, but its parts
were identif ied in kinship terms, as well. The universe was thereby “human-
ized,” that is, categorized in ways that humans could relate to one another in
complementary sets. At the base of the drawing, located on earth are the mor-
tal couple, male and female, united to form the most basic social unit.8
7
Studies of Pachacuti’s drawing that informed my reading include those by Samuel
Lafone Quevedo (1950), R. Tom Zuidema and Ulpiano Quispe (1967), Billie Jean Isbell
(1976, 1978), Pierre Duviols (1976; in Pachacuti 1993), John Earls and Irene Silverblatt
(1978; also Silverblatt 1987), and Constance Classen (1993).
8
Despite Pachacuti’s claims, most scholars do not believe that his drawing actually rep-
resents an interior wall of the Qorikancha in Pre-Hispanic times. Many Andeanists do
maintain, however, that the diagram ref lects a native Andean understanding of the nature
and structure of the universe. Recently, Duviols (in Pachacuti 1993: 30–58), in his analysis
of the drawing and its companion text, has argued that the drawing is entirely f ictitious—
that it was inspired by and responded to Christian monotheism, that its organization (namely,
the archetypes of creation surrounding the creator) was European, and that the archetypes
Pachacuti chose matched those featured in late-16th-century Christian doctrines. Duviols
concludes that the drawing does not evoke anything that could suggest authentic Andean
religious thought, and that only two of the f igures may represent Andean mental structures
(the “grid” at the bottom of the drawing, which he identif ies as the wall of the Qorikancha
covered in gold plates, and, signif icantly, the oval plaque representing Wiraqocha). Further,
he argues that the drawing ought to be called “The Retablo of the Creation” or “The
Retablo of Monotheism.” He does not, however, discuss the complementary distribution
of elements, nor does he challenge the male/female dichotomy so widely discussed by
others. While I f ind aspects of Duviols’s argument persuasive, I would note that the Andean
creator is not just the origin of all of the elements depicted by Pachacuti, which is a
European notion, but also the mediator of complements, which is very Andean indeed.
150
The sexes were apparently conceived of as appropriately different. What

those differences were and how they were manifested is critical to our under-
standing of what made a biological male a man in Andean terms. Guaman
Poma’s (1988: 168–209) description of Inka census categories, which he iden-
tif ies as calles (passages)—ten for males and ten for females—helps to def ine the
characteristics distinguishing not only human males from females, but boys
from men and girls from women, as well.9 Although his information may not
be strictly accurate, it is in his description of the process of aging that we see
how gender f irst waxed and then waned as humans moved through the phases
of their lives.10
BOYS TO MEN/GIRLS TO WOMEN

According to the information Guaman Poma provides, the stages of growth
of a Pre-Hispanic Andean child were distinguished by the child’s physiological
capabilities. Age was not so much the sum of years as an evaluation of physical
attributes, abilities, and dexterity (Dean 1995: 119–121), and, thus, “men” and
“women” were not ahistorical, universal biological categories.11 The native
chronicler tells us that indigenous children of less than one year of age, still in
the cradle, had to be cared for by others, as did those under f ive years of age
who could crawl but were as yet unweaned. Small children of both sexes were,
9
Guaman Poma was not alone in identifying Andean age-grade categories. The
Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa (1986), the licenciado Fernando de Santillán (1927),
Father Cristóbal de Castro (1934), and an anonymous group of Andeans (Los Señores
1904) who served under Inka lords in Pre-Hispanic times provide similar accounts. Rowe
(1958) argues that because Murúa’s list is so similar to that of Guaman Poma, the friar must
have used Guaman Poma as a source (Guaman Poma and Murúa were contemporaries and
known to one another).The census categories provided by Santillán, Castro, and the Andean
informants, while differing from those recorded by Guaman Poma and Murúa, are close
enough to each other to indicate a common source as well. Rowe concludes that Castro
must have been responsible for recording the testimony of the Andean informants and that
Santillán used Castro as his source. These three accounts can thus be designated collectively
as the Castro group. While Guaman Poma and Murúa differentiate male from female, the
chroniclers of the Castro group make no such distinction. Further, Guaman Poma provides
a list of specif ic duties assigned to each age group, which is missing from the accounts of
the Castro group.
10
See B. J. Isbell (1997: 275–296) for an account of contemporary Andean life stages and
gender development, based on her ethnographic work in Chuschi, Ayacucho. Like Guaman
Poma, she observes that gender waxes and wanes; she emphasizes the turn to androgyny at
the end of life and especially in death.
11
Edholm, Harris, and Young (1977) problematize the use of the term woman to desig-
nate a primarily biological category. See also Kristeva (1980), who (like others) argues that
woman cannot and should not be def ined absolutely, since the term is historically and cul-
turally constituted.
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Carolyn Dean
Fig. 5 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer Fig. 6 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer
nueva corónica, fol. 212 [214], 1615. Andean male, nueva corónica, fol. 233 [235], 1615. Andean fe-
one month old (after Guaman Poma 1988: 188). male, one month old (after Guaman Poma 1988:
208).
according to Guaman Poma, without purpose or usefulness in that they served

no one and, in fact, had to be served by others. His drawings of a male and
female of one month depict infants who are similarly wrapped and cradled
(Figs. 5, 6). In both text and image, there is little to differentiate the sexes at this
young age. One-year-old children likewise engage in similar activities (Figs. 7,
8). Interestingly, it is in dress that the female child is distinguished: she wears a
gender-specif ic head covering and belted tunic. Thus, the young girl has al-
ready begun to look female. The male, however, who wears a nondescript, ge-
neric tunic, can still do nothing but crawl and so has yet to act male.The rutuchikuy,
or haircutting ceremony, which was (and is) performed when the infant was
weaned, marks this preliminary stage in the gendering of the Andean child.
According to Guaman Poma, Inka children aged f ive through nine were
assigned certain tasks; it is at this point that masculinity becomes visibly appar-
ent in his illustrations (Figs. 9, 10). Boys of this age aided their parents and
152
one year old (after Guaman Poma 1988: 186). male, one year old (after Guaman Poma 1988:
206).
community by watching younger siblings, performing various domestic chores,

and helping to raise orphans. Girls of the same age served as pages for impor-
tant females; they also helped their parents by collecting f irewood and straw as
well as spinning, gathering edible wild plants, raising younger children, fetching
water, cooking, and cleaning. From nine to twelve years old, young males served
both their parents and the cacique (native lord) by hunting small birds, herding,
fetching f irewood, spinning wool, and twisting rope. Girls of this age collected
f lowers, herbs, and leaves for dyeing cloth and cooking; they could also serve
the government as human sacrif ices.
Apart from the all too casual reference to the sacrif ice of girls (a point to
which I shall return), the tasks assigned prepubescent children were not strik-
ingly different. Both sexes spun wool, gathered f irewood and other items, helped
to raise younger children, and aided in a variety of domestic chores. In the
companion drawings, however, the sexes begin to diverge in behavioral terms.
153
Carolyn Dean
nueva corónica, fol. 208 [210], 1615. Andean male, nueva corónica, fol. 229 [231], 1615. Andean female,
f ive years old (after Guaman Poma 1988: 184). f ive years old (after Guaman Poma 1988: 204).
At age f ive, the young boy is shown with a sling, practicing to be the hunter or
warrior he will become (Fig. 9); the young female is, in contrast, much more
restrained in her activity as a porter (Fig. 10). At age nine, the boy hunts birds
(Fig. 11) while the girl gathers f lowers to be used in dyeing wool (Fig. 12).
Again, while his motions as depicted by Guaman Poma are expansive—reach-
ing out—hers are restrained as she pulls things toward her.
At age twelve, both sexes are shown herding (Figs. 13, 14). The male carries
dead birds—the trophies of his successful hunt—while the female has gathered
f irewood and is engaged in spinning. The companion text tells us that male
youths aged twelve to eighteen guarded the herds and hunted birds. Females of
this age group served their elders by spinning and weaving, shepherding, sow-
ing, tending crops, and making chicha (an alcoholic beverage); they also helped
around the house, performing numerous tasks. Despite a remarkable variety of
duties that Andean females discharge, spinning and weaving become the typical
154
Fig. 11 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer Fig. 12 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El
nueva corónica, fol. 206 [208], 1615. Andean male, primer nueva corónica, fol. 227 [229], 1615.
nine years old (after Guaman Poma 1988: 182). Andean female, nine years old (after Guaman
Poma 1988: 202).
feminine activities from puberty on. Adult females are identif ied by this task
throughout Guaman Poma’s work.12 Interestingly, this does not mean that fe-
males necessarily risked losing their femininity when they participated in ac-
tivities that were gendered male, such as warfare.13 Perhaps because femininity
12
See Franquemont (1979) for the ways in which spinning and weaving activities def ine
stages in a female’s life in late-20th-century Chinchero, a community near Cusco. Allen
(1988: 78) discusses the identif ication of weaving with women in the Quechua community
of Sonqo, even though Sonqueño men both spin and weave.
13
Inka legend features two prominent warrior–women in particular: Mama Waqo (Mama
Huaco), the f irst queen who helped to pacify the original inhabitants of Cusco, and Chañan
Qori Kuka (Chañan Curicoca), who led the people of Choco and Cachona (two villages
to the south of Cusco) against the Chanka when the latter rebelled against the Inka. Of
course, these women also fulf illed female gender roles. Mama Waqo was Manko Qhápaq’s
mate and mother of his children, and Chañan Qori Kuka is described as a “widow” (Pachacuti
1993: 220; see Urton 1990: 54–55 for an analysis of Chañan’s role in Inka history). Other
155
Carolyn Dean
twelve years old (after Guaman Poma 1988: 180). male, twelve years old (after Guaman Poma
1988: 200).
was a state of being rather than an act of doing, “doing” male activities did not
seem to have violated female gender boundaries. This contrasts with the effect
produced by males who “looked” like females and did not “act” according to
masculine gender paradigms, as is the case for Guaman Poma’s unisexed male
Chunco who cries in Figure 3.14 If my observations are accurate, the Andean
case provides an interesting juxtaposition to Julia Kristeva’s (1980: 137–138)
observation that women (in the West) cannot “be” and do not belong “in the
order of being” because they are def ined negatively as “not men.” Andean women,
tales of Inka history feature women as diplomats, engineers, agronomists, inventors, and a
variety of other noteworthy occupations, as well as warriors (Dean n.d.a).
14
Gender roles clearly could be, and were, f lexible and contingent on circumstances.
Allen (1988: 83) accounts for a certain pliancy in gender norms among the contemporary
Quechua by observing that “a man should express his female aspect in a properly masculine
manner; a woman should express her male aspect in a feminine manner.”
156
Fig. 15 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El Fig. 16 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer
primer nueva corónica, fol. 223 [225], 1615. nueva corónica, fol. 202 [204], 1615. Andean male,
Andean female, thirty-three [eighteen?] years eighteen years old (after Guaman Poma 1988:
old (after Guaman Poma 1988: 198). 178).
in contrast, appear “to be,” while Andean men must establish their masculinity
by acting.
Females over the age of eighteen were eligible for marriage and therefore
considered adults. Guaman Poma’s drawing shows a woman of thirty-three
years of age with a spindle in hand (Fig. 15). In contrast, young males aged
eighteen to twenty served as messengers of the community and lackeys to
warriors and great lords; Guaman Poma calls them Indians of half-tribute, not-
ing their status as “not quite adults.” His drawing shows a youth of eighteen
functioning as a messenger (Fig. 16).
A second drawing of a thirty-three-year-old woman shows her weaving
(Fig. 17).15 The text tells us that she is an adult woman and as such is either
15
Since Guaman Poma depicts two 33-year-old women, we may conclude either that
there were actually only nine census categories for females and the artist duplicated the
157
Carolyn Dean

nueva corónica, fol. 215 [217], 1615. Andean female,
thirty-three years old (after Guaman Poma 1988:
191).
married or widowed. The native author also indicates that until marriage a
female is referred to as a child, niña, no matter what her age. This view persists
in the contemporary Andes where a person—male or female—is not consid-
ered an adult until he or she marries (Harris 1978: 28; B. J. Isbell 1976: 37; 1978:
214; Platt 1986; Urton 1985: 252). Like Pachacuti (and as is done in the Andes
today), Guaman Poma conceives of the conjugal pair as a complementary unit.
The counterpart to the adult female is the thirty-three-year-old warrior, whose
trophy now is a decapitated human head (Fig. 18). Just as spinning and weaving
are the feminine activities par excellence, warfare is the adult male’s; his youth-
female at the prime of life for reasons of complementarity or that Guaman Poma intended
to identify the woman on folio 223 [225] as being 18 years old (thus matching the pictured
male) but erred.
158

nueva corónica, fol. 194 [196], 1615. Andean male,
thirty-three years old (after Guaman Poma 1988:
168).
ful bird hunting has evolved to this end. These “typical” activities marked gen-
der and def ined adulthood (see Silverblatt 1987: 9–10, 14). Both Andean male
and female puberty rites—kicuchikuy for girls and warochikuy for boys—stressed
the gender duties that adult Andeans were expected to perform. Burial prac-
tices also underscored gender-specif ic tasks. Women often carried spindles and
skeins of yarn to the grave as mementos of feminine activities, while men were
usually buried with either the weapons of warfare or their takllas, the hoes they
used in plowing (Arriaga 1968: 27–28). Plowing and warfare were equated as
masculine activities in the Pre-Hispanic Andes.16 Songs of victory, hayllis, were
16
See Bauer (1996) for an excellent discussion of the Inka analogy between plowing and
warfare and its ideological implications. Classen (1993: 56–57) offers a f ine analysis of the
conceptual parallels among Inka agriculture, warfare, and marriage.
159
Carolyn Dean

nueva corónica, fol. 1153 [1163], 1615. August plow-
ing songs (after Guaman Poma 1988: 1050).
sung at the f irst breaking of the earth prior to planting, as well as in celebration
of military triumphs.
While plowing was analogous to warfare with its destructive consequences,
planting was a metaphor for sexual intercourse and its creative potential. In
Guaman Poma’s work one often sees couples engaged in planting; while men
open the earth with their foot plows, women plant the seeds (Fig. 19). The
subtitle in his drawing of August plowing rites, “Hailli, chacra iapvicvi pacha”
(Haylli, chakra yapuykuy pacha), translates as “victory songs at the time of plow-
ing the earth.” While the male conquest of the earth is celebrated in song, the
female contribution is equally valuable. In the Andean sierra today, planting
consists of activities that are gendered both masculine and feminine (see, e.g.,
Fortún 1972). Many highland Andean peoples still believe that the placing of
the seed in the ground should be done by a woman, and that while the man is
160

nueva corónica, fol. 217 [219], 1615. Andean female, f ifty
years old (after Guaman Poma 1988: 193).
the cultivator, she is the owner of the seed (Harris 1978: 30; B. J. Isbell 1976:
37). The sexes combine their efforts to produce a successful harvest; the male
conquest of the earth, when met and matched by its female complement, is
generative.
Masculinity and femininity contrasted most strongly in sexually active, re-
productive humans involved in a pair bond whose duties and conduct insured
the continuity not only of their lineages, but of the community and—more
broadly—the cosmos itself. Gender in the Pre-Hispanic Andes thus operated,
as it does in many places, to encourage stable pair bonding between men and
women. In nonreproductive humans, gendering was less important.17 Thus, while
17
Guaman Poma’s (1988: 176–177, 196–197) account of Inka census categories indi-
cates that the handicapped—the inf irm, the disabled, the blind, the deaf, the mute, hunch-
161
Carolyn Dean

sixty years old (after Guaman Poma 1988: 172).
childhood witnessed an increasing divergence between the sexes, old age saw a
return to similitude. Guaman Poma tells us that by the age of f ifty the woman—
no longer capable of reproduction—is considered old (Fig. 20). Apparently
having raised her own children, she has now entered into the service of female
elites, acting as a porter, servant, maid, cook, or manager. Males, according to
Guaman Poma’s account of life stages, do not become “old” until the age of
sixty. He shows us a man of that age gathering f irewood (Fig. 21). The text
indicates that he is past the age of tribute and serves native lords as a porter,
servant, or accountant. Interestingly, the male at age sixty looks somewhat like
the twelve-year-old female, complete with a companion dog (Fig. 14). This
backs, etc.—were classif ied separately, as they never assumed full adult roles and responsi-
bilities.
162

eighty years old (after Guaman Poma 1988: 174).
visual correlation complements Guaman Poma’s textual assertion that the eld-
erly, like the young, are less useful. It is particularly interesting to note that it is
the male who, as he ages and becomes less capable of masculine action, behav-
iorally approximates the nearly pubescent female. Also, elder women with their
shorter hair resemble older males just as girls resemble boys in childhood. Long,
f lowing hair is the mark of a sexually active, potentially reproductive female (B.
J. Isbell 1997: 278–279).
In the f inal phase of life, from eighty to one hundred or one hundred f ifty
years old, the elderly person cannot do anything but eat and sleep; he is “with-
held from everything” (reserbado del todo) and she is “past it all” (pasada del todo)
(Figs. 22, 23). If they are capable of doing anything, it is to help raise domesti-
cated animals and watch over houses. Both male and female are shown with
staves; the male is somewhat more active, but essentially, both pictorially and
163
Carolyn Dean

nueva corónica, fol. 219 [221], 1615. Andean female,
eighty years old (after Guaman Poma 1988: 194).
textually, the sexes have come full circle. At the beginning and the end of life,
they are strikingly similar.
Thus, humans appeared to move from androgyny to single sex, and back to
androgyny. The f irst differences were manifested in dress and were most appar-
ent in the female. Later, differences were also apparent in the types of activities
in which each sex participated. In behavioral terms, males acted expansively
while females were more restrained; while males lashed out and destroyed (birds
and human beings), females gathered and created (textiles and human beings).
Although Guaman Poma’s reference to the sacrif ice of girls was brief and
casual, it should also be noted that whereas males killed, females died. As ob-
served in the Chuncho stereotype above, while femininity is a state of being,
masculinity is acted or performed.When the male body is incapable of gender-
appropriate action—in infancy and dotage—its androgynous nature is readily
164
apparent in Guaman Poma’s representations. Because females are female, in con-

trast to males acting male, they manifest femininity early on (through dress)
before they are old enough to do much of anything; once past menopause,
however, females display androgynous characteristics and thus, according to
Guaman Poma’s characterizations, precede their male counterparts in the turn
to androgyny. Interestingly, the ethnographic data indicate that postmenopausal
Andean females today take on some social roles and behaviors of males, so that
elder women are said to exhibit androgynous aspects by the contemporary
Quechua as well.
CACHED MASCULINITY
If it is true that, according to Andean gender paradigms, masculinity was
performed, then it is interesting to note that the body—that which exists, or
that which is—appears to have been conceptually female when it was at its
most inactive, that is, in death (B. J. Isbell 1997: 256 ff ).The dead body, whether
biologically male or female, was called malki, which means seed or plant. Pachacuti
pictured the malki as a seedling and located it on the left, or feminine, side of
his cosmological diagram (Fig. 4). The malki, especially the mummif ied corpse
of a revered ancestor that was preserved and propitiated, was understood to be
like a seed not yet sown—full of potential life, but dormant until acted on by
exterior forces. Owing to its inactivity, the malki was feminized. What, then,
happened to a man’s masculinity after he could no longer “act” it?
It is fairly clear that in the Pre-Hispanic Andes, masculinity could be housed
apart from the dead body, or the feminized malki. That is, the masculine aspects
of the human could be and were separated from the more feminine mortal
remains.18 Various chroniclers report on a range of sacred objects, especially
those known as huancas (wankas) and huauquis (wawkis), which hosted mascu-
line energies in particular. Huanca refers to a male ancestor who turned to
stone; the stone was conceived of as the owner of the location, village, or
18
The Pre-Hispanic Andean notion that death separates (at least some of ) the comple-
mentary aspects of the living human appears to have modern corollaries. Bastien (1987: 46,
72), for example, reports that the contemporary Qollahuayas of Bolivia conceive of the
living body as a hydraulic system and believe that death severs permanently the wet from
the dry elements of the body. Allen (1982: 183–185) indicates that in the southern Andean
community of Sonqo the inseminating qualities of ancestors are thought to be located
physically within the desiccated bones while the ancestors, as a category, are said to inhabit
ancient tombs where no physical remains actually exist. While Allen does not interpret the
evidence in this way, it would seem that Sonqueños continue an ancient Andean tradition
of separating the masculine from the feminine aspects of the androgynous deceased and
locating each in its distinct place—in this case, masculinity in the bones and femininity in
the tombs.
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Carolyn Dean
territory where it stood, and was a symbol of the occupation and possession of
that place (Duviols 1978, 1979). As there are no reports of female huancas, and
the actions associated with these tutelary monoliths are those of conquest and
control over territory, we may understand huancas as repositories of the mascu-
linity thought to have been possessed and expressed by particular male cultural
heroes. Huancas were widespread in the high agricultural zones of the southern
Andes.19 According to Pierre Duviols (1979), there were at least two types of
huanca: the marcayoc, the colonizer and proprietor of a village, and the chacrayoc,
the tiller and owner of a productive f ield. The stone, in its un-malki-like incor-
ruptible, indestructible body, commemorated the dual masculine activities—
those of conquest, whether actual (the taking of land) or metaphorical (the
tilling of agricultural f ields), and of possession.
Although the huanca was usually said to be a petrif ied ancestor, Duviols
(1978: 360) observes that every huanca corresponded to a malki. At the death of
this important male—usually the conquering hero and founder of a place—he
split into two, the body and the stone. The pair were conceived of as two
different entities, and the name of the huanca was generally different from that
of the malki. Huancas were not only signs of conquest, control, and foundation,
however; they also referred to male regenerative energies, especially when con-
sidered in concert with the malkis.While the malki was likened to a seed housed
in the womblike cave of mother earth (and ancestral corpses were, in fact,
usually preserved in caves), the huanca was the inseminating phallus. Duviols
(1978: 362–363; 1979: 21–23) argues that the masculine huanca, often oblong in
shape and planted vertically in the earth, is the phallus that plunges into the
womb of pachamama (mother earth), recalling male insemination during sexual
intercourse.
Duviols (1978: 359) also observes that the huanca was closely related to
another type of repository for aspects of male elite identity, the huauqui. While
the huanca was conceived of as a male turned to stone after death, or at least the
male properties of a deceased man housed in stone, the huauqui was ordinarily
constructed while a man was alive. The term huauqui means “a male’s brother,”
and it was regarded as the living man’s double. Both Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
(1943) and Bernabé Cobo (1990) provide considerable information on the
huauquis of Inka royalty; much of their information is probably derived from
Juan Polo de Ondegardo, the magistrate of Cusco who, in the latter half of the
sixteenth century, tracked down Inka mummies (malkis) and with them fre-
19
Duviols (1979: 9), citing documents from 1660, concludes that every southern Andean
village between 2,800 and 4,000 meters in altitude once had a huanca.
166
quently found their huauquis. Recently, Maarten Van de Guchte (1996) has
offered an extremely useful discussion of the subject. Apparently, huauquis could
be made of a variety of materials. Those belonging to the Inka emperors were
usually stone or gold, but there were exceptions. According to the chronicler
Juan de Betanzos (1987: 220), when Atawalpa challenged his brother for Inka
rulership, he ordered that a bulto (bundle) be fashioned of his own nails and
hairs, as had been done earlier for his father, the ruler Wayna Qhápaq; he then
named this composite Inga Guauguin (Inka Huauqui). Although Cobo de-
scribes them as “portraits” of the Inka, most, if not all, huauquis were not physi-
ological likenesses. Sinchi Roqa’s, for example, was a stone shaped like a f ish
called Guanachiri Amaro (Sarmiento de Gamboa 1943: 63).
An important individual might have had more than one huauqui; in fact,
Manko Qhápaq, the legendary f irst Inka, had several, the most famous of which
was Huanacauri (Wanakawri). According to Cobo (1990: 74), Huanacauri Huaca,
the huauqui of Manko Qhápaq, was an unshaped, “somewhat tapering” stone
of moderate size. It was taken to war by his descendants; Wayna Qhápaq, for
example, took it to Quito during his campaigns to conquer the northern realms.
It was returned to Cusco when Wayna Qhápaq died (Cobo 1990: 74). Both
Polo de Ondegardo (1916: 10–11) and José de Acosta (1962: 227) conf irm that
the huauquis of rulers were taken to war as well as carried in processions to
insure adequate rainfall and good harvests. The huauqui, then, began as the
companion of a living man, but after his death apparently became most useful
as a stand-in for him. Both the malki and its stone “brother” had their own
estates and servants. Like huancas, huauquis housed male properties; their use in
war and to induce rainfall—conceived of as an inseminating f luid—correlates
with Andean notions about masculine attributes and activities.
Like huancas, huauquis were paired with malkis. While the chroniclers are
not always clear about distinguishing malki from huauqui (often using the hope-
lessly imprecise term bulto), there is a suggestion that the huauqui might have
been the more active of the pair. Many of the malkis were found outside of
Cusco, in places considered “homes” of the deceased Inka. Yáwar Wákaq’s
mummy, for example, was discovered in Paullu, which is where he was raised.
Similarly, Wiraqocha Inka’s mummy was found by Spaniards in Caquia
Jaquijahuana, a village where he had taken refuge during the Chanka invasion
of Cusco. Thus, in death, the feminine aspects of both rulers returned to nour-
ish places that had offered them shelter and safety during their lives. Although
I have little conclusive evidence, I would suggest that the huauqui was con-
structed as the future brother/mate of the inevitable malki (echoing the prac-
tice of Inka rulers marrying their sisters). The huauqui amassed the masculine
167
Carolyn Dean
energies of its owner during his lifetime, and was put into “action” when the
mortal body ceased to be active (i.e., at death).20 Accordingly, it was probably
most frequently the huauqui, “brother/mate” of the malki, that was taken in
procession and especially to war.
Although the malkis of female elites were kept and propitiated, no female
counterparts to huauquis have been recorded (Van de Guchte n.d.: 293).21 Like
huancas, huauquis seem to have been a means of housing the masculine side of
males, particularly those whose actions were of note and therefore worthy of
preservation. This made a hero’s masculine properties immortal and allowed his
energies to be used by future generations. While masculinity may have been
suspended in an inanimate state, it was thus regarded as an exploitable resource
by the living. Accordingly, the repository itself was treated as though it were
animate or capable of animation. Catherine Allen (1988: 63), in her study of
one contemporary southern Andean society, observes that, “from an Andean
perspective, the compact hardness of stones, bones, and statues implies not a
lack of animation, but a different state of animation—life crystallized, as it
were.” This notion is surely an extension of Pre-Hispanic beliefs. Obviously,
such reverence of “crystallized” masculinity encouraged living males to behave
like these role models, or, in other words, “like men.” The use of huancas and
huauquis to capture masculinity thereby induced humans to reproduce gender
roles by simultaneously rewarding those who exhibited desired behavior and
shaming those whose actions challenged the so-called norms.
OF ROCKS AND MEN

In light of the earlier observation that the Andean universe was sexed, it is
interesting to note that stone seems to have been the most common vessel for
storing masculinity. Rocks, according to an Andean worldview, are potentially
animate. There are numerous Andean legends of stone coming to life and of
human beings and animals turning into stone. One popular legend concerns a
recalcitrant boulder that the Inka attempted to move. The stone, distressed at
20
Classen (1993: 85–95) discusses some of the ways in which Andeans thought about
the dead human body and its potential for affecting the lives of the living. It is clear that
they considered the human dead as active participants in the social structure of the living
(Urioste 1981: 15–17). Separating the masculine energies from the feminine malki seems to
have been a way for Pre-Hispanic Andeans to isolate the particular contributions that the
dead could make to the living. These ancient understandings have modern corollaries; see,
for example, Bastien (1978: 173) on how the Bolivian Qollahuaya dead are reintegrated
into the community.
21
There were, however, statues made in the likenesses of royal women (Estete 1968:
393), but their function was, unfortunately, never recorded.
168

nueva corónica, fol. 159 [161], 1615. “El noveno
capitan, Inga Urcon” (the ninth captain, Inka
Urcon) (after Guaman Poma 1988: 138).
being relocated and weary from travel, began to cry tears of blood. Guaman
Poma relates and illustrates one version of this story (Fig. 24). He shows tears
spilling from the monolith that the Inka, under the command of Inka Urcon,
are trying to relocate; on the weary boulder itself, he has penned lloró sangre la
piedra (“the stone cried blood”). The petrifaction of the Ayar brothers in the
legendary accounts of the founding of Cusco and the pururauka—monoliths
that came to life to f ight for the Inka against the invading Chanka army—are
just two more of the better known examples of “lithomorphing” in Inka lore.
Given the rock’s potential for animating, this natural material would seem to
have served as an ideal host for energies temporarily at rest.
In the gendered landscape of the Andes, rock appears to have been associ-
ated with masculinity. While the earth itself is conceptually feminine, most
169
Carolyn Dean
rocks that are specif ically identif ied are male, as are most mountain peaks, sug-
gesting that masculine energies are what is ordinarily housed apart from the
body, which is, in its essence, female.22 Females, however, do turn into stone in
some instances, and these exceptions are enlightening. In a myth from Huarochirí,
the supernatural female Caui Llaca changes into stone rather than have sexual
relations with the lustful deity Cuni Raya Vira Cocha (Salomon and Urioste
1991: 46–48). This myth accounts for the rocky islands off the coast of
Pachacámac, surrounded and assaulted by “Vira Cocha,” which means “sea-
foam.” The frothy white foam, which ceaselessly assails the partially submerged
rocks, not only refers to Vira Cocha, but suggests his semen as well. When the
woman becomes transformed in this legend, she is rendered unproductive as a
female; that is, she cannot be inseminated by Vira Cocha and thus, although
inundated in his (symbolic) semen, remains forever impregnable. Here, the pro-
cess of petrifaction can be said to make her, at the very least, not female (if not
conceptually male). In other tales from Huarochirí, lithif ication is directly asso-
ciated with an end to female sexual activity (see, e.g., Salomon and Urioste
1991: 59, 63, 134).
Interestingly, Guaman Poma (1988: fol. 389 [391]) reports that the captive
Inka ruler Wáskar, imprisoned and abused by followers of his half-brother, was
given a rock dressed like a woman to serve as his wife (“le dio . . . por muger,
una piedra larga bestida como muger”). The fact that the dethroned, doomed
Wáskar would produce no progeny was cruelly apparent in the mocking steril-
ity of the stone in feminine garb.23 Whether historically accurate or not, the
story related by Guaman Poma employs a symbol—the rock—that resonates in
the gendered landscape of the Andes.
In an illustration that in some ways mirrors the Huarochirí story of Caui
Llaca and Cuni Raya Vira Cocha, Guaman Poma (1988: fol. 316 [318]) depicts
the Chacan drainage system, most particularly the entry of the river Saphi (or
Watanay) into Cusco (Fig. 25). Van de Guchte (n.d.: 115) identif ies the place-
names given in the drawing as being linked to this river system: Cinca Urco
(Mt. Senqa), for example, is located to the north of the beginning of the Chacan
22
Although, in my opinion, it can be argued that rocks in the Andes are generally con-
ceived of as masculine, there are exceptions. Núñez del Prado (1974: 243, 246) indicates
that near Qotobamba, in southern Peru, some outcrops (wiñaq rumi) are considered to be
extensions of pachamama; they are called ñust’a (princess) and are said to house her female
spirit. See Decoster (n.d.: 62–63) for a discussion of this notion in 20th-century Accha (in
Paruro province south of Cusco); he also offers pertinent observations about the gendering
of landscape features.
23
See Van de Guchte (1996) for a discussion of some of the other dimensions of this
story.
170

nueva corónica, fol. 316 [318], 1615. “Canciones i
mucica” (songs and music [of young men and
women]) (after Guaman Poma 1988: 289).
drainage system; Quean Calla (Quiangalla) is a famous huanca in the area; and
Uaca Punku is the entry into Cusco below Sacsayhuaman. Thus, the artist has
telescoped the Chacan drainage into a single image. Since the Andean land-
scape is gendered, Guaman Poma’s drawing can be understood to refer, meta-
phorically, to sexual intercourse. The place of the river’s entry into Cusco is
occupied by two nude women. Two men sit atop (masculine) mountain peaks
and blow (phallic) f lutes; according to the caption, they are playing arawi, which
are love songs. Guaman Poma’s female f igures, awash in the raging river, are the
very opposites of Caui Llaca in the Huarochirí myth, who turned into stone to
avoid insemination; these females are vulnerable (note the long, loose hair, which,
as mentioned above, suggests sexual receptivity). In the drawing, the blowing
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Carolyn Dean
of f lutes is analogous to fellatio, which sets the fertilizing waters f lowing.24

Interestingly, according to an Inka legend, Pachakuteq (identif ied as a son of
Manko Qhápaq) once stopped torrential rains and prevented f looding by per-
suading a supernatural male entity not to blow his trumpet—the symbolic equiva-
lent of ejaculation (Murúa, 1986: 313).
R. Tom Zuidema (1990), in his discussion of an Inka structure in Cuzco
called the Casana, has commented on the fact that the Saphi gorge—the place
shown in Guaman Poma’s drawing—was gendered female and conceived of as
vaginal. He notes (1991: 165) that “the term casana is derived from casay, ‘to
pierce,’ a verb used for ‘planting’, that is ‘to put maize seeds in the ground using
a stick.’ It can also be applied to other means of piercing. Yet casa also means a
‘gorge’ through which a river penetrates.” Thus, Zuidema suggests that the
river penetrating the valley at the entrance to Cusco was a symbol of impreg-
nation, both of the earth and of women. The Inka edif ice known as the Casana
was located on the northern side of the Haucaypata, on the eastern bank of the
river Saphi (Watanay), close to the place where the river entered the city. Al-
though its functions are not described in detail by any of the chroniclers, Wil-
liam Isbell (1978: 275) concludes that the northwestern side of the plaza, where
the Casana was located, can be identif ied with masculine and intellectual ac-
tivities, in complementary balance to the opposite side of the plaza, which was
devoted to feminine fertility and production.
Casana also refers to a tunic design that was an arrangement of four smaller
squares within a larger square. It refers, according to Zuidema’s (1990, 1991)
insightful analysis, to the earth divided into its four parts and being pierced
through by the Axis Mundi, which is a reference to male procreative power.
When worn on an Inka tunic, the casana design, I would note, rather sugges-
tively covers the man’s groin: his penis, when erect, becomes the axis that pen-
etrates. This reading is especially apparent in Guaman Poma’s illustration of the
Inka plowing ritual of August, in which the sexual metaphors, already dis-
cussed above, are obvious (Fig. 19).
24
Harris (1980: 73) discusses the phallic symbolism of wooden pipes among the Laymi
of Bolivia today. The complementary opposition and conjugal union of metaphorized
males/conquerers/mountain peaks/rushing water and females/conquered/valleys/still wa-
ter are salient features of Andean oral and visual culture. For a discussion of the operation
of these metaphors in the myths from Huarochirí, see Salomon (Salomon and Urioste
1991: 9–10, 14–15). Bergh (1993: 82–85) argues that the Pre-Hispanic Moche culture on
the northern coast of Peru identif ied mountains with masculinity and the water originat-
ing there with semen. Modern Andeans still compare rushing or foaming water to semen;
see, for example, B. J. Isbell (1978: 124, 143, 163), Ossio (1978: 379–381), and Urton (1981:
202–4).
172
CONTROLLING THE MASCULINE

Huancas, huauquis, and the gendering of nature in general not only allowed
Andeans to utilize vital masculine energies associated with cultural heroes, but
also afforded a sense of control over masculinity, which had a dangerous, de-
structive side. Andean legend and history are rife with examples of men whose
“male” activity is excessive and, therefore, ruinous. According to Pachacuti (1993:
246), Wayna Qhápaq endeavored to marry one of his sisters, Mama Koka and,
when she rejected his advances, attempted to punish her by giving her to a
decrepit, coca-addicted kuraka (native leader). These inappropriate and vindic-
tive actions against his sister provoked divine rage, and a plague that ended his
life was the result.25 Sexual intercourse and marriage between royal siblings
were not prohibited among the Inka; what was offensive here was the forced
nature of the act—the inappropriate and destructive assertion of the masculine
over the feminine. Wayna Qhápaq’s son and heir Wáskar committed similar
“sins” when he def iled akllas, or chosen women (virgins dedicated to religious
service). According to Pachacuti (1993: 254–255),Wáskar ordered his troops to
rape a group of akllas.26 Duviols (in Pachacuti 1993: 25–26) points out that the
sexual violation of akllas was a challenge to the Creator’s authority, an assertion
of control over what did not properly belong to the Inka ruler (see also Trexler
1995: 154). If the sexual act was equated with military conquest, Wáskar, in his
rape of akllas, declared victory over the Creator or at least challenged His su-
premacy. Pachacuti offers this as the reason for the subsequent slaughter of
Wáskar and his entire family by Atawalpa’s generals. What matters here is not
whether this incident ever actually occurred, but that Pachacuti understood it
to be a reasonable explanation for the demise of Inka rulers.
It is certainly the case that Pachacuti’s interpretation of Andean history was
inf luenced by Christian precepts; control over the sexuality of the colonized
was a preeminent concern of the clergy, and such moralizing tales no doubt
ref lected the preoccupations of the colonial church. There are, however, a suf-
f icient number of such tales to suggest at least that Andeans and Europeans
shared the belief that deities were concerned with proper sexual behavior.What
constituted “proper behavior” in the minds of Europeans differed from the
understanding of Andeans, of course. One instructive tale, recorded in the late
sixteenth century, accounts for the downfall of the north coast ruler Fempellec.
25
For further discussion of this incident and its other implications, see Duviols (in
Pachacuti 1993: 25–26).
26
Pachacuti (1993: 266) writes that Wáskar was found “[f ]ornicating with virgins who
were dedicated [to the Creator] without considering His grandeur” (Fornicando a [las] doncellas
[del Hazedor] y a él dedicadas sin hacer casso a su grandeza del Hazedor).
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Carolyn Dean
His unrestrained sexual relations with a “demon” who appeared to him “in the
form and f igure of a beautiful woman” (en forma y figura de una hermosa mujer)
prompted a heavy, prolonged rainfall, which resulted in disastrous f looding
(Cabello Balboa 1945: 312). The Andean moral appears to condemn the fact
that the ruler’s libido distracted him from his duties (tan poca la continencia del
Fempellec), rather than the fact of his having illicit sex, which would be a more
European reading. Not only did masculine lust bring about a natural disaster in
this legend, but the resultant calamity came in the form of rainfall, a common
Andean metaphor for semen. The irony here is rich: immoderate masculinity
leads to excessive rainfall, which leads to destruction (specif ically, sterility and
hunger) rather than creation. According to the legend, to remedy the situation,
Fempellec’s own priests and nobles took him prisoner, bound his hands and
feet, and cast him into the sea. Similarly, in the origin myth of the Cañari of the
Ecuadorian highlands, when male lust leads to rape, the transgressor is drowned
(Sarmiento de Gamboa 1943: 37–38).27 In both cases—that of Fempellec and
that of the Cañari—the libidinous male drowns, thereby suffering an appropri-
ate fate.
The Inka likewise seem to have understood excessive rainfall, as well as
prolonged drought (more of a danger in the Cusco region), to be divine pun-
ishment meted out for transgressions (Murúa 1986: 429). In Cusco, drought
was often met with appeals to either the malkis (the corpses) or the huauquis
(the statuary “brothers”) of deceased Inka rulers. Inka Roqa (as a malki) or his
huauqui, called Vicaquirao, was carried in procession to alleviate drought, for
example. Apparently, it was appropriate to call on him because, according to
some sources, it was Inka Roqa himself (and according to others, his mate,
Mama Mikay), who was credited with ordering irrigation channels to be built
to bring water to Cusco from the Chacan drainage. Their lineage, the ayllu also
called Vicaquirao (or Vicaquirao Panaca ayllu), was charged with caring for this
system of irrigation (Cobo 1979: 124–125). While Mama Mikay may have
27
The myth concerns two Cañari brothers, Ataorupagui and Cusicayo, who were the
only two men to survive a great f lood. One day, while they were away from their hut,
sowing their land, they were left bread and chicha. After this occurrence was repeated, the
brothers hid themselves near their hut and observed two Cañari women bringing them
gifts of food. The brothers tried to capture the women but failed. Realizing they had done
wrong, the brothers prayed to the Creator to let the women return, which He did in order
that the men not die of hunger. Shortly thereafter, the elder brother had forced sexual
relations with one of the women; apparently, as a consequence of this rash and unapproved
act, he drowned in a nearby lake. The younger brother married one of the women and took
the other as his mistress. By them, he produced ten offspring; f ive of them comprised the
moiety of Hanansaya, and the other f ive, the moiety of Hurinsaya, and from them all
Cañari descended.
174
been associated with attracting the fertilizing f luid to Cusco, her male comple-
ment was called into action when there was a problem with its delivery.
Clearly, masculine energies could be summoned to aid the living. Their
excess could be dangerous, however, and it most often required feminine forces
to control them (B. J. Isbell 1997). As Frank Salomon (Salomon and Urioste
1991: 10) points out in his analysis of the Huarochirí manuscript, the paradigm
of complementarity accounts not only for cooperative action, but for conf lict
and its resolution as well. In the Huarochirí myth of Collquiri and Capyama,
male sexuality represented as rushing irrigation water is controlled by women
(Salomon and Urioste 1991: 139–142). A second Huarochirí myth tells the
story of how one of Chuqui Suso’s sisters seduces the fearsome Tutay Quiri,
the strongest son of Paria Caca, by showing him her genitalia and breasts, and
in so doing successfully brings to an end his conquest of the region (Salomon
and Urioste 1991: 82–83).28 In both stories, masculinity is characterized as
destructive unless countered by femininity, and the delicate fabric of society, as
highly susceptible to ruptures emanating from conf lict. Women, the prototypi-
cal weavers, represent in these stories feminine forces that sustain the social
fabric against the rending effects of masculine aggressivity.
In contemporary southern Andean society, the unsocialized, sexually ag-
gressive and unrestrained young male is likened to the bear, an animal of the
forested lowlands; in fact, as Gary Urton (1985: 270–272) has noted, young
men dressed in bear costume for ritual performances speak in falsetto, imitating
the adolescent boy’s cracking voice. Only when a young man enters into a
union with a female complement, begins to procreate, and f inally assumes full
adult responsibility and kin obligations is he recognized as being like animals of
the Andean highlands: f irst he is compared to the fox and then, as a fully re-
sponsible member of the community, to the puma. B. J. Isbell (1985: 289),
commenting on Urton’s f indings, notes that this signals the man’s transforma-
tion from “sexually unbridled to socially reproductive, from self-gratifying to
self-sacrif icing for communal interests, from irresponsible to responsible.” The
bear, as performed by young highland men, is a boisterous, sexually aggressive,
28
Inverting this myth, the Inka evoked what has been called a “conquest hierarchy,”
characterizing themselves as victorious males while the conquered were conceptualized as
defeated females (Silverblatt 1987: 67–80; Zuidema 196: 40–41). Under these circumstances,
controlled masculine aggressivity was applauded, as it led to the further enhancement of
the Inka empire while the feminine counteraction was held in abeyance. In this context,
females were subordinated to males and metaphorized as victims. See Nash and Leacock
(1982) for an analysis of how the concept of male superiority/female inferiority is often
linked to male competition over social and economic prerogatives in stratif ied societ-
ies.
175
Carolyn Dean
unsocialized animal, identif ied with his forest origins and conceived of as an
invader of highland villages, indiscriminate impregnator of women, and dis-
rupter of civilized society. As evidenced by the Chunchos mentioned at the
outset, the jungle—the complementary opposite of the highlands—produces
unbalanced sexuality; in this case, the lowland masculinity of the bear threatens
to destroy rather than properly complement its female counterpart.
CONCLUSIONS
This reprise of the lowland-highland opposition brings us back to Doña
Pasquala’s tacit attack on her husband’s masculinity. Her bequest to him of
Chuncho costumes accuses him not (or not just) of effeminacy, but of failing
to perform as her complementary partner. She certainly offers ample evidence
that he failed to participate with her in their conjugal union. In Andean terms,
that means not merely that he was a man who was like a woman, but that he
was not a man at all. Here Olivia Harris’s (1978) discussion of the notion of
chachawarmi among the contemporary, Aymara-speaking Laymi of Bolivia is
extremely helpful. Chacha means “man” or “husband,” while warmi means
“woman” or “wife.” Harris explains how this term operates to identify the pair
bond as a single, distinct unit.29 In Quechua, q’ariwarmi (again, “man–woman”)
or warmi-q’ari has a similar meaning (Allen 1988: 72–77; Platt 1986). Since
Doña Pasquala’s mate—the q’ari to her warmi—did not participate in the pair
bond either in terms of work (he did not contribute to her income) or in
terms of reproduction (he fathered no children by her), he failed to be an
Andean man. She reasoned that since he did not perform the activities that
would have def ined him as a man, and since being a man did not exist outside
of performance, he was no man at all. In fact, Doña Pasquala’s bequest echoes
the Inka custom of sending women’s clothes to men who had failed as warriors
and so had not lived up to their gender role (Guaman Poma 1988: 96, 360;
Pachacuti 1993: 255).
Like the Inka state before her, Doña Pasquala practiced gender, that is, she
purposefully put it into play in order to effect change, prompt certain behav-
iors, and/or preclude others. Doña Pasquala’s argument was critical not just as a
potent insult from beyond the grave, one f inal attempt to “get even” with the
man who clearly did not live up to her expectations. Under Spanish colonial
rule, a wife’s belongings were legally controlled by her husband.30 Doña Pasquala’s
29
Similarly, Platt (1986: 245–257) discusses the concept of yanantin (pair) among the
Macha of Potosí, Bolivia, which includes the idea that the human couple is but a single
body in two halves. Allen (1988: 85) also explores this concept.
30
See Silverblatt (1987: 119–120) for an insightful analysis of how this law affected
Andean women in colonial Peru.
176
ability to bequeath her possessions as she desired, in accordance with the Pre-
Hispanic tradition of parallel inheritance, depended on her charge that her
husband, because of his failure to act like her husband, was not entitled to
anything but what she chose to leave him—and what she chose to leave him
was a damning assessment of his masculinity and therefore, essentially and im-
plicitly, a claim to her own independence.
Acknowledgments I am grateful to Jean-Jacques Decoster for reading an early

draft of this essay and to Constance Cortez for attending a “dress rehearsal”
prior to the conference at Dumbarton Oaks; Cecelia Klein also offered invalu-
able insights and commentary. Research for this essay was made possible by
grants from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
177
Carolyn Dean
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182
None of the Above:
Gender Ambiguity in Nahua Ideology
CECELIA F. KLEIN
I
n her critique of the Western medical establishment’s treatment of
hermaphroditism, Julia Epstein (1990: 101, 104–105, 129) notes that the
law today “assumes a precise contrariety between two sexes, whereas medical
science has for several centuries understood sex determination to involve a
complex and indef inite mechanism that results in a spectrum of human sexual
types rather than in a set of mutually exclusive categories.” Epstein is referring
here to modern medical awareness of the variety of biological factors that
enter into the determination of a person’s sex, such as chromosomal patterns,
gonadal structure, hormonal dominance, and the morphologies of both inter-
nal and external genitalia, as well as to the multiplicity of combinations that
these can form. Despite scientif ic understanding that in some infants neither
sex prevails biologically and that some of the determinants may not fully reveal
themselves until the child is older, our law requires doctors to register a name
and sex for every newborn at the time of birth. If the doctor’s choice of sex for
the infant later turns out to have been awkward, the “error” is often addressed,
as among transsexuals, with genital surgery.1 For unless such so-called mistakes
are “corrected” so that they can be classif ied as either “true” males or “true”
females, hermaphrodites, homosexuals, effeminate men, and masculine women
in our culture are likely to suffer psychological anguish and social discrimina-
tion, if not outright abuse. Neither sexual nor gender ambiguity, in other words,
is accorded a constructive place in our society, where what Epstein calls the
“legal f iction” of binary gender boundaries forms the basis of the social order
and is, therefore, rigidly maintained.
1
In this essay I use the def initions of sex, gender, sexuality, transsexualism, gender identity,
gender variance, and sexual identity that are provided by Jacobs and Cromwell (1992: 62–64).
Gender, according to most gender theorists, is a sociocultural construct, whereas sex is based
on observable biophysiological characteristics.
183
Cecelia F. Klein
Anthropology and history have made it clear, however, that this has not
been, and still is not, the case always and everywhere. A number of cultures not
only recognize more than two genders, but also acknowledge that an individual’s
sexual preference, gender role, and sexual and/or gender identity can change
over time.2 The implications of these f indings are profound, for they not only
refute the common modern Euro-American assumption that gender is immu-
table, but also, as Anne Bolin (1996: 23, 29) has observed, “problematize our
Western biocentric paradigm of gender as bipolar and biologically unequivo-
cal.”3 Nor should we assume that ambiguous gender was and is, always and
everywhere, deemed socially destructive and therefore dangerous. In numerous
non-Western cultures, as in the European past, gender ambiguity is known to
have played important and constructive roles.4
I argue here that during the Late Postclassic period (a.d. 1250–1521) Nahuatl-
speaking inhabitants of Central Mexico likewise perceived gender as neither
immutable nor stable, nor did they see sex and gender as inherently bipolar and
necessarily biologically determined. Rather, both sex and gender could be de-
termined socially and supernaturally. Uncertain gender, moreover, was not al-
ways viewed as negative and marginal, as it is in contemporary Western culture,
but instead played a far more variable role. I provide evidence of the belief that
because gender ambiguity served as a powerful Nahua metaphor for a wide
2
I know of no culture that has recognized only one gender, whereas a number of
cultures recognize more than two ( Jacobs and Cromwell 1992). Laqueur (1990: 4 ff ) has
shown, however, that until the 18th century Europeans adhered to a one-sex model in
which women were perceived as having the same genitals as men, albeit inside the body
rather than out. As such, the woman represented an inferior variant of the biological male.
Recent research among the transgendered has revealed that an individual’s gender identity
may change at least once during his or her lifetime, regardless of biological characteristics
and/or sexual preference (Ramet 1996: 14–15, 36–38). The word transgendered here in-
cludes both surgical and nonsurgical transsexuals, as well as cross-dressers, male and female
(cf. Bolin 1996: 37).
3
It was not until recently that sexual preference was thought to play a major role in
def ining one’s self-identity. As Rocke (1996: 10–11, 13–14, 258, n. 20) notes, the current
dichotomy between homosexuality and heterosexuality is a relatively recent, 19th-century
European phenomenon, which did not penetrate American culture until the present cen-
tury. Rocke has found that 15th-century Florentine men who temporarily or sporadically
engaged in same-sex relations were not regarded, and did not regard themselves, as “devi-
ants.”
4
This is particularly well documented for Native North America, where gender-am-
biguous men and women have sometimes attained high social status, performing, among
other things, as diplomats and ceremonial leaders ( Jacobs and Cromwell 1992). For a more
detailed discussion of the positive social value assigned to gender ambiguity in Native
North America, see Roscoe (1991), Whitehead (1981), and Williams (1986). For an oppos-
ing viewpoint, see Trexler (1995).
184
None of the Above
variety of human hopes and fears, it was perceived as capable, under the right
conditions, of actually facilitating necessary and much wanted change.
These conditions occurred on at least four strategic occasions in the indig-
enous Nahua calendar, each marking the end of one important astronomical
period or season and the need for a smooth transition to another. Mesoamericans,
it is well documented, viewed such times as fraught with physical and cosmic
danger. The f irst of these occasions was the ceremony held at the end of every
solar year; the second, the celebration of the end of the annual dry season and
the beginning of the time to plant; the third marked the end of the wet season
and a turn toward warfare and the hunt; and the fourth occurred every twenty-
eight-plus days at the end of the lunar cycle. At these times, ambiguous gender
enabled the transformation of one temporal phase into another by giving an
appropriate bodily form to Nahua fears. These included fears of cosmic and
social chaos, loss of direction and purpose, illness and madness, the recklessness
of youth, impotence, barrenness and loss of reproductive energy, darkness and
deception, the onset of poverty and powerlessness—indeed, formlessness itself.
Ambiguous gender gave these dangerous forces form so that man could harness
them and transform them into something new and positive. As a symbol of
inversion, of reversal, and of the in-between, gender ambiguity was enormously
important in Nahua ideology because it could reinstate social and cosmic or-
der, thereby guaranteeing renewal, maturity, prosperity, and good health.5
In what follows, my frequent use of modern ethnographic data should in
no way be taken to imply that I see Mesoamericans today as living in a pristine
state unaffected by the almost f ive-hundred years of often traumatic change
wrought by conquest and incorporation into a new political and religious or-
der. Nor should my willingness to look at other Pre-Hispanic, non-Nahua
cultures suggest that I view Mesoamerican ideation in general as uniform
throughout the area (Chevalier and Buckles 1995: 1–2). Rather, due to the
limited and often biased reports provided by colonial sources, I turn at times to
other Mesoamerican times and places where documented beliefs and practices
can help us to recognize certain cultural patterns and thus hypothetically to
f lesh out our understanding of preconquest Nahua gender ideology.6
5
In so doing, gender ambiguity in Nahua culture represents yet another instance of the
wide use of mythic and ceremonial inversions to mark boundaries and endings, effect
transitions, and thereby create ideal conditions for the new (Babcock 1978: 27 ff; Turner
1967: 93–111).
6
For a full defense of the controlled use of ethnographic analogy in Pre-Hispanic
Mesoamerican studies, see my “Conclusions” in this volume. On the limitations of colonial
Spanish understanding of native sexuality in particular, see Burkhart (1989, this volume)
185
Cecelia F. Klein
Fig. 1 Codex Borbonicus, fol. 21. Oxomoco and Cipactonal divining (after Nowotny
1974).
ALL OF THE ABOVE: GENDER DUALITY

It is necessary at the outset to distinguish between gender ambiguity and
what I call “gender duality,” since past failure to do so has led to considerable
confusion in the literature. Gender duality refers to entities who simultaneously
incorporate within themselves both a wholly male and a wholly female aspect.
These entities are often described in colonial texts as married couples (see
Joyce, this volume).The best-known example of a dualistic Pre-Hispanic Nahua
supernatural is the supreme creator deity Ometeotl, or “God Two,” who com-
prised both a male and a female aspect. The male aspect was addressed as
Ometecuhtli, “Two Lord,” and the female as Omecihuatl, “Two Woman.” In
Nahua art, dual-gendered supernaturals appear as two separate, distinctly
gendered beings. In Codex Borbonicus (Nowotny 1974: fol. 21), for example,
the creator gods Cipactonal and his wife Oxomoco appear, in the context of
the f irst half of the Nahua “century,” or f ifty-two year cycle, facing each other
across an empty space (Fig. 1). They are represented as equal in size, and their
and Trexler (1995). On the broader history of Western discourse on sexuality and gender,
see Foucault (1978–86) and Laqueur (1990).
186
None of the Above
Fig. 2 Codex Borgia, fol. 58. Happily married couple (after Nowotny 1976).
respective genders are indicated clearly by the differences in their costumes

and—since, among the Nahua, only men were supposed to sit with their knees
up, and only women could properly kneel—in their poses. In earlier Mexican
manuscripts, bilateral symmetry and gender-appropriate poses and dress simi-
larly characterized the harmoniously paired man and woman (Fig. 2).
In a number of Mesoamerican communities today, the contented married
male–female couple serves to structure the perception of nature.7 In many
places, for example, the cosmos and its contents are believed to be composed of
two discrete but complementarily gendered aspects. Among the Otomi and the
Mixtec, the sky tends to be gendered male, and the earth female. Each of these
entities, in turn, has its own male and female aspects (Galinier 1990; King n.d.:
369). William Madsen (1969: 130) has found that the present-day Nahuas of
San Francisco Tecospa similarly organize their world in terms of a balance
7
Single supernaturals with a male and a female component survive today in rural ide-
ologies throughout Mexico and Guatemala. Tarn and Prechtel (1986: 173), for example,
discuss beliefs in dualistic supernaturals among the present-day Tz’utujil Maya of Santiago
Atitlán, Guatemala, while Knab (1979: 30–130) and Sandstrom (1991: 267) have reported
the same phenomenon for contemporary Nahuas (see also Madsen 1969: 130).
187
Cecelia F. Klein
between male and female elements, while Nahuas living today in the Sierra de
Puebla say that the earth has two differently gendered aspects addressed respec-
tively as Tlaltetata, “Earth Father,” and Tlaltenana, “Earth Mother”(Sandstrom
1991: 240). This practice probably goes back to the colonial period, for the
anonymous author of the mid-sixteenth-century Nahua document Histoyre du
Mechique ( Jonghe 1905: 25) states that, while some early colonial–period Nahuas
thought that the earth took the form of a woman, other informants claimed
that the earth looked like a man.8 Among today’s Chortí Maya, according to
Charles Wisdom (1940: 410), the male component of a supernatural being is
said to affect only women, whereas the female side affects only men.9 For
Mesoamericans, including Nahuas, a dual, male-plus-female unit was held to
have generative and protective powers far greater than could be possessed ei-
ther by a dysfunctional or infertile couple, or by any single individual regard-
less of the gender. This is why in some places important, highly venerated
individuals, whether dead or alive and of either gender, were—and still are—
called “Father Mothers.”10
8
The author of the Histoyre du Mechique ( Jonghe 1905) calls the earth Tlaltentli, which
is probably a mishandling of Tlaltecuhtli, “Earth Lord,” the name given by most sources. For
similar gendering of the earth among the Totonacs of Veracruz, see Ichon (1973: 146). For
the Nahuas of San Miguel Tzinacapan in the Sierra de Puebla, see Knab (1979: 130). Knab
(n.d.: 221) reports a Nahua association of land with the masculine and water with the
feminine, a distinction echoed among the Otomi in a study by Dow (1974: 4).
9
This concept may arguably be European in origin, since the Spanish inquisitor Pierre
le Broussard, working in Arras, reported that for women the Devil took the form of a man
and vice versa (Caro Baroja 1964: 91). In the New World, however, the concept seems to
have its strongest hold in precisely those areas where Catholicism has made the fewest
inroads into traditional beliefs, thus suggesting that it has preconquest roots.
10
Pre-Hispanic Nahuas used the term “Our Mother, Our Father” to address important
supernaturals such as the state patron god Huitzilopochtli (“hummingbird left”), as well as
their political superiors (Durán 1994: 131). The people of Tepeyacac, for example, ac-
knowledged the dominance of the Nahuas of Tenochtitlan by calling them “Our Mother
and Our Father” (Leibsohn n.d.: 360). When a new ruler was installed at Tenochtitlan, the
people were told, “It is assuredly true that he is thy real mother, thy real father. Thy mother
is not thy mother; thy father is not thy father. Truly this [the ruler] is thy mother, this is thy
father” (Sahagún 1950–82, 6: 79). Among the Maya, one f inds an example of this as early as
the 7th century, on a stucco panel in the Temple of the Cross at Palenque where the Maya
ruler Kan-Bahlum II wears a netted jade skirt that was f irst worn, according to Freidel,
Schele, and Parker (1993: 286), by First Mother and First Father, the Maya equivalent of the
Nahua Ometeotl, or “God Two.” The accompanying text identif ies Kan-Bahlum, who was
male, as the “Mother” of the gods, which is a reference to his ability to materialize the
ancestral deities by “suckling”—that is, nourishing—them (Newsome n.d.: 24). Today, the
highland Tzotzil Maya address as “Father–Mother” (totilme’il) not just their ancestors but
anyone who has held a higher off ice or who otherwise protects his or her fellow beings.
The Quiche, in turn, refer to their patrilineage heads and priest-shamans as “Mother Fa-
ther” (chuchkahaw) (Freidel, Schele, and Parker 1993: 169; D. Tedlock 1985: 47).
188
None of the Above
This ideology ref lected Mesoamerican social values. Throughout

Mesoamerica, the stable and productive marriage of a fully feminine woman to
an entirely masculine man represented the hallmark of social maturity and
formed the basis of the socioeconomic order. Gender dualism, in which a male
and a female took on complementary gender roles designed to benef it the
family as a whole, thus represented the social ideal (see Joyce, this volume). This
parallels the Andean region, where gender complementarity continues to struc-
ture domestic roles and where people have long conceived of the successful mar-
ried couple as a single body with two halves (see Dean, this volume). Olivia
Harris (1980: 90) has found that among the present-day Laymi of Bolivia, the
fundamental conceptual opposition is not between man and woman, but be-
tween the married couple, viewed as “the embodiment of society itself,” and
unmarried people,“who in certain respects are relegated to the wild.” “Women
and men,” in Harris’s words (ibid.), “are not pre-given, eternal categories but
change their relationship to the symbolic in the course of their lives.” As we see
below, a similar opposition structures thought in parts of Mexico and Guate-
mala today.
What we f ind here are cases of multiple but discrete genders that combine
to form a single, male-plus-female whole. The two genders may be viewed
either simultaneously or in alternation, but they are never ambiguous or am-
bivalent because there is nothing uncertain, unpredictable, or incomplete about
them. Rather, these genders are additive, or doubled. In none of these cases do
the individual aspects or components that make up the unit ever change their
gender, nor do they represent an intermixture of gender traits within them-
selves. The anticipated benef its of such gender doubling are perhaps best seen
in a lengthy 1958 healing chant addressed, under the inf luence of hallucino-
genic mushrooms, to “Father Jesus Christ” and “Most Holy Mary” by the Mazatec
shamaness María Sabina. As the chant gained momentum, Sabina frequently
augmented her credentials by repeating “Woman [male] saint am I, and woman
[female] saint am I” (Halifax 1979: 199). María Sabina became all of the above.
NONE OF THE ABOVE: GENDER AMBIGUITY

By “gender ambiguity”—or what some call “gender liminality,” and others
call “gender blending,” “gender reversal,” or “gender variance”—I refer to in-
stances in which a single entity is either not entirely or not consistently male or
female.11 The boundaries between female and male, in other words, are suff i-
11
The term gender liminality is used by Besnier (1994), while gender blending serves as the
title of a book by Devor (1989). Gender reversal is preferred by Ramet (1996: 2), and gender
variance by Bolin (1996: 23), while Epstein and Straub (1991) write of the politics of gender
189
Cecelia F. Klein
ciently blurred that it is impossible to assign a single gender. Rather than com-
prising all genders or having one integral gender, the gender-ambiguous indi-
vidual has less than one gender. Such an individual represents a single,
fundamentally male or female being who, by virtue of being infused with traits
of the other gender, is incomplete, imperfect, unfulf illed, partially disguised or
hidden, and therefore severely compromised.
Semiotically speaking, only true gender ambiguity can successfully invert—
and thus construct and validate—the meanings conveyed by gender doubling.
This must be why Wisdom (1940: 410) found the Chortí Maya death god
described both as a male with a female consort, each dressed according to sex,
and as a giant male dressed in female clothes. A single, transvestite death god
whose masculinity has been compromised by his feminine dress has a meaning
directly opposite from that of a death god who can present himself either as a
single entity of two opposite genders or as one or the other member of a pair.12
As Marjorie Garber (1992: 11–13) points out, cross-dressing is a powerful sig-
nif ier because it introduces an epistemological crisis by destabilizing and thus
challenging the inevitability of bipolar gender categories. A man in a woman’s
dress—whether he be a regular cross-dresser, an actor, or the impersonator of a
female deity—is by no means truly female, yet neither is he, at least for the time
being, entirely male.
Like the Chortí, Pre-Hispanic Nahuas apparently did not recognize a com-
pletely intersexed adult in whom neither sex predominated. There could only
be effeminate men and masculine women. When Nahuas spoke of what we
today call hermaphrodites, they identif ied them as women who possessed pro-
nounced male biological traits and sexual habits.13 Thus, the Franciscan Ber-
nardino de Sahagún’s informants def ined what they called the patlache, or
hermaphrodita, as a “detestable woman” who had a penis and testes, a beard, and
man’s speech, and who had carnal relations only with women (Sahagún 1977,
ambiguity. Whether the emphasis is on mixed gender signs, homo- or bisexuality, or intersexed
individuals depends on the author.
12
For lack of adequate alternatives, I continue to use certain controversial words here,
such as transvestite and homosexual, which, I realize, can connote Western biases. These terms
are not, of course, drawn from indigenous vocabularies or discourses, and the values and
meanings that they represent to us today may differ signif icantly from Pre-Hispanic con-
cepts of, and attitudes toward, mixed gender signs. They should therefore be taken here
strictly as descriptive terms devoid of any implicit moralizing. Transvestite, in other words,
means cross-dresser and nothing more.
13
The Nahuatl dictionary compiled by Molina (1970: fol. 22v) identif ies the hombre
delicado, “delicate [weak, effeminate] man,” as ciuanacayo, which, Karttunen (1992: 34) says,
probably derives from cihuanacayo, meaning “one’s female genitals/vulva/vagina.”
190
None of the Above
Fig. 3 Florentine Codex, fol. 40r. Hermaphrodite (after Sahagún 1979, 3).
3: 130–131; 1950–82, 10: 56) (Fig. 3).14 The implications can be seen in Diego
Muñoz Camargo’s (1978: 151–152) account of a Tlaxcalan girl of low birth
with whom the son of the ruler became enamored. The ruler put the girl with
the other women of the court, only to come home from a long trip to f ind that
“she” had impregnated more than twenty of his women. The imposter, obvi-
ously male, was denounced as una hermaphrodita que tuvo dos sexos—that is, a
woman of two sexes—and was promptly condemned to a gruesome death. We
can assume that, in order to effect this deception, the man had appeared to the
prince and the court dressed and coiffed as a woman.
As the foregoing demonstrates, what offended Nahuas about those whose
appearance and behavior were at odds with their “real” sex was their view that
these individuals might take advantage of appearing to be something they were
not. As agents of trickery and deceit, hermaphrodites, like homosexuals, were
therefore not just disapproved of, but often killed as well. Interestingly, Fernando
de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1975–77, 2: 101) claims that in Texcoco, although both
14
In Nahuatl, patlache means “one who is extended” (translation mine). Another Nahua
term for hermaphrodite, ciuatl tepule, literally means “woman who has a virile member,” a
concept that for us is an oxymoron (Siméon 1977: 113, 501).
191
Cecelia F. Klein
Nahua partners in a male same-sex relationship were killed and buried in hot
ashes, it was only in the case of the “passive” partner, or cuiloni (“he who is
taken”), that entrails were removed through the anus.15 It was also the passive
partner alone who was condemned as “a def ilement, a corruption, f ilth; a taster
of f ilth, revolting, perverse, [and] full of aff liction,” and as a man who, being
“womanish,” deserved to be burned (Sahagún 1950–82, 10: 37–38). The sexual
behavior of the active partner in a male same-sex relationship, in contrast, was
viewed as essentially consonant with his biological sex and therefore not a
direct cause of misfortune.16
The link between misfortune and effeminacy can be seen in Alfredo López
Austin’s (1982: 167; 1988, 1: 305–306) observation that the Nahuatl word cocoxqui,
“effeminate,” can also mean “sick” and “weak.”17 Bernard Ortiz de Montellano
(1990: 151) notes seventeeth-century testimony collected by Hernando Ruiz
de Alarcón (1982: 182) that same-sex behavior was thought by Nahuas to cause
crops to freeze, livestock to die, and business deals to fail. Similar associations
are found today among the Otomi and the Quiche Maya. Jacques Galinier
(1990: 642) reports that the Otomi attribute male impotence and female bar-
renness to homosexuality, while Barbara Tedlock (1992: 116) tells us that a
Quiche child born on the day Tz’i will be not only confused, weak, and un-
lucky but also sexually unsatisf ied and, possibly, a homosexual, a fornicator, or a
prostitute.18 According to the commentator of Codex Magliabechiano (Nuttall
1978 fol. 77r), if Nahua diviners diagnosing illness threw maize kernels in such
a way that one kernel fell on top of another, it was said that their client’s illness
was the result of “sodomy.” The damage wrought could be psychological, as
15
In the Spanish version of the Florentine Codex, Sahagún (1977, 3: 120) def ines the
cuiloni as el somético paciente, “the passive partner,” while Molina (1970: fol. 100v) equates the
word with the Spanish term puto que padece, or “puto [sodomite] who suffers,” as opposed to
tecuilontiani, “puto who does it to someone else” (Molina 1970: fol. 93r; see also Sahagún
1997: 253). We do not know whether the Nahua similarly distinguished between the dan-
gers posed, repectively, by the active and the passive partner in a female same-sex relation-
ship.
16
Colonial sources concur that in the urban capitals of Tenochtitlan and Texcoco both
participants in a same-sex act were likely to be killed (e.g., Jonghe 1905: 18). Trexler (per-
sonal communication, 1996), however, sees these claims as part of a later Nahua attempt to
represent their sexual past in terms acceptable to the Church.
17
See Molina (1970: fol. 24r) and Siméon (1977: 121) for this def inition of cocoxqui. Two
Nahua terms for male homosexuality (amo tlacayotl and ayoc tlacayotl) suggest that it was re-
garded as inhuman behavior (López Austin 1982: 167; Molina 1970: fol. 115v).
18
The name Tz’i comes from tz’ilonic, “to be dirty, soiled, stained, and impure,” with,
according to B. Tedlock (1992: 116), the “connotation of making love either to the wrong
person or at the wrong time or place.” In divination, a high-numbered Tz’i count indicates
that the person has committed a serious sexual sin, such as sodomy.
192
None of the Above
well. Mid-sixteenth-century Nahuas, for example, described the masculine

woman as “a corrupter, a deranger; one who deprives one of his reason” (Sahagún
1950–82, 10: 37).19
In addition to causing illness, gender ambiguity, not surprisingly, had dire
social connotations. Nahua youths who had in some way hindered the efforts
of the state’s armies or musicians, for example, were said to have become “old-
womanish” (Sahagún 1997: 244). The word cuiloni was often used by warriors
to insult their enemies because it connoted (and hopefully would incur in the
opposition) “womanly” cowardice and defeat.20 Women’s garments on a male
body therefore served as a common visual and verbal metaphor for military
weakness, defeat, and the poverty and disgrace that attended submission (Klein
1994: 113–114).21 In some sources, these garments are specif ically described as
dirty and tattered. The Anales de Tlatelolco (Berlin and Barlow 1948: 74), for
example, states that, once his city had fallen to the Spaniards, el gran señor, el
hombre poderoso (“the great lord, the powerful man”) of Tlatelolco appeared
only in rags, wearing the headdress, skirt, and blouse (huipil) of a woman (trans-
lation mine).22
19
Many Mesoamerican peoples today fear transvestites—whether males dressed as fe-
males or masculine women who appear to be wholly feminine—who lie in wait in order to
trick members of their own sex into having intercourse with them. As in Europe since the
Middle Ages, it is frequently feared that the act will drive the victims mad. It is possible that
the notion was transported across the Atlantic following the Spanish conquest, but even in
that case it undoubtedly fused with comparable indigenous beliefs, since, as we will see, the
association of gender ambiguity with treachery and illness permeated Nahua ideology and
language.
20
For the association of cowardice with femininity, see Guerra (1971: 154), Klein (1994:
113), Stenzel (1976: 183), and Trexler (1995: 64–81). Muñoz Camargo (1978: 209) states
that at the start of the conquest the Cholutecas believed that the Spaniards could not
prevail, in part because they saw the invaders’ Tlaxcalan allies as sodomites “who are noth-
ing but their women” (translation mine).
21
Durán (1994: 91–92) recounts the story of a Coyoacan ruler who ordered three visit-
ing ambassadors from the Aztec capital to return home to Tenochtitlan in women’s skirts
and blouses (huipils) as a means of provoking a war. Burkhart (1986: 120–121) calls atten-
tion to Juan Suárez de Peralta’s tale of a braggart who was sent by Motecuhzoma II into a
war against the Purépucha (Tarascans) but balked at the onslaught and f led the battle.
Motecuhzoma punished the coward by dressing him in a woman’s blouse and castrating
him so that he could never reproduce. According to the Relación de Michoacán (Craine and
Reindorp 1970), upon hearing of Tenochtitlan’s defeat at the hands of the Spaniards, the
Nahuas’ Purépucha cousins in Michoacán lamented that “they have put women’s underskirts
on all of us” (Krippner-Martínez 1991: 191).
22
The report is no doubt allegorical, but in some places female dress is still associated
with the end of political power and the ensuing poverty. In Tzotzil Maya Zinacantan,
Chiapas, for example, one of the male members of an outgoing administration is dressed in
the clothes of a white Ladino woman (Blaffer 1972: 41). This may symbolize the fact that
many Maya off icials deplete their resources in the course of fulf illing their responsibilities.
193
Cecelia F. Klein
In all documented instances in which Nahua men were forced to cross-

dress as women, their tormentors’ intention seems to have been not just to
mark but also to mock their victims’ loss of status and power. The man or
woman who voluntarily cross-dresses, in turn, typically mocks other people.
We see this in certain parts of Mexico today, where ritual mockery is a princi-
pal activity of certain men who voluntarily dress in women’s garments. For
example, Victoria Bricker (1973: xiv–xv, 9) notes that Zinacanteco Maya festi-
vals feature costumed men, some of them dressed as women, who mock and
humiliate the ruling functionaries.23 As is typical of such rites elsewhere in
Mesoamerica, men’s costumes are either a combination of male and female
garments or a tawdry parody of proper female dress; as is common elsewhere,
these men engage in obscene acts.24
End of the Year

In Zinacantan, as in a number of places in Mesoamerica today, obscene
transvestite performances are held at certain times of the year, suggesting that
gender ambiguity is somehow tied to specif ic points in time. One occasion is
the End of the Year, or New Year, ceremonies, which run from 16 December
through 25 January, coinciding with the end of our Gregorian year. At this
time, according to Evon Vogt (1976: 177), the Zinacantecos “are f irst unwiring,
or unstructuring, the system of order and then rewiring it, or restructuring it.”
The second major occurrence is Carnival, which takes place shortly afterward,
in February or March, and is linked with Easter. At Zinacantan, as in many
other places in Mesoamerica, Carnival coincides with the last f ive days, or “lost
days,” of the indigenous solar calendar, a period that currently runs from Ash
Wednesday (a moveable feast normally falling in February) through Easter Sunday.
In other communities, the “lost days” immediately precede, if they do not
23
Bricker’s (1973) pragmatic explanation of Zinacanteco ritual cross-dressers’ costumes
and behavior is that, by publicly exposing the failures of outgoing off icials who have ne-
glected their duties, the cross-dressers impress society’s standards and expectations, as well as
the consequences of any future failures, on incoming off iceholders. At the same time, such
comic imitations of female appearance and behavior reinforce the communal notion of
how a proper woman—as well as a proper man—should look and behave. For more infor-
mation on modern ritual mockery of people’s foibles, see Bricker (1973: 64, 130, 135–136)
and Taube (1989).
24
In places, the obscenities are perpetrated by men dressed as feos (“uglies”) (Wagley
1949: 117). Among the Tzotzil speakers of San Pedro Chenalhó, with whom Guiteras-
Holmes (1961) lived for some time, impersonators of mythic and historical f igures, includ-
ing men dressed as negros (blacks), visit the local off icials and, once there, “realistically”
simulate the carnal act. Guiteras-Holmes (ibid.: 101) does not say whether any of these
impersonators are dressed as women.
194
None of the Above
overlap, the beginning of Semana Santa, or Holy Week. This represents a shift
from the original European practice of holding Carnival earlier, during the
period extending from Epiphany ( January 6) to Ash Wednesday (see Provost
n.d.). Nonetheless, at Zinacantan both of the principal occasions for ritual
cross-dressing mark the end of a solar year—the Gregorian year in the f irst
case and the indigenous year in the second case. The association of gender
ambiguity with year endings is further made evident by J. Steward Lincoln’s
(1945: 118) observation that, during the f ive unlucky days (O’ki) in their cal-
endar, the Ixil Maya fast and offer sacrif ices because it is feared that boys born
at that time will “be like girls.” Ixil children born during O’ki may also grow up
to be impotent, sterile, and “without molars.” Here effeminacy is conf lated
with other sexual failures as well as with immaturity in order to characterize
the end of the indigenous year in terms opposed to the ideal, reproductive
married state.
The ancient Maya Uayeb and modern Maya carnival. The f ive “lost days,” as
Bricker (1973: 8–9) points out, also correspond to the period of f ive “nameless
days” that the Yucatec Maya formerly called Uayeb, which fell at the end of the
indigenous Yucatec year. Although Bishop Diego de Landa’s (1975: 135–149)
lengthy sixteenth-century description of the Uayeb rites does not mention
cross-dressing, it is likely that transvestites performed at those times. Bernardo
de Lizana (1893: 41), writing in the early seventeenth century, mentions female
impersonators in the area, and Bricker (1973) points out that gender imperson-
ation has not been uncommon in Yucatán in recent times. In 1971, in the
Yucatec town of Hocabá, for example, Carnival featured a woman who was
dressed as a man; the star female impersonator, called Mariquita (Sissy), pre-
tended to be a homosexual while making jokes about homosexual behavior
(Bricker 1973: 182–183). In 1901, during Carnival in Mérida, Frederick Starr
(1902: 80–82) saw an “indecent” dance in which half of the dancers were
dressed as women with exaggerated breasts.25 Robert Redf ield (1936: 241)
mentioned that during “the annual f iesta” at Dzitas, one of two men acting like
clowns was dressed as a woman, and the costumes of both were “in tatters.”
Landa’s description of the sixteenth-century Uayeb rites includes several
features that have parallels in Pre-Hispanic Central Mexico. Landa (1975: 143,
145, 147) mentions, for example, much dancing by old women “clothed in
certain garments,” who, as we can infer from another passage in his work, were
25
For more on ritual humor, buffoonery, and ceremonial cross-dressing, see Bricker (1973:
185–187) and Taube (1989).
195
Cecelia F. Klein
midwives.26 As discussed below, elderly midwives have an important relation to

gender ambiguity among the Nahua. In addition, Landa (1975: 138–149) refers
to an eff igy of a god that was carried f irst to the home of the principal, or chief,
where it was honored, and then, once the f ive unlucky days ended, to the
temple, where it remained until the Uayeb of the incoming year. Folios 25
through 28 of the Maya Codex Dresden (Thompson 1972) refer to these Uayeb
days, with each page depicting an anthropomorphic opossum carrying a deity
on its back (Fig. 4). The four opossums are thought to represent the four Maya
“year bearers”; the term refers to the four day signs that alternate in giving their
names to the f irst day of the Mesoamerican year (Taube n.d.: 220 ff ). In Codex
Dresden, as in Landa’s Yucatán, the year bearers are Kan, Muluc, Ix, and Cauac,
but in the present-day Quiche Maya town of Momostenango they are all re-
ferred to as Mam (B.Tedlock 1992: 89–90, 99–100). There, as among the Mam-
speaking Maya of Todos Santos, each Mam year bearer is identif ied with a
particular mountain (Oakes 1951: 71).27 J. Eric S. Thompson (1930: 57–58) had
the impression that the Mams were “dual-sexed,” but, as we see further on, their
gender is more likely ambiguous.
The f igures carried by the opossum year bearers in Codex Dresden repre-
sent the patron deity of the last day of the old, outgoing year (Taube n.d.: 277–
279). From Landa’s (1975: 139) description, it seems certain that they were
statues made of clay. Diego López de Cogolludo (1954–55, 1: 353), however,
writing in the seventeenth century, said that the Uayeb image of his time was a
piece of wood dressed like a “boy” and placed on a stool; its clothes, once the
ceremonies were completed, were removed and thrown onto the ground. Two
centuries later, Juan Pío Perez (1843: 437) identif ied the Uayeb eff igy as a god
called Mam, who, over the course of the f irst four days, was gradually moved
from the altar of the temple f irst to its f loor and then to the threshold.28 Even
though these European reports identify all of the Uayeb images as essentially
male, Pío Perez associates them with an eff igy referred to as Mam, who is today
described as dual-gendered (meaning ambiguously gendered). As discussed be-
26
Landa (1975: 129) states that on one festive occasion, “certain old women” were ad-
mitted to the temples. These old women were apparently the “sorceresses” who attended
women in childbirth, whom he referred to in the remaining sentences of the same para-
graph. Tozzer (Landa: 129, n. 597) relates the women in this passage to the old women who
In his reference to old women’s roles during Pop, however, Landa (ibid.: 152) does not
specif ically state that they danced at that time.
27
In the Toledo district of Belize, the Mams correspond to the four world directions;
there they are all called Huitz-Hok, “mountain-valley” (Thompson 1930: 57).
28
These passages from Cogolludo and Pío Perez were f irst cited by Tozzer (Landa 1975:
139, n. 646).
196
None of the Above
Fig. 4 Codex Dresden, fol. 26. Opossum “year bearer” (after Thompson 1972).
low, Mam is the name of a present-day bisexual, transvestite, highland Maya

supernatural who, in the form of a wooden eff igy sometimes addressed as
“Boy,” plays a major role in the End of the Year celebrations.
Carnival in modern Mexico. While these accounts of the Yucatec Uayeb

differ somewhat, they all emphasize that the Uayeb eff igy was either moved or
undressed, and sometimes both, at the end of the f ive unlucky days. The logic
behind this appears to lie in Landa’s repeated assertion (1975: 138–139, 142,
145–146) that the purpose of the Uayeb rites was to get rid of the evil spirits
that caused sickness, so that the incoming year could begin safely.29 When the
aged Mam was removed, in other words, he took with him those dangerous
forces.We see a similar pattern in Mesoamerican Carnival celebrations today. In
the Otomi village of El Zapote in the Huasteca, for example, Carnival features
a specially built platform, called altar de los viejos (“altar of the old ones”), that
supports a seated muñeco (“doll”) made of large leaves, whose face is a black
29
See Landa (1975: 139, 143, 147, 149). Taube (n.d.: 300) notes that the Mam f igure
featured in Uayeb ceremonies “seems to epitomize the evil and anti-social forces present at
this time.”
197
Cecelia F. Klein
mask with a white beard signifying its male gender and advanced age (Williams
García 1960). Often referred to as El Viejo, “The Old Man,” the eff igy not only
represents the evil spirits who walk freely at such times, but is also said to
absorb the evil that could otherwise bring future trouble. At the end of Carni-
val, the f igure and the platform are removed, and the f igure is decapitated and
abandoned by the side of a road outside of town. In other places in Mesoamerica,
Carnival eff igies are either disassembled or burned (e.g., Reina 1966: 161; S.
Lothrop 1929: 20).
In Guy Stresser-Péan’s (1959: 459) opinion, the mannequin honored dur-
ing Carnival in the Huasteca “is probably . . . in part of European origin.”
While Spanish-speaking mestizos in the Huasteca today sometimes make these
“dolls,” the Huastec-speaking peoples do not. Indeed, present-day Carnival in
Spain often involves manufacture of a crude f igure made of straw or rags,
which is sometimes called Judas, Mahoma (Mohammed), Diablo (Devil) or Pelele
(Roma Riu 1980: 81, 132–134). In at least one instance, the mannequin ap-
pears dressed in ancestral clothes to emphasize that it is very old. Julio Caro
Baroja (1965: 89, 106) says that Pelele clearly embodies something evil that
needs to be removed from the community, apparently to “expiate its sins.” Even
if Mesoamerican Carnival eff igies owe much to Spain, however, it seems likely
that they ultimately descend from the eff igies used in Pre-Hispanic year-end
ceremonies. Paul Jean Provost (n.d.) emphasizes that the Huasteca is largely
separated from the heavily Hispanicized, “Latin” parts of Mesoamerica, and
thus has been free to develop its own, syncretic versions of Carnival. Carnival’s
function and meaning in the Otomi Huasteca have been grafted onto indig-
enous beliefs and customs as well as adapted to local, present-day needs. Such
religious syncretism probably characterizes much of today’s rural Mesoamerica,
and undoubtedly dates back to the years immediately following the conquest,
when Carnival was f irst introduced to Mesoamerica.
Nahua Carnival. In Nahua communities in the Sierra de Puebla today,

Carnival is again held at the end of the indigenous solar year, which occurs
during Nanahuatili, “the wild days,” and usually falls between mid-February
and the end of March. Alan Sandstrom (1991: 288–290) writes that the cel-
ebration lasts about a week and features the appearance of a group of men
representing the mecos, or spirits of the underworld, half of whom are dressed
as women and speak in falsetto voices (Fig. 5).30 These raucous Nahua beings,
according to Sandstrom, similarly mock people, make obscene jokes and ges-
30
An interesting twist was introduced by an inhabitant of the Nahua community of
Tlayacapan, in northern Morelos, who told Ingham (1986: 124) that the dresses and falsetto
198
None of the Above
Fig. 5 Nahua man dressed as a “lady” for Nanahuatili (Carnival), Huasteca.

Photograph courtesy of Paul Jean Provost.
tures, and generally raise havoc. At the end of the festivities, the mecos retire to
their underworld home, hopefully not to bother people for another year.
Nanahuatili also brief ly sees the mecos cleanse and purify sick children, which is
another common feature of contemporary Carnival rites. Finally, with the dis-
appearance of the mecos, it is said, the rains can return, vegetation will revive,
and spring planting can soon begin. In other words, their withdrawal prepares
the world for agricultural renewal and rebirth.
voices of local carnival performers were originally intended to suggest that “the Spaniard is
a homosexual.”
199
Cecelia F. Klein
Nahuas associate these transvestite dancers with homosexuality, and some

of the dancers are recognized homosexuals. In Nahua Ichcatepec, Veracruz,
homosexuals join the carnival group called the comparsas, part of a larger group
of Viejos, or “Old Ones,” that is partly made up of men dressed as obscene
mestiza prostitutes. Luis Reyes García (1960: 57–58) notes that although these
men appear in women’s clothes, they wear men’s sombreros on their heads—
that is, they represent themselves as neither male nor female. Enzo Segre (1987:
22, 35) states that the men who impersonate obscene women during Holy
Week in the Nahua town of San Miguel Tzinacapan are likewise known ho-
mosexuals; Galinier (1990: 352, n. 108) makes a similar claim for the Otomi.
Since men who assume the sexual role of women are normally looked down
upon, the function of these dancers appears to be that of loosing sexual devi-
ancy in order to mock it and thus contain and remove evil before the New
Year begins.
Nahua Carnival celebrations date back to shortly after the Spanish conquest
in the Valley of Mexico, allowing for continuity through time. The earliest
recorded Carnival celebration in Mexico City was held in February 1539. Just
a few years later, however, Bishop Juan de Zumárraga canceled the city’s Cor-
pus Christi festival because the participants were cross-dressing and “conduct-
ing themselves lasciviously in dance.” For these reasons, Carnival was severely
circumscribed in the capital throughout the next two centuries, although it
continued to be celebrated on its outskirts (Lopes Don 1997: 20–21).31 It is
problematic, however, whether the cross-dressing and obscenities that so of-
fended Zumárraga had indigenous roots, since in today’s Spain Carnival is simi-
larly characterized by the freedom to adopt the dress and manners of the opposite
sex and, as in Mexico, the sexual identity of Spanish men who dress as women
at this time may be regarded as “equivocal” (Caro Baroja 1965: 89, 91). In some
towns in Aragon, men dressed as women also go about suggesting “sexual lib-
erties” (Roma Riu 1980: 98). Nonetheless, there are signif icant differences
between Old World and Mesoamerican ritual transvestism, such as the fact that
31
A later ban on men dressing as women during Carnival in Los Reyes Culhuacán,
which today is part of Mexico City, was published in 1731 (Oehmichen 1992: 35).
From early times, Carnival in the Mexico City area has involved dancers called
huehuenches or huehuetones, “old ones,” half of whom are typically men dressed as women.
They appear today in those sections of the city that were urbanized only recently, where
civil and ecclesiastical attempts to suppress Carnival were ineffective—e.g., Culhuacán to
the south and Huixquilucan in the western suburbs (Domínguez 1962a: 102–103). For
details regarding Carnival practice in these communities, see also Oehmichen (1992: 35–
36). Carnival has disappeared, however, in the historic center of the city as a result of this
suppression.
200
None of the Above
Mesoamerican women are typically far less apt to dress up as men than their
Spanish counterparts. That the cross-dressing and obscenity of modern
Mesoamerican Carnival predate the conquest is further suggested by Diego
Durán’s (1971: 295) dismay at having seen, in some mid-sixteenth-century Nahua
villages, an obscene dance called the cuecuechcuicatl, “tickling dance” or “dance
of the itch,” which involved men dressed as women. Unfortunately, the of-
fended Dominican did not specify the occasions.
Pre-Hispanic Nahua End of the Year Rites: Tititl and Nemontemi

It is known that men dressed as women were featured in the rites held in
Tenochtitlan and its environs during the indigenous Nahua month Tititl. The
anonymous Spanish commentator of Codex Tudela (Orden 1980: 80–81), re-
garding folio 27, stated that twenty to thirty priests, calling themselves Tona and
wearing women’s clothes, danced with the female slave who would soon be
sacrif iced to the “demon” Tonan, “Our Mother.” The Codex Tudela helps to
interpret a depiction of a goddess, identif ied as Cihuacoatl, “Woman Snake,” in
the cognate scene in Codex Magliabechiano (Nuttall 1978: fol. 45r). Cihuacoatl
was sometimes addressed as “Our Mother.” Moreover, like the old women who
danced during the Yucatec Uayeb, Cihuacoatl was a midwife. At the time of
the conquest, she was the patron deity of Nahua midwives and childbearing
women. According to Sahagún (1950–82, 2: 155–158), however, it was specif i-
cally Cihuacoatl’s aspect of Ilamatecuhtli, “Old Woman Lord,” that was hon-
ored during the rites of Tititl. In line with the eff igies and many of the female
impersonators of the present-day Carnival, then, the patron deity of Tititl was
not only a midwife, but also an “Old One.”
At the top of the Codex Tudela page (Orden 1980: 80), the commentator
adds the date 20 December, which coincides with the date of the winter sol-
stice in our calendar. Since Codex Tudela was written prior to the 1582 change
from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, however, this date in reality corre-
sponds to our 30 December. Sahagún’s (1997: 66) Primeros memoriales states that
the festivities of Tititl salía (“got underway”?) on 23 December, which corre-
sponds to our 2 January.32 It is nonetheless signif icant that during the period
stretching from the f irst solar nadir, which falls on 18 November, to the winter
solstice, the sun is lowest in the sky. At this time, Susan Milbrath (1980: 292)
argues, it would have been perceived “as moving from a position of weakness
32
Unless otherwise indicated, all dates given in this essay refer to the current Gregorian
calendar.
Caso (1971: 341) calculated that Tititl began on 30 December according to the Julian
calendar, which again would place it in what is now January.
201
Cecelia F. Klein
toward one of growing strength as it moves toward the zenith at the close of
the dry season.” According to Milbrath (1980: 292), at the time of contact with
the Spaniards, the rituals conducted during the Nahua month Panquetzaliztli,
which, by her calculations, began two days after the f irst solar nadir, celebrated
the birth of the Nahua patron god Huitzilopochtli, who in some way repre-
sented the reborn sun. If she is correct, during Tititl the sun would have been
perceived as still in its infancy or early childhood. Moreover, the end of the
indigenous Nahua year would have corresponded to the beginning of our
Gregorian year, making an eventual conf lation of the two both easy and likely.
Although the Codex Tudela commentator and Sahagún both claim that
Tititl was the seventeenth, or next to last, month of the solar year, Alfonso Caso
(1967: 134) believes that it was conceptually, if not originally, the eighteenth
and thus the last month, since the succeeding month, Izcalli, symbolized re-
newal. Sahagún (1950–82, 7: 19) himself says that Tititl marked the end of cold
and frost, the beginning of mild weather, and “the time of sowing.” This may
seem odd given that today farmers in the Basin of Mexico usually do not sow
until May. For the Lake Texcoco area, however, where chinampa agriculture
allowed for continuous cultivation throughout the year, including during the
dry season (Coe 1964: 90, 95; Armillas 1971: 654), Sahagún’s identif ication of
Tititl as a time for planting is not unreasonable.
If Caso is right—and I (Klein 1980: 192–193) have other reasons for think-
ing that he is—it was Tititl rather than Izcalli, at least at some point in the past,
that immediately preceeded the wild and dangerous f ive nameless days at the
end of each solar year. Pre-Hispanic and colonial-period Nahuas called this
period Nemontemi.33 Sahagún (1950–82, 3: 35) says that the f ive days of
Nemontemi were regarded as evil and unlucky, and adds that during this time
Nahuas did no work. The association of cosmic cataclysm with the f ive un-
lucky days at the end of the year was probably widespread. Karl Taube (n.d.:
290–291), for example, cites a song in the Yucatec Maya Cantares de Dzitbalche
(Barrera Vásquez 1965), probably compiled in the eighteenth century, which
states that “these [f ive unlucky] days will be the end of the world.”34
Since no source states that Nahuas conducted public rites during Nemontemi,
any Nahua year-end rites that were held must have taken place during Tititl.
Assuming this was the case, the male priests in women’s clothes discussed by
33
Nemontemi, according to Siméon (1977: 325), means “insuff icient to fulf ill or com-
plete the solar year” (translation mine).
34
Taube (n.d.: 291–292) points to two passages in the Yucatec Maya Chilam Balam of
Chumayel indicating comparable expectations that the unlucky days will witness cosmic
and political catastrophe (Roys 1933: 112, 149).
202
None of the Above
Fig. 6 Codex Borbonicus, fol. 36. Tititl, detail (after Nowotny 1974).
the Codex Tudela commentator would have appeared at the end of the solar
year. This conforms to the appearance of the transvestite mockers of present-
day Carnival and year-end ceremonies in Yucatán, Guatemala, Chiapas, the
Huasteca, and the Sierra de Puebla.
A depiction of the rites of Tititl appears in Codex Borbonicus (Nowotny
1974: fol. 36) in the context of the completion of a f ifty-two-year cycle, or
Mesoamerican “century,” which was a dangerous period, full of great fear that
the world would come to an end (Fig. 6). At the time of contact with the
Spaniards, this period began with the Drilling of New Fire ceremony during
the Panquetzaliztli festival celebrating the birth of Huitzilopochtli, which, as
we have seen, corresponded to the f irst solar nadir35 and continued through the
35
On the timing of the New Fire ceremony, see Broda (1982), Krupp (1982), and Milbrath
(1980: 294). The New Fire ceremony was a moveable festival timed by the midnight zenith
passage of the Pleiades and, according to Milbrath and Krupp, by the solar nadir as well.
Milbrath (1997: 191–195, 203; personal communication, 1999) suggests that it was also
associated with the f irst full moon following the solar nadir, preferably during a lunar
eclipse. At the time of Spanish contact, to judge by Codex Borbonicus (Nowotny 1974),
this occurred during Panquetzaliztli.
203
Cecelia F. Klein
f ive days of Nemontemi. The Codex Borbonicus scene includes a number of

individuals representing the priests who, as we know from a variety of sources,
dressed for the occasion as deities. Here, four of the impersonators are dressed
as goddesses.36 The costumes worn by two of these, with their skeletal masks
and red shifts bordered at the hem with a row of shells, match those in several
colonial manuscript paintings of Cihuacoatl-Ilamatecuhtli.37 The smaller of
these two f igures may represent the female slave who impersonated Cihuacoatl-
Ilamatecuhtli during Tititl, only to be sacrif iced by having her heart excised.
After the woman’s death, her body was decapitated and her costume donned by
a male priest. This signaled, in Milbrath’s (1997: 196) opinion, the goddess’
“transformation into a male persona.”38 It is probably this transvestite priest
who is represented by the larger of the two f igures, standing on a platform
decorated with skulls (Caso 1967: 129–130) (Fig. 7).
The connections between Tititl and the Maya Uayeb go beyond the shared
emphasis on midwives and ritual cross-dressing. During both Tititl and the
Uayeb, a large wooden object was constructed in the main precinct and then
ceremonially burned. Sahagún (1950–82, 2: 156–157) describes the Nahua ver-
sion as a framework of pine branches that were joined and then caulked with
paper, stating that the Nahuas called it a “grain bin.” Although Landa (1975:
148–149) identif ies the Uayeb structure as a large “arch,” his description of it
sounds more like a wooden crib with doors of the sort commonly used for
food storage in Mexico today.
According to Landa, the Maya f illed their ceremonial crib with bundles of
sticks, which were consumed in the f lames. This is signif icant because toward
the end of every f ifty-two-year cycle, Nahuas bundled together and ceremoni-
ally burned f ifty-two reeds representing the f ifty-two years of the “century”
that was coming to a close. In Codex Borbonicus (Nowotny 1974: fol. 36), just
such a “year bundle,” dressed like a human corpse, awaits cremation. I would
like to propose at this point that the fact that the Pre-Hispanic Nahua year
bundle was anthropomorphized, together with the fact that it was ritually de-
36
Of the other impersonators of goddesses depicted in Codex Borbonicus (Nowotny
1974: fol. 36), one is dressed as the maize and fertility goddess Xilonen, while the other
represents Tocih, the old goddess of cotton and midwifery.
37
See, e.g., Codex Magliabechiano (Nuttall 1978: fol. 45r), its cognate Codex Tudela
(Orden 1980: fol. 27r), and Codex Telleriano–Remensis (Hamy 1899: fol. 6r), all of which
represent Tititl. The patron deity in the Telleriano–Remensis scene is twice identif ied mis-
takenly by the commentator as Xochiquetzal. As Quiñones Keber (1995: 150) points out,
this name in both cases has been struck out, while the ruler diadem that accompanies the
f igure could well refer to the tecuhtli (lord) in Ilamatecuhtli’s name, “Old Woman Lord.”
38
Milbrath (1997: 195) links this transformation to the disappearance of the moon dur-
ing its conjunction with the sun.
204
None of the Above
Fig. 7 Codex Borbonicus, fol. 36 (detail). Priest impersonating

Ilamatecuhtli during Tititl (after Nowotny 1974).
stroyed at the end of the cycle, relates to the colonial Yucatec Uayeb practice of
creating and then discarding a wooden eff igy at the end of each solar year. It is
entirely possible, in other words, that the wooden and leaf Carnival eff igies
representing the past solar year in rural Nahua areas have descended from these
anthropomorphized year bundles of sticks or reeds.39 As noted earlier, in many
modern Mesoamerican villages, the eff igies constructed to expiate communal
sins during Carnival are burned, as were the year bundles.
Yet another parallel between Tititl, the Maya Uayeb, and today’s Carnival
can be seen in the behavior of the Nahua priest who impersonated Cihuacoatl-
Ilamatecuhtli. Following the sacrif ice of the female impersonator of the god-
dess, the priest who assumed her costume grasped her severed head in his hand.
What this man did next is very interesting. Sahagún (1950–82, 2: 156) says that
39
The form of earlier Maya year bundles is not known. Milbrath (personal communica-
tion, 1998) suggests that the so-called cross-batons glyph that seems to represent “founder”
in Classic Maya script at Tikal and Copan depicts a pair of year bundles (see Schele 1992:
f ig. 8). Since this glyph frequently contains a small face or a pair of eyes between the
bundles, these bundles may have been anthropomorphized.
205
Cecelia F. Klein
he danced with the head and that, as he danced, “he kept stepping back; he
raised his legs up behind him . . . And when he thus danced, it was said
‘Ilamatecuhtli backeth away.’ And they put on him a mask; it looked in two
directions. It had large lips, it had huge lips; and it had big, round, protruding
eyes.” Exactly what this mask looked like unfortunately remains uncertain be-
cause the masked Cihuacoatl-Ilamatecuhtli impersonator in the Codex
Borbonicus scene appears to look in only one direction.40
Like the mask that looked in two directions, the backward dance move-
ments of the Cihuacoatl-Ilamatecuhtli impersonator seem to symbolize rever-
sal or inversion. I suspect that, like the Mam eff igy that was moved from place
to place and f inally set in the doorway or simply undressed during the Uayeb,
and like the present-day eff igies that are burned or discarded at the end of
Carnival, the priest who impersonated Cihuacoatl-Ilamatecuhtli had the func-
tion of absorbing and removing the contamination that had accumulated over
the course of the period drawing to a close.41 John and Sarah Fought (1972:
503–505) provide a Chortí Maya text, “Exorcism of the xiximai,” that tells of a
secret ceremony performed in July to purify not only a house, but also its
corncrib, by removing the evil spirits, xiximai, who would otherwise use up all
the food. The corncrib in this story recalls the granaries, or “arches,” that were
burned during Tititl and Uayeb. Moreover, following a censing of the Chortí
house and its contents, the mistress of the house, like the priest who imperson-
ated Cihuacoatl-Ilamatecuhtli, exits walking backward, “so that,” we are told,
“the xiximai in the house will go out.” The narrator adds, “They say that that
woman, it is as if she were the xiximai.” Walking backward and having feet that
are turned backward are common features of anthropomorphized forces of
evil in many Mesoamerican cultures, including those of Nahuatl speakers (Hunt
1977: 102, 105; López Austin 1988, 1: 225; Sandstrom 1991: 252).42 Vogt (1976:
170, 176–177), for example, notes that the only Zinacantecos to dance or march
40
The next day at the conclusion of the ceremonies, boys f illed net or grass bags with
f lowers or paper scraps and threw them at girls and women who failed to protect them-
selves. Sahagún (1950–82, 2: 157–158) describes this melee as a “mock f ight” that, nonethe-
less, caused some girls to weep. Mock battles also characterized Uayeb ceremonies, as they
do modern Carnival, and thus provide yet another link between Tititl and these other year-
end ceremonies.
41
In former times, Guatemalans sometimes killed an old woman in order to represent
and thus purge the community’s “sins.” In such cases, people sought the oldest, most de-
crepit woman they could f ind (Tomas López Medel, in Landa 1975: 217).
42
Those who die by drowning at Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, for example, are said to be
restless and dangerous; they are distinguishable from the other dead by their heads, which
are turned backward. These shades also “dance backwards, they can only look backwards.
They don’t look forward like people do” (O’Brien n.d.: 118–120).
206
None of the Above
backward are those dressed as the evil spirits, both male and female, who are
driven out during the year-end festivities.43
A second dance performed during Tititl cements its link to modern year-
end ceremonies. In his Primeros memoriales, Sahagún (1997: 66) says that Tititl
was also called ilamatecuhchololoya, which translates as “Ilamatecuhtli’s leap.” Special
dance movements described as great leaps are characteristic of Mesoamerican
Carnival and year-end ceremonies today. At Tepoztlán, Morelos, where Nahuatl
is still spoken by some, Redf ield (1930: 106–107, 110) observed the cross-
dressed male members of a Carnival group called Chinelos “leap” for hours in
a fashion “prescribed by custom” to music that, he claims, is literally called
“leaping.”Vogt (1976: 148–149) reports something similar for Zinacantan, where
men dressed as women during the year-end ceremonies “leap” about, creating
what Vogt calls a “ludicrous and unbecoming picture of masculine behavior in
women.” Sahagún (1997: 66) says that during Tititl, all of the gods performed
this leaping dance.44
Sahagún (ibid.) adds that one group of these masked men “assumed the
likenesses of the Cihuateteo.” The Cihuateteo, or “Divine Women,” were the
shades of Nahua women who had died during childbirth; their patron goddess
was the archetypal old midwife, Cihuacoatl-Ilamatecuhtli.These dancers there-
fore were probably the same male priests whom the Codex Tudela commenta-
tor called Tona and described as dressed like women. Like today’s Carnival
transvestites, the Cihuateteo were regarded as “mockers of the people.” It was
feared that they would return to earth at crossroads, either at midnight or dur-
ing eclipses, to inf lict illness and deformities on the living, especially children
(Sahagún 1950–82, 4: 41, 107; 6: 162–163). In Mesoamerican thought, cross-
roads appear to have represented an excessive number of paths or directions,
and as such to have symbolized lack of direction, disorder, and immorality.
It is not surprising, then, that Codex Vaticanus B (Anders 1972: fols. 78–79),
43
Another Chortí text collected by Fought and Fought (1972: 71–74) tells of a frighten-
ing being named sesimite whose toes point backward and heels forward, for which reason he
is said to walk in reverse. I cannot help seeing in the Chortí names xiximai and sesimite
adulterations of the Nahuatl word tzitzimitl. The tzitzimime (plural of tzitzimitl) were the
nocturnal shades of earlier races who had been transformed into fallen stars and returned to
earth during certain periods of darkness, such as eclipses, to bring illness and physical de-
formities to the living. They were particularly feared at the very end of a 52-year cycle,
when people worried that the sun would never rise again. Cihuacoatl, the archetypal mid-
wife, was one of them; for more on Cihuacoatl’s role as a tzitzimitl, see Klein (2000).
44
Much like present-day Carnival dancers who are taken to perform at the homes of
ruling functionaries, the male priests costumed as gods during Tititl were taken to private
homes and made to dance there. One purpose, as in Carnival, may have been purif icatory,
since “it was said that when the gods danced, their feet were washed” (Sahagún 1997: 66).
207
Cecelia F. Klein
Fig. 8 Codex Vaticanus B, fol. 79. Cihuateteotl (after Anders 1972).
probably painted not far from the Valley of Mexico, shows one of the f ive
Cihuateteo portrayed with her feet turned inward (Fig. 8). The reversed feet
probably allude to the woman’s prior sexual inf idelities, since Nahuas attrib-
uted a diff icult pregnancy or labor to sexual misbehavior (López Austin 1988,
1: 293–308). Reversed or contorted bodies, limbs, and heads often specif ied
sexual misconduct in colonial-period Nahua manuscript paintings. In Codex
Telleriano-Remensis (Hamy 1899: fol. 11r), for example, the upper body of a
weeping woman identif ied as Ixnextli, “Eyes Blinded with Ashes,” is twisted to
face backward (Fig. 9). The commentary explains that Ixnextli weeps because
she “gathered roses,” which, like blindness and the vase of excrement in her
hand, was a euphemism for sexual indiscretions. In the Pre-Hispanic Codex
Borgia (Nowotny 1976),45 some of the f igures on the pages dealing with mar-
riage prognostications appear with twisted heads and bodies. Folio 59, for ex-
45
Codex Borgia was probably painted in the Puebla–Tlaxcala area a century or more
before the Spanish conquest, and, if not the product of Nahuatl speakers, is at least icono-
graphically very similar to both precontact Nahua relief carvings and early colonial Nahua
manuscripts such as Codex Borbonicus.
208
None of the Above
Fig. 9 Codex Teller iano–

Remensis, fol. 11r. Ixnextli (af-
ter Hamy 1899).
ample, represents a presumably adulterous man: despite the grasp of a woman

who is probably his wife, he fondles the breast of another woman whose pose
is as contorted as his (Fig. 10). Such f igures not only violate the compositional
symmetry that characterizes depictions of harmonious couples (Figs. 1, 2), but
also, through the disarray of their bodies, graphically express the principles of
moral disorder and lack of direction that were attributed by Nahuas to adulter-
ers.
The reversed feet of the Cihuateteotl in Codex Vaticanus B (Anders 1972:
fol. 79) therefore identify this dead woman as an adulteress. In Sahagún’s (1997:
122) earliest list of attributes of Nahua deities, the only attribute that he notes
for the Cihuateteo is tetlaximaliztli, “adultery.” It was presumably because the
Cihuateteo were regarded as experienced in sexual indiscretion that, as the
commentator of folio 18v in Codex Telleriano–Remensis (Hamy 1899) in-
forms us, prostitutes and adulteresses ritually petitioned them for assistance in
ridding themselves of their “sin” (Quiñones Keber 1995: 182, 265).Their com-
promised femininity is ref lected in the belief that they had to leave their cloth-
ing behind when they relocated, after death, to the western horizon, where
they took up the costumes and shields of male warriors instead. Clearly un-
209
Cecelia F. Klein
Fig. 10 Codex Borgia, fol. 59. Adulterous husband caught in the act (after Nowotny 1976).
happy in their predicament, they periodically returned to earth to search for

their female garments and domestic implements (Klein 1993a: 47; 1994: 141;
n.d.).46
This explains the maxtlatl, or male loincloth, that hangs beneath each
Cihuateteotl’s skirt in Codex Vaticanus B (Anders 1972: fols. 78–79; Leeuwen-
van Koppen 1990: 66; see Fig. 8).47 The present-day counterpart of Cihuacoatl
among the Cuicatec of northern Oaxaca is an adulterous gender-shifter whose
Nahuatl name is Maxtlacihuatl, “Loincloth Woman.” Eva Hunt (1977: 102–
107) reports that when Maxtlacihuatl seduces a man, he becomes pregnant.
The baby he bears resembles feces, which is an allusion to sodomy, according to
Hunt, who observes that this goddess represents an inversion of normal female
sexuality. Hunt interprets the reversed feet of the Cihuateteotl in Codex Vaticanus
46
The Cihuateteo were one of three closely related groups of deif ied women who had
died in childbirth; the other two were the Ciuapipiltin, or “Princesses,” and the
Mociuaquetzque, “Valiant Women.”While the Mociuaquetzque do not appear to have been
hostile to the living, members of the other two groups were. For the Mociuaquetzque,
wearing male garb was apparently a sign of honor (Klein 2000).
47
Codex Borgia (Nowotny 1976: fols. 47–48) contains a similar set of deformed
Cihuateteo. None of these women, however, wears a maxtlatl, nor do any of them have feet
that turn backward.
210
None of the Above
B (Anders 1972: fol. 79) as a local “visual euphemism for homosexuals,” since
the Cuicatec call homosexuals “reversed walkers.”48 The neighboring Chinantec,
on the other hand, say that Maxtlacihuatl “has only one foot,” a deformity that,
as we see below, likewise symbolizes ambiguous gender (Weitlaner 1977: 138 ff,
145 ff ). In the case of the Nahua dancers who represented the Cihuateteo
during Tititl, then, gender ambiguity took the form of men dressed as women
who were believed to dress as men!
End of the Dry Season

Maximon. We have thus been seeing provocative evidence that ambiguous
gender played—and still plays—a pivotal role in Nahua rites marking the end
of the indigenous year. At these times, it is the ambiguously gendered who
remove the stains of the past, making it possible for time, and with it individual
and agricultural life, to begin anew with a “clean slate.” But if gender ambigu-
ity has this potential to reverse misfortune, then one might expect to f ind it in
operation at the closing of other major temporal periods, as well. Indeed, there
is good reason to think that Nahuas also employed gender ambiguity to ritually
facilitate the annual transition from the dry season of winter, when agricultural
activities were relatively minimal, to the wet, highly agricultural season of sum-
mer.
This argument draws inspiration from ethnographic work conducted over
the course of this century among Tz’utujil Maya speakers residing in the vil-
lage of Santiago Atitlán in highland Guatemala. There, as elsewhere in the
Guatemalan highlands, people speak of a being named Mam—the same name
as that given by López de Cogolludo and Pío Perez to the clothed wooden
f igure honored during the Yucatec Uayeb.49 Mam is actually one of several
names for the important supernatural also known as Maximon.50 Like the co-
lonial Yucatec Mam, the Aiteteco Mam/Maximon is represented in the form
of a large (ca. four feet high) wooden eff igy or “doll” dressed in a man’s clothes.
In Santiago Atitlán, it is constructed of wooden sticks that are taken from a
sacred tree, tied together with strings and rings, and then padded with rags and
48
The Cuicatec today fear certain legendary women who, in addition to reversed feet,
have mouths at the back of their neck. This last trope, as Hunt (1977: 102–103) tells us,
must signify sodomy, since the anus is called the “mouth of the buttocks.”
49
In 1927–28, when S. Lothrop (1929: 20) was in the area, the Mam cult was shared by
the Quiche and Cakchiquel, as well as other Tz’utujil communities.
50
According to Carlsen (1997: 172–173, n. 12), the Tz’utujil seldom refer to this being as
Maximon, preferring to call him Mam. Carlsen thinks that the name Maximon derives from
the Tz’utujil words ma (“mister”) and xim (“knotted”) and means “Mr. Knotted,” a refer-
ence to the eff igy’s manner of construction.
211
Cecelia F. Klein
cornhusks before being clothed and adorned with numerous colorful scarfs.
One or more broad-brimmed hats crown its head, which is said to be made of
a gourd placed to face backward (Mendelson 1959: 57; O’Brien n.d.: 175, 189)
(Fig. 11).
The eff igy’s arms and legs, which have been cut off at the ends, and this
reversed head constitute an “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” punishment. The
story relates that Maximon was created by the ancestors at the beginning of
time to save the town from rampant adultery, but ran away with his powers.
One of the abuses he inf licted on the Aiteteco was to frighten adulterous
women so badly that their heads remained in reversed position. For this,
Maximon was condemned to the same fate (Mendelson 1959: 9; O’Brien n.d.:
160–161, 175). In view of Sahagún’s description of the Nahua Cihuacoatl-
Ilamatecuhtli impersonator as having worn a mask with two faces—one look-
ing forward and one looking back—it is signif icant that Maximon wears, on
the back of his reversed gourd head, a carved wooden mask that faces forward.
Maximon is housed in the cofradía Santa Cruz, where he is tended by a male
off icer called the telinel, who is symbolically Maximon’s “wife” (O’Brien n.d.:
199). For decades, his eff igy has been removed from the cofradía only once a
year, during Holy Week, when it is publicly displayed for a period of f ive days
ending on Good Friday. Robert Carlsen and Martín Prechtel (1991: 30) em-
phasize that this f ive-day period also marks the end of the indigenous year, the
“delicate” days that provide the transition to a new year.51 Maximon therefore
plays a calendrical role today that parallels the role played by the Mam eff igy
during the Yucatec Uayeb.
Although the Aiteteco do not celebrate Carnival during Lent, Maximon at
this time resembles many of the Carnival and Holy Week eff igies elsewhere in
Mesoamerica in representing Judas Iscariot (Mendelson 1958: 5). Maximon
appears, in fact, to have replaced a straw eff igy of Judas that was formerly used
during Holy Week; according to an Aiteteco informant, the Judas eff igy was
afterward discarded in the cemetery (Tarn and Prechtel 1997: 202). Like Carni-
val and Judas eff igies everywhere, as well as the ancient Yucatec Mam eff igy
and the Nahua Ilamatecuhtli impersonator, Maximom is said to represent the
accumulated “f ilth” of the past year (Taube n.d.: 287–288). Nathaniel Tarn and
Prechtel (1997: 192) state that the eff igy is regarded as heavy with “all the sins
which go into the Mam’s body.”
The point in the local calendar at which Maximon is publicly honored also
coincides with the end of the local dry season, which, although the rains do
51
The Kekchi Maya bury an image of Mam during an “unlucky” f ive-day period that
falls during their Easter ceremony (Taube 1989: 354).
212
None of the Above
Fig. 11 Maximon being tended by his telinel, Santiago Atitlán.

Photograph courtesy of Robert Carlsen.
not usually begin until April or May, closer to the f irst zenith passage of the sun
on 18 May, symbolically ends on the day of the vernal equinox.52 According to
Tarn (1984: 401), Mam is “principally the deity of the dry season,” which
Carlsen and Prechtel (1991: 30) describe as a “time of death.” Since Mam is
“retired” at the end of Holy Week, the wet season, the time of agricultural
52
O’Brien (n.d.: 173–174) agrees with Carlsen and Prechtel (1991: 30) that Maximon’s
public appearance theoretically occurs at the time of the vernal equinox. Both she (n.d.)
and E. Lothrop (1948: 120), writing of a 1928 visit to Santiago Atitlán with her archaeolo-
gist husband, S. Lothrop, say, however, that Maximon is not assembled and presented to
public view until the Tuesday before Easter. Curiously, O’Brien (n.d.: 140) claims that the
New Year at Santiago Atitlán begins later, on 24 June. This would put it at the summer
solstice—a placement that, in the face of other data, I f ind unconvincing.
213
rebirth, can begin. Carlsen (1997: 152) states that during Holy Week, Maximon
is vital to “fueling the transition of the dry season into the wet.”53
In preparation for the Holy Week ceremonies in which Mam/Maximon is
featured, a group of Aiteteco men are sent down to the coast to bring back
tropical fruits that will be offered to Christ. According to Linda O’Brien (n.d.:
179–180, 187), who studied the songs sung by these men while on the road,
these fruits, which are phallic in shape, are gendered male, while the bearers
themselves, like the telinel who cares for Maximon, are gendered female. In the
songs, the fruits address their bearers as “Mother” and “Midwife.” The men
reenter the town bareheaded, wearing women’s shawls. After a period in which
the fruit is censed and allowed to ripen, it is brought in procession to the
municipal building where it is joined by a second procession coming from the
cofradía Santa Cruz. This second procession is headed by the telinel who, like the
opossum year bearers in Codex Dresden carrying the patron deities of the
outgoing years on their backs, carries Mam/Maximon on his shoulders. At the
municipal building, the eff igy is laid among the fruit, where it remains until
late afternoon.
O’Brien (n.d.: 180) claims that Maximon at this time is identif ied with the
masculine fruit, while Carlsen (personal communication, 1996; 1997: 152) de-
scribes him as intensely hypersexual and fertilizing, “a penis,” in his words,
“whose task it is to reinseminate the world and hence pave the way for the
coming of the rainy season” (see also Tarn and Prechtel 1997: 203–204). So
sexually potent is Maximon that barren Aiteteco women used to drink the
water in which Maximon’s clothes had been washed, apparently because it was
believed that Maximon could help women to conceive.54 In his unbridled hy-
persexuality, Maximon is preceded by the aged Pre-Hispanic Maya God N,
whom scholars have long identif ied with the ancient Mam of the Yucatec
Uayeb.55 Taube (1989: 367–368) links God N to the randy old man who ap-
pears in Classic-period Maya f igurines (a.d. 200–900) fondling a young woman
who may represent the moon. If this genealogy is accurate, excessive sexuality
53
Since Maximon represents the point at which the dry season ends and the wet season
is about to begin, he is at this time associated with the center of the world and referred to
as “Lord of the Middle of Everything” (Carlsen 1997: 173, n. 13).
54
John Monaghan (personal communication, 1997) witnessed a woman visiting the cofradía
Santa Cruz climb onto Maximon’s lap and simulate intercourse with him. The embarrassed
telinel pulled her off but would not discuss with Monaghan the woman’s motives for her
actions. It is possible that this woman hoped that Maximon’s “wild” sexuality would help
her to conceive (Mendelson 1959: 59).
55
For a history and defense of this identif ication of God N with Mam, see Taube (1992:
92).
214
Fig. 12 Maximon hanging in the “tree,” Santiago Atitlán (af-
ter S. Lothrop 1929: f ig. 9).
has long been an important aspect of both the modern and the ancient Yucatec
Mam.
After lying on the f loor of the municipal building for a while, the fruit is
tied to a wooden framework behind the altar.56 At this time, Maximon is bound
to a small “tree” made of a pole adorned with leafy branches, which is planted
in a small chapel in the church plaza constructed solely for the purpose (Fig.
12).Tree branches are painted on the inside of the chapel, and real tree branches
are tied to the post (Carlsen, personal communication, 1996).57 Later Maximon’s
56
For details of these events, see Mendelson (1958, 1959, 1965) and O’Brien (n.d.: 177 ff ).
57
In 1928, this “tree” was not enclosed; the chapel appears to have been added later (E.
Lothrop 1948: 123; S. Lothrop 1929: f ig. 9). See Fig. 12 in this chapter.
215
Cecelia F. Klein
eff igy is removed from the “tree” and paraded through the town, where it
encounters a procession bearing the church statue of the crucif ied Christ. It is
only after this confrontation with Christ at the end of Good Friday that
Maximon is unceremoniously returned to the cofradía. Formerly, the f igure was
quickly disassembled and its parts stored in the rafters until the following year.
Around twelve years ago, however, the cofradía began reassembling the f igure
shortly after the conclusion of the Good Friday ceremonies, presumably so it
could receive visitors and offerings throughout the coming year (Carlsen, per-
sonal communication, 1996).
The Tz’utujil notion that masculinity is produced by gender ambiguity in-
forms Tarn and Prechtel’s (1990: 80–81; 1997: 282–286) interpretation of the
role played by Maximon during Holy Week.58 They argue that when Maximon
is f irst brought out of the cofradía on Wednesday of Holy Week and laid on the
municipal building f loor, he is understood by the Aiteteco to “eat” or “copulate
with” the surrounding fruit. The fruit, according to these authors, not only is
male, but also specif ically symbolizes Christ, who represents the sun. At the
time of the vernal equinox, the sun is seen as passing from youth to maturity,
and the resurrected Christ is perceived to be “reborn” as maize on Easter Sun-
day.59 Tarn and Prechtel suggest that Christ at the beginning of Holy Week is,
like Maximon, understood to be immature, feminine, and even bisexual. By
sexually attacking Jesus’s femininity, Maximon draws it out, thereby bringing
the sun/Christ to full masculinity at the crucif ixion.This must happen because,
like the Laymi of Bolivia, Aitetecos say that effeminacy must be transformed
into mature masculinity in order for two people to marry and produce food
and children alike (Tarn and Prechtel 1990: 81). The idea that Maximon
“sodomizes” Christ at this time is supported, Tarn and Prechtel contend, by the
fact that Aiteteco men who show signs of becoming priest-shamans are de-
scribed as being “sodomized” by Mam.
Maximon’s hypersexuality is therefore presented not only in terms of an
oversexed male but in the form of same-sex behavior, and thus bisexuality, as
well. This is evident in the fact that he has a female complement in the form of
a bundle, kept in the telinel’s home, that contains a mask called, among other
names, María Castelyan and Yamch’or, “Virgin Whore” (Carlsen 1997: 153).
Carlsen says that María Castelyan represents both the promiscuous wife and the
58
Many of the key points made by Tarn and Prechtel in the 1990 article f irst appeared in
Tarn (1984).
59
This situation appears to contrast with that reported by Lincoln (1942: 124) for the
Quiche community of Santa María Chiquimula, where the opening of a new year, with
the entry of a new year bearer, is referred to as “when the Mam takes possession.”
216
None of the Above
female aspect of Maximon, who must never be brought into direct contact with
the mask lest the world will end.60 María Castelyan’s identity as an adulteress
and a prostitute recalls the adulterous Cihuateteo. During f iesta Santiago,Tz’utujil
whores visit Maximon and his “whore” wife daily in their cofradía. Prostitutes in
Guatemala City keep images of “their best friend” Maximon in their rooms
(Tarn and Prechtel 1997: 193, 300).
The gender-ambiguous Maximon is also described as a shape-shifting trickster
who can turn into a woman at will. At the beginning of the world, Maximon
not only frightened adulterers and promiscuously mated with young women,
but often turned into a woman in order to have sexual relations with young
boys as well (Mendelson 1958: 9). In the latter case, he resembles the Nahua
stereotype of the trickster and deceiver who shifts his gender signs in order to
engage in same-sex relations. According to O’Brien (n.d.: 172), Maximon still
turns into a woman at will so that people will not realize that he is present.
According to Carlsen (1997: 26), the price of succumbing to his attractions is
death.61
Like the Laymi of Bolivia (Harris 1980: 90), then, the Aiteteco equate
Maximon’s immaturity with sexual disorientation (Tarn 1984: 402; Tarn and
Prechtel 1990: 75; 1997: 276–288). Once married, however, a person must re-
main faithful to one’s spouse, for extramarital sex can cause fever and madness.
In Santiago Atitlán, it is Maximon who can cure these ills, no doubt because he
epitomizes illegitimate sex (Tarn and Prechtel 1997: 203). His further associa-
tion with nonreproductive marital sexuality is evident in his reputation for
either being sterile or fathering cretins (Tarn and Prechtel 1997: 203). These
traits identify him as overmature, too old to reproduce, as well. Maximon thus
represents all forms of sexuality that fall outside the category of faithful, repro-
ductive marriage. The conf lation of unmarried youth, sterile old age, and am-
biguous gender is apparent in Aiteteco songs that address Maximon as “old old
boy, old old man,” “the boy, the girl,” and “mama, papa” (O’Brien n.d.:197,
245). Slapping Maximon on the back, the telinel calls him “pretty boy” (Tarn
and Prechtel 1997: 201).
60
O’Brien (n.d.: 200) says that María Castelyan is regarded as promiscuous, and Carlsen
(1997: 25–26) sees her as evidence of Maximon’s promiscuity. According to O’Brien, the
telinel keeps an “image” of María Castelyan as his special guardian spirit and helper, but she
does not say whether or not this image is a mask.
61
Grigsby and Cook de Leonard (1992: 127, 137), writing of the present-day Nahua
community of Tepoztlán, say that the period corresponding to Tititl runs there from 20
March to 8 April and thus overlaps the end of Lent. On 19 March, the day before the
period begins, there is a festival honoring San José, who is described as elderly and asexual.
217
Cecelia F. Klein
It is precisely because his gender is ambiguous, then, that Maximon can

remove sexual impurities and produce maturation in another entity such as
Jesus. He is said to do this in his home in the underworld, which is an odorous
sweatbath of sulfurous waters, where at night he “burns” people’s sins for a
price (Tarn and Prechtel 1990: 78–79). The role identif ies him, like the
Cihuateteotl, as a punisher and a mocker, who is referred to in songs as the
“laughing man” (O’Brien n.d.: 246). This ability to erase vices in turn makes
him especially important to curers, who, during certain festivals, visit his cofradía
to pay him homage.Whereas Cihuacoatl was the patroness of Nahua midwives,
Maximon represents the f irst and greatest Tz’utujil shaman (O’Brien n.d.: 175,
242). This makes him a patron of midwives, as well. Since his sweatbath repre-
sents a primal womb, Maximon is thought to help to “ripen” unborn children
with his heat, much as he does the young sun-child over the course of the dry
season. For this reason, he is important to midwives, who call upon him, just as
Nahua midwives called upon Cihuacoatl, when a woman is in labor or a child
is born ill (Tarn and Prechtel 1997: 282, 302–303).
What we are seeing in this case is the need to give a name and a physical
form to socially unacceptable sexual behavior. This need is felt at moments
when an important time period has come to its end, necessitating the removal
of those dangerous forces that have accumulated over its course in order for the
next period to begin on schedule, with renewed vigor. It is precisely because
the materialized being represents, and thus locates and crystallizes, those threat-
ening forces that it is properly equipped to remove them. Since its gender blurs
or vacillates between male and female, the ambiguously gendered embodies the
very principles of transition and reversal. It is the ambiguous nature of Maximon’s
gender identity that makes it possible for him to safely “cross over” from the
stable center into the world of spirits, sickness, and death—to leave the one
true path for the crossroads at the periphery, where he can aimlessly mix with
the forces of the wild and lawless.62 Maximon was described to E. Michael
Mendelson as a “great traveler” who traveled at night through every country
(in Tarn and Prechtel 1997: 196, 203, 282).63 A Ladino midwife said that she
saw him one night dressed in black and smelling of cigar and skunk. Indeed,
one of Maximon’s names is Mapaar, “Lord Skunk” (Carlsen, personal commu-
62
As Gillespie and Joyce (1998: 291) point out, in Mesoamerica the center is contrasted
with the periphery, which is represented by the wilderness and represents, in turn, asocial,
immoral behavior, danger, f ilth, and disharmony. Yet the periphery, they note, is also a place
of creativity and sacred knowledge.
63
Sometime before the 1980s, E. Michael Mendelson took the name Nathaniel Tarn as
his nom de plume.
218
None of the Above
nication, 1996). Maximon is therefore a wanderer, who reeks of odors that

spread in all directions, and is therefore likened to the darkness and the wind.
As such, he represents lack of direction, unpredictability, and cosmic disorder.
This is ref lected in the fact that the priest-shamans working with Maximon are
associated with the so-called enemies who, like him, represent the unknown
and the unpredictable in nature and work to destroy the order of the saints.
This is surely the reason why Maximon, like the Chinantec Maxtlacihuatl,
suffers from several physical deformities. In addition to the backward-turned
head and cut-off arms and legs of his eff igy, Maximon is said to have only four
f ingers on his hand and to be lame as well. The Aiteteco provide diverse ac-
counts of how one of Maximon’s legs came to be injured (Tarn and Prechtel
1997: 102, 133). Moreover, like the Cihuateteo and the Chortí Maya sesimite,
Maximon—who is believed to violate all of the sexual rules instituted by the
ancestors—is said to do his work “with the feet toward the back” (Tarn and
Prechtel 1990: 81–82). According to one informant, Maximon, like Cuicatec
homosexuals, walks backward, as well (Tarn and Prechtel 1997: 102, 106–107,
133).64
Tezcatlipoca. There are striking parallels between Maximon and the one and
only Pre-Hispanic Nahua god whose masculinity was said to be in question—
Tezcatlipoca, “Smoking Mirror,” also known by a host of other names, who is
identif ied by many sixteenth-century writers as the most important Nahua
deity at the time of the conquest.65 Like Maximon, Tezcatlipoca was character-
ized by a physical deformity in the form of a bad leg for, like the Chinantec
“Loincloth Woman” Maxtlacihuatl, he had only one foot.
Sahagún recorded several occasions on which Tezcatlipoca was apt to be
berated as a sexual deviant by individuals whose luck had turned against them.
When a person’s fortunes had fallen because he had abused a slave, for example,
he cried, “O Titlacauan, thou sodomite! Thou wretched sodomite! Thou hast
made fun of and mocked me” (Sahagún 1950–82, 4: 35). A sick person who
blamed his illness on Tezcatlipoca addressed the god thus, “O Titlacauan, O
wretched sodomite! Already thou takest thy pleasure [with me]” (Sahagún 1950–
82, 3: 76).66
64
According to Tarn and Prechtel (1997: 218), “Today, unusual, crippled, retarded, or
eccentric individuals are still sometimes granted miraculous powers.”
65
See, e.g., Motolinía (1971: 33), Pomar (1975: 8), Mendieta (1971: 80), and Torquemada
(1975, 2: 256).
66
The Spanish translation uses the word puto for “sodomite” (Sahagún 1977, 1: 277; 3: 2).
219
Cecelia F. Klein
While it would be easy to dismiss these as conventional insults rather than

valid indicators of the god’s gender or sexual preference, there is further evi-
dence that Tezcatlipoca’s gender was ambiguous. The Historia de los mexicanos
por sus pinturas (García Icazbalceta 1891: 231, 233) states that Tezcatlipoca was
the f irst of the Five Suns, presiding over the cosmic era in which giants were
said to have lived on earth. Juan de Torquemada (1975, 1: 34–35) claims that
these giants committed great sins, especially those “against nature,” for which
they were burned by a f ire that came from heaven. Nahuas feared that one of
these giants would return as “the disguise, the transformation, of the demon
Tezcatlipoca with all of which he maketh sport of men,” presumably because
Tezcatlipoca was the leader of these deviants (Sahagún 1950–82, 4: 35).67
Torquemada (1975, 2: 393) says further that sodomy was long ago introduced
into Central Mexico by a god named Chin, who “committed the nefarious sin
with another demon in order to demonstrate to the people how it was done.”68
Chin is one of the names provided by Bartolomé de las Casas (1909: 627)
for the god who, he says, introduced sodomy to the Maya; one of this god’s
other names was Cavil. Signif icantly, K’awil is the name of the Pre-Hispanic
Maya deity also known as God K, whose left foot is replaced by a serpent in
Classic Maya art (Freidel, Schele, and Parker 1993: 46; Stuart 1987). God K, the
f irst Maya shaman and a sorcerer, is thought by many to be a Maya precursor of
the Nahua Tezcatlipoca (Coe 1972: 5 ff; 1973: 116; Spero 1991; cf. Taube 1992:
79).69
67
Veytia (1836, 1: 150) speaks of an early race of giants who lacked women and were
given over to sodomy to the point that they completely rejected the daughters of a group
of newcomers who, according to Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1975–77, 1: 418), in turn destroyed
them in the year 1 Rabbit. Today, Nahuas of San Francisco Tecospa in the Federal District
speak of the “wise old people” of yore who were giants with “two faces” and could see out
of the backs of their heads (Madsen 1969: 69).
68
The Spanish verb used here is cometer, “to commit,” a word usually reserved for the
penetrator. Sullivan (1974: 88) translates this reference to Tezcatlipoca as “bugger,” appar-
ently having concluded that Tezcatlipoca was the active, rather than the passive partner. It is
possible that Tezcatlipoca, and, indeed all actives in a same-sex relationship, were viewed as
hypersexual in contrast to their passive partners. Regardless, as we will see, there is ample
evidence that Tezcatlipoca was at times decidedly effeminate, which is another indication
that homosexual and immoderate heterosexual behavior tended to be conf lated into a
single category.
69
In addition to the missing foot or leg and their shamanic profession, K’awil and
Tezcatlipoca share a number of other traits, including the role of the ruling family’s patron
and an association with an obsidian mirror. Morever, K’awil and Maximon may be directly
related. One old Aiteteco told Mendelson (1959: 60, n. 9) that Maximon was created when
the world was only nine days old, after two previous beings created by the “angels” had
been taken into heaven. The story recalls inscriptions in the Temple of the Inscriptions at
Palenque, which record the birth of three offspring of First Mother and First Father, the
220
None of the Above
Tezcatlipoca’s gender ambiguity is additionally evident in numerous

mythohistorical accounts of the Toltec peoples who during the Early Postclassic
period controlled Central Mexico from their capital, Tollan. These accounts
agree that the man–god Quetzalcoatl ruled the city in peace until he was tricked
into disgracing himself by a great sorcerer named Tezcatlipoca or Titlacauan.
Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1975–77, 1: 277) says that the f irst sign of trouble came from
a priest in Cholula who broke his vow of chastity, a sin invented by two broth-
ers who were great nigromanticos (practitioners of black magic), the elder being
Tezcatlipoca. These two proceeded to talk everybody into “great sins and ugly
and abominable things.” In other stories, Tezcatlipoca changed himself into a
woman to seduce his enemy.70 His deceit may explain why, in addition to being
called Yaotl, “Enemy,” the god was addressed as Necoc Yaotl, “Enemy on Both
Sides.”71 Both names recall Maximon’s identif ication with the Aiteteco “en-
emies.” Like Maximon, then, Tezcatlipoca was not just a trickster, a sorcerer,
and a sodomite—he was also a shape-shifting transsexual.72 In terms of the
bipolar opposition of male versus female, Tezcatlipoca was none of the above.
Toxcatl. Tezcatlipoca was honored during the month fest of Toxcatl, which,
according to Durán (1971: 100, 426), began on 19 or 20 May in the Julian
calendar. Milbrath (1980: 292; personal communication, 1998), however, has
determined that Toxcatl ran from 7 May to 27 May, pointing out that it fell
exactly six months after Panquetzaliztli.73 If Milbrath is right, Toxcatl encom-
third and last of whom was K’awil. This account of the so-called Palenque Triad is often
compared to the Quiche Popol Vuh (D. Tedlock 1985: 159–160), which tells how, before the
f irst humans were created, twin boys—who seem to represent the f irst two members of the
Triad—had ascended to heaven as the sun and moon.
70
For example, the Anales de Cuauhtitlan tells of two sorcerers, one of them named
Tezcatlipoca, who deceived the Toltec ruler Huemac by changing themselves into women
and seducing him; the subterfuge successfully brought an end to Huemac’s reign (Bierhorst
1992: 38).
71
In the story mentioned above, in note 70, the second brother’s name was Yaotl.
72
As such, Maximon precedes present-day brujos and “witches,” who throughout Mexico
are said to be able to change their sex at will (e.g., Blaffer 1972: 14; Galinier 1990: 642; Kelly
1965: 51; Lipp 1991: 161).
Milbrath (1995: 59–60) interprets a contorted female f igure in Codex Borgia (Nowotny
1976: fol. 60) as a hermaphrodite because it has what she reads as two heads, one male, one
female. She identif ies the body and the f irst head with the goddess Xochiquetzal and the
second head as that of the male deity Tepeyollotl, an aspect of Tezcatlipoca. The consider-
ably smaller “second head” looks to me, however, like a mask of the sort said to have been
worn on the back of the head by the Nahua impersonator of the goddess Cihuacoatl-
Ilamatecuhtli during Tititl.
73
Durán (1971: 426) claims that Toxcatl usually coincided with Corpus Christi, whereas
P. Carrasco (1976: 275), following Caso’s correlation, thinks that it began on 5 May.
221
Cecelia F. Klein
passed 18 May, the date of the f irst zenith passage of the sun in Central Mexico.
In this region, this day marked the end of the dry season, just as Semana Santa
does at Santiago Atitlán. Indeed, the name Toxcatl is generally translated as
“Something Dry” (Heyden 1991). For this reason, Tezcatlipoca was personally
beseeched for rain. The god was also blamed for droughts, famine, plagues, and,
like Maximon, sterility (Durán 1971: 110).74 It is likely that, like the Aiteteco,
the Nahuas perceived the young sun as maturing into an adult man at this time.
There is no mention of transvestites having participated in the rites of Toxcatl.
Sahagún (1950–82, 2: 75), however, states that the women who danced at this
time “were leaping about” and that it was said of them and the (male) offering
priests who danced with them that “they make the Toxcatl leap.” The leaping
dances movements recall descriptions of the dances performed by masked par-
ticipants during Tititl as well as during modern Carnival, where many dancers
were and are dressed as women. In addition, Sahagún (1950–82, 2: 76) says
specif ically that the two men who led the dancing at this time “danced in the
fashion of women.”
Following the sacrif ice of the male slave who had been chosen to represent
Tezcatlipoca for the entire year preceding the ceremonies, the Nahuas sacri-
f iced another youth who shared several of Tezcatlipoca’s other names. Although
the Tezcatlipoca impersonator was “married” to, and allowed to sleep with, four
slave women for twenty days prior to his death, the other young man who was
sacrif iced is described by Sahagún (1950–82, 2: 76) as “he who had lived to-
gether with Titlacauan” (that is, Tezcatlipoca). This suggests that up until his
death the Tezcatlipoca impersonator participated in both hetero- and homo-
sexual relations—in other words, that he was bisexual. In Nahua legends, as we
have seen, Tezcatlipoca is often accompanied by a male friend or a younger
brother. In Torquemada’s (1975, 2: 393) rendition of the introduction of male
sodomy, the “other demon” mounted by the god “Chin” [Tezcatlipoca] was
presumably this male sidekick.
I have long marveled, moreover, at the insistence on physical perfection
required of the youth who was selected to give human form to Tezcatlipoca for
the year prior to his sacrif ice during Toxcatl (Sahagún 1950–82, 2: 66–69) (Fig.
13). This man, Sahagún tells us—in a litany that spans more than a page of the
74
Williams García (1960) has linked Tezcatlipoca’s cult to present-day Carnival, but his
arguments differ considerably from mine. A more commonly accepted model is that pro-
posed by Boilès (1971: 142–149), who argues that Carnival rites have evolved out of the
Pre-Hispanic rites of the month Tlacaxipehualiztli, “Flaying of Men,” which was dedicated
to the god Xipe Totec, “Our Lord the Flayer.” Although Tlacaxipehualiztli took place in the
spring, I see little resemblance between it and Carnival.
222
None of the Above
Fig. 13 Florentine Codex, fol. 31r. Selecting the Tezcatlipoca impersonator

for Toxcatl (after Sahagún 1979, 3).
Florentine Codex—had to be, among many other things, slender, not too tall,
“like something smoothed, like a tomato, like a pebble.” His hair had to be
straight and long, falling to his loins like a woman’s, and his features and skin
without blemish. While this description arguably applies to the ideal Nahua
man, it impresses me as effeminate.75
Moreover, an important part of the Toxcatl ceremony involved a f lute and a
whistle, which the surrogate was required to play wherever he went (Sahagún
1950–82, 2: 68). As he ascended the stairs of the pyramid to meet his fate on the
75
We know little about Nahua views on male beauty. Nahua gender ideology, however,
stressed the military virtues of bravery and endurance for both men and women; daughters
of noble families, for example, were urged to metaphorically “assume the shield like the
good soldiers” (i.e., conduct themselves well) and to “suffer manfully” while giving birth
(Klein 1994: 139–140; Sahagún 1950–82, 4: 9, 79; 6, 162–164). Since Nahuas presumably
valued muscular strength and “toughness” in young men of military age, it seems unlikely
to me that Sahagún’s description of the beautiful Toxcatl impersonator matches the appear-
ance of the ideal Nahua male.
223
Cecelia F. Klein
Fig. 14 Florentine Codex, fol. 30v. Sacrif ice of the Tezcatlipoca

impersonator during Toxcatl, with broken f lutes and whistles on
pyramid stairs (after Sahagún 1979, 3).
sacrif icial stone, the beautiful impersonator broke his instruments, scattering
their parts behind him (Fig. 14). Since Galinier (1984: 54) says that the Otomi
associate the whistle and the f lute with the penis, these broken wind instru-
ments may have symbolized Tezcatlipoca’s “castration” and thus his feminiza-
tion. The Otomi word for penis, pita, is also used to refer to the f lute and the
whistle. In Nahuatl, the penis is described as pitzaoac, “thin,” a word derived
from the root pitz, which means “to huff and puff with anger, to blow on
something, to play a wind instrument” (Karttunen 1992: 197; Sahagún 1950–
82, 10: 39). Two Nahuatl words for f lute, uilacapitztli and tlapitzalli, contain this
root (Molina 1970: 63v). Today, in Mexico, the Spanish word for pipe, whistle,
or f lute, pito, is also a vulgar euphemism for the penis (Eulogio Guzman, per-
sonal communication, 1997).
Each of the four slave women “married” to the Tezcatlipoca impersonator
before his sacrif ice personif ied a goddess. As Yolotl González Torres (1995: 47–
48, 52) points out, Tezcatlipoca is the only male deity in Nahua mythology
224
None of the Above
who has sexual relations with goddesses. He is also the only god who remains
without a permanent female consort.This would seem to testify to Tezcatlipoca’s
hyperheterosexuality; indeed, González Torres describes him a great “seductor.”
At the same time, however, González Torres recognizes Tezcatlipoca’s androgy-
nous nature, which, she suggests, signif ies a symbolic return to the “chaos of
undifferentiated unity that preceded the creation.” One is reminded of the
Laymi and Aiteteco conf lation of bi- and homosexuality in their opposition to
the ideal married state.What seems to have mattered most to the Nahuas is that
Tezcatlipoca’s sexuality—whether it be heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual—
was immature, asocial, and unpredictable. Tezcatlipoca, like Maximon, repre-
sented the sexual behavior that was fundamentally opposite to that of the ideal,
married man.
It was no doubt precisely because Tezcatlipoca was hyper- and bisexual that
people believed that he, like Cihuacoatl and Maximon, could cure certain kinds
of sickness. Mothers took their sick children to Tezcatlipoca’s temple and pledged
them to future service in the temple if the god healed them (Durán 1971:
110).76 Like Maximon, Tezcatlipoca seems also to have specialized in inducing
and curing diseases caused by sexual improprieties. Durán (1971: 97, 99) re-
ports that every four years, during Toxcatl, errant people who feared that the
god, in his wrath, would punish them with an illness sought his pardon.77 As
among the Cihuateteo and the Aiteteco followers of Maximon, these trans-
gressions included adulterers; other sexual deviants presumably did the same
(Durán 1971: 97; Sahagún 1950–82, 3: 11–12).78 The maladies that these peti-
76
This was probably due to the fact that many illnesses, from the time the child was a
fetus in the womb until he or she became sexually active, were attributed to the sexual
peccadilloes of the parents. Once the child began in turn to engage in sexual practices,
many health problems that might arise were attributed to his or her own carnal vices
(López Austin 1988, 1: 222, 259–260, 262, 306).
77
Their fear would have been fueled by the fact that Tezcatlipoca was said to “taketh
pleasure, delighteth in the castigation” (Sahagún 1950–82, 6: 2). In the Borgia group manu-
scripts, Tezcatlipoca appears in his manifestation of the blindfolded god of punishment,
Ixquimilli, wielding an axe to disembowel small, naked individuals who have presumably
committed a sexual offense (Klein 1993b: 24–25). In Classic Maya art, the axe wielded by
Tezcatlipoca’s progenitor, K’awil, is a symbol not only of lightning but also of sacrif ice
(Freidel, Schele, and Parker 1993: 200). A frightening Nahua apparition called the Night Axe
was said to be a manifestation of Tezcatlipoca (Sahagún 1950–82, 3: 11–12). It looked like
a headless man with the chest and belly split open, the two sides noisily opening and closing
as it wandered at night.
78
A confession of adultery initially addressed to Tezcatlipoca as “The Lord of the Near,
of the Nigh” switches its target to the “Goddess of Filth,” Tlazolteotl (Sahagún 1950–82, 6:
29–34). Since Tlazolteotl, originally a Huastec goddess who presided over illicit sex, did not
have a cult or a temple in the religious precinct of the capital, it may be that, for the state,
Tezcatlipoca was the chief confessor and punisher of sexual improprieties.
225
Cecelia F. Klein
tioners hoped to avert included, in addition to problems with legs and feet,
several anal and genital disorders attributed to sexual misbehavior. One of these
was skin pustules, which were probably caused by venereal disease and were
attributed, among other vices, to sodomy (Klein 1993b: 23; Sahagún 1950–82,
1: 31).79
That Maximon is related to Tezcatlipoca is further suggested by numerous
other mutual traits and habits. As Tepeyollotl, “Heart of the Mountain,”
Tezcatlipoca parallels the yearbearing Mams of Todos Santos, each of whom, as
we have seen, is identif ied with a mountain.80 Like Mam/Maximon,Tezcatlipoca
was a wanderer. Davíd Carrasco (1991: 35 ff ) notes that Tezcatlipoca’s youthful
impersonator wandered randomly through the capital during the year prior to
being sacrif iced. Like Maximon, too, Tezcatlipoca appeared in black, usually at
night or in the darkness of the shadows. The god was said, in fact, to be invis-
ible, like a shadow or the wind, and thus able to see and penetrate everything;
his “abode was everywhere—in the land of the dead, on earth, [and] in heaven”
(Sahagún 1950–82, 1: 5).81 Accordingly, like Maximon, Tezcatlipoca was associ-
ated with substances and odors that pervaded space. The most obvious of these
was smoke, which formed part of the deity’s name.82 Another emanated from
79
Other illnesses included leprosy, swollen knees, cancers, “the itch,” hemorrhoids, and
“humors of the feet” (Sahagún 1950–82, 3: 11).
80
Taube (1992: 94) notes that the Maya God N was likewise identif ied with mountains.
Moreover, colonial authors often report that there were four Tezcatlipocas, just as there
were four year-bearing Mams.
81
For more on Tezcatlipoca’s omnipresence, see Sahagún (1950–82, 1: 67–68; 3: 11, 51,
53; 4: 33–34; 6: 1, 7, 17–18, 25, 28). Tezcatlipoca’s ubiquity is evident in one of his forms of
address: Tloque Nahuaque, “Professor of All That Surrounds Us” (Durán 1994: 53, n. 4).
82
The pictograph for the name Tezcatlipoca, a smoking mirror, often replaces the god’s
left foot or appears at his temple as part of his headdress. Ortiz de Montellano (1990: 138–
40) informs us that for the Nahuas, as for the Maya, smoke, like all odors, bore moral
connotations and was thought to cause or cure disease. A Nahua penitent, for this reason,
referred to his vices as his “stench” and his “rottenness,” while smoke was a metaphor for
the odorous gases that emanated from bodily orif ices, especially the anus, locus of excre-
ment and sodomitic pleasure (Hunt 1977: 103; Sahagún 1950–82, 6: 29). Sahagún’s (1950–
82, 10: 22) informants described the anus (tzoiotl) as “smoky.”
Dead bodies smell too, however. The name of the Yucatec Maya death god was Cizin,
“Stench” (Thompson 1970: 302). Cizin burned the souls of the dead on the mouth and
anus, perhaps in the belief that the smoke could prevent the spread of the diseases that were
borne by the odors released by the corpse. Not surprisingly, there is a Nahua tale that has
Tezcatlipoca tricking the Toltecs by turning into an odorous cadaver whom the Toltecs
tried unsuccessfully to remove: “Verily it terrif ied one as it stank; verily it wounded the
head. And wheresoever the wind carried the stench, then the common folk died” (Sahagún
1950–82, 3: 27–28). Sahagún’s illustration of the event is relatively benign, but the illustra-
tor of a different version of the story in Codex Vaticanus A (fol. 11) shows a gaping wound
in the corpse’s abdomen, indicating that it has been disemboweled. Since disembowelment,
226
None of the Above
the skunk; in fact, one name for Tezcatlipoca, Tlacauepan, seems to be derived
from tlacaua,“master of slaves,” and epa, from epatl,“putrid” or “skunk” (Corona
Núñez 1964–67, 3: 32). Just as Maximon is said to appear reeking of skunk, the
skunk was one of the omens of Tezcatlipoca. When the skunk emitted its foul
odor, people said, “Tezcatlipoca breaketh wind” (Sahagún 1950–82, 5: 171).83
Not all of the god’s odors were unpleasant, however. The Toxcatl imperson-
ator went about for a year smelling f lowers, while, during a famine Tezcatlipoca,
in another story of his trickery, assumed the form of a little old woman toast-
ing maize, which “spread its fragrance to the world over.” The starving Toltecs
migrated to the source of this delicious smell, where the treacherous
transgendered god promptly slew them (Sahagún 1950–82, 5: 171).84 Such pleas-
ant smells, it is clear from the sources, represented prosperity and wealth, which,
like odors, were tempting, potentially dangerous, and always f leeting.Tezcatlipoca,
like Maximon, was therefore arbitrary Fate; one of his names was Moyocoyatzin,
“Capricious One” (Sahagún 1950–82, 3: 33; Sullivan 1974: 86). It was for this
reason that he was honored by royal families; only he could determine whether
those in power would keep or lose that power, thereby having to dress in rags.85
The newly installed Nahua ruler was told that “our lord, the lord of the near, of
the nigh, is made to laugh. He is arbitrary, he is capricious, he mocketh. He
willeth in the manner he desireth. He is placing us in the palm of his hand; he
as mentioned earlier, was a punishment for sexual vices, it is not surprising that the Codex
Vaticanus A commentator says that this frightful f igure symbolized “the sin of their com-
munity” (Corona Núñez 1964–67, 3: 32).
83
The Nahuas said that if one chased a skunk, it, like the god, “mocked and gibed.” The
odor, like smoke, “penetrated one . . . [it] was spread all over the area; it extended all over the
region. It reacheth everywhere, and spread on people” (Sahagún 1950–82, 5: 171). See also
Sahagún’s (1950–82, 11: 13–14) def inition of the skunk as one whose stench “is spread all
over the land; it pervades the whole countryside.” It was believed that if the spray got in
one’s eyes, it would cause blindness.
84
Flowers also connoted illicit sexuality (Heyden 1983: 107–108). They were identif ied
in particular with the fertility goddess Xochiquetzal, “Precious Flower,” who was a patron-
ess of adulterers and a mother of twins. Codex Magliabechiano states that it was from
Xochiquetzal’s sexual member that f lowers were born (Nuttall 1978: fol. 61v). In one myth
of the creation, Xochiquetzal is said to have sinned against her husband, the rain god Tlaloc,
by stripping the petals from his f lowers (Anderson 1982: 45). A woman born on the day 1
Flower, moreover, might be aff licted with piles and infections sent by Xochiquetzal (Ortiz
de Montellano 1990: 133–34). Some of these infections, which affected the genitals, were
acquired through sexual vices, but many were contracted by simply smelling or stepping
over certain f lowers (Sahagún 1950–82, 5: 183).
85
Of these unfortunates, it was said, “Poverty, misery, uselessness prevail. Destitute are
they whose tatters hang from their necks, their hips.There the wind cometh, there it carrieth
them off, there it whippeth them about, there it taketh them away. They escape nowhere”
(Sahagún 1950–82, 6: 35, cf. 18).
227
Cecelia F. Klein
is making us round. We roll; we become as pellets. He is casting us from side to

side.We make him laugh. He is making a mockery of us” (Sahagún 1950–82, 6:
51).86 Unpredictably rolling people in any and every direction, creating chaos
where there had been calm and order, Tezcatlipoca joins Maximon and the
transvestite clowns of Carnival when he is addressed as Moquequeloa, “The
Mocker” (Sahagún 1950–82, 6: 14, n. 16).87
Frightened petitioners therefore left offerings of f ir branches at Tezcatlipoca’s
“mound” or “watching place,” which, like the shrines to the adulterous
Cihuateteo, was located at a crossroads (Sahagún 1950–82, 3: 12). This was
done, we are told, on the last f ive days of every month, a period that, like the
endings of all temporal cycles, was clearly fraught with danger. These chaotic
places were associated with sexual immaturity, as a passage in the Tulal manu-
script testif ies: “Rather than be mothering, rather than be fathering, instead at
the crossroads I scatter ash, I scatter seed. Heedlessly I father children, I mother
children” (Maxwell and Hanson 1992: 175). The initial mention of mothering
and fathering here appears to refer to proper parenting within the matrimonial
state, and thus to mature, marital sexual behavior. To “heedlessly” father and
mother children, on the other hand, means to engage in illicit philandering
outside of marriage—behavior that is immature and socially irresponsible.
The Huichol and the Tamales de Maiz Crudo ceremony. In order to lend further
support to my argument that gender ambiguity was used to mark the end of
the Nahua dry season, I now turn to a modern Huichol ceremony that Carl
Lumholtz (1987, 2: 28) describes as “the greatest feast of the year.”The Huichol,
who live in western Mexico in the modern state of Nayarit, speak an Uto-
Aztecan language related to Nahuatl. Perhaps due to a distant mutual ancestry,
their beliefs and customs often parallel those of the Nahuas.
Lumholtz (1987, 2: 28), who observed this feast at San José in the 1890s,
called it the Tamales de Maiz Crudo, or “eating cakes of unhulled corn,” cer-
emony. Although there was no pole dance at the ceremony witnessed by
Lumholtz (1987, 2: 46), he was told that in the southeastern part of the country
86
If a man had taken a captive who then managed to escape, he chastised the god thus,
“Thou sodomite, O Titlacauan! O that this had likewise befallen thee! Be accursed that
thou hast given me a captive only to make sport of me” (Sahagún 1950–82, 4: 35).
87
Under the name Yaotl, “Enemy,” the god advised the early inhabitants of Cuauhtitlan
not to become arrogant and proud, for, he warned, “If you people become proud, I will
mock you, destroy you, the way I mocked [the ruler] Maxtla, who lived at Toltecatepec,
who had two daughters, Quetzalquen and Quetzalxilotl, whom he kept in a jeweled cage.
I got them pregnant with twins and they gave birth to two creatures in the form of opos-
sums” (Bierhorst 1992: 41).
228
None of the Above
Tamales de Maiz Crudo rites include a pole dance in honor of the sun that is
performed by men dressed like women.Tall poles, like cross-dressing, often play
an important role in Nahua and Otomi carnivals, as well.88 Like the present-day
Nahua Carnival, the Huichol Tamales de Maiz Crudo festival was held for the
people of the underworld. Moreover, its pole dance involved jumping and
backward steps reminiscent of transvestite dances during Carnival and Tititl.
The leader of the Huichol pole dances distinguished himself, according to
Lumholtz (1987, 2: 35), “by executing a good deal of lively backward kick-
ing.”89
Lumholtz does not mention the time of year at which this ceremony took
place, but Konrad Theodore Preuss (in Furst 1996: 122–124), in the course of
his travels among the Huichols between 1905 and 1907, observed a Tamales de
Maiz Crudo ceremony that was held in June. He notes that it was followed
closely by a sowing ritual, which was the last ceremony of the year. At that
time—which correlates with the summer solstice—the dry season in Nayarit
ended, according to Preuss, and the rainy season began. This also marked the
beginning of the Huichol new year, as manifested by the sprouting maize.
During the Tamales de Maiz Crudo ceremony, Preuss (in Furst 1996: 132–133)
witnessed the local temple off icers, all dressed as women, each grab a sash
suspended from a pole that “reaches to the sky.” As they proceeded to dance, an
old man ran around with his penis exposed and simulated sexual intercourse
with them (see also Zingg 1938: xxxiv).
88
Otomi communities in Hidalgo and Veracruz, for example, erect a tall pole for Carni-
val and tie the eff igy to its base. Representing the center of the world, the pole is used for
the Volador ceremony, which, according to Galinier (1990: 383–84), retains its traditional
meaning in this remote area. The performers who descend from the pole with ropes sym-
bolize the fall and expiation of “devils,” or evil, while the dancer who remains on the top of
the pole represents Christ in ascension (Galinier 1990: 394–395). In the mixed Nahua and
Otomi village of Los Flores, Veracruz, a “doll” is placed at the foot of a Volador pole during
Carnival; it is later taken to the captain’s home, where it purif ies and then shares a meal
with him and his family. Costumed men dressed as “ladies” dance with the “devil” before
the eff igy is f inally discarded by the side of a road (Williams García 1960: 44). For more on
ceremonial poles, see Redf ield (1936).
89
Zingg (1938: xxix–xxx, 660), who visited the area later, in the 1930s, never got to see
the Tamales de Maiz Crudo ceremony and the pole dance because the tradition had died
out by the time he arrived in Huichol country. He assumed that it was part of a separate
temple dedication ceremony that had followed the First Fruits ceremony, although he did
not say exactly when the First Fruits ceremony was held. There are striking similarities,
however, between the First Fruits ceremony that Zingg (1938: 482–502) witnessed in 1934
and the Tamales de Maiz Crudo ceremony described by Lumholtz (1987). For example,
both describe their ceremony as an appeal to the sun-father, in Zingg’s case to prevent
smallpox. Also common to both is an emphasis on the ritual consumption of tamales.
229
Cecelia F. Klein
End of the Wet Season

If Nahuas employed gender ambiguity at the end of the dry season in order
to prepare the way for a fruitful wet season, then it is logical to suspect that
gender ambiguity also played a role during the transition from the wet to the
dry season. At this time, as the agricultural season came to a close in most parts
of Mesoamerica, hunting and warfare gained tremendously in importance
(Durán 1971: 145–148, 455–456; Sahagún 1950–82, 2: 25–26, 134–140). Ac-
cording to Ruben Reina (1967: 325), the rainy season in the Central Mexican
highlands comes to a close at the end of October, a month or more after the
f irst harvest of fruits. Milbrath’s identif ication of the f irst day of Panquetzaliztli
as 22 November places the f irst solar nadir, which occurs on 20 November, on
the last day of the month Quecholli.90 This may explain why the rites of
Quecholli, which featured the manufacture of vast numbers of arrows, were
primarily dedicated to the hunting god Mixcoatl (also known as Camaxtle)
and to the hunt. It also f its well with the Tovar Calendar statement that during
Quecholli “the captains who had been idle on account of there being no war
raised their banners and performed deeds worthy of their persons” (Kubler and
Gibson 1951: 32). At this time, the sun was presumably perceived as greatly
aged and very weak, in need of immediate regeneration or rebirth.
If Quecholli did indeed celebrate the end of the wet season and prepara-
tions for the dry season, it is worth noting Torquemada’s (1975, 2: 299) state-
ment that, in the course of the rites of Quecholli, there appeared, in addition
to “public, indecent women” who were dressed for war, what he calls “the
effeminate men, [who were] womanly, in the habit and dress of a woman.”
While Torquemada notes that the “public women,” who were of the sort that
followed warriors into battle, were sacrif iced,91 he does not say the same of the
“effeminates.” Of them he says only that they were “very abject and of little
value” because they stayed with the women and did women’s work (transla-
tions mine).
It is impossible to know exactly who these male transvestites might have
been. No other text concerning Quecholli mentions them.92 Torquemada’s
90
Tichy (1981: 234) argues that the indigenous Nahua month Quecholli, named after a
brightly colored bird, began on the next to last day of October and ended on 18 Novem-
ber. Carrasco (1976: 276) calculated earlier that the f irst day of Quecholli was 1 November,
but Tichy has modif ied Carrasco’s schema.
91
These “public women” were known as maqui, a name that Torquemada (1975, 2: 299)
translates as “gossips,” but which may relate to the words maquiza, maquizani, and maquixtia,
which refer to f leeing danger and seeking refuge (Siméon 1977: 256).
92
An alternative explanation of this reference is that the Quecholli transvestites were
temple “berdache” who, willingly or by force, had given up male dress and occupations to
230
None of the Above
sources, however, may have been describing priests who, as we saw in the case
of Tititl, sometimes appeared at ceremonies dressed as deities, both male and
female. Although such an appearance is not included in descriptions of the
regular events of Quecholli, it is reported for the feast of Atamalqualiztli, which
was held every eight years and often fell during Quecholli (Sahagún 1997:
68).93 It is also documented for the Drilling of New Fire ceremony. Johanna
Broda (1982: 134) argues that due to a combination of circumstances, the New
Fire ceremony may at one time have fallen during the last days of Quecholli
rather than during Panquetzaliztli. For the New Fire ceremony, priests, “ar-
rayed in and wearing the garb of the gods,” proceeded from the main temple in
the capital to the hill of Huixactlan, where New Fire was drilled (Sahagún
1950–82, 7: 27). In the Codex Borbonicus depiction of this event (Nowotny
1974: fol. 34), we see clearly that some of the impersonated deities were female.
There are scattered reports of other Mesoamerican communities featuring
cross-dressing in rites that probably took place at the end of the wet season.
Thompson (1930: 103), for example, mentions a “chorus” of men dressed as
women who participated in the deer dance at San Antonio, in what is now
Belize.94 He thinks that the performance was a hunting play aimed at ensuring
a good hunt, and notes that in Landa’s day, in Yucatán, it occurred on 7 Zip,
which corresponded to 1 September. According to Landa (1975: 4), the Yucatec
wet season in his day came to a close at the end of September.95 Landa’s de-
perform womanly duties, possibly including sexual favors to other men, in the temples.
Trexler (1995: 103–104) notes that both Pedro de Gante (Ghent 1954) and Bernal Díaz del
Castillo (1968, 1: 162) claimed that such individuals lived and worked in the temples in
Tenochtitlan. Gante’s credibility has to be questioned in this matter, however, since in the
same paragraph he makes the ludicrous claim that Nahua priests survived solely on the
blood of babies sacrif iced for the purpose. Motolinía (1971: 321), moreover, later denied
categorically that there was “sodomy” in or even near the capital. Nonetheless, it is possible
that it was a group of temple transvestites who participated in the rites of Quecholli.
93
S. Lothrop (1929: 5) witnessed a Quiche “snake dance” in which half of the maskers
dressed as women and danced with those who were dressed as men. In one town, one of
the male dancers simulated the rape of one of the “females,” invoking much laughter.
Nonetheless, Lothrop felt that the dance had a serious purpose and that it may have been a
fertility ceremony. He compared it to the Pre-Hispanic Nahua Atamalqualiztli ceremony
held every 8 years, in which snakes also played a role. The purpose of Atamalqualiztli was to
give the maize a deserved “rest” and thus “revive” it (Sahagún 1950–82, 2: 177–178).
Atamalqualiztli, however, was held in the late summer or the fall, while Lothrop observed
the Quiche ceremony during the winter.
94
A deer sacrif ice was an important component of Carnival around Ixhuatlán de Madero,
in the Sierra de Puebla. The deer, according to Galinier (1990: 371), is one of the principal
incarnations of El Señor del Mundo; after its death, it is implored to remove todo el mal (“all
the bad”) from everyone in the community.
95
This may seem odd given that today September is normally the month of the heaviest
231
Cecelia F. Klein
scription (1975: 156) of the sixteenth-century deer dance makes no mention

of cross-dressed performers, but it does mention a tall pole that was set up at
the end of the ceremony.
End of the Lunar Cycle

The Huastecs say that the moon goddess “may be a man transformed into a
woman” (Stresser-Péan 1952–53: 231). Today, as the moon changes its form
over the course of a month, it is widely believed not only to age and die like
the sun, but to change its gender, as well.96 Among the Quiche, the waxing
moon is said to have been reborn, and thus is called “little moon” or “baby
moon.” As it grows, the moon is seen to “mature” and is addressed in prayers as
“Our Mother.” Signif icantly, on the one night that the Quiche moon is com-
pletely full, it takes on a fully male aspect. As it immediately begins to wane,
however, it resumes its essentially female gender. At this time it is addressed as
“Our Grandmother.” Finally as, the waning moon draws ever nearer the sun, it
is said to “dry up,” eventually to be “buried” as it disappears in conjunction (B.
Tedlock 1992: 182–185).97
Like many Mesoamericans today, the Zoque living in Chiapas believe that
the development and gender of a fetus are directly related to the moon’s phases,
with the f irst (waxing) phase being associated with femininity (Báez-Jorge 1988:
246). Certain points in the lunar cycle are associated with ambiguous gender, as
well. The Pokomam Maya at Chinautla, for example, say that a girl born face-
down during a full moon—the ideal condition for a male birth—will grow up
to be “as strong as a man” (Reina 1966: 242). According to Barbara Tedlock
(1992: 184), the Quiche of Momostenango believe that “babies conceived on
the night of a full moon, especially during a partial eclipse, will become either
twins or transsexuals.”98 These “ambiguous babies,” she adds, “are said to at f irst
change back and forth rapidly (every three or four days) from male to female,
rainfall in the area (Milbrath, personal communication, 1998). It is possible, however, that
the timing of the change of seasons has shifted somewhat over the past 400 years.
96
See Báez-Jorge (1988: 246), Galinier (1990: 556 ff ), Girard (1966: 218), B. Tedlock
(1992: 183–84), D. Tedlock (1985: 45, 296–297, 328, 368–369). Among the Huichol, the
moon is described as a trickster (Zingg 1938: 529–30).
97
See also Neuenswander (1981: 143) on the Achi Maya, who similarly described the
moon in conjunction as buried, dried up, and “f inished.” Some Mesoamerican communi-
ties today believe that the moon has both a male and a female aspect, only one of which is
responsible for menstruation (Báez-Jorge 1988: 259; López Austin 1994: 131).
98
A similar belief obtains among the Tewa Pueblo Indians of the North American South-
west, where the kwido’, an androgynous male who may be homosexual, heterosexual, bi-
sexual, or trisexual, is said to come into being because his genitals were exposed to the full
moon when he was an infant ( Jacobs and Cromwell 1992: 55–56).
232
None of the Above
and female to male. Later they change their behavior and gender identif ication
more slowly, eventually alternating between female and male behavior, dress,
and identif ication every three or four years” (ibid.).
The notion of an aging moon dates back at least to the conquest, since
Sahagún (1950–82, 7: 40) reports that Nahuas believed the moon to die as it
disappeared in conjunction. Milbrath (1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1997) has discussed
Nahua perceptions of the moon as aging as it progressed through its cycle, and
has also pointed out that certain phases of the moon were represented by Nahua
goddesses temporarily transformed into males. In Nahua art, Milbrath notes,
these goddesses often wear men’s loincloths, while in Nahua calendrical rites,
the skin and clothing of sacrif iced women who had impersonated these god-
desses were subsequently donned by male priests.
For Nahuas, as for the Totonacs, however, the principal representative of the
moon at the time of contact with the Spaniards was a bisexual male. In the
sixteenth-century sources, his name is given as Tecciztecatl, “Sea Shell Lord,” a
reference to the conch shell that often appears with him in colonial Nahua
manuscript paintings. As Milbrath has noted, the conch shell is a metaphor for
a woman’s womb.99 The fact that the Nahua moon god had an effeminate
aspect is made clear in the Leyenda de los soles (Bierhorst 1992: 148), where it is
related that during the creation, while the pauper Nanahuatl prepared to be-
come the sun, the moon—whose name is given here as 4 Flint—sang and
danced “like a woman.”100
The Leyenda de los soles suggests that, among the Nahuas, lunar effeminacy
was peculiar to periods of darkness when the moon was invisible. In that case,
it would have corresponded to either lunar eclipse or the “dead” moon in
conjunction, or to both. The latter interpretation is strengthened by Galinier’s
(1984: 48) report that in the nearby Otomi Mezquital region, the third, waning
quarter of the moon is called Moon of the Great Rotted Foot, while the
darkened new moon of the fourth quarter is said to be “amputated.” One
99
The fact that Tecciztecatl’s conch shell symbolized the womb is well attested to in the
sources; see, e.g., Codex Vaticanus A (fol. 26) and Corona Núñez (1964–67, 3: 68).
100
In Nahua manuscripts, an aspect of Tezcatlipoca known as Chalchiuhtotolin, “green
hen” (depicted as a turkey), was patron of the day sign tecpatl, “knife” (Seler 1990, 1: 133);
most heavy-duty knives were made of f lint. The date of 4 Flint has been associated with
the god Mixcoatl, as well as the goddesses Xochiquetzal, Tlazolteotl, and Quilaztli (Caso
1967: 198). According to the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas (García Icazbalceta
1891, 3: 237), Quilaztli, in the form of a two-headed deer, fell from the sky in a year 4 Flint.
A legend recorded by Torquemada (1975, 1: 80–81) identif ies Quilaztli as a “manly woman”
who dressed as a warrior and challenged the men who ruled the migrants from Aztlan. She,
too, was therefore of ambiguous gender.
233
Cecelia F. Klein
Otomi name for the moon in conjunction means “the moon is amputated”;
presumably, the amputated body part is once more a foot. Galinier (1984: 46)
notes that, in line with the Otomi attribution of all malformations of the foot
to lunar inf luences, Otomi parents present the Great Rotted Foot with offer-
ings to protect their newborns from its wrath (Galinier 1984: 46).
This is surely tied to the belief, found in many places, that the moon poses
the greatest threat to plant and human reproduction and good health during
lunar conjunction. Throughout Mesoamerica, however, a link between fetal
deformities and lunar eclipse can also be found (Reina 1966: 239; Sahagún
1950–82, 7: 58;Wisdom 1940: 400). Often these deformities involve the feet. In
Coahuila, for example, there is concern that the child of a pregnant woman
who has been exposed to a lunar eclipse will be born clubfooted (Kelly 1965:
9, 116), while in Momostenango, it may be born lame (B. Tedlock 1992: 184).
The widespread association of foot deformities with lunar eclipses recalls the
Cihuateteotl with reversed feet depicted in Codex Vaticanus B (Anders 1972:
fol. 79). John Pohl (1998: 194), it should be recalled, identif ies the Cihuateteo
with the stellar tzitzimime who, it was feared, would descend to harm the living
during periods of darkness such as eclipses.
The gender of the full moon in eclipse may likewise have been viewed as
ambiguous. Today the full moon is associated with maximum potency in many
places; among the Tzotzil Maya, for example, it marks the most auspicious time
to plant (e.g., Holland 1963: 78). The Pipil say, morever, that plants sown when
the moon has disappeared, as during an eclipse, will not grow (e.g., Thompson
1939: 142, citing Schultze Jena). Since present-day inhabitants of a number of
Otomi communities refer to the full moon as mba po, “His Erection,” it follows
that a lunar eclipse would connote the opposite—detumescence, castration,
and effeminacy (Galinier 1990: 535).
There is no doubt, in any event, that the Otomi association of lunar con-
junction with a missing limb, presumably a leg, implies that, in this culture, the
gender of the moon while in conjunction is ambiguous. According to Galinier
(1984: 45), among the Otomi, the absence of a foot renders a male feminine
because the foot symbolizes the penis. One Otomi word for penis, kwa, also
means foot, while male Otomi shamans sexually metamorphize into women
by removing one of their own legs. The moon whose leg or foot has been
amputated, by this reasoning, has been castrated and metamorphized into a
womanly man.101 That other Mesoamericans shared this belief is supported by
Bricker’s (1973: 113) record of a similar connection between the foot and the
101
For more on the symbolism of a missing foot, see Galinier (1990: 627–633).
234
None of the Above
penis in the Tzotzil Maya town of Chamula.102 Missing or injured legs are
linked to illicit or deviant sexuality in a number of places in Mesoamerica.
Among the Quiche of Momostenango, for example, an idiom that literally
means “to burn his/her leg” (c’atic rakan) is a metaphor for a married person
committing adultery with a virgin of either sex (B. Tedlock 1992: 110).
While there is no comparable linguistic relation between the words for foot
and penis in Nahuatl, the word for moon, metzli, also means leg and thigh. The
fact that it also forms the root of words referring to menstruation suggests that
the Nahuas, too, made a connection between the moon, femininity, and the leg
(López Austin 1988, 2: 163; Siméon 1977: 271).103 Like the Otomi, they appar-
ently related all of these concepts to sorcery, as well. Today, as in Pre-Hispanic
times, the female Nahua magician called mometzcopinque changes her form—
and presumably her gender—by detaching her calf and f itting bird claws in its
place. To return to the normal condition, she must restore her missing limb
(López Austin 1988, 1: 173). Sahagún (1950–82, 4: 43) describes the magician
as “one who removed his leg.”104
These connections bring to mind the missing foot of Tezcatlipoca, Maximon,
and the Chinantec Maxtlacihuatl, all of whom are described as sorcerers. The
data strongly suggest that a deity’s missing foot connoted, among other things,
his or her compromised sexual identity. In Santiago Atitlán today, those who
behave in an irrational, abnormal manner, especially when “in love,” are de-
scribed as “standing on one leg” (Carlsen and Prechtel 1994: 99). Since in this
community one side of the body is associated with the female aspect, the other
with the male, the absence of a leg or foot would logically have implications
for one’s gender (Carlsen and Prechtel 1994: 92). It seems likely, therefore, that
for Nahuas Tezcatlipoca represented conjunction at the end of the lunar cycle.105
102
The Huichol cultural hero Kauymali, a trickster referred to as “the lame one,” is in
contrast described in myth as having a powerful and extraordinarily long penis (Zingg
1938: 361–362).
103
The connection is visualized in the so-called thigh skin mask, or mexayacatl, which
plays an important role in the Nahua month fest of Ochpaniztli, and is decorated with
lunar crescents in Codex Borbonicus (Nowotny 1974: fol. 12).
104
The Chortí today say that evil sorcerers keep their patron saint in their left leg, whereas
diviners and curers keep their spirit in their right leg (Wisdom 1940: 428). The Nahuatl
verb cotzqua, which derives from cotztli, “calf ” (of the leg), means “to enchant someone.”
According to López Austin (1988, 1: 173), the calf for Nahuas “apparently contained a kind
of vital force”; the verb meaning “to devour a victim” literally means “to eat the calf.”
Curiously, cotztli also meant “the obsidian stone of round surface,” a probable reference to
the obsidian mirror used for divination and another possible allusion to Tezcatlipoca,“Smok-
ing Mirror.”
105
Tezcatlipoca’s association with the moon may relate to the widespread belief that the
changing position of the crescent moon correlates with the changing wet and dry seasons.
235
Cecelia F. Klein
As Henry B. Nicholson (1971: 412–413) has pointed out, Tezcatlipoca seems to

have been in some way related to Tecciztecatl. In Codex Borbonicus (Nowotny
1974: fol. 6) and the Aubin Tonalamatl (fol. 6; Aguilera 1981), for example,
Tezcatlipoca replaces Tecciztecatl as co-patron of the sixth trecena (thirteen-day
period). A bird wearing Tezcatlipoca’s smoking mirror and heron headdress is
accompanied in Codex Vaticanus A (fol. 47; Corona Nuñez 1964–67, 3: 111)
by the written statement that on the day 7 Cuauhtli (7 Eagle), which was
dedicated to the moon, women with menstrual problems offered sacrif ices.106
CONCLUSIONS
The foregoing strongly suggests that, unlike us, Pre-Hispanic Nahuas viewed
gender as both complex and mutable and did not expect it to necessarily con-
form to a person’s physiology and sex. Moreover, a recent study of words used
by the Gulf Coast Nahuas for the reproductive organs points “to an intertwin-
ing of gender attributes, a blending of masculinity and femininity written over
both sexes from the moment of birth” (Chevalier and Buckles 1995: 287). Put
another way,“each sex partakes of the attributes of the opposite gender” (ibid.,
289). Among present-day Gulf Coast Nahuas, therefore, gender is seen as inher-
ently ambiguous. Among the Otomi today, a belief that women are capable of
metamorphizing into men and back is said to cause considerable anxiety (Galinier
1984: 44–45).107
Any society that is dependent on frequent, successful human reproduction,
in which sex and gender are believed to naturally intermix and possibly change
within the individual, must feel a pressing need to ensure that the mature indi-
vidual, upon marriage, can and will play the proper role of either one gender
or the other. In such societies, the years preceding marriage can therefore be
expected to provoke, both in parents and in society at large, a strong desire to
As in Pre-Hispanic Mexican manuscript paintings, the moon among the Chortí today is
depicted as a jar of water that stands upright during the dry season and lies on its side,
releasing its contents, during the rainy season (Girard 1966: 111). A similar concept orders
ideas of the Achi Maya about the changes of season (Neuenswander 1981: 130, 139). See
also Báez-Jorge (1983: 389) and Fought and Fought (1972: 387).
106
Certainly, Nahuas linked the moon to the detached limbs of sorcerers. The commen-
tary to fol. 12v in Codex Telleriano–Remensis (Hamy 1899), which depicts Tecciztecatl as
co-patron (with Tonatiuh, the sun) of the sixth trecena, says of the day 1 Death that “those
who were born here would be magicians for they tried to transform themselves into the
shapes of various animals as well as other shapes as well as making it appear as if a man were
separating into pieces, as if each leg and arm were detached” (Quiñones Keber 1995: 260;
emphasis mine).
107
Lang (1996: 187) notes that ambiguity and transformation are recurrent themes in
Native American world-views.
236
None of the Above
stabilize a child’s gender. López Austin (1988, 1: 289) notes that from the time
of reaching puberty until his or her marriage, a Nahua child was believed to be
in danger of becoming sexually deviant. This fear probably extended to the
very young child, as well. We know that, like our doctors today, Nahua parents
were very quick to assign a gender to their newborns (which they presumably
based on the infant’s genitalia) and to culturally reinforce it, providing babies
within several days of birth with miniature versions of the work tools appro-
priate to their designated gender (Berdan and Anawalt 1992, 3: fol. 57r; Durán
1971: 124; Sahagún 1950–82, 6: 201–204). This eagerness implies a concern
that the child’s gender might f luctuate. This may explain why none of the
Nahuatl terms for prepubescent children differentiates sex; the word piltontli,
for example, refers to a child of either sex (López Austin 1988, 2: 272–273).108
Society introduced gendered terms only once the child’s gender had hopefully
begun to stabilize.
A number of Mesoamerican peoples today share this concern for the child’s
gender identity. According to Calixta Guiteras-Holmes (1961: 107–108), for
example, a Tzotzil woman will take care not to let a pregnant woman pick up
her newborn “for fear that the sex of her infant will change after birth.” Guiteras-
Holmes was told of several cases where this had occurred. Aiteteco midwives,
on the other hand, are thought to be capable of changing the sex of a child
while it is still in the womb (Carlsen and Prechtel 1994: 100–101, citing Will-
iam Douglas). These sex changes, as we have seen, can also be caused by natural
and supernatural forces. As noted earlier, Quiche babies in Momostenango who
are born under a full moon or during a partial lunar eclipse may become trans-
sexuals whose gender will keep changing from male to female throughout
life.109
When a Nahua child was old enough—around four years of age, to judge
by painted scenes in Codex Mendoza (Berdan and Anawalt 1992, 3: fol. 58r)—
its parents began to teach it how to perform gender-appropriate tasks. Boys
learned to hunt and f ish, girls to spin and weave. More importantly, parents
108
See also Lockhart (1992: 603, n. 18) regarding the gender neutrality of many Nahuatl
kinship terms.
109
A Nahua myth in the Leyenda de los soles (Bierhorst 1992: 145) relates that the god
Quetzalcoatl found the bones of the previous inhabitants of the earth neatly laid out in two
piles in the underworld; one pile contained the bones of women, the other of men. He
wrapped them up to take them back to earth but, on the way, fell into a pit and spilled them.
Quails nibbled the bones before the god gathered them up, rewrapped them, and took
them to the goddess Cihuacoatl/Quilaztli, with whose help he then produced from them
the f irst humans. Belief that at least some of the male and female bones became mixed
together as a result of this accident would help to explain Nahua parents’ concern for the
stability of their offspring’s sex.
237
Cecelia F. Klein
were anxious to ensure that their offspring was not contaminated by contact
with the work tools of the other gender. Sahagún (1950–82, 3: 52, 61), for
example, mentions twice that the parents of young boys going off to school for
the f irst time entreated their sons’ teachers to make sure that their boys would
not so much as lay a hand on a spindle or a weaving stick lest they become
effeminate.110 These admonishments clearly ref lect a belief that socialization
can ultimately determine a growing child’s gender, regardless of its biological
sex. Added to the effects that certain natural and supernatural forces, such as the
moon, could have on a child’s gender, this makes clear just how tenuous Nahuas
must have perceived gender to be.
Like us, then, Pre-Hispanic Nahuas appear to have been disapproving and
fearful of those whose gender was ambiguous, and to have perceived it as a
disruptive, antisocial force. In a world where the socioeconomic order is predi-
cated on the dual-gendered married couple and yet gender identity is under-
stood to be socially and supernaturally conditioned, ideology works to maintain
the precarious separation and equilibrium between that which is regarded as
entirely female and that which is seen as wholly male. It characterizes as back-
ward, dangerous, and even criminal the inhabitants of that frightening area
where women begin to look like men and men begin to talk and act like
women.
Unlike us today, however, Nahuas harnessed the metaphorical power of
ambiguous gender and turned it back upon itself. As we have seen, among
many Mesoamericans, including Nahuas, ceremonies held at the end of major
astronomical periods and seasons featured cross-dressing, male effeminacy, fe-
male masculinity, and obscene mockery on the part of beings often reputed to
be promiscuous, adulterous, gender-shifting, homosexuals, bisexuals, and
hypersexuals. These ceremonies fell at the end of the year, of the dry season,
and of the wet season, all of which tended to be associated with a major station
of the solar cycle. Additional rites were probably held during lunar conjunc-
tion and lunar eclipses. The asocial behavior of the gender-ambiguous per-
formers was manifested by their leaping and backward movements as well as
their often-tattered clothing; in myth it was expressed in terms of extreme age
or immaturity, reversed heads and limbs, and missing body parts, especially feet.
110
A modern Huichol myth tells how the hunting god changed a boy’s sex to that of a
female simply by taking away his bow (Zingg 1938: 123). An interesting variant of this
theme can be found among the Tzotzil Maya described by Guiteras-Holmes (1961: 112),
who reports that in San Pedro Chenalhó, boys are not allowed to put on girls’ clothes
because it is believed that their children will then be girls, and vice versa.
238
None of the Above
These beings, however, were usually also described as powerful shamans,

midwives, or sorcerers, and as such they had the power to purify and cure. It
was precisely because uncertain gender represented a reversal of the social ideal,
if not the norm, that such a person possessed the inherent ability to reverse the
undesirable in nature. Given the right form, put in the right places at the right
times, and directed to make the appropriate movements, the twisted could
therefore straighten out social disorder and cure sickness and deformity, the
aged could cause rebirth, the unpredictable could ensure stability, the soiled
could purify, and the being whose gender was contaminated by aspects of the
other gender could literally produce, as Maximon produced each year in the
form of Christ, a thing of singular, pure masculinity or femininity.
Acknowledgments A number of people have provided invaluable assistance

in the researching and writing of this essay. Mary Ellen Miller offered impor-
tant feedback on the initial, oral version, while Robert Carlsen, Susan Milbrath,
Elizabeth Boone, and Eulogio Guzman read an earlier draft of the published
version and made valuable suggestions. Robert Carlsen kindly shared with me
his data on the Maximon cult at Santiago Atitlán, as did Alan Sandstrom and
Paul Jean Protzen for modern Otomi and Nahua carnival celebrations. Susan
Milbrath’s tireless e-mails kept me from making a number of calendrical and
astronomical mistakes. Many of my ideas were sharpened by conversations with
Richard Trexler. Finally, I could not have completed this project without the
untiring aid of my former research assistants, Delia Cosentino and Elisa Mandell.
239
Cecelia F. Klein
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253
The Concept of Feminine Places in Mesoamerica:
The Case of Xochitécatl,Tlaxcala, Mexico
MARI CARMEN SERRA PUCHE
INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES ANTROPOLÓGICAS,
UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL AUTÓNOMA DE MÉXICO
R
ecent advances in archaeology, as well as its self-assessment as a
discourse created by and for a particular society, have without doubt
broadened not only the explanatory scope of our discipline but also
its ability to provide useful and reliable information for all those who seek an
explanation of their present in the past. Archaeological studies of gender have
made one thing clear: On many occasions, the interpretation of archaeological
finds reflects a homogeneous concept of society. Researchers—men and women
alike—tend to generalize and to refer to the inhabitants of ancient settlements
as generic human beings, forgetting that the place assigned to each member
depends on his or her physical characteristics, age, manual and mental skills,
economic status, class membership, and even personal preferences.We frequently
overlook the fact that we are talking about men and women who have a spe-
cific place in society, and that often it is precisely their sex that detemines their
position in life and the social group to which they belong.The same can be said
about other groups, such as children and the elderly.
This tendency to generalize has invariably led researchers to give attention
to very broad aspects of the social group they are studying, forgetting not only
everyday life but also the importance that individuals, with their own particular
skills and limitations, have within their society. The dangers inherent in such
neglect of the individuals are illustrated by the recent excavation at an Epiclassic
site in Central Mexico.
In the southeastern part of the state of Tlaxcala on the Central Plateau of
Mexico, in a landscape framed by the majestic volcanoes Popocatepetl,
Iztaccíhuatl, and La Malinche, stands the hill of Xochitécatl, an ancient volcano
with a Pre-Hispanic ceremonial center at the top (Fig. 1).1 Its favored geo-
1
All figures and photographs were made for the Proyecto Arqueológico Xochitécatl,
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia–UNAM, México, D.F.
255
Mari Carmen Serra Puche
Fig. 1 The archaeological site of Xochitécatl, Tlaxcala, and its surrounding landscape, from
the northwest, with the view of the Iztaccíhuatl (White Woman) volcano in the back-
ground.
graphical location at the center of the Puebla–Tlaxcala plains, permanently

watered by the Zahuapan and Atoyac Rivers, was a factor that determined the
settlement here of large population nuclei engaged mainly in agriculture (Fig. 2).
As is normal in any archaeological project, the investigation of the Xochitécatl
site has yielded a large amount of information and, along with this, some puzzles
yet to be solved. The chronological and geographical position of Xochitécatl
(Fig. 3) provided those of us who excavated the site with an initial framework
for systematizing and delimiting our data. However, as work progressed, the
excavations led us along an unexpected path. In contrast to other occasions, we
did not need in-depth studies to be able to begin interpreting the roles played
by individuals, both men and women, in this society.
The presence of feminine elements in cultural discourse came to light with
the first archaeological finds. Numerous ceramic and stone representations of
women discovered at the site were key in determining the course of our inter-
pretation of the data. At the risk of jumping to conclusions, we can say that
Xochitécatl appears to have been a ceremonial center that at the end of the
Formative period (400 b.c. to a.d. 100) and during its second occupation in the
Epiclassic period (a.d. 650 to 850) (Fig. 4) was dedicated to a feminine cult.
256
The Concept of Feminine Places in Mesoamerica
Fig. 2 Aerial view of the ceremonial center at Xochitécatl, Tlaxcala, after the excavations
(counterclockwise from left to right): the Pyramid of Flowers, the Building of the Serpent, and
the Building of the Spiral; at the center of the plaza, the Base of the Volcanoes.
Images of goddesses, female rulers, and women in various phases of the life
cycle, as well as fertility symbols and evidence of cosmic rituals, have begun to
emerge during our work.
The archaeological evidence at Xochitécatl has compelled us to study the
representations of women, their associations, and their contexts in depth. At
this stage of investigation only a very descriptive study can be offered, since the
data need further analysis before more exact and verifiable conclusions can be
reached. With this essay, however, I hope to provide new elements of analysis
for the investigation of gender in Pre-Hispanic Mexico.
The ceremonial center of Xochitécatl was built on the top of a hill, which
was altered to give it the form of a great plaza. This monumental architectural
complex is composed of four buildings. In the Formative period, the first building
stage of the incipient ceremonial center was completed, which included the
construction of the Building of the Serpent, the Pyramid of Flowers, and the
Base of the Volcanoes. In the site’s second period of occupation, between a.d.
650 and 850, the Pyramid of Flowers was again used for ceremonies, but it was
enlarged by the addition of more levels and a temple on the top, and given a
new orientation, as was the Base of the Volcanoes.
257
Fig. 3 Location map of Xochitécatl, Tlaxcala; (right; clockwise)

E1: Pyramid of Flowers; E2: Building of the Serpent; E3: Build-
ing of the Spiral; and E4: Base of the Volcanoes.
Xochitécatl is closely connected with its better-known neighbor, the ar-

chaeological site of Cacaxtla, famous for its splendid palace murals with designs
and colors exhibiting Maya influence. Cacaxtla was at its height between a.d.
600 and 800, or, in other words, at the end of the Classic period, at which time
the two sites formed a single cultural unit. Xochitécatl most probably became
the place of worship for the residents of the palaces, people from the public
and administrative buildings of Cacaxtla, and the population of the surround-
ing valleys. In addition, it also became a key trade center, controlling the routes
to the Gulf of Mexico, Oaxaca, and the Maya area.
Despite its strategic location, monumental architecture, and closeness to
Cacaxtla, Xochitécatl had received little attention from scholars of Pre-
Columbian Mexico. Until a few years ago, only a handful of investigators knew
this site. From the beginning of colonial times up to 1939, Xochitécatl lay
completely forgotten.
The site is mentioned in such colonial documents as the map of
Cuauhtinchan no. 2 (Reyes García n.d.), Diego Muñoz Camargo’s Historia de
Tlaxcala (1978), and the Monarquía indiana by Juan de Torquemada (1969). Nine-
teenth-century travelers such as José María Cabrera (1995), Hubert Bancroft
(1883), and Eduard Seler (Sepúlveda y Herrera 1992:89) likewise noted that it
258
Xochitécatl Popocatepetl Xochitécatl
Periods Occupation Diagnostic Diagnostic Eruption Radiocarbon
Sequence Ceramics Elements Dates Dates
1600 Colonial ceramics
Late Postclassic 1500
Cholula polychrome
Middle Postclassic 1400
1300
Early Postclassic 1200
1100 Second abandonment
1000 a.d. 800 to 1095
900 Pyramid of Flowers
Epiclassic 800 Second building Coyotlatelco Complex Burials in the Pyramid of Flowers figurine offerings
700 phase Tablero fine incised Offerings with marine elements a.d. 632 to 774
600 Foso thick wall, fine incised Offerings of figurines
500
400
Classic 300 First abandonment
200
100 100 b.c. Building of the Serpent
a.d. 1 First building Tezoyuca Tina–Escalinata– to a.d. 215 388 b.c. to a.d. 342
Late Formative 100 phase Ticomán Escultural Complex
200 Red on white lithic workshop Substructure of the Serpent
300 White spiral 688 b.c. to a.d. 538
400
500 Initial building Red on white fine incised Substructure of the Spiral
Middle Formative 600 phase ceramics with 792 b.c. to a.d. 354
700 differentiated firings
800 White fine incised
Fig. 4 Cultural chronology of the Puebla–Tlaxcala valley.
259
existed. Xochitécatl is also referred to in the Atlas arqueológico de la República

Mexicana of the Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia (1939), and
described by Pedro Armillas in an article in Revista Mexicana de Estudios
Antropológicos (1946). However, it was not until 1969 that Bodo Spranz of the
German Foundation for Scientific Research conducted an archaeological sur-
vey of the hill of Xochitécatl and sketched the ceremonial area. He later car-
ried out the first controlled excavations (1970: 37). Due to further topographical
surveys, and the analysis of archaeological material made by Angel García Cook
(García Cook and Merino Carrión 1984), it has been possible to define the
chronology of the most important archaeological sites in Tlaxcala.
Thanks to the project begun in 1992, the ceremonial center of Xochitécatl
has been explored intensively as part of the fourteen Special Archaeological
Projects carried out under the auspices of Mexico’s National Archaeology Fund.2
The archaeological work of the Xochitécatl project began with an analysis of
aerial photographs, surface reconaissance, and detailed topography studies, and
ended with extensive excavations and the clearing and strengthening of the
structures. It has enabled us to sketch out a history of the settlement, which
shows distinct cultural influences from the Valley of Mexico, Teotihuacan,
Cholula, the Gulf Coast, Oaxaca, and the Maya area. The site was abandoned
during the Classic period and reoccupied in the Epiclassic, around a.d. 850. It
was again abandoned at the end of this period with the eruption of Popocatepetl,
an event that, thanks to recent studies, can be carbon 14–dated as contempo-
rary with Xochitécatl (Siebe et al. 1996).
The largest and most imposing building at Xochitécatl is the Pyramid of
Flowers, located at the eastern end of the central ceremonial plaza, with a
rectangular base almost as large as those of the Pyramid of the Moon at
Teotihuacan and the pyramid called Tepalcayo 1 at Totimehuacan, Puebla. This
base measures approximately 144 meters from east to west, and 110 to 115
meters from north to south. It is more than 30 meters high, and is composed of
nine stepped tiers on its northern, eastern, and southern faces. The most com-
plete sequence of cultural materials comes from the Pyramid of Flowers and
dates from the Late Formative, the Epiclassic, and, in a few cases, the Post-
Classic period. This is the building that yielded the archaeological evidence
discussed below.
The most important find consisted of more than thirty-two burials, mostly
of females and infants, accompanied by offerings and several stone sculpures.
Two large monolithic vats were discovered in front of the pyramid’s main fa-
2
The National Council for Culture and the Arts, through the National Institute of
Anthropology and History, was responsible for this fund.
260
cade, which faces west and has a central staircase composed of rectangular
blocks of stone. The first layout and the construction of the building—with
boulders and blocks of tuff, or tepetate—date from the Late Formative period.
Later on, in the Epiclassic period, the pyramid was remodeled, a tepetate stair-
case was constructed over one of the stone blocks, and a temple was built on
top of small blocks of dressed tepetate covered with stucco. The building’s enor-
mous volume suggests that many gangs of workers carried hundreds of tons of
rocks and boulders from the lower slopes of Xochitécatl. The structure there-
fore provides evidence of a high degree of social organization in which the
ruling group assigned activities and ceremonies.
At the southern end of the central plaza is the Building of the Serpent. It
has a rectangular ground plan (73 by 58 meters), faces north, and has a mud-
covered staircase and a ramp leading up to its top. It consists of four stepped
tiers, which have rounded corners on the southwestern face. Another mono-
lithic vat, 1.3 meters in diameter, which was found in the middle of the top
platform, contained a sculpture of a serpent’s head.
The Building of the Spiral, located at the western end of the ceremonial
center, is composed of thirteen circular stepped tiers. The diameter of its base
is 50 meters, and that of the upper tier, 17 meters. Rising 15.6 meters over the
level of the central plaza, it belongs to the Middle Formative period. According
to radiocarbon dating, it was built in the Texoloc phase (760 to 380 b.c.).
At the center of the plaza is the rectangular Base of the Volcanoes, measur-
ing 45 by 33 meters. As it is a later structure, its design and orientation are not
like those of other buildings. Its architectural features, style, and materials date
it to the end of the Epiclassic period (a.d. 650–850). It is distinguished by its
talud and tablero faces of red volcanic stone, or tezontle, covered with stucco like
the faces of the temple of the same date built on top of the Pyramid of Flowers.
The region of the Puebla–Tlaxcala valley, where Xochitécatl stands, shows
signs of sedentary occupation by people engaged mainly in agriculture on the
alluvial plains since early times. There is evidence of this in some archaeologi-
cal sites located in the region, with domestic units belonging to the Late For-
mative period, precisely when the ceremonial center was planned and built.
The scarcity of cultural material from Early and Middle Classic periods, when
Teotihuacan flourished, and its increased abundance after this time would seem
to support the theory that the ceremonial center reached its peak during this
final, Late Formative, period, as was the case for the neighboring elite palaces at
Cacaxtla. At this time, trade with places such as Teotihuacan, Cholula, Oaxaca, the
Gulf of Mexico, and the Maya area brought numerous luxury items to Xochitécatl,
and with them came the integration into a shared system of religious beliefs.
261
The buildings of Xochitécatl fall squarely within the pattern common for
the Central Plateau of Mesoamerica. For the moment, however, we can know
the use of the spaces created in this ceremonial center only through their ar-
chaeological contexts. The activities that took place in the buildings and plazas
can be reconstructed by inferences drawn from the analysis of traces that are
left by the individuals who acted here at particular times. Here I agree with
Diane Lyons:
All context, i.e., all human experience occurs in time and space. Con-
trol of resources in a society requires control of social interaction and
control of how individuals or groups of individuals percieve their roles
and identities to be within their society. Both social interaction and
social identity are profoundly shaped by the manipulation of time and
space. In order to understand past social structure we must be con-
scious of the construction and meaning of the dimensions of context.
(1991: 113)
I define the space discussed in this essay as including not only that occupied
directly by the Pyramid of Flowers at Xochitécatl, but also that of the area
surrounding it—both the platform on which it stands and the landscape, as well
as “sight lines,” orientation, and siting, with the view of the volcanoes
Popocatepetl, Iztaccíhuatl, and La Malinche. In addition, there is a “sidereal
space,” the movement of constellations and stars as points to be observed from
this building. In short, one can speak of sacred geography.
We have identified a complex of artifacts and architectural features as signs
of the possible activities that were carried out at the Pyramid of Flowers. They
include offerings of figurines; spindle whorls; burials of mostly young women
and children; staircases and the temple; stone monuments, namely, round sculp-
ture and vats; and a cave. Orientation and integration of the building into the
surroundings contribute to our interpretations.
OFFERINGS OF FIGURINES
The offerings of female figurines found embedded in the staircases of the
Pyramid of Flowers are the most important indications of a feminine cult and
its association with fertility.3 The offerings, seven in all, were deposited directly
in the fill of the different tiers, in other words, without any type of special
casket or pit to hold them. They covered areas ranging from 2 to 7 square
meters, and were made up of figurines placed one on top of the other, some-
3
Due to their position and composition, the figurines reported earlier by Spranz (1970,
1973) were likely part of one or more of the votive caches.
262
Fig. 5 Location of the seven figurine offerings at the Pyramid of

Flowers, Xochitécatl, Tlaxcala.
times in association with bowls or other figurines. Only one of the offerings
had a connection with architectural elements (a floor and a bench), while two
others were associated with child burials (Fig. 5).
The figurines can be divided into eight different groups:
1. Supplicating, praying, or worshiping women. The first group consists of
modeled and polished figurines that are hollow (some with perforations, per-
haps for hanging) and polychrome. Either seated or standing, they are charac-
terized by the particular position of their arms, which are raised in an attitude
of supplication or prayer. The figures have short hair with a fringe and side
263
Fig. 6 Female figurines, Xochitécatl,Tlaxcala: (a) worshiping women;

(b) richly dressed women; (c) pregnant women, or receptacles.
264
bunches, and red-and-white headbands, sometimes with circular ornaments.

Their faces are painted red from eyes to chin, and several have black lines that
look like tears.The women’s smiling mouths reveal the so-called T-shaped den-
tal mutilation.4 The figures also have circular earplugs.They are wearing blouses,
or quechquemitl, with geometric decoration in red, black, and white; the gar-
ments seem to be very complex in structure, perhaps produced using the tech-
nique of curved weaving. Many figures also wear skirts or wraps around them,
held up with a sash, as the fringes hanging at the waist indicate; the skirts are
likewise decorated, following the design of the blouse, in red, black, and white.
The hands of the figures are painted red, with bangles indicated in black. Most
have their feet shown painted or with bands around their ankles, and some are
wearing sandals with bows (Fig. 6a).
2. Richly dressed women. The second group consisists of flat, polychrome
figurines cast in molds, usually with two holes for hanging them up. They
represent richly dressed and adorned women whose faces are half covered with
red paint. The figures show T-shaped dental mutilation, and each has earplugs
in the shape of flowers, a necklace of beads or in the form of a band, a quechquemitl
decorated with fringes, a skirt with varying designs, and bare feet. There are
two variants in this group: women alone and women with children.The women
alone wear headbands with three flowers, of five petals each, and both of their
hands are placed on their skirts (Fig. 6b).
3. Pregnant women, or receptacles.This group includes hollow modeled
figurines, each with an orifice in the abdomen usually occupied by the small,
removable figure of a child. The mothers wear headbands decorated in the
center with a circle and a feather surround, flower-shaped earplugs, and red
face paint. Hands are not indicated at the ends of their short arms, and clothing
is simply drawn on the figures with black and white lines. The child figure is
flat and also has a headband, circular earplugs, and face paint (Fig. 6c).
4. Women with children in their arms or on their laps. This group is made
up of flat, polychrome, cast figurines, which have holes for tying or hanging
them. Each of these images represents a woman with a child in her arms and
sometimes another on her back. In addition to the presence of infants, the
headdresses are markedly different, consisting of a wide band with three slop-
ing stripes in black and white; in the center, there is a circle surrounded by
feathers (Fig. 7a).
4
On the subject of this form of mutilation, Spranz says, “This T-shaped mutilation with
inlays of small stone disks is known from the Maya region of Belize, the Ulua valley, Copan,
and Uaxactún. Surprising in this connection is the first and hitherto only appearance of
wall painting in a Maya style in the Mexican highlands, discovered in 1976 at Cacaxtla,
immediately to the east of Xochitécatl” (1982: 165).
265
Fig. 7 Female figurines, Xochitécatl, Tlaxcala: (a) women with

children; (b) infants in cradles; (c) old women; (d) articulated
figurines.
266
5. Infants in cradles.This group contains modeled figures of babies in cradles,

which are simple flat plaques, usually with a handle that extends over the baby’s
upper body. The infants have face paint, and their clothing is drawn on them
(Fig. 7b).
6. Enthroned, deified women. Each of these figurines depicts a woman
seated on a palanquin or throne, wearing a headdress of a serpent, or the Earth
Monster, holding a shield and a scepter, and richly dressed in a quechquemitl,
skirt, sandals, belt or sash, bracelets, and necklaces. Like the figurines of preg-
nant women, these represent an occupation or activity—not of a mother this
time, but of a ruler, a warrior, or a priestess. Although they could be deities, I
suggest that, based on the overall context and their association with other figu-
rines representing different phases of the female life cycle, they are worldly and
ordinary. (Fig. 8)
7. Old women. This group of figures, which may be flat or hollow, cast or
modeled, represents old women. Their faces are crossed by lines depicting
wrinkles, while their smiles show their only two remaining teeth. Their hair is
carefully arranged, and they wear a simple quechquemitl or their bodies are painted
(Fig. 7c).
8. Articulated figures and rattles. The last group is composed of hollow
figurines with movable limbs.They are anthropomorphic and have pear-shaped
bodies covered in red paint. These “women” wear headdresses profusely deco-
rated with bands, flowers, circles, and other motifs, and display the red face
paint and the T-shaped dental mutilation mentioned above. Some of them
resemble the “praying women” described earlier (group 1), and several contain
beads and can be used as rattles (Fig. 7d).
The types of figurines described by Spranz (1973) coincide with those found
in the Pyramid of Flowers. Having been made locally, they correspond chrono-
logically to the late period of Teotihuacan, or the Epiclassic. Spranz tried to
identify the figurines by comparing them with the pictures of deities in the
codices of the Borgia group, although the figures are more complex in their
design and coloring. According to his analysis, three Borgia-group goddesses
are represented in the Xochitécatl figurines: Xochiquetzal, identified by a
headband, sometimes twisted, and a typical headdress with three rosettes and
two upright or lateral bunches of hair (this is the type referred to here as
“richly dressed women”); Xilonen, the young corn goddess, who wears a
headband with rosette in the center (as in the case of “women with children in
their arms”); and Tlazolteotl, originally a Huastec goddess of the earth and a
patroness of newborn children, who wears a cotton headband with dark and
white stripes (corresponding to “pregnant women, or receptacles”).
267
Fig. 8 Figurine of an enthroned woman,

Xochitécatl, Tlaxcala.
Recent explorations at Xochitécatl have demonstrated limitations of the

analysis made by Spranz. The absence of a clear archaeological context for the
origin and association of the figurines that he studied prevented him from
going beyond iconographic analysis and the questionable identification with
Aztec deities. In my opinion, the figurines from the offerings at Xochitécatl
represent flesh-and-blood women. Each offering includes infants, mature women,
mothers, and old women, or, in other words, the complete life cycle of real
women. Although it may be true that some of their traits appeared later as
attributes of Aztec goddesses, this is because Mesoamerican supernaturals typi-
cally adopted elements of dress from mortals (Fig. 8).
SPINDLE WHORLS
Nearly five hundred spindle whorls were found in the Pyramid of Flowers,
most of them in the stratigraphic level corresponding to the figurine offerings,
although they were not associated with the figurines. It is significant that more
than 65 percent of the whorls were discovered in the upper part of the pyra-
mid and the staircase area. As has been pointed out many times, spindle whorls
were closely linked to the images of goddesses or women.
BURIALS
Thirty-two burials were found in the Pyramid of Flowers. Covering all the
different periods of the site’s occupation, the burials were collective and indi-
268
Fig. 9 Offering 6, Pyramid of Flowers, Xochitécatl, Tlaxcala.
vidual, primary and secondary. They contained more than fifty persons and
were distributed in the upper section of the pyramid and along the front stair-
case in excavated pits. Fourteen of the burials additionally included offerings
of conch shells, shell artifacts, small obsidian blades, beads and plaques of green
stone and bone, ceramic vessels, and figurines dating from the Epiclassic period
(Fig. 9).
Preliminary analyses of bone remains, which are in a very poor state, show
that some of the burials are of adult women, but the majority—70 percent—
269
Fig. 10 Front view (west facade) of the staircase of the Pyramid of Flowers, Xochitécatl,
Tlaxcala. Note the use of metates.
are of children and adolescents. Two corpses were covered with inverted vessels
in the shape of truncated cones. At least two of the bodies show signs of ritual
sacrifice: two infants had been beheaded and their hands cut off.
STAIRCASES AND THE TEMPLE

Another element associated with the female nature of the space is the stair-
cases that lead to the top of the pyramid where a temple once stood. These
staircases are where most of the figurine offerings were discovered. They are
built of dressed stone, but saddle querns (metates) were used for some of the
steps. This isolated element could lead one to think that although the metates
were worn and had been discarded, it was logical to reuse them in buildings
because they were made of very good raw material, generally basalt. In con-
nection with all the other archaeological evidence present, however, it is valid
to assume that they do in fact have a ritual meaning associated with the femi-
nine cults practiced in the Pyramid of Flowers (Fig. 10). In the archaeological
context in Mesoamerica there is always an association between grinding maize
and women’s work.
STONE MONUMENTS
The stone sculptures found in the rubble of the staircase of the Pyramid of
Flowers are yet another feature of the “feminine cult.” They are as follows:
1. A man, perhaps the only male figure at Xochitécatl, sits cross-legged
270
with one arm over his chest and his hand resting on his shoulder. In the other
hand he holds his penis as if masturbating, which almost certainly is an allusion
to semen as fertilizer. This statuette is fragmented and has no head (Fig. 11a).
2. A skeletal woman carved in relief lies with her arms over her head and
her legs spread open to reveal her sexual parts. The woman’s ribs are marked in
the chest area, and she has an opening in her belly like the “pregnant” figurines
discussed above (Fig. 11b).
3. A serpent woman (Cihuacoatl) of gray stone, found in the debris of the
staircase of the Pyramid of Flowers, is portrayed with gaping jaws and the body
of a serpent that spirals around the statue to end in a rattlesnake’s tail on the
woman’s back (Fig. 11c).
4. Two round stone vats or water holders, measuring 1.7 and 3. 7 meters in
diameter, Vats 1 and 2, were discovered in association with the staircase. The
first contained four sculptures: a toad, a person in the jaws of a reptile, and two
anthropomorphic figures, one probably suffering from facial paralysis and the
other with a face suggesting death. Vat 2 seems to have been buried with its rim
at floor level; like Vat 1, it has a drainage hole. Judging from their stratigraphic
position, both vats, like the stone staircase, date earlier than offerings of figu-
rines. They could be related to a fertility cult because they contain water and
were oriented to face the female volcano of La Malinche (Fig. 12).
Finds like these have been recorded at other sites in the Puebla–Tlaxcala
valley (e.g., Totimehuacan and Tlalancaleca, suggesting that the complex just
described is not unique to Xochitécatl but typical of the whole region.
THE CAVE
During the surface reconnaissance, a cave was detected on the eastern slope
of the hill, located exactly opposite the facade of the Pyramid of Flowers and
aligned with it. This archaeological feature has not been studied thoroughly
because of the poor safety conditions inside it. However, we do know that it is
a natural cavity that people altered by cutting chambers and entrance tunnels
into it. As has been demonstrated at Teotihuacan, the presence of caves gives a
site a mythical meaning, linking it with the places where the human race and
the universe were thought to have originated. Caves were also often associated
with the woman’s womb in Pre-Hispanic times.
ORIENTATION AND INTEGRATION INTO THE SURROUNDINGS

As noted previously, Xochitécatl is a ceremonial center located at the top of
an extinct volcano. Its orientation is very important in connection with the
arguments laid out here. Once topographic surveys were made and the exact
position of each building plotted, there became distinguishable a series of sig-
271
Fig. 11 Round sculpture from the Pyramid of Flowers, Xochitécatl, Tlaxcala: (a) man
masturbating (ca. 60 cm high); (b) skeletal woman (ca. 45 cm high); (c) serpent woman (front
and rear views) (ca. 75 cm high).
272
Fig. 12 Vats 1 and 2, in front of the staircase at the Pyramid of Flowers, Xochitécatl,
Tlaxcala.
273
nificant factors that were in accordance both with the natural landscape and
with an artificial landscape constructed on the basis of ritual interpretation. In
other words, the choice of site and of positioning for each of the buildings
seems to have been the expression of a particular “cosmovision,” and, more
specifically, an interpretation of the relationship between the volcanoes and
humans.
In this case, there is a close connection with Popocatepetl and Iztaccíhuatl
southwest of the site, and with La Malinche to the east. Viewed from the center
of the plaza, the Pyramid of Flowers aligns perfectly with the profile of La
Malinche. This is evident not only in the direction of the facade and the stair-
case, but also in the positioning of burials and offerings. The Nahuatl name for
this extinct volcano is Matlacueye, or “She with the Blue Skirt,” which, de-
pending on the source, refers either to the springs that rise in its foothills or to
the color of renewed vegetation.
Throughout Mesoamerica, mountains and settlements were related sym-
bolically by alignments with astronomical and calendrical characteristics. These
particular connections could have influenced the foundation of sites and temples
throughout the Puebla–Tlaxacala valley, including places surrounding Xochitécatl
where there was concordance between such observable phenomena (Broda
1991: 461). The concepts that the ancient Mesoamericans had of geography
and climate included not only elements derived from exact observation of the
environment, but a large number of mythical and magical notions as well.
Cosmovision, defined as the structured observation of the universe in relation
to man, embraced the close fusion of these components.
I do not discuss here the archaeoastronomical studies that are being con-
ducted at La Malinche and Xochitécatl; it is worth mentioning, however, that
there are important days, such as 28 September, when sunrise can be observed
from the highest part of the archaeological site. As John Carlson has observed
(personal communication, 1994), the orientation of the Pyramid of Flowers
(and possibly Building A at Cacaxtla) is related to La Malinche, as well as to the
connection between Venus, corn, and fertility.
At dawn on 28 September the sun, when seen from the Pyramid of Flowers,
casts its first rays through the “mouth” of the female profile formed by La
Malinche (Fig. 13); at the same time on the other side of the valley, these rays
light up the Popocatepetl volcano. The next day, the nearby village of San
Miguel del Milagro celebrates its patron saint in a regionally important fiesta.
These days coincide with the beginning of the Late Postclassic (a.d. 1300–
1520) Nahua month Tepeilhuitl, or “Feast of the Mountains,” which fell on 30
September, as described by Bernardino de Sahagún:
274
Fig. 13 Sun rising in the “mouth” of La Malinche’s “profile” on 28 September.
In this month they celebrated a feast in honor of the high mountains,

which are in all these lands of this New Spain, where large clouds pile
up. They made the images of each one of them in human form, from
the dough which is called tzoalli, and they laid offerings before these
images in veneration of these same mountains.
Upon arrival of the feast in honor of the mountains, they slew four
women and one man. The first of these [women who were represen-
tations of the mountains] they called Tepexoch.The second they called
Matlalcueie. The third they named Xochitécatl. The fourth they called
Mayauel. And the man [who represented a serpent] they named
Milnauatl. They decked these women and the man in many papers
covered with rubber. And they carried them in some litters upon the
shoulders of women highly adorned, to the place where they were to
slay them.
After they had slain them and torn out their hearts . . . they carried
the bodies to the houses that they called calpulco, where they divided
them up in order to eat them. The papers with which they arrayed the
images of the mountains, after they had broken them to pieces in
order to eat them, they hung in the calpulco. (1982: 137–139; transla-
tion mine)
275
276
Fig. 14 Cycle of life: Female clay figurines of Xochitécatl, Tlaxcala.

CONCLUSIONS
The most important conclusion so far about the finds at the Pyramid of
Flowers at Xochitécatl derives from the clear archaeological evidence of an
obviously feminine ceremonial center. Further analysis of the contexts and
material briefly discussed here will no doubt eventually enable us to draw a full
picture of places where rituals and ceremonies of a female nature took place.
In contrast to neighboring, Cacaxtla, Xochitécatl is clearly an “exclusively
ceremonial area”; it cannot be said with any assurance, however, at what date or
time of the year the ceremonies were performed, and to which deity, natural
power, or moment in the life cycle they were dedicated. Approximate answers
can only be arrived at through ethnographic comparison, analysis of sources,
and tools such as archaeoastronomy.
It is important to emphasize that many of the female figurines found among
the offerings show birth, motherhood, maternal care, and old age—in other
words, the complete female life cycle. This probably points to ceremonies re-
lated to the fertility aspect of female life, connected not only with the earth,
but also with the reproduction of human society itself (Fig. 14). Other ele-
ments, such as the vats, clearly indicate a water cult. Thus, the entirety presents
duality, the pairing of earth and water, of positive and negative, of masculine
and feminine principles.
Who performed these ceremonies? Men and priests or women and priest-
esses? Perhaps this is not the most important unknown element; possibly both
sexes participated. What is more interesting is to understand the meaning of
any such ceremony and the influence it had on the behavior of the social group
that performed it and believed in it. The reason for the existence of a feminine
cult, a female deity, and a feminine space can be explained in part by studies of
Nahua female deities, which reveal similarities to some of the archaeological
evidence found:
Women were offered up at the feast of Xochiquetzal. Girls who were
sacrificed in her honor had their legs crossed at the moment of being
killed to indicate that they were dying virgin. Another woman was
sacrificed who was dressed as the goddess; she was flayed so that a man
could put her skin on and sit on the temple steps, where he pretended
to weave. Artisans and painters dressed as different animals gathered in
front of this man to dance, each holding his working tools. This dance
lasted until dawn, then they all went to bathe and so wash away their
sins. (Rodríguez-Shadow 1996; translation mine)
277
Among the archaeological elements found in direct association with the

Pyramid of Flowers and possibly related to the description of this ceremony
are the sculpture of a sacrificed woman and figurines that are richly decorated
with flowers.
At the time when the sculpture of the serpent woman was discovered, some
old residents of two nearby communities, San Miguel Xochitecatitla and San
Rafael Tenanyecac, had already told us the legend of Queen Xochitl, who lived
at Xochitécatl. A very beautiful woman, always dressed in white, she charmed
men who looked at her and made them cross a river where she washed her
clothes. Once these men, attracted and captivated by her beauty, plucked up the
courage to cross the river, she helped by carrying them but, halfway across,
turned into a serpent and devoured them.
As noted by Cecelia Klein (1988), the elites of the Aztec capital emphasized
the cruelty of Cihuacoatl and expressed her monstrous aspect in terms of in-
sects, skulls, sacrificial knives, and her alleged lasciviousness.
To retain their place in the Tenochca pantheon, the goddesses wor-
shiped by peasants had to adopt masculine, warlike characteristics and
equip themselves with feather headdresses, shields, and arrows.
The above simply shows that the fertility traditionally associated
with the female figure and peasants cults was transferred to and iden-
tified with what may be the penis because of a masculinizing, warlike
ideology. Therefore, goddesses of agriculture, especially Xochiquetzal,
could not remain completely female but had to acquire a dual or am-
biguous character, in a way, a type of symbolical hermaphroditism.
(Rodríquez-Shadow 1996, translation mine)
As regards the worship of female deities in Mesoamerica, we can refer to
the ideas put forward by Janet Berlo (1992) and Félix Báez-Jorge (1988) about
the existence of a feminine cult that took various forms during the region’s
history. The Mother Earth Goddess originated very early on and was basically
linked to agriculture. However, in Aztec times she was separated into several
different avocations, which dramatized their presence in many spheres of di-
vine action. For example, there were Chicomecoatl, propitiator of human fe-
cundity, who was venerated for her fertility that provided corn and thus
nourishment; Xochiquetzal, who turned sexuality into a sacred moment and
place of earthly and human fertility;Tlazolteotl, who helped her sons and daugh-
ters to sweep away their sins and who assisted at the birth of new human
beings; Chantico, honored daily by the household fire; Mayahuel, symbol of
pulque, which referred back to the myth of death generating life; Tonantzin,
278
“Our Mother,” generous but a fearsome warrior;Tonacacihuatl or Omecihuatl,

the primordial creator goddess, a Mother deity par excellence; and Coatlicue,
mother of Quetzalcoatl–Venus, Huitzilopochtli–Sun, and Coyolxauhqui–Moon.
The goddess of Xochitécatl is a bridge between the Great Mother Goddess
of Teotihuacan and the multiple avocations of the divine female principle that
appeared in Aztec times. Although she shares certain traits with the Mother
Goddess, such as, for example, an association with caves and mountains, there
are peculiarities in her representations that may allow for differentiation of
specific deities.
Although Xochitécatl’s dedication to a specific deity is still the subject of
debate, its geographic location shows that it was a cosmic center of primary
importance. This is evidenced by the orientation of the site toward dawn on a
particular date, its special relation to La Malinche, and the fact that the Pyramid
of Flowers is a copy of that mountain itself (Fig. 13). Together, these observa-
tions reveal a site where ceremonies were performed in which women played
the main roles, where children were sacrificed, and where other ritual activities,
such as baths and offerings, took place. All of these factors point to ceremonies
dedicated to the Earth Mother, as personified by the female volcano.
Another hypothesis still open to proof is whether there was a government
made up of women, perhaps a matriarchy, in view of the overwhelming pres-
ence of females among the figurines and stone sculptures. Women are shown
seated on thrones, holding shields and scepters, which is often associated with
goddesses in colonial manuscript paintings. Why not consider the possibility of
a female ruler, an outstanding “Amazon,” or a religious leader? As I have re-
peated throughout the discussion of the archaeological evidence, however, we
still lack data to confirm these hypotheses.
For now, it only remains for us to accept the challenge of identifying what
indicators an archaeologist should look for, and which ones have yet to be
interpreted, in order to bring us closer to an understanding of the position and
the role of the women who lived at Xochitécatl.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank everyone who took part in the

1992–94 Xochitécatl Project: archaeologist Ludwig Beutelspacher, who coor-
dinated the field work; my pupils Davíd Morales, who discovered the offerings
after long days of excavation, Beatriz Palavicini and Juan José González, who
applied themselves to the difficult task of analyzing excavated material; and
tireless co-workers Manuel de la Torre and Karina Durand, who helped with
the final version of this essay.
I must also thank John Carlson, who drew my attention to the relationship
279
between the stars and the site, and Felipe Solís, who has helped me to find my
way along the thorny paths toward an interpretation of Mesoamerican reli-
gion.
Finally, thanks to a Dumbarton Oaks grant awarded me in the summer of
1995, I was able to devote time to bibliographical research into this new ap-
proach of using gender analysis as a tool for interpretation. I am also grateful to
Cecelia Klein for inviting me to the symposium where I was able to present the
initial results of a long and fascinating research project.
280
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283
Physiology, Production, and Gendered Difference:
The Evidence from Mixtec and
Other Mesoamerican Societies
JOHN MONAGHAN
WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY
I
n the 1980s some of the most interesting anthropological work on kin-
ship was reconstituted in the field of gender. I am specifically referring to
David Schneider’s criticism of the widespread assumption that kinship is
based on the “natural facts” of sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and parturition.
Prior to Schneider’s work, anthropologists had assumed that the biology of
human reproduction produced a genealogical grid that was the same for all
societies. Where societies differed, ran the argument, was in how they classified
various elements in this grid, for instance, grouping the children of same-sex
siblings together in one category and the children of opposite-sex siblings in
another, or how they emphasized certain relationships over others, for example,
descent from mother over descent from father (Meigs 1984: 118).
Schneider (1968, 1984) argued instead that the idea of a genealogical grid
itself—which in its diagrammatic form was used by generations of fieldworkers
after W. H. R. Rivers for structuring their kinship data—is based on a Western
folk model, where relatedness is constructed as “blood” and/or “law.” Follow-
ing Schneider’s lead, we discovered that societies may use substances other than
blood to construct relatedness. For example, Zoque speakers of Chiapas say
that fathers transmit bone and anima to their children (Báez-Jorge 1975: 169).
Furthermore, the ways in which these substances are thought to be transmitted
need not be limited to sexual relations between males and females. Among
Mixtec speakers of Oaxaca, it is indeed blood that relates mothers and children.
However, blood is transmitted through the mother’s feeding of her child, both
inside the womb and outside the womb, as the child nurses (breast milk is
considered blood). All this has important consequences for kin relationships,
and may produce a kinship grid that departs in significant ways from one an
ethnographer might construct based on Western notions of consanguinity. To
285
John Monaghan
return to the Mixtec example, since it sometimes happens that a woman will
not be able to nurse her child after birth, the child is nursed by another
woman. This second woman then establishes a blood relationship with the
child; when the child grows up, it will be taught to refer to the wet nurse as
his or her “mother.” The child will then have two “consanguineal” mothers.
The general conclusion to be drawn here is that if we are to use kinship to
explain social patterns, we must begin by defining what constitutes kinship in
each particular case.
In extending this insight, Sylvia Yanagisako and Jane Collier (1987) took
aim at the idea that gender is simply a device through which particular groups
comprehend the facts of sexual differences. Just as Schneider rejected the idea
of a universal genealogical grid, they reject the idea that sex is a presocial,
biological fact. They suggest instead that sex is culturally variable, and that one
cannot assume that it universally provides the raw material for gender con-
structions. This position converges with the views of those, such as Michel
Foucault (1978–86), who emphasize the historical construction of naturalized
and essentialized sexualities (see also Moore 1994: 817).
An interesting example of the way in which the sexual body is historically
and culturally defined comes from the case of infant Siamese twins separated at
the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto during the 1990s. The twins both
had male chromosomes, but they shared only one set of genitalia. Doctors
chose to leave the more active, “aggressive” infant as a male, while constructing
a vagina for the meeker infant, who will be given hormones to develop as a
woman, although she will remain infertile. In Western “folk” thinking, genitals
are viewed as naturalized signs of gender difference, in no small part because
they are seen as connected to differences that are interior to the body, such as
chromosomes, hormones, and dispositions (Errington 1990). However, the Ca-
nadian case turns this premise on its head, since the doctors began with what
they perceived as interior differences in the twins (dispositions) in order to
construct the corresponding exterior signs (genitals). Many things could be
said about this example, including the way femaleness was defined by absence
or lack, but, most important, it clearly illustrates the way in which the gendering
of individuals concerns things that go far beyond the natural facts of sex.
In sociocultural anthropology today, it is accepted wisdom that the scope of
gender questions is as broad as the field itself. Even something as basic to
Mesoamerican ethnology as ethnic/community identity is a gendered category.1
1
Paraphrasing Leslie Devereaux (1987: 99), one is not simply a Zinacanteco; one is
either a Zinacanteco man or a Zinacanteco woman.
286
Physiology, Production, and Gendered Difference
We are fortunate to have in the ethnographic literature a number of rich

accounts of the ways in which males and females interact in given contexts.
Recent studies have also emphasized the differential impact of develop-
ment and economic change on males and females in rural communities,
which has created new insights into the organization of rural Mesoamerican
societies (e.g., Bossen 1984; Ehlers 1990; Mathews 1985; Stephen 1991).
But if gender is not necessarily defined in terms of the obvious, biological
binary sexual difference, then one of the things ethnographers need to do—
something that has not been done in relation to Mesoamerica—is ask what
the gender distinctions, in this area, are based on.
In carrying out this project, we have to be careful not to reduce the mean-
ingful aspects of gender to one or two core functions (Phillips 1990: 94–95;
Strathern 1988), acknowledging that gender can be conceptualized and classi-
fied in more than one way (Meigs 1990; Moore 1994). Failure to realize this
can produce confusing and even misleading results. For example, an assertion is
often made in the ethnographic literature of Mesoamerica that genders are
“complementary.” One can discern three distinct senses in which genders are
said to be complementary. First, there is the sense of two halves “constituting
the whole,” as in the gendered images used in Mesoamerican religions, which
begin with the proposition that reality is unified. The divine principle respon-
sible for the nature of the cosmos is often rendered in a discourse that com-
bines maleness and femaleness, as in the case of the Father–Mother gods of the
Maya (Hunt 1977: 234). Here, the indivisibility of reality is highlighted, and
transgendered images are used to evoke wholeness and completion. These im-
ages derive their force from denying the seemingly binary relation between
male and female (D. Tedlock 1983: 268). The second sense in which the gen-
ders are said to be complementary is that of males and females mutually com-
pleting each other. The ethnographic literature in this instance focuses on the
way men and women need each other to achieve a certain status in society.
Thus, throughout rural Mesoamerica, one becomes a fully adult man or woman
only after marriage. Finally, there is the sense that men and women comple-
ment each other in order to produce effects in concert that are different from
those produced separately. In this case, the focus is usually on something like
cargo service, fiesta sponsorship, or household maintenance, which requires
males and females to pool their efforts to ensure a successful outcome.
We can see from these examples that the assertion of gender complementarity
in Mesoamerica can have diverse references—a nondualistic image of cosmo-
logical wholeness, the achievement of a social status, or the organization of
collective activities. Unfortunately, these concepts are often collapsed, or as-
287
John Monaghan
sumed, rather than shown, to be mutually related. This is further complicated

when complementarity in something like fiesta sponsorship is taken as evi-
dence for a thoroughgoing ideology of equality. Not only does this reduce all
contexts to one, but it ignores the possiblility of ordering complementary rela-
tionships in a hierarchical way.
In this essay, I focus specifically on the physiology of gender difference in
Mesoamerica, without making any claims about gender relations, the way this
difference may be used socially, or even how it may relate to nonphysiological
markers of gender difference. I am willing to concede that by doing so, I fail to
account for the roles that various institutions and practices play in shaping the
body, sex and gender, or the way in which gender discourses function within
hegemonic projects. At this stage, however, we need fewer totalizing pronounce-
ments and more precise analysis.
I begin with examples from my own fieldwork among Mixtec speakers in
southern Mexico. The Mixtecs constitute the third largest indigenous language
group in Mexico, with more than four hundred thousand speakers. They live in
villages and small towns in the Mixteca, a region covering western Oaxaca,
eastern Guerrero, and southern Puebla, with sizable immigrant communities in
Baja, California, and elsewhere in the United States. Since 1983, I have been
working with Mixtec speakers in Santiago Nuyoo, a town of about three thou-
sand inhabitants in the Mixteca Alta region of western Oaxaca (Monaghan
1995). I have also carried out fieldwork in Mixtec-speaking towns on the Pa-
cific coast of Oaxaca and in the arid Mixteca Baja of Oaxaca and Puebla. Most
of the information I present here comes from Mixtec communities that have a
high proportion of monolingual Mixtec speakers, a very low percentage of
converts to evangelical and other faiths, and only a handful of nonindigenous
inhabitants. Many of the points made in this essay about the construction of
gender in the Mixteca can be applied to other Mesoamerican communities
that share similar profiles, as I attempt to demonstate with supporting evidence
from the literature.
THE BODY AS MATERIALIZED DIFFERENCE

It is not easy to frame questions that would allow one to establish whether
bodily organs or physiological processes are a focus of gender difference. First
of all, there arises the problem of talking about a subject that is not normally
discussed in mixed company. Additionally, it is problematic for a man to discuss
women with other men, as well as talk to women directly about sexual matters.
But perhaps the most difficult issue for me has been deciding how to deter-
mine what a “focus” might be for the people I work with. No one would deny,
288
for example, that there are genital differences between males and females, yet
how does one conclude whether these differences are a major center of atten-
tion in Mixtec gender ideology? I have decided to approach this question through
an examination of taboos, since norms of avoidance and prohibition single out
matters of special interest, often because they are powerful, dangerous, or both.
In Santiago Nuyoo there are several taboos that constrain female participa-
tion in productive activities. Women should not sow or weed corn fields, they
should not climb fruit trees, nor should they step over or sit upon corn, beans,
or any other agricultural products. With some variations, this pattern can also
be found in other areas, as among the Q’eqchi’ Maya of Guatemala (Wilson
1995: 114–115). The reason for this taboo is that in Mixtec discourse women
are ten’en, “polluting,” which the Mixtec relate to the odor and emanations
from female genitals. Such emanations, it is believed, will cause the crops to fail,
fruit trees to become barren, and seeds to spoil. A particularly vivid example of
this is found in the Codex Laud (Anders, Jansen, and Reyes García 1994: fol.
40), where the scribe has portrayed Tlazolteotl, the Central Mexican goddess
identified with sexual filth, with a dark vapor coming from between her legs.
Male activity is also constrained by taboos. As discussed below, men in cer-
tain states should not go into corn fields at any stage of production, nor should
they approach places where other men are making lime. (This process requires
limestone to be heated in an underground oven.) These males are also ten’en, or
polluting, and the odor and emanations coming from their genitals will like-
wise cause crops to fail, fruit trees to become barren, and so on.
If males are not all pure, however, females are not all polluting. Young girls
for example, may help in the fields or climb fruit trees without causing any
damage. Aged women are also often freed from these restrictions (although I
do not believe that many eighty-year-old women would rejoice at being al-
lowed to shimmy up a mango tree again).
What makes certain males and most adult females polluting is not some-
thing essential to their being, but the fact of their having engaged in sexual
intercourse. In Nuyoo Mixtec, the verb used to describe the sexual act is sa’a
cuachi, “to sin,” which should be interpreted as physical stain or defilement
rather than interior guilt. The idea that the sexual act produces pollution and
negative effects can be encountered in other areas of Mesoamerica as well. For
the Mixe, another indigenous group in Oaxaca, a dream of sexual union por-
tends the loss of crops, terrible sickness, or the death of a family member (Lipp
1991: 45). Among the Q’eqchi’, sex is “a shameful, guilty act,” although it is not
the odor but the heat generated by the act that damages the corn (Wilson 1995:
112, 152). In a Tzotzil Maya story from Chiapas, people begin to engage in sex
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only after they are instructed how to do so by a demon named Pukuh (Gossen
1993: 424). Although the Catholic Church itself had once taught that Original
Sin was transmitted through marital sexuality (Ingham 1986: 78–79, 188), at
least some colonial Spanish priests found the idea that sex could lead to crop
failure and misfortune so unorthodox that they described it in their reports on
illicit and demonically inspired knowledge (e.g., Ruiz de Alarcón 1892: 182–
183). Early Spanish accounts also documented the Nahua practice of bathing
children at birth to remove the contamination of their parents’ sexual activity,
since it was believed that sexual fluids could pollute the child (Burkhart 1989:
113; López Austin 1980, 1: 326, 336; Sullivan 1966: 83).
Since the source of pollution is the sexual act, the males who are not al-
lowed to go into the corn fields must be those who have had sexual relations
relatively recently. It is said that a man should wait at least a day after sex before
going back to work and should bathe thoroughly, especially if he is planting or
weeding. Participation in ritual activities is also prohibited after sex. Some in-
digenous groups in Oaxaca extend this prohibition in dramatic ways. In the
Chatino-speaking town of Santiago Yaitpec, for instance, the ritual calendar
requires the general population to observe 249 days of abstinence yearly; as a
consequence, July, August, and October, which fall nine months after the peri-
ods with few restrictions, have consistently high birth rates (Greenberg 1981:
163–168). For individual Mazatec religious specialists, periods of sexual absti-
nence can last up to fifty-two days (Boege 1988: 173).
It is true that defilement from the sexual act lasts longer in the case of
women. One Nuyooteco man has attributed the difference to bodily architec-
ture, saying that women retain sexual fluids and cannot remove the pollution as
quickly and easily as men; consequently, since it is assumed that adult women
have sex regularly, they are never completely free from the pollution. Thus,
there is nothing inherently more polluting about female genitals than male
genitals. The same notion can be seen in the widespread Nuyooteco opinion
that the reason for the difference is a functional consequence of clothing: men
wear pants, which prevent the odors and emanations from escaping the genital
area, while women wear skirts, from which the emanations are free to escape.
June Nash (1970: 272) reports something similar for the Maya of Chiapas,
among whom a woman’s skirt is perceived to capture the “negatively powerful”
odors that emanate from her body. In some areas adult women seem to achieve
a pure state by abstinence, just as males can. The Totonac of eastern Mexico, for
example, consider widows pure because they do not have sex. Widows there-
fore often assume the task of preparing foods and other objects on ceremonial
occasions (Ichon 1973: 248–249, pl. 18).
290
All this suggests that differences between male and female participation in
productive activities are not based on genital difference. Men and women can
be equally polluting, and the source of this pollution is the same for both. It
should be noted that the word often translated as “genitals” in Mixtec, shu,
encompasses both genitals and anus, and Nuyootecos generally identify this
area of the body as the part that is most likely to “pick up dirt.” Barbara Tedlock
(1982: 146) notes that in Quiche, the polite name for genitals of either sex is
awas, or “taboo,” while Leslie Devereaux (1987: 92) remarks that for the
Zinacantan “there is no particular conceptual elaboration of the physiological
differences of male and female.” The idea that genitals are not the focus of
differentiation for Mesoamerican people may perhaps also be seen in the Aititeco
use of the avocado as a metaphor for both sexes’ genitals (Tarn and Prechtel
1986: 173), as well as in the belief that males and females, as gendered beings,
existed prior to their acquisition of genitals. Alfonso Villa Rojas (1978: 437–
438) cites a Yucatec Maya Adam and Eve story, in which the two, while in the
Garden of Eden, were physiologically undifferentiated. Even though they formed
“la primer pareja humana,” neither of them had genitals, and Eve had no breasts.
God placed them in the garden to take care of an apple called Príncipe. After a
while they were unable to resist and ate the apple (Eve’s culpability is much
reduced in the Maya version). Pieces of the apple got stuck in different places
in their bodies, causing changes to appear. One piece, stuck in Adam’s throat,
became his Adam’s apple, another piece got stuck between his legs and turned
into his penis. One more piece became Eve’s breasts, and another her “zona
sexual.” Sin occurred for the first time because the two began to have sexual
relations, not because they disobeyed God.
It is true that the lack of genitals here could be interpreted as a manifesta-
tion of a presocial world. There is evidence from Mesoamerica that genital
ambiguity can be viewed as a manifestation of a general lack of identity. Thus,
in some places those born on the five unlucky days—the period “sin año,” or
time out of time, as Toribio de Benavente o Motolinía (1914: 29) puts it—are
said to lack a destiny. Destiny in Mesoamerica is identity, personality, and for-
tune all rolled into one, so those born at this time lack identity. Among the Ixil
Maya of Guatemala, such individuals were held to be sexually ambiguous; girls
looked like boys, and boys looked like girls (Lincoln 1945: 118). We do see
individuals without genitals portrayed in the Codex Vindobonensis (Anders,
Jansen, and Reyes García 1992), one of the few surviving Pre-Columbian books,
even though these individuals are not genderless.
To repeat, the argument here is only that genitals are not an important basis
for an ideology of gender differentiation; Mesoamerican people certainly do
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John Monaghan
recognize distinctions between male and female sexual organs. So, we may ask,
is there a body organ or physiological process that does define gender differ-
ence for native Mesoamerican people? The evidence so far has been based on
the equivalences found in the way male and female genitals are treated in the
taboo system. Are there bodily organs or physiological processes that are differ-
ently tabooed? To answer this question, we need to consider the treatment of
pregnancy in Nuyoo and other Mesoamerican societies.
PREGNANCY
In Nuyoo, there is a wide range of activities that pregnant women should
avoid, and which do not have anything to do with their health or the health of
their fetuses. Pregnant women should not approach metal pots where pork
rind is frying, since it will then come out heavy with fat and sticky. Pregnant
women should avoid the places where tamales are being boiled, since the tama-
les will then cook only on one side. The same is true for meat and ground corn
cooked in underground ovens (the famous Mixtec barbacoa). Among the Huave
of Oaxaca, pregnant women should not approach places where chocolate or
atole is being prepared, since they will cause it to curdle (Rita 1979: 285). In
Nuyoo, even tortillas will be affected, since pregnant women will cause them to
grow mold after only half a day. Pregnant women should also avoid the ovens
where men make lime, since the fire will burn unevenly, and the rock will
come out only half-done. This can also be seen in Zinacantan, where it is
believed that the fire will burn outward from the chimney where the stones are
piled, toward the oven entrance (Blaffer 1972: 122). In pottery-making com-
munities in Oaxaca, pregnant women do not approach kilns for the same rea-
son. Finally, pregnant women in Nuyoo should avoid contact with fruit, in
particular bananas, since these will mature only on one side, with the other side
remaining green. Some say that pregnant women may upset things because
they have a strong vision, nuu sheen, sometimes translated as the “evil eye,”
which Jacques Galinier (1990: 649–651), who has worked among the Otomi,
alludes to when he notes that pregnant women are sometimes suspected of
witchcraft.
Becoming pregnant and giving birth are a rite of passage in many
Mesoamerican societies. Conversely, not being able to produce children is of-
ten grounds for divorce. Among the Chinantec of Oaxaca, brides take pride in
being visibly pregnant at the wedding ceremony (the betrothed may initiate
sexual relations immediately after the formal pedida, or marriage request)
(Bartolomé and Barabas 1990: 176). According to some Nuyootecos, women
who do not bear children find themselves condemned to a very unhappy fate
292
after death.They say that the the evil wind Tachi forces these women to have its
children, so they spend eternity giving birth to snakes, toads, scorpions, and the
like. Others say that they go to a cold, dark, sad place, where they live alone. No
such fate awaits men, although Nuyootecos do tell the story of a man whom
god returned to life because he had not had sex.
These data suggest that in Nuyoo and other Mesoamerican societies there is
a focus on the pregnant body as a gendered sign of difference. While a variety
of taboos restrict the activities of women who are pregnant, in Nuyoo at least
there is no equivalent set of taboos for men. We might ask at this point why
pregnancy is of special interest in Mesoamerica. If genitals represent, for us,
things that are constitutive of differences in male and female identity, can we
say that pregnancy represents something equally significant?
One way to answer this question begins with considering the widespread
use of the body and its processes as a kind of idiom to organize the realm of
production in Mesoamerica. Those familiar with the physiocratic eighteenth-
century model of the economy, in which exchange was likened to blood circu-
lation (see Gudeman 1986), should not be surprised that Mesoamerican ideas
about the body would enter into ideas about production. Indeed, Europeans in
the premodern period frequently wrote about production as “giving birth” to
new material objects. This seems to be the general sense in which production is
viewed in Mesoamerica as well. Perhaps the best example of this is found in the
work of Martín Prechtel and Robert Carlsen (1988: 123), when they note that
“amongst the people of Santiago Atitlán, weavings are not just woven but in
fact born.” As evidence, they point out that the shed is called the umbilicus, and
the shuttle, nourishment (1988:126). In Santiago Nuyoo, corn production is a
process where the corn plant, identified as a young, fertile woman, bears an ear
of corn like a mother bears a child (Monaghan 1995: 110–117). As in other
areas of Mesoamerica, containers such as large cooking jars and ovens, in which
a number of productive processes take place, are equated with wombs (Monaghan
1995: 57; for other examples, see Galinier 1990: 303, 307; Katz 1996: 6. Alfredo
López Austin (1980 1: 275) notes that during earthquakes the Aztecs covered
their ollas so that pregnant women would not miscarry. Moreover, in the Mixteca,
the womb is seen as a kind of receptacle in which the fetus grows, and women
who are pregnant are said to be “cooking.” Thus, any process that involves the
transformation of something through baking it in an oven, firing it in a kiln, or
boiling it in a jar resembles what goes on in a woman’s womb when she is
pregnant.
Three clarifying points need to be made about the notion that production
is like the process by which a woman brings a child to term. First, we need to
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be careful not to view production simply as the projection of human physi-

ological processes onto the acts of weaving, corn growth, lime making, or cook-
ing. Mixtec ideas about the process of becoming pregnant and bringing a child
to term are also informed by ideas about other productive processes.The woman’s
body, for example, goes from being yute, while she is with child, to nijia, after
she gives birth and is given a sweatbath by the midwife. The former is a term
used to refer to plants that have not ripened and whose fruits remain green,
immature, and full of water, while the latter signifies things that are mature and
hard, like stout beams used for constructing a house (see also Katz 1996). More-
over, the state of being pregnant is compared to a plant seed that has become
wet and sprouted. This projection of the cycles of plant development onto
pregnancy can likewise be seen among the Chinantec, where, as Carole Browner
(1985: 27–28) reports, the gestation of the fetus is compared to the process of
growth of a parasitic mistletoe. The fetus is believed to attach itself to the
mother’s spine, much as the mistletoe attaches itself to a tree trunk, and then to
feed from the mother’s intestine, just as the mistletoe seed sends roots into the
host plant and is nourished by the plant’s food intake. The parallel can also be
found among the Zoque, where Laureano Reyes Gómez (1988: 207–212), noting
the frequent metaphorical associations between the human body and trees,
concludes that the plant world is the model for the body. Nor should we see
this only in naturalistic terms. As mentioned above, the process of carrying a
child to term is explicitly said to be a process of “cooking” (see also Blaffer
1972: 123). Esther Katz (1996: 6, 13) reminds us that the Mixtec word chi’yo,
“cooking,” can mean boiling and steaming as well as roasting, and that it is the
former processes that the Mixtec want to evoke when referring to pregnancy.
These examples indicate that, just as we should be careful not to accept one’s
sex as a presocial, biological fact, so we should be equally careful when consid-
ering reproduction.
The second clarifying point concerns the division of labor. Many ethno-
graphic accounts have documented a clear-cut division of labor in rural
Mesoamerican societies, with activities divided into male and female tasks (al-
though what these are can vary). Productive tasks that are not gendered are the
exception. In the Mixtec households I lived in, only shelling corn, gathering
firewood, tending goats and sheep, harvesting crops and hauling loads from the
fields occur to me as activities in which men and women participated equally.
Most other jobs were either “male” or “female.” Moreover, participation of
women in many male tasks was constrained by taboos, as was male participa-
tion in some female tasks (although, of course, people could ignore these ta-
boos in a pinch). In Zinacantan, there is a well-developed sense of shame that
294
surrounds the participation of males in female tasks such as cooking tortillas or

even picking up a loom (Devereaux 1987: 97–98).
If one looks closely at Mesoamerican ideas about production, however, the
ideological segregation of genders is not as absolute as it appears initially. One
could argue that both males and females are present in any productive act. Thus,
in Nuyoo it may be men who make lime, but the focus of the activity is the
lime oven, which men treat as a womb. If a pregnant woman, for example,
happens by, and the process is ruined because the fire begins to burn unevenly,
the men will pull out all the timbers and reinsert them, starting the fire again.
In this case, however, they will also add bone to the logs. Bone is considered a
highly charged, fertile, even seminal substance in Mixtec culture (Furst 1978:
318), and thus it is as if the men have reinitiated the productive process by
refilling the oven/womb with bone/semen. This interpretation is supported by
the Mixtecs’ own explanation for this practice: they say that the bone gives yii,
“heat” or “force,” to the fire. Yii is an unbound morpheme that also appears in
the words yicin, “bone,” and tee yii, “male” (King n.d.).
Weaving is another activity where both male and female elements are present.
The batten of the loom is called in Nuyoo the machete, which is the preemi-
nent male symbol; dreams of a machete, for example, portend the birth of a
male child. Even though weavers are female, weaving depends on their ma-
nipulation of this highly charged object (it is so potent, in fact, that should one
strike nettlesome female children with it, it might leave them sterile). In other
words, males may be the ones who engage in agriculture, and females, the ones
who weave, but—at least in terms of the ways in which production is imag-
ined—both activities seem to be joint creations. Even the delivery of infants
can be seen in this way, since in Nuyoo males serve as midwives.
The third point to make about production is that when we are confronted
with examples like this, our tendency is to think of the production process as
involving the producer engaged in a kind of sexual act with a female or male
who is symbolically present or symbolically giving birth. If one looks closely at
the ethnographic material, however, another interpretation offers itself. In the
case of agriculture, the male farmer manipulates both male and female items in
the productive process—the digging stick and the machete on the male side,
the earth and the “female” corn plant on the female side. In weaving, the female
weaver manipulates both female and male items; the shed may be female, but
the batten is male. What this suggests is that producers are not symbolically
having sex or becoming pregnant; rather, the producers’ role is to bring to-
gether items that are critically matched and integral to the creative process.
If we return to the question posed earlier—why pregnancy is a basis for the
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construction of gender difference in Mesoamerica—the answer, of course, has

more than a little to do with the fact that pregnancy is something that males
cannot achieve. This does not tell us, however, why, among all physiological and
bodily states that might distinguish males from females, pregnancy is such a
focus. To address this question, it is important to begin by noting that taboos on
pregnant women are not about contamination. In my opinion, this is a point
that Sarah Blaffer misses in her discussion of the Zinacantan material. Blaffer
(1972: 122) says that pregnant women cause things to putrefy, but I do not
think that this is the only, or even the correct way to conceptualize the situa-
tion (it is not clear to me, for example, how lime can putrefy). While it is true
that Nuyooteco men and women in a state of pollution can damage the same
things as pregnant women, the ethnographic material indicates that they do so
for different reasons. Pregnant women are definitely not ten’en, “polluting,” and
do not emit odors or any other kind of emanations that cause things to “go
wrong.” Most say that the danger lies with their vision. The Huave even con-
sider that pregnant women emit a very pleasing odor (which may attract un-
wanted visitors) (Rita 1979: 279). In Nuyoo, pregnant women affect things by
causing them to “remain raw” (nsa’a tiu’in) or “not cook” (ndu chi’yo), not by
causing them to rot. The explanation seems to be that pregnant women, who
are “cooking,” should avoid contact with things that are also being cooked,
such as baked foods, pork rinds fried in fat, lime made in ovens, pottery fired in
kilns, and so on. The examples that Blaffer (1972: 122) gives, in which pregnant
women harm lime and chicha, involve things that are also cooking or trans-
forming, with the result that they come out badly.
Women, then, are cooking, ripening, and “producing” while they are preg-
nant, and thus may disrupt other productive processes. The taboos that exist are
concerned with keeping productive processes discrete, since the things that
pregnant women negatively affect are all likewise in the process of cooking,
ripening, or transforming (even the moldy tortillas are the product of improper
cooking: they have not been baked long enough, and too much water has been
left in them). As one Nuyooteco pointed out, no one would try to cook barbacoa
in the oven where one was making lime—one or the other, if not both, was
bound to be ruined.
Cooking, of course, is a widespread metaphor for creation and transforma-
tion, perhaps as widespread as birth, and thus, if pots are born, it should not be
too surprising that babies are cooked. However, it is worth noting that, based
on the Mixtec idioms, what occurs in a woman’s body is the direct counterpart,
if not the equivalent, of the very process that makes humans civilized. One
example of this is the classification of space. Cleared land, where people have
296
cut down the forest to build houses, make milpa, and carry out social activities,
is also called chi’yo “cooked.” In the sixteenth century, the term chi’yo was used
for altar, house site, or foundation. In the ancient writing systems, the concept
of chi’yo was represented by a temple platform with a stairway to one side
(Smith 1973: 45, 47). “Cooked” lands contrast with forests and brush (yuku),
places beyond ordered existence.
On another level, pregnancy and birth are equated with agriculture. For
Nuyootecos, corn agriculture, along with living in houses, sacrificing to the
gods, and cooking food, is a practice that distinguishes humans from the presocial
tiumi, “owl people,” of ancient times, who hunted, lived in caves, did not wor-
ship the gods, and ate their food raw (see Monaghan 1995: 32–33). The gods
made corn agriculture possible by giving to people their daughter, the corn
plant, just as parents give their daughters in marriage. She then bore a child, the
ear of corn, just as newly married women ideally bear children.
Finally, birth is widely used to represent institutional acts. There is, for ex-
ample, the idea that Nuyootecos had claimed the territory that they came to
occupy because they had emerged from a place called soco usha, “cave seven” or
“womb seven.” Caves of emergence are iconographically compared to wombs
throughout Mesoamerica, and images of wombs are ubiquitous in the cosmog-
onic events portrayed in Mesoamerican manuscripts (Milbrath 1988). Even
sacrifice—the cosmogonic act articulating Mesoamerican social, political, and
cosmological arrangements—is related to pregnancy and birth. In a neat con-
junction of images, the Lord 9-Wind, the Mixtec Quetzalcoatl, brings water
from the sky to make the land fertile, oversees the birth of the Mixtec elite
from the tree at Apoala, initiates key rites in the Mixtec cult, and is born from
a sacrificial knife (Codex Vindobonensis, in Anders, Jansen, and Reyes García
1992: fol. 49a), suggesting that if creation is like the act of sacrifice, then sacri-
fice is like the act of giving birth. Again, throughout Mesoamerica, sacrificial
wounds and wombs are equated (Milbrath 1988).
Although Nuyootecos say that pregnant women are sick, ca’vi,2 and although,
after giving birth, women are flaccid and weak, ki’mu,3 one should not assume
that this is a negative state. To the contrary, the processes associated with it
suggest that women possess a unique power. It is true that the literature usually
describes pregnancy in negative terms. However, Q’eqchi’ women, when preg-
nant, strive to reach a state of kalkab’il, which means peace, contentment, and
2
The term ca’vi refers specifically to the blotches that sometimes appear on the skin of
pregnant women and boys entering puberty.
3
The term ki’mu is also applied to chickens and turkeys that have just laid an egg.
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John Monaghan
optimism. Richard Wilson (1995: 129) notes that the Q’eqchi’ use the same
word for the desired ambiance of a ritual, suggesting that a pregnant woman is
in a marked, sacred condition.
It is also clear that pregnant women can act positively. In the ethnographic
literature this involves righting productive acts that are going badly. Victoria
Bricker (1973: 107) mentions that in Chamula feasts, the sponsor may ask women
who are pregnant to bite the brisket of the bull that has been slaughtered, to
protect the meat from flies and from spoiling. In other words, while pregnant
women can cause meat that is already in the fire to cook improperly, they can
also prevent raw meat from starting to cook improperly. Among the Otomi,
pregnant women can cause frying pork rinds that have become too crisp to
soften again (Galinier 1990: 425). Similarly, in San Miguel el Grande, a Mixtec-
speaking community near Nuyoo, a man may ask a pregnant woman to walk
around the oven in a counterclockwise direction if lime or barbacoa is coming
out badly, so that the product comes out as it should. A somewhat different
example is provided by the ethnohistorical literature. The Mexica saw women
who died in pregnancy as the counterparts of warriors who died in battle.
Warriors would try to force midwives to surrender the bodies of women who
died in this way, or even disinter a buried body, so that they could cut off her
middle finger and remove some of her hair, which they would then attach on
the inside of their shields when going into battle. This would “benumb” the
feet of their foes, ensuring that they captured and killed many of them (Sullivan
1966: 89). Thus, as this example clearly shows, the power of the pregnant body
cannot be said to be absolutely positive or negative, since it depends on the
woman’s relationship to the object she affects.
To conclude, if bodily organs and processes are viewed in terms of what is
singled out as special and powerful, i.e., tabooed, then male and female genitals
do not appear strongly differentiated in Mesoamerica. However, men and women
are strongly differentiated by pregnancy in the taboo system, in that the restric-
tions placed on activity of pregnant females have no parallels for males. More-
over, pregnant women have unique effects on things, which should not be seen
as contaminating. While the regulative functions of these constructions have
not been considered here (see, however, Browner 1986, 1989), it is clear that
the Mesoamerican fascination with pregnancy must be seen in terms of the
discourses that associate it with the practices of corn agriculture, clearing land
for building houses and towns, and craft production—in other words, the civi-
lizing acts that make humans distinct from the presocial beings of the past.
298
Acknowledgments This essay is based on fieldwork supported by the Mellon

Foundation, the University Research Council of Vanderbilt University, and the
Wenner-Gren Foundation. I would like to thank Cecelia Klein for her critical
comments and editorial suggestions.
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John Monaghan
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304
Breaking the Glass Ceiling:
The Strategies of Royal Women in Ancient States
JOYCE MARCUS
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Few women in history have achieved a dominant position in

the working world, and even fewer have competed with male
politicians and become political leaders. . . . (Rosaldo 1974: 37)
U
nder certain conditions women became political leaders in the an-
cient world. In which ancient societies was it easier for women to
rule, and why? I begin this essay by presenting two Old World societ-
ies in which women rose to power. In one society, female attributes were thought
to be desirable for rulership; in the other, rulership was considered so “gender
male” that a queen literally had to be depicted as a king. Having established the
two opposite ends of the continuum, I then situate Mesoamerican societies
between those extremes, evaluating the degree of diff iculty that women had in
becoming rulers. By looking at the two Old World cases f irst, we can begin to
develop a framework for the comparative study of Mesoamerican women, and
we can focus on those Mixtec, Maya, and Aztec women who broke through
the “glass ceiling” to be rulers in their own right.
Male rulers dominated the records of ancient states. Their names and faces
are well known to us from the many monuments they commissioned. Most
women who became politically powerful were members of royalty. Many were
the mothers of kings, wives of kings, or temporary regents who kept the throne
warm for sons too young to rule. Countless royal women inf luenced political
decisions through advice and persuasion, but remained invisible to history.Their
role was to be “the whisper behind the throne” (Cohen 1993: 191). Among
Africa’s Ashanti, for example, the whisper came from the ohema, or “queen
mother.” Her son, the king, sat upon a stool that was def ined as a male artifact
on which no woman, save one, could sit. When the Ashanti king went off to
war, his wife took her husband’s name and sat upon his seat. This occasion was
the “only exception,” according to Robert Rattray (1969: 83), “to the rule that
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Joyce Marcus
no woman may sit upon the male stool.” Nevertheless, his mother’s words were
said to have profound inf luence on his political decisions.
Each society discussed here def ined gender differently, and each had its own
history (Gero and Conkey 1991). Such histories reveal that programmatic state-
ments like “history is androcentric” or “men make states, women make babies”
are too rigid and stereotyped to be useful. As anthropologists, we must analyze
each culture in its own terms before we search for general trends. As Lynn
Meskell (1995) argues, our goal must be to discover the truth about past societ-
ies without imposing a modern political agenda.
THE LOVEDU OF SOUTH AFRICA

I begin with a society in which rulership became “gender female,” the Lovedu
of South Africa (Fig. 1). According to the ethnohistory of this Bantu-speaking
group, their last male ruler held off ice around 1800. He was followed by three
female rulers named Mujaji I, II, and III (Krige and Krige 1943).
Key to the Mujajis’ success were f ive attributes—order, peace, prosperity,
nurturing, and appeasement—all intimately associated with women by the
Lovedu. On the other hand, the Lovedu connected chaos, aggression, and strife
with men. “Politics that works was feminine,” says Ronald Cohen (1993: 194),
and “politics that leads to dispute or even violent conclusions was masculine.”
The Lovedu regarded women as nurturers, associating them with harmony
and peace. Their last male ruler, they explained, was a leader during times of
war, but after him they needed a leader to bring peace and prosperity, and a
woman was considered to possess more of the necessary qualities.“The Lovedu
case is instructive,” says Cohen (1993: 195), “because womanly qualities are the
cardinal virtues associated with political skills even when, as they usually are,
the practitioners are men.”
The Lovedu version of how they came to have queens undoubtedly com-
bines legend with history, but it reveals a worldview and a political ideology in
which women could rise to power. The regime of the last male ruler, they say,
was marred by internecine strife. At the end of his reign, this ruler predicted
that a new era would begin and that a woman would rule. He conf ided this
vision to his daughter, who later became Mujaji I, asking that she bear him an
heir. Since the f irst child of this incestuous union was a son, he was strangled;
the second child was a daughter who lived to be Mujaji II.
Mujaji I, known as the Rain Queen because her name literally meant “Trans-
former of the Clouds,” was on the Lovedu throne from ca. 1800 to 1850. This
period was noted for its peace and prosperity, a relief from the chaos of her
father’s reign. Mujaji I spent most of her life secluded from her own people,
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Breaking the Glass Ceiling
Fig. 1 Location of the Lovedu in South Africa (redrawn after Krige and
Krige 1943: endpaper).
which gave rise to legends about her fair skin, her wisdom, and her immortality.
In her court she received ambassadors from the neighboring Zulu and Swazi,
who gave her gifts of young women as “brides.” In return, the Mujaji was
supposed to send rain to the territories of these foreign visitors. Her reputation
as a rain-maker was great, with the Zulu regarding her as “the greatest magician
of the north.” Among her neighbors, the Mujaji was considered “immortal,
inaccessible, mysterious.” She was described as the “queen of locusts and of
drought, a four-breasted marvel, her name struck terror in the hearts of would-
be enemies, and her fame surpassed even that of Mantatisi, the ferocious female
tyrant who . . . laid the foundations of the Rotse empire” (Krige and Krige
1943: 1).
The young women received as “brides” by the Mujaji were used by her in a
strategy of alliance building; she married them out to most of the one hundred
district heads ruling below her in the political hierarchy. By allocating wives to
district heads, the Rain Queen became “parent-in-law” to all (Krige and Krige
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Joyce Marcus
1943: 175). This web of f ictive kinship extended to other spheres, and many
off ices were considered “gender female.” For example, the intermediaries who
came to the Lovedu capital, and through whom political and legal matters were
brought from the districts to the Rain Queen, were called “mothers” of their
districts.This was a hereditary post that could be f illed by either men or women.
In 1940, 86 percent of the “mothers” were biological males whose role it was
to “nurture” their respective districts (Krige and Krige 1943: 180). Many “moth-
ers” were relatives of the Rain Queen, whose job it was to settle disputes
among her “children.”
It should be noted that, although the Rain Queen was the de facto head of
the judicial system, she never appeared in court because it was located in the
men’s courtyard. She was, however,“always in the background, and in theory all
decisions at the capital should be reported to, and conf irmed by her” (Krige
and Krige 1943: 186).
The Lovedu queen had no off icial husband, but maintained a secret male
consort by whom she bore offspring. Mujaji II, allegedly the incestuous off-
spring of Mujaji I and her father, was secretly entrusted with the scepter of
off ice around 1850. Because Mujaji II was barren, her “wife” bore her succes-
sor, Mujaji III, who ascended the throne in 1896. By then, there were so many
Europeans living in South Africa that we have written histories independent of
the oral accounts of the Lovedu themselves.
These European histories conf irm the queen’s reputation for being able to
bring rain and good harvests. They tell us that her emotions were thought to
affect the rain. For example, when she was upset there was drought, and during
droughts the “mothers” of the districts approached her with gifts, pleading for
rain and a good crop.“It is doubtful,” write Eileen and Jacob Krige (1943: 273),
“whether any one other than the queen herself is in possession of this secret
[of bringing rain], for it is bound up with the title and power to succeed to the
throne.” This secret of rain making was imparted to the queen’s successor just
prior to the queen’s death.
Without question, the likelihood of female rulership among the Lovedu
was increased by that culture’s positive view of feminine qualities such as nur-
turing and peacemaking. “The queen does not f ight,” say the Lovedu (Krige
and Krige 1943: 284), who consider appeasement a strength and a source of
prestige, rather than a sign of weakness. Nowhere else in South Africa, accord-
ing to the Kriges, were so many women found in so many important political
positions, especially considering the fact that kinship was patrilineal. Lovedu
worldview and ideology may be contrasted, for instance, with those of their
neighbors, the Lozi, for whom leadership was considered a masculine role. The
308
Lozi at that time had two capitals, with a man ruling the northern capital, and
a woman the southern. All Lozi considered the leader of the southern capital
to be a man, including the ruler herself. “When I go into council,” said a Lozi
princess to anthropologist Max Gluckman (1951: 24),“I change—I am a man.”
This revealing statement prepares us for the case of Egypt’s Hatshepsut.
EIGHTEENTH-DYNASTY EGYPT
Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty (1550–1300 B.C.) offers a sharp contrast to the
Lovedu. It would be diff icult to imagine an ancient state in which a woman
had less chance of becoming ruler. The ancient Egyptians considered kingship
“gender male,” because Re (the sun god and father of the pharaohs) was male,
as were both Horus (the falcon sky god) and Osiris (god of agriculture, death,
and rebirth). There was, in fact, no word for “queen” in early Egyptian hiero-
glyphic texts; the only titles open to royal women were “god’s wife,” “king’s
wife,” and “king’s sister.” To be recognized as a ruler in eighteenth-dynasty art,
one had to wear a chenjyt or kilt, a false beard, and a nemes headcloth—all male
garments. To rise to the top, a woman literally had to become “king.”
Out of Egypt’s roughly three hundred pharaohs during three thousand years,
we know of four who were women—Nitocris, Sobek Neferu, Tausret, and
Hatshepsut. Of these four, the best-documented case is that of Hatshepsut,
who ruled from ca. 1479 to 1458 B.C., during the eighteenth dynasty.
Hatshepsut’s Rule
Hatshepsut’s father was Thutmose I (1504–1492 B.C.). Upon his death,
Hatshepsut’s husband (and half-brother) Thutmose II came to power; when
her husband died in 1479 B.C., Hatshepsut’s stepson (and nephew) Thutmose
III acceded to the throne.Within a few years of Thutmose III’s reign, Hatshepsut
usurped the throne of Egypt. For perhaps twenty to twenty-two years, she was
the supreme power. Her young nephew Thutmose III did not disappear, but
seems to have remained as junior co-regent, while his aunt was senior co-
regent (Murnane 1977: 32–44). In her monuments, Hatshepsut backdated her
reign to 1479, the date of her husband’s death; she also made sure that her
monuments were set up within Egypt’s boundaries, while Thutmose III’s were
erected outside.
Scholars believe that Hatshepsut had been planning her takeover as king for
some time, but shrewdly kept her male relative on as junior partner (Murnane
1977; Naville 1906; Redford 1967: 21; Uphill 1961: 251). She clearly knew
how Egyptian kingship worked. Prior to her takeover, Hatshepsut had borne
three principal titles—“god’s wife,” “king’s wife,” and “king’s sister.” Of the
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Joyce Marcus
three titles, the crucial one was “god’s wife,” which provided her with divine
credentials that helped pave the way to kingship (Robins 1983: 76–77; Troy
1986). The title “god’s wife” seems to have referred specif ically to a priestly
off ice for which a woman wore a short wig to conduct special temple rites.
Even as co-regent,“Hatshepsut reinforced her authority by drawing on kingly
iconography, titulature, and actions” (Robins 1993: 46). In seizing the throne,
Hatshepsut began to refer to herself with masculine pronouns such as “he,”
“him,” and “his.” Compensating for her role as usurper, she commissioned more
than two hundred statues of herself, a behavior reminiscent of usurpers in
Mesoamerican cultures as well (Marcus 1974: 83; 1992b: 306, 351). Most of
these statues and reliefs come from Hatshepsut’s funerary temple at Deir el-
Bahri on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes; these reliefs were carved before
her death.
On most monuments commissioned by Hatshepsut, she is shown wearing
male attire. Not only did Hatshepsut wear a nemes headcloth, a kilt, or a fake
beard, but she had herself portrayed with the body of a man, as is evident when
she is shown naked to the waist (Fig. 2). On other occasions she had herself
depicted as a sphinx (Winlock 1942). Of scenes carved on the walls of her
temple, Edouard Naville (1906: 5) says, “She knew that her sex was an obstacle
to her recognition as king; the Egyptians would not allow a woman to occupy
the throne, so she had to appear as a man.” Gay Robins (1993: 50–51) concurs,
“Since there was no provision for a female king within Egyptian ideology, she
had to adapt to a male gender role, appearing on her monuments in male
costume with the f igure of a man.”
Strategies of Hatshepsut
As had many male usurpers before her, Hatshepsut followed a multifaceted
strategy to legitimize her reign. The main components of her strategy were as
follows:
1. First, she “rewrote history” to claim that she had originally been crowned
king by her father before his death (Redford 1967: 21; Robins 1983: 74). In her
temple at Deir el-Bahri she claimed to have received the artifacts of kingship
in a ceremony called “the appearance of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt,”
held on New Year’s Day toward the end of her father’s reign (Naville 1906: 23–
24).1
We know that this claim is revisionist history, since other texts—written
during her husband’s reign and the f irst years of her nephew’s reign—refer to
1
An alternative reading of the same text holds that she was merely designated “heiress
to the throne,” not king.
310
Fig. 2 Chapelle rouge, Hatshepsut Block 26, Karnak.

Hatshepsut (left) and Thutmose III (right) are both
shown as males, naked to the waist, wearing the kilt
of rulership. The only way we know that the f igure
on the left is not a biological male is by reading the
name of Hatshepsut in the cartouche above her head.
Drawing by Kay Clahassey.
Hatshepsut as the “king’s wife.” A more likely “true” coronation date for her is
recorded in the temple at Karnak. In the latter text, Hatshepsut claims that
during the early years of her nephew’s reign, she was confronted by the god
Amun who told her that she was “king of the two lands,” and crowned her.
Following her usurpation, Hatshepsut kept her nephew absent from Egypt for
extensive periods, conducting foreign wars, while she attended to internal af-
fairs. Later we see carved reliefs in which Hatshepsut, in male attire, appears as
the protagonist, while Thutmose III plays a less prominent role.
2. Hatshepsut’s claim that her father had chosen her as his heir was a good
beginning; but she also needed divine parentage. So, in her funerary temple
reliefs, she had herself variously portrayed as (a) the offspring of the god Amun
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Joyce Marcus
Fig. 3 Hatshepsut, depicted as a young boy, is shown drinking at the udder of the cow goddess
Hathor (redrawn after Naville 1906: 58).
and her human mother, Ahmose, or (b) the offspring of the cow goddess Hathor
and her human father, Thutmose I. One scene shows her drinking directly
from Hathor’s divine udder (Fig. 3); another shows her being created as a male
infant and his double, or ka (Fig. 4).
3. Hatshepsut allied herself with loyal men, some of whom had also served
her father and husband during their reigns. These men included the steward
Senenmut; Ineni, her father’s chief advisor; Ahmose pa-nekhbit, a treasurer and
professional soldier; and Hapuseneb, a high priest of Amun.
Senenmut’s close relationship with Hatshepsut is ref lected in his titles,“gov-
ernor of the royal palace” and “superintendent of private bedrooms and bath-
rooms.” In anticipation of becoming king, Hatshepsut sent Senenmut to the
Aswan quarries to procure red granite for two enormous obelisks to be set up
in the eastern part of the temple at Karnak. Once these obelisks were erected,
312
Fig. 4 The divine creation of Hatshepsut. On the left the god Khnum (the supernatural
potter) is seated with outstretched arms, in the act of creating two infants who stand on the
“god’s table.” The male infants are Hatshepsut and her double, ka (redrawn after Naville
1894–1908: pl. 48).
Labib Habachi (1957: 96) assures us, “it is certain that [Hatshepsut] was known
as ‘king’, for such monuments as obelisks were only erected by reigning kings.”
Hatshepsut later commissioned two more obelisks of red granite, which showed
her offering those monuments to the god Amun-Re. Signif icantly, the hiero-
glyphic text reads, “The king himself [sic] erected two large obelisks for his [sic]
father Amun-Re” (Habachi 1984: 68).
4. In Egypt, kingly behavior included victory in battle and the taking of
captives. There is evidence to suggest that war and captive taking became part
of Hatshepsut’s strategies as well. Donald Redford (1967: 62) cites an inscrip-
tion, carved by Hatshepsut’s artist Amenmose, that was found on the island of
Sehel near Aswan; this text indicates that Hatshepsut was victorious in a war
with Nubia. Referring to Hatshepsut only with masculine pronouns, an eye-
witness account by an off icial named Ty describes the battle as follows: “I saw
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Joyce Marcus
Fig. 5 Hatshepsut shown as a sphinx (head of a man and the body of a lion) trampling the
bodies of her many enemies (redrawn after Naville 1894–1908, VI: pl. 160).
him [sic] overthrowing the Nubian nomads, their chiefs being brought to him
[sic] as prisoners. I saw him [sic] destroying the Land of Nubia, while I was in
the following of his [sic] Majesty. Behold I am a king’s messenger doing what is
said” (Habachi 1957: 99–100, 102, 104).
Reinforcing Hatshepsut’s role as victorious general is a scene carved in her
funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri; it shows the Nubian god Dedwen leading
Nubian captives to Hatshepsut (Naville 1894–1908: VI, pl. 152). In the same
part of her temple, Hatshepsut is depicted as a sphinx crushing enemies be-
neath her feet (see Fig. 5; Naville 1894–1908: VI, pl. 160). Further evidence
comes from the stela of Djehuti, a man who claims to have seen Hatshepsut
collecting booty on the battlef ield itself (Habachi 1957: 104; Redford 1967:
60).
While these texts surely contradict earlier views of Hatshepsut’s reign as
devoid of foreign wars (Wilson 1951: 174–175), one wonders whether
Hatshepsut actually was present on the battlefield to receive prisoners and booty.
Like the depictions of the Mixtec cacica 6 Monkey, discussed below, Hatshepsut’s
texts are probably royal propaganda—a mix of fact, exaggeration, and f iction.
In support of this statement is the fact that Hatshepsut claimed to have
expelled from Egypt the Hyksos, invaders from Palestine who ruled Egypt for
314
Fig. 6 Hatshepsut’s daughter,

Neferure, with her hair in a single
side braid, the hairstyle typical of the
royal male child (redrawn after Troy
1986: f ig. 55).
a time. This claim ignores the f ifty to seventy-f ive years of prosperity that
Egypt had enjoyed since two earlier rulers, Ahmose and Kamose, had repelled
the Hyksos at the end of Egypt’s Second Intermediate period (ca. 1555 B.C.).
Hatshepsut simply took credit for the victories of her predecessors.
Hatshepsut also tried to lay the groundwork for her daughter to succeed
her as king. In a text from Sinai, carved in the eleventh year of her reign,
Hatshepsut asserted that her daughter, Neferure, would succeed her in off ice.
In preparation, she bestowed on her daughter the title hmt ntr, “god’s wife”
(Gardiner and Peet 1952–55: 179). Her daughter, signif icantly, is shown in the
accompanying scene with a single braid hanging from the side of her head
(Troy 1986: 136), exactly as a royal male child would be depicted (Fig. 6).
Further evidence of Hatshepsut’s effort to reverse gender roles was her ap-
pointment of a male steward, Senenmut, as her daughter’s “caregiver”—a role
def ined as female by Egyptian society (Fig. 7). Unfortunately for Hatshepsut,
her attempt to establish her daughter as heir apparent by portraying her as
“gender male” was unsuccessful. As Redford (1967: 85) puts it,“Hatshepsut was
making a supreme effort by the sheer weight of her personality to modify the
basis of Egyptian kingship and succession. But her personality was not suff i-
cient, and her ancillary measures were not thorough enough. Nor were they
315
Joyce Marcus
Fig. 7 Granite statue of Senenmut,

Hatshepsut’s steward, in his role as
“caregiver,” with his arms wrapped
around Neferure, Hatshepsut’s daugh-
ter. Drawing by John Klausmeyer.
logically conceived: her assumption of kingly attributes was, in fact, a conces-

sion to patriarchy.”
The Execration of Hatshepsut’s Name

For the better part of two decades, Hatshepsut succeeded in portraying
herself as divine king and victorious general. But she was swimming against
the tide of Egyptian culture, and “an aura of illegitimacy always surrounded
the person of Hatshepsut” (Redford 1967: 82).
Sometime around the sixteenth year of her reign, Senenmut, her loyal sup-
porter, disappeared from the written record; not long after, her daughter, Neferure,
died. Her nephew and stepson Thutmose III, a successful general, was more
often at Hatshepsut’s side, and he began to assume more and more of her
duties. Although the early years of Thutmose III’s reign had been claimed by
Hatshepsut as part of her reign (Murnane 1977; Redford 1967: 55), he f inally
ruled on his own after his aunt died.
Following Hatshepsut’s death, most of her monuments suffered the deliber-
ate defacement, which Egyptologists call “execration.” “One by one her reliefs
were hacked out,” Redford (1967: 87) tells us, “her inscriptions erased, her
316
cartouches obliterated, her obelisks walled up. Egypt was to know her no more.”
The erasure of Hatshepsut’s name from her monument on the island of Sehel
near Aswan was done in a manner identical to the erasures of her name at Deir
el-Bahri, suggesting that most of the destruction can be attributed to Thutmose
III after his aunt’s death (Habachi 1957: 91). Redford (1967: 87) explains
Thutmose III’s actions as being “motivated not so much by a genuine hatred as
by political necessity. His own legitimacy stood in need of demonstration. . . .
To leave the glories of Hatshepsut’s reign open to view would, in any case,
invite invidious comparison with his own accomplishments, a comparison that
the new monarch just would not brook.”
Nor did the execration of Hatshepsut end there. An off icial king list, com-
missioned by Seti I more than 150 years after Hatshepsut’s death, does not
mention her (Kemp 1989: f ig. 4; Marcus n.d.b). Nor, for that matter, does the
king list mention any of the other female rulers we know existed. Because of
this deliberate “defeminization” of the Egyptian king lists, we probably cannot
answer the question,“How many women ruled Egypt?” The simplest answer is,
“More than Seti I wanted us to know.”
MESOAMERICAN STATES
Now let us turn to the Americas and examine the careers and strategies of
some royal Mixtec, Maya, and Aztec women. Our excursion into the Old World
has provided us with a comparative framework and a means of evaluating royal
women in the Americas. As shall be demonstrated below, royal women of the
Americas were intermediate between the Lovedu and eighteenth-dynasty Egypt
in terms of the diff iculty of breaking through the glass ceiling.
6 Monkey “Serpent Quechquemitl”: A Mixtec “Warrior Queen”
By the eleventh century A.D., the Classic Mixtec states of southern Mexico
had broken down into smaller Postclassic polities known as cacicazgos, señoríos,
or principalities. While these societies retained kingship and social stratif ica-
tion, their rulers generally controlled territories no larger than that of a small
chiefdom.
The Postclassic Mixtec had a bilateral descent system with Hawaiian kin-
ship terms (Spores and Flannery 1983: 340), which allowed nobles to reckon
their descent through whichever parent had the bluest bloodlines (Spores 1974).
Many lords and princes inherited titles through both parents. In theory, the
father’s title was to pass to the f irst-born son of his f irst wife, but when no male
heir was available, it could go to the f irst-born daughter. Sociobiologists would
undoubtedly see this as a case of the ruler wanting his title to pass to a close
genetic relative, regardless of gender.
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Joyce Marcus
Fig. 8 The Mixtec cacica 6 Monkey (left) shown conferring with a priest 10
Lizard “Dead Man’s Hair/Jade Axe” (redrawn after Marcus 1992b: f ig. 11.19).
Unlike the Aztec system of succession, in which the title was likely to pass
to a brother, uncle, or nephew, the Mixtec system produced a lot of cacicas, or
female rulers. From the painted books, or codices, of the Mixtec we know the
names of at least 951 noble women (Marcus 1992b: 203, Whallon 1992). It is
likely that the small size of many Mixtec principalities served to limit the pool
of noble males, thereby increasing the likelihood of a woman rising to power.
The royal woman 6 Monkey, nicknamed “Serpent Quechquemitl” for her
decorated overblouse, was born into this eleventh-century culture (Caso 1964;
Spinden 1935). Her story is told in the Selden Codex, a painted book believed
to have been written in Magdalena Jaltepec in Oaxaca’s Nochixtlán Valley (Smith
1983, 1994). Six Monkey had three older brothers, 1 Reed, 12 Water, and 3
Water, all of whom were ahead of her in the line of succession; but all three
were defeated in battle and apparently sacrif iced by their enemies. This left 6
Monkey as heir apparent, but in need of showing her military prowess.
The Selden Codex then follows 6 Monkey’s career. She is f irst shown con-
ferring with a priest named 10 Lizard “Dead Man’s Hair/Jade Axe” (Fig. 8);
they probably discussed what she needed to do to claim the throne of “Belch-
ing Mountain,” the place ruled by her father. The priest 10 Lizard sent her to a
second priest, 6 Vulture “Planting Stick,” who in turn sent her on a pilgrimage
to a sacred cave (Fig. 9). Following this, 6 Monkey selected her future husband,
318
Fig. 9 The priest 10 Lizard (a) sends 6 Monkey (b) to talk with a priest named 6 Vulture “Planting Stick” (c). Footprints indicate that 6 Monkey
traveled to, and entered, a sacred cave (d) (redrawn after Marcus 1992b: f ig. 11.20).
319
Joyce Marcus
Fig. 10 The royal couple 6 Monkey (right) and 11 Wind (left) are shown in a
“bathing scene,” one of the Mixtec conventions for marriage ceremonies. The
wedding presents are shown above them (redrawn after Marcus 1992b: f ig. 11.22).
320
Fig. 11 6 Monkey sends out two ambassadors (a and b); they pass through Hill of the Moon and speak with its lord, 6 Lizard (c); then
they pass through Hill of the Insect with its lord, 2 Crocodile (d). These two lords (c and d) insult 6 Monkey’s ambassadors. The
insults are indicated by f lint knives attached to their speech scrolls, a depiction of their “cutting words” (redrawn after Marcus 1992b:
f ig. 11.23).
321
322
Joyce Marcus
Fig. 12 6 Monkey (a) is shown grasping the hair of her enemy, 6 Lizard (b), followed by 2 Crocodile (c); these prisoners are the two lords who
insulted her ambassadors. Behind them is the compound place-name of Hill of the Moon/Hill of the Insect. Flames in the upper corners of
the place sign indicate that those two towns were burned (redrawn after Marcus 1992b: f ig. 11.26).
Fig. 13 Two days after sacrif icing her enemies, 6 Monkey is shown (left) wearing a new
overblouse, quechquemitl, decorated with the chevrons associated with war. Her former at-
tire and nickname, “Serpent Quechquemitl,” appear before her face. 6 Monkey and 11
Wind have been installed as rulers at Bundle of Xipe (redrawn after Marcus 1992b: f ig.
11.30).
a prince named 11 Wind “Bloody Tiger,” heir to the throne of a place called
“Bundle of Xipe.”
The engaged couple visited a priestess named 9 Grass at “Skull Temple,”
probably seeking her blessing before their wedding. They were married on the
day 7 Flower in the year 12 House. The bride and groom are shown bathing
nude together, one of the Mixtec conventions for a royal wedding (Fig. 10).
Now, having strategically married a prince with good bloodlines and the
support of his warriors, 6 Monkey set about claiming her throne (Marcus 1992b:
379–380). On her way to her husband’s town, she and her ambassadors passed
through two communities, “Hill of the Moon” and “Hill of the Insect.” There,
her ambassadors were insulted with “cutting words,” shown in the codex by
speech scrolls tipped with sharp f lint knives (Fig. 11). These “cutting words”
were used by 6 Monkey as the pretext for declaring war. After consulting again
with the priestess 9 Grass, 6 Monkey launched an attack that left Hill of the
Moon and Hill of the Insect in f lames. Although it is unknown whether 6
Monkey actually accompanied her troops into battle, the Selden Codex shows
her personally taking captive the two princes who had insulted her (Fig. 12).
This scene may be compared with Djehuti’s “eyewitness” account of Hatshepsut
collecting booty after the battle in Nubia (Habachi 1957).
Following her military victory, 6 Monkey’s nickname was changed from
“Serpent Quechquemitl” to “War Quechquemitl,” and she and her husband
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Joyce Marcus
were installed as rulers in his hometown, Bundle of Xipe (Fig. 13). Reading
between the lines, we suspect that the marriage uniting 6 Monkey and 11
Wind—a marriage that united their warriors as well—consolidated their grip
on both hometowns. Her second son, 1 Crocodile, went on to be ruler of
Belching Mountain.
Royal Maya Women at Palenque and Yaxchilán

In contrast to the small principalities of the Postclassic Mixtec, the Classic
Lowland Maya (A.D. 250–900) lived in state polities often considerably more
extensive (Marcus 1995b). To be sure, these Maya polities went through peri-
odic cycles of consolidation and breakdown, and during their periods of disso-
lution they might break down into provinces no larger than a principality (Marcus
1989, 1992a, 1993). At their peaks of consolidation, however, Classic Maya
states covered thousands of square kilometers and had large pools of male
nobles from which rulers could be chosen (Marcus 1973, 1983).
Although more than seventy royal Maya women are depicted or named on
stone monuments, very few left behind complete records of their lives and
deeds (Berlin 1959; Marcus 1976, 1992b, 1992c; Proskouriakoff 1960, 1961;
Schele and Freidel 1990). When a Maya woman is mentioned in texts, it is
usually because of her relationship to a man. A male ruler might mention his
mother, especially if she came from a more important dynasty than his father’s;
for example, Copán’s ruler 18 Jog (Waklahuntah Kabah Kawil) claimed that his
mother was from Palenque, but never mentioned his father (Marcus 1976: 145;
1995a: 13–16). A male ruler might also mention his wife, especially if she came
from a more important dynasty than his own (Marcus 1976: 176–179; 1992b:
250–255). Only rarely do we see a royal woman described as the ruler of a
major city, and when we do it is usually because she served as regent until her
son was old enough to rule. Among the Maya,“the whisper behind the throne”
was often the queen mother.
One of the most widely publicized male rulers of Palenque was Pacal,
“Shield” (Fig. 14). He claims to have ruled from A.D. 615 to 683, but, interest-
ingly, no hieroglyphic inscriptions from the f irst thirty-two years of his reign
have been found. This is remarkable enough to start us thinking, especially
since we know that in Egypt usurpers sometimes execrated their predecessors’
monuments and extended their reigns back in time to account for the gap
(Berlin 1977).
Of further interest is the fact that Pacal refers to his mother in what Linda
Schele and David Freidel (1990: 227) have called a “mysterious and unusual
way.” He uses the name of a mythical goddess to refer to his mother, thereby
324
Fig. 14 The name Pacal, “Lord Shield,” is recorded in different ways in the Palenque
inscriptions (redrawn after Marcus 1992b: f ig. 7.17).
creating for himself a kind of divine right to rule, as Hatshepsut did when she
described herself as the child of Amun. Pacal gives his mother’s name as Zac
Kuk,“White Parrot,” and says that she assumed the Palenque throne in A.D. 612,
turning it over to him three years later (Fig. 15). The fact is, however, that no
monuments dating from White Parrot’s alleged reign have yet been found; we
know her only from texts commissioned by her descendants. In fact, before the
thirty-second year of Pacal’s reign, we have no contemporaneous records.
Pacal asserts that his mother lived for twenty-f ive years after he took off ice.
What was her status during those years? Was she co-regent with her son, and is
325
Joyce Marcus
Fig. 15 Oval Palace Tablet from House E, Palenque. It was com-

missioned by Pacal (right) to show him receiving the “crown of
rulership” from his mother, White Parrot. His father is not de-
picted or mentioned (redrawn after Marcus 1994: f ig. 12.5).
that why no monuments from the f irst three decades of her son’s reign have yet
been found? We know little about Pacal’s father, except that he never ruled
Palenque.Was Pacal a usurper who, like Hatshepsut, created his own semif ictional
divine ancestry? Or were his mother’s monuments later obliterated because,
like Hatshepsut, she was a female ruler in a man’s world?
The mystery continues with Pacal’s son, Chan Bahlum (“Snake Jaguar”),
who acceded to the throne of Palenque in A.D. 684. In the three temples com-
prising the Cross Group, Chan Bahlum presents his own hieroglyphic version
of Palenque’s dynastic history (Schele and Freidel 1990: 237). Although Pacal
had only extended his dynasty back to A.D. 431, Chan Bahlum extended it back
to supernatural ancestors who lived thousands of years ago. He used a mytho-
logical prologue to link himself to a goddess allegedly born in 3121 B.C. (Berlin
326
Fig. 16 Inscription commissioned by

Chan Bahlum, who asserts that a mytho-
logical ancestor was inaugurated thousands
of years before his own time. This passage
can be paraphrased as follows:“At the age
of 815 an ancestor/goddess took off ice
on August 13 in the year 2305 B.C.” (re-
drawn after Marcus 1992b: f ig. 9.20).
1963, 1965; Kelley 1965; Lounsbury 1980), and took pains to make it appear
that his father’s date of birth was an anniversary of hers. This supernatural
ancestor, Chan Bahlum asserted (Fig. 16), took off ice in 2305 B.C. at the age of
815! Like Hatshepsut, who showed herself drinking from the udder of Hathor,
Chan Bahlum created his own divine credentials.
The scribes of Palenque leave us with an interesting ambiguity. On the one
hand, they reveal no ideological barrier to having a woman on the throne. On
the other hand, they have so far provided us with no monuments that date to,
and conf irm, the alleged reigns of either Kanal Ikal (Pacal’s great-grandmother)
or Zac Kuk (Pacal’s mother).
Further evidence of the ambiguity surrounding female rulership among
the Classic Maya comes from Yaxchilán. That city erected stone monuments
327
Joyce Marcus
Fig. 17 Stela 10, Yaxchilán. A phrase giving the name Lady Ik Skull of Calakmul; in the
third and fourth hieroglyphic compounds, we read the title k’ul ahau caan/chan (“Holy Lord
of Calakmul”) (redrawn after Marcus 1992b: f ig. 8.28).
from A.D. 514 to 808. Some of Yaxchilán’s rulers claimed that their dynasty had
been founded in A.D. 320, long before the earliest known royal inscription.
Most of the Yaxchilán texts and monuments revolve around the reigns of
two rulers, Shield Jaguar and Bird Jaguar. From A.D. 681 to 742, Shield Jaguar
ruled Yaxchilán. Following a ten-year gap, his son Bird Jaguar ruled, from A.D.
752 to 771 (Marcus 1992c: 236; Proskouriakoff 1963). This gap in succession is
hard to explain, since Bird Jaguar claims to have been thirty-two years old
when his father died. Why, then, was Bird Jaguar’s inauguration delayed for a
decade?
Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1963: 163) was the f irst to discuss the ten-year gap,
arguing that there might have been pretenders to Shield Jaguar’s throne. More
recently, Carolyn Tate (1987: 822; 1992: 125) has suggested that a woman may
have ruled in the interim. With the recent discovery of hieroglyphic texts as
well as the reanalysis of other extant texts at Yaxchilán (Stelae 10, 11, and 35,
and Lintels 32 and 53), I can now suggest that a royal woman from Calakmul
named Lady Ik Skull (also called Evening Star) may have ruled Yaxchilán dur-
ing the ten-year gap (Fig. 17). In support of this suggestion is the fact that Lady
Ik Skull bears titles usually associated with male rulers, such as mah k’ina, k’ul
ahau, and batab (Tate 1987, 1992; Schele and Freidel 1990; Marcus 1976, 1992b,
n.d.b).
How did a woman from Calakmul come to rule Yaxchilán for a decade?
Limited data suggest at least one possible scenario. This Calakmul woman came
to Yaxchilán to marry Shield Jaguar, although she was not his f irst or second
wife. When Shield Jaguar died in A.D. 742, there may have been serious compe-
tition for the throne among the sons of his various wives (Bardslay n.d.;
Proskouriakoff 1963; Tate 1992). Lady Ik Skull may have prevailed in this com-
petitive environment, precisely because she was from the ruling lineage of
Calakmul, a dynasty more powerful than Yaxchilán’s. She therefore outranked
328
Fig. 18 Stela 11, Yaxchilán. Bird Jaguar,

ruler of Yaxchilán, reviewing captives.
His parents are shown facing each other
(top). Seated on the left is his mother, with
text (behind her) giving her name as Lady
Ik Skull. Seated on the right is his father,
whose text (behind him) is largely illeg-
ible but does include the glyph for jag-
uar and the titles “captor of ahau” and
“Lord of Yaxchilán,” both associated
with Shield Jaguar (redrawn after Marcus
1992b: f ig. 11.5).
Shield Jaguar’s other wives, which allowed her (perhaps with the backing of
Calakmul) to take over as regent until her own son, Bird Jaguar, could get
himself in position to be inaugurated. Lady Ik Skull died on 13 March in A.D.
751, apparently leaving the throne empty. Even though Bird Jaguar had been
waging war to obtain high-ranking captives and had produced an heir of his
own, it was still almost a year before he was inaugurated as ruler of Yaxchilán
on 10 February 752 (Fig. 18).
329
Joyce Marcus
Although I originally thought that the marriage between Shield Jaguar and
Lady Ik Skull was isogamous—that is, a marriage between equals (Marcus 1992b:
255–256)—I now believe that it must have been another case of Maya hypogamy.
In hypogamy, the bride outranks the groom. Such marriages seem to have been
a major reason why Maya rulers mentioned their mothers (Marcus 1973, 1976,
1992b). It is highly signif icant that we learn about Lady Ik Skull of Calakmul
only from inscriptions commissioned by her son (Marcus n.d.a, n.d.c).
I conclude that royal Maya women played important roles in marriage alli-
ances between major cities, that they held thrones open for their sons, and that
there were brief periods when they served as regents or even rulers. They
occasionally became rulers in their own right when there were gaps in succes-
sion or bitter disputes over succession. Almost never, however, were monuments
erected to such women while they were on the throne. That honor was reserved for
men, leaving royal women to be mentioned only in the inscriptions of their
sons or their lower-ranking consorts.
Ilancueitl and Atotoztli: Royal Aztec Women

The Aztec empire of A.D. 1520 was the most territorially extensive of all
Mesoamerican states, exceeding in area even the largest Maya polities (Barlow
1949; Berdan et al. 1996). Once vassals of Azcapotzalco, the Mexica or the
Aztec traditionally began their king list in A.D. 1376 with a ruler named
Acamapichtli. They had a kind of dual rulership in which the tlatoani, “he who
speaks,” was in charge of external relations, while the cihuacoatl, or “snake woman,”
was in charge of internal affairs. Despite his female title, the cihuacoatl was usu-
ally a man. In fact, the sixteenth-century documents portray Aztec kingship as
almost exclusively male, although many Aztec ethnohistories also make it clear
that there were important roles for royal women. As in the case of the Classic
Maya, women played such major roles because of hypogamy, that is, the mar-
riage of a male ruler to a more highly ranked woman (Marcus 1973, 1976,
1992b).
Such seems to have been the case with the royal woman Ilancueitl. In the
ethnohistorical documents she is variously described as the aunt, mother, foster
mother, wife, or wet nurse of Acamapichtli, the f irst Aztec king. Most sources
agree that Ilancueitl was from Culhuacan and hence a member of the Culhua
dynasty, who were descendants of the Toltec. As such, she was a source of
legitimization for Acamapichtli, linking him to the imperial Toltec dynasties.
According to some sources (Anales de Cuauhtitlan 1938: 174; Historia de los
mexicanos por sus pinturas 1941: 227–228; Origen de los mexicanos 1941: 268; Relación
de la genealogía 1941: 249–251), Acamapichtli began his career as the husband of
330
his aunt Ilancueitl. He could not immediately assume off ice, because Ilancueitl
herself was the tlatoani, or external relations ruler, of Tenochtitlan (van Zantwijk
1985: 99). Only later did Acamapichtli become her cihuacoatl or internal rela-
tions minister, and the progenitor of a ruling line, putting himself in position
to become the f irst male ruler of the Aztecs.
As often happens in legendary histories, there are conf licts among the vari-
ous accounts of Acamapichtli’s role as the founder of the Aztec royal line. It
appears that he needed the prestige of Culhua ancestry to legitimize his son;
hence the story that he married his aunt. Ilancueitl, in the words of Susan
Gillespie (1989: 26), “gave the f ledgling dynasty its nobility; in an act of ‘royal
incest’ with her husband-son [Acamapichtli], she demonstrated that the power
of kings is beyond that of their subjects.” Indeed, some sources (Origen de los
mexicanos 1941: 270; Relación de la genealogía 1941: 252) consider Huitzilihuitl—
the half-Culhua, half-Mexica son of Acamapichtli and Ilancueitl—to have been
the f irst true male tlatoani of Tenochtitlan.
This story of royal incest, of course, reminds us of the Lovedu mating of a
king and his daughter. Marshall Sahlins (1985: 79) adds that the dynasty of
sacred chiefs in Hawaii began with a similar incestuous relationship of father
and daughter, and he argues that incest, patricide, and fratricide are common
elements in the legends of “founders” and the origins of rulers. Sahlins (1985:
80) concludes, “The king must f irst reproduce an original disorder. Having
committed his monstrous acts against society, proving he is stronger than it, the
ruler proceeds to bring system out of chaos.” While Ilancueitl, the incestuous
Culhua aunt, looms large in Aztec legends, her role in real life is still being
debated (van Zantwijk 1985: 102).
Equally mysterious is the royal woman Atotoztli, another member of the
Culhua dynasty. Documents left by Domingo Francisco Chimalpahin (1965:
182), a resident of Chalco in the southern Basin of Mexico, assert that
Atotoztli was the daughter of the ruler of Culhuacan and the mother of
Acamapichtli. J. M. A. Aubin (1886: 318) suggested that Atotoztli and Ilancueitl
were the same woman, while Gillespie (1989) has proposed that they might
simply have become conf lated into one person over time.
In Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s accounts (1975: 297–303), Ilancueitl and
Atotoztli are described as sisters. Atotoztli is said to have married Huetzin, heir
to the throne of Coatlichan, while Ilancueitl married Acamapichtli, ruler of
Tenochtitlan. The Codex Xolotl (Dibble 1951: pl. III) shows Ilancueitl and
Atotoztli as the daughters of Achitometl, ruler of Culhuacan; in this codex
(Fig. 19), we see each daughter leaving her father’s town and traveling to her
husband’s community. This represents a typical pattern of Nahua hypogamy:
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Joyce Marcus
Fig. 19 Achitometl, ruler of Culhuacan, is shown (far right) with his daughters, Atotoztli
and Ilancueitl (in front of him). Footprints show them leaving to marry lords of other towns.
Ilancueitl marries Acamapichtli (lower left), and Atotoztli marries Huetzin (upper left). Each
daughter brings chinampa lands (shown above Achitometl’s head) (after Dibble 1951: pl. III).
princesses from the highly ranked dynasty of Culhuacan are “married down”
to princes of the lower-ranked communities of Coatlichan and Tenochtitlan
(Carrasco 1984; Marcus 1992b: 223–229). Any sons resulting from the mar-
riages would probably mention their highly ranked mothers in their genealo-
gies.
Indeed, there are suggestions that the male recipients of such hypogamous
brides might even claim them in their histories as mothers. The Historia de los
mexicanos por sus pinturas (1941) gives Ilancueitl as the f irst ruler of Tenochtitlan,
with Acamapichtli as her successor. “Since Acamapichtli was to begin the dy-
nasty,” says Gillespie (1989: 50),“Acamapichtli’s wife became his mother so that
he would be her descendant, for it was she who was noble, and it was from her
that he derived the right to rule, as some accounts explicitly state.”
332
Fig. 20 Atotoztli’s name is given both in European script

and in Nahua writing. Above her head, we read çihua
(woman) pilli (noble) atotoztli, or “noblewoman Atotoztli.”
Her hieroglyphic name, attached to the back of her head,
is composed of three signs: (1) water (providing the ini-
tial sound a or at); (2) two bird heads (toto [tl] or to [totl],
“bird” + toz [nene] “yellow parrot”); and (3) a feather
(ihuitl) or obsidian blade (iztli, the f inal sound “tli”) (re-
drawn after Caso 1958).
The association of the names Ilancueitl and Atotoztli with the founders of
dynasties is not limited to Tenochtitlan. For example, a woman named Ilancueitl
is given as the dynastic founder of Azcapotzalco (Los Códices de México 1979),
and a woman with the two-word name Ilancueitl Atotoztli is given as the
dynastic founder of Texcoco (Muñoz Camargo 1978).
Much later, yet another woman named Atotoztli (Fig. 20) may have served
as tlatoani of the Mexica during a six-year gap between the reigns of
Motecuhzoma I and Axayacatl, from A.D. 1466 to 1472. This possibility is raised
by a document Los Anales de Tula (van Zantwijk 1979). Another document, the
Relación de la genealogía (1941: 254), goes even further, claiming that this Atotoztli
actually ruled for more than thirty years. Rudolf van Zantwijk (1985: 188,191)
argues that we know little about Atotoztli’s reign because the off icial Aztec
scribes—almost all of whom were men—neglected to mention the female
tlatoani since female rulers were so uncommon. Thus, rather than mentioning
Atotoztli, most scribes f illed this gap between male kings either by extending
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Joyce Marcus
the reign of Motecuhzoma I beyond his death, or by pushing back the begin-
ning of Axayacatl’s reign to a date before his actual inauguration. Earlier in this
chapter, we saw the same “defeminization” of the Egyptian king lists by their
scribes (Marcus n.d.b).
CONCLUSIONS
What general patterns can we derive from the histories of these royal women
who broke the glass ceiling? To begin with, each woman must be understood
in the context of her own culture and political system, without the universal
stereotypes sometimes seen in gender studies—stereotypes that usually tell us
more about the author than about gender (Meskell 1995).
Furthermore, gender is not a static, permanent status; rather, it is a changing
and moving target, and therefore much more diff icult to pin down for a spe-
cif ic time and place without the aid of historical and ethnographic data. As
Martin Whyte (1978: 170) concluded in his comparative work, one “can no
longer assume that there is such a thing as the status of women cross-cultur-
ally. . . . each aspect of the status, roles, and relationship of women relative to
men must be examined and explained separately, unless future research shows a
cross-cultural reality that is very different from the patterns we have discov-
ered.”
We have seen that the route to the top was much easier for a woman among
the Lovedu, where qualities such as nurturing and appeasement were consid-
ered appropriate for a ruler. It was much more diff icult for a woman to become
ruler in Dynastic Egypt, where rulership was considered so much a male pre-
rogative that Hatshepsut had to depict herself either as a man or as a sphinx.
The route to the top started with having a father who was the reigning
king. It also helped to come from the most highly ranked dynasty around.
Many of the Mesoamerican royal women I have examined in this paper held
off ice only because their bloodlines were bluer than those of their consorts.
Even incest was not considered out of bounds, if it led to an heir who out-
ranked everyone else (as we saw among the Aztec and the Lovedu).
Still, one had to be lucky or opportunistic. The Mixtec princess 6 Monkey
inherited the throne of Belching Mountain only because her older brothers
had been killed in battle, and she married an appropriate male ruler before
claiming that throne. Some Maya women ruled only because their husbands
died while their sons were too young to ascend the throne. Some Culhua
women may have ruled Tenochtitlan while their lower-ranking Mexica hus-
bands waited for an heir who was half-Culhua. Even in societies where rulership
was conceived of as “gender male,” many kings preferred to be succeeded by a
334
daughter who was their direct descendant rather than by a nephew or a male
cousin (Goody 1966).
When a king had more than one wife, each wife often fought to ensure that
her son succeeded him on the throne after his death. Lady Ik Skull, mother of
Bird Jaguar of Yaxchilán, may have held the throne for her son until the dis-
pute over succession could be resolved. It also seems clear that in all these
societies, at one time or another, royal women held off ice during gaps in suc-
cession. It was usually a thankless task, since later Egyptian, Aztec, and Maya
scribes omitted them from the king lists. Hatshepsut’s own nephew execrated
her monuments.
We have also seen, in many of these cases, some interesting reversals of
gender roles. The Rain Queen of the Lovedu made “mothers” out of her male
district heads, and in the ritual aspects of her marriage she received “wives” and
performed in the role of a man.The Aztec “snake woman” was a man. Hatshepsut
made her male steward into a “caregiver.” And Hatshepsut gave herself the
ultimate “makeover,” appearing with the false beard, kilt, headcloth, and bare
chest of a man.
In cultures where having a female ruler caused cognitive dissonance,
“defeminization” of the king lists has probably led us to underestimate the
number of women who reached the top (Marcus n.d.b). At the same time,
those very cultures’ legends of dynastic origins are f illed with royal women—
queen mothers, incestuous aunts and daughters, and women who fought along-
side male soldiers in battle. These epics suggest that the low numbers of
documented female rulers do not necessarily ref lect the actual political power of
royal women in their roles as hypogamous brides who raised the status of their
grooms, as widows who held thrones for their sons, and as queen mothers who
were “whispers behind the throne.” As Queen Mkabi of the Zulu explained it
to Cecil Cowley (1966: 28), “And have we wives and mothers of the Zulus not
the greatest power over our kings and princes, when we talk to them in the
silence of the night?”
335
Joyce Marcus
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340
Epilogue:Thinking about Gender
with Theory and Method
MARGARET W. CONKEY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
T
he conference that generated this book was exceptionally stimulat-
ing and wide-ranging. Each presenter took an original and different
tack in grappling with the overall theme of the conference, initially de-
fined as “Recovering Gender in Pre-Hispanic America.” This volume is another
testimony to the innovative and previously unimagined diversity of approaches
that has characterized the last decade, in which gender has become increasingly
of concern to scholars of past human societies (Conkey and Gero 1997).
It is not possible to summarize here all the provocative issues that the au-
thors present; indeed, each essay stands firmly on its own merits. However, as an
anthropological archaeologist who does not work with the ancient New World,
I might be in a good position to comment on some of the theoretical and
methodological implications of these essays in the hopes of furthering two
ends. On the one hand, there is much that the relatively recent engagement
with gender in archaeology and other fields studying the human past can offer
to other disciplines that are also probing gender. On the other hand, there is
inevitably further internal enrichment that we can generate for our own con-
tinuing inquiries. That is, we can both offer things outwardly, to other disci-
plines and fields, and enrich things inwardly, in the archaeological study of
gender. Toward these ends, I want to explore three primary issues of a rather
ambitious sort: the concept of gender, theoretical resources, and methodologi-
cal directions.
EPISTEMOLOGICAL PREAMBLE: GENDER IS NOT A “THING”

I begin by returning to a term, recovering, which was part of the original
mandate for the conference, “Recovering Gender in Pre-Hispanic America.”
However, I want to use it as a vehicle for making an epistemological point. To
recover, according to Webster’s New World Dictionary (sic), “implies a finding or
getting back something that one has lost in any manner.” As a literal term,
341
Margaret W. Conkey
recovery—in this case, of gender—raises some fundamental epistemological and

ontological issues. Despite a decade of concern with gender in the field of
archaeology, which has been the most recent to enter into this discussion, there
are still some serious differences of opinion as to what this kind of inquiry is all
about, and the issues that lie behind terms such as “recovery” are part of this
debate.
While we can and should celebrate the fact that, indeed, the very topic of
gender in past societies has been increasingly considered a serious and impor-
tant enterprise, I still worry about those who think that “gender” is some sort
of static, bounded phenomenon that can be “captured” or, in a strict reading of
the term,“recovered” by us. In her chapter in this volume, Louise Burkhart puts
this most succinctly when she notes that “we cannot expect to recover Pre-
Hispanic gender in some pure, essential form” (p. 104). As I have mentioned
elsewhere (Conkey 1993), this notion of “finding” gender can be a rather posi-
tivist view of the past; it reminds me of a well-known story in Americanist
archaeology that was part of the famous debate on typology between James
Ford (1954) and Albert Spaulding (1953; see also Hill and Evans 1972) in the
1950s. They differed on whether artifact types were inherent and “real” or
created by the archaeologist. Ford accused Spaulding of viewing classification
as if it were an Easter egg hunt, in the sense that there were (to Spaulding) real
types that could be discovered:“You talk as if you think Nature has provided us
with a world filled with packaged facts and truths that may be discovered and
digested like Easter Eggs hidden on a lawn!” (Ford 1954: 109).
Indeed, in the case of an Easter egg hunt, it has been decided that, as objects,
Easter eggs are worth finding; someone obtained or collected the eggs, deco-
rated them, hid them, and waited. In archaeology and other historical inquiries,
the enterprise is often characterized in this positivist manner: certain classes of
data or objects of knowledge have been constructed as “worth finding,” and it
is our task to “discover” them.
In the early years of our explicit concern with gender in past human life, we
could see and show that previous histories and archaeologies were either
gendered male or not engendered at all (at least not explicitly), because many
of the preferred data and objects of knowledge had little or nothing to do with
women or other-than-men genders, which led to either androcentric or dehu-
manized pasts.
Yet, with the enriching of archaeologies and histories that have deemed
gender discoverable and recoverable—perhaps as a new Easter egg of archaeo-
logical and historical value—two important issues all too readily get sidestepped.
One is the positivist notion that there is such a thing as gender “out there”
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Epilogue
waiting to be “found,” if only we ask the right questions and/or develop the
breakthrough methods.While I want to be clear that asking good questions and
deploying innovative and robust methodologies are crucial to all we do, there is
much more to the interpretive process. Secondly, the lack of the method for
“finding” gender, or the lack of the attribution of gender to specific classes of
archaeological/historical data, is not, in my view, an adequate basis for dismiss-
ing the engagement with gender from archaeological and historical research
(cf. Dobres 1995). As with any other domain of historical inquiry, some ques-
tions or concerns will be more appropriate, and perhaps more strongly sup-
ported, given the specifics and contingencies of the case in question. As Elizabeth
Brumfiel suggests in her essay, gender research has been necessarily opportunis-
tic. An insistence on gender attribution or gender “method-idolatry” (Daly
1978) or on there being just one or a few limited methods or ways of studying
gender, often discourages the more imaginative approaches, so richly repre-
sented in this volume. I would reinforce Brumfiel’s point: not only do we need
to envision gender imaginatively, but the choice of where we try to “see” gen-
der must be imaginative as well. That gender could be differentially “at work”
in tribute payments, for instance, as Brumfiel (1991) discusses, had not been
imagined previously.
CONCEPTUALIZING AND PROBLEMATIZING GENDER

Just over a decade ago, the historian Joan Scott (1986) argued persuasively
for gender to be viewed as a “useful category of historical analysis,” which
indeed it is, as is demonstrated repeatedly in the essays in this volume. But it is
much more than a category: it is lived experience of all members of our soci-
ety and presumably of many peoples in the past. Few of those who spend their
time thinking and theorizing about gender would accept it as a given, as a
unidimensional phenomenon, or as an attribute that has some fixity to it. On
the contrary, if there is one thing to be learned from more than two decades of
vibrant and voluminous scholarship that takes up gender in many disciplines
and from many perspectives, it is that gender must necessarily be problematized
and wrestled with. The concept of analysis—of gender—is a dynamic and
contested concept; it refers to a diverse set of roles, practices, and beliefs, not to
a static unchanging “category” or “type.” In this volume, Joan Gero, for ex-
ample, makes an important point about gender as being a process, while Brumfiel
underlines the multiple dimensions of gender. Both Cecelia Klein and John
Monaghan provide important reminders and documentation about gender not
being the equivalent of, or derived from, some sort of given biological sex. As
Thomas Laqueur (1990), among others, has shown, the very notions that “we”
343
Margaret W. Conkey
have about sex are themselves historically and socially contingent, and not much
more than a century in use. And an entire body of work, most prominently
represented by that of Judith Butler (e.g., 1990, 1993), has also raised questions
about the “naturalness” of sex (see also Dreger 1998; Fausto-Sterling 1985;
Kessler 1998). In Carolyn Dean’s exposition (in this volume) of gender trans-
formations throughout the life cycle in Inka society as reported by Felipe
Guaman Poma de Ayala, the answer to the question “Are men and women
really the same?” is, “Well, it depends.” Certainly, in the case of the Inka, there
is some convergence, especially in old age.
Since there are still rampant misunderstandings about what gender is, and
since in works such as Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) or Judith Lorber’s Para-
doxes of Gender (1994; see also Ferree, Lorber, and Hess 1999) scholars them-
selves are still negotiating, defining, and reconceptualizing gender, we must be
quite explicit. In this volume, there are many essays that have engaged with
gender as something that creates social personae other than just women, as
something that is relational (that is, emerging out of and being created through
relationships with others) rather than an attribute. But we should not be fooled
into thinking that we do not need to be explicit about how we conceptualize
gender, for, of course, that does influence our analyses, the questions we ask, and
how we “read” the evidence.
I myself can get caught short on this. For example, my French archaeology
colleagues find the Anglo-American concern with gender—and, consequently,
the existence of a gender archaeology—to be incomprehensible. There is no
comparable word in French (or in Spanish; see del Valle 1993a); their best ap-
proximation is “masculine/feminine relationships.” They see our concerns with
male/female differences and power to be culturally and historically contingent
on our own social history, asserting that “the French have always known that
men and women occupy two different culturally and socially defined places in
the society” (Anick Coudart, personal communication, 1994), which in itself is
a very revealing and contingent statement. These archaeologists do not, as they
themselves say, “understand why some (American, English, Australian) need a
gender archaeology to tell what seems so obvious” to them (Coudart, personal
communication, 1994; see also Demoule and Coudart 1997).Thus, even within
Western academic circles, the concept of gender has no single, stable set of
meanings. Without explicit attention to what each scholar means by gender—
and this is sometimes very hard to put down in writing—we may seriously
subvert our own inquiries and the possibilities for genuine insights into the
past.
I do not intend to be programmatic about what gender “is”; there are sev-
344
Epilogue
eral different approaches in this very volume. I am only programmatic about

the idea that we still need to be very explicit about the conceptualizations that
direct our research. Of course, the logical next question is, how does one come
to do this? What are (and have been) the theoretical resources?
WHAT’S THE POINT OF THEORY?

In a review of the archaeological literature on gender and feminism, Gero
and I (Conkey and Gero 1997) noted that it is frequently the case that writings
on gender in the human past do not make manifest the theoretical sources
upon which they draw. Many studies that might be enriched by explicit en-
gagement with feminist and other social theory are often mute in this regard;
many merely “graft” gender onto an extant—and unquestioned—conceptual
framework (Hanen and Kelley 1992; see also Wylie 1996, n.d.b). In the surge of
gender studies in archaeology, as Barbara Bender (2000) noted, in her role as
discussant for a 1994 gender conference, there appears to be a rush to be “prag-
matic,” and generate case studies, which bypass the necessary simultaneous en-
gagement with theory. Her pronouncement on those papers as a group was a
very British, yet thoroughly understood metaphor of, “rather thin gruel.”
While one recognizes that feminist theory today is enormously complex,
often contradictory, and of uneven value to our archaeological and historical
concerns, there nevertheless exists in such theory a rich and ever-expanding
body of concepts that deals explicitly with gender, difference, and relationships
between sex and gender. It is a body of theory that raises questions about
symbol, language, and social practice, which are certainly of central concern to
archaeologists and historians. It is also a body of theory that simultaneously
endorses the centrality of grounded empirical research and a critique of sci-
ence and the production of knowledge (e.g., Longino 1990;Wylie 1992, 1997).
Much of this literature is openly concerned with how we move between hy-
pothesis and evidence.
It is precisely in much of this social, critical, and especially feminist theory
that one finds clear recognition of the fact that one’s position does affect one’s
research. Contrary to popular lore, the recognition of positionality—that is,
where one stands in relation to the research at hand—does not mean that “we
can say anything since it is all constructed,” nor is it the case that we are com-
pletely constrained by our stances. As Ruth Tringham and I have argued (Conkey
and Tringham 1995;Tringham and Conkey 1998; see also Billington and Green
1996; Goodison and Morris 1998; Meskell 1995) with regard to the use of
archaeological data (specifically, Paleolithic and Neolithic female figurines) in
support of the so-called Goddess movement, with its female-centered interests,
345
Margaret W. Conkey
we cannot say something about the past just because it is desired or perhaps
even needed. We can, of course, say such things if we make it very clear that it
is only speculation.
Theory is not something that comes in a little tool box that you take with
you to the field or to the archives, with different theories like drill bits of
varying size that you can just “apply.” It is much more complicated than that,
especially since few people are writing theory with our particular questions in
mind—questions about the past, technology, space, settlement, imagery, history,
and change. A point is frequently made that scholars who are interested in
exploring human relations with the environment can gain much from consult-
ing ecological theory and adapting it to help solve archaeological or historical
problems. Unfortunately, we still need to ask many scholars of gender,Why not
consult an extant (albeit somewhat unruly) body of feminist/social theory in
our inquiries into gender and other social phenomena? Certainly, some appli-
cations of this theory can be found in the essays in this volume.
For example, Brumfiel’s discussion and research on Aztec gender (see also
Brumfiel 1991, 1992) is clearly embedded in a theoretical approach that com-
bines feminist theory with that of political economy, where cultural phenom-
ena—engendered ones at that—are to be understood within the complex
dynamics of material practices and political formations. Bringing an explicitly
gendered approach to political economy allows for a more nuanced under-
standing of what can often be taken only as macroprocesses. If we want to—as
I believe we must—take our narrow disciplinary insights and show their
significance for history, art history, and anthropology, as well as for feminist
studies and social theory more widely, then it is up to us to make the connec-
tions. In this still-new venture, we should neither take our theory/theories for
granted nor hide them under the proverbial bush. The very underdetermined
and poorly understood nature of what we work with in studying Pre-Hispanic
America (or any other past contexts) requires an explicit engagement with
theory, which fills the spaces whether we address it or not.
In Mari Carmen Serra Puche’s contribution to this volume, we are im-
pressed (if not also envious and admiring) by the rich and almost redundantly
female nature of the archaeological finds of figurines, burials, sculptures, and
spatial layouts at Xochitecatl. And, as she shows, one issue in particular demands
thoughtful and careful theorizing: in what specific contexts, given what we
know about this time period and place, would such symbolic and material
practices have been meaningful, and to whom? In other words, as the feminist
art historian Griselda Pollock (1977) has asked: “What do images of females
mean?”
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There are many potentially useful theoretical perspectives, such as practice

theory, that do not make any explicit reference to gender, but which could and
should be engendered, as Rosemary Joyce (1998, 2000; Joyce and Hendon
2000) shows with her particular wedding of the theories of Butler (e.g., 1990,
1993) and Pierre Bourdieu (e.g., 1977) in a study of gender in Pre-Hispanic
Central America. As Joyce points out, for example, there is an enormous litera-
ture regarding “the body”; indeed, if most traditional notions about how to get
at gender in the past suggest that we want evidence like mortuary data (espe-
cially based on sexed skeletons) or depictions of humans, then the literature on
the body is potentially of great use. The proposition that we have much to gain
from reading gender, and related theory, is made compelling by Joyce’s ap-
proach, among others.
But a point of theory made by Caroline Bynum (1995), who asks, “Why all
the fuss about the body?” is worth stressing here. She reminds us once again
that the point of theory is not to just “apply” it to our specific contexts of
concern. Since we situate our own categories in the context of our own poli-
tics, then we must, Bynum argues (in reference to the Middle Ages), situate
those of the past (e.g., Pre-Hispanic America) in the context of theirs. As she
notes (Bynum 1995: 29), “The relationship between then and now will thus be
analogous and proportional, not direct.” In reference to the theories of Butler
(e.g., 1990, 1993), Bynum points out that, since Butler is addressing such very
contemporary issues as identity positions (and Butler is indeed unlikely to be
thinking of how her theory applies to the Aztecs or other cultures!), and since
she also finds it impossible that any of us could “be us” without performing
what we call gender, it is up to us to question the applicability of Butler’s
notions, because only we can best assess how analogous the situations are. Bynum
(1995: 29) goes on to state that “The past is seldom usefully examined by as-
suming that its specific questions or their settings are the same as those of the
present.What may, however, be the same is the way in which a question, under-
stood in its context, struggles with a perduring issue such as, for example, group
affiliation.”
At this point in the development of gender studies, it is important to address
the question “Why theory?”or “What is the point of theory?” (Bal and Boer
1994). On the one hand, there is often resistance to theory—“I am not a theo-
rist,”; “I don’t ‘do’ theory.” In fact, there was considerable resistance at this con-
ference to my suggestion that there is a need to read and draw on some of the
rich resources of feminist theory. As Gero and I have pointed out (Conkey and
Gero 1997), however, “one must do the reading.” No one is without theory; all
facts are theory-laden (e.g., Daston 1991; Wylie 1992; among many). On the
347
Margaret W. Conkey
other hand, theory, like all scholarly work, is complicated, and often intimidat-
ing or made to be so. Jonathan Culler (1994) has made an important and inter-
esting case for theory to be best considered not so much in that or how it is
“applied,” but in terms of its effects, its practical effects. He argues that theory is
something that changes people’s views; it makes them conceive of their objects
of study and knowledge, as well as their activity of studying them, differently.
And this, he goes on, will be “different for people differently situated” (1994:
16).
Theory, then, is inevitably practice, and “its value cannot be separated from
participation in the activity itself ” (Culler 1994: 16). By not engaging with
theory, or by a widespread occurrence—at least in contemporary American
archaeology—of a conflation of theory with method and of offering up theo-
ries that are those for methods, what is inhibited are the possibilities of generat-
ing what Culler suggests to be “new understandings of cultural forms and
activities that come from widening the range of disciplinary references” (1994:
16).
One aspect of theory is that it has the potential to democratize knowledge
making, to encourage it as a pluralistic enterprise, engaging dissent seriously
and fostering views from all sorts of vantage points, or, as the feminist philoso-
pher, Helen Longino (1994), has said, from “many wheres” (see also Wylie
1995). Of course, it is of equal concern to consider how theory is done, how
and when it is used as a tactic for disciplinary control, what its narratives and
images are, and how it is produced and practiced. There are, for example, seri-
ous concerns about the problematic nature of the gender of theory—that is,
which genders are more likely to be rewarded for “doing” theory—in cultural
anthropology (Lutz 1995) and in archaeology (Conkey 1998). By not practic-
ing theory explicitly, however, we risk falling short of the potentials of what
our inquiries—in this case, into gender in Pre-Hispanic America— might yield.
Why should anyone resist or refuse ideas that might help to increase our in-
sights and understandings?
That I have chosen to address theory in these comments, despite the resis-
tance from some who attended this conference, is not an attempt on my part to
impose some mandate on those who study Pre-Hispanic America, nor is it a
request or an admonition that we need to hear the “right” theoretical citations.
Rather, I am inspired to suggest, following Culler and others, that it is not easy
for scholars to embrace the fact of the necessity of theory, since “to admit to
the importance of theory is to make an open-ended commitment, to leave
oneself [myself included] in a position where there are always things one doesn’t
know” (Culler 1994: 14). Theory is no longer something preliminary, basic, or
348
Epilogue
foundational; instead, it is an “open-ended corpus of writings that have an

impact on domains other than those to which they ostensibly belong” (Culler
1994: 16). In that sense, it is just as crucial that what is said about gender in Pre-
Hispanic America has an impact on literary and medieval studies, political sci-
ence, or art history as what is said in feminist literary theory, contemporary
studies of the body, or feminist anthropology has an impact on how one goes
about exploring gender in Pre-Hispanic America.The point of theory, as Culler
concludes, is the recognition that the “intimidation we feel when confronted
with discourse we don’t know or understand is inseparable from the possibility
of new understanding” (1994: 17).
WHAT ARE SOME USEFUL METHODS?

Of course, we cannot disentangle the two foregoing issues—that of the
problematization and conceptualization of gender, and that of the centrality of
explicit theory—from each other, or from the ways in which researchers con-
duct their inquiry into gender in the specific Pre-Hispanic contexts at hand. It
is clear that Klein, in her role as conference organizer and editor, intended to
elicit contributions that addressed the issue of “how to,” or methods, and has
succeeded, which is no small task in such a subject matter. The methods are
likewise not something to be thought of as a tool kit, no matter how much we
think we would like one, with a few big hammers, wrenches, or pliers for
extracting or beating gender out of our data. Several papers, however, show
particularly useful approaches that have potential applicability to other con-
texts.
First, both Gero’s and Joyce’s chapters in this volume show effectively how
one can use the repetitiveness, the constraint, or the consistency of markings in
artifacts, such as Recuay pots, Maya earspools and ornaments, and so on, as a
platform for inferences about gender concepts and engendered practices. Ad-
mittedly, these selected sets of artifacts and practices do not perhaps show the
range of gender options or expressions in these particular societies, but, as Joyce
points out (see also Joyce 1998), it is, in fact, possible to infer here historically
situated practices of inscription through which the citationality of sexed bod-
ies was created. Methodologically, both studies serve as a reminder that at-
tributes of material culture that we might categorize merely as “standardized
craft production” are, in fact, potentially important sources for new queries—
such as, for example, queries into practices of bodily and gender inscription,
that is, ways in which one inscribes and therefore produces and announces
one’s situational, specifically gendered, identity. As Janet Spector (1993) has
shown, for a very different archaeological/historical context, the very category
349
Margaret W. Conkey
we archaeologists might have been tempted to use—in this case, “standardized

craft production”—can be replaced by a framework that is consistent with an
engendered archaeology (Roberts 1993), promoting more sensitivity to the
active peoples of the past.
Second, in her essay Dean illustrates that it is as much in the oppositions, the
negations, the internal contradictions that we can tease out conceptions of
gender. Gender is not something that can be “read off ” in some direct way by
the twenty-f irst–century observer. Anyone studying hierarchical societies knows
how material imagery and forms can be used for fibbing, if not lying, or at least
for misrepresentation (e.g., Marcus 1974, 1992).
Third, in Brumfiel’s contribution to this volume, it is underscored that, in
the past, studies of certain classes of artifacts, such as spindle whorls, may not
have been given much attention precisely because such artifacts were associ-
ated with women. Once they are reconsidered in the context of a gender
consciousness and an approach informed by gender theory, however, there is
indeed much to be learned not only in terms of morphology and issues of
formal variation (in and of itself an important enrichment of empirical evi-
dence), but also in terms of issues of identity, changing roles, and labor (see also
McCafferty and McCafferty 1991; for another interpretation of the Aztec ma-
terials, see Evans 2001).
Thus, as many of the chapters show, it is not necessarily the case that in
pursuing a relatively new topic, we have to collect new data, only that the
extant data are readily reconceptualized, as is the case with the array of imagery
used by both Dean and Klein in support of their studies. And yet, with time, we
should also have what we find in Gero’s essay: the first results from a project
begun some eight years ago, which from the very beginning was undertaken
with a gender consciousness on Gero’s part. At some point, as a companion
piece to her paper, there should be a discussion of how this particular starting
orientation affected the collection of data and the choice of problem.
On Ethnography and Ethnohistory

Methodologically, and perhaps interpretively as well, I, as an outsider to Pre-
Hispanic studies, have another concern, which emerges from some of the chap-
ters—a concern about the use of ethnography and ethnohistory. This is not to
say, as has been sometimes misinterpreted, that there should not be so much
ethnography or ethnohistory in this area of research. On the contrary, there
should probably be more, and, in any event, no one should ignore any available
resource—and certainly not the available ethnography and ethnohistory—and
every possible line of evidence. For those of us who are, so to speak, ethno-
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graphic orphans (such as myself, a student of the Late Paleolithic period in

Europe, of some fifteen thousand years ago), we are always impressed and some-
times worried by what Pat Watson once called the “embarrassment of riches”
(personal communication, April 1988) that most Pre-Hispanic scholars have in
the form of their ethnohistories and ethnographies in a more-or-less direct
historical relation to their archaeologies.
When I read Gero’s essay in this volume, which boldly ventures into issues
of representation (specifically, representation of humans on Recuay ceramics)
in a context of emergent political complexity, I find myself expecting certain
references—not to the specific cultural history of the Andes, much less to Pre-
Hispanic America, but for example, to the volume on African art and leader-
ship (Fraser and Cole 1972). There are references that could bolster what many
of us consider to be a set of riches, that is, local ethnohistories that can perhaps
inhibit as much as inform the imaginative possibilities for interpretation. Per-
haps we need another version of Martin Wobst’s classic paper (1978) on the
tyranny of ethnography, this time with specific implications for the study of
gender (see Marcus 1995: 25–27).
From Joyce Marcus’s essay in this volume, one gets a sense of how enriching
it can be to consider what appear to be analogous situations in other cultural
and historical contexts, as well as what it is about these specific situations that
can illuminate one’s own case study. What was it, for example, about gendered
conceptions and specific social actions or strategies that provided the context
within which the Mujajis of the Bantu-speaking Lovedu of South Africa could
succeed? Marcus’s chapter also shows precisely why there is much to be gained
from an in-depth empirical understanding of the available historical evidence
in convergence with the analysis of iconographic and writing systems.
Perhaps I am more sensitive to the occasional “slippage” back and forth
between ethnohistorical and ethnographic examples. While a Paleolithic ar-
chaeologist is hardly allowed to make a critique of how others conflate several
centuries into a generalization, I would like to think that if we Paleolithic
scholars had such resolution we would be more careful about its use. Just as we
must be cautious about projecting the present onto the past, or thinking that
the relationship between the present and the past is a direct one (rather than
analogous; see Bynum, 1995), we must similarly conclude that even though
ethnographic circumstances of one place (or two) in Mesoamerica or the Andes
have “ended up” in a certain way and been thus observed, this does not mean
that they were always that way (e.g., Hastorf 1991; Marcus 1995). In gender
research, as in other domains of inquiry, few would disagree with the notion
that an archaeology, history, or ethnohistory that only confirms the ethnogra-
351
Margaret W. Conkey
phy or the texts is on very tectonic scholarly terrain. It is clear that we often
require dynamic models that can see change(s) over time.
However, for those who worry about the casual way in which a community
of scholars can come to dip generously into ethnographic/ethnohistorical ac-
counts,1 the chapter by Burkhart is elegant, insightful, and appropriately trou-
bling. This essay is crucially important for this volume. I readily applaud her use
of some fundamental tenets of discourse theory to scrutinize the double dis-
course, or, as she calls it, the counterdiscourse, and the dialogues on a case-by-
case (or text-by-text) basis. She does not just appeal to the “texts,” but shows
that each text or each genre has its own history and sources. This is a fine
example of a dialogical method, at many levels; Burkhart works back and forth
between the Christian (specifically, the Franciscan Catholic) and the Nahuatl
texts and cultures, between gender roles and ideologies, between practice and
theory. It is a method of “tacking” that could be readily applied to other data
and questions. What Burkhart shows, of course, is not that the texts are useless
—not at all—but that there are problems, and that the circumstances in which
a particular text is written and the reasons for writing it need scrutiny. These
texts can be used, but used judiciously indeed.
Representation and Sexuality

There is no doubt that most essays in this volume—as well as much gender
research in wider archaeological/historical contexts—have been notably suc-
cessful when at least some of the evidence concerned has been iconographic,
especially representational imagery. While this is a powerful foundation for in-
ferences, it is also a potential interpretive land mine, often lacking an explicit
framework. It is for some art historians who have dared to, and who must, to
work in this arena. The theories of representation are, like every other theoreti-
cal domain, not a stable, agreed upon body of theory, but they have been af-
fected by feminist concerns and critiques in productive ways.2 As we are
emboldened to step up to images and representations in the hopes of inferring
something about gender or cultural meanings, we must first scrutinize our own
systems of visual conventions, since we inevitably take these to the very images
upon which we want to draw.
1
I have often held this debate with various archaeologists studying hunting–gathering
peoples in southern Africa and Australia.
2
What this means is that many of us need to do this reading, too. See Bryson (1983),
Davis (1996), Garb (1998), Kampen (1995), Mitchell (1994), Nochlin (1988), Pollock (1977),
and Solomon-Godeau (1997), to name but a few, and not all feminists.
352
Epilogue
This leads me to note something rather remarkable about many of the

essays in this volume, namely, their explicit engagement with sexuality. Since
about half of the essays confront this topic head-on, in provocative, if not
always “resolved” sorts of ways, I would say that this gives the volume some-
what of a landmark status. With few exceptions, at least in anthropological
archaeology (but cf. Schmidt and Voss 2000), the only works on archaeology or
history of sexuality that a few might know about are either somewhat popular
overviews (e.g., Taylor 1996) or writings by Michel Foucault (1972, 1978),
who hardly had our kind of concerns in mind when he appropriated the term
“archaeology.”
If there is much to learn about the complexities and multiplicities of the
concept of gender, there is even more to think about in terms of sexuality. It is
not just that there is a notable homoerotic dimension to Classic Maya society
(see Joyce, this volume), but there is also the real probability that what is labeled
“homosexuality” and perceived rather monolithically is itself a varied phe-
nomenon, just as there is no fixed concept of what it means to be heterosexual
(e.g., Herdt 1994; Roscoe 1991, 1994). The fact that there is no single way to
approach this, even within an admittedly large but agreed-upon “culture area”
such as Pre-Hispanic America, can be seen in the tension between the respec-
tive approaches employed by Joyce (this volume, 2000a, 2000b) and by Richard
Trexler (1995).3
While there is a great deal to be said about the necessity of bringing sexu-
ality into the conceptions and theories of gender, Monaghan’s chapter in this
volume pinpoints rather precisely what is at stake here, namely, the necessity of
working out the relationships between varying concepts and practices of sexu-
ality and the concepts and practices of gender. In an exceptionally concise and
accessible commentary, Henrietta Moore (1993: 196–198) summarizes some
of these new observations, including the feminist critiques of Foucault’s work
on sexuality. Our earlier, simpler notions concerning the sex/gender system
have been seriously destabilized. And, as Monaghan notes, “At this stage . . . we
need fewer totalizing pronouncements and more precise analysis” (p. 288).
Where Do We Stand?
Thus, Pre-Columbian studies are still contributing to innovative and pro-
vocative research directly relevant to understanding gender. In Engendering Ar-
3
For other attempts to address issues of sexuality in various past contexts, see, for ex-
ample, Hollimon (1997), Kauffmann (1979), Leick (1994), Ringrose (1994), and Schmidt
and Voss (2000); for Mesoamerica specifically, see McCafferty and McCafferty (1991, 1999).
353
Margaret W. Conkey
chaeology (Gero and Conkey 1991), one of the first edited volumes on archae-
ology and gender, three out of the nine areal studies were concerned with the
Pre-Hispanic Americas, while Virginia Miller’s book (1988) may still be one of
the few works focused on this topic in a particular geographic or cultural area,
along with a publication by Cheryl Claassen and Joyce (1997) and another
more recent one by Joyce (2001).
We have come a long way from the somewhat simplistic, but necessary
entry into this kind of research, with the notion that doing gender research
means primarily finding out what women did, or identifying women’s roles. As
Alison Wylie (n.d.a) has argued, this approach has, nonetheless, generated a new
consciousness and reinforced a central tenet of feminist research, namely, that
gender is not to be “disappeared.” In an excellent assessment of the anthropol-
ogy of gender, Moore (1993) is insightful and incisive about the new perspec-
tives generated from that wider field. She makes a particularly compelling point
about our need to think as much about what she calls “differences within” as
about “differences between.” Moore reminds us that anthropology has moved
beyond the early implicit assumptions that each society being studied had a
single gender ideology or model based on the two—and only two—discrete
categories of “male” and “female.” The picture now, she notes, is much more
complex, and, as mentioned above, there is no single way of categorizing the
male or the female and no one gender ideology within any one society (Reeves
Sanday and Goodenough 1990). As Moore summarizes,
It is clearly necessary to . . . recognize that the increasing evidence for
the instability of the sex/gender distinction, as anthropology has con-
ventionally applied it, complicates the investigation of indigenous
concepts of personhood. . . . Once more, it becomes crucial to investi-
gate differences within categories and entities, as well as between them,
and this applies to the categories woman and man, the categories fe-
male and male, and the social entities of cultures, bodies, persons. (1993:
202)
We have seen some explorations of this approach. Dean’s essay presents an
example among the Inka of differential performative inscriptions, which vary
not just between men and women but throughout the life cycles of each. If
Monaghan’s observations about only certain women being able to serve ritual
meals were applied to Gero’s Queyash feasting, she might have access not only
to differences between genders and classes, but to differences within them as
well. Brumfiel also has suggestive data about the differences within the cat-
egory of Aztec women, in terms of their solutions to providing tribute cloth.
354
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As Marcus elucidates here (see also Marcus 1992), it may be the case that in
most states royal and noble women were differentiated from each other, as were
noble women from commoners. She goes on to insist that,“in fact, royal women
are more like royal men than (like) commoner women” (Marcus, personal com-
munication, 1997).
In Moore’s overview of Gendered Anthropology (del Valle 1993b), she points
out that in the last twenty years of the anthropological study of gender, both
new ethnography and “theoretical illumination” have been produced. The his-
torical and archaeological study of gender may not be too far behind, but it is
not easy and will never be unambiguous. This volume represents just the tip of
the iceberg of complexities and complications in a field that many scholars are
still reluctant (and perhaps resistant or afraid) to address. The results achieved
here are bold.
To me, inquiry into gender in ancient societies means that it is no longer
business as usual; gender is not just another variable to check off, to “find,” or to
measure. The historian of science Lorraine Daston has formulated some com-
pelling guidelines for this kind of new work. She has developed a concept of
“perspectival suppleness,” which she defines as the ability “to try to think one’s
way into another world” that is designed to “unsettle the self-evidence of our
belief structure and encourage an intellectual as well as moral empathy with
other ways of thinking” or of being in the world (quoted in Thomas 1993; see
also Daston 1991). Probing into gender and other social, ideological, and sym-
bolic processes and practices of the past requires that we develop alternatives to
what appears to be logical.
Once we have grasped that there are alternative ways in which we can think
about the past and such phenomena as gender, an engendered archaeology
immediately becomes the enterprise in which we are not merely seeking to
learn what men/women or others “did,” but investigating our own inquiry as a
highly constructed form of knowledge seeking, from the general disciplinary
goals to the research interests of individual practitioners. This volume makes a
significant contribution to that enterprise.
As Bynum (1995) points out in her consideration of what is to be learned
about the remote past from current feminist theories, the “only past we can
know is one shaped by the questions we ask; yet these questions are also shaped
by the context we come from, and our context includes the past.” Thus, to
paraphrase Bynum in regard to the focus of this volume, our picture of Pre-
Hispanic concerns is “as influenced by current feminist debates as those de-
bates”—debates on language, symbol, and social practice—“are influenced by
the ideas from which they partly descend. . . . We must never forget to watch
355
Margaret W. Conkey
ourselves knowing the otherness of the past, but this is not the same as merely
watching ourselves” (1995: 30–31).
Acknowledgments I am grateful to Cecelia Klein for inviting me to join a

distinguished group of scholars who have been so important in advancing our
understanding of both the ancient New World and gender. The hospitality and
professionalism of all at Dumbarton Oaks made for a delightful and most com-
fortable event. I am indebted to Joyce Marcus for many helpful editorial com-
ments and suggestions, and to colleagues Rosemary Joyce and Joan Gero for
continuous dialogue and discussion, which have improved my thinking and
helped me to understand better the culture of Pre-Hispanic scholars. Several
anonymous reviewers were generous in their endorsement of my outsider’s
approach and made helpful suggestions on improving the manuscript. Finally,
without the work of scholars outside the field of anthropology, such as Caroline
Bynum, Jonathan Culler, Lorraine Daston, and Helen Longino, as well as Alison
Wylie, this essay would not have been possible.
356
Epilogue
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362
Conclusions: Envisioning
Pre-Columbian Gender Studies
CECELIA F. KLEIN
T
he points raised by Margaret Conkey in the preceding essay evoked
a firestorm of debate at the conference, not only during the discussion
that followed the last presentation, but long after as well. Once the
conference ended, both Conkey and I received a barrage of e-mail messages,
phone calls, and letters from both conference participants and members of the
audience. Later we exchanged summaries of the feedback each of us had re-
ceived, as well as our own impressions of the conference, our reservations, and
our rejoinders. That the controversy galvanized many of us to continue the
dialogue well into the next month and beyond was a clear sign (to me, at least)
that it had been, despite the insufficient time allowed for discussion, a success.
In what follows I address what I perceive as the key issues raised during the
conference discussion itself and the weeks that followed, and try to convey the
nature of those debates. In the process, I share my personal assessment of what
the conference and this volume imply in terms of the current state of Pre-
Columbian gender studies, and indicate some key directions in which I think
the field might develop. I do so, however, as a trained art historian with no
personal experience of conducting archaeological research, and my perspective
and interests have surely been shaped and limited accordingly.
The issue that elicited the greatest reaction among both participants and the
audience was that of the relevance and importance of theory to Pre-Columbian
gender studies. Conkey’s frank assessment of the conference papers as, with a
few exceptions, sadly undertheorized brought forth eager endorsements from
some people at the same time as it raised the hackles of others. The latter
response was of no surprise to me, since I already knew that Pre-Columbian
studies had been traditionally resistant to gender theory. In fact, one of my
major goals in inviting Conkey, a leading gender theorist who was not herself
a Pre-Columbianist, and some of the other presenters to participate was to put
the relative isolationism of Pre-Columbian gender studies “on the table,” so to
speak.
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Cecelia F. Klein
There are multiple reasons for the skepticism regarding theory that perme-
ates the field of Pre-Columbian gender studies. For one thing, the field has
tended to be dominated by archaeologists, and archaeology, as has been previ-
ously pointed out by others (Conkey and Spector 1984; Gero 1983, 1988), has
been historically defined and practiced largely by men. It is no secret that male
scholars in many disciplines are either indifferent to or feel threatened by gen-
der theory. Some of them see it as a feminist attempt to criticize, if not depose
them, while others simply view it as a minor subset of their discipline, which,
they seem to assume, should be left to female scholars. At the same time, many
serious archaeologists lament the current lack of a scientific methodology for
envisioning gender. They are dissatisfied with the efforts of scholars, like some
of those represented in this volume, who, when data are scarce, rely on context
to help them to “see” gender in the archaeological record. Like many practitio-
ners of other disciplines, such as history, moreover, they often perceive efforts
to study gender as biased or “soft,” and thus inconsequential, no doubt in part
because, in this country, gender studies first emerged in departments of English
and literature. Some archaeologists warn that a focus on women and an en-
gagement with political feminism necessarily undermine the objectivity and
empirical rigor expected of a “hard” science—a charge that is denied by gen-
der theorists (Wylie 1992).
As I noted in the introduction to this volume, Pre-Columbian art history,
even though it tends to be regarded as a “sissy,” or “woman’s,” discipline, has
done no better. Art history, unlike archaeology, has engaged theory head-on in
recent decades, but most art historical theory, including theory that addresses
gender, has been generated by scholars of modern and contemporary art
(Gouma-Peterson and Mathews 1987; Nochlin 1988; Pollock 1988; Broude
and Garrard 1992). Many art historians who elect to work with pre-contact
New World art regard themselves as “divorced” from such allegedly Eurocentric
scholarship, preferring to specialize in the “non-West” and to remain
microfocused and data oriented. Some practitioners even see Pre-Columbian
studies as a place of refuge from the complex theoretical debates raging in
other art historical fields. I therefore think it fair to say that the current attitude
of many Pre-Columbian art historians toward gender theory is at least as hos-
tile as that of many archaeologists.
Pre-Columbianists frequently offer other reasons for either avoiding theory
altogether or resenting the accusation that they do not sufficiently consult and
use it. Some admit to not being certain just what “theory” is. This is not diffi-
cult to understand, given that definitions and uses of the term have changed
over time (Culler 1994: 15–16). The word “theory” is often used in place of
364
Conclusions
“speculation” or “hypothesis”—as in “I have a theory”—and that still is its

principal meaning to some scholars. For others, theory is equivalent to meth-
odology; it tells one, in other words, how to go about one’s work. For this
reason, those who are self-conscious about their methodology will often claim
that they, in fact, “do” theory. The relatively new field of critical theory, in
contrast, suggests to many that theory is essentially criticism and self-reflection.
Because critical theory is rooted in postmodernist thinking, it translates as the
questioning of one’s sources, one’s institutional base, one’s biases or views in
general, and in particular the premises upon which these rest. Many scholars
believe that they already take a critical approach to their sources, although their
success in doing so must be questioned. Few Pre-Columbianists, in any event,
seem to currently understand theory in the sense that Jonathan Culler (1994:
13, 16) defines it. To Culler, theory is an unbounded corpus of writings that
challenge and reorient thinking beyond the field in which they have been
generated. Theory, in other words, makes us look at things differently by taking
advantage of the “most powerful and innovative thinking and writing available
today,” regardless of the discipline or field that generates them.
One member of the conference audience argued that there was too much
specialized knowledge required in Pre-Columbian studies for us to get bogged
down in nuanced deconstructions of texts and objects. There just is not suffi-
cient time to read and “know” everything, so we must eschew the “nonessen-
tial” writings. At the conference, Conkey criticized Pre-Columbianists for this
preoccupation with data and empirical knowledge, lamenting their reluctance
to abandon an empirical, positivist approach to the past. Unfortunately, the
venue for this critique was somewhat unsuitable given that the Pre-Columbian
Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks, a research center and a library rather
than a humanitarian center or a “think tank,” has traditionally regarded data
collection and dissemination as its primary mandate. Moreover, as has been
pointed out since the conference, no truly meaningful understanding of Pre-
Columbian gender, theoretical or otherwise, can be constructed without en-
gaging the data. The fact that Conkey works primarily on Paleolithic Europe,
for which data are far more scarce than those found in the Pre-Columbian
field, together with her unfamiliarity with the data available to Pre-Columbianists,
may help to account for her position. Nonetheless, Conkey’s remarks have
triggered the countercharge, perhaps inevitable, that theorists theorize only
because they personally lack data.1
1
Several of the attendees noted after the conference that the most highly theoretical
presentations had been “data poor.”
365
Cecelia F. Klein
The resolution of this tension, it seems to me, lies somewhere between the
two extremes. The need to collect and analyze data does not prohibit theoriz-
ing any more than theory prohibits the need for ample and solid data. What we
need to strive for is the extension of our data analyses to the point where they
become more obviously relevant to the work of scholars outside our field, as
well as within. Some of us may be better equipped and more inclined to do this
than others, but more of us need to involve ourselves in the effort. The field
needs to balance more excellent data sets and case studies with the formulation
of more appropriate and relevant theoretical frameworks.
Perhaps the most frequently heard excuse for not theorizing one’s work
concerns what many Pre-Columbianists view as the use of unnecessary “jar-
gon” in theoretical discourse. Most Pre-Columbianists seem to think that the
specialized vocabulary that has emerged in theoretical writing is not only pre-
tentious but also deliberately opaque and therefore obfuscating. Theorists do
not want to be understood, according to this complaint, and deliberately talk
over most peoples’ heads. Even Culler (1994: 14) acknowledges that theory is
“hard reading.” I personally think that the above criticism is sometimes justi-
fied, and wonder why more female and gender theorists have not taken to
heart Catherine Lutz’s (1995: 252–255) observation that it is, in part, precisely
because theory is difficult reading that it tends to be coded masculine in our
culture. Lutz identifies other characteristics of theoretical writing that help to
engender it as male, among them broad generalization at the expense of his-
tory, emphasis on originality of thought rather than information (data), rela-
tively few citations, and a celebration of (usually male) authorial genius. Much
gender theory today, even when written by women, exhibits these same char-
acteristics instead of attempting to contest them. What we need to develop is a
new way to write theory that does not have the effect, described by Lutz, of
saying to some readers, “This is not for you.”
On the other hand, Pre-Columbianists need to acknowledge that many of
the unfamiliar words bandied about by theorists have been constructed be-
cause no extant word conveyed their exact meaning. A “problematic” is some-
thing more than just a “problem,” for example. Many of these words intimidate
and confound us because they are relatively new and unfamiliar to us, not
because they are overly long or unnecessarily convoluted. Moreover, as in the
case of all “foreign” words, their meanings can be, with effort, learned. Learn-
ing to read and write theory is obviously hard work, but it is, I would agree
with Conkey, work that is important.
There are, however, justifiable complaints about the relative lack of effort
on the part of many theorists to help the uninitiated to “learn the lingo” and
366
Conclusions
“talk the talk.” A number of our presenters admitted that, although they would
like to better theorize their writing, they were unsure how to go about it.
Obviously, simply listening to or reading theory does not necessarily help nov-
ices to figure out how to use it. At our conference, some of the most theoreti-
cally sophisticated papers were more or less incomprehensible to many in the
audience because specialized terms and unfamiliar names were never defined
or identified. The presenters were perceived as not wanting to communicate
with anyone who was not already steeped in the literature. We have tried, in
this volume, to correct this problem by taking care to define these new words
and concepts wherever they crop up.
Ironically, the charge of esotericism can also be turned around and directed
at the Pre-Columbian field itself. When theorists complain about Pre-
Columbianists talking only to each other and not communicating with schol-
ars outside their field, they often do more than admit to having little interest in
our actual field and data. They may also gripe that the literature is hard to read
because Pre-Columbianists, too, write in their own, highly specialized jargon.
Pre-Columbianists often fail to see this. For us, Nahuatl and Quechua names
drip from the pen like honey from a piece of toast. Because all of us know
what a “horizon,” a ceque, or a “star war” is, much of the time we do not bother
to define such terms, and I doubt that we ever seriously consider whether
someone without the appropriate training will be able to make sense of our
material. In other words, while data-oriented Pre-Columbianists, among oth-
ers, charge theorists with obscurantism, they themselves seem disinterested in
communicating with nonspecialists! Thus, all Pre-Columbianists, theoretically
inclined or not, need to improve their manner of communicating to a broader
audience. If progress is to be made in raising the level of sophistication in Pre-
Columbian gender analyses, scholars on all sides have got to find a way to speak
to each other across the real and imaginary borders that separate our disciplines,
our fields, and our areas of specialization.
One of the most spirited debates at the conference centered on the empha-
sis placed in several of the papers, as well as in Conkey’s commentary, on the
primacy of feminist theory. Some people stated that they read other kinds of
theory but are not particularly well disposed toward feminist theory. The major
reason given at the time was that feminism had “gone soft” in recent years by
deliberately striving to refute former feminist representations of women as
relatively powerless, which was accomplished by redefining power to include
women’s influence in the informal, individualized, private, and domestic realms
(e.g., Rogers 1975; Duffy 1986). A proponent of this argument, I pointed out
at the conference that because feminism formerly concentrated on social injus-
367
Cecelia F. Klein
tice, it originally propelled people to take an activist stance. “Theory,” in other

words, has inspired social action, which is responsible for the improvements we
have seen. I stated that, for me, the original power of the Women’s Liberation
movement of the 1960s and 1970s lay in its recognition that women had less
official political and economic power than men—a situation that has not sub-
stantially improved since then. The feminist contention at that time was not
that women lacked power of any kind, but rather that they lagged behind men
in terms of being in a position to make decisions that could radically and swiftly
improve both their individual situations and the status of other women. I am
concerned that, as much current feminist theory focuses on female forms of
power that are not primarily or directly political or economic, it does little to
enable women to exercise greater direct control over the lives of women as a
group. In other words, since this new emphasis obscures the gross inequities in
the broader powers of women versus men, feminist theory today fails to lead to
the social action that might correct them, restricting itself instead to verbal
criticism and attempts to alter negative representations of women.
This is, of course, part of the recent broader theoretical shift away from
materialist and social theories of historical change toward the current
postmodernist preoccupation with discourse, signs, subjectivity, and meaning—
in other words, the “mental” and the “ideational” (Weeden 1987; Mascia-Lees,
Sharpe, and Cohen 1989; Nicholson 1990; Butler 1992). What we need, as
Sherry Ortner (1996: 1 ff ) points out, is a better way to integrate the study of
the ways in which we “construct” categories, such as representations, with so-
cial practice. Not surprisingly, it was primarily the older feminists at the confer-
ence, those who had participated in the women’s movement in the 1960s and
1970s, who shared my point of view. Most of the younger feminists aligned
themselves with the more recent attempts to highlight the power that women
already have.
In the weeks following the conference, at least one archaeologist identified
a related tendency for feminist theorists to eschew general theories of social
power. In our conference presentations, gender hierarchies, when they were
discussed at all, were seldom situated in relation to the writings of the major
social theorists of the modern era, such as, for example, Karl Marx (1973),
Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Michel Foucault (1978–86), Anthony Giddens (1984),
and Michael Mann (1986–93). In part, this may well be due to an understand-
able feminist skepticism regarding the masculine origins of these theories (e.g.,
Hartsock 1990). I suspect, however, that much of our reluctance to take on the
“big guys” is due not so much to the fact that they are “guys,” but rather to a
concern that their models may skew our understanding. John Monaghan (in
368
Conclusions
this volume) states outright that he has neither chosen to analyze gender rela-
tions in Santiago Nuyoo, nor addressed how gender and sex there are condi-
tioned by institutional practices. His reason is that “at this stage . . . we need
fewer totalizing pronouncements and more precise analysis” (p. 288). It must be
kept in mind, however, that many social theories are not totalizing in the sense
of allowing for no amendments or alterations. Rather, they are general in the
sense of looking at the big picture without imposing a limited and inflexible
set of analytical categories. There is no reason why we cannot and should not
test such theories against our data.2
One conference speaker, anthropologist Rosemary Joyce, invoked Bourdieu’s
writings in her conference presentation, but felt it necessary to remove those
references for the published version because some people in the audience had
failed to grasp the connections that she made between Bourdieu’s ideas and her
analysis of Maya gender. This was particularly true of art historians, some of
whom might defend their bewilderment, however wrongly, by arguing that
social theory is not part of art history’s preserve. This is not to say, however, that
the essays in this volume have no broader social theoretical value. Joyce Marcus’s
cross-cultural study of female rulers, for example, draws conclusions that can
be readily tested against other case studies. As generalizations about female
power, they have implications for scholars working in a number of fields out-
side anthropology. Elizabeth Brumfiel’s study shows how gender identity may
change in response to changes in production that result from state formation
and control. Brumfiel also has something to say about the ways in which state
demands for goods and labor affect the organization of labor and how these
relate to gender and class. Her work should affect not just that of other social
anthropologists and archaeologists, but also that of historians, economic an-
thropologists, and gender theorists.
A final complaint regarding feminist theory that surfaced at the conference
concerns its tendency to accept as a given for other societies the West’s bipolar-
ized categorization of gender, our myth that society is largely, if not entirely,
made up of exclusively what we call men and women. Some feminists at our
conference contested this essentialism, rightfully pointing out that feminism
means too many different things for such a generalization to be valid. However,
as I noted later to Conkey, only one of the self-professed feminists who spoke
at our conference—Joyce—ever questioned whether gender categories within
the society she worked with were bipolar. The others took it as a premise that
among Pre-Columbian peoples, as among us in the West today, there were only
men and women to (seriously) consider. Whether there was anybody else out
2
I owe special thanks to Claire Farago for working through this argument with me.
369
Cecelia F. Klein
there, or whether men were not always masculine, and women not always femi-
nine, was neither recognized nor factored into the questions these other femi-
nists addressed. Moreover, none of the other presenters ever asked how gender
in these societies was determined—that is, on what basis their recognized gen-
der categories were constructed. As Joyce (in Joyce and Claassen 1997: 1), fol-
lowing previous authors, has recently observed,“Neither feminist nor womanist
writings consistently address what might be taken as central to both, the prob-
lematic status of gender as a concept.” “In archaeological writing,” Joyce notes,
“gender has largely been treated as self-evident, coincident with biological sex
or sexual orientation, and women have often been viewed as almost inter-
changeable, engaged in universally predictable activities.”
Besides Joyce, curiously, it was Monaghan, an ethnographer, and two art
historians—Carolyn Dean and myself—who took up these issues at the con-
ference. Like Monaghan, neither Dean nor I wear feminism on our sleeves.
Why were we the ones who refused to assume outright that gender in Pre-
Columbian America was defined according to the criteria used by us today?
Why were we the only ones to ask whether gender was contingent upon biol-
ogy in these cultures, and whether it was thought to be immutable or suscep-
tible to factors such as age, illness, nature, and the gods?
I can only speak for myself here, but in my case it was because I was reading
a set of theorists different from those whom most of the feminists were regu-
larly citing. These readings included medical studies of intersexuality, cross-
cultural works on cross-dressing and same-sex relations, and, in particular, queer
theory.Why, as I later asked Conkey, do feminist archaeologists seem to eschew
these other kinds of theoretical writing on gender? Why, if Judith Butler’s
work on the performativity of gender is regarded as useful by archaeological
feminists, is her objection to the feminist elision or pathologization of gender
normativity so commonly ignored? As Butler notes in the anthology Feminism
Meets Queer Theory (1997: 2), the binary between “men” and “women” seems
“not only to be a constant presupposition within feminist work, but [in the
past] was elevated to the theological status of the ‘irrefutable’ within some
French Feminism.” In so doing, she points out, it has “only shored up, without
marking, the heterosexist assumptions of the paradigm”—that is, it has rein-
forced the categorical distinctions that have created so many of our problems
in the first place. I also have to ask why, in concluding that many of us failed to
adequately theorize our studies, Conkey did not perceive those papers that
problematized the gender binary as having a theoretical foundation and value.
Is this a manifestation of what Butler criticizes as the deep identification of
feminism with heterosexist assumptions?
370
Conclusions
One person who attended the conference has shared with me her disap-
pointment that, although feminists demand that others situate themselves in
the historical and institutional context in which they operate, they seldom do
so themselves. Surely, the historical conditions that fostered the women’s move-
ment in recent decades—women’s need to enter the workplace in the face of
sex discrimination, for example—could be linked to feminist archaeology’s con-
tinuing determination to naturalize the categories “male” and “female.”
Those earlier battles centered on the roles and statuses of women in relation to
men rather than on people whose gender was ambiguous. More self-reflexivity
would be refreshing. It seems to me that if we really want to problematize
gender, to open it up to new understandings, and to force a radical rethinking,
we have to be willing to “queer” some of our most fundamental assumptions
(Weed 1997).
I will even go further and claim that the studies in this volume that ask how
gender was formulated in Pre-Columbian times produce a consensus that con-
stitutes a significant contribution to gender theory. For in the studies by Joyce,
Dean, Monaghan, and myself, gender was not found to have been inherently
bipolar. Gender categories were not biologically determined either by the Classic
Maya or by the Nahua, and multiple variants of the masculine and the femi-
nine were clearly recognized in these two cultures, as they were in the Andes.
In all of the areas covered by these authors, some form or forms of androgyny
played central roles in formulating gender identity and structuring social rela-
tions. Among the Inka, the Classic Maya, and the Nahua alike, people were
perceived as singularly sexed only during the time that they were married and
producing offspring. In the course of the life cycle, individuals moved from a
relatively androgynous, or gender-ambiguous, state to having a single sex, and
then back to androgyny. Among the Nahua, moreover, ambiguous gender was
not perceived as invariably antisocial because at certain times of the year its
antisociality could be harnessed to benefit society. Certainly, none of these
findings is without parallel; in fact, they fit well with mounting evidence that
many ancient and non-Western peoples thought about gender very differently
from us today (e.g., Blackwood 1984; Laqueur 1990; Roscoe 1991; Herdt 1981,
1994; Ramet 1996; Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang 1997). Scholars working on gen-
der in other times and places should therefore find these studies relevant to
their own findings.
There are other instances in which the studies in this volume bear upon
theory. Louise Burkhart’s very careful analysis of the interrelation between Chris-
tian and indigenous Nahua elements in colonial Central Mexican texts speaks
eloquently in regard to some of the key issues currently being debated by
371
Cecelia F. Klein
postcolonial theorists. On one level, it resonates with the general critique of

both colonial and twentieth-century representations of the indigenous people
and customs of the Americas, which exploded in the years just before and after
the Columbus Quincentennial. This, in turn, was an offshoot of the broader
critique of Western representations of culture, launched earlier by Edward Said
(1978, 1989) and later forcefully brought to the attention of social scientists,
and Pre-Columbianists among them, by authors such as James Clifford (1988;
Clifford and Marcus 1986). Since all Pre-Columbianists engage in interpreta-
tion of culture in one form or another, the postmodern issues of how we
construct our knowledge, in particular knowledge of our “Others,” must be
confronted. Understanding what happens to a culture dramatically affected by
another, in many ways very different, culture is particularly important for Pre-
Columbianists, because even our interpretations of data from periods long pre-
dating the conquest tend to be rooted in models drawn from postconquest
sources (Boone and Cummins 1998).
Burkhart’s analysis therefore is critical. She makes it quite clear not only that
colonial texts cannot be used uncritically as “windows” onto the Pre-Hispanic
past, but that merely trying to strip away from them what seems to be Euro-
pean influences does not solve the problem, either. Colonial sources are not just
blends of native and European—they are colonial constructions drafted for
colonial purposes and thus produced under new or altered circumstances. They
are often reinterpretations, misrepresentations, and fabrications; they reflect bi-
ases and counterdiscourses. As Burkhart notes, some are even dialogical, em-
bedding the tensions and counterarguments generated by life in a colonial
world. Her study therefore has serious implications for scholars interested in
the effects of colonization on cultural forms such as literacy (Mignolo 1995) or
visuality (Farago 1995). It also speaks directly to the process that theorists refer
to as cultural hybridity (Young 1990, 1995; Bhabha 1994, 1997). Homi Bhabha
(1997) identifies hybridity with that space “in between,” the interstitial site of a
double consciousness, a place of ambiguity and ambivalence where identities
are blurred and people are engaged in an ongoing process of negotiation. It is
precisely within this “midstness,” this place of mimicry and slippage and trans-
lation that Burkhart situates her work.
That Burkhart focuses on the representation of gender in early colonial
Central Mexican texts is even more important, for it helps to relate the concept
of gender to the problem of hybridity. How did Christian authors treat the
issue of gender during this period of culture contact and transition? How did
these representations relate to the ethnic backgrounds and colonial identities
of their authors? How were sexuality and morality represented in culturally
372
Conclusions
hybrid documents? In a previous work (Klein 1995), I tried to address some of

these same questions as they pertained to colonial Nahua images of a Pre-
Hispanic goddess. As with Burkhart’s Nahua documents, I found the colonial
visual hybrid to be complex, ambiguous, not capable of being distilled into
European and indigenous Nahua “parts.” The gender of the subject, too, was
affected by the interstitial colonial space of production. As the sixteenth cen-
tury wore on, the gender of the goddess in these images slowly changed from
female to androgynous and, finally, male. In my article in this volume, I deal
even more directly with “gender hybridity” by focusing on Nahua notions
about ambiguous gender.
One point that comes across loud and clear in Burkhart’s article is the par-
ticular importance of language at moments of exceptional hybridity. Since she
works with written documents produced during a period of double conscious-
ness and negotiation, some penned in Spanish, some in Nahuatl, Burkhart can
assess their implications for gender only by knowing both languages. Similarly,
in my 1995 article, I argue that an art historian cannot comprehend what hap-
pened to visual imagery in the New World during the colonial period without
knowing as much about the visual languages of preconquest times as about
those used in Europe and colonial Latin America. This is not just a technical or
methodological point. One of the key issues in current postcolonial theory is
that of native agency and voice. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) classic
essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” has ramifications for both Colonialists and
Pre-Columbianists.We in Pre-Columbian studies cannot escape from our tem-
poral, cultural, and institutional positions when writing—and hence speak-
ing—for others (Mohanty 1984; Alcoff 1991–92). How do Pre-Columbianists
allow the voice of their subjects to be heard when, by definition, all their sub-
jects are long dead?
One of the ways to provide for this is to enter into these ancient discourses,
whether they be literary or visual, with knowledge of the languages in which
they were waged. Work by Burkhart, James Lockhart (1992), and his students,
among others, has shown that careful translation of colonial documents writ-
ten in Nahuatl dramatically changes the way we perceive the position and
attitudes of the “Other.” Other scholars have done the same for Quechua speakers
in the colonial Andes (e.g., Mannheim 1998). When these texts are analyzed, it
becomes clear that the ethnic survivors of the conquest were active partici-
pants in the construction of their colonial experience. They were not the pas-
sive “victims” of a “spiritual conquest,” for example, as we used to think (e.g.,
Ricard 1966). Burkhart’s article points directly to mastery of the indigenous
languages as an important means to reinstating native agency in our representa-
373
Cecelia F. Klein
tions of the colonizing process. As she has shown, this can have equally impor-
tant results for our efforts to envision gender relations and identities in ancient
times.
This brings me to the last of the controversial matters taken up in our
discussion after the conference. Like the others, this one continued to be de-
bated in the months that followed. As Conkey puts it in this volume (p. 352),
she is concerned about “the casual way in which a community of scholars can
come to dip generously into ethnographic/ethnohistorical accounts.” The eth-
nographers at the conference tended to take these comments personally, as a
negative assessment of the relevance of their work for Pre-Columbian studies.
Those presenters who had extensively used postconquest data to support their
arguments concluded, on the other hand, that Conkey opposed all use of eth-
nographic information. The debate that followed, which was based on these
misunderstandings, was therefore somewhat volatile. In this volume, Conkey
tries to make it clear that she is not against the use of ethnographic material,
but rather objects to what she perceives as the scholarly practice of moving
back and forth in time as though time had not really passed, or in her own
words, the tendency to “conflate several centuries into a generalization” (p.
351). In so doing, Conkey rightly warns us, we risk missing the “slippage” that
inevitably occurs over the centuries, and may therefore end up reproducing the
present in the past.
The debate over whether or not it is appropriate to use ethnographic data
to interpret the Pre-Columbian past is not new to the field, and no Pre-
Columbianist who uses ethnographic material today is unaware of its history
or the problems that such usage entails. The arguments have come from differ-
ent places, however, and the vocabulary, emphases, and actors cited shift sub-
stantially from camp to camp. Conkey mentions the cautions of Martin Wobst
(1978) against what he called the “tyranny of ethnography,” but the debate
among social scientists had begun long before that (e.g., Steward 1942; Hawkes
1954; Ascher 1961; Heider 1967; Anderson 1969; Oswalt 1974). Social scien-
tists could point as well to the defense of this methodology by the anthropolo-
gist Gordon Willey (1973) that was immediately rebutted by the art historian
George Kubler (1973). Kubler had already published frequently on the subject
of what the earlier art historian Erwin Panofsky (1960) had called “renascences,”
contrasted with what he had termed “disjunction.” Like Panofsky, Kubler (1977)
makes the point that old art forms may survive the era that produced them
without keeping their original meanings, just as old subjects and themes may
remain vital but, over the centuries, become expressed through new or differ-
ent forms. One cannot, in other words, assume that, just because a particular art
374
Conclusions
form in the present is similar if not identical to one from an earlier era, it
maintains the same meaning that it bore originally.
All Pre-Columbian art historians are well aware of the famous debate be-
tween Willey and Kubler; in fact, many Pre-Columbian art historians were
trained by Kubler. All are alert to the possibility that disjunction has occurred.
Moreover, as historians, they know as well as anyone the degree and kinds of
changes that may occur over time, particularly in the often-oppressive after-
math of a violent political takeover. However, the majority of Pre-Columbian
art historians working with cultures that immediately predated contact still
turn to ethnographic data for inspiration and support. They do this for the
same reason that they continue to depend heavily on colonial (ethnohistorical)
sources: without these, it has proved to be almost impossible to derive verbal
meaning from the Pre-Columbian visual record. Social scientists who seek the
same goal likewise continue to employ ethnographic analogy, while being fully
aware of more recent cautions and suggestions by colleagues such as Patty Jo
Watson (1979; Gould and Watson 1982), philosopher Alison Wylie (1982), and
Bruce Trigger (1982).
It seems to me that, whether one is an archaeologist or an art historian, the
relative reliability of ethnographic analogy in helping us to interpret the past
depends on a number of variables.The Paleolithic material with which Conkey
works, for example, dates to a far more distant point in time than does that of
any of the other authors in this volume. Whereas the Paleolithic period ended
at least twelve thousand years ago, most Andeanists and Mesoamericanists work
with societies that flourished after the fourth millennium B.C., and less than six
hundred years have passed since the Spanish conquest. When, in my essay in
this volume, I use contemporary highland Maya field data from Santiago Atitlán
to provide insight into how Nahuas thought about ambiguous gender, I need
to extend my findings only five centuries back in time. Moreover, sixteenth-
century documents make it clear that the peoples living in highland Guatemala
today have descended from those living there at the time of the conquest, when
many communities in the highlands had close socio-political ties with Nahuas.
As Bryony Orme (1973: 482) points out, archaeologists of the Americas are
therefore better able than Europeanists to document historical continuity be-
tween the prehistoric past and the present. As a result, they tend to approach
the problem of ethnographic analogy differently. Americanists, for example,
often eschew the cross-cultural, even transoceanic comparisons that Conkey
advocates in this volume, instead favoring analogies drawn from historically
connected groups living within a single geographic area. They do so because it
is generally agreed by scholars that continuity produces the stronger form of
375
Cecelia F. Klein
analogy (e.g., Gould 1974; 1978: 255). The so-called direct historical approach,
which is used by most Pre-Columbianists, depends on this demonstrated cul-
tural continuity between the archaeological past and the ethnographic present.
These Pre-Columbianists can show, in other words, that the same ethnic and
linguistic group has continuously occupied the area that they study. At the same
time, as Marcus and Kent Flannery (1994: 56) have observed, this approach
allows scholars to more easily recognize the changes that have inevitably oc-
curred over time and to appreciate the tendency for change to take place faster
in some areas of experience than in others. Certain circumstances, in other
words, make the use of ethnographic analogy not just far less risky than Conkey
implies, but far more reliable than the cross-cultural comparisons that she ad-
vocates, as well.
In the past decade, it has been the ethnographers themselves who have made
the strongest case for ethnographic analogy. Robert Carlsen and Martín Prechtel
(1994: 78–81) remind us that there is a difference between the meanings of
cultural phenomena as seen from the emic vantage point of the people who
experience them and the meanings that we, as etic observers, impose upon
them. Social scientists taking an etic approach may be blind to the meanings that
people themselves attach to their cultural experiences and products, while the
same people may be unable to relate to—to see themselves in—the scholars’
findings. For those of us who seek to better understand how earlier peoples
thought about gender, ethnographic descriptions provide the best clues. Refus-
ing to ground our gender models in an ethnohistorical or an ethnographic
model makes it more likely that we will perceive the past in terms of our own,
ethnocentric Western categories and experiences.
Primed by postmodern, feminist, and subaltern critiques of their discipline,
and supported by the findings of ethnohistorians and linguists like Burkhart
and Lockhart, ethnographers are also the social scientists who have allowed the
greatest space in their thinking for the possibility of local agency. Fieldworkers
are more sensitive now than they were twenty years ago to the ways in which
native peoples adapted to their colonial circumstances, accommodated the Chris-
tian hierarchy, absorbed and synthesized new ideas, and yet retained the basic
structures of their preconquest worldviews. As Carlsen (1997: 24) points out,
all the evidence from the Maya community of Santiago Atitlán, where he works
(and from where I have drawn much of my material), indicates that “the Atitecos
adapted to their Post-Columbian environment in such a way that, while sig-
nificant change within their cultural configuration certainly occurred, change
of that configuration was avoided.” “Post-Columbian Mayas,” according to
Carlsen, citing Judith Friedlander, “were not successfully drafted to serve as
376
Conclusions
‘accomplices in their own oppression’” (Carlsen 1997: 23; also see p. 2). To
think they did so “entirely discounts the role of the huge Maya population in
shaping the history of the region in which they remain the majority. In so
doing, it utterly ignores the Mayas’ capacity to resist, to subvert, to adapt; in
short, to think.”
Carlsen takes care to locate his analysis of Santiago Atitlán in its own history
and to analyze its social institutions through time. Precisely because he does so,
he can make a convincing case for the continuation of certain traditional cus-
toms and structures despite the changes that have occurred. His approach is
very much in line with that advocated by Nicholas Thomas (1994: 8–9), who
criticizes what he sees as a postmodern essentialism of colonialism, one which
implies that there is one, universal, colonial “experience.” Thomas advocates
instead a “pluralized field of colonial narratives,” or what he terms “colonialisms
rather than colonialism.” In this he seconds Jorge Klor de Alva (1992, 1995),
who goes so far as to question the appropriateness of the concept “colonial” for
the postcontact experience of most Latin Americans. This experience, Klor de
Alva warns us, varied so widely from place to place, was so irregularly paced
over time, and was so deeply affected by issues of class, race, and ethnicity (to
which I would add gender) that the usual generalizations about moral oppres-
sion and cultural extinction are simply invalid.
The way to locate the differences in the reactions of groups to being colo-
nized, according to Thomas (1994: 9), is to undertake what he calls a “historicized
ethnographic approach.” In other words, each colonial and postcolonial in-
stance must be studied on its own terms before one tries to theorize about the
effects of the colonial process. I would extend this to suggest that one should
not generalize a priori about the degree of cultural change that may have taken
place in colonized/postcolonized communities. This means that theory should
not be allowed to get in the way of research in such matters. It also means that
the extent to which data from a particular postconquest or even living commu-
nity might be useful to the Pre-Hispanicist depends in large part on the histori-
cal experience of the people living there. Some ethnographic data are more
potentially useful than others for helping us to envision the past. It is the job of
responsible scholars to identify and restrict themselves to those data.
This can be accomplished not only by considering the historical circum-
stances that conditioned this information, but also by limiting ourselves to mod-
ern material that can be more carefully controlled. Wylie (1985: 97–101), in a
lengthy and detailed review of the history of the debate over ethnographic
analogy in the social sciences, has proposed several strategies for strengthening
our use of analogical reasoning. One is to “determine the overall extent of the
377
Cecelia F. Klein
similarities” in order to ensure that a systematic comparison of the items under

consideration has outweighed the differences. A second strategy is to locate the
similarities in a wide range of source contexts—that is, to expand the base of
interpretation; in other words, we need to broaden the breadth and specificity
of the similarities. There is no reason why everyone who uses ethnographic
analogy should not try and hope to be able to do this. However, the question
remains: If these criteria cannot be met, should ethnographic data invariably be
eliminated from consideration? My guess is that there are those who would
refuse to give up the insights that they believe to have gleaned just because the
similarities between the two cultural forms being compared are statistically
deficient.They might well argue instead that one or two really close similarities
will be enough to raise the possibility, at least, that other correspondences ex-
isted.
Many of these dissenters would be art historians. There is no doubt that in
the course of this entire discussion we have been seeing some of the major
differences between the ways in which social scientists—particularly feminist
archaeologists and anthropologists—approach their work and the ways in which
art historians approach theirs. The problem is not so much that one group is
“more theoretical” than the other; it is that the theoretically informed mem-
bers of each group often draw on their own discipline’s literature and different
bodies of theory. Art historians seem to read more literary criticism, for ex-
ample, than archaeologists. The social scientists, in contrast, seem to me far
more preoccupied with talking and writing about how they do what they do
and how they have come to the point of doing it than are art historians. Art
historians tend to just go ahead and “do it,” often relegating matters of method
and theory to the margins and footnotes, if they include them at all. I do not
propose to try to account for these differences among the disciplines but sim-
ply point out the obvious. Art historians, because they do not aspire to be
scientists, tend to find an intrinsic value in offering up provocative yet plausible
interpretations and ideas that they realize they cannot always “prove.” In other
words, although their arguments are typically data oriented, they are as inter-
ested in producing interpretive models and plausible hypotheses as they are in
what scientists call “hard truths.”
If Pre-Columbian gender studies are to move to the next level, where, hope-
fully, more works will be produced that fit Culler’s criteria for theoretical writ-
ing, the various disciplinary players must make a greater effort, as Conkey urges,
to reach out to each other. As I have tried to indicate here, there are places
where the different approaches and emphases can meet and mingle, as well as
places where improved communication can occur. It is equally important, how-
378
Conclusions
ever, that we try to gain a better understanding of, and respect for, the special-
ized nature of the questions that each discipline “wants to ask” about the past,
and thus the specific goals that each is trying to achieve. Archaeologists are
archaeologists because of the nature of the questions that they strive to answer,
just as art historians choose art history because they have a somewhat different
agenda. Hopefully, this volume and the conference that produced it represent a
significant further step along the path leading to the kinds of interdisciplinary
collaborations that could greatly expand and enrich our future visions of gen-
der in Pre-Columbian America.
Acknowledgments Too many people have contributed to this discussion to

allow me to thank all of them by name. I am especially grateful, however, for
the input of Mary Ellen Miller, Joyce Marcus, Elizabeth Brumfiel, Joan Gero,
Geoffrey McCafferty, Claire Farago, and Margaret Conkey. Special thanks go to
Jim Brady, who has directed me to archaeological and anthropological litera-
ture about which I would otherwise not have known, and helped me to better
understand the issues that it treats. It should be understood that these col-
leagues do not necessarily agree with all or any of the opinions I have ex-
pressed here.
379
Cecelia F. Klein
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385
Index
1 Deer (Creator Deities), 110 Gendered Anthropology, 355

6 Monkey (Serpent Quechquemitl), 314, Anunciación, Juan de la, 94, 98
317-24, 318-23, 334 archaeology and archaeologists, 2, 58, 255-56,
9 Wind (Creator Deities), 110 364, 369, 370. See also Andeans, Early
Intermediate Period, Recuay ceramics;
Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Fernando de, 60, 191, 331 artifacts; burials; f igurines; pottery
ancestors, 116, 121, 125, 165 Armillas, Pedro, 260
First Father, 110 art history and art historians, 2-4, 363, 364,
First Mother, 110 369, 378
veneration of, 113 artifacts. See also Andeans, Early Intermediate
Andeans (Chunchos and Inkas), 9, 143-77, Period, Recuay ceramics; archaeology and
371 archaeologists; burials; f igurines; pottery
and Andes region, 62n, 189 decoration, 64, 71
Callejón de Huaylas, 18, 19-26 gender attribution, 64, 70, 70n
and the cosmos, 150, 161, 165 panpipe fragments, 22
def inition of Chuncho, 143 Arvey, Margaret Campbell, 2
and Early Intermediate period (EIP), 17- Atotoztli (and Ilancueitl), 331, 332, 332, 333-
19, 22 34, 333
bilateral kinship, 38 Aztecs (Nahuas), 1, 9, 62–65, 183, 192, 371
feminist interpretive data, 48-51 and Acamapichtli, 330-33
and link between gender and archaeology, 62-65
marriage, 161, 176 children, 111
and power, 26-28, 38, 48-51 and Coyolxauhqui, 2, 62, 63
Recuay ceramics, 7, 17-52, 30-35, 37- gender systems, 6, 57-76
44, 47 Great Temple, 62-63
Recuay textile motifs, 36 and hypogamy, 330-32
and stones (rocks) and masculinity, and material culture, 112-15
168-71 National Archaeology Fund of Mexico,
Manko Qhápaq (f irst Inka), 167 260
and pururauka, 169 and present-day customs, 187-88, 203,
and Quechua, 367, 373 220n
and signf icance of bequest of Chuncho state, 3, 59, 67
dance costumes to Doña Pasquala and Tenochtitlan, 62, 188
Quigua’s widower, 143, 143n, 147, women, 57-74, 305, 330-34
176-77 See also Atotoztli; celebrations and
and site at Queyash Alto, 19-26, 20, 21 observances; codices by name; historical
women of, 23-26 texts by name; Ilancueitl; Nahuatl;
See also codices by name; historical texts specif ic deities by name
by name
anthropology and anthropologists, 2, 51, 57, Báez-Jorge, Félix, 278
369 Bancroft, Hubert, 258
387
Index
Baudot, George, 90 genitalia, 129, 131, 172, 183, 190, 191n,
Bautista, Juan, 89, 101 214, 223-24, 237, 272, 286, 289, 291,
Berlo, Janet, 278 298
Bhabha, Homi, 372 and bloodletting, 130, 130
Bird Jaguar, 121, 329, 335 castration, 234
birth. See body, diseases and conditions, hair, 122, 152, 163, 171
pregnancy and birth (fertility); midwives odors, 226n, 289, 290, 296
bisexuality. See sexuality, sexual orientation ornamentation, 112, 113, 116, 119
Blaffer, Sarah, 296 with beads, 113
body with ear ornaments or earspools, 113-
anus, 211n, 226n, 291. See also sexuality, 15, 119, 121-22
sexual acts, sodomy of hair, 114-15, 119
cranial modif ications, 115 with iron ore, 114
dental inlay, 115 with jade, 113, 129
deformities, 208-9, 219n with mirrors, 114
fetal (birth), 195, 234 of neck and chest, 113-14
foot and leg, 219, 225, 226 Pre-Classic, 114
backward, 206, 208-9, 220, 238 with tattooes, 119, 122
Great Rotted Foot, 234 and representations of, 112
missing, 211, 220, 226, 233, 234, semen
235, 236, 238 and fertility metaphor, 271
genitalia, 183, 190, 191, 190n and rainfall metaphor, 174
head (backward), 238 and smoke metaphor, 226
Siamese twins, 286 Bolin, Anne, 184
diseases and conditions Bonampak murals, 121, 126
adolescence (puberty), 119, 121, 159, Bourdieu, Pierre, 104, 368
297 Brewington, Robbie, 71
blindness, 208 Bricker, Victoria, 194
breastfeeding, 285-86 Brown, Betty Ann, 2
death and malki/huanca concepts, 165- Brumf iel, Elizabeth, 369
71 burials, 146
disembowelment, 225, 226-27n artifacts, 64, 70, 269
healing, 71, 74, 110, 125, 189, 199, Aztec, 65
217, 218, 225, 226n, 238 and body ornamentation, 114
hemorrhoids (piles), 226n, 227n Pre-Classic, 112
impotence, 192, 195 at Tlatilco, 115
madness, 193 at Xochitécatl, 260-70
menopause, 10, 165 of children, 269
menstruation (menses), 71, 235, 236 and Pyramid of Flowers, 268-70
pregnancy and birth (fertility), 63, 71, Burkhart, Louise, 8, 185n, 371
74, 128, 210, 223n, 232, 292-98. See Butler, Judith, 109n, 111, 112, 115, 118, 370
also midwives
sterility, 10, 192, 195, 214n, 217, 222, Cabrera, José María, 258
295 cacicas. See women, ruling
virginity, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 103 Cakchiquel, 211n
excrement (feces), 208, 210 Cañaris (of Ecuador), 174
exposure of, 116 Carlsen, Robert, 376
facial hair, 117 Carlson, John, 274
f ingerprints, 16 Caro Baroja, Julio, 198
388
Index
Carrera, Magali Marie, 2 and archaeologists; artifacts; burials;
Caso, Alfonso, 202 f igurines; pottery
Catholic Church. See Christianity ceremonies. See celebrations and observances
caves Chalchiuhtotolin, 233n
6 Monkey and the sacred cave, 318 Chan Bahlum (Snake Jaguar), 326-27
emblematic of female deities, 279 Charlton, Cynthia Otis, 72n
and homosexual images at Naj Tunich, chastity. See sexuality
131-32, 131 Chicomecoatl, 278
Mary Magladene residing in, 98 Chilam Balam, 202n
metaphorical signif icance of, 271, 297 childbirth. See body, diseases and conditions,
as place of male socialization, 132 pregnancy and birth (fertility); midwives
celebrations and observances Chimalpahin, Domingo Francisco, 331
Atamalqualiztli, 231 Chin, 220
Carnival, Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, 88, Chinautla, 232
194, 195, 199, 200, 200n, 203, 212, 216, Christianity, 8, 87, 188n, 290, 352
222, 222n Abel, 93
Corpus Christi, 200, 221n Adam and Eve, 93, 100, 291
and dances afterlife, 89, 90, 93
San Antonio deer dance, 231-32 confession manuals, 89
snake dance, 231n counterdiscourse with, 87, 93
tickling dance, 201 dualism of body and soul, 91
and dancing, 200 and God, 90, 91, 92, 98, 100, 102
backward, 206, 211, 229, 238 and inf luence over Andeans, 173
and huehuenches (huehuetones/los and Jesus Christ, 88, 94, 95, 97, 98, 189
viejos), 200n and penitence, 93, 95, 96, 97, 103
and leaping, 207, 222, 229 Psalmodia christiana, 94, 96, 98
pole, 229, 231-32 and saints, 94-99, 103, 189
Drilling of New Fire, 231 Agnes, 95-96
and eff igies, 196-98, 212 Ann, 95, 97, 98, 103
end-of-the-year, 194, 201, 207, 212 Augustine, 97
and feasting, 23, 25, 45-46 Catherine of Alexandria, 95
f irst fruits, 229n, 230 Clare of Assisi, 95, 96, 97, 103
lost days (also known as nameless days and Joachim, 97
Uayeb), 194, 195, 197, 198, 205, 212, John the Baptist, 93
214, 228 John the Evangelist, 93
modern-day, 203, 217 Joseph, 95
Nahua, 185 Lucy, 95, 96
Ochpaniztli, 235n Martha, 95
Panquetzaliztli, 203, 231 Mary Magdalene, 95, 98-99
of San Jose, 217n Monica, 95, 97
Tamales de Maiz Crudo, 228, 229 Paul, 91, 93
Toxcatl, 221-22, 224-25, 224 Sermonario, 94
at Xochitécatl, 279 and sin, 198, 290, 373
See also specif ic names of celebrations and teachings of, 88, 89
listed separately and Virgin Mary, 88, 93, 94, 97, 144, 189
ceramics Chunchos. See Andeans
diagnostic at Xochitécatl, 259 Cihuacoatl (Snake Woman), 111, 201, 210,
See also Andeans, Early Intermediate 271, 278, 330, 331, 335
Period, Recuay ceramics; archaeology Cihuacoatl-Ilamatecuhtli, 207, 221n
389
Index
Cihuateteo (Divine Women), 207 and metaphor of lion (Spaniards) and
and Maxtlacihuatl (Loincloth Woman), rabbit (indigenous people), 99
210 and postcolonialism, 377
Cizin, 226n and women’s status, 99-102
Clark, John, 131 See also Spain
Clifford, James, 372 Conkey, Margaret W., 4, 11, 363
climate, 274 Connerton, Paul, 113n
dry season, 211-14, 222, 229-30, 235, cooking. See women’s labor
236n, 238 Cordy-Collins, Alana, 3
wet season, 211-14, 229-32, 235, 236n, corn (maize), 8, 69, 101, 110, 111, 117, 192,
238 204n, 216, 227, 274, 228, 229, 289, 293, 297
cloth, 66-74, 117 and corncrib purif ication, 206
for clothing versus tribute, 71 Xilonen (corn goddess), 204, 267
production of, 123, 131 costumes. See body, ornamentation; clothing;
textile designs, 36 masks; men’s costumes; transvestism;
as tribute, 67-72, 68, 117 women’s costumes
See also women’s labor, weaving Coyolxauhqui, 62, 63, 279
clothing, 290 Cromwell, Jason, 183n
function of, 67 cross-dressing. See transvestism
gender-appropriate, 119, 187 Culler, Jonathan, 365
tattered, 193, 227n, 238
and textile designs, 33 dances and dancing. See celebrations and
and Great Crested Being motif, 33, observances
36, 37, 40, 46 Dean, Carolyn, 6, 9, 370
and World Tree image, 117, 128, 129 deer
See also body, ornamentation; men’s 1-Deer, 110
costumes; masks; transvestism; women’s hunts, 60, 131
costumes sacrif ice of, 231n
codices, 88, 333 and San Antonio dance, 231-32
Borbonicus, 186, 203, 204, 205, 208n, 231 two-headed, 233
Borgia, 187, 208, 210n, 267 deformities. See body
Dresden, 196, 197 deities, 62, 71, 90, 92, 93, 94, 97, 99, 103, 110,
Florentine, 59-60, 63, 91, 92, 111, 119, 111, 267, 277-79
125, 191, 192n, 223 Aztec, 62, 71, 110, 128, 267, 268
Laud, 289 corn goddess, 204, 267
Madrid, 130 Creator Deities, 110
Magliabechiano, 192, 201, 204n dual-gendered beings, 8, 9, 110, 116, 118
Mendoza, 59, 68, 119 Earth Father, 188
Mixtec, 127 Earth Mother, 188
Selden, 318, 323 Father-Mother, 188, 287
Telleriano-Remensis, 204n, 208-9, 236n Tlaloc, 110
Tudela, 201-2, 204n Tlaltecuhtli, 110, 188
Vaticanus A, 226n, 236 Earth goddess, 71, 72, 225n, 267
Vaticanus B, 207-10 and female volcano, 279
Vienna, 110 See also specif ic deities by name
Vindobonensis, 291 demons and devils. See divination
Xolotl, 331 Devereaux, Leslie, 110, 125
See also ethnohistory; historical texts Diego de Landa, Bishop, 195
Collier, Jane, 286 diseases. See body, diseases and conditions
colonialism, 8, 185, 377 divination, 99, 110, 119, 125, 186, 196, 220, 221
390
Index
and bathing newborns, 290 copulating, 37-38, 38, 39, 46
and demons, 89, 93, 201 of llama men, 39-42, 41, 42
and devil worship, 99 of women, 262-68, 277
and evil spirits, 197, 198, 229 iconographic themes, 49-51
and shamans, 189, 216, 218, 219n, 220n, Jaina style, 117n-118n
221, 235, 238 kaolin, 20, 26
and María Sabina, 189 moldmade, 118n
and signif icance of crossroads (center), Neolithic and Paleolithic, 345-46
207, 218, 229n Pre-Classic, 115
and sorcery (witchcraft), 71, 196n, 221, rattles, 267
235, 236 Recuay ceramics, 17, 17-52
and underworld, 90, 91, 92, 129, 199-200, See also Andeans, Early Intermediate
226 Period; archaeology and archaeologists;
Douglas, William, 237 artifacts; burials; pottery
dress. See body, ornamention; clothing; men’s Foucault, Michael, 186n, 286, 368
costumes; transvestism; women’s costumes Fought, John and Sarah, 206
Dumbarton Oaks, 52, 280, 356 Furst, Jill, 110
publications on Pre-Columbian studies,
vii-viii Galinier, Jacques, 187
symposia, vii, 1-11, 363-79 Garber, Marjorie, 190
Durán, Diego, 75, 87, 193 García Cook, Angel, 260
García, Luis Reyes, 200
Early Intermediate Period. See Andeans, García, Roberto Williams, 198
Early Intermediate Period gender, concepts of, 7, 109, 343-45
effeminacy. See sexuality and ambiguity, 6, 110, 184, 185n, 186,
eff igies. See celebrations and observances 189, 190, 217, 218, 233-36, 238, 371
Egypt (ancient). See Hatshepsut and complementarity, 116, 117, 148-51,
empiricism. See epistemology 187-88, 189, 287
epistemology, 341-43 and def initions of gender terms, 189n-
and empiricism, 365 190n
Epstein, Julia, 183 and duality, 9, 186, 196, 238
ethnography and ethnographers, 4, 7, 185, and f luidity, 107-8, 111, 112, 184, 221,
350-52, 370 369
analogies, 11, 185n, 374-75 and identity, 8-9, 57, 71, 75, 76, 119, 184,
ethnohistory, 1, 7-8, 58-59, 60, 350-52, 371 237-369
and perspectives (emic vs. etic), 376 and instability, 190, 184, 371
See also anthropology and anthropologists; roles, 1, 8, 10, 57, 76, 184
archaeology and archaeologists; art versus sex, 8-9, 128, 183n
history and art historians; codices; and social construction, 8-10, 15, 17, 119-
historical texts; history and historians 20, 238
Evans, Susan, 73 and unpredictability, 189
gender, determination of, 9, 237, 370
feminism and feminist theory, 5, 345, 364, dichotomous, 110-12, 116, 117, 119
369, 370. See also gender theory differences, 119-20, 287, 288, 291
Fempellec, 173-74 gender studies, vii-viii, 1, 3, 57-59, 363-64
festivals. See celebrations and observances and focus on women, 5
f igurines, 28-48, 112, 117, 118, 122, 346 Gender Trouble, 344
Classic Maya, 123, 129 methods used in, 349-52
of human images, 27-28 Paradoxes of Gender, 344
of babies, 267 and positionality, 345
391
Index
and relationship to other disciplines, 1-11 Bancroft dialogues, 102-3
and social theory, 368 Cantares de Dzitbalche, 202
symposia on, 1-11, 363-79 Confessionario mayor, 89, 91
gender, symbolism and systems, 76, 110, 278 and Cortés, Hernán, 59
in ancient Egypt, 10, 309-17 and Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 59
archaeology of, 15-16, 58, 59, 62-76, 255 Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas,
Aztec, 57-76, 63, 185, 223n 220, 233n
among Lovedus in South Africa, 10, 306- Historia de Tlaxcala, 258, 262
9 Historia general de las cosas de Nueva
and politics, 6, 15, 58, 346 España, 89
gender theory, 3, 17, 341, 343-49, 363, 364, Histoyre du Mechique, 188
370 and huehuehtlahtolli (old speech), 89-94,
Feminism Meets Queer Theory, 370 96-98, 100-101
ideology, 3, 57, 71, 291, 354 Leyenda de los soles, 233
and Western attitudes, 10, 345 Map of Cuauhtinchan no. 2, 262
See also feminism and feminist theory Monarchía indiana, 258, 262
genitalia. See body Origen de los mexicanos, 331
geography, 63, 274 El primer nueva cronica, 146-47, 152-71,
relationship with sacredness at the 146-47, 152-64, 169, 171
Pyramid of Flowers, 262, 271-74 Primeros memoriales, 59, 201
Gero, Joan, 7 Psalmodia christiana, 94, 96, 98
Giddens, Anthony, 368 Relación de la genealogía, 331
Gillespie, Susan, 61 Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, 111, 119,
González Torres, Yolotl, 224, 225 125
Gossen, Gary, 125 Relación de los antiguedades, 148-51,149
Graham, Mark, 3 Relación de Michoacán, 193n
Great Crested Being motif. See clothing Sermonario, 94
Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe, 145, 146-47, See also codices
151, 163, 146-47, 152-64, 169, 171 history and historians, 2, 364, 369, 374
Guerra, Francisco, 3 continuity of, 375
Guiteras-Holmes, Calixta, 194n revisionist, 310
See also art history and art historians;
Hatshepsut 309-17, 311-14, 323, 325, 326, codices; ethnography and
334 ethnographers; ethnohistory; historical
defeminization, 316-17, 334 texts
execration of name, 316-17, 335 Hocquenghem, Anne Marie, 3
obelisks, 312-13 holidays. See celebrations and observances
and Senenmut, 312, 315, 316 Holly, Michael Ann, 6
as sphinx, 334 homosexuality. See sexuality, sexual orienta-
strategies of, 310-14 tion
healing. See body, diseases and conditions Hoskins, Janet, 109n
Hendon, Julia, 74 households, 58, 117n, 118n, 120
Hero Twins, 129 Aztec, 63-65
heterosexuality. See sexuality f igurines and pottery in, 118
Historical texts, 7-8, 59-60, 62n, 63, 87, 89- See also women’s labor
94, 187, 204, 352, 372-73 Houston, Stephen, 131
Anales de Cuauhtitlan, 221n Huichol, 228-29
Anales de Tlatelolco, 193 Huitzilopochtli (Sun), 1, 62, 188, 202, 279
Las Anales de Tula, 333 Huixquilucan, 200n
Atlas arqueológico de la República Mexicana, 260 Hunt, Eva, 110, 210
392
Index
husbands. See marriage Lyon, Patricia J., 3
Lyons, Diane, 262
Icazbalceta, Joaquín García, 220
Ichcatepec, Veracruz, 200 Madsen, William, 187n
Ilamatecuhtli, 201, 204n maize. See corn
Ilancueitl, 330, 331, 332, 333 Mam. See Maximon
incest. See marriage Mann, Michael, 368
Inkas. See Andeans Mannheim, Bruce, 374
Ixquimilli, 225n Marcus, Joyce, 10, 369, 376
Iztaccíhuatl volcano, 64, 255, 274 marriage (and couplehood), 10, 88, 89, 92,
99, 100, 102, 103, 150, 176-77, 176n, 187,
Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, 183n 195, 238
Jesus Christ. See Christianity and adultery, 92, 209, 210
Joyce, Rosemary, 8, 369 Andean, 157
and concubinage, 99
Kanal Ikal, 327 and division of labor, 66, 70
Kauymali, 235n and hypogamy, 330, 332, 335
Kellogg, Susan, 109n and incest, 306, 331, 334
Kerr, Justin, 123 among Laymi, 189
Klein, Cecelia F., 110, 128, 278, 370 and polygamy, 99
Klor de Alva, Jorge, 377 and relationship to Andean concept of
Knab, Tim, 187n gender, 161
Kubler, George, 374, 375 and sexual relations, 91, 100, 228
See also sexuality
Lady Ik Skull, 328-30, 335 Marx, Karl, 368
La Malinche volcano, 255, 274, 275 masks, 206, 212, 221
Landa, Bishop Diego de, 111 and María Castelyan (Virgin Whore),
Laqueur, Thomas, 184n 216-17
Laymi See also celebrations and observances;
and marriage, 176, 189, 225 men’s costumes; women’s costumes
and Maximon, 217 Matlacueye volcano, 274
and phallic symbols, 172n Maximon (Mam), 196, 211-14, 215, 217,
Leacock, Eleanor, 3 218-19, 222, 235
Lechtman, Heather, 1 and God K, 220n
Leibsohn, Dana, 3 and Guatemalan prostitutes, 217
León-Portilla, Miguel, 87 and Judas Iscariot, 212
Leventhal, Richard, 125 and Laymi, 217
Lewis, Laura, 99 and María Castelyan, 216-17
Lincoln, J. Steward, 195 Mayas, 25, 195, 202
Lizana, Bernardo de, 195 Achi Mayas, 232n
Lockhart, James, 92, 373 ancestors, 111, 330
López Austin, Alfredo, 192 art, 3
López de Cogolludo, Diego, 196 Jaina style, 117n-118n
Lovedus, 306-9 Yaxchilán lintels, 116, 120, 121, 124,
and incest, 331, 334 125, 128
map of region, 307 Yaxchilán sites, 324, 327, 328, 329
and Mujaji I (Rain Queen), 306-9, 335 Classic Maya, 371
and Mujaji II and III, 306-9 coming of age and gender practices,
Lumholtz, Carl, 228 119-32
Lutz, Catherine, 366 homoerotic art, 131–32, 131
393
Index
pictographs of male genitalia, 129, goddess), 207
129-32, 131 and Maximon, 218
sites at Chichen Itza, Labna, Uxmal, men as, 295
131 Xmucane, 125
cosmology, 117 See also body, diseases and conditions,
costumes, 111 pregnancy and birth (fertility)
God K (K’awil) Milbrath, Susan, 2, 201
and Maximon, 220n Miller, Mary Ellen, 2
and Tezcatlipoca, 220 Miller, Virginia, 2
God N, 214, 226n Mixcoatl, 230
Ixil Maya practices, 195 Mixtecs, 10, 187-88, 285-98
Kekchi Mayas, 212n cacicas (female rulers), 318
Palenque, 111, 121, 122, 220n-221n, 324, and language, 288
327 and Santiago Nuyoo, 10, 288
Pokomam Maya, 232 women, 305, 317-24
and Santiago Atitlán, 187n, 211, 213, Molina, Alonso de, 91, 100
213n, 215, 293, 375, 376-77 Monaghan, John, 5, 368
Tzotzil Maya, 125, 193n, 194n, 234 moon, 8, 110, 150, 214, 235, 236n
Tz’utujil Mayas, 187n, 211 and gender, 8, 233-35
Uayeb (also known as lost days and and lunar cycle, 185, 203-4, 232-33, 235,
nameless days). See celebrations and 237
observances, lost days Moon of the Great Rotted Foot, 233
women, 305, 324-30 Motolinía, Toribio de Benavente, 231n, 291
year bearers, 196 Muñoz Camargo, Diego, 191
McAnany, Patricia, 121
McCafferty, Sharisse and Geoffrey, 71, 109, Nahuas. See Aztecs
127 Nahuatl, 88, 184, 274, 367, 373
McKinnon, Susan, 109n Nanahuatili, 198-99
Mendelson, E. Michael. See Tarn, Nathaniel Nash, June, 3, 61
Mendieta, Gerónimo de, 67 Native North Americans (North American
men’s costumes Indians), 184n, 232n
Andean tunics, 172 Nemontemi, 201-2
bear, 175
and bequest of dance costumes to Doña O’Brien, Linda Lee, 212
Pasquala Quigua’s widower, 143, 147, obscenity. See sexuality
176-77 odors
casana design, 172 skunk, 218-19, 227
loincloths, 122, 128, 210 smoke, 226
warrior, 124 See also body
World Tree, 128, 129 Olmos, Andrés de, 89, 90, 101
See also celebrations and observances; Omecihuatl, 186
clothing, masks; transvestism Ometecuhtli, 110, 186
men’s labor, 64, 70, 126, 294-95 Ometeotl, 186, 190
and taboos, 289 Orme, Bryony, 375
Mexica, 96 Ortiz de Montellano, Bernard, 192
royal histories, 110 Otomis, 183, 187, 188n, 224, 229n, 233-34,
society, 111 236
See also Aztecs and Carnival, 200, 229n
midwives, 71, 75, 98, 110, 128, 196, 295 Oxomoco, 110, 186
Cihuacoatl-Ilamatecuhtli (midwife
394
Index
Pacal, 324, 325, 326. See also Chan Bahlum and connection with childbirth, 297
Pachacuti (Yamqui Salcamaygua), Juan de of deer, 231n
Santa Cruz, 148-50, 173 and Feast of the Mountains, 275
Paleolithic period, 365, 375 of girls, 153, 164, 279
Panofsky, Erwin, 374 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 59, 67, 87, 89, 90,
Parsons, Mary, 66 91, 92, 93, 98, 100, 101, 119, 125, 190, 193.
phallic symbols. See body, genitalia; sexuality, See also codices; historical texts
sexual acts, in cave drawings; Maya, Classic Said, Edward, 100, 372
Maya, pictographs of male genitalia saints. See Christianity
Pío Perez, Juan, 196 Sandstrom, Alan R., 187
Popocatepetl volcano, 64, 255, 259, 260, 274 Schneider, David, 285
Post-Classic period, 130, 260 Segre, Enzo, 200
Postmodernism, 5, 365 Seler, Eduard, 258
pottery, 21, 117, 125, 129. See also Andeans, Serra Puche, Mari Carmen, 9
Early Intermediate Period, Recuay sexuality, 3, 71, 111, 118, 126, 353, 373
ceramics; archaeology and archaeologists; and androgyny, 8, 9, 10, 143, 164-65, 217
artifacts; burials; f igurines and castration, 234
Prechtel, Martín, 187, 376 and chastity, 88, 90, 93, 94, 96, 99, 101,
pregnancy. See body, diseases and conditions, 103, 104
pregnancy and birth (fertility) and Christian teachings on, 89, 91
Preuss, Konrad Theodore, 229 and def inition of sexual terms, 183n
Proskouriakoff, Tatiana, 3, 125 and deviance, 184, 234, 236
Provost, Paul Jean, 198 versus gender, 128, 183n
Pyramid of Flowers. See Xochitécatl and hypersexuality, 214, 225
and intersexuality, 370
queens. See women, ruling; specif ic ruling and obscenity, 194, 195, 199-200, 229,
women by name 238
querns (metates), 270n and punishment after death, 209-10
Quetzalcoatl, 221 and virginity, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 103
Quiche, 188n, 189, 192, 211 232, 235 Virgin Whore (María Castelyan), 216-17
and Popol Vuh, 125, 129 and sexual acts, 289-90
abstinence from, 93, 290
Rain Queen. See Mujaji adultery. See marriage
Recuay ceramics. See Andeans, Early in cave drawings, 131-32, 131
Intermediate Period incest. See marriage
Redf ield, Robert, 195 with Maximon, 214n
Reina, Ruben, 230 and planting metaphor, 160, 166
religion. See celebrations and observances; pleasure and, 91-92
Christianity; deities; divination; specif ic and potency, 214
deities by name and prostitution, 192, 216-17, 230
rituals. See celebrations and observances; and rape, 231n
sacrif ice and Recuay copulation scenes, 37-38,
Robertson, Merle Green, 122 38, 39
Rocke, Michael, 184 and relationship with f lowers, 227n
Ruiz de Alarcón, Hernando, 192 sodomy, 192, 193, 210, 216, 219, 220,
ruling women. See women, ruling; specif ic 220n, 221, 222
rulers by name as war metaphor, 63
and sexual orientation
sacrif ice bisexuality, 197 222, 225, 232n, 233
and calpulcos, 275 effeminacy, 147, 184, 190, 216, 233,
395
Index
234, 238 Tloque Nahuaque. See Tezcatlipoca
heterosexuality, 111, 116, 222, 225, Tocih (Our Grandmother), 97, 204n
232n, 370
homosexuality, 9, 164, 190, 192, 195, transvestism, 184, 190, 191, 193, 195, 199-
200, 217, 220, 221, 222, 225, 232, 200, 204, 210, 214, 222, 229, 230, 238, 370
370 Trexler, Richard C., 4, 239
trisexuality, 232n tribute cloth. See cloth
Shield Jaguar (Chel Te), 120, 121, 328 Trigger, Bruce, 375
Silverblatt, Irene, 3 twins, 221, 228n, 232
skunks. See Maximon; odors Hero Twins, 129
snakes (serpents), 33, 125, 261, 271, 275, 293 and meaning of cihuacoatl, 111
Snake Woman (Cihuacoatl), 111, 201, Siamese, 286
210, 271, 272, 278, 330, 331, 335
and Xochitl, 278
sorcery. See divination Villa Rojas, Alfonso, 291
South Africa. See Lovedus Virgin Mary. See Christianity
Spain, 176, 188, 198 Vogt, Evon, 194
and modern-day Carnival, 200 volcanoes
See also colonialism, historical texts personif ication of, 64
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 373 and relationship with humans, 274
Spranz, Bodo, 260, 267 See also specif ic volcanoes by name
Starr, Frederick, 195 Voorhies, Barbara, 1
Stone, Andrea Joyce, 2, 131
Stresser-Péan, Guy, 198 war, 63
Suárez de Peralta, Juan, 193 Andean, 159-60
sun and its relationship with Earth, 150, 185, captives, 127
201-3, 213, 222, 229, 274, 275 enemies, 221
and Quecholli, 230 and Inka women warriors, 155n
sweatbaths, 74-75, 294 and insults to enemies, 193
and Maximon, 218 and metaphor for childbirth, 128
mock battles, 206
taboos, 74, 74-75, 294 and pururauka, 169
and cooking, 296 and signif icance of women’s clothes, 193
and pregnancy, 75, 296-98 and women warriors in Cacaxtla murals,
Tarn, Nathaniel (E. Michael Mendelson), 127
187n, 212, 218n Watson, Patty Jo, 375
Taube, Karl, 194n weaving (spinning). See women’s labor
Tecciztecatl (Sea Shell Lord), 233 wives. See marriage
Tedlock, Barbara, 192, 196 Willey, Gordon, 374, 375
Tejeda, Antonio, 126 Wilson, Richard, 298
Tezcatlipoca (Tloque Nahuaque), 92, 219, Wisdom, Charles, 188
220n, 221n, 223-25, 226n, 227, 233n, 235 Wobst, Martin, 374
See also Maximon women
Thomas, Nicholas, 377 Andean, 3, 146, 155n-156n
Thompson, J. Eric S., 196 Aztec, 57-74, 317
Tikal, 121, 124 cacicas (female rulers). See women, ruling
Tititl, 201-2 and cult of femininity, 270-71
Titlacauan. See Tezcatlipoca def inition of woman, 151n
Tlazolteotl, 71, 72, 225n, 267, 289 and determination of lineage, 43, 48, 317
396
Index
elderly (and androgynous), 193, 206n tortilla making, 69, 296
and judging prisoners in Bonampak weaving, 66-74, 102, 117, 123, 125-27,
murals, 126 154-55, 295
masculine, 209-10, 233, 238 male weavers, 70, 70n
Maya, 3, 317, 324-30 and spindle whorls, 24, 66-74, 65, 66,
and power, 10, 367 73-74, 268, 350
and reproductive role, 118. See also body, See also midwives
diseases and conditions, menopause; Wylie, Allison, 375
body, diseases and conditions, pregnancy
and birth (fertility) Xilonen (corn goddess), 204, 267
ruling, 10, 155n, 279, 305-35, 355, 369 Xochiquetzal, 204n, 221n
in ancient Egypt, 309 Xochitécatl, 10, 255-79, 257-58, 262
among Lovedus, 306-9 Base of the Volcanoes, 257, 261
and Mixtec system, 317-18 Building of the Serpent, 257, 261
See also specif ic ruling women by Building of the Spiral, 261
name buildings, 262, 276
saints, 94-99 and connection to Cacaxtla, 10, 262
and the state, 58 and cultural chronology of Puebla–
status of, 3, 8 Tlaxcala valley, 259
and virginity, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 103 Pyramid of Flowers, 257, 260, 262, 269-
as warriors in Cacaxtla murals, 127 70
See also Christianity, female saints by and f igurines, 259, 263-64, 266, 267,
name; Christianity, Virgin Mary; deities; 268, 272, 275
female deities by name; feminism and suggestive of a matriarchy, 279
feminist theory; gender studies; and surroundings, 271-72
marriage; midwives; women’s labor Vats 1 and 2, 271, 273
women’s costumes
aqsu, 36 Yanagisako, Sylvia, 286
huipil, 122, 125 Yaotl (Enemy), 221n, 228
Mayan, 117 Yaxchilán. See Maya, art, Yaxchilán lintels;
relinquished after death, 209-10 Maya, art, Yaxchilán sites
skirt, 122
tupu pins, 20, 23-25, 29 Zac Kuk, 327
warrior, 124, 209-10 Zinacantan, 194-95
See also clothing; transvestism Zingg, Robert Mowry, 229
women’s labor, 60, 61, 64-65, 67-70, 101, Zoques
117, 118, 119, 123, 153, 294-95 and modern-day beliefs, 232
cooking, 25, 69, 296-97 Zorita, Alonso de, 90
and food storage, 204, 206 Zulus
sweeping, 96, 97, 102 and Mujaji, 307
taboos, 289 and Queen Mkabi, 335
397

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Gender in Pre-Hispanic America

Cecelia F. Klein, Editor

Jeffrey Quilter, General Editor

© 2001 Dumbarton Oaks

school of European art formalism. Moreover, many of its practitioners started

open up Pre-Columbian studies to a greater variety of disciplinary points of

Arvey, Margaret Campbell

1993 The Shield Women: Resolution of an Aztec Gender Paradox. In Current

Often, the assumptions and perspectives that we use to “construe” archaeo-

point us toward what we want to know about gender. Even if f ingerprints

THE PERUVIAN EARLY INTERMEDIATE PERIOD

Fig. 1 Callejón de Huaylas, Peru.

In order to address gender, however, we need to translate these profound

FIELD “KNOTS” IN THE CALLEJÓN DE HUAYLAS

Fig. 4 Early Intermediate period white-on-red straight-sided bowl; fragments of such

convenient handle formed by the butchered llamas’ nose bones. Taken as an

How to Envision Women at Queyash Alto?

artisans commissioned to advertise their status, as well as a new set of economic

The centrality of sociopolitical hierarchy and power consolidation as the

The Gender Content of Recuay Ceramics

Fig. 5 Recuay vessel depicting a fe-

Fig. 6 Recuay vessel depicting a fe-

Fig. 7 Recuay vessel depicting a fe-

Fig. 10 Recuay vessel depicting a

any of which might be aff ixed to an underlying turban. Circular earspools,

Fig. 11 Recuay vessel depicting a

Fig. 12 Recuay stone statue with

Fig. 13 Recuay vessel depicting a male

Fig. 14 Recuay vessel depicting a

Fig. 15 Recuay vessel of a fe-

tions contrastive and consistent, segregating and creating bounded uniformity

context. If we are ultimately to understand the status of EIP women in shaping

Fig. 17 Recuay vessel depicting a

Fig. 18 Recuay llama man holding a young

Fig. 19 Recuay llama man with a shield, wear-

Fig. 20 Recuay llama f igurines from

Fig. 21 Recuay architectural vessel de-

Fig. 22 Recuay vessel depicting a cer-

Fig. 23 Recuay vessel depicting a ceremonial scene, with a principal

Feminist Interpretive Frameworks for the EIP Data

evidence having been left unselfconsciously in the ground. Not surprisingly, in

Acknowledgments The research carried out at Queyash Alto was made

Funerary Art. In Death and the Afterlife in Pre-Columbian America (Elizabeth P.

past, archaeologists must use a series of inferences or bridging arguments, so-

Fig. 2 Woman feeding teopochotl seed to turkeys to fatten them

Huitzilopochtli’s birth, which is recounted in the text and illustrations of the

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

Fig. 5 Mother holding unspun cotton teaches her four-year-old daugh-

archaeological data—in this case, spindle whorls—using research questions gen-

Fig. 7 A thirteen-year-old girl making tortillas. Note the jar

Fig. 8 The Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl, with a

Within states, gender systems differ according to class (Fernández-Kelly 1983;

Fig. 10 Plan of Structure 6, a provincial palace at Cihuatecpan,

Fig. 11 Midwife massaging a pregnant woman in a sweatbath

interhousehold contacts among women. Sweatbaths might have constituted a

dangerous to argue from an absence of evidence in archaeology; in this case,

advantages, archaeology is sometimes able to recover more of the agency of

Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Fernando de

Costin, Cathy Lynne

with particular attention devoted to interconnections between the two discur-

SEX AND THE HUEHUEHTLAHTOLLI

frightening place of obsidian-bladed winds, as if it were a place of punishment.

counterdiscourses to Christianity. They do, to some extent, articulate indig-

nence or to a broader range of behaviors aimed at moral and/or ritual purity?

tion, Visitation, Purif ication, and Assumption. She is described as existing in a

Thus, some critical ways in which gender hierarchy was constructed in

these speeches.Women’s responsibility for household tasks is not at issue; rather,

and Catholic priests—can we evaluate them as sources of information about

García Quintana, Josefina

1569 Confessionario mayor, en la lengua mexicana y castellana. Antonio de Espinosa,

gender implicit in Mesoamerican ideology is expressed in multiple ways. As

MATERIALIZING THE BODY: A MESOAMERICAN HISTORY

heirloom ornaments exhibited the history of bodily practices and undermined

ear ornaments reminds us that the stability of this form of ornamentation

Fig. 1 Paired male and female f igures, show-

DICHOTOMOUS GENDERS AND POLITICAL CONTROL