At the beginning of Playing with Things, Mary Weismantel calls herself an outsider to the world of Moche art: trained as an ethnographer, she goes where mostly archaeologists and art historians have tread. Although she has covered Moche topics in the past, it is Weismantel's outsider view that proves valuable in her analysis of the sexually explicit ceramics considered in this book.
After introducing the Moche (who occupied the north coast of Peru for most of the first millennium AD) and their titular vessels, the book is divided into five chapters: the modern history and interpretation of the pots; the notion that humor may have been one of their functions; cultural beliefs about fertility connected in an ever-widening gyre; the role the pots played in the perpetuation of systems of inequality; and the profound contribution of liquids, especially water, chicha (maize beer), and blood, to the meaning and “being-ness” of these ceramics. An epilogue introduces us to Kukuli Velarde, a contemporary Peruvian artist whose sculptures revisit and transform Moche and other Indigenous Peruvian ceramics, along with a brief mention of other Latinx thinkers’ and artists’ engagement with ancient art and sex. An online supplement to the book is in preparation, as the COVID pandemic made it impossible to acquire some images before publication. As of the time of writing, the site was still under construction.
What this book does very well is envision how these ceramic vessels were a part of people's lives—their materiality and lively interaction with human bodies, as well as their social connections to the living and the dead that express notions of how life is generated, nurtured, and ensured, which are often seen through cross-cultural comparisons—and how they manifest a worldview very different from Western ideas about objects, nonhuman animals, and the profound interactions among humans, the landscape, and climate. Weismantel also acknowledges the tension between a traditional Western consideration of the pots as “inert objects from a long-dead past” versus as “vibrant Indigenous things, alive in their own inhuman temporality” (p. 4). Citing contemporary and historical Indigenous thinkers, she makes an effort to center their perspectives and to ensure they are important influences on the way we think about these pots. The term “play” in the title activates the pots’ existence, heightening the reciprocity between the human body and the clay body that she proposes was a key aspect of these objects’ lives in the Moche world. An important thread throughout the book is the need for Western readers to revisit and revise their ideas about the way the world works, including what pots might “want,” what human bodies are composed of, and how babies are made. We are asked to understand these objects in a way that rejects Western divisions—between the living and the dead, the sacred and profane, and humans and nature, among others—that may not have existed in the culture of their birth.
The “unified sex pot theory” that Weismantel lays out is a valuable contribution to the field of Moche studies: bringing together previously separate pieces of scholarship with her own work, she is able to show how a topic that represents a small percentage of the overall Moche artistic output fits into a comprehensive worldview that is less about sex than the reproduction and fertility of the world (humans included, but not necessarily at the fore), the permeability of the worlds of the dead and the living, and the structures through which Moche elites maintained and perpetuated their power. It is an excellent demonstration of how cultural worlds are made up of webs that often connect widely disparate objects.
Where this book stumbles is in some of the details. A discussion of pronouns and of how modern English usage of both traditional and new pronouns to distinguish among genders might (or might not) mesh with how gender was perceived in the Moche world is relegated to a note, when it would have been much more useful to the reader in the main text. This is an intriguing topic in the field, and it is unfortunate it was not, at the very least, engaged with in the epilogue, where contemporary and ancestral ideas freely mix. Noting that the imagery on these vessels represents “collective mythologies, not lived realities” (p. 88) is crucial to understanding the elite communication that these vessels—and all Moche fine ceramics—embody; that key aspect could use reiterating as Weismantel leads the reader through the ever-growing spiral of the pots’ meanings. This could also be accompanied by a more substantive definition of “elite” as the term is used in the book, for even though the Moche artists who made these vessels might have been elite compared to farmers or fisherfolk, they were not at the same social level as the rulers of Moche polities. These vessels, like other fine ceramics, would sometimes have been gifted by members of the high elite class to the artists who lived in their shadow, which then provokes the desire to explore how the pots’ meaning might change from viewer to viewer depending on social class.
Weismantel follows Steve Bourget's Sex, Death and Sacrifice in Moche Religion and Visual Culture (2006) in asserting that human-on-human vaginal intercourse is not depicted in Moche art; yet, this sexual act is indeed depicted, although very rarely. A few examples are in the extensive collection of the Museo Larco in Peru, whose holdings and history are mentioned in the book but from which we do not see many examples. The book's illustrations rely heavily on US museums and photographic archives of Peruvian collections. Although no museum collection can replace excavated examples, it would have been good to include Peruvian institutions more in this project.
Overall, this book would be useful for a graduate seminar in sexuality studies, courses on the ancient Andes with an emphasis on visual culture and materiality, and courses that focus specifically on the Moche. The shortcomings of the book do not detract from its insights into how scholars can approach with fresh eyes subjects that we think we know, as well as the connective path along which Weismantel leads the reader.
