This volume explores how animated places, bodies, and things played fundamental roles in the exercise of authority in Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Amazonia. The book's 15 chapters demonstrate the significant intellectual value of understanding ontological difference as it relates to animating powers in the Americas, and the book's 18 contributing authors and coauthors invite a fundamental rethinking of the political beyond the strictly human, economic, and institutional. Tracing authority to the Latin root auctor (a revered source, foundational act, the capacity to augment), Steve Kosiba critiques Lockean and Weberian theories that stress consent or legitimate domination (and see chapter by Carlos Fausto). Approaches that foreground government apparatuses and disciplinary technologies (sensu Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben) are also charged with reductionism; instead, most authors examine “the constitution of authority as an interpersonal relationship in a community of persons, human and nonhuman, mediated through things” (Kosiba, p. 16). In interpreting the political agency of nonhuman entities, the contributors reject Victorian “animism” as a primitive stage of religious evolution. Instead, they emphasize “animacy,” defined by Kosiba as “practices that acknowledge the personhood or vitality of another being” (p. 3).

Sacred Matter will appeal widely to anthropologists because it provides an original examination of how things and nonhuman beings worked politically to create, legitimize, and challenge authority within Indigenous societies of the Americas. The authors consider diverse forms of media as animated and authoritative persons, including chiefly houses and wooden effigies (Fausto); sculpted stone monoliths (John Janusek, Mary Weismantel); ensouled, hungry buildings (Scott Hutson et al., Arthur Joyce); human remains (Beth Conklin, Fausto, Patricia McAnany); temple structures as living animals (Marco Curatola, Weismantel); Aztec codices (Byron Hamann); and healing amulets (Diana Loren).

At the same time, contributors critically evaluate the concepts of animism and ontology, and they contend that scholars can only interpret authoritative things in their proper historical contexts (Thomas Cummins, Santiago Giraldo, Hamann, Hutson et al., Joyce, Kosiba, Loren, McAnany, Bruce Mannheim, Weismantel). Several chapters expose limitations of the new materialism in deciphering the intersection of animacy and authority in the ancient Americas (Cummins, Hutson et al., Kosiba, Loren, McAnany).

Recent archaeological considerations of ontology, including those in this volume, challenge notions of culture as the symbolic reworking of one empirical reality. Instead of many “representations” of a single physical universe, there are multiple, materially mediated “worlds” that differentially set the parameters for behavior, thought, agency, sociality, and politics. The chapters of the volume demonstrate the interpretive merits of taking ontological difference seriously: a “controlled approximation” (Catherine Allen) of the lifeways of cultural others must recognize the authorizing beings and practices that materialized historically particular realities. Certainly, relational or animistic ontologies characterized many Amerindian cultures, in which a continuum of interdependencies inextricably linked the human, animal, ancestral, and material. In certain contexts, Amerindian persons are best understood as “dividuals,” because identity and a sense of self were forged through ritual and material ties that assembled sentient humans, places, animals, and objects into integrated communities (Allen, Cummins, Hutson et al., Janusek, McAnany). Among the Maya, personhood was not confined to the body of a bounded individual. It was the product of such assembling processes—as exemplified by the polysemous Maya term ch'ulel (often glossed as “life essence” or “soul”; Hutson et al., Kosiba, McAnany). Notions of distributed personhood also find parallel in the Andes as expressed in concepts such as camay, sami, wak'a, and ayllu (Allen, Cummins, Kosiba, Mannheim). In the case of the Xinguanos of the Amazon, however, illness dislocates and distributes once-finite persons across different spiritual and worldly realms (Fausto, p. 55).

In addition, the volume makes a significant contribution in demonstrating that the diverse cultures of the ancient Americas defy reduction to a singular animist ontology—and that ritual in particular, wielded in politically charged events, often determined what could become animate and animating (Allen, Conklin, Cummins, Fausto, Janusek, Joyce, Kosiba, Loren). Giraldo's chapter further reveals that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism or Philippe Descola's four ontological types would fail to describe the beliefs and value systems of the Kogi and Arhuaco of Colombia. Hamann also notes that René Descartes's philosophy was a product of a particular historical moment—especially the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War—and that anthropologists have long simplified his thinking. Therefore, ontology alone (animist or otherwise) is certainly limited in making sense of historical change, political struggles, and cultural differences. Indeed, it is equally important to make room for ethics, ideology, and epistemology. Kosiba endorses such a perspective in his call for social scientists to examine “situations” as opposed to monolithic worldviews. In this spirit, contributing authors here interpret the political efficacy of nonhuman beings not simply as reflecting deep-seated ontological dispositions. Instead, the authority of animated things was variably historicized in terms of ecoregimes (Allen, Janusek), assemblages (Joyce, Kosiba), cosmopolitics (Fausto, Janusek), situated lifeworlds (Conklin), covenants (Joyce), tacit theories (Mannheim), and ontological claims (Giraldo).

In the end, the chapters illustrate how power relations and the constitution of authority in the Americas are irreducible to human agency or social organization, and they demonstrate that explanations of historical process must take into account the animated material worlds (“distinctive natures”) of Amerindian peoples. As Allen notes in her concluding chapter, “In spite of their vast differences in geography, environment and historical position, most indigenous American societies define authority in terms of some kind of systematized articulation of human and non-human agencies” (p. 428). In fact, this observation would accurately describe many societies beyond the Americas (Cummins, Hamann, Loren). Indeed, this volume should inspire archaeologists working in other regions of the world to examine how authority, deference, compliance, exploitation, coercion, resistance, and so forth were mediated by distinct ontological orders and realized in part by vital, nonhuman persons.