Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica

( Gender was a fluid potential, not a fixed category, bef...)

Gender was a fluid potential, not a fixed category, before the Spaniards came to Mesoamerica. Childhood training and ritual shaped, but did not set, adult gender, which could encompass third genders and alternative sexualities as well as "male" and "female." At the height of the Classic period, Maya rulers presented themselves as embodying the entire range of gender possibilities, from male through female, by wearing blended costumes and playing male and female roles in state ceremonies. This landmark book offers the first comprehensive description and analysis of gender and power relations in prehispanic Mesoamerica from the Formative Period Olmec world (ca. 1500-500 BC) through the Postclassic Maya and Aztec societies of the sixteenth century AD. Using approaches from contemporary gender theory, Rosemary Joyce explores how Mesoamericans created human images to represent idealized notions of what it meant to be male and female and to depict proper gender roles. She then juxtaposes these images with archaeological evidence from burials, house sites, and body ornaments, which reveals that real gender roles were more fluid and variable than the stereotyped images suggest.

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Cerro Palenque: Power and Identity on the Maya Periphery

( Excavations at Cerro Palenque, a hilltop site in the Ul...)

Excavations at Cerro Palenque, a hilltop site in the Ulua Valley of northwest Honduras, revolutionized scholars’ ideas about the Terminal Classic period (roughly ad 850–1050) of Maya history and about the way in which cultures of the southeast Maya periphery related to the Lowland Maya. In this pathfinding study, Rosemary Joyce combines archaeological data gleaned from site research in 1980–1983 with anthropological theory about the evolution of social power to reconstruct something of the culture and lifeways of the prehispanic inhabitants of Cerro Palenque. Joyce organizes her study in a novel way. Rather than presenting each category of excavated material (ceramics, lithics, etc.) in a separate chapter, she integrates this data in discussions of what people did and where they did it, resulting in a reconstruction of social activity more than in a description of material culture. Joyce’s findings indicate that the precolumbian elites of the Ulua Valley had very strong and diversified contacts with Lowland Maya culture, primarily through the Bay of Honduras, with far less contact with Copán in the Highlands. The elites used their contacts with these distant, powerful cultures to reinforce their difference from the people they ruled and the legitimacy of their privileged status. Indeed, their dependence on foreign contacts ultimately led to their downfall when their foreign partners reorganized their economic and social order during the Terminal Classic period. Although archaeological research in the region has been undertaken since the 1890s, Cerro Palenque is the first full-length study of an Ulua Valley site ever published. Joyce’s pioneering approach—archaeological ethnography—will be of interest to scholars dealing with any prehistoric people whose material remains provide the only clues to their culture.

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Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology by Joyce, Rosemary A. (2008) Hardcover

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Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology Paperback 2009 Rosemary A. Joyce

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Embodied Lives:: Figuring Ancient Maya and Egyptian Experience

( Examining a wide range of archaeological data, and usin...)

Examining a wide range of archaeological data, and using it to explore issues such as the sexual body, mind/body dualism, body modification, and magical practices, Lynn Meskell and Rosemary Joyce offer a new approach to the Ancient Egyptian and Mayan understanding of embodiment. Drawing on insights from feminist theory, art history, phenomenology, anthropology and psychoanalysis, the book takes bodily materiality as a crucial starting point to the understanding and formation of self in any society, and sheds new light on Ancient Egyptian and Maya cultures. The book shows how a comparative project can open up new lines of inquiry by raising questions about accepted assumptions as the authors draw attention to the long-term histories and specificities of embodiment, and make the case for the importance of ancient materials for contemporary theorization of the body. For students new to the subject, and scholars already familiar with it, this will offer fresh and exciting insights into these ancient cultures.

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Embodied Lives: Figuring Ancient Maya and Egyptian Experience: 1st (First) Edition

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Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica GENDER AND POWER IN PREHISPANIC MESOAMERICA BY Joyce, Rosemary A ( Author ) Jan-15-2001 GENDER AND POWER IN PREHISPANIC MESOAMERICA GENDER AND POWER IN PREHISPANIC MESOAMERICA BY JOYCE, ROSEMARY A ( AUTHO

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Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology

( There has never been a single way that social life has ...)

There has never been a single way that social life has heen organized by sex. The ancient Greeks saw men and women as expressing varying degrees of a single sexual potential; many Native American societies considered sexual identity as something that changed and developed during a lifetime, and recognized three or four categories of sexual identity. Ranging from the earliest European hunters who created the first human images known to us almost 30,000 years ago to the lives of men and women from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who seldom appear in conventional histories, Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives explores how men and women have represented sexual differences, and lived lives shaped in part by those differences. Professor Joyce shows not only how archaeologists learn about the lives of men and women in the past, but also why the stories they can tell are important to hear today. She challenges us to reconsider how we think about sex and its implications for each person. Showing the critical role of the material world in forming our experiences of and concepts about sex, this book connects archaeology firmly to contemporary studies of material culture and identity. 35 black-and-white illustrations

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Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica: 1st (First) Edition

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(Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology) Author: Rosemary A Joyce published on (March, 2009)

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Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology

( There has never been a single way that social life has ...)

There has never been a single way that social life has heen organized by sex. The ancient Greeks saw men and women as expressing varying degrees of a single sexual potential; many Native American societies considered sexual identity as something that changed and developed during a lifetime, and recognized three or four categories of sexual identity. Ranging from the earliest European hunters who created the first human images known to us almost 30,000 years ago to the lives of men and women from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who seldom appear in conventional histories, Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives explores how men and women have represented sexual differences, and lived lives shaped in part by those differences. Professor Joyce shows not only how archaeologists learn about the lives of men and women in the past, but also why the stories they can tell are important to hear today. She challenges us to reconsider how we think about sex and its implications for each person. Showing the critical role of the material world in forming our experiences of and concepts about sex, this book connects archaeology firmly to contemporary studies of material culture and identity. 35 black-and-white illustrations

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0500051534/?tag=2022091-20

Encounters with the Americas (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

(Historic black-and-white photographs and striking color i...)

Historic black-and-white photographs and striking color images of archaeological and ethnographic objects enhance this introduction to one of the world's most significant Central and South American anthropological collection. Encounters with the Americas also places the museum in a living context through first-person accounts of sixteenth-century contact between Europeans and Aztec and Maya peoples and post-Columbian encounters of Native peoples with explores and anthropologists.

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