Reviewed by Parker VanValkenburgh, Harvard University

In 1991, social anthropologist Orin Starn accused Andeanist anthropologists of “missing the revolution” – essentially, of failing to consider that a movement like the Sendero Luminoso Maoist insurgency (The Shining Path) could emerge in a rural, primarily indigenous area of Peru. Starn was particularly critical of the work of Billie Jean Isbell, whose book To Defend Ourselves (1978) chronicled life in the same village (Chuschi, Ayacucho department) where Sendero announced itself to the world by burning ballot boxes during an election in 1980. By focusing on “traditional” culture rather than contemporary socio-economic conditions, anthropologists in general, and Isbell in particular, had “portray[ed] contemporary highland peasants as outside the flow of modern history” (1991: 64). Starn saw this tendency to romanticize and essentialize the Otherness of Andean peoples as a regional manifestation of Orientalism (Said 1978), and so he called it “Andeanism.” Today, most Andeanists know it as the problem of lo Andino (THE Andean).

After the publication of Starn’s article, scholars were quick to come to Isbell’s defense. Sendero was a movement started by urban intellectuals, not rural indigenous people; Starn’s argument was an acerbic attack that lacked constructive suggestions about how to advance the field; lo Andino was not simply Orientalism in the Andes but had its roots in 19th century Latin American discourses about civilization and barbarism, the early 20th century Indigenista movement, and the strategic essentialism of contemporary indigenous intellectuals (Harris 2000).
Yet despite its shortcomings, Starn’ s analysis did catalyze ongoing discussions among social anthropologists and ethnohistorians about how to explain and depict the simultaneous continuity and transformation of Andean societies in time. As a result of these conversations, recent ethnographic research in the Andes has been much more attuned to the political valences of indigenous cultural practice, to the ways in which rural economies are indelibly bound to global markets, etc. – in essence, to the modernity of Andean indigenous people.
For prehistoric archaeologists working in the region, however, the relationship between structure and history remains a central interpretive and political concern. As in so many regional traditions of scholarship, analogies between conditions described in ethnographic and ethnohistoric research and the prehistoric past form the backbone of Andean archaeological interpretation (Wylie 1985). And despite becoming more careful about the ways in which we construct such analogies, Andean archaeologists are still frequently accused of uncritically projecting ethnographic models into the deep past – particularly “uniquely Andean” patterns identified in the work of the late John Murra and his students (e.g., ayllu-based social organization, the absence of markets, “vertical archipelago” exchange, the importance of cloth above other materials) (W. Isbell 1997, Goldstein 2005, VanChiVard 2007).

One of the many ways in which Denise Arnold and Christine Hastorf’s new book Heads of State (Left Coast Press, 2008) can be read is as a novel intervention in the complex methodological interface where Andean archaeology meets ethnography and ethnohistory. To my knowledge, Heads is the first major monograph on an Andean topic to be co-written by an ethnographer and an archaeologist. As such, its implications extend beyond the more specific topic the book seeks to address ¬(the practice of head taking and the meanings of heads in the Andes from the Formative period to contemporary times).
Much of Arnold’s previous work has focused on the intersections between weaving, gender, violence, memory and textuality in the ayllu of Qaqachaka, a highland Aymara-speaking group living on the border between the departments of Oruro and Potosí, in Bolivia. Hastorf’s scholarship has ranged from explorations of ancient diet and agriculture in the central Peruvian highlands, to Formative Period archaeology (1500BCE to 400CE ) in the Lake Titicaca region. Accordingly, case material in the volume gravitates towards these various geographic poles of attraction. Readers familiar with the authors’ previous publications will recognize elements of Heads that draw on Arnold’s co-authored work with Juan de Dios Yapita on contemporary and historical head taking in the Qaqachaka region (Arnold and Yapita 2006) and a recent article by Hastorf (2003) on ancestor veneration at the Middle Formative site of Chiripa, Bolivia. However, several new topics are treated (e.g., the meaning of heads in Chavín, Paracas Nazca, Moche, and Inka contexts, as well as among Amazonian groups), such that the volume’s coverage is truly sweeping.
The overarching argument of Heads is that head taking in the Andes, and its iconographic representation, are and have always been consummately political practices – not simply ritual mumbo-jumbo. In the authors’ view, the potent meanings of heads among Andean and Amazonian peoples (as the seat of some “seed-like” quality, or the soul, or a kind of mana or hau [or ch’ama] that could be captured and accumulated) led head taking to be a generative political practice in Andean history, entangled in the development of institutions as diverse as bureaucratic record-keeping, market exchange, and textile arts.
The volume is divided into two parts – the first primarily ethnographic, the second mostly archaeological. Topically, the bulk of its pages are devoted to describing the elaborate and diverse practices that center on heads in contemporary Andean settings. Archaeological material is concentrated in Chapter 6 “Heads and Andean Political Change from an Archaeological Perspective” and Chapter 7 “Central Andean Political Developments.” However, the authors also frequently insert archaeological examples into earlier chapters to reinforce arguments constructed primarily in reference to ethnographic material.
But rather than focusing on marshalling their evidence to simply prove that Head Taking = Politics, Arnold and Hastorf explore specific ways in which the practice operates in political context. They favor a spectral approach to ethnographic analysis, refracting contemporary examples of head symbolism and head taking through diverse theoretical perspectives instead of presenting a single concise description. At the same time, the presentation of ethnographic material downplays historical change and geographic diversity, suggesting a general and consistently “Andean” way of understanding heads and head taking.
The volume’s spectrum of approaches are concisely presented in the “nine axes of current and future research” outlined in the concluding chapter (p. 217-233). The authors suggestion that, in the Andes, both in the past and the present:
1) Heads are symbols of political power, and an individual’s acquisition of enemy heads is a major pathway to authority.
2) Heads are thought to contain the power of (re)generation – effective in human reproduction and agricultural fertility.
3) Head-taking practices articulate gendered forms of authority: masculine power is associated with head taking and feminine power is associated with the curation of captured heads.
4) Heads reference speech, and this connection with the spoken word is one of the reasons that head taking later evolved into Andean knotted string recordkeeping (khipu). In the authors’ own words, “head taking and the related cultural development of using the pendant hair to form early versions of the knotted threads, called kipu in Quechua or chinu in Aymara, might be at the heart of early developments in bureaucratic accounting systems associated with early political formations” (47).
5) Heads, like other body parts, implicitly reference a whole and (especially when they are perceived as belonging to ancestors), thus serve as effective metaphors in the constitution of group identity.
6) Heads are politically important both in “centrifugal” (expansive) polities, where they are captured from enemies, and “centripetal” (inward-looking) societies, where they are more important as references to ancestors and genealogical lines. However, in expansive polities, enemy heads are often ritually converted into ancestors.
7) Practices centered on head taking and curation express and construct social identity and difference.
8) Heads were sought out in a spirit much like that of Marxian “primitive accumulation” and their circulation may have “triggered the initial stage of a differentiated economic domain, with certain elements in common to an incipient form of capitalism” (p. 231).
9) The guarding and maintenance of heads concentrates their potential and historically connects them more tightly to bureaucratic management and the origins of complex recordkeeping
In short, there is no lack of novel ideas presented in Heads of State. The ethnographic chapters present intriguing historical and contemporary examples of head taking, as well as a wealth of provocative suggestions about its meaning and political efficacy. The archaeological chapters offer an excellent synthesis of previous scholarship on head taking in the prehistoric Andes, as well as ample evidence for its longstanding political character – e.g., the association of caches of heads with large monuments, the depiction of head taking in larger battle scenes.

In many ways, the connection between the ethnographic and archaeological material in the volume is a loose one. Because the authors’ ethnographic description of head taking is so multi-faceted, it serves less as a baseline for writing a whole history of the practice and more as source of inspiration for the interpretation of isolated archaeological examples. For example, the association between severed heads and plants in Nazca (0-500 CE , southern Peruvian coast) iconography recalls the contemporary understanding of heads as possessing regenerative potential. Or the caching of heads in D-shaped buildings in Wari (500-900 CE, central Peruvian Andes) may be an indication of a sort of primitive accumulation. These are all clearly presented, well-argued points.
But it may be going too far to proffer that head taking was the essential “origin point” of the full range of institutions the authors attribute to it: that “the Andean notion of jucha in the sense of obligation, duty, or debt derives from the original sucking of the brains out of skulls in warfare” (225); that “…the origins of weaving may have derived from creating in the loom space the cultural medium for appropriating the energies of the trophy head of a dead enemy, and reintegrating its spirit into the [sic.] own group” (227); that “…the generating yield obtained from [the] statewide scale of head taking and head management might even have triggered the initial stage of a differentiated economic domain, with certain elements in common to an incipient form of capitalism” (231). These seem too many phenomena, too grand, and too pervasive to be explained without reference to other generative political practices – not to mention other cultural preoccupations, physical needs, or elements of political economy.
After reading Heads, it is difficult to deny the important place of head symbolism and head taking in a diverse range of political contexts in Andean history. But I am also reminded of Ann Stahl’s (1993) message about the importance of using ethnographic and historical analogies to interpret archaeological remains in ways that allow us to explore differences between them, not just similarities. When and where did Andean peoples not participate in the cult of heads, or of its direct historical derivatives? Why did head taking or head curation gain particular importance in some Andean contexts but not in others, and how did these practices articulate with other, contemporary symbolic regimes? While Orin Starn’s nearly twenty-year-old devaluation of historical continuity in Andean societies seems hasty in retrospect, it helps remind us of the essential need to seek out discontinuities between past and present in order to make mutual sense of them. So while Heads points us in many interesting directions, it may be necessary to return to the beginning to find our way there.
Bibliography
Arnold, Denise Y. and Christine A. Hastorf. 2008. Heads of State: Icons, Power, and Politics in the Ancient and Modern Andes. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Arnold, Denise Y. and Juan de Dios Yapita. 2006. The Metamorphosis of Heads: Textual Struggles, Education and Land in the Andes. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, Illuminations Series.
Goldstein, Paul. 2005. Andean Diaspora: The Tiwanaku Colonies and the Origins of South American Empire. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.
Harris, Olivia. 2000. To Make the Earth Bear Fruit. London: Institute of Latin American Studies.
Hastorf, Christine A. 2003. “Community with the Ancestors: Ceremonies and Social Memory in the Middle Formative at Chiripa, Bolivia.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22(4): 305-322.
Isbell, Billie Jean. 1978. To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Isbell, William. 1997. Mummies and Mortuary Monuments: A Postprocessual Prehistory of Central Andean Social Organization. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Stahl, Ann B. 1993. “Concepts of Time and Approaches to Analogical Reasoning in
Historical Perspective.” American Antiquity 58(2): 235-260.
Starn, Orin. 1991. “Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru.”
Cultural Anthropology 6(1): 63-91.
Vanderbilt-Chicago-Harvard Workshop in Andean Studies. March 30-31, 2007. Nashville, TN.
Wylie, Alison. 1985. “The Reaction Against Analogy,” in Schiffer, Michael B., ed.,
Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory. New York: Academic Press. 63-111.