Conv. Session: (Mis)Representing “Justice” in Mesoamerica and the Andes, AD 100-1650

(Mis)Representing “Justice” in Mesoamerica and the Andes, AD 100-1650

 

College Art Association Annual Meeting, February 3-6, 2016, Washington, D.C.

 

 

 

European concepts and images of justice introduced by the conquistadors have both informed and obscured our views of Pre-Columbian systems of justice and their representations. Much therefore remains to be understood about indigenous notions of justice, the official apparatuses that reinforced them, and the many ways that visual culture in Middle and South America, including performance and ritual, reflected, distorted, abetted, and condemned them. In the modern world, while images of justice have sometimes helped reveal the inner workings of justice systems, they often have also helped to reinforce or conceal social inequalities, as well as the beliefs that sustain them. Was this the case in Mesoamerica and the Andes? What can art tell us about the ways in which older and widespread indigenous understandings of “merit” (i.e., the belief that one “deserves” or “owes” something) were reshaped, first by indigenous leaders, and second, by early colonists, to consolidate and cement their control? How did different indigenous and early Colonial social groups use the visual arts to manifest and maintain their notion of justice? Finally, what does art in Pre-Conquest and early Colonial times tell us about how justice was enacted, inscribed upon, and expressed via the human body? This panel invites papers that combine visual analysis with linguistic, ethnohistorical, and archaeological approaches to shed light on indigenous Mesoamericans’ concepts of justice and their complicated relationship with those introduced by Europeans. Papers that deploy new art historical methodological approaches and theories to enlighten our current paradigms of pre-Conquest justice and its representation in early Colonial Latin America are especially welcome.

 

Session organizers: Angélica Afanador-Pujol, Arizona State University; and Cecelia F. Klein, University of California, Los Angeles. E-mail: Angelica.Afanador.Pujol@asu.edu and CKlein@humnet.ucla.edu. For submission guidelines please visit www.collegeart.org.