Art, Nature, and Religion in the Central Andes: Themes and Variations from Prehistory to the Present

Mary Strong

may 2012 · University of Texas Press

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From prehistory to the present, the Indigenous peoples of the Andes have used a visual symbol system—that is, art—to express their sense of the sacred and its immanence in the natural world. Many visual motifs that originated prior to the Incas still appear in Andean art today, despite the onslaught of cultural disruption that native Andeans have endured over several centuries. Indeed, art has always been a unifying power through which Andeans maintain their spirituality, pride, and culture while resisting the oppression of the dominant society.

In this book, Mary Strong takes a significantly new approach to Andean art that links prehistoric to contemporary forms through an ethnographic understanding of Indigenous Andean culture. In the first part of the book, she provides a broad historical survey of Andean art that explores how Andean religious concepts have been expressed in art and how artists have responded to cultural encounters and impositions, ranging from invasion and conquest to international labor migration and the internet. In the second part, Strong looks at eight contemporary art types—the scissors dance (danza de tijeras), home altars (retablos), carved gourds (mates), ceramics (ceramica), painted boards (tablas), weavings (textiles), tinware (hojalateria), and Huamanga stone carvings (piedra de Huamanga). She includes prehistoric and historic information about each art form, its religious meaning, the natural environment and sociopolitical processes that help to shape its expression, and how it is constructed or performed by today’s artists, many of whom are quoted in the book.

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Mary Strong is a visual anthropologist, writer, and illustrator who has collaborated with painters and craftspeople in Latin America and the United States. She served on the Board of Directors and was president of the Society for Visual Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. She also coedited and contributed to the book Viewpoints: Visual Anthropologists at Work; guest-edited and contributed to two special issues of the journal Visual Anthropology; and was ethnographer for the award-winning film compilation Arts in Ayacucho.