Indigenous Visual Cultures in Latin America: Seeing, Being, and Meaning

Reframing the study of Indigenous visual cultures, this volume explores how images and objects generate affect and relation in non-Western contexts, foregrounding alternative modes of material engagement and meaning-making.

While traditional approaches to Indigenous visual cultures have often centered on iconography and representation, this volume turns toward other ways that images and objects act in the world. Indigenous Visual Cultures in Latin America explores how material productions function not merely as signs that point elsewhere but as agents that help shape relationships, environments, and affective experience.

Spanning Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Amazonia from 1500 BCE to the present, the chapters examine how meaning may reside in materials themselves; how making is a form of exchange between maker and matter; and how visual forms participate in configuring relations among humans, ancestors, deities, and place. These works are not passive containers of meaning, but charged presences—generative forces within ongoing worlds. Attuned to Indigenous ways of knowing and being, the volume invites readers to think beyond the frame, beyond the image, and beyond representation itself.

Tamara L. Bray is Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She is the author or editor of several books including The Archaeology of Wak’as: Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes, Visual Languages of the Inca, and, most recently, Objects of Empire: The Ceramic Tradition of the Imperial Inca State.

Carolyn Dean is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dean’s research focuses on Inka visual culture. Her books include Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Los Cuerpos de los Incas y el cuerpo de Cristo: El Corpus Christi en el Cuzco colonial), and, most recently, Inside Abstraction: Interpreting Inka Visual Culture.