Product details
- ISBN 9781477331514
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jul 2025
- Publisher: University of Texas Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A study of the ancient practice of Andean head shaping and its cultural connotations.
In the late sixteenth century, Spanish conquerors in Peru’s Colca Valley encountered the Collaguas and Cavanas, Indigenous people who undertook a striking form of body modification: Collaguas bound the heads of infants and children so that their skulls grew narrow and elongated, and Cavanas so that their skulls became wide and squat. Head shaping resulted in craniums that resembled two specific mountains associated with the groups. For Europeans, shaped skulls immediately and durably became a marker of territorialized ethnic difference.
The Mountain Embodied offers a more nuanced story. Having studied hundreds of samples of human remains, bioarchaeologist Matthew Velasco argues that reducing head shape to a mere ethnic marker is a colonial invention. Instead, the social significance of head shaping was protean and intersected with other structures of difference, such as gender, kinship, and status, influencing experience within the community. Head shaping, then, was one factor in the construction of a locally embedded kind of subjectivity. An outsider could deduce group identity from head shape, but for practitioners, head shaping reflected something else: nothing less than personhood itself.
Matthew C. Velasco is an assistant professor of anthropology and codirector of the Human and Animal Bone Laboratory at Cornell University.
