Making and Marking Maleness and Valorizing Violence

Abstract

The unmarked category of man and claims of innate violence have been tightly linked in the public imagination and in much scholarly work, both in views of the past and the present and in how those temporalities mutually inform one another. However, these notions of the naturally violent man eschew the evidence showing how social, political, and other processes interact to make and mark gender and connect narratives about violence with gender and other aspects of identity. Drawing on examples from the pre-Hispanic and early Spanish colonial Andean world, I explore how (bio)archaeology investigates both overt physical violence and structures of violence that can be hidden yet are deeply impactful. This kind of analysis places the archaeological body at the core, also interrogating how norms about violence become embodied. Through a consideration of this constructive process, I examine the corporal effects of various narratives about violence, gender, and the body in the (pre)historic Andes. These (bio)archaeological and ethnohistoric data are also examined to scrutinize how these stories of past violence are used in the service of normalizing and naturalizing (male) violence today.

Climate change intensified violence in the south-central Andean highlands from 1.5 to 0.5 ka

“…It is important to note that while violence is most often associated with aggression, harm, and broadly negative connotations in modern contexts, the anthropological literature informs of broader connotations within other cultural contexts. For example, violence is often an important aspect of the formation of masculinity and male identities (Martin, 2021; Tung, 2021), attaining social status (Scaffidi and Tung, 2020), an important aspect of social cohesion and enforcing social norms in the forms of witch-hunts (Martin and Harrod, 2020), and a factor in releasing inter-community tensions in the form of tinku fights in the Andes (Alarcón, 2004; Tung, 2007). Nonetheless, such forms of violence having a specific ritual, spiritual, or social function does not preclude them from influence from external or ecological factors (Arkush and Stanish, 2005; McCool et al, 2021).…”

“…Such violent encounters can—but do not always—manifest as perimortem or antemortem fractures in the crania. Violence also can manifest in post-cranial regions, but we limit our analysis because cranial traumas are frequently well preserved and are the most consistently documented indicators of violence in the Andes (Arkush and Tung, 2013; Tung, 2021; McCool et al, 2022b), which allows for relatively reliable comparison of many samples examined by different analysts.…”

“…Life experiences manifest themselves in the skeleton through a process of embodiment, potentially reflecting disease, violence, and malnutrition, or lack thereof. Through various biological and cultural processes, the social and physical environments are transcribed on the skeleton (Walker, 2001;Armelagos, 2003;Sofaer, 2006;Larsen and Walker, 2010;Agarwal and Glencross, 2011;Tung, 2021).…”

“…Within the archaeological record, evidence for the different types of violence can take numerous forms, including cranial fractures, paleopathological lesions indicative of metabolic stress, and stable isotope signatures indicative differential access to important foodstuffs (Walker, 2001; Tung, 2021). These forms of evidence often point to events of direct and structural violence among past populations (Klaus and Tam, 2009).…”

Towards understanding human–environment feedback loops: the Atacama Desert case

“…In practice, our dataset concatenates scores for the frequency of cranial and postcranial traumas, which represent archaeological proxies for physical conflict during times of social tensions (e.g. [24,59]). Although this set is the most comprehensive source of data on interpersonal violence for the inland Atacama ( n = 596 records), we recognize that it might be subject to biases in spatial and temporal coverages.…”