Collecting Native America
John Lloyd Stephens and the Rhetorics of Archaeological Value
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12976647 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christen Mucher (0000-0003-0991-803X, Smith College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2018-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Transnational American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1940-0764 • E-ISSN: 1940-0764 |
| Publisher | California Digital Library (CDL) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5070/t891023391 |
| OpenAlex | W2910565874 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
This article focuses on the representations of Maya statues made by archaeologist–explorer John Lloyd Stephens and his artistic collaborator Frederick Catherwood in the 1840s. While Stephens’s and Catherwood’s trips to Central America, Mexico, and the Yucatán were meant to provide material objects for a Pan-American museum of Native American “antiquities,” the statues themselves were never exhibited to the public. Nonetheless, the visual and literary representations of the Maya “idols” circulating across North and Central America as well as Europe incited international interest and dramatically increased similar statues’ monetary value. Stephens’s valuation of Indigenous objects as possessable historical relics rested on the transformation of Indigenous bodies into laborers and Indigenous homelands into saleable property; their representation as mystical “idols” merely concealed this transformation. What is more, the historical and monetary value of the relics collected by Stephens was eventually surpassed by their textual reproductions. These representations—rather than the artifacts or communities behind them—set a persistent pattern for the study and evaluation of Native American “culture” as demonstrated by the textual afterlives of Stephens’s work
Archaeology · Art · Art history · Ethnology · Indigenous · Indigenous culture · Maya · Native american · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Anthropology · Archaeology and Natural History · History · Latin American history and culture · Law
Class and society in central Chiapas
Incidents of travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan /
Incidents of travel in Yucatan /
Introduction
Capital
Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan
Inventing America
Memories of conquest
Actually Existing Indian Nations
A Rich Land, A Poor People
Catlin and His Contemporaries
Informal Empire
The Indian Craze
Going Native
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |