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In this article, we argue for a multi-dimensional research strategy incorporating material, social and phenomenological analysis in the study of figurines and other human effigies. We call this approach 'following the material'. To illustrate, we examine two case studies: figurines from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük (Turkey) and human effigies from the Formative region of Moche (Peru). We look first at the material substances from which artifacts are made and the material contexts in which they were produced, circulated and deposited, before turning to analysis of the representation of the body. This enables us to see these objects as themselves bodiesnot merely imperfect replicas of actual humans, but material objects made of substances that afford particular kinds of interactions between fleshly and artifactual bodies. This focus on the materiality of artifacts reveals tight connections between objects in human form, material culture, environment, landscape, and political economy.

This article asks the question: What is a reproductive act? Ceramics produced by the South American Moche (A.D. 150-800) depict a wide variety of sex acts but rarely feature vaginal penetration. The cross-cultural literature, especially from Melanesia and Amazonia, is used here to argue that the relationship between sex and reproduction has been variably defined, with many actsincluding anal and oral sex-sometimes perceived as reproductive. It contrasts notions of time found in Western ideas of procreation and in pornography to the expanded reproductive time frame of kin-and lineage-based societies and argues that Moche ceramics, with their emphasis on the movement of fluids between bodies, do in fact portray a reproductive process. In the stratified context of Moche society, where these pots were produced for elite consumers who often placed them in tombs, these representations solidified the power of ancestors, elders, and elites.

This article juxtaposes Viveiros de Castro's theory of 'perspectivism' with carved stone monoliths from the Peruvian site of Chavín de Huantar to explore the interactions between humans, animals, and things in Pre-Columbian material culture. Using insights from new work on animal/human relations and the ethnography of shamanism and hunting, it illuminates aspects of the iconography, scale, and style of the stones that were previously opaque. Finally, it challenges archaeologists to address the limitations of perspectivism, notably its abstraction and ahistoricism, avoiding the retrogressive return to romantic primitivism that sometimes mars the ontological turn, thus transforming perspectivism into a better means of political engagement with indigenous Americans present and past.

Race, long discounted in An&an ethnography as relatively unimportant, is a social fact of great salience in the Andes. This essay introduces the articles in the special issue on race in the Andes with an overview of the interrelated intellectual histories of racism in the Andes, Europe and North America, from colonial proto-racism, to the totahsing theories of the 19th century, to the heterogeneous 'neo-racism' found in the Andes today, in which both these earlier ideas and contemporary cultural racisms are at home. It concludes with a discussion of an oppositional ideology found in some indigenous communities, in which race is somatic but not biological in origin. 0