The Politicization of the Dead: Violence as Performance, Politics as Usual

Endemic violence in a pre‐Hispanic Andean community: A bioarchaeological study of cranial trauma from the Majes Valley, Peru

“…The age‐at‐death and sex profiles for the Uraca population, and the more intense and lethal cranial trauma for elite sector adult males suggests that surviving or dying in physical combat was a social requirement for burial in the elite sector. Maintaining these distinct death spaces and mortuary rituals for injured elites would have memorialized and inscribed narratives about the value of violence (sensu Connerton, ; Pérez, ; Vankilde, ), linking violence to the establishment and maintenance of social status inequalities in this group. The performance of violence against community members and household members (whether related by blood, fictive kin, or captured from other communities) may also have normalized, lionized, and perpetuated physical violence from generation to generation.…”

“…Around this time, people from the Wari homeland in the Ayacucho Valley expanded throughout the Peruvian Andes, reorganizing economies, subsistence, ritual practices, and sociopolitical structures in their heartland and at distant Wari outposts (Edwards & Schreiber, ; Isbell & McEwan, ; Jennings, ; Tung, ; Williams, ; Williams & Nash, ). Given that the consolidation and expansion of polities corresponded with an uptick in physical violence in other prehistoric contexts in the Andes and other global regions (Buzon & Richman, ; Martin et al, ; Pérez, ; Smith, ; Torres‐Rouff, ; Torres‐Rouff & Costa Junqueira, ), we use cranial trauma data from Uraca to evaluate how this time of sociopolitical transformation in southern Peru was characterized by violence.…”

“…To understand the role of physical violence in society, and during times of profound social transformation, it is imperative to explore how political, ritual, and “everyday violence” (sensu Scheper‐Hughes, ) are bound up with the construction of social roles and norms (Klaus, ; Martin et al, ; Martin & Tegtmeyer, ; Redfern, ; Robb, ) and how those roles are negotiated over the course of life and death (Glencross, ; Sofaer, ). Because violence is an intentional performance (Pérez, ; Whitehead, ) the hour, time of year, place, weapons used, victims chosen, and the way blows are choreographed make statements about the social identities of participants. Bioarchaeological analysis of violence‐related skeletal injuries enables us to unravel the performance of violence to reconstruct the broader social and political dynamics within and between social groups.…”

Violence in hunters, fishermen, and gatherers of the Chinchorro culture: Archaic societies of the Atacama Desert (10,000–4,000 cal yr BP)

“…In a different perspective, more recent theoretical approaches based on social theory, but in a bioarchaeological framework, envision violence and war not only as reactions or responses to a set of external variables (e.g., environmental stress, competition for resources, population growth). In contrast, they argue that violence would be heavily codified with intricate cultural meanings (Martin, Harrod, & Pérez, ; Pérez, ). Thus, models have been proposed that, with a more inclusive views, analyze the social and symbolic uses of violence, and how these could be identified in the skeletal register.…”

“…That is the paradox of violence. For this reason, other more inclusive approaches have argued that the more functionalist models of violence, such as those discussed in the previous paragraphs, have prevented exploring violence in its most social or symbolic dimension (Milner, 2016; Pérez, ).…”