Renee McGarry

Transforming the Elite: Evidence of Prehistoric Masking in the Southeastern United States

While the indigenous peoples who inhabited the Southeastern United States from the years 800 CE to 1500 CE left no written materials and very little in the way of a continuous oral tradition, a great deal of archaeological evidence exists that supports the existence of a long-standing and transformative tradition of masking and masquerade.  Much of this evidence has a common theme that neatly situates it in what has been termed the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a matrix of iconography that determines relationships between varying peoples in the area.  In this paper, I seek to use this evidence of masking and masquerade to further codify those cultural, religious, ritual, and political interactions.  I argue that masking traditions were used by elite members of the community to create a separate class of citizens, one that could enter into interactions and relationships with supernatural beings.  By visually inserting themselves into a vibrant and living cosmology, this class of citizens was able to reinforce social hierarchies by projecting themselves into a liminal state that allowed for travel between the three separate worlds of the Southeastern cosmos, The Above World, This World, and The Beneath World.  

 

Renee McGarry is in her fourth year in the PhD program in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center specializing in Pre-Columbian art and architecture.  Her main interests include the intersection of secular and religious imagery in indigenous visual cultures and Aztec imagery of the natural world.   She will gladly pontificate for hours about how the Aztecs made her vegan and how one time she tried ordering a “quesadilla sin queso” on research trip in Oaxaca.  Her request was denied.