THE CERAMICS FROM PUCARÁ IN PERU: MATERIALITY OF MEMORY

Abstract

This article aims to make some considerations about memory and pre-Hispanic objects, or the memory of pre-Hispanic objects. The proposal was drawn from the field research in which I investigated the relationship between potteries and the Andean cosmology. My reflections move between the pre-Hispanic objects and the image they project when "operationalized" (appropriated) by the tourism industry to the detriment of the relationship the craftsmen establish with the objects they produce. For the craftsmen, the objects are the materialization of memory, representing and exercising its agency towards practices and cosmological conceptions. The material culture, in this case the production of pre-Hispanic objects, recounts an idealized past that is operated by collective memory, while the agentive memory is polysemous, "signified" (inscribed) in social relations. This analytical perspective does not ignore state policies and, above all, market and "marketing of the past", making it increasingly "exoticized" (exotic) and idealized, nor exhaust the numerous possibilities of analysis. At first I introduce the Pucara District and some objects that combine and harmonize the materiality, image, history, memory and the imagination (of place, community). Following, I present the cosmological logics that animate objects and conviviality in the Andes. Later, I conclude with a cross analysis between what I call material memory and the images that feed its production, analyzing an object of the Andean ceramics: the “torito de Pucará”.