Vital Voids

Andrew Finegold is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was founding president of the Pre-Columbian Society of New York. He is coeditor of Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives and maintains the blog Ancient Americas, Appropriated: Modern Representations of the Pre-Columbian Past.

[Finegold] demonstrates-convincingly, and in engaging prose-that the sustained analysis of holes provides insight into the ways in which ancient Mesoamericans conceived of cavities as teeming with vital energies or pregnant with the possibility of emergence...there is a satisfying rhythm and structure to this book, which moves through an impressive array of ideas but keeps returning, almost poetically, to the place it started: a beautifully painted Late Classic Maya plate rife with meaning and replete with a small drilled hole. Finegold charts a new and productive path for thinking about voids as procreative spaces that were integral to Mesoamerican creation narratives, ritual behavior, individual identities, and expressions of social order. For this reason, this book should be of interest to readers beyond the confines of Mesoamerica who, like Finegold, see potential in a void. (caa.reviews) [A] wonderfully illustrated book...Finegold has offered us a well-written, well-illustrated book on a topic that has received relatively little attention...Finegold manages to pierce a productive hole in our previous frame of understanding, allowing for a new and creative reinterpretation of a Mesoamerican cultural tradition and the underlying worldview. (21: Inquires into Art, History, and the Visual) One of the great contributions of this volume...is to provide a model for using deep object reading-integrating material, iconographic, and sociohistorical interpretations of a single ceramic dish-as a springboard into uniquely Mesoamerican philosophical systems of aesthetics, ontology, and metaphysics. Finegold’s arguments also open the door to a further consideration of voids in Mesoamerican material culture (and they are everywhere once one begins to look for them), acknowledging that his text does not and could not cover the full scope of the subject. The implications of his central thesis are far-reaching and will no doubt spark further debate and exploration by other scholars. (Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture)

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsChapter 1. What’s in a Hole? Material Culture and InterpretationChapter 2. Perforated Vessels: Revitalizing the Discourse Surrounding “Kill Holes”Chapter 3. Cavities in the Living EarthChapter 4. The Act of DrillingChapter 5. Perforating the BodyChapter 6. Conclusions: Beyond the Resurrection PlateNotesBibliographyIndex