Enemy - Stranger - Neighbour: The Image of the Other in Moche Culture
is dedicated to artistic renderings of the Recuay people in Moche art,
in all available and preserved media. The Moche and the Recuay were the
creators of the two main cultures of northern Peru in the Early
Intermediate Period (approx. 100-750 CE). They were both illiterate and
they left no written documents concerning the nature of their mutual
contacts. The Moche, however, represented the Recuay quite extensively
in their ceremonial art, which served as a powerful ideological tool of
social influence and control. Its iconography gives an exceptional
opportunity to study the mechanisms of perceiving and presenting the
'other' in a traditional society. This study offers an analysis of a set
of several dozen complex, painted and bas-relief scenes, as well as
several hundred mould-pressed, sculpted depictions of foreigners in
Moche art. It tries to answer the questions of how the message regarding
the 'other' was created and communicated, what its concept may have been
and what social functions it may have served among the groups living in
the Southern Moche Region. The attitude to foreigners - as reconstructed
on the basis of Moche iconography - was not unidimensional. It was
characterized by a combination of extreme feelings and emotions such as
fear and admiration, resentment and interest, repulsion and fascination.
It has many features of a typical approach to all 'others' studied by
specialists of different disciplines in various contexts and cultures.
The observations made in this book will prove of interest not only to
Moche scholars, Andean archaeologists or, people interested in the
pre-Columbian cultures of South America, but also - if only as an
analogy - to historians, art historians, sociologists and
anthropologists dealing with the issue of alterity.
