Competitive feasting, religious pluralism and decentralized power in the late moche period

Abstract

Ritual plays a fundamental role in the creation of political subjectivity and the materialization of ideological struggles, and its inextricable relationship to power has been the subject of productive anthropological inquiry (Bell 1992, 1997; Bloch 1989; Cohen 1981; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1993; Kelly and Kaplan 1990; Kertzer 1988). Indeed, the analysis of religious practices, as best inferred from the material record, is critical to interpreting power relations in prehistoric societies (Brumfiel 1998; A. Joyce et al. 2001). Ritual performance and the manipulation of ceremonial space articulated differing political dispositions in the ancient Andes that variably shaped hierarchical socioeconomic systems (Moore 1996a). Therefore, political and ideological structures in prehistoric Peru can only be fully understood through archaeological investigations of the ritual mediation of power by different communities comprising a given polity. © 2006 Springer.