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Becoming Petrified: the making of archaeological Personhood

sandra rozental

metamorphosis is defined as “the process of changing in form, shape, or substance; especially transformation by supernat-ural means.”1 in this text, i am concerned with a particular

kind of metamorphosis—one that involves the transmutation of stone, an inanimate substance, into a living, animate substance with personhood2—as well as the reverse process. the transformation into stone need not be a physical or biological fact, but can simply imply a metamorphosis of substance in metaphorical terms. Petrification is described as a “conver-sion into stone or stony substance,” but since 1678 it has also been associ-ated with “the action or process of hardening or immobilizing (a person or thing); a hardened or immobile condition, especially a state of temporary paralysis brought on by extreme fear.”3 the linguistic association between the substance of stone, immobility, and an emotive state of fear and anxi-ety is echoed by the many myths that plot being turned into stone as di-vine punishment: niobe in greek mythology and lot’s wife (salt being a type of stone) in the old testament, as well as the scandinavian trolls pet-rified by sunlight. in myths, the ability to turn others into stone, like that of medusa, is cast as a dangerous and privileged power. the substance of stone, associated with coldness, hardness, and fixedness, is, therefore, the direct opposite of life, warmth, and flexibility; it is something to be avoid-ed at all costs, or to be used strategically against our worst enemies.

the world of myths and legends is peppered with stories about persons being turned into stone and about stones with person-like characteris-tics, yet my interest here is not in myth, but in a particular historical case that i hope will illuminate the relationship between personhood and stone, as well as describe a specific process of petrification. this case

1 oxford english dictionary, online version.2 although there exists a literature within the discipline of anthropology, especially prolific in the 1970s and 1980s, that has explored personhood, in this essay, i base my understanding of personhood on marcel mauss’s essay “a category of the human mind: the notion of Person; the notion of self,” in which he shows that the person is a social and relational position, hence his interest in naming, kinship terms, and roles or personnages (1985). i also understand personhood as involving a power, a potential to will and act in and upon an environment, an agency that implies the capacity to move and shape worldly circumstances.3 oxford english dictionary, online version, s.v. “petrification.”

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in both space and in the social imaginations of a multiplicity of actors—intellectuals, scientists, cultural bureaucrats, and the inhabitants of coatlinchan—by following igor kopytoff and arjun appadurai’s invita-tion to look to “the social life of things” (1988) to understand objects’ bi-ographies in motion, condensing different stages in a progression defined developmentally as a “life.” however, “life” here is not merely a metaphor for a biographical cycle, but a characteristic moment (or moments) within a biography where a thing, a stone, metamorphoses from something into someone. this metamorphosis turns stone into an agent with personhood, a god capable of making skies thunder and rain, a being able to feel emo-tions and experience loss, a male or a female, a social actor with kinship ties and social responsibilities.

the information and stories that follow are based on data gathered during preliminary fieldwork done in coatlinchan in 2006, as well as dur-ing several research trips to the town and archival research undertaken in mexico city in 2006 and 2007 as part of my dissertation project for a Phd degree in anthropology from new York University. i have collected sources that describe the object, produced by archaeologists, engineers, historians, and museum curators, both in mexico city and coatlinchan, as well as press clippings and newsreels from the time of its removal. i also interviewed different groups mobilized around the object and record-ed their stories and memories. through these various, often overlapping, often contradictory versions, i will describe how this stone, inalienably linked to a community and a place, acquired personhood through its entry into the world of science as it was excavated by the discipline of archaeol-ogy, then through its removal from coatlinchan to the museum, and now through a doubling process involving copies and replicas generated in the midst of the uncertainties brought about by a neoliberal system.

although further ethnographic fieldwork needs to be conducted to un-derstand how life emerges out of and within this object, this paper is an initial experiment. Using theories of material culture, gifts, and fetishes in anthropology, as well as sigmund freud and d. W. Winnicott’s psycho-analytic understandings of, respectively, the uncanny and transitional objects, i will try to hint and evoke, rather than conclude, possible ways of looking at this puzzle. i will first map the changes in substance under-gone by the monolith in its “social life” through its circulation in space, but also in and out of different regimes of value. i will anticipate that the metamorphosis of the substance of stone into that of a person, and vice versa, are in fact reactions to historical circumstances that produce

concerns an object of colossal proportions made out of stone. carved by humans in teotihuacan times (roughly ad 100 to ad 850), the monolith of coatlinchan, a 167-ton figure mentioned in sixteenth-century colonial accounts, was discovered by archaeologists in the late nineteenth centu-ry, and then, in 1964, removed from its original location—the village of coatlinchan in the state of mexico—to mexico city where it still stands today as a monument in front of the national museum of anthropology.

even though the coatlinchan monolith’s matter is stone, its substance oscillates between the inanimate and the animate, shifting and morphing in response to particular circumstances. having been described as per-son-like because of its anthropomorphic form in archaeological studies predating 1964, the object seems to have literally acquired the attributes of personhood, rather than merely representing them metaphorically, af-ter it was removed and exchanged for a yet-to-be-fulfilled promise of mo-dernity: a school, a clinic, water, and a road, none of which were ever fully completed. recently, the object’s personhood has been summoned again by another yet-to-be-fulfilled promise of progress, this time not made by a protectionist state interested in modernization through centralized poli-cies, but by a neoliberal state promoting laissez-faire development.

the 1964 mexican state was very much a patrimonialist state in the Weberian sense, coopting heritage and cultural production for political legitimacy and national unity (lomnitz 1999; aitken et al. 1996). the current state is also concerned with heritage, but as a commodity to be exploited through tourism as a for-profit development strategy taken on locally in a decentralized manner. my argument is that it is precisely this neoliberal model that is making local communities like coatlinchan use and lay claim on pre-hispanic objects and the past they contain, con-structed as national history and heritage by the mexican ancien régime. it is also neoliberalism that provokes new states of anxiety in a society that is changing with the times, making pre-hispanic objects like the coatlinchan monolith take on new lives and personhood to face uncer-tainty and soothe fears. thus, in the midst of a crisis prompted by the increasing economic inviability of living from an agrarian economic model in mexico, local authorities and cultural activists in coatlinchan have worked together to build a life-size replica of the monolith that, as of march 2007, stands in the main square of the town, brought to life by the villagers’ hopes and expectations that it will bring new prosperity to a depreciated region.

in this essay, i will explore the trajectory of the coatlinchan monolith

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for neat resolutions and clear-cut boundaries among things and between persons and objects” (1998:2). fetishes are, thus, always a hybrid category condensing the human and the non-human. they are a product and con-sequence of encounter. they are inherently unstable, located in an un-certain moment of history that is precisely what makes them destined to metamorphose from objects with personhood to inanimate objects of art or curiosity once the waters of change are appeased. the fetish is a tran-sitional category (spyer 1998:36).

the “inalienable possessions” described by mauss and Weiner are also not neatly categorized as simply things, nor are they really people; they condense both the attributes of things and the attributes of personhood because they tie together a group’s past, present, and future, making these objects undetachable from their owners. fetishes, however, in addition to their hybrid nature, are imbued with the tension of certain historical mo-ments of encounter between systems of signification, also becoming in-alienable because they come to signify a community’s survival. it is their destiny to metamorphose because they sooth moments of transition by generating continuity. as Webb keane shows in his chapter in Border fe-tishisms, they are “the silent guarantors” of the continuity of one system’s past, into the future of another (spyer 1998:18).

if inalienable possessions contain the possibility for reproduction, and fetishes contain the possibility for continuity through change in their hy-brid status, what happens when, and how do, inalienable objects or fe-tishes change from being inalienable to being alienable, and vice versa? What happens when the inalienable—inalienable because the object’s ma-teriality can’t be detached from its owners—is severed and taken away in the midst of a process of change? What happens when new types of objects are generated by processes of encounter, or by new technologies? marilyn strathern’s work on human embryos (1998), as well as the inter-est demonstrated by nancy scheper-hughes, loic Wacquant (2003), and margaret radin (1999), in the commodification of body parts seem to be driven by precisely this question: looking at how the human body—life—the inalienable par excellence, has been turned by new reproductive and surgical technologies into a detachable object that can be exchanged, sold, and claimed through legal frameworks.

i am also interested in the making of a new detachable object where there was none, but not because the object was considered entangled with substances that are alive and human—persons—but because it was not detachable from place, a place that fosters the identification of persons

states of anxiety ensuing from rupture and change. in the midst of social change and transition from one social system to another in mexico, from a protectionist system to a neoliberal one, the substance of stone seems to generate a particular type of person, an “archaeological personhood” that becomes a mechanism for social and cultural continuity and creative endurance, connecting people to land and community in ways no longer available to all mexican citizens.

Inalienable Possessions and the Fetishthe idea that persons and things are interlaced is not a recent discov-

ery. in the discipline of anthropology, particular kinds of objects have been studied as blurring the line between the human and the non-human. the objects that have received most attention in this literature are taon-ga, a maori term that condenses this blurred category in particularly en-lightening ways. taonga are embedded in intricate networks of exchange where they come to crystallize social relationships, ancestors, and parts of people in ways unimaginable in the world of commodities. in , the gift, marcel mauss frames these objects as inalienable because they contain the personhood of their owners, something given away in exchange of a future reciprocity necessary to lubricate social relationships (1923–4). in her studies of melanesian systems of exchange, annette Weiner compli-cated mauss’s sense of inalienability by showing that, beyond reciproc-ity, these objects or possessions in fact guarantee the reproduction of the group, its immortality, its potential to or possibility of a future (Weiner 1985).

other objects that blur the categories of the human and the non-human have been explored in a different, yet related, literature on “fetishes,” a term created to contrast Western colonial powers’ interest in objects as trade goods and colonial subjects’ seemingly supernatural relationship to objects (Pietz 1985). the attachment to these objects as beings that are alive and have the attributes of personhood was framed as irrational by the colonial authorities. in the collection of essays Border fetishisms, the authors further tie the history of the fetish to the history of colonial en-counter: it is a “composite, border phenomenon,” a “hybrid” that pieces together heterogeneous elements (1998:1). Perhaps most importantly, as Patricia spyer states in the introduction: “gesturing as it does toward a beyond that guarantees its own futurity as well as toward a posited past moment of origin, the fetish more generally is never positioned in a stable here-and-now and thereby confounds essentializing strategies that aim

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The Body of the Kingon april 16th, 1964, at 6:13 a.m., a colossal body moved across the

landscape of the Valley of mexico, with a cortege of followers walking and running in its wake. the figure, a pre-hispanic rain deity carved in stone, lay on the platform of a custom-made truck designed especially by a team of engineers to carry its mass at three miles an hour, on the thirty-five miles of dirt roads and asphalt highways that connect coatlinchan, a town in the texcoco municipality, to mexico city. in one of the most well-known images of this procedure, highly covered by both the written press and the audiovisual media, the figure appears lying on its back on top of the truck with seventy-two wheels, strapped in a gulliver-like fash-ion with steel cables, in the midst of a rural backdrop, and followed, like the body of a king, by a slowly moving procession numbering thousands of beings of lilliputian proportions, of faithful pilgrims parading along with the monolith, throwing firecrackers in its wake. this image cannot but invoke a montage: the juxtaposition and reversal of scales, as well as the transformation of a stone into a body, and of an engineering feat into something like a religious procession.

once it arrived in mexico city, another memorable image was captured at 10:38 pm: the giant body traversing an urban landscape this time, the central plaza of mexico city’s historic district, with the national Palace and the cathedral ceremoniously illuminated for the occasion. a crowd of tens of thousands gathered to welcome the regal figure to its new ur-

and, therefore, contains them. the transformation of land from an in-alienable possession into something that can be sold and exchanged is perhaps the best example of such a process (Verdery 2006). however, al-though land can be objectified and sold as a commodity, it can’t be turned into a movable or portable object (yet). the original french term used by mauss to describe the inalienable: biens immeubles, means literally “im-mobile” or “immovable,” a term also used in french to refer to buildings or large constructions that are indeed not mobile, and that are indistin-guishable from the place where they are built, yet not really the place itself. given this definition of inalienable as immovable, what would en-sue from a process that made what was indistinguishable from place—the immovable—movable, detachable, and mobile? What if immovable stone embedded in landscape was turned into portable matter?

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clearly acquiesced to the demands of the state and gave away the object in exchange for the promise of modernity and progress, in what had been until then, and what still is today a marginal town (a point i will come back to later in this essay), a backwater that is too close to the city’s ex-panding mass to be called rural, and that is too close to an agricultural landscape to be deemed urban.

The Scientific Specimen: Distance, Scale, and Mobilitysince 1964 and to this day, the monolith stands watch over mexico

city, greeting visitors to the museum as well as casual passersby. still and silent, it seems to be waiting patiently for something to happen. the only trace of its provenance is a metal plate standing inside the fountain in the middle of which the monolith stands. this plate was placed there only re-cently to explain that the object was found in the vicinity of coatlinchan, whose inhabitants “generously gifted” it to the museum in 1964. the plate functions as a museum label, dating and describing the object: “the monumental sculpture is unfinished and represents the deity of water, a fundamental element in the life of the people of teotihuacan, a city that was dedicated to agriculture, and whose inhabitants sculpted the figure. teotihuacan culture, classic Period (ad 100 to 850)” (my translation). through the label, the rain god has been transformed into an artifact with human makers, a museum object that is part of the national mu-seum’s collections,5 but also a gift given by a marginal town to a national whole.

the monolith has been morphed by the national museum of anthro-pology into an inert and inanimate carved stone, a manmade, datable, and transportable object, maybe even an object of art, a museum piece and scientific specimen labeled and framed as such through specific mu-seological “keys.” however, it has not always had these characteristics.

ban abode in the midst of a torrential storm. By 1 a.m., the rain god had reached its destination: a fountain at the entrance of the national mu-seum of anthropology that was going to be inaugurated in september of that year. Because of its unequal proportions (it is the largest monolith or single carved stone in the americas) the rain god was chosen to announce and highlight, as a monument and a marker, the magnitude of the mu-seum, the most important public cultural project of that era.

in his account of the process, the architect of the museum, Pedro ramirez Vazquez, frames the taking of the object as an exchange, placing it in metaphorical terms as a gift from coatlinchan to a larger whole: the mexican nation. he cites the negotiations with the local schoolteacher and the latter’s way of convincing the rest of the town’s inhabitants: “look muchachos, ‘la piedra’ (the stone) is like the grass of a lake: the grass at the edge and the grass at the center are all grass from the same lake” (ramirez Vazquez 2004:47; my translation). this organic, living analogy transforms the stone into a live part of an organic whole—the nation— but it also makes the stone equivalent to any other part, one of the many shoots of grass that emerge from a rhizome (deleuze and guattari 1980). thus, the stone morphs into a citizen like any other of a national body, rather than a distinct, located, and local object.

this metamorphosis gave the inhabitants of coatlinchan access to an “imagined community” (anderson 1983), certainly an important aspect of some of its inhabitants’ acceptance of the terms of exchange. however, more than belonging to a greater national whole is at stake: the object was removed by the power of science and technology—the custom-made trucks and trusses designed by specialized engineers as part of the state’s investment in progress—but it was also exchanged for the power of sci-ence and technology. after heated negotiations between unequal parties, the community of coatlinchan accepted the exchange of an object from its landscape—a part of its sense of place—for a school, a clinic, a road, and two wells. the echoes with of very core of what was defined as “mod-ern” at the time—education, healthcare, and infrastructure—are evident. to further convince the town’s inhabitants, the state (or, rather, the gov-ernment officials sent to coatlinchan), offered them free and perpetual access to the national museum of anthropology, an institution histori-cally linked to mexico’s strategies to become a modern nation capable of displaying its own heritage (garcia canclini 1989; morales-moreno 1994). according to some versions, an official replica of the object was also promised.4 those in charge of the negotiations on behalf of coatlinchan

4 Pedro ramirez Vazquez reveals that the negotiation included free and perpetual access to the museum for all inhabitants of coatlinchan (other mexican citizens must pay a fairly elevated entrance fee, except on sundays when the museum is free for all). this element of the negotiation has so far never been mentioned to me by the people of coatlinchan to whom i have spoken. the inclusion of an official replica (the governmental body that is in charge of archaeological heritage, the inah, has to authorize all replicas in mexico) has been mentioned to me by some inhabitants of coatlinchan, but i have so far not been able to locate a document or an official statement confirming that free entrance to the museum was indeed part of the deal.5 the relationship between the object and the museum is especially interesting given the fact that the monolith is the only object that is part of the national museum of anthropology’s collection that is not physically inside the museum or on loan to another institution. it is outside, exposed to the elements, and is merely labeled as belonging to a collection through this museological device.

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seems to be the first instance where the object’s personhood is openly dis-cussed, albeit on scientific terms. archaeologists publicly fought over its identity, gender, and body parts. alfredo chavero, one of mexico’s first scholars on mexican antiquities, got into a heated argument with Batres about whether the deity was tlaloc (a male rain god generally repre-sented with fangs and goggle eyes) as Batres believed, or chalchiuhtli-cue (a female water deity generally represented wearing a jade skirt and a characteristic headdress) as chavero argued (Batres 1903, 1904, 1905; chavero 1904). chavero’s article in mexico a traves de los siglos, is the first published source where the object is described as a person, having a gender and a body:

Unfortunately, her hands are destroyed and her face is ru-ined, and she dwells lying in the ravine, mistreated by the waters of which once upon a time she was the goddess. she has the headdress that the goddess wears traditionally (...) the upper part of the head’s decoration presents an excavation in the shape of a tub about 50 cm deep that served to gather rain water (...) in addition, the immense monolith bears an instru-ment in its hands, that seems to have sounded when blown into...” (1958 [1889]: 663–664)

chavero’s description has morphed the stone into a female being with body parts: hands, head, and a face. moreover, this being is mistreatable, and therefore capable of emotional engagement.

although chavero seems to have been correct according to the more re-cent archaeological studies regarding the figure’s gender (noguera 1964; arrizbalzaga tobon 2005), Batres’ tlaloc interpretation prevailed; he was a good friend of President diaz and a much more established schol-ar in the nascent field of archaeology. despite chavero’s many attempts to make the stone into chalchiuhtlicue, Batres won the battle in the last and final exchange, and the stone was cast as tlaloc, a male deity, and henceforth referred to with the male pronoun “he” (Batres 1905). for gen-erations, the monolith has been known as tlaloc by scholars and mexico city inhabitants, allotting it a male gender and a male name, as is made evident in most of the publications (mostly popular, rather than scholarly) where the figure is mentioned after 1905 (covarrubias 1957, tovar san-tana 1966, 1993; garcia ramos 1982, ramirez Vazquez 2004).

since its “discovery” in the late nineteenth century as a scientific speci-

the monolith is not part of an archaeological find, since it was not dug out of the ground in its entirety by archaeologists. it was always partially unearthed, as detailed by sources from the sixteenth century that mention its existence as an idol in the vicinity of texcoco (de mendieta 1980). in the late nineteenth century, a boom in scholarship on mexican antiquities initiated by european explorers and scholars, including Baron alexander von humboldt (Pratt 1992), led scholars to be interested in the figure. it was framed as a scientific “discovery” by the explorers—including de-sire de charney, who described it in 1881, and leopoldo Batres, the father of mexican archaeology and known for his work in teotihuacan (Bernal 1980)—who dug it further out of the ground in 1903. a portrait of the fig-

ure was published in 1889 as an etching by one of mexico’s most acclaimed nineteenth century artists, Jose maria Velasco, and was included in an edition of the widely read encyclopedic work mexico a traves de los siglos (1959 [1889]). the early scholarship on the figure, its further extraction from the soil, and its portrayal in a published source as a standing figure, began a new stage in the life of the object, an object now cast as a specimen in the world of science.

in a gesture that further anthropomorphized the monolith, the etching made the object into a figure standing on its “feet,” rather than a carved stone ly-ing on the ground (the position it had assumed until

1964). more importantly, the portrait of the object by Ve-lasco reduced its scale, from a colossal figure lying on the

ground, partially immersed in the soil with no possibility of being fully viewed from above, to a standing figure, completely unveiled and the size of a thumb—a size that is digestible on human terms, and maybe the first representation that allowed the figure’s anthropomorphic form to be fully appreciated. Bruno latour argues that reduction in scale is a form of generating the scientific distance needed to act upon events, places, and people (1985). like latour’s examples of the cartographers that reduced the size of the world to paper folds, and the botanists that mapped nature in kew gardens to ensure visual domination of all plants on earth, Velasco’s reduction of the scale of the monument allowed it to be mobilized and grasped. after this initial appearance in a published source, the object was mentioned, described, and represented in many more.

the scientific work around the object in the late nineteenth century

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detected with the aid of a hand-lens, and so may a few black pseudomorphs after hornblende. the microscope reveals the lava to be porphyritic, pilotaxitic, pryoxene andesite with resorbed hornblendes. about 25 to 30 % of a typical sample consists of phenocrysts of labradorite-bytownite that show intense oscillatory zoning... (1963:96).

thus, regardless of whether it represents a male or a female, whether it is movable or not; and whether it is finished or not, in the eyes of science, the monolith is essentially a stone.

Piedra de los Tecomates: Stone Place, Stone Canvas, Stone Plugin coatlinchan, none of the scientific names given to the object by

scholars has ever stuck: the voice of science failed. this failure seems to have to do with a prior, more resonant voice, heard and retold among the inhabitants of the town. for them, for as long as they can remember—and this is a fact recorded by Batres in his 1903 publication, but also men-tioned on multiple occasions by my informants, the monolith is known as la Piedra de los tecomates, or the stone with tecomatl, a reference in nahuatl to the two rows of six perforations that line one of the monolith’s features.7 Both elements that compose this name are of interest. Piedra re-fers to the material, stone, the matter out of which the object is made, but also a word that is feminine in spanish; and tecomatl in nahuatl trans-lates into “cups” or “containers”, placing the object necessarily in a hori-zontal position where the perforations would indeed become containers (of rain water, or perhaps of offerings).

the name Piedra de los tecomates fits nicely with the stories that i have heard from the elder coatlinchan inhabitants who have never re-

men, although much has been published on the object’s removal, very little scholarship has been produced about the object itself. in the 1960s, right before the monolith was extracted from the ravine where it lay in coatlinchan, geologists robert heizer and howel Williams published an article about the monolith’s weight. they showed that the object was made out of a colossal boulder of andesite (lava)6; their calculations showed that, at the time it was made and given the technology available, it would have required two thousand to four thousand men to move (1963:97). this leads them to argue that the object was left unfinished by its makers when they realized that it was neither transportable nor raisable, and thus not mov-able to a ceremonial site. this explains why the object’s form is rough and unpolished, having been abandoned, left to history as a perpetual work in progress (1963). the discussion on the object’s movability points again to latour’s work on the distance shrunk by science to make the unfamil-iar familiar. for latour, one of the ways that science sought to act at a distance on events, places, and people, was by rendering them “mobile, so that they [could] be brought back” (1987:223). heizer and Williams’ article antedated the transformation of the object into a mobile mass that could be “brought back.” it was not until 1964—despite an earlier attempt by Porfirio diaz in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to have the monolith brought to mexico city by railway, which did not succeed because the necessary technology to move it was not available—that this object became portable and therefore potentially alienable.

regardless of its person-like form, human attributes, and mobility, the scientific understanding of the monolith as an anthropomorphic repre-sentation made out of a particular material by craftsmen keeps the fig-ure as inanimate. although “he” or “she” lies on “his” or “her” back, has hands, and is abandoned and mistreated, “his” or “her” substance is al-ways stone. heizer and Williams in fact use science and technology—a lens and a microscope—to describe this substance in intricate detail:

the coatlinchan andesite is coarsely porphyritic, vesicular, pale gray lava characterized by many phenocrysts of dull white feldspar, most of them between 1 and 5 mm. long. dark minerals are relatively scarce. a few pyroxene prisms can be

7 naming is clearly important to coatlinchan’s inhabitants. in a publication generated for mariana castillo deball’s exhibition estas ruinas que Ves at the museo de arte carrillo gil in mexico city in 2006, i cited one of the first interviews i conducted in coatlinchan, a conversation with one of the vendors on the town’s main square, who had called the monolith tlala because he claimed that it was not tlaloc, but in fact a female goddess. over a year later, having given people the community hundreds of copies of the publication as part of a donation by the artist, i was told by some of the cultural activists that i was mistaken—that this was never the name given to the object, and that whoever had told me this was either pulling my leg or an outsider. the object was and had always been known as la Piedra de los tecomates. in a recent strategy to reclaim the object, some of these same culture brokers organized a week of festivities in honor of the replica of the Piedra that was being built on the town’s central square. in the publications surrounding this event, the object was returned the identity given to it by chavero, the female rain goddess, but respelled in a nahuatlized fashion as Xalxiutlicue.

6 heizer and Williams explain its large size: “the boulders in the alluvial fans that descend to coatlinchan and texcoco are unusually large because they were derived from a very thick flow of massive lava on the steep slopes of mount tlaloc, a high eroded Pliocene volcano whose summit lies 13km east-southeast of the unfinished monument” (1963:95).

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wounds.When the object was taken from coatlinchan in 1964, the press and

the official bodies in charge of its extraction claimed that, for the peo-ple in coatlinchan, the object was not stone at all, but a mass that con-densed either economic advantages or supernatural powers. Planned for february 20th, 1964, rather than april 16th, the transportation of the monolith—also known as “operation coatlinchan,” a denomination with clear military overtones8—was delayed because of unrest among the peo-ple of coatlinchan. they had agreed to give up the object once the gov-ernment had fulfilled its promised exchange. on february 20th, none of the modern infrastructure and institutions that were promised had been built.9 thus, when the truck arrived to take the object away, the villagers threw stones at its windows, punctured its gigantic tires, and poured dirt into its gasoline tank. they also destroyed the structure of cables that was sustaining the monolith in a hammock-like contraption so that the truck could slip under it and carry it away without having to lift its enor-mous weight off of the ground. the sabotage of the engineering exploit was answered by a convoy of one hundred military cadets sent to the site to guard the god from further damage by its own vassals, the people of coatlinchan. although initially the authorities claimed that the 20th of february was merely a trial run (“movilizando a tlaloc” 1964), in a 1968 publication made ironically by a publishing house called editorial tlaloc, the architect of the museum, Pedro ramirez Vazquez, finally admitted that the operation had failed due to local resistance.

the act of resistance was attributed to two factors in official sources: the loss of a very meager income from tourism described as consisting only of a woman selling soft drinks at the side of the monolith, and a su-pernatural relationship between the community and the object (ramirez Vazquez 2004).10 ramirez Vazquez explains that the community did not

ferred to the object as a person or as having person-like attributes. they have told me that they remember the Piedra as an object that they used to play with when they were children, going to the place where it lay on fam-ily excursions, and playing games with it, one involving throwing smaller stones into its perforations. others have referenced the fact that people carved their initials on the object, making their relationship to it tangible by the act of etching. for my informants, the Piedra, when it was still in its original location, blurred the lines between object and place, and between place and time, working as a link to a not-so-distant past—to a childhood memory of home and family. this points to the object being essentially a stone, a stone imbued with memory and place, but an inani-mate stone nonetheless. the article that appeared in the new York times in 1964, when the monolith was taken to mexico city, confirms this:

tlaloc, in the last century or so, has provided a trysting place for young people of the village of coatlinchan (...) townspeo-ple who had thought little of the monolith except as a stone on which young couples scratched their initials suddenly came to the realization that its removal would stop the trickle of tourist traffic which had to pass through the pueblo to reach the idol (april 12 1964).

the Piedra de los tecomates was an object, a stone; it was an identifica-tion marker, a mass that placed coatlinchan on the map. it was an object, which even if considered merely matter, and maybe even because of this, mattered.

one of the reasons for the object’s removal given by archaeologists, as well as by the makers of the museum in 1964, is that it was abandoned (see chavero’s description cited above). the etchings made on the rock are often given as evidence of the community’s lack of interest in and respect for the object, defacing it with graffiti rather than preserving it as a heri-tage object. the state, and archaeology as its privileged science, cast itself as the saviors of the god, rescuing it from the mistreatment and abandon to which it had been subjected by the inhabitants of coatlinchan. my ar-gument reverses this claim: the inhabitants of coatlinchan etched their initials on the object precisely because it did matter to them. the initials make their identification with the stone tangible. however, their presence does point to the object’s substance being stone, and not an animate life force. after all, the etchings are referred to as etchings, not as scars or

8 the military echoes in mexican archaeological practice and its publications has been eloquently studied by luis Vazquez leon (2003:198-205).9 i have so far been able to collect various versions from informants in coatlinchan regarding this non-compliance to the terms of exchange. some say that the school and the clinic were built, but the road was left unfinished and the wells were never created; others say the buildings were erected, but neither teachers nor health technicians were brought. those in charge of “operacion coatlinchan” tend to think that their part of the bargain was fulfilled, and that the people of the town just wanted more than they had negotiated originally. Until further research is done, it is unclear why the state, in an era known as the Pri’s (the institutional revolutionary Party, the leading political party) apogee, did not keep their promise given that its cadres were busy keeping promises in the rest of the country as part of the party’s large-scale cooptation and consensus-making strategy.

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the feminine quality of “piedra,” has a husband or a partner, a double that is hidden and secret. of the people i have interviewed, only one con-fessed to ever having seen this double, yet nearly everyone i have spoke to acknowledges its existence. this object is often referred to as the “real” tlaloc or monolith, hidden in the mountain that towers over coatlinchan, never to be revealed so that the state won’t remove it. it is said to be “lone-ly” because its “wife” has been taken away. i have sometimes heard the lack of rain in coatlinchan since 1964 attributed to this real double’s lone-liness and sadness, rather than to the removal of the monolith itself. the latter is thus capable of having social relationships, but also of producing them. a local group of dancers interested in and promoting their pre-his-panic roots refers to the monolith as abuela or “grandmother,” a kinship term that gives the object the possibility of reproduction and of engender-ing offspring for multiple generations.

the doubling of the object is not only present in storytelling among coatlinchan’s inhabitants. images and physical reproductions of the monolith pepper the town’s landscape: the image of the monolith is paint-ed on houses’ walls, has been transformed into the logo of the local taxi stand, and has prompted some people to have miniature copies made to decorate their home patios or to buy miniature clay reproductions sold in both local and nation-wide craft markets.11

in all of these representations, the shape of the object has been slightly altered to accentuate its anthropomorphic features. although the origi-nal is missing a hand and a foot,12 and is largely disfigured, the minia-tures all have complete bodies, and have been altered to have a clearly marked face: two cavities as eyes, a protruding nose, and the rows of perforations, actually believed to be a pectoral by archaeologists, have been transformed into a mouth with daunting teeth. as erving goffman shows, having a face is more than an anatomical fact, which in this case allows us to state that by making the object have a physical and tangible face, the artisans of these miniatures have given it personhood. rather, goffman invites us to think about having a face as an intrinsically social

have a ritual relationship to the object, but that its people did have an “ancient superstition” that the removal of the object would deprive them of water. the object, in this superstition, was not cast as a rain god, a person-like entity with meteorological powers, but as a plug to a water source, which if removed would close access to water forever. another version of this story has emerged recently. in an article published in a prominent mexican newspaper, a local schoolteacher is interviewed, and she explains retrospectively that when she found out the object was going to be taken away, she exclaimed: “What do you mean they are going to take it away? We won’t let it happen! if they move that stone, it will be the town’s doom.” at that time, a legend was told stating that the stone was the plug to the ocean and that if it were to be removed, everything would be flooded (rivera 2002). still, the monolith is a stone, a canvas with etch-ings, a plug; an inanimate object that can be acted upon, and that can only then engender consequences. it does not yet have personhood, or a will of its own, or the capacity to act upon persons and things.

From Stone to Meteorological Agent to Social Beingfour decades after the monolith was removed from coatlinchan, the

substance of the rain god has somehow been transformed. the object is still mostly referred to as la Piedra, but its person-like attributes are no longer merely representational. my informants no longer speak of it as a stone, but rather in terms that point toward affective and human qualities. first and foremost, the object is thought to have certain powers, namely meteorological abilities that allow it to give or take away rain. some say that it stopped raining in coatlinchan the day that the Piedra was taken away, and that its presence in mexico city is the reason for the constant rain and flooding that plague the city even during the dry season. members of the community’s belief that the object has meteoro-logical powers is echoed by the 1960s press reports that marveled at the fact that the heaviest rain ever recorded in mexico city until then befell on the city the day the rain god was transported to the museum. the headlines read: “llego tlaloc y hubo lluvia” (tlaloc arrived and there was rain) (excelsior, april 17, 1964).

Beyond its meteorological prowess, one of the most interesting qualities spoken about in reference to the object is its capacity to have and engen-der kinship ties. in the village, the object, generally cast as female given

11 since its placement outside of the national museum of anthropology, the monolith has become part of a greater family of objects that are emblematic or iconic of the mexican nation, and that are constantly iterated in various formats and representations. the monolith, like the Piedra del sol or aztec calendar, the cuatlicue, a stylized chac-mol, and a stylized olmec head, are the most common objects represented on logos, letterheads, postcards, key chains, t-shirts, and jewelry.12 some people in coatlinchan have told me that the missing hand was cut off by the revolutionaries during the second decade of the twentieth-century. they allegedly cut it off because they believed that it contained gold.

10 in an interview i conducted with him in June 2006, Pedro ramirez Vazquez confirmed this by telling me a very similar narrative.

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does not emulate the original. however, its ceremonial framing points to a doubling that is not based on form, but on something like what Walter Benjamin describes as “aura,” a substance in art generated by the unique-ness of an original that is destroyed through reproduction (1936). in this case, a reproduction carved by hand, a copy made in the original’s posi-tion and location, seems to have preserved the original’s aura, or rather to have invoked and absorbed it, precisely through reproduction. the copy contains the powers of the original by being in the right place and made out of similar matter.

the second double was not made in situ, or placed in the same posi-tion as the original. the recently completed replica made by an artist and paid for by the state of mexico government is standing on its feet in the middle of coatlinchan’s main square, inside a fountain similar to the one in front of the national museum of anthropology in mexico city. Yet, the finished object is completely indistinguishable from the original formally. this double functions more like a clone than a twin, being the product of a seven-year study of the original monolith’s shape, texture, and even its faults and deterioration, conducted at the museum by the artist. despite its clone quality, this exact replica is the result of a process that, though partially hidden by a plastic drape during the rainy season, was publicly visible to anyone passing by the central square of coatlinchan. first an iron structure with the shape of the monolith was erected, looking very much like a fleshless skeleton referred to by locals as “bones”; then, the structure was filled with cement; and finally it was covered by a textured mix of river sand and concrete, referred to by both the artist and the workers hired to construct the replica as “skin.”

i would like to pause on the use of the word “skin” to describe the fi-nal layer of matter that was placed on the monolith’s clone, but also to refer to the original’s unpolished texture. this skin was described to me by the artist as “rough” and “grainy,” difficult to depict in color terms because each surface was slightly different. in a similar way to goffman’s account of face as a social phenomenon, turner, in his study on kayapo body adornment, shows that skin is a social category: “the frontier of the social self” (1980:112). having skin is not only having a boundary between the self and the physical environment, but also between the self and other selves. By describing the monolith’s surface as “skin,” the object is not only being further anthropomorphized, but also is being transformed into a bounded and distinct social self.

the skin-covered replica is a double of the original monolith, but it has

phenomenon that does certain types of work:

one’s own face and the face of others are constructed of the same order; it is the rules of the group and the definition of the situation which is to determine how much feeling one is to have for face and how this feeling is to be distributed, among the faces involved (...) the person’s face clearly is something that is not lodged in or on his body, but rather something that is diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter and becomes manifest only when these events are read and inter-preted for the appraisals expressed in them” (1955: 820).

having a face is the equivalent of having social ties made tangible. in being represented with a face, the object—the stone—morphs into a social being.

Copies, Doubles and Clones: The Transference of Substance and Aurathe monolith’s personhood is not only reproduced through formal

means, but seems to also be generated through substance and place. about a decade ago, a group of danzantes13 carved a version of the original monolith on a stone located in the ravine where the original came from. they surrounded the copy with a stone path delimiting the shape of the original, and built a ceremonial spot to make fire and burn copal incense next to it. more recently, an artist has been commissioned by the texcoco municipality to construct an exact replica of the monolith for coatlin-chan’s central square. some of the artist’s models have been bought by townspeople to decorate their restaurants, gardens, and even the town’s administrative headquarters.

of the copies made of the monolith, only two really correspond to the notion of a “double”—an object containing the substance of the original—rather than merely to a representation. the first copy created on site by the danzantes was carved out of a similar, albeit much smaller, stone that probably came from the same rock source as the one the original monolith was carved from. lying on its back, it is made to resemble, but

13 this term refers to several groups of dancers in mexico that claim pre-hispanic heritage and perform dances as public performances and rituals. for more on these, see francisco de la Pena’s study hijos del sexto sol: Un estudio etnopsicoanalitico del movimiento de la mexicanidad (inah, 2002).

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of coatlinchan were determined to have the replica view their ritual. the completed replica was partially unveiled for the occasion, but still had a white drape covering its front, awaiting the official inauguration in may in order to be fully revealed. Beginning the ritual sequence with this drape on the replica, the ceremony suddenly came to a halt when the procession arrived before the clone: the leader, a nahuatl teacher and spiritual guide invited to perform the ritual, demanded that the drape be removed, since the ritual would be moot, or even punished, if the figure could not see it. although many in coatlinchan knew that they might get in trouble with the texcoco municipal authorities for unveiling the replica before the of-ficial inauguration, they decided to temporarily uncover the replica’s eyes so that it could at least watch the ritual enacted in its honor.

the object’s personhood is also echoed in its capacity, both as original, and as cloned double, to have agency, or the power to mobilize social net-works and assemblages, to use michel callon’s actor network theory’s premise. the monolith of coatlinchan does not just have personhood, but it also the capacity to produce a particular type of person. michel callon is known for his insistence on understanding agency as a power to engen-der social networks and, consequently, new social actors. in addition to the networks of explorers, archaeologists, engineers, government agencies, the press, and different groups within coatlinchan itself, the monolith has the power to give birth to new social actors that emerge from these new networks, associations, and assemblages. this process is reminiscent of callon’s analysis of “the simultaneous production of knowledge and con-struction of a network of relationships in which social and natural enti-ties mutually control who they are and what they want” (1986:6). these new actors come to acquire another particular substance, a product of a link to the object’s materiality—stone—that allows them to become what i will call “archaeological persons.”

The Making of Archaeological Personhoodmexico’s imagined community is built around archaeology in a way

that makes archaeological personhood central to being a part of the na-tion. scholarship generated by historians and anthropologists explores the relationship between archaeology and mexican nation building in depth (Brading 1985, tenorio trillo 1996, matos 1998, lomnitz 2001, Vazquez 2003, nalda 2005, Breglia 2006). the entangled relation between archae-ology and the nation is made tangible by the fact that one of mexican post revolutionary nationalism’s foundational texts, forjando Patria, was

also become a clone that is grafted into the social landscape of coatlinchan as if it were the original. despite the fact that everyone knows that it is a copy, and that it is made of an iron structure and cement, that it was created and crafted by an artist and a group of workmen in 2006–2007, it has somehow morphed into the original. although the replica is made of metal and concrete, and not of stone, it is imbued with the same sub-stance as the monolith that is still in mexico city. the headline of an ar-ticle that came out in the mexican press when the replica was completed is revealing: “luego de 43 años, regresa tlaloc a coatlinchan” (“after 43 years, tlaloc returns to coatlinchan”). in march 2007, a local inaugura-tion of the replica, or rather a week of festivities was organized by a lo-cal group of cultural promoters called the grupo cultural coatl-i-chan.14 this event showed that the replica is not just metaphorically thought of as a return of the object, but that it has actually acquired its substance. Perhaps one of the most obvious of the ways in which this transference is evident is in that the name used to refer to the replica is again la Pie-dra, even though the fact that the replica is not made out of stone is well known. Beyond naming, the replica was allotted certain powers believed to be possessed by the original: the power to make it rain. during the cer-emony in honor of the replica, graniceros (a special kind of healers) from nearby highland villages were invited to perform a rain petition ritual in front of the replica. When in the later afternoon it started to rain, many people exclaimed that the rain was caused by the assuaging and return of the Piedra.

Perhaps the most revealing moment of the metamorphosis of the rep-lica into a clone of the original, therefore containing the exact same sub-stance and personhood, was a gesture that clearly pointed to the towns-people’s relationship to the monolith as a person that has stone eyes that can actually see. having choreographed an entire ritual around the rep-lica—complete with a procession around the town’s pre-hispanic layout, dancers donning ceremonial dress, playing jaranas, and beating huehuetl drums, headed by a woman dressed in white and carrying a miniature representation of the monolith like a baby in her arms—the inhabitants

14 an inaugural ceremony spread out over three days was held in coatlinchan on march 9-11 2007. Because an “official” unveiling was going to take place once the whole fountain and main square renovation, and not just the replica of the monolith, was finished, the grupo cultural coatl-i-chan, an organization that has been very active in promoting coatlinchan’s history and culture, was careful to remind all present that this was not an inauguration, but merely a week of cultural events (semana cultural) in honor of the monolith. the official inauguration took place in may 2007.

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cisely in tandem with the much disputed project of building the largest airport in latin america, and with a possible expansion of the Bordo Po-niente, mexico city’s only active landfill, both in the direct vicinity of coatlinchan. even if my speculation on the relationship between the cur-rent geopolitical position of coatlinchan and its acquisition of “archaeo-logical personhood” proves unfounded, it is possible to see how being an archaeological community might allow for benefits that a marginal town like coatlinchan would not have access to under normal circumstances: both federal and state funds to develop a cultural preservation program, and planning and infrastructure related to tourism that would give the depreciated town an alternative income base.

Becoming Petrified: Coatlinchan in Transitioncoatlinchan’s inhabitants seem to want to become “archaeological per-

sons” in the twenty-first century so as to participate in national progress and modernity, echoing but also countering their “acceptance” of shed-ding their archaeological personhood in 1964 for the exact same promise. another parallel between these two moments has to do with the meta-morphosis from stone to person, and vice versa. Before 1964, although the object might have been understood as representing a human or person-like figure, and an extremely important one for the community’s iden-tification with place, as suggested above, it remained a stone. since its removal in exchange for the promise of progress, and now that it has been cloned to concretize the promise of progress in the midst of economic and social crisis, the object’s substance has metamorphosed from stone into a living, seeing, and feeling social being.

traveling from twentieth century coatlinchan to seventeenth century loudun in provincial france might be a surreal jump, but certain com-mon threads unite the two in enlightening ways. in his account of the possession of the Ursuline nuns in loudun during the 1630s, michel de certeau argues that the nuns were possessed with ancient demons as a reaction to the anxiety provoked by deep political change: from a system based on the power of religion to one based on the power of the central-ized state, science, and reason. in the first page of his work, de certeau poetically sets the stage:

normally, strange things circulate discreetly below our streets. But a crisis will suffice for them to rise up, as if swol-len by floodwaters, pushing aside manhole covers, invad-

written by manuel gamio, a student of franz Boas, who was the first archaeologist to use stratigraphic excavation techniques in mexican soil (1916). thus, archaeology is the basis of citizenship in mexico where the national flag contains an image—the serpent eating a snake on a cac-tus—that comes from an archaeological object now housed in the na-tional museum of anthropology. in another more current example that actually includes the monolith from coatlinchan in a national drama, the partisans of andres manuel lopez obrador, the left-wing Prd candi-date to the presidency in the 2006 elections who were demanding a ballot recount in the months following the election, hung a banner in front of the object that read “tlaloc clama: gota por gota, Voto por Voto, casilla por casilla” (tlaloc demands: drop by drop, vote by vote, voting booth by voting booth). in a country where all are taught to be archaeological citizens, only few actually come to embody this category as “archeologi-cal persons” by living on or near, or owning, archaeological sites—land where archaeological objects are buried or found. this land, according to mexico’s legal system is not expropriated by the state (although it can be), but is rather placed under a liminal category where ownership can remain in private or communal hands, but the state regulates what the land can actually be used for, generally forbidding construction. this leads me to speculate that the claiming of archeological personhood by certain groups such as the grupo cultural coatl-i-chan is related to the particular geo-political position and socio-economic circumstance of the town.

indeed, coatlinchan is made up for the most part by arable land (both private plots and communal ejido), but in the recent decades, this land has been gradually abandoned as a source of income through agricultural practice. the most important economic generators in coatlinchan in the recent past have been the cattle and milk industry, as well as sweatshop labor for the nearby textile giant of chiconcuac. since mexico’s economic crisis of the 1980s and its entry into full-fledged neoliberalism with the signing of the north american free trade agreement (nafta) in the 1990s, even these local industries fail to provide opportunities, largely surpassed by imported milk and by textiles made in east asia. the fact that most of the town’s inhabitants own cattle, but do not regularly drink locally produced milk, but rather an industrial “fortified” milk subsi-dized by the government (liconsa) is revealing. in addition to the eco-nomic stagnation that shadows over coatlinchan and that might have led it to seek and nurture archaeological personhood, this strategy, linked to the reclaiming of the monolith and the building of a replica, began pre-

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by the spanish crown in the sixteenth century. in a visit to coatlinchan in march 2007, i was told a story about the monolith and its personhood. this story echoed the petrification stories in Biblical narratives and greek mythology mentioned in the introduction. one of the members of the grupo cultural coatl-i-chan explained to me that the monolith was neither tlaloc nor any rain goddess represented in stone. in fact, its origi-nal substance was not stone—a mineral matter that had been carved and imbued with personhood and power through human systems of significa-tion and ritual—but rather was always a living substance. in this story, the monolith was originally a person. the stone figure was an ordinary woman turned into stone by the wrath of the gods because she was sell-ing pulque as a commercial beverage, instead of treating it as the sacred and ritual drink that it had been in the past. the position of the figure is explained by the tale: her arms are outstretched as if handing or sell-ing something, and her legs are shaped like a semi-circle, an empty space where the barrel used to be. it is interesting to note that mass consump-tion of pulque, rather than an elite and ritual intake, was a product of the arrival of the spaniards to mexico, and their destabilization of the pre-hispanic state that restricted the circulation and consumption of the beverage (guerrero 1980). it is likely, therefore, that this story of petrifi-cation, of the transmutation of person into stone, is also related to a mo-ment of change.

the living substance within stone, both in versions that claim it as orig-inal and in the ones that believe it to be produced, does not seem to be easily welcomed by the inhabitants of coatlinchan, provoking rather a state of anxiety. Will the Piedra, now cloned in the central square, have the power to make it rain? Will it bring prosperity? Will its sadness and anger be appeased? the emotional anxiety surrounding the monolith’s personhood, the stone being transformed into a living being, is what led me to think about the double meaning of petrification: being turned into stone, but also being paralyzed with fear. few texts have dealt with fear in more eloquent ways than freud’s essay on the uncanny: the heimlich made unheimlich, the familiar rendered strange by a process of repres-sion. for freud, the feeling of anxiety surrounding the uncanny is related to the encounter of two systems, one based on a primitive state, and one very much linked to a modernity that represses the primitive state and its inbuilt fear of death (2003:149–51). in freud’s terms, the inanimate stone object became an animate person-like being because it became uncanny: a familiar object, rendered strange by its exchange for the promise of mo-

ing the cellars, then spreading through the towns. it always comes as a surprise when the nocturnal erupts into broad daylight. What it reveals is an underground existence, an in-ner resistance that has never been broken. thus lurking force infiltrates the lines of tension within the society it threatens. suddenly, it magnifies them; using the means, the circuity al-ready in place, but reemploying them in the service of an anx-iety that comes from afar, unanticipated. it breaks through barriers, flooding the social channels and opening new path-ways that, once the flow of its passage has subsided, will leave behind a different landscape and a different order (1996:1).

for de certeau, this lurking substance overflows in moments of violent change to soothe anxieties and tensions provoked by a state in flux—un-stable, unpredictable, uncharted. in loudun, this liminal state is gener-ated by a political transition from a decentralized regime ruled by lo-cal churches and ecclesiastical authorities to a centralized french state headed by bureaucrats and government officials.

loudun and coatlinchan do not just share the experience of deep change, albeit in opposite directions—centrifugal in the case of loudun, and centripetal in the case of coatlinchan—but also the way this state of instability shifts the relationship between persons and things, namely the metamorphosis of the inanimate into an animate substance in the shape of possessed bodies. in loudun, it is not stones that come to life, but body parts. the nuns’ bodies were transformed from individual “selves” to indi-vidual organs each possessed by a different demon. in one of the minutes of Jeanne des anges’ exorcism, her head is possessed by leviathan and her mouth by Behemoth (1996:97). de certeau explains: “the ‘residence’ of the devils in the forehead, the stomach, or ‘below the navel,’ indicates not only their character (...) but also recondite correspondences between their celestial functions and the body’s physiological ones” (1996:93). Body parts acquired autonomous personhood in the midst of transition from one system to another.

the transformation of a stone monolith into living substance with per-sonhood during a time of systemic change in coatlinchan seems to echo the metamorphosis of organs into agents in loudun. another metamor-phosis in coatlinchan, this time of person into stone, a real petrification, ensues from yet another moment of historical change, at which the fa-miliar is rendered strange: the conquest of the pre-hispanic city-states

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dernity, a promise that has yet to be fulfilled. it is the unfulfilled repressed promise, rather than the promise itself that makes stone come to life, and that turns people into stone.

here, i would like to return to the theories about the fetish mentioned earlier in this paper. in many ways, freud’s approach to the fear provoked by the uncanny precisely because of the encounter between a primitive state and modernity echoes the unsettling feeling generated by the colo-nial fetishes brought back to inhabit imperial powers’ museums. like the fetish, uncanny objects embody moments of transition and make a link between a disappeared past and an inevitable future tangible. Perhaps freud can help us understand why colonial subjects’ belief in fetishes’ powers were always thought to be irrational, and yet were simultaneously feared, by colonial powers.

By evoking fear and petrification, i do not mean say that coatlinchan’s inhabitants have been paralyzed and turned into stone, especially given the many exciting and creative ways in which they are mobilizing around their own history and heritage, and using archaeology on their own terms. But perhaps it does explain why their way of making that promise come true inevitably involves using archeological objects—stones—to become what i earlier referred to as “archaeological persons” precisely because the community is in a state of anxiety around its own potential future.

Yet, coatlinchan’s case involves anxiety, and not-quite-full-fledged fear. Perhaps the object is what mediates and assuages the fear, and its return in the form of a clone is in fact a soothing palliative. in his work on tran-sitional objects and phenomena, d. W. Winnicott focuses on infants’ use and relationship to particular objects that he calls the “first not-me pos-session” (1953:89). these possessions are interesting because they remain in a liminal space: not belonging to the body of the child, yet not fully recognized as being from the outside world (1953:89). objects like secu-rity blankets and special teddy bears are examples of what Winnicott de-scribes. one of the qualities that Winnicott details of these objects is that “[they] must seem to the infant to give warmth, or to move, or to have texture, or to do something that seems to show it has vitality or reality of its own” (1953:91). this vitality is a defense against anxiety.

my use of Winnicott is not meant to suggest that coatlinchan is a “child” in an early stage of a developmental cycle, but rather to place two moments, the first in 1964 and the second in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as stages of transition, and to place the monolith as an object used to undergo its tumults. thus, the monolith functions as

a certain kind of “first not-me possession” for coatlinchan, an alienable object created by being severed from its landscape, no longer a part of a place, but a cultural property. it would be inadequate to frame this tran-sition as encompassing a trope from tradition to modernity. the transi-tion seems to have to do more with the status or type of person generated in particular historical moments: from an essentially agricultural person, to an industrial and urban person, to an archaeological person. the ob-ject’s change of substance, from stone to personhood, seems to point to its belonging to the realm of “transitional objects.” if this is the case, it is likely that the life imbued in the object since its removal, and in its clone since it was finished, will eventually fade, or change back to merely meta-phorical or representational qualities. like the fetish, transitional objects are destined by nature to change. the monolith and the replica might just return to being matter—stone and concrete—until their vital powers are summoned again to face another radical change.

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