"Not Seeing Like a State: Visualization of human and other than human relations in ancient Ulua traditions of
prehispanic Honduras"

How are "embodied dependencies" shaped by, not merely reflected in, the materials studied by archaeologists and art historians? Drawing on analyses of the visual culture of the ancestral Lenca of northwest Honduras, what archaeologists today call the Ulua style, this presentation explores this question in a region where hierarchy is muted, where there is little evidence of absolute abjection of the kind taken as definitive of enslavement, or even of the less extreme forms of gender-based dependency treated as constitutive of some societies in neighboring Mesoamerica. This presentation will advance an argument that inherently, the anthropomorphic and anthropomorphized objects that are the products of Ulua traditional craft production created discourses about valued forms of embodied subjectivity, both human and other-than-human. In the context of a broader discussion of asymmetrical dependency, the Ulua context offers particular insight as a social order that has been characterized successively as non-state, pre-state, egalitarian, heterarchical and in my current work, as illuminated by theories of anarchic society. The kinds of visual- and object-relations explored with Ulua materials in this presentation are not unique, and the analysis presented seeks to contribute methodologically to broader comparative understanding of the ways that visuality, corporeality, and agential intra-action may be understood.