Miruna Achim

Drawing on various methodological and disciplinary approaches (object biographies, art history, global history, science and technology studies, ethnography and oral history) and on a wide array of sources (archival and published material as well as specific objects in different collections), this project studies the trajectories of Mesoamerican jades since the sixteenth century and the ways in which understandings of matter have affected and continue to affect the region whence it is extracted. It reconstructs how the values of and knowledge about jades have been produced, translated and distributed between linguistic and geographic borders, and scaled and negotiated between local contexts of use and global networks of exchange. And it inquires into the conceptual and political arrangements that have sustained the differential production of knowledge and ignorance about jades, making it possible for certain narratives of the stones’ use and value to become prominent, while the social and environmental violence pending on their extraction today has been silenced and opaqued. Jade functions thus as a site for probing into the ways in which ancient America has been imagined, constructed, collected, and displayed, in juxtaposition with objects from other cultural areas; into the place of pre-conquest cultures in universal and global histories of mankind; and into the relations of contemporary Amerindian communities with other transregional economic and political actors.