Mary Weismantel is a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, where she has previously served as director of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and as an adjunct curator at the Field Museum of Natural History. She received a PhD in anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the author of two books of ethnographic research in South America, Cholas and Pishtacos: Tales of Race and Sex in the Andes and Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes.
What this book does very well is envision how these ceramic vessels were a part of people's lives-their materiality and lively interaction with human bodies, as well as their social connections to the living and the dead that express notions of how life is generated, nurtured, and ensured...[Playing with Things provides] insights into how scholars can approach with fresh eyes subjects that we think we know. * Latin American Antiquity * Refereshing...This is an academic work - thoroughly researched, footnoted, and at times quite theoretical - but Weismantel's style remains accessible, easy to understand, and rarely mired down in jargon. * Queer as Fact * Refereshing...This is an academic work - thoroughly researched, footnoted, and at times quite theoretical - but Weismantel's style remains accessible, easy to understand, and rarely mired down in jargon. * Queer as Fact * Weismantel draws from a vast corpus of theory and ethnographic literature to support her arguments but does not dwell on usual concerns of Moche scholars, including ceramic chronology or regional and temporal variation within the Moche sphere...she offers fresh ideas and innovative approaches. The text is witty, engaging, and insightful and will be of interest within and beyond the broader field of anthropology. This book also demonstrates the potential of a fully integrated four-field anthropology in which specialists have the courage and inquisitiveness to venture past the traditional territorial boundaries of the subdisciplines. * Journal of Anthropological Research *