Mopa Mopa Practice and Orality in Colonial Andean Culture: ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with Catalina Ospina
This talk discusses the process of making mopa mopa images in the colonial northern Andes, which included chewing the resin to clean it and mix in pigments. The speaker argues that in the Andes the mouth’s various functional and communicative mechanics were a site of cultural production, directly tied to the primacy of oral discourse in Andean societies, which were non-textual before the arrival of the Spanish.