Analyzing Gender in the Moche Society Through Archaeology

On a recent trip to Havana, two fellow visitors reminded me what it feels like to encounter the Cuban city for the first time and to become enamored with its paradoxes. The first, a young Kansan woman in my Airbnb, learning that I study Cuban architecture and urbanism, expressed a familiar curiosity about the dramatic contrast between austere 19th century mansions, colonial palaces and the surrounding blocks of ruinous buildings. The second, a Berliner, shared ceviche with me on a restaurant balcony overlooking a street bustling with tourists and art vendors. He pointed out with a laugh that our utensils came from Air France first class.

“I believe we are in an exacerbated crisis of non-guarantee of women’s rights throughout the country, with the peculiar characteristic of finding ourselves in a moment of different rhetoric — of it being the time of women — because we now have the first woman president, seventy years after women gained the right to vote in this country,” said my interviewee, an organizer for a women’s rights organization in Oaxaca.

Around the halfway point of my doctoral studies, I spent a year living between Boston and Belém in the Amazon region of Brazil to experience firsthand what I had until then been researching from satellite images and other people’s accounts. Belém became my base, from which I made frequent short excursions to surrounding areas to get a feel for life in the region. After that initial experience, I planned deeper immersions that recently brought me back for two longer field trips. This is a brief narrative of one of them.