Making Relations: Nahua Precious Art as Material Socialization

Among the Nahuas of central Mexico, precious, multimedia devices, meant to be worn on the body and combining valued stones, shells, feathers, metals, flowers, and other materials, were a major artform undertaken by specialist artists, often in the context of royal or commercial workshops. Although studies of these artworks have often focused on their complex crafting, Nahuatl-language descriptions provide alternate understandings of precious devices’ creation as an ongoing process that both exceeded and decentered the time and space of the artists’ workshop. Based on close readings of the Nahuatl text of Book 2 of the Florentine Codex (1575–77), I trace the way that the Indigenous authors of the text understood making precious devices to be a multistage process of socialization in which materials entered human society, acquired novel relationships with other materials, and ultimately achieved new forms of sociality through practices of ritual dressing and bodily display. In part by highlighting the experience of component materials themselves as they moved through different social relationships, Nahua accounts underscore that crafting was only one stage in the gradual transformation of precious materials. Ultimately, Nahua narratives challenge us to think about material gathering and practices of display as core forms of making while also providing new vantages onto artistic crafting itself. As one of many stages that transformed materials by modifying their social relations, artistic crafting was neither decidedly different from nor more important than the attendant practices of recognizing, gathering, dressing, and dancing that together brought precious devices into being.