M.A.R.I. Lunch Talk - Guest Speaker is Dr. Miruna Achin

Abstract

This talk presents a current project reconstructing the uses of Mesoamerican jade — a mineral rich in meaning in ancient Mesoamerica — as an object of art, science, politics, and commerce since the Spanish conquest. Placing jade's material properties — color, texture, translucence, hardness, chemistry —at the center of analysis, the talk explores how changing perceptions of matter have shaped interactions with the stone and among the people who extract, work, traffic, collect, and study it. Building on the premise that jade is not an ontologically fixed essence, the project asks, first, how its uses have been produced and translated over time across linguistic, geographic, and cultural borders. Second, it examines the conceptual and political arrangements that sustain a differential production of knowledge and ignorance, making it possible for certain narratives of the stone's uses to become prominent while obscuring the violence surrounding its extraction. Jade functions as a site for inquiring into the ways Mesoamerican pasts and material cultures have been incorporated into global histories, and into the relations of contemporary Amerindian communities with transregional economic and political actors. By delving into the uses of a stone, the talk asks how Mesoamerican material culture and its circulation still haunt, affect, and inspire contemporary contexts worldwide.

BIO

Miruna Achim (BA, Harvard University; PhD, Yale University) is an Associate Professor in the Humanities at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa in Mexico City. Her research centers on the material cultures of science and technology, with a focus on the history of antiquarianism and collection building in Mexico. Her recent publications include From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museum of Mexico (Nebraska UP, 2017); Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking Mexico's National Collections (edited with Susan Deans-Smith and Sandra Rozental, University of Arizona Press, 2021); Piedra, papel y tijera. Instrumentos en las ciencias en México (edited with Laura Cházaro and Nuria Valverde, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2018); Museos al detalle: colecciones, antigüedades e historia natural (edited with Irina Podgorny, Prohistoria, 2014); and Lagartijas medicinales: remedios americanos y debates ilustrados (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2007). She was a fellow at the Paris Institute of Advanced Studies in 2023-24 and has carried out archival research at various institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, and CIRMA in Antigua, Guatemala. She is presently a fellow at the Latin American Library at Tulane.