Performativity and Metaphor: The Kiva Murals at Pottery Mound

ABSTRACT In this dissertation, I propose a hermeneutical consideration of the Pottery Mound murals as active participants within a transtemporal Puebloan cultural landscape—a consideration grounded in what Gaston Bachelard might refer to as a “slower ontology,” one that is based within the domains of what may be observed and imagined. In so doing, I position myself as a scholar whose art-historical practice acknowledges the creative artistry of my chosen discipline as a fundamental component in the production of critically generative scholarship. The methodological framework for this project comprises site visits, community consultation, critical ethnographic analysis, archival and collections research, and a review and synthesis of existing scholarship. I consider the lively role of metaphor in a Pueblo life world across time and space, and I propose that such a consideration constitutes an essential framework for writing about Pueblo material cultural production and performativity. I discuss the paintings at Pottery Mound as sites of transformation, and I consider the figurative depictions in the murals as they correspond to the art-historical concept of portraiture. I suggest that many, if not all, of the painted figures are portrayals of specific individuals and that, moreover, they represent a diversity of genders. Drawing upon ethnographic evidence, I suggest that such depictions correspond to a wide and varied spectrum of lived genders and orientations in an Ancestral Puebloan life world and that the practice of kiva spaces at Pottery Mound, like the figurative representations upon their walls, may have been far more diversely gendered than is commonly assumed.