CONSUMING INDIGENEITY: INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON THE ECONOMIC AND GEOPHAGIC CONSUMPTION OF TONALÁ BRUÑIDA WARE

Abstract

Tonalá Bruñida, or “Tonalá Burnished,” ware is an Indigenous Mexican ceramic ware whose production has remained largely consistent from the late colonial period to today. As part of Spain’s extensive colonial maritime trade network, Tonalá Bruñida ware was a prolific luxury commodity among the upper socioeconomic classes of Spain during the colonial period. Today, the ware is produced mostly in forms that are marketable to tourists and collectors, marking a trend in the commodification of this Indigenous product by western audiences throughout time. This connection merits inquiry as it pertains to a broader understanding of colonialist oppression and the paradoxical fetishization of certain “New World” aesthetics which followed. Beyond its position as an object of economic consumption and aesthetic desire, Tonalá Bruñida ware was also an object of dietary consumption among wealthy colonial-period European women. This is an example of geophagy, or earth-eating, a nutritional practice that exists globally in both historic and modern contexts. The ware was shipped in both whole-vessel form and in bags of broken sherds from Mexico to Spain for this purpose. This resulted in its prevalence across 18th century commercial Spanish shipwreck contexts throughout the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Using a combination of oral history, pedestrian survey, archaeometric, and traditional ceramic analysis methods, this thesis investigates the nutritional and cultural values associated i with the intersection of Tonalá Bruñida ware as Spanish colonial material culture and as an object of geophagy. These efforts represent novel anthropological research on the ingestion of a finished ceramic product, illuminating an underexplored dimension of folk medicine. Taken with the understanding that Tonalá Bruñida ware geophagy was stigmatized in its discrete time and place, this thesis also aims to more fully grasp the methods by which upper class Spanish women consumed Tonalá Bruñida ware and their intentions in doing so in relation to its continued practice in Mexico today.