Indigenous Knowledge and Women's Cosmetics: Mopa Mopa in the Colonial Northern Andes

Abstract

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indigenous northern Andeans created intricate images to decorate wooden objects using a unique resin known as barniz de Pasto or mopa mopa. One of the pigments that they used is a mercury-based substance called calomel. Before calomel was found in 2018 on a mopa mopa object, neither conservators nor art historians had ever known of the use of calomel as a pigment. In this essay I argue that calomel's use as white pigment in mopa mopa objects resulted from the encounter between two subaltern knowledge traditions rarely studied together: that of European women and Indigenous Andeans. Through an object-based approach, I trace the knowledge and expertise required to handle materials like calomel and mopa mopa resin, highlighting the essential role of objects in recovering the vernacular paths of knowledge that contributed to the transformation of the early modern world.