in fact that it is impossible to disentangle the two. Moreover, as enmeshed in particular spatio-temporal contexts, our being-in-the-world means we encounter, experience, and understand things in specific, relational ways, within an elaborate field of possibilities. These include, for example, everyday items which are ‘ready-to-hand’ in contrast to objects of detached observation and contemplation (ie., things which are ‘present-at-hand’; see Heidegger 1962:98- 99). His classic example is that of a hammer which is first and fundamentally known to us through our embodied engagement with it, as well as our understandings of its use and position within a web of other items such as lumber and nails. When it is used as intended, the hammer ‘withdraws’ from any explicit concern we might have with it. It is only when the hammer breaks that it becomes something to ponder in its uselessness, Heidegger's concern with our practical understandings of the world, which implied that one could not tease apart the conscious and the corporeal in everyday modes of engagement, was recognized by Merleau-Ponty as a facet of post-Enlightenment thought in need of explication. To this end, in the Phenomenology of Perception (1962 [1945}), Merleau-Ponty advanced the theory of the corps-sujet or body subject’ as a unified whole defined by the primacy ofa perceptual rather than ‘pure’ consciousness. The world is always already understood as relational and meaningful because situations are experienced, first and foremost, not as atomized and idealized events instilled with meaning by the ‘mind,’ but rather as immediate and suffusive encounters that provide modalities for a bodily relationship with things that cannot be achieved by consciousness alone. This point is taken up by Mary Weismantel in her discussion of architectural features at Chavin de Huantar in Peru. Here, Weismantel’s focus on the ‘body/artifact interface’ provides for a discussion of the kinaesthetic forms of engagement that must take place in order to view stones such as the Obelisk Tello and the Lanzén, processes which at times are frustrating, awkward, and incomplete. But what is this corporeal form through which our relationships with the world become reified? Is it an inviolable and fixed container, as modern Western conventions would have it, the surfaces of which may be subject to a variety of cultural’ modifications (e.g., through dress, cosmetics, prostheses, ornamentation, tattooing, etc.)? Following Strathern’s (1988) performative account of Melanesian personhood and Csordas’ (1990) call for a ‘paradigm of embodiment,’ (see also e.g. Butler 1993; Grosz 1994), many anthropologists and archaeologists have explicitly eschewed such biological conceptions, and have instead embraced a view of the body as a fabrication of the social relations that take effect among an assortment of human and non-human ‘others.’ Chief among the tenets associated with such a position is that the human body is a processual entity; it is continually made and remade through the exchange of human and non-human substances such as bodily fluids (e.g, Busby 1997; Weismantel 2004), foodstufts, and medicines, as well as the incorporation of ornaments and the like. This theme is explored in contributions by Losey et al., McNiven, Hofmann, and Harris. Crucially, it is also within such a view that the physicality of the body, rather than the ethereal properties of consciousness, can be regarded as the locus of difference between humans and animals. Considerable efforts have been devoted to advancing this topic within various strands of Amazonian (¢.g., Descola 2005;