ABSTRACT
To exercise the mimetic faculty is to practice an everyday art of appearance, an art that delights and maddens as it cultivates the insoluble paradox of the distinction between essence and appearance. Cuna ethnography has much to teach concerning the spirit powers that, in the form of images, emerge from this paradox. Colonial history too must be understood as spiritual politics in which image-power is an exceedingly valuable resource. Cuna ethnography provides valuable lessons in this regard, the most notable being the gendered division of mimetic labor among the Cuna. The colonial image of America as woman extends into anticolonial reckoning as well. Unlike most of the world colonized by Europe from the sixteenth century onward, sexual intercourse as well as cohabitation between colonizing men and native women in Latin America was not uncommon and was the obvious source of the mestizo fraction of the population.
