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55 Developing the theoretical tools to accomplish the goals outlined in the previous chapters, and to enable a productive archaeological contribution to the comparative understanding of colonialism, requires coming to grips with the issue of agency in both indigenous and colonial societies and abandoning the kinds of teleological assumptions of inevitability that have been shown to underlie many of the approaches discussed previously. Progress in understanding the colonial experience and its unfolding consequences in the specific contexts examined here depends on recognizing that intercultural consumption of objects or practices, the process that instigated the initial entanglement of the colonial encounter, is not a phenomenon that takes place at the level of cultures, social formations, or other abstract structures. Nor is it a process of passive diffusion. It is an active process of creative appropriation, transformation, and manipulation played out by individuals and social groups with a variety of competing interests and strategies of action embedded in local political relations and cultural perceptions. People use alien contacts and goods for their own strategic political agendas and they give new meanings to borrowed cultural elements. Foreign objects are of interest not for what they represent in the society of origin but for their perceived use and meaning in the context of consumption. Hence, the colonial encounter must be very locally contextualized in the intersection of the different social and cultural logics of interaction of the specific parties involved. This is the level at which agency is potentially discernible in the archaeological analysis of colonialism, and at which its operation is historically crucial. 3 CONSUMPTION, ENTANGLEMENT, AND COLONIALISM 56 • C O N S U M P T I O N , E N T A N G L E M E N T , C O L O N I A L I S M COLONIALISM AND AGENCY In invoking the concept of agency, I am decidedly not talking about an attempt to introduce a notion of Cartesian individualism into archaeology. Rather, the aim is a more nuanced relational understanding of human subjectivity and consciousness in which the conditions forconsequentialaction,anditsmotivation,aredisplacedfromtranshistoricalmetastructures (particularly crudely economic ones) to socially situated positions and culturally constructed dispositions that are locally contextualized. In other words, I wish to avoid both the Scylla of individual autonomy and the Charybdis of forms of reductionist historical determinism in which agency is attributed solely to macrostructures of economic or political power. Local agency is, obviously, not something to be treated naively in colonial encounters. The concept often has been myopically exaggerated and overly romanticized in ways that effectively deny the genuine coercive and discursive power of colonial agents, institutions, and structured environments in many situations. But, on the other extreme, the kind of analysis that sees every practice, action, or institution as an effect of, or a reaction to, colonial domination is lapsing into a dangerous kind of macrofunctionalism in which all aspects of indigenous life are reductively explained simply by their supposed hegemonic or counterhegemonic functions within an overarching colonial system.1 Aside from doubts about the coherent systematicity of many colonial situations voiced earlier, I would add that such a perspective is powerless to provide insights into the specific cultural forms and meanings that motivate and structure daily life in indigenous and colonial societies; in effect, it furthers the ideological projection of colonial domination by negating, a priori, the possibility of consequential action or voice by those subjected to colonialism. Choices, desires, and actions are clearly conditioned by broader structures of the political economy, but they arise from particular cultural systems of categories and dispositions, particular positions within social fields, and particular sets of practices. Moreover, they always have significant unintended consequences that continually alter the broader structures of power in a recursive dialectical fashion. It is precisely this situated agency and the dynamic unfolding of unintended consequences that should be the focus of analysis in colonial encounters if we hope to expose and understand the crucial contradictions and contingencies of colonial situations and processes. One of the main points of this study is to understand how both indigenous societies and alien Mediterranean states, through the operation of the disparate (and often contradictory) desires, interests, and practices of their diverse groups, categories, and classes of members, gradually became entangled in broader fields of power relations and were transformed in the process. Such an understanding of the colonial encounter can emerge only from a consideration of multiple points of agency, their structuring contexts, and the consequences of action at a variety of...

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