The Archaeology of Kinship: Advancing Interpretation and Contributions to Theory

10. The Political Economy of Kinship and Marriage

197 CHAPTer Ten The Political economy of Kinship and Marriage Parts II and III describe different social organizational strategies and their archaeological interpretation. Part IV focuses on the political economic dynamics of kinship and marriage systems. This chapter describes a political economic perspective on kinship leading to hypotheses on change for three categories of social organization and marriage: descent groups with “elementary” reciprocal marriage systems, descent groups with Crow/omaha organization and competitive exogamy, and cognatic organization with “complex” competitive marriage systems. Chapter 11 discusses the archaeological data needed to address the hypotheses, and Chapter 12 evaluates the degree to which the models can explain social changes among the Hohokam. The value of a political economic perspective is that it integrates social organization, marriage, ceremony, exchange, ideology, and agency into holistic models on social dynamics, social reproduction, and change. Although some Us archaeologists may be uncomfortable with the use of a political economic framework or may not immediately see the reason for its use, the integration of kinship and political economic analysis is a long tradition. Kinship incontrovertibly influenced classical Marxist theory. for Marx (1964), various forms of “community” in noncapitalist societies are what anthropologists recognize as kinship relations. for engels (1972), “family” meant various forms of kinship, as originally described by Morgan (1870). engels’s work then influenced more than a century of feminist theory, which returned to influence anthropology (e.g., leacock 1972, 1978; reiter 1975; rubbo 1975b). But this is old news. 198 chapter ten Here we are interested in more recent and better ethnographically informed perspectives. After a long period of cognitive trends, research since the 1970s illustrates an awareness that kinship relations are the basis for political economic relations within nonstate societies (e.g., Arcand 1989; friedman 1984; Gailey and Patterson 1988; Godelier 1978, 1982, 1984; leacock 1972, 1978; ledgerwood 1995; Meillassoux 1972, 1981; Modjeska 1982; Moore 1991; rosman and rubel 1971; schweizer and white 1998; Terray 1984; Tsing and yanagisako 1983; wolf 1982:88–96). In its more current uses, kinship analysis provides a framework for understanding the local impacts of, and active reactions to, expanding global capitalism (e.g., Blackwood 2007; Chan 1994; Choi 2000; dube 1997; ellison 2009; Hutchinson 1996; Jarvenpa 2004; McKnight 2004; Peletz 1995; sillitoe 1999). To propose that archaeologists should approach kinship with an up-to-date anthropological perspective should not be considered surprising or controversial. Alternatively put, attempting to understand social organization and marriage without considering how social relations, labor, property, competition, leadership, and ideology are intertwined (i.e., a political economic perspective) would ignore the wealth of anthropological knowledge on the subject. This chapter begins with an overview of how kinship structures social relations of production in nonstate (or non-class-based) societies. different marriage systems (elementary, Crow/omaha, and complex) are shown to variably structure agency, ceremonial competition, and surplus production . once arriving at a general understanding of the ways that kinship and marriage organize political economies and agency, the final section focuses on the internal processes leading to social transformations. Although using the term “process” here, no evolution or human passivity is implied. Kinship, Political Economy, and Transformations Political economic analyses seek to understand a given society in terms of its social, economic, political, and ideological organization. A critical aspect of political economic analysis is that a given social formation is best understood or explained by the ways in which people interact in production and property ownership. These are social relations of production. As anthropology became more materialistic in the 1960s and 1970s, cultural ecology (after steward 1963) and cultural materialism (after Harris 1968), among other materialistic perspectives, established traditions that focused on production-related explanations for cultural phenomena. Although having different understandings of the subject, all had some basis The Political Economy of Kinship and Marriage 199 in Marxist theory, explicitly or implicitly. Many anthropologists sought to discover and label new modes of production defined by social relations of production in non-western cultures. After many labels were given, the concept of mode of production began to lose its value. even worse, many began to define modes of production based on subsistence/ ecological adaptations, which are never social relations of production. others were more interested in general categories of modes as conceptual tools for analysis (e.g., sahlins 1974; wolf 1982), as opposed to rigid types. As more anthropologists used these concepts as an analytical framework for nonstate societies, they discovered that...