The Archaeology of Regional Interaction: Religion, Warfare, and Exchange across the American Southwest and Beyond

7: Theorizing the Political Economy of Southwestern Exchange

151 THEORIZING THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOUTHWESTERN EXCHANGE Dean J. Saitta 7 Recent years have seen a renewal of interest in the phenomenon of precontact exchange in the Americas. This is indicated by Schortman and Urban’s (1992b) edited volume on power, resources, and interregional interaction and the two-volume set on North and Middle American exchange systems edited by Baugh and Ericson (Baugh and Ericson 1994; Ericson and Baugh 1992). An examination of these volumes reveals a broad consensus on three points about the study of exchange in the Americas. First, exchange is driven as much by social as by economic necessity . Exchange not only helps to buffer resource stress through various kinds of “banking” strategies, but it also serves the aims of “social reproduction .” That is, exchange cements political alliances between interacting groups and provides goods that can be used on a local level to create and signal important status distinctions, as well as meet the requirements of group ritual activities. Second, exchange is variable across the continent in terms of the kinds of goods exchanged, the social context of exchange, and the intensity of exchange. Exchange systems also wax and wane in scale and complexity depending on the specific circumstances of time and place. Third, because of the social nature of exchange and its responsiveness to historical contingencies, particular forms (e.g., reciprocity, redistribution ) or scales (e.g., bounded, extended) of exchange do not neatly 152 Archaeology of Regional Interaction correlate with other social characteristics or particular levels of social complexity. Rather, any society can display a number of different forms or scales of exchange activity depending on environmental, social, and historical circumstances. In other words, typological and normative approaches to exchange do not work (Plog 1992). In this chapter I examine the category of exchange models known as prestige goods models, which command interest because they are widely used across North America to account for the development of social complexity (Earle 1994). Further, because of their concern with the transformative potential of differences in wealth and power between individuals and groups, these models speak to the internal dynamics of social formations. Several southwestern archaeologists—most recently Stephen Plog (1995)—have advised us to pay more attention to such dynamics. I will argue that whereas prestige goods models have been useful guides for research in many areas, they make some problematic assumptions about the relationship among material objects, labor flow, and social power in middle-range societies. These assumptions need to be rethought if we want to gain new perspectives on the dynamics that organized and transformed past societies. First, I briefly review the key claims of the prestige goods model, discuss some theoretical critiques of the model, and review some real world cases in which it has been found wanting. These critiques and cases alert us to the need for new theory. Next I outline an alternative framework for theorizing the political economy of southwestern exchange . The framework invokes teleonomy as a causal principle and taps Marx’s (1964) work on variation in precapitalist forms. I close with some thoughts about exchange in the ancestral Pueblo system centered at Chaco Canyon, using current uncertainty about the meaning of Chacoan exchange data as a touchstone for the argument. THE PRESTIGE GOODS MODEL IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL THEORY The prestige goods model is an account of how political elites— understood here to be individuals who differentially control resources and the life chances of other individuals—come to be established and their political and economic power maintained through the tactical manipulation of exchange (for summaries see Baugh and Ericson 1992; Blanton et al. 1996; McGuire 1989; Schortman and Urban 1992a). The model assumes that social power stems from the control of valuables necessary for important life transitions such as initiations and marriages. Lineage elders (usually assumed to be senior men) exercise such control , and juniors subordinate themselves to seniors to obtain socially 153 Political Economy of Southwestern Exchange necessary items. Lineage elders extract surplus (objects and food) from juniors, which these emergent elites use in competition with other lineage elites to build political alliances, expand exchange networks, and extend their power. In this model, valuables have status as instruments of power: They are a means to appropriate the labor of subordinates. This system is considered inherently unstable because many valuables come from distant sources, precluding lineage elites from exercising direct control over their production and exchange. Archaeological expectations of...