From Rational to Relational: Re-configuring Value (2012)

2015

This thesis explores the value of manufactured items among the Sanema, a hunting and horticultural people of Southern Venezuela. By extending the ‘virtue ethics’ approach prevalent in the study of Amazonian societies, I suggest that artefacts are as much a component of Sanema virtuous conviviality as corporeal practices. Manufactured items are meaningful in a distinct way to the often-studied crafted artefacts, which are widely seen to embody the human subjectivities of the maker. Instead, the valuable prefabricated properties of industrial goods, which I refer to as ‘affordances’, can allow morality to be conceptualised and materialised. The focus on manufactured items reflects the recent influx of such goods into Sanema lives that feature centrally in their daily narratives of personhood, sociality and ethical practises. In drawing attention to these industrial goods that emerge from the wider national context, I contextualise Sanema experiences within the contemporary setting of ...

The Construction of Value in the Ancient World, 2012

Values in the prehistoric Andes varied significantly over time, and this essay attempts to track notable changes among early cultures of ancient Peru. During the Middle Preceramic, values focused on the family, including a concern with the death of neonates and infants. Late Preceramic Period monumental architecture with repeated renovations evidences values grounded in community cooperation and reproduction. The first social valuables appeared in the form of biconical rectangular beads with distinctive dual drilling. In the Initial period, sea lion canines and whalebone ear ornaments associated with leaders emphasize new values of power, strength, and courage. Evidence for socioeconomic inequality appears in central and northern Peru during the Early Horizon in association with the Chavin religious cult, which emphasized harmony and balance, as well as interaction with the supernatural realm, through religious rituals, including the ingestion of psychoactive drugs and shamanic transformation. Material social valuables that symbolized the new set of beliefs included gold jewelry and crafted exotic stones, minerals, and shells brought from distant areas. Shimmering surfaces and strong colors were invested with symbolic meaning related to the religious beliefs and attributes of cult leaders.

One of the most challenging aspects of exploring value in the past is defining it in a relational way that is not based on modern conceptions and capitalist preoccupations. At the same time, as researchers, we need to have a common understanding of what value is and how to define it before we understand it. What is it that made something have value and what does that mean? We find it helpful to break value down into three parts, as suggested by Penny Crook (2019), who included V 1 (measure), V 2 (esteem), and V 3 (moral). V 1 , discussed as exchange value, is usually applied to commodities in the market and in terms of equivalencies and direct measures of value. Does exchange value exist when there is no commensurability or fungibility of products? Can we truly measure the worth of objects in the Mesoamerican past? In some cases yes, as will be

Political economy has provided a broad framework for the study of power relations in early complex societies , but its top-down approaches have limitations for understanding the simultaneous formation of unequal and equal social relations. Through the conception of power as heterogeneous, contradictory, and multidimensional, this study addresses how inequality and equality are constituted through production, exchange, and consumption of material objects. Recent material culture studies grounded in practice theories highlight material objects as both medium and consequence of social practice and negotiation. Such a conception of material culture leads us to explore consumption as a key theoretical and methodological concept to understand the relationship between material culture patterns and social reproduction and transformation. This study explores how consumer demand is created by examining the process of the creation and transformation of the regimes of value, which allows to address the entan-glement of material properties, multiple agencies, and the acts of production, exchange, and consumption. A case study from Teotihuacan documents archaeological evidence of changing distribution, direct evidence of production, and material characterization of lime plaster and demonstrates how changing social relations were embodied by production, exchange, and consumption of lime plaster.

The article critically appraises the ontological turn in archaeological research, especially approaches that draw inspiration from nonrepresentational and non-anthropocentric theories. A comparison of the Late Formative center of Jatanca (300-100 BCE) with the neighboring Moche site of Huaca Colorada (AD 650-850) in the Jequetepeque Valley of Peru will then demonstrate how radical transformations in architectural construction point to fundamental changes in how communities perceived and experienced the material world. The markedly different traditions of place making certainly suggest significant shifts in the meaning and political effects of built environments. Nevertheless, the article concludes with the important caveat that the pronounced architectural differences do not necessarily translate to major shifts in ontologies and constructions of personhood but more likely to transformations in ritual practices and political organization. Therefore, the comparison reveals the dangers of assuming that distinct materialities correspond to distinct ontologies or even distinct "materialisms." Ultimately, the author argues that a focus on the materialities of place making, as opposed to generic interpretations of ontology, permits a more effective means of reconstructing historical process within the specific Andean context.

2013

s April 2013 Claudia Brittenham and Diana Magaloni Kerpel, The Eloquence of Color: Material and Meaning in the Cacaxtla Murals. This paper examines how materials constitute meaning in the murals of Cacaxtla, a Central Mexican city-state which flourished during the Epiclassic period between AD 650-950. Drawing on technical analyses by Diana Magaloni, we present evidence that the painting technique of Cacaxtla synthesizes different Mesoamerican traditions in ways comparable to the stylistic and iconographic synthesis of the paintings, in order to demonstrate that the Cacaxtla painting tradition is a distinctive local practice. We then consider select examples of the iconography of color in the murals. The choice of hues and pigments can create rhetorical parallels: at the Red Temple, for example, maize, jade, and quetzal feathers are all painted with a precious Maya blue pigment. But color can also be used to make vitally important distinctions, as when victors and vanquished in the B...

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2020

This slim volume showcases, reworks, and extends some of the core resources anthropologists, and like-minded scholars, have developed over the past 200 years or so for thinking about value. Rather than theorize value head on, I offer a careful (but punchy and non-ponderous) interpretation of a Mayan text (about an offering to a god that lamentably goes awry), its telling, and the conditions of possibility for its original publication.

The only available indigenous preconquest information pertaining to Inka recordings of numbers and values is locked up in still only partially deciphered knotted cord khipus. This study first discusses how numerical data were registered in general and then analyzes the organization of numerical data and color coding in a complexly formatted khipu from the south coast of Peru. This case allows for an exploration of the registration of status and prestige differences as an example of the construction of value in a social context. The discussion turns to possible means of recording three basic formulations of value in Inka political economy: exchange and market-based value; value expressed in comparative terms; and intrinsic value. Focus in the latter value form is on sacred places (wakas) in the landscape, including a consideration of ethnographic material illustrating by example one discursive practice by which places become sanctified through attachment to (supposed) ancestral events. The study ends with speculation on the possible semiotic connection between place value in constructions of landscapes and in the Inka positional (base 10) numeration system.