RITUAL ECONOMY

Untethered by Space, Time, or Economic Form

5th Cotsen Advanced Seminar, March 2-3 2006

Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA

E. Christian Wells & Patricia A. McAnany, Co-Organizers

Increasingly, economists have acknowledged that a major limitation to economic theory has been its failure to incorporate human values and beliefs as motivational factors. More to the point, the economic underpinnings of ritual practice are under-theorized and therefore not accessible to economists working on synthetic theories of human choice. The intent of the proposed seminar is to initiate a rapprochement between economic theory and social theory. The chosen modus operandi for this endeavor is a seminar that will bring together scholars of economic anthropology as well as those who study past economic systems using archaeological remains. The immediate goal of this project is to forge an analytical vocabulary that will constitute the building blocks of a theory of ritual economy—the materialization of values and beliefs through acquisition and consumption aimed at managing meaning and shaping interpretation. Our ultimate goal is to push economic theory towards a more socially informed perspective. These goals will be accomplished through a seminar structure that balances case studies with broader theoretical considerations.

Cosmology and ritual practice have long been recognized as significant factors in the structure and process of economic systems in noncapitalist societies. According to Katherine Spielmann’s anthropological study of small-scale societies, “ritual and belief define the rules, practices, and rationale for much of the production, allocation, and consumption in an individual’s life… It is to people’s participation in and manipulation of the ritual context that we must look to understand variation and changes in many economic practices.” This line of work emphasizes the dynamic and on-going process of materialization, whereby all members of society can participate in creating, negotiating, reproducing, contesting, and challenging cultural meaning. This is an important distinction from studying the economics of ritual practice, which instead emphasizes the ways in which resources are marshaled for the conduct of ritualized behavior, sometimes for political ends.

By focusing on the intersection of cosmology and material transfers, this approach knits together ritual and economy—two realms of inquiry that often are sequestered into separate domains of knowledge. Ritual economy represents complex, dialectic, and interactive processes embedded within communities whose economic compositions vary according to local cultural and ecological landscapes. Fundamental to social constructions, this approach carries tremendous potential for understanding human society. Unfortunately, theory and methods for studying ritual economy are grossly underdeveloped. To address this shortfall, this Cotsen Advanced Seminar brings together scholars within anthropology who have devoted considerable energy towards the study of ritual practice and/or economic process. Assembled scholars will consider the variable pathways through which ritual and economic practices articulate in the operation of societies, past and present. In order to ground the discussion in actual case studies, seminar participants will prepare papers that utilize this approach in reference to archaeological data along with information produced from other genres, including ethnography, ethnohistory, personal narrative, and art.

Case Study: Mesoamerica

Since the seminar is organized by two Mesoamericanists, we will emphasize Mesoamerican ritual economy, focusing on three issues: 1) identifying the salient principles of Mesoamerican ritual economy, 2) examining the manner in which those principles were/are materialized, and 3) tackling the unique methodological challenges of archaeological interpretation of ritual economy. Although participants will not be limited to archaeological data, the first part of the seminar will focus on the manner by which “cultural agents” construct, reproduce, and transform ritual economy within predominantly noncapitalist contexts.

For example, in prehispanic and early Colonial Mesoamerica, the use of feasts and festivals to mobilize and regulate collective labor, along lines similar to what Roy Rappaport calls the “ritual mode of production,” was a fundamental economic practice in the development of social inequality and hierarchy. Conquest and Colonial accounts of Mesoamerican rituals that marked calendrical and astronomical events as well as important life-crisis ceremonies, including births, initiations, weddings, and funerals, reveal that many of these proceedings were extravagant affairs, where pomp and pageantry required a great quantity and variety of raw and processed materials, such as copal and cacao, along with specialty crafts, such as elaborate costumes and ritual paraphernalia. In addition to stimulating surplus production and long-distance acquisition of exotic or luxury items, these occasions also provided opportunities for hosts to display, and sometimes distribute, many other kinds of goods, including textiles and jade and marine shell accoutrements, which were critical for forging alliances with peers and for encouraging acquiescence by others in political realms. Agricultural festivals, political banquets, tribute feasts, and pilgrimage fairs represent other kinds of politically transformative events where ritual and economic activities intersected to catalyze social and cultural change.

If ritual economy is to become useful as a theoretical framework for generating research questions and corresponding test implications for anthropological study, an analytical vocabulary is needed that can serve as a heuristic for future work. The following three domains of inquiry are critical to this effort and will be examined by seminar participants during discussion of case studies from Mesoamerica and revisited during our consideration of broader theoretical formulations: materialization, acquisition, and consumption.

Materialization of a group’s values, morals, ideals, and ethics, through ritual can be studied by investigating the conditions, contexts, and practices by which material objects are endowed with symbolic or sacred characteristics. Sources of value and meaning for symbolic objects include their unique histories of ownership and exchange, the sacredness of their component materials, and their direct association with elite or sacred individuals, ancestors, and deities. Such objects may have high intrinsic worth, based primarily on the ideological context of production or use, independent of their production costs. In other words, items manufactured from inexpensive materials can be considered “socially valued goods,” which gain ritual power through the history of their use. Similarly, skillfully crafted objects may have great value in a particular context, but in absolute terms may cost little more than the food required by the artisans who produce them. Mary Helms, for example, argues that the manipulation of “durable tangible objects” that embody mystical powers can be harnessed for considerable periods of time, which can lead to enduring social hierarchies.

Acquisition and consumption constitute two important axes by which materialization can be measured. Acquisition of material culture critical to ritual practice can involve manufacture (“ritual mode of production”), material transfer across long distances (“spatial/temporal there-and-then”), and gift giving (“marking services”). The final category is particularly important in Mesoamerican communities, where gifting often involves sacrifice to ancestral and spiritual realms, along lines similar to Marcel Mauss’s “fourth obligation” of gift giving. Equally important to the conditions governing the acquisition of sacred or symbolic objects are the contexts in which such items are consumed. Consumption can take place at the level of household, community, or urban entity or within the context of age, gender, class-specific, or more heterogeneous social groupings. Diacritical feasting and potlatching are two anthropologically recognized means of consumption. The political aspect of conspicuous consumption, at the scale of the polity, is key to a consideration of Mesoamerica as Arthur Demarest has argued in reference to the “theater states” and “galactic polities” formulated by Geertz and Tambiah respectively.

Broader Theoretical Formulation of Ritual Economy

While the salience of ritual economy to the expression of Mesoamerican cultures is clear, the concept is more broadly relevant. We argue that all human societies require some form of ritual economy to materialize cultural meaning and social memory. Variation in the process of materialization leads to contrasting developmental trajectories, which give rise to diverse organizational strategies and local, historically contingent contexts for social action. The second part of the seminar will situate the study of ritual economy in a broader comparative context that will include capitalist modes of production and will seek to forge a general theoretical construct for this approach.

To do so, we expand our scope to consider the ways in which a theory of ritual economy can be applied to both capitalistic and noncapitalistic settings across a number of different cultural contexts. This “untethered” consideration of ritual economy will achieve three goals. First, it will permit us to evaluate the extent to which the principles identified in the first part of the seminar (focused on Mesoamerican cases) can be generalized or must be understood as historically contingent. Second, it will allow us to apply this general approach to recent and contemporary cultures and then evaluate its contribution to an understanding of Late Capitalism. Finally, it will encourage us to consider the utility of this approach in providing insight to the increasingly polarized resource inequities of a global economy.

Broadly speaking, our examination will include grappling with the social and ritual consequences of commodification—hallmark of the capitalist mode of production. Commodification of land, labor, and fabrication processes fundamentally alters notions of value; this reformulation requires us to revisit the concepts of materialization, acquisition, and consumption. An understanding of the manner in which commodification transforms ritual economy is critical to forging an analytical vocabulary with wide cultural applicability. The seminar also will focus on how ritual economy is materialized in a variety of cultural and economic contexts and will distinguish common ground from distinctive trajectories. Attention will be given to the pronounced fashion in which resource inequities and hierarchies are diacritically marked by ritual practices.

Schedule

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1

12:00-6:00 pm Participants arrive

6:00-8:00 pm Reception and dinner

THURSDAY, MARCH 2

8:30-9:00 am Coffee/Tea

9:00-9:15 am Welcome

E. Christian Wells (cwells@cas.usf.edu), University of South Florida

9:15-9:30 am Introduction

Patricia A. McAnany (tricia@bu.edu), Boston University

9:30-10:00 am Economy, ecology, and the realm of the sacred: Ritual exchange among the Nahua of northern Veracruz, Mexico

Alan R. Sandstrom (sandstro@ipfw.edu), Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne

Nahua ritual specialists of northern Veracruz, Mexico, portray spirit entities by cutting their images from paper. Paper cutting is an ancient craft in Mesoamerica that traces back to the pre-Hispanic era. The impetus to materialize the spirits in this way is the result of the highly abstract and pantheistic nature of the Nahua religious system. In pantheistic thought, the cosmos itself is the deity and all apparent diversity can be seen as different aspects or manifestations of a seamless sacred unity. The Nahua ritual specialist places the paper figures on elaborate altars where he or she dedicates special offerings, including blood, to them. Two purposes of these ritual offerings are evident: first, the removal of obstacles, in the form of acts of disrespect, that impede interaction with the spirits, and second, the exchange of valued items with spirits in an effort to obligate them to restore the flow of benefits upon which humans depend for their lives. The fundamentally economic nature of Nahua ritual exchange is revealed through examination of multiple factors: the symbolic meanings of sacred chanting and altar construction, the role of religion in constituting Nahua ethnic identity in the face of domination by mestizo elites, and the ecological context that renders life precarious for indigenous horticulturalists of this region of Mexico.

10:00-10:30 am Environmental worldview and ritual economy among the Lenca of Honduras: Archaeological implications for southeastern Mesoamerica

E. Christian Wells (cwells@cas.usf.edu), University of South Florida

The extent to which worldview enables and constrains human action has been fiercely debated for nearly a century. A rare point of consensus to emerge is that nonmaterial motives often drive economic choices at the expense of rational, utilitarian behavior. Recently, economic anthropologists have suggested that archaeological and historical cases can play a key role in understanding long-term trends in the ways in which values and beliefs articulate with economic processes. In this paper, I expand on some of my previous work that seeks to offer economic theory an archaeological case of how the materialization of worldview is embedded in economic contexts by means of ritual practice. Here, I examine the relationship between environmental worldview and ritual economy among the Lenca, an indigenous group inhabiting the highlands of central and western Honduras. The intrinsic meanings and effects of environmental worldview on the structure of ritual economy, as indicated by the Lenca example, suggest that our research questions and corresponding research designs may be leading us to overemphasize substantive explanations while giving less attention to formal ones. In examining the Lenca case, my aim is to redress this imbalance by determining some of the material expressions one might expect to find in the archaeological record regarding ritual practices associated with resource extraction, and then to evaluate those hypotheses with empirical data from western Honduras. This exercise exposes important gaps in our knowledge about the interplay of ritual, economy, and the environment and, in doing so, identifies the relevant information that is needed to explore environmental worldview and ritual economy in southeastern Mesoamerica.

10:30-10:45 am Catered break

10:45-11:15 am Accompanied by a jaguar: Ritual economy of the royal Maya court

Patricia A. McAnany (tricia@bu.edu), Boston University

The most powerful and effective forces of hierarchizing are those that naturalize difference so that it is beyond dispute and something to be tacitly accepted. Such hierarchization has been described by Touraine (1977:461) as a type of historical action by which a cultural model is transformed into a principle of social order. In the Classic Maya world, this “social speciation” was naturalized and materialized through a complex web of ritual practice, deity emulation, enhancement of body aesthetics, and the fabrication/possession of hypertrophic goods. The latter symbolized exclusive knowledge, tremendous investments of time, and sometimes, distant and precious raw materials. Additionally, the architecture of Classic Maya royal courts broke with an older Maya residential pattern of accretional construction filled with ancestral burials in order to materialize more effectively social difference, to provide space for exclusive ritual performance, and to showcase the highly valued and gendered labor of textile production. Such instruments of authority, from another perspective, are “weapons of exclusion” (Douglas and Isherwood 1979:95) that can be wielded to fend off assaults on hierarchy. From this perspective the profound transformations of the 9th century are considered an assault that was not defendable.

11:15-11:45 pm Weaving rituals and the production of commemorative cloth in highland Guatemala

Walter E. Little (wlittle@albany.edu), University at Albany, SUNY

In Mesoamerica the act of weaving, the process of making cloth, and the uses of that cloth are well-known ritual and mundane practices. Most often, these practices—ritual and mundane—have been regarded by scholars as markers of primordial identity and clear indications of deep historical continuities with the pre-Columbian past. Rather than re-tread this intellectual ground, in this paper I analyze a set of commemorative wall hangings from Tecpán, Guatemala to argue that ritual weaving persists in contemporary Mesoamerica within global economic contexts. I hold that these Tecpán textiles contain multiple significations that, in addition to indicating cultural continuities and community identity, symbolically link hamlets to the municipality, represent development projects completed, and symbolize the connections these hamlets have to the broader global economy. Furthermore, I contend that these hangings not only commemorate completed development projects and give thanks to the municipality, but that they signify weaving as a ritual act and as a symbol of local-global linkages. This analysis of weaving and cloth is contextualized within the cultural and economic conditions of Tecpán in order to discuss the interrelationship between the ritual and the mundane, as well as what hand-woven cloth means to contemporary Maya weavers.

11:45-12:15 pm Discussion: What is ritual economy?

12:15-2:00 pm Lunch

2:00-2:30 pm Crafting the Sacred: The Sociality of Ritual Production in Small Scale Societies

Katherine A. Spielmann (kate.spielmann@asu.edu), Arizona State University

The ritual mode of production is such a salient concept for those of us who focus our research on small scale societies because the extant archaeological record is often heavily dominated by the ritual places and objects created by prehistoric peoples. For centuries, and perhaps millennia, peoples widely separated in time and place have devoted considerable labor to enclosing and elaborating communal ritual spaces, and to producing objects for ritual consumption in these spaces. While ritual and economic actions are evident in this record, the sociality of production is not. This paper explores three archaeological case studies, referencing relevant ethnographic data, to explore the sociality of the organization of production of ritual spaces and paraphernalia in small scale societies.

2:30-3:00 pm Liturgical economic allocations

John D. Monaghan (monaghan@uic.edu), University of Illinois-Chicago

This paper examines what can be called “liturgical” economic allocations, which are made by private individuals and can make up a significant percentage of a society’s total expenditures on public works. It makes the point that such allocations are driven by tournaments of honor that emphasize highly visible acts and public evaluations of status, which turn on one’s willingness to put at risk what is most highly valued in society. Unlike philanthropy, participation in these tournaments is necessary to achieve and maintain citizenship, but unlike taxation, where rates are imposed from above, what is given is determined by a complex social negotiation. The paper argues that the relativity of honor gives such systems a particular dynamic, which is illustrated in several case studies.

3:00-3:30 pm The political ecology of ritual feasting

E. Paul Durrenberger (epd2@psu.edu), Pennsylvania State University

I will discuss the political economy of ritual feasting among Lisu highlanders and Shan lowlanders of northern Southeast Asia and medieval Icelanders. The audience for Lisu feasts is fellow villagers all of whom are engaged in limited competition for prestige to insure equality among households. These reciprocal feasts use a considerable portion of the annual value of each household’s production. Among Shan the audience is non-reciprocating Buddhist monks and non-reciprocating fellow villagers to validate positions in the social-political hierarchy in terms of Buddhist merit. The feasts use a relatively small portion of any household’s annual production. Among Icelandic chieftains, the audience was followers and potential followers to validate claims to chieftaincy and could initially use only a fraction of the annual production of a chiefly household, though as wage the source of revenue changed form household slaves to renters and wage workers and competition for land developed, the ritual dimension of chieftaincy became exaggerated and used an increasing portion of revenues as there were fewer and fewer increasingly powerful and combative chieftains.

3:30-3:45 pm Catered break

3:45-4:15 pm Desires of the heart and laws of the marketplace: Money and poetics in the practice of Betsileo ritual specialists in highland Madagascar

Susan M. Kus (kus@rhodes.edu) and Victor Raharijaona, Rhodes College

When silver coins (Maria Theresa Thaler) appeared in Madagascar in the mid-nineteenth century, Malagasy culture saw in their uncut, silver form (vola tsy vaky) an image of completeness, of perfection, of beginning and end, and a gift befitting a sovereign. Such coins became obligatory offerings of recognition of the sanctity of the sovereign in all ritual occasions accompanied by an array of additional offerings of symbolically significant plants, animals and material objects. While large numbers of these coins were used in the construction of silver canoes for royal burials, they also conveniently filled the coffers of the living sovereign. Today, local traditions of the highlands have co-opted and subverted this royal offering of “uncut coins” for their own ritual circumstances. Further, local ritual specialists continue to poetically assail “laws of the market place.” Claiming that their talent, a gift from the ancestors, cannot be bought or sold, they direct their clients to offer recompense according to “the desires/directives/feelings of their heart” (sitrapo, safidipo, hafaliampo.) They further engage in numerous symbolic assaults on “all purpose money.” This paper draws upon royal oral traditions, ethnohistoric accounts and contemporary ethnographic work with Betsileo ritual specialists to argue that the poetic and the syncretic should enter into our discussions of hegemony.

4:15-4:45 pm Gifting the children: The ritual economy of a community school

Rhoda H. Halperin (halperinr@mail.montclair.edu), Montclair University

Moral meanings intersect economic realities in a community school located in a diverse working class neighborhood in the Midwestern U.S. The school was created by a community/university partnership in the wake of a complicated and long economic development planning process that is still ongoing. School children from the community are eighth generation residents. As an extension of the development process, several community elders hold jobs in the school as volunteer coordinator, cafeteria and maintenance managers, case managers (lay counselors) and school administrators. Ironically, perhaps, the school was established as a nonprofit corporation, but job descriptions and rules resemble those in corporate workplaces. But work in the school does not follow corporate job descriptions. It both violates these descriptions and extends beyond them. Gifting the children involves a complex set of morally driven and ritualized economic practices: participation in the informal economy, modeling survival strategies, and providing actual resources such as food, clothing and school supplies. Intersections of kinwork and paid work blur distinctions between work and family. For community residents and leaders employed in the school, work extends far beyond job descriptions and regular business hours. Often people work 16-18 hour days. This work schedule requires mobilizing extended kin to cover small child and eldercare responsibilities. Employing community kin, insuring job stability, and keeping the peace are also priorities. These practices are all forms of resistance to capitalism, globalization and several forms or hegemony. At the same time, since children’s success in school is facilitated by such practices, gifting the children is complicit with the goals of neoliberal capitalism. “Gifting the Children” is about informal support systems for kids, consisting of economic practices that require adults to expend considerable resources in time and money on community children. These practices grow out of a strong and often ritualized community ethos, which, in fact, is the keystone of all community projects. The folk term for this ethos is “doing whatever it takes.” Work, gifts, food, housing are tied to an alternative, informal, non-market economy embedded in a grassroots social movement. Beyond job descriptions, and, in many instances, in spite of them – community people go the extra mile. There is a sense of commitment and morality, tied with notions of doing what is right, and with taking care of community children, broadly conceived as working class youth. A strong social justice agenda underlies economic practices. The goal of this agenda is to bring kids up to speed in the face of poor public education and class and race discrimination. The theoretical underpinnings of this paper draw on the work of Eric Hobsbawm, Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. Concepts of Social banditry, power and knowledge, including most importantly local knowledge, inform the analysis.

4:45-5:15 pm Discussion: How do culture, power, and history intersect to frame ritual economy?

5:15-6:00 pm Break

6:00-8:00 pm Dinner

FRIDAY, MARCH 3

8:30-9:00 am Coffee/Tea

9:00-9:45 am Discussion

Jeremy A. Sabloff (jsabloff@sas.upenn.edu), University of Pennsylvania

9:45-10:30 am Open discussion

10:30-10:45 am Catered break

10:45-11:15 am Discussion Theme I: Ritual communication and performance

11:15-11:45 pm Discussion Theme II: Economic rationality and nonrationality

11:45-12:15 pm Discussion Theme III: Materialization of worldview

12:15-2:00 pm Lunch

2:00-2:30 pm Discussion Theme IV: Toward a theory of ritual economy

2:30-3:00 pm Discussion Theme V: The shortcomings of our projects

3:00-3:30 pm Catered Break

3:30-5:15 pm Cotsen Visiting Scholar Lecture: Explaining World Linguistic Diversity: The Role of Archaeology and Molecular Genetics

Colin Renfrew, Cotsen Visiting Scholar 2005-2005 and Disney Professor of Archaeology, University of Cambridge

5:15-6:00 pm Break

6:00-8:00 pm Dinner

SATURDAY, MARCH 4

8:00-12:00 pm Participants depart