Mesoamerica

Tomas Matza

Tomas A. Matza received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2010. His research interests extend across the subfields of sociocultural, environmental, and medical/psychological anthropology, and touch on issues of mental health, political economy, environment, and global health, and theoretical considerations of subjectivity, care, expert knowledge and power. His research to date has focused on Russia, El Salvador, and Hawai'i.  His newest project focuses on land stewardship in Hawai'i as a form of human/more-than-human care and as a practice of environmental justice in the Anthropocene.

Research Description

Tomas A. Matza’s first book, Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia (2018), draws on fieldwork in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he explored the psychotherapy boom that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. This involved ethnographic research in psychological assistance organizations for children and adults, media analysis, and extensive interviews. The book examines how new ideas and practices of selfhood, and what he calls “precarious care," emerged alongside Russia's political and economic transformations following the collapse of the USSR. Shock Therapy describes the various political afterlives of psychotherapeutic care, which is now practiced as: a marketable commodity, a technique of biopolitical management, and a means to personal healing. These transformations in the nature of care have, in turn, turned the “self” into a site of political, economic and ethical production, providing practitioners with new forms of geographic and class mobility, but also creating new means of social differentiation among clients. 

Professor Matza’s second project engaged with critical global mental health. This work draws on fieldwork in El Salvador and focussed on an NGO’s effort to promote child wellbeing in child welfare centers. His research explored how psychological theories (in this case related to attachment), circulated in the contexts of neoliberalism, El Salvador’s postwar gang violence, and Western hemispheric security, as well as how anthropological critique can be incorporated into collaborative research. The project also explored the social life of metrics and data in the pursuit of “global health.”  He is currently working on a collaborative ethnography that explores the potential for life history to offers insights into political struggle, forms of violence, and reliance.

Professor Matza’s newest research explores care in a new context—via biocultural stewardship in Hawai‘i. The Hawaiian islands are global biodiversity hotspots whose habitats and endemic species continue to be threatened by introduced species, over-development, increasing water scarcity, and other factors. At the same time, as many in the native sovereignty movement have pointed out, Hawai‘i was illegally annexed by the United States, and thus remains a sovereign kingdom. These overlapping social, ecological, and political contestations present significant challenges when it comes to caring for land. Are there ways to do so that can promote multi-species well-being? What is “just conservation”? Who should care for the land and on whose behalf? Through a collaboration with Dr. Nicole Heller, Associate Curator of Anthropocene Studies at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and in conversation with scholars in Hawai‘i doing research on biocultural stewardship, the project aims to use collaboration, co-development, and transdisciplinary research to answer these difficult questions.

Public-Facing Engagement

Since 2022 I have been co-developing an environmental justice learning initiative with my colleague and friend, Dr. Nicole Fabricant (Towson University). This work brings together environmental justice community activists from Baltimore and the Pittsburgh region, and faculty and students from University of Pittsburgh, Towson University and other educational institutions in the context of three activities centered on environmental justice harms and community responses for repair in Southwestern Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio and South Baltimore. The larger goal of this initiative is to build cross-regional solidarities as a basis for developing community-facing collaborative projects, resources, educational materials, and even possible policy interventions.

I am a member of the Pitt Faculty Union's Communication Action Team, and am one of many working to improve working conditions for our colleagues as I see a natural link between their well-being and the quality of our students' educational experiences. 

Disciplinary Service

In my final year's role as a Councilor for the American Ethnological Society I am co-organizing with Dr. Heath Cabot the AES spring conference on the theme of "Repair." This conference is co-sponsored by APLA and will take place at Pitt from April 4-6, 2024. I have benefitted immensely from collaborations with Darlène Dubuisson, Nicole Heller, Noah Theriault, Emily Wanderer, and Gabby Yearwood.

Graduate Recruitment

As an interdisciplinary scholar myself, I welcome applications from prospective students with multidisciplinary backgrounds. I enjoy working with students who are insatiably curious; who are both rigorous and generous in their engagement with other scholarship; who are interested in contributing to a convivial departmental atmosphere through cohort building and departmental citizenship; and who are interested in linking their work to the pressing concerns of our times. Applicants interested in my mentorship should be familiar with my research and approach, although interests need not exactly mirror my own. Instead, I am best suited to mentoring students with whom there is an exciting thematic, theoretical or geographic resonance and for whom my expertise would provide a solid foundation for a PhD. Successful applications should also identify links with other faculty in the department, department thematic clusters, and other relevant university resources. Please feel free to contact me by email with questions.

Courses

Environments, Health, and Power

Graduate Seminar. The Anthropocene, a new geological designation identifying humanity’s unprecedented, massive impact on the Planet, has been a fertile area of anthropological inquiry. Concerned with giving an ethnographic grounding to the impacts of climate change, species loss, land enclosure or pollution, scholars have documented the specific ways that capitalism and colonialism continue to animate many of these harmful processes, while also prompting pressing questions about the relationship between human and more-than-human worlds. How are political economic processes implicated in new forms of dispossession? What is the best way to account for the slow violence of toxic pollution? How should scholars respond to the ending of local lifeways and place-based societies? At the same time, anthropologists have also focused on mitigation efforts, adding complexity to our understanding of the politics of protection efforts, the permeabilities between human and more-than human words, and the way that the Anthropocene affords us with new imaginative capabilities. What insights does this literature offer scholars writing in responses to crises? What does it contribute to public understandings of the relationships between environments, health, and power? And what broader take-aways might there be for debates about the future of life in the Anthropocene? To explore these questions, this graduate seminar organizes anthropological and allied social theory literatures around four different themes—conservation, exploitation, contamination, and re-imagination–as relates to human/nature relationships. We aim to grapple with how power operates in and through environment at a moment when human/nature relationship have become matters of life and death. Topics include Anthropocene/Plantationocene studies, coloniality & decolonization, infrastructure and the built environment, affect, resistance, and repair.

Culture & Politics of Mental Health

Undergraduate Lecture Course. Are emotions universal, or are they culturally specific? Are talk therapies, drug regimes and diagnostic categories effective in the same ways cross-culturally? And, thinking beyond cultural diversity, how does psychological knowledge intersect with power and capital? How, for instance, are some qualities made to seem more “healthy” than others? Finally, do affective disorders carry a biological marker, or are they the result of particular ways of seeing? And what difference does that distinction make to people who provide mental healthcare, and those living under the description of disorder? At their core such questions are fundamentally anthropological, touching on topics of personhood, identity, subjectivity, medical authority and power and temporality, to name a few. This course explores these topics by exploring several ways in which anthropology has intersected with “the psychological.” Those include: studies that have sought to add anthropological depth to a psychological accounting of the human; studies that have interrogated the “psy-ences’” as a social institution enmeshed in relations of power; and studies exploring the increasing biomedicalization of mental health. The goal is to gain not only an appreciation of the rich diversity of human experience, but also a critical understanding of how our feelings and senses of wellbeing are structured by forces beyond ourselves.

Anthropology of the Anthropocene

Undergraduate Seminar. The “Anthropocene” is the name that many scholars are using to name a new epoch in the Earth’s history. The idea is that human impacts on the planet have grown to such a scale as to match other Earth system phenomena. The signs of the times include anthropogenic climate change, the impending sixth extinction (due in part of human-caused habitat loss), the disappearance of coral reefs and ocean acidification, etc. What sense can we, as concerned humans, make of this situation? And how can anthropology help us to grapple with the multiple meanings of the current age? How do the answers to these questions vary across different groups? And what are the prospects for confronting this shared challenge as a collective when responsibility for the crisis, and possibilities to survive, are often unevenly distributed? This course examines these questions from two angles: disaster and adaptation/hope. We will devote significant time to reading contemporary ethnographies from around the world. These texts demonstrate a variety of approaches and outlooks on the current planetary crisis. To prepare to engage with this material, we also devote several weeks at the start of class to read up on the history of the Anthropocene as a concept and scientific descriptor. And we also explore the question of whether the Anthropocene is a concept that means the same thing to every person.

Global Health & Humanitarianism

Undergraduate Seminar. In the face of various global crises—health inequality, refugees, violence, natural disasters—the impulse to do something is understandable; however, helping is far from straightforward. What does it mean to help? Should those receiving it be consulted? What are the politics of help? This discussion-based seminar sets out to investigate these and other questions by examining two recent trends in international assistance—humanitarianism and global health. Humanitarianism, in its contemporary form, mobilizes international sentiment, ranging from sympathy to outrage, to address a variety of crises—displaced peoples (refugees), natural disasters, genocide, hunger. The movement for Global Heath, a successor to international health aid, leverages private/public partnerships to measure and eradicate the rising “burden of disease” globally. While distinct in their practices, both of these share a vision of global responsibility, as well, generally, as a transfer of expertise and concern from the global north to the global south. The course will place these two trends in historical and critical perspective by introducing students to a careful, anthropologically-based consideration of them. It seeks to push beyond two forms of naiveté—on the one hand the idea that help is always good; on the other, that it always masks some ulterior motive. The primary aim is to promote students’ awareness of the political, socioeconomic, medical and cultural complexity of the globalization of humanitarian and health concerns, and the importance of anthropological perspectives in discussing unintended problems and pursuing solutions.

Graduate Core Course in Cultural Anthropology

Graduate Seminar. This course is an intensive, graduate-level introduction to key theoretical paradigms in Euro-American sociocultural anthropology since the late-19th century. The purpose is to provide you with an understanding of how anthropological ways of thinking have been shaped through specific debates, controversies and lines of inquiry. In the first half of the course you will see an evolving discourse on such core topics as culture, function, society, structure, comparison, objectivity, materiality, symbols and signs, agents, history, change, practice, method, politics and anthropology’s status as a social science, to name a few. And you will learn about how lines of inquiry that were formed at an earlier stage (for example kinship and social structure) return later in altered form (e.g. challenges to the category of “kinship”; interventions around gender and sexuality). Throughout the semester, partner readings will also destabilize “the canon,” calling attention to its construction, who (or what) is left out, and how the history of theory in cultural anthropology also bears the imprint of hierarchy, position and privilege. In the second half of the course we examine anthropology’s “reflexive turn”—a series of moments in which cultural critique took a more central place in the discipline. Topics covered include gender and sexuality, race, knowledge, power, difference, decolonization, ontology and posthumanism.

The Social Life of Climate Change

Undergraduate Seminar. Anthropogenic climate change is arguably the biggest challenge of the 21st century. If scientists are correct, we stand to lose whole cities due to sea-level rise, suffer food shortage due to desertification, trigger the sixth mass extinction, and endure unforeseen effects on human livelihood. What perspectives do scholars in anthropology and related fields offer on this contemporary problem—a problem that, elusively, appears on a future horizon? This course draws on emerging social science scholarship to show how an attention to the social and cultural dimensions of climate change can help us think about the causes, consequences and possible responses to the “carbon problem.” Topics covered include: the basic science of climate change; consumer culture and global inequality; climate policy as seen through the anthropology of development; living through disaster; representing slow violence; and, finally, how climate change is prompting us to rethink “the human” and “the future.” Together, these topics will offer students a robust sense of the social life of climate change, as well as a set of critical tools for thinking about this pressing contemporary problem.

Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Undergraduate Lecture. Cultural anthropology is a social science that seeks to understand human diversity and social life. This course aims to introduce students to the fundamental methods, theories, and concepts of cultural anthropology. Some of the questions we explore include: How widely variable are the norms and forms of social organization? How do cultural values shape our perception of the world, our language, and our identity? How do class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity influence how we position ourselves/are positioned in the world? How does the mass media shape conceptions of family and community? Finally, how should we understand cultural difference in a rapidly changing world? In exploring these questions this course will seek to demonstrate the usefulness, but also complexity, of the concept of culture and related anthropological modes of observation and interpretation. Readings, lectures, and activities draw on case studies from a variety of settings – both familiar and distant – in order to examine sources of commonality and difference between human groups. By the end of the course you can expect to have a solid understanding of the history of cultural anthropology, its central topics and approaches, and a sense of new and exciting areas of ethnographic research. Finally, you will see the ways in which cultural anthropology is a productively reflexive field, in constant conversation with its past and the politics of representing others.

Anthropology of Latin America

Undergraduate Seminar. Latin America is vast, covering 7.4 million square miles of territory, and includes 33 countries, nearly 450 languages, and diverse histories. Counting it as one entity is challenging. Nonetheless, a range of historical processes, experiences, cultural orientations and trajectories link together this diversity. Colonialism, indigenous dispossession, slavery, post-colonial nationalisms, indigenous struggles for sovereignty, and navigating neoimperialism are just a few such shared histories. In this course we explore a range of processes that cut across the region, tying “Latin America” to other transnational and global processes. Topics explored include neoliberalism, development and democracy; extraction and indigenous dispossession; legacies of war, violence and security; novel racial formations; migration patterns; and alternative knowledge and healing systems. Students can expect to gain broad knowledge of the region, an understanding of the ways in which Latin America has globalized over the last centuries, and what that has meant for its diverse peoples.

Precarity and Affect

Graduate Seminar. Precarity, as primarily used in European social movements and taken up elsewhere, references a shift in the conditions of late-stage capitalism towards more flexible, irregular, and casual labor. This shift has been accompanied by a turn towards affective labor: capitalism that draws upon and produces/commodifies affect. This course explores the two concepts of precarity and affect in terms of their intersection, overlap, and interface: How is affect experienced and produced under conditions of global capitalism and expanding inequity, risk, and insecurity in social living around the world?  We look here at: affect under precarious conditions of labor and life; how affect gets managed and extracted by post-socialist/neoliberal economies; and the commodification of affect but also activism and solidarity generated by an affect of hope or outrage over (shared) precarity. The course will tack between theoretical and ethnographic studies of the two concepts, considering their utility, how they can be expanded in other directions, and what an anthropological approach does, or could, lend to these topics. How does one do an ethnography of affect/precarity? What might a theoretics or politics or ethics of precarity/affect entail? What does anthropology illuminate about the affective landscapes of contemporary precarious existence?

Everyday Life After Socialism

Graduate/Undergraduate Seminar. When everyday life as one knows it is disrupted, how does one survive? This course explores this broad question through the prism of the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse and re-composition as Russia. Taking as a point of departure “the everyday,” the course will explore the ordinary intimacies, pleasures, and also forms of violence and exclusion that have proliferated throughout Russia as people have sought to survive the turmoil of the 1990s and 2000s. We focus on the themes of art and/of death, gods, food & rest, life’s infrastructures, home and homelessness, and belonging. The course’s aim is to consider the everyday not as a site mundane existence, but rather as a locus of social and cultural vitality, as well as political contestation.

Fieldwork Methods

Undergraduate Seminar. This course has two objectives: to explore what is—and how to do—ethnography, and to engage some of the central debates and discussions about ethnographic method in anthropology. Over the course of the semester you will conduct research that culminates in an ethnography of some aspect of social life; at the same time, the course readings will prompt deeper reflection on, and perhaps even trouble, that research. The tension between these two objectives is an important aspect of the course. Beyond being just a methods class, this course will challenge you to think about epistemology—that is what we know, how we know it, and how we gather information to constitute knowledge. Thus, students will be asked to consider in practice and also as a conceptual operation how to transform gossip, field notes, impressions, documents, interviews, emotions, personal experiences, entanglement, dislike and love into ethnography.

Olivier de Montmollin

Olivier de Montmollin received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1985. He is an archaeologist interested in the operation of ancient political systems and their impacts on settlement patterns, with a focus on the Maya and other cultures in pre-hispanic Mesoamerica. His other interests include time scales as they are understood by archaeologists and by ancient Mesoamericans, space and ritual communications in ancient cities, changing forms of conflict and consensus linking Mayas to outsiders before and after Spanish conquest, pre-Axial and Axial cosmologies and their impacts on political practices in Mesoamerica (and the Andes), and ethnoarchaeology. He does fieldwork in southern Mexico.

 

Research Description

Maya Political Organization

The apparent reproduction of a full three-level political hierarchy within Tenam Rosario is an indicator of centralization, suggesting that the political functions at all levels are centrally carried out at the capital.

Olivier de Montmollin 1989 The Archaeology of Political Structure, Cambridge University Press, p.229

Ojo de Agua lacks Tenam Rosario's symmetrical arrangement of similar-looking plaza complexes flanking a central acropolis-palace...a political microcosm is absent at Ojo de Agua.

Olivier de Montmollin 1995 Settlement and Politics in Three Maya Polities, Prehistory Press, p.121.

excavation - modest residence at Iglesia Hundida

excavation – elite residence, Loma Zorrillo

survey - Cerro La Tuna, residences

survey – Tenam Concepcion, civic building

 

Courses

Ancient States in the New World

Graduate/Undergraduate Lecture. This course uses political anthropology concepts and methods to explore diverse political themes relating to ancient prehispanic polities (states and empires) in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Political themes include: intrusion of Old World Spaniards into New World polities; native Mesoamerican and Andean views of their own history and political practices; political actors - apical (royal) rulers and their subjects (nobles and commoners); communications - writing, performance, learning; internal strife - colonial and prehispanic era resistance of subjects against their rulers; external strife - geopolitics (war and diplomacy, Hegemonic and Territorial geopolitical arrangements); political cycling, polities rising and falling; economic underpinnings for politics - political economy, cities, taxes, administration; retrospective accountings - lessons and heritage material gathered by ancient Mesoamericans and Andeans and by current Latin Americans and North Americans as a result of studying ancient New World states and empires.

Evidence used to explore the above themes comes from sets of prehispanic New World states (and sometimes empires) associated with Aztec, Inka, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Maya, Chimu, Tiwanaku-Wari, and Moche civilizations. A principal focus is on the Aztec and Inka empires. These two independently developing empires are the best documented of all ancient prehispanic polities in the New World, as a result of having been conquered and incorporated (and lavishly described) by the agents of an expanding Spanish empire in the 16th century AD.

It makes things even more interesting that the Aztec and Inka empires were highly contrastive, covering between them a wide span of political variations. Information about other states (mostly earlier and more sketchily documented ones) can also be used to further widen the scope of contrastive variations.

Several outcomes result from examining and comparing the themes across the Mesoamerican and Andean cases.

We get a sense of what has and has not changed in political practices and institutions from ancient prehispanic times to modern Latin America. We can start to figure out differences and similarities between 1. ancient states in a non-western and non-axial (New World) statecrafting trajectory and 2. modern nation-states appearing late in a western and axial (Old World) statecrafting trajectory. On a more abstract-conceptual level, we get an understanding of how native New World ideas and practices concerning statecraft converge with or diverge from western political science theories about statecraft (Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau and onwards). This highlights a central feature of what makes political anthropology interesting - the use of both insider (native, emic) perspectives and outsider (western, etic) perspectives.

We can draw lessons from the past. We get a basis for judging which (if any) political practices and institutions from the ancient New World can still provide inspiration, guidance, or warnings for present and future political policies and arrangements in Latin America and elsewhere.  

Ancient Civilizations

Undergraduate Lecture. This course covers the rise, operation, and fall of several ancient civilizations, the largest and most complex forms of social organization to emerge in pre-industrial times. Lectures span the archaeology and history of several regions recognized as significant arenas for the early and mostly independent development of ancient civilizations: the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Basin, China, Southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, and Andean South America. For each region of ancient civilization, several historical stages are reviewed: the rise of earliest civilization from a baseline of ranked societies (chiefdoms), the operation and eventual decline of earliest civilization, and the cyclical rise and fall of successor civilizations.

Ancient civilizations are viewed within a framework of underlying theoretical themes that guide how scholars can organize their thinking about ancient civilizations (and about human societies in general). Theoretical underthemes relate to:

CAUSAL FACTORS AND UNITS OF STUDY

 1 Material and Mental Factors

 2 Conflict and Co-Operation Factors in Political and Social Life

 3 Collectivities (Institutions) and Individuals (Actors) 

OBSERVATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

 4 Outsider (Etic) and Insider (Emic)

 5 Top-Down Elitist and Bottom-Up Populist

 6 Retrospective (Hindsight) and “In The Moment”     

SOCIO-POLITICAL MECHANISMS/PRINCIPLES

 7 Hereditary-Ascribed-Stratified and Achieved-Meritocratic-Egalitarian

WORLD OF ANCIENT IDEAS

 8 Non-Axial and Axial Cosmologies-Worldviews

 9 Relative Gap between Ontology (Religion) and Epistemology (Technology)

10 Communications Tools - Fluid Speech and Fixed Writing-Iconography.

The approach taken to the multiple cases of ancient civilizations is a comparative one. Our aim in the class is to come to understand noteworthy differences and similarities among ancient civilizations. To bring this into sharpest focus, the last part of the course covers cross-civilization themes of economics, politics, warfare, urbanism, religion and values, literacy, quality of life, and lessons gained from studying the past experiences of people in ancient civilizations.

An outcome of looking at ancient civilizations individually and comparatively is a better understanding of both unfamiliar and familiar aspects of the “past as a foreign country,” which, to the untrained eye seems so distant from our present-day concerns and experiences.

Mesoamerica Before Cortez

Undergraduate Lecture. This course focuses on ancient prehispanic Mesoamerica (in what is now Mexico and Central America). On a global scale, prehispanic Mesoamerica was one of 6-7 areas in the ancient world with locally original development of ancient civilizations. Ancient civilizations within Mesoamerica involved a diachronic development of institutions and practices such as states, cities, armies, irrigation farming, market exchange, writing, strict social inequality, and baroquely elaborate religious beliefs and rituals. Developments of civilizations are tracked and compared across Mesoamerica’s long-lasting social and linguistic sub-divisions: the Central Highlands with Nahuat people, the Southern Highlands with Zapotec and Mixtec peoples, the Gulf Lowlands with Olmec-Zoque people, and the Southern Lowlands with Maya people. In checking these developments, we aim to arrive at:

1. An appreciation of the methodological tools used by archaeologists, historians, art historians, ethnographers, linguists, and biological anthropologists to generate evidence about ancient individuals and events.

2. A crafting of some compelling stories about what happened to ancient families and their communities in various social, political, and economic circumstances.

3. Explanations of how and why ancient people and communities in different times and places within Mesoamerica had similar or different lifestyles and experiences. 

4. Understandings of how prehispanic developments in Mesoamerica continue to impact heritage arguments and socio-political practices in parts of the modern Mexico, Central America, and USA.

Archaeology Theory

Undergraduate Seminar (Writing Class). This course covers theories used by anthropological archaeologists when trying to make sense of (prehistoric and historic) archaeological records. Theories from Social Anthropology and other branches of present-focused social sciences are considered with a view to understanding how these theories can be adjusted for meaningful application to people and events from past times. In a nutshell, the ontological and epistemological challenge we face is how best to use analogies from recent times in order to relate unobservable past behaviors to the material residues of those behaviors currently observable by us in archaeological records. The journey through archaeological theory takes us through the following waystations.

GROUNDWORK: Levels Of Theory [High Theory – Middle-Range Theory – Base-Level Theory]; Select Underthemes (High Theory)

HIGH THEORY PROGRAMS: Culture History; Processual New Archaeology, Social Evolution, Ongoing and Cognitive Processual Archaeology; Marxism; Structuralism; After Structuralism; Neo Darwinism

ONTOLOGY/EPISTEMOLOGY: Agency of People and Objects; Time Spans

SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES: Discontinuities (Past is a Foreign Country)

MORE EPISTEMOLOGY: Working with Analogies (Source-Side Issues); Archaeology and History; Archaeology and Art History

ADDITIONAL SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES: Big-Picture Social Evolution [Technology], Disasters and Collapses; Identity, Style, Gender; Early Cognition; Communications; Religion; Politic; Heritage (Nations and Native Minorities); Urbanism.

Ethnoarchaeology

Graduate/Undergraduate Seminar (Writing Class). This course examines ideas and case studies from the anthropological field of ethnoarchaeology. Ethnoarchaeology lies at an intersection between ethnography and archaeology, two of anthropology’s sub-disciplines. Ethnoarchaeologists want to observe living peoples’ practices and to quiz them about their thoughts and behaviors, especially as the thoughts and practices relate to the material record produced by people in the present. Of course, it’s a material record produced by ancient people (dead, inert, mute) which is the primary source of evidence that prehistoric archeologists observe and work with directly. 

In other words, an Ethnoarchaeologist sees people acting/thinking and she also sees the material “signatures” of actions and thoughts (houses, artifacts, ecofacts). An Archaeologist does not see people acting/thinking but she does see the material “signatures” of unobserved actions and thoughts. For archaeologists looking backward into past time, ethnoarchaeology studies provide useful information needed to build interpretive models for inferring what were the past peoples’ thoughts and practices that produced the material remains seen and studied today in the archaeological record.

For social anthropologists (and other social scientists such as historians, political scientists, and sociologists) looking across a range of past-present-future timespans, ethnoarchaeological studies are interesting because they contribute fresh and vivid information about the varied ways that relatively more recent (more directly observable) peoples, including our WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) selves, are entangled with material worlds.

In the widest theoretical sense, the span of ethnoarchaeological studies and discoveries is becoming cosmological, part of an Ontological Turn in social sciences. It is starting to cover the relations between people and their “material” world, with that world being expanded beyond just inorganic matter to include plants, bugs, worms, animals, and what are/were often perceived to be divine forces. Thinking about ethnoarchaeology in these ways also allows us as mere archaeologists to access and explore a path-breaking re-think in Social Anthropology and other social sciences about how humans have connected and continue to connect themselves to worlds of animals, plants, and things (a re-think known as the Ontological Turn).

Traveling through an ethnoarchaeology theme park, we visit the following attractions: Thinking Ethnoarchaeology; Site Formation, Fieldwork; Subsisting - Hunter/Gathering; Subsisting – Farming; (Categorizing and) Crafting Pots and Lithics; Identifying Ourselves Stylishly; Interacting, Feasting, Big-Manning, Factioning; House Containers Enveloping Communities, Families; Families Experiencing Homes and Gardens; Managing the Dead; Thinking with Things, Religion; Relating to Things, Divinities, and Other Non-Human Species.

Archaeological Method and Theory

Graduate Seminar (Writing Class). This course covers methods and theories in anthropological archaeology.

TOPIC 0 - Setting Up A Framework

*Levels of Theory: Material is organized according to a framework of levels of theory - high (substantive) theory [HT], middle-range or bridging theory [MRT], and basal or observational theory [BLT]. In a colloquial sense, HT corresponds to theory proper and MRT and BLT correspond to methods.

*Recurrent Underthemes: Different HT programs’ claims and research practices are understood by using a working checklists of persistently recurring underthemes. One such checklist is the following:

HOW WE DESIGN OUR STUDIES (PROCEDURE ISSUES)

Units Of Study

1 social systems and individual actors

Epistemological Perspectives

2 outsider (etic) and insider (emic)

3 retrospective and “in the moment” time placements

4 realist and anti-realist

5 correspondence and coherence truth criteria

HOW WE CONCEPTUALIZE THE TARGET OF OUR STUDY (SUBSTANCE ISSUES)

Causal Factors

6 material and mental/ideological 

7 coercion and consensus in socio-politics

Socio-Political Mechanisms and Logics

8 top-down (elitist) and bottom-up (populist) mechanisms

9 constructivist and essentialist logics for identities 

World Of Ideas and Information

10 modern (axial) cosmologies and ancient (non-axial) cosmologies 

11 matches between cosmo-ontology and epistemology

12 information technology - fluid speech, fixed writing 

*Historical Discontinuities: Thoughtful archaeologist looking back at the past can check their presentism by considering historical discontinuities or they can indulge their presentism by ignoring or minimizing such discontinuities. A partial (complex society-oriented) listing of such discontinuities covers:

1. ECONOMICS - Non-Market or Market

2. ENERGY CAPTURE – Feeble to Massive

3. presence/absence of Concept of CIVILIZATION vs. NOT-CIVILIZATION

4. STATECRAFT – Archaic to Early Modern to Modern Regimes

5. presence/absence of ETHNIC-BASED CONFLICT and NATIONALISM

6. NON-AXIAL vs. AXIAL COSMOLOGY

7. presence/absence of “RELIGION”

8. GROUP vs. INDIVIDUALIZED PERSONHOOD

9. COMPLEMENTARY vs. PATRIARCHAL GENDER

10. presence/absence of FEMINIST Concepts

11. presence/absence of LITERACY

12. presence/absence of Printing Press

13. presence/absence of AESTHETICS and ART

 

TOPICS 1-4 - Bazaar of HT Programs 

We get an overview of several kinds of HT programs used by archaeologists. The varieties of HT are found as one (metaphorically) cruises up and down the more programmatic aisles of a theory bazaar. The HT perspectives are arranged in a series of aisles linked to three variants of past-focused thinking that emphasize different kinds of records – archaeology (things), history (glottographic and semasiographic communications), and art history (images); a fourth multi-aisle contains a potpourri of thematically shiny new stuff.

TOPIC 1 Archaeology Aisle: Old Archaeology (Culture History); New Archaeology (Socio-Cultural Evolution [SCE]); Ongoing SCE; Social (Structural-Functional) Archaeology; Ideology-Focused SCE; Archaeology Of Mind; Behavioralism; Neo-Darwinian Selectionism 

TOPIC 2 History Aisle: Marxism; “Annales” (Social History); Americanist Ethnohistory; Critical Historical Archaeology; Historiography

TOPIC 3 Art History Aisle: Earlier and Ongoing Post-Processualism;

Structuralisme; Thinking And Communicating with Things; Image and Word

TOPIC 4 More Aisles Worth Strolling Down: Next Thing - Matter-Mind; Next Thing – Comparisons/Networks, Complexity; Advanced Agency – Cartesians to Experientials (Phenomenology); Historical Discontinuities/Continuities; Externals-Internals, Philosophy Of Science

TOPIC 5 - Material Correlates Of Ancient People’s Experiences-Thoughts-Practices-Behaviors: deals with middle range theory =  efforts to bridge between material patterns observed in the archaeological record and what really interests anthropological archaeologists - the behaviors, experiences, thoughts, and practices of past peoples and their societies, seen in the contexts of conditions and events occurring in the past. Middle range tools worth thinking about and understanding include: ethnographic, historical, and other kinds of analogy, replicative experiments, and ethnoarchaeology. Understanding the formal logic and the informal manipulation of analogies is a key to working around Middle Range Theory in anthropological archaeology.

TOPIC 6 - Research Designs For Problem-Oriented Anthropological Archaeology: explores why and how different levels of theories and observational methods are conventionally woven together in the research designs crafted by anthropological archaeologists.

TOPICS 7-9 Dimensions Of Archaeology – Form, Time, Space

Two Topics address how archaeologists deal with the form[al] dimension of their discipline. TOPIC 7 covers form-related issues relating to material styles which in turn are linked to substantive identity/ethnicity issues. TOPIC 8 covers additional form-related issues associated with classifications of artifacts. We can also explore some classificatory-typological reasoning used in other realms such as settlements (space-substance), social organization (substance), and roving bands of rival archaeologists. Finally, form-related issues are linked to substantive technology issues.

TOPIC 9 concerns a variety of ways that archaeologists can think about and “measure” an archaeological record’s time dimensions. There are also some extensions into the substantive arena of other peoples’ times.

TOPICS 10-13 - Thinking About and Investigating Substantive Research Themes Relevant To Past Societies

The last topics cover examples of how diverse archaeological theories and methods are used to develop currently interesting substantive research themes and findings relating to a variety of past societies. The research themes are ordered in a way that reflects their varying relevance to societies arrayed for analytical convenience on a continuum from earlier smaller-simpler cases to later larger-more complex cases – bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states, empires (BTCSE).

TOPIC 10 covers earlyish Band/Tribe-flavored themes: Early Thought; Early Inequality; Roots Of Farming.

TOPIC 11 covers Tribe/Chiefdom/State-flavored themes: Religion; Burials.

TOPIC 12 covers State/Empire-flavored themes: Ancient and Modern Political Economics; Literacy; City Living.

TOPIC 13 covers State/Empire-flavored themes: Politics; Nationalism, Heritage, Resistance.

Maya Resistance 

Graduate/Undergraduate Lecture. In this class we aim to understand the motivations, practices, and experiences of Maya peoples (ancient through modern – spanning AD 1-now) as they have mounted political, cultural, and economic resistance and accommodation with reference to non-Maya outsiders. If you are interested in the workings of xenophobia-nativism versus xenophilia-cosmopolitanism, the Maya cases of dealing with outsiders can be powerfully informative and evocative, especially when viewed across the diversity of circumstances and possibilities that characterizes the following timespans: Prehispanic times (AD 1-1520), Spanish conquest/colonial times (AD 1520-1820), Mestizo independence times (AD 1820-1940), and Mestizo modernizing times (AD 1940-now).

To make better sense of the issues we start by moving diachronically through Maya-outsider interactions for the last 500 years, book-ended by an epic (spice and gold and soul-seeking) Spanish conquest of Mayaland and an equally epic expansion of globalizing (income-seeking) Maya workers into foreign places and economies. With a handle on the better documented and theorized last 500 years (the “modern” era in European history terms), we go on to cover the previous and much more thinly documented and theorized prehispanic cases of Maya-outsider interactions (AD 1-1520). A key aim here (especially for those who are “aficionados” of studying the past using “historical imagination”) is to puzzle out the relevance of understandings (and analogies) based on more thickly understood modern times (AD 1520-2015) to arguably very different pre-modern times (AD 1-1520).

With reference to the different time periods, a variety of anthropological research methods are useful. For the Maya in colonial/independence times ethnohistory predominates. For the most recent Maya the emphasis is on ethnography. For the prehispanic Maya the focus is on archaeology and epigraphy.

To make sense of the diverse cases of conflict (xenophobia) and accommodation (xenophilia), we can draw on multiple lines of anthropological thinking, many of them originally developed with reference to studies of Maya people, communities, and polities. Such lines of thinking concern: violent peasant rebellions, everyday peasant resistance, ethnic nationalism, cultural essentialism, invented traditions, testimonial history, mythohistory, cultural renaissance or revitalization movements, gender and native authenticity, religious conversion (orthodoxy and  syncretism), axial versus non-axial thinking (with more or less exoticizing for divine non-human forces), ethnic and communal tradition as imposed trap or chosen defense mechanism, uses of material culture for communication, and literacy as trap or defense.
Topics and cases include the following.

INTRODUCTION: Maya resisters; up and down the river of time (AD 1-2015); ideas about native resistance in anthropological and world historical contexts.

CONQUEST/COLONIAL TROUBLES (AD 1520-1820): Spanish conquests; Cancuc revolt; Canek disturbance and others; colonial overview, independent frontiers.

INDEPENDENCE TROUBLES (AD 1820-1940): Independence overview;

Yucatan Caste War and aftermath; Chamula Caste War.

RECENT TROUBLES (AD 1940-now): Chiapas - indigenist Mexican state, conflict performed, Zapatistas; War in Guatemala – overview, communities, testimonies, Maya cultural renaissance seen by us (etics) and them (emics), post-war Guatemala, globalized livelihood, new religions; modern comparisons.

LOOKING BACK TO PREHISPANIC TROUBLES (AD 1-1520): prehispanic overview; Classic Maya kingdoms and Teotihuacan; Epi/Postclassic Toltec “conquest” of Yucatan; Postclassic Highland bi-ethnic “conquest” states; everyday prehispanic Maya peasant resistance.

New World Native Resistance 

Graduate/Undergraduate Lecture. The class covers native societies in the New World, with special attention to how people in these societies worked out their conceptual, political, and economic resistance to outsiders who were seeking to dominate them in conquest, colonization, and post-colonization settings. The analytical focus is primarily on native insurgents but also extends to non-native (Spanish, Mestizo, and African) practitioners of domination and counter-insurgency directed at natives. The entry point is to focus on native strategies of resistance, but other strategies available to natives for interacting with outsiders come into view as well, including collaboration, complicity, emulation, self-assimilation, and exodus into a diaspora. The native societies we look at exist(ed) in an environment of states and empires. Taking a long view of the subject, we consider cases of overt and covert conflict and resistance ranging from prehispanic times right through to current times, with the cases of resistance sprinkled across a span of 2,000 years. The first part of the class covers colonial through early independence and modern times (1520-now). After getting to know that 500 year span of variably dysfunctional relations between New World natives and exotic Old World outsiders, we turn back to pre-colonial times (1-1520) to explore in what ways conceptual/cosmological, political, and economic conflicts might have played out in the earlier pre-colonial states and empires and to consider how native vs. outsider alignments were relevant to such conflicts.

Many of the cases examined concern Maya peoples and societies in what is now southern Mexico and upper Central America. Since the Spanish conquest, Maya societies have been impressively troublesome (squeaky wheels) to their Spanish, Criollo, and Mestizo rulers. Consequently there is almost unequaled breadth and detail in outsider-generated “rap sheets” for the Maya. Additionally, Maya leaders and scribes generated their own elaborate (and sometimes sarcastic) records of their rancorous conflicts with outsiders. For comparison, balance, and variety, additional cases of resistant native societies are drawn from other parts of New Spain/Mexico and from Andean parts of South America.

Appreciating what the records can tell about the experiences and thoughts of the people who participated in the stirring and tragic disputes between natives and outsiders is engaging work for scholars using outsider and retrospective perspectives. It forces them to get over themselves by shedding solipsism, ethnocentrism, and presentism, while developing “historical imagination”. Following a recipe from Marshall Sahlins (anthropologist, comedian, pamphleteer), in order to appreciate past peoples and their interesting troubles, we can bring counter-pieties, lashings of dark humor, lateral thinking, and keen curiosity about what actors before us were interested in [Sahlins 2008 The Western Illusion of Human Nature, Prickly Paradigm Press].

New World Resistance topics and cases include.

THINKING ABOUT NATIVE RESISTANCE [Then and Now]: Latin America, native resisters, timerivers; starter toolkits for thinking about native resistance

CONTACT/COLONIAL TIMES [1520-1820]: Spanish Conquests for Mesoamerica and Andes [1520-1570]; Colonial overview; Cancuc Maya [1712] and Canek Maya [1761] revolts; independent natives on New Spain frontiers - Peten Itza Maya [1697] and Pueblos [1680-1696]; Andes Colonial revolts [1500s-1600s]; Tupac Amaru rebellion [1780-1781]

INDEPENDENCE TIMES [1820-1920]: Independence overview; Yucatan Maya Caste War [1840-1910]; Chamula Maya Caste War [1868-1870]; later Mapuche Wars in Chile [1820-1883]

MODERN TIMES [1920-2020]: Modern overview/issues; Revolutionary Indigenist Mexican State and Mayas [1910-1980]; conflict performed [timelessly] and Maya Zapatistas [1994-now]; Guatemala War [1980s]; Testimonies and Maya Cultural Renaissance [1990s-now]; Andean Nativism/Indigenism [20th c.]; Peru - Sendero Luminoso [1980-now]; Mesoamerica and Andes - Globalization, Diaspora, Evangelization [1980s-now]

PREHISPANIC TIMES [1-1520] - Prehispanic overview; Mesoamerica - Classic Maya kingdoms and Teotihuacan [200-500]; Postclassic Mayas and Toltecs [900-1520]; Andes - Middle Horizon diasporas and “globalizations” [600-1000]; “Ethnic” polities before/during Inka Empire [1200-1450, 1450-1540]; peasant resistance vs. exoticizing rulers [timeless]

UPSTREAM and DOWN: backwards/forwards with native resistance [2000 BP – now]