The Ritual Mode of Production in the Casas Grandes Social Field

This chapter introduces a mode of production approach focused on how social labor was appropriated in the Casas Grandes Region of Chihuahua, Mexico. A domestic mode of production seems to have defined productive activities throughout the sequence beginning in the Viejo period (AD 600–1200) and continuing into the Medio period (AD 1200-1450). However, in the latter half of the Medio period, a ritual mode of production developed around Paquimé in which surplus labor was increasingly appropriated for site construction, communal agriculture for feasting and more elaborate craft production. Rather than a distinct mode, however, I argue that these new relations reflect an elaboration of the domestic mode that limited exploitation and elites power.

Kin-Mode Contradictions, Crises, and Transformations in the Archaic Lower Mississippi Valley

A Marxist perspective considers contradictions within modes of production that ultimately lead to crises and transformations to other modes, providing a framework for interpreting political economic change in human societies. This chapter describes how kinship and marriage structure social relations of production and contradictions in kin-modes that may lead to social transformations. An archaeological framework for making inferences on kinship and marriage is applied to the Archaic periods of the Lower Mississippi Valley to explain the enigmatic development of early mound-building foraging societies and their dissolution in the Tchefuncte period. The Archaic periods reflect competitive “Crow/Omaha” kinship and marriage—explaining mound building and widespread craft production and exchange—that experienced the disproportionate demographic growth among descent groups hypothesized to cause crises in social reproduction. This was followed by a social transformation in the Tchefuncte period to bilateral descent networks with a less competitive “complex” marriage system.

Applying Modes of Production Analysis to Non-State, or Anarchic, Societies

The concept of modes of production has been a constructive way to analyze state societies in archaeological history. Yet the utility for archaeologists working with non-state, or anarchic societies, can be quite generalized, mainly useful for broad temporal scales of analysis. To apply to non-state societies, I reorient modes of production from historical epochs to the microscale, evaluating the seasonal shifts of activity throughout the annual round. For complex hunter-gatherers, such as the Coast Salish of the Northwest Coast, modes of production shifted constantly season by season as they adjusted their subsistence strategies toward the availability of varied resources. In so doing, they implemented distinct means of production and varying relations of production to harness those resources most effectively. Some involved small-scale formations, with dispersed families (egalitarian and autonomous), while others involved corporate multi-family groups (hierarchical with ranks of authority), for instance, to process fish during annual salmon runs. In this way, Salish individuals engaged different modes of production throughout the year, each varying in levels of autonomy, which they often pursued. By focusing modes of production into particular modes, we can track the microscale revolutions that occur within broader historical epochs.

Introducing Modes of Production in Archaeology

Many readers (and especially those English-speakers under ~50 years of age) primarily employ secondhand knowledge of the writing of Marx and Engels. Basic Marxist concepts that structure analysis (such as mode of production) have been filtered through the writings of anthropologists and understood under different names and are now attributed to scholars of the second half of the twentieth century. We therefore begin by reviewing key concepts from Marx and Engels’ original writings and define basic Marxist terms.

Re-envisioning Prehispanic Mesoamerican Economies

Exuberant Spanish accounts of the 16th century Aztec market system have been part of the documentary record for hundreds of years. Yet the significance of markets and marketplace exchanges in the prehispanic Mesoamerican world has consistently been under-theorized until relatively recently. One of the key, but not sole, factors that has forced a shift in our analytical framing is the archaeological evidence that almost all production (craft and agrarian) was situated domestically in prehispanic Mesoamerica, yet many households were producing at least in part for exchange. In consequence, centralized managerial control over production would have been difficult if not impossible to sustain. Although such findings have cast great doubt on long-held visions of Mesoamerican command economies, understanding how power was funded in different prehispanic time/space contexts remains a central issue with a greater analytical focus now shifted to the fiscal foundations of collective action, governance, and power. Despite important shifts in the specific lessons and legacies that we draw from Marx’s historical analysis, intellectual parallels and debts to this materialist frame of thought remain, and these help generate new questions to guide the way forward for studying this region’s past.

Social Formations Analysis

Gender relations and human agency are central to today’s dominant archaeological thought on social change. This chapter argues that Marxist analyses are appropriate for characterizing both class and gender relationships: the structural contexts for agency. However, the routine interpretation of a single mode of production for a group or population suggests only one type of social relation of production with only one social contradiction, which glosses over what are arguably more complex class and/or gender dynamics. Therefore, a social formations perspective is advocated whereby archaeologists can interpret multiple articulating modes or forms of production that create multiple contradictions and contexts structuring the possibilities for agency. In a case study on the prehispanic Chontal Maya, the framework identifies diverse contradictions within and among classes and genders in a tributary social formation having articulating forms of tributary and kinship modes. In another case study on the early Hohokam, the analysis leads to inferences on multiple age and gender contradictions within a social formation comprising articulating forms of the kinship mode, which suggests gendered agency altered relationships over time. The interpretations illustrate the framework’s capacity to identify multiple contexts for negotiating contradictions that better characterize the dynamic, complex lives of past peoples.

The Tributary Mode of Production and Justifying Ideologies

In his definition of the tributary mode of production, Eric Wolf proposes that those societies that extract economic surplus through political means generate religious models of the cosmos where supernatural beings provide a metaphor of tribute relations in the human world. As Wolf puts it, “…public power is thus transformed into a problem of private morality." This is a classic Marxist assertion that religion creates false consciousness and motivates people to act against their material interests. Rather than assuming this proposition is correct, anthropological data can be employed to assess it. This chapter evaluates whether a society’s mode of production corresponds to beliefs about the structure of the cosmos using ethnographic data from the eHRAF World Cultures database. Do societies where tribute is extracted by political means have similar justifying ideologies? Conversely, do societies where surplus extraction occurs through kin relations lack such justifying ideologies? My goal is to evaluate Wolf’s intuitively logical proposition with anthropological data. The implications of this evaluation are at the heart of a materialist understanding of causation by empirically evaluating whether material conditions influence ideational beliefs.

The Plantation Mode of Production

The use of enslaved labour has long produced a conundrum in the analysis of the Capitalist Mode of Production. By considering the incorporation of slavery into a distinct colonial variant of Capitalism, this chapter explores the concept of the Plantation Mode of Production. To illustrate the utility of this concept, this chapter explores how the Plantation Mode of Production was manifested in coffee plantations in early 19th century Jamaica.

Colonialism, Articulation, and Modes of Production at an Early Seventeenth-Century English Colony in the Western Caribbean

Early-modern European colonialism necessarily involved the transplantation of an existing capitalist mode of production into an unfamiliar environment. A key issue in the transplantation involved articulating with pre-existing forms of production and distribution. Understanding the process of articulation helps to explain the colonialist process and the expansion of capitalism in a broad way. The early seventeenth-century English colony of Providence Island in the Western Caribbean provides a useful, specific example.

Bronze Economy and Mode of Production

Control over the exchange of metal was crucial for the reproduction of society during the Bronze Age of Eurasia. In order to enter the global metal trade network, Bronze Age societies of temperate Europe exploited differential geographical control over valued products such as amber, tin, copper, and textiles in the development of regional specializations and in the creation of surplus value. Working from a Marxist perspective we argue that such regional interdependence and division of labour define a Bronze Economy, which formed part of a Eurasian Bronze Age Social Formation.