Identity and Power in the Ancient Andes

Tiwanaku Cities through Time

John Wayne Janusek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135940881
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Tiwanaku state was the political and cultural center of ancient Andean civilization for almost 700 years. Identity and Power is the result of ten years of research that has revealed significant new data. Janusek explores the origins, development, and collapse of this ancient state through the lenses of social identities--gender, ethnicity, occupation, for example--and power relations. He combines recent developments in social theory with the archaeological record to create a fascinating and theoretically informed exploration of the history of this important civilization.

PART 1

CHAPTER 1
Identity and Power in the Past

Theory concerning the rise and constitution of past complex societies has struggled with the relation of state and society. Many models, and some drawing on Durkheim’s concept of organic solidarity, have stressed the role of integrative institutions. Seminal in this vein was the work of Elman Service (1975:53), which considered everything in complex societies, including “technological, economic, religious, artistic, and recreational functions. . .” as “depend[ent] on the ability of the political aspect of the culture to integrate and protect the society.” Other models have stressed the roles of internal tensions and ranking in the rise of complexity, a broad perspective well-summarized in Morton Fried’s remark (1967:27) that “[e]quality is a social impossibility.” Models in this tradition, influenced to varying degrees by Marxist social thought, take the position that states fundamentally institute inequality.

While at first blush dissimilar, these two perspectives differ largely in the moral value attributed to the interests of the state, and to the place, fate, and relative power of the people. Different values involve divergent analytical emphases regarding the relative role of political structures, economic redistribution, and religious ideology. Yet, such sweeping approaches to the rise and character of colonial regimes and states—whether viewed from above or below, whether conceptually grounded in organic solidarity or in class divisions, and whether the moral emphasis leans toward central institutions or toward subaltern communities—share common epistemological foundations. Searching for commonalities has fostered an essentialized view of past complex orders as relatively homogeneous formations. Implicit in the sociological category of state are shared assumptions regarding the composition of complexity, the dynamics of history, and the significance of power, identity, and cultural practice.

Most archaeologists agree that archaic states were urban societies rooted in agrarian or agropastoral pursuits, and that they maintained a relatively stable (or “non-fissioning”) centralized political structure (Claessen 1984; Cohen 1981; Cohen and Service 1978; Wright 1977; Wright and Johnson 1975). Whether emphasizing integration or inequality, conventional approaches to complexity typically invoke societies characterized simultaneously by political integration on the one hand, and social heterogeneity on the other. Social heterogeneity refers to differences in role or occupation, while status, characterized as an expression of integration (Service 1975; Wright and Johnson 1975) or of inequality (Blau 1977; Fried 1967; McGuire 1983), refers to differences in wealth, prestige, or power (following Weber 1947). Dimensions of social difference not necessarily grounded in role or status, including ethnicity, faction, kinship, age group, or gender, are all too frequently underemphasized or altogether ignored (but see Brumfiel 1994, 1995; Crumley 1987, 1995; Demarest 1992, 2004; Feinman 2000; Joyce and Winter 1996; Joyce et al. 2001; Joyce 2000; Pauketat 1994, 2000; among others).

Most models of complexity in the social sciences (not to mention in everyday common sense) are, to one extent or another, rooted in an evolutionary paradigm. Conventional evolutionary approaches narrate a natural progression of increasing cultural complexity that is characterized by either increasingly effective integration or increasing inequality (e.g., Flannery 1972; Fried 1967; Service 1975; Steward 1955; White 1949). In either approach history is largely hypothetical, a mythical exegesis— whether legitimization or critique—of the genesis of a modern Western-dominated civilization of nation states. Recent models elaborate intricate processes of social change and long-term cycles of state rise and fall (Marcus 1992, 1993; Wright 1984), while developing more intricate approaches to the relation between cultural processes, historical events, and individual actions (Flannery 1999). Even in some recent models, however, attention to human strategy and activity in explaining social transformation falls squarely on leaders, chiefs, or other ruling elites— in fact, they verge on heroic narratives. Human motivation is largely one-dimensional and predictable. People, it is assumed, invariably seek wealth, prestige, and power. History is treated as a natural unfolding of the specific moral value attributed to the state, with scant attention to nonelite interests, strategies, and actions on the one hand, or to the particular cultural logics that inform them on the other. Overall, evolutionary models treat complex societies as vast, self-serving systems, whether of benevolent integration or of inequality.

Yet, social systems and structures consist solely of human relations and activities. Of conventional models Lewellen (1983:60) notes, “[o]ne feels the need. . . to reestablish the sense that we are talking about real human beings—living, dying, warring, struggling to make it against the odds.” In many models the everyday relations and activities that compose past polities, the “concrete rhythms of daily life” (Ensor 2000), are significant only to the extent that they affect or support the system. Individuals and groups, by the same token, are significant insofar as they fill a rank or a role. Living day to day and doing archaeology or any other work, we have a practical sense that this is not the case. Just as we do not completely live and work for the institutions or political systems in which we find ourselves, and we do not entirely agree with their ideals, methods, and aims, neither did people living in past complex societies. We must assume that, to some degree, life in past complex societies was also multifaceted, and that humans, most of the time, maintained diverse interests and reasons for living and doing.

Pointing out what appears deceptively obvious, Anthony Giddens (1979:7) notes that “social systems have no purpose, reasons or needs whatsoever; only human individuals do so.” Societies exist only insofar as they are created, reproduced, reformulated, and destroyed through social relations and activity—relations and activity that shape and are transfigured by enduring “structuring structures” (Bourdieu 1977:22). While much human motivation and activity in past states clearly supported state power and centralizing strategies, most extended well beyond that limited domain, as is resolutely demonstrated in the collapse of many past states (e.g., Demarest et al. 1997). In seeking to illuminate the rise, consolidation, and ultimate fragmentation of past states such as Tiwanaku, we must address a fuller range of cultural logic and social practice.

In this chapter I establish a theoretical foundation for what I consider a deeper understanding of past complex societies such as Tiwanaku, and an epistemological framework for elaborating dynamic models for state rise, consolidation, and collapse. Like Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer (1985:7–8), I believe traditional and current models attribute too much concreteness to “the idea of the state,” and take too literally the “message of its domination (emphasis added),” whether celebrating or critiquing its specific interests and ends. Suspiciously resonant with popular (and populist) political ideas and corporate management strategies, many political models take for granted the “noun-ness” of states, and so mirror their politically interested appearance of impenetrability and solidity.

I address such assumptions in two ways. First, and again to quote Corrigan and Sayer (1985:3), the “activities and institutions conventionally identified as ‘the State’ are cultural forms.” States state and establish truth. They foster emotional attachment to a range of things both material and ideal, forging a state culture that is in appearance common, global, and timeless. States are, in addition, as Durkheim noted (1904:72) “above all, supremely, the organ of moral discipline,” and they seek to normalize, render natural, and establish as obvious, what are, in reality, contextually and historically specific ideological premises. The affective, symbolic, and ideological dimensions of society’s power were implicated (in varying senses) in Durkheim’s collective conscience, in Weber’s legitimacy, and in Marx’s ponderous traditions. Yet an approach that weighs in such domains must also consider activity that transcends state functions, symbols, and interests. Thus, and second, we must consider all of society, differentiated as it was in regard to gender, class, ethnicity, territory, lineage, ancestry, and ritual. A long-term perspective may clarify in what ways group identities and local practices emerged and shifted over phases of state emergence, development, consolidation, and collapse. In considering a wide range of social groups and practices in an archaic state, and by paying close attention to transformations at multiple scales, we may understand how a unifying dominant ideology and homogenizing state culture were differentially interpreted, refracted, and even appropriated and reinterpreted in myriad ways, for specific local interests and, perhaps, in some cases, to counterhegemonic ends.

In the following pages I elaborate a theoretical perspective of identity and power as culturally grounded social relations amenable to archaeological research on past states. First, drawing on established ideas, I develop a framework for identifying social activity as cultural production, and generative principles as human activity. Next, I establish a foundation for understanding this relation in the long term, over spans of relative continuity and phases of profound cultural and political change. I then investigate the place of power in complex society by focusing on ideology and what I term “practical hegemony” as two dimensions of state culture and social consciousness. Next, I investigate social identity, expressed as ethnicity and other types of affiliation, as a potent element of power relations in settings of state hegemony. The discussion then turns to power and identity in past cities, the political and ritual centers of archaic states, and their possible expressions in built environments and anthropogenic landscapes. Together, these themes establish a conceptual foundation for appreciating the place of power and identity in the rise and collapse of Tiwanaku.

A Perspective on Practice

In archaeology we often deal with relatively broad scales of human history, the langue durée, or “history with a slower pulse rate” (Braudel 1980:95). Much of what we survey, excavate, or analyze is the collective residue of processes that occurred over generations. In treating long-term history, we need not assume that change “just happened,” that societies simply evolved into states, or that day-to-day events and real human intentions were insignificant. As cultural anthropology increasingly turns to the particular and the evanescent in its focus on the global present, archaeology is advantageously positioned to highlight relatively enduring principles of social life, and the significance of recurring activity and entrenched relations. To use a visual metaphor, the relation between scales of history is similar to the different ways one experiences a city like Chicago, whether from its gritty, bustling streets or from a place a hundred stories above. As observers in a skyscraping deck we enjoy a unique perspective, and may be able to discern a world of macro-patterns not immediately apparent to a window shopper on State Street. Archaeologists are well positioned to apprehend the significance of phases in which social practices and material culture changed gradually and in subtle ways, and times when, following cumulative transformations, they changed rapidly and profoundly.

Archaeology requires a flexible theoretical approach that considers long-term history as cumulative social practices and historical events. Attention to the long term draws us into the domain of praxis, a “situational sociology of meaning” (Sahlins 1985:xiv) in which we can investigate culture through time. So-called practice theory has fostered some understanding of the dialectical relation of cultural principles and human actions, yet no approach effectively grasps all dimensions of this complex relation. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus, as the subliminal “generative schemes” that humans unconsciously draw on while going about life, establishes a foundation. Habitus, according to Bourdieu, is an internalized, malleable system of dispositions—a common sense mastery of situations—that generates particular practices. These practices are similar among people sharing similar circumstances and experiences (a family, community, ethnic group, etc.), appearing harmonized and ordered without recourse to overt rules or laws. The dispositions of habitus are commonsense traditions beyond argument, for “what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying” (Bourdieu 1977:167). However, in this view there is ultimately little attention to how such dispositions induce social change. Novel human intentions play a relatively minor role in the habitus, for the “conditional freedom it secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from a simple mechanical reproduction of things as they are” (Bourdieu 1977:95).

Giddens’ (1979) research on structuration, increasingly popular among archaeologists (e.g., Barrett 1994; Joyce and Winter 1996; Joyce et al. 2001; Dobres and Robb 2000), offers more powerful roles for human action and intention. The concept of structuration emphasizes the dialectical relation of “structure” and “action.” Less deterministically than humans drawing on habitus, Giddens’ humans are knowledgeable individuals who go about life drawing on “tacit stocks of knowledge,” a more informed common sense. In going about daily life, humans intervene in the world through intentional and continuous flows of activity or “agency,” in which they draw on practical knowledge and, to some extent, reproduce the social world. By continually engaging in society “every actor knows a great deal about the conditions of [its] reproduction” (Giddens 1979:5), and so is empowered with some “discursive penetration” of its workings, however limited and incompletely comprehended. Thus, intentional or not, activity often has powerful consequences, and given changing circumstances beyond the control or awareness of any agent, these consequences can produce major—even unexpected—changes. Empowered with knowledge and potential action, all humans, elite and commoner, ruler and subject, can effect profound change, even if, ultimately, the specific, cumulative consequences are unintended.

Following such epistemologies and inhabiting a world of fast-paced change, ephemeral relations, and virtual realities, anthropologists now generally privilege the individual over structure, strategic action over essential order. Anthropologists focus on cultural mutability and multiple voices as part of a shared cultural experience. Culture is a “carnivalesque arena of diversity” (Clifford 1988:46) more than it forms an “integrated ethos”(Ortner 1984:131) or patterned “webs of significance” (Geertz 1973). According to what many now consider outmoded culturalist approaches (Sahlins 1985:47), “culture” too restrictively determines historical reality, and hegemonic representations weigh too heavily on the brains of the living (Obeyesekere 1997). Some suggest leaving behind the concept of culture altogether as an essentialized, colonial construct (Abu-Lughod 1991).

To be sure, increasing interest in diversity and cultural discontinuity challenges a “dominant modernist identity” that celebrates essentialized “others” and invented national histories (Friedman 1994:117). It encourages awareness that just about anywhere, past or present, culture is negotiable, symbols can be separated from things, and meaning systems are cognitively and strategically fashioned. Constructivists point out that contemporary ethnic movements and other identity struggles, in the face of global processes, often involve the “invention of tradition,” the intentional creation of cultural identity, and the strategic manipulation of history to support new identities (Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm 1983).

Yet, I agree with Emberling that many anthropologists “tend to overestimate the potential for manipulation in past societies” (Emberling 1997:307). As Van den Berghe notes (1981:27) of ethnicity, it “can be manipulated but not manufactured.” People forge their identities and create traditions “in a world already defined,” both locally and globally, for “the past is always practiced in the present” (Friedman 1994:117, 141; Holland et al. 1998:46). Though often strategic, invented traditions and crafted identities involve significant historical and cultural continuity. Jing notes that “no tradition is invented overnight” (1996:45) for “whatever is invented must be adjusted to meet various social considerations and cultural conventions” (1996:68). Current emphasis on cultural evanescence reflects the peculiar corporate anonymity and cynical disjunction of symbol and reference in our current brand of capitalism (see Sennett 1998). Even if there is no coherent order that regulates all activities in a given community, activities are learned and “organized around sets of situated understandings and expectations” that have been, to a great extent, already established in the past (Holland et al. 1998:57).

In any society past or present, activities are learned in and organized by what Dorothy Holland and colleagues (1998:52) term “figured worlds.”These are culturally configured realms in which “particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others.” This concept situates the actions of knowledgeable, empowered agents in enduring realms of shared experience, memory, and identity, and in “contexts of meaning and action.” In figured worlds people develop statuses and roles, including positions of influence, prestige, and power, and most important, they “develop identities” (Holland et al. 1998:60). A figured world is a social domain that is, in part, collectively imagined and in part the product of concrete, regularized activity—as it is in the world of politics or academia, or among communities in a specific cultural context, whether totemic clans in aboriginal native Australia or nation states in the modern West. As individuals develop in specific instances of these worlds, in a particular family, gender, age group, ethnic group, and nation, for example, they bring creative ideas to them, authoring their own idiosyncratic narratives and actions. Through time, they become more familiar with their logics, more knowledgeable about their inner workings, and, via mimicry and creative appropriation, they change them just as they reproduce them.

Practice theory offers no coherent explanation of state development and collapse, but it establishes that complex societies consist of people whose actions involve dynamic relations between generative principles (webs of significance, generative schemes, or tacit knowledge) and practical activity (culturally situated but often creative and transformative actions). On such a foundation we can formulate models in which all individuals, and not just rulers and elites, continually transform culture and society (just as they reproduce them). We can also begin to understand how individuals participating in specific figured worlds come to hold different perspectives, interpretations, and political views of a given social order. Still, archaeologists require models that, in applying these concepts, can account for the significance of cultural continuity in relation to profound, cumulative, and sometimes relatively rapid change. Since this is a primary aim of the book, it bears elaborating a few key concepts.

Continuity and Change

In all societies, certain key values, symbols, and elements of material culture demonstrate significant historical continuity. If we accept that humans actively create and recreate their worlds, continuity cannot be taken for granted; it must be explained as cultural production. Recently, anthropologists have begun paying serious attention to the continuities and even strategic essentialism that ground current indigenous movements. Fischer (1999, 2001), for example, finds that among contemporary Maya, certain ancient cosmological paradigms demonstrate great historical and regional continuity. This is in part because they serve to inform novel situations and impart meaning to new interpretations and actions. Enlisted in the volatile process of generating a pan-Maya identity, ancient paradigms manifest a fundamental cultural logic, or a web of generative principles, that provides cultural coherence even if conditioned by novel contingencies (Fischer 1999:474). Anchoring them are “authentic” artifacts, symbols, and gestures—glyphs, calendar systems, traditional dress, ritual practices, and monumental sites—that draw the past into the present, even if fragmentarily and creatively and their meanings radically transformed. In Maya identity politics, cultural “continuity is maintained by giving old forms new meaning and new forms old meaning” (Fischer 2001:13).

Historical consciousness or collective memory forms an essential part of a community’s generative principles, linking the past and present with visions of the future. Among the contemporary Maya as elsewhere, it is inscribed in various nonwritten activities, objects, places, and social contexts as domains for expressing and reifying social m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Notes
• Bibliography