Chapter One
Surplus: The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life
An Introduction
CHRISTOPHER T. MOREHART AND KRISTIN DE LUCIA
Archaeologists identify surplus as a central pivot in the big issues of historical change: the development of state society, the emergence of inequality and social stratification, the creation and intensification of agriculture, specialization and technological evolution, the division of labor (including between men and women), the formation of exchange networks and markets, the beginning of sedentism and eventually urban life. Observed through the lenses of such macro-theoretical issues, surplus occupies an interpretive position not unlike other variables considered to be basic âtriggersâ to societal transformation, such as demographic growth and climatological change. Like these variables, the role of surplus in reconstructions of change is often vague, assumed, and monolithic or is difficult to pinpoint in relation to emergent conditions in a sociopolitical landscape (Dalton 1960). âThe production of surplus . . . permitted the . . .â is a common phrase repeated throughout archaeological literature to explain why changes occurred but also why societies in the past seemingly became more like our own.
Surplusâs legacy in archaeology is associated closely with social evolutionary models of change. Such models tend to emanate from top-down approaches to political economy, conceived either managerially or coercively (see Brumfiel and Earle 1987), and view surplus production as part of macro-level processes. However, the explicit study of surplus as a major intellectual theme has become less common today than during the heyday of the New Archaeology from the 1960s through the 1980s. With the rise of theoretical perspectives influenced by âpost-processualâ critique, many archaeologists have progressively either rejected the targeted study of surplus or simply abandoned it in favor of the social and cultural dimensions of consumption. The analyses of important social archaeological topics, such as identity, being, temporality, and materiality (e.g., Meskell and Preucel 2007), we argue, are essentially matters of consumption. They represent an intellectual shift toward subjectivity, particularly through its experiential and phenomenological dimensions. Some scholars have argued, however, that when taken to an extreme, such approaches lead to a âbleachingâ (Carrier 1997) of production in favor of consumption, either producing an idealized romantization of the past or impeding archaeological understanding of historyâs material reality (see Brumfiel 1992; Harvey 1989; Jameson 1991; Trigger 1998). These studies also can be overly particularlistic, rejecting the existence of common processes operating in otherwise very different sociocultural contexts and inhibiting efforts to promote a comparative anthropology and archaeology.
However, as the studies in this volume attest and the critical genealogy of surplus reveals, the social dynamics of consumption are inextricably tied to production. The politics that produce subjects and surplus are always entangled with consumption (see Ekstrom and Brembeck 2004; Miller 1987), in ways that differ depending on the social, temporal, and geographic scale at which we focus our analytical gaze. A dialectical tieâsimultaneously biological, physical, material, and culturalâbetween consumption and production is a major relationship that shapes not only practice but also historical change, a dynamic that few fields but archaeology can truly capture. Archaeologically, indeed, our narratives of surplus often emanate not from an abstract conception of productive capacity but from the material results of this dialecticâthe archaeological record. Even in social anthropology, this duality cannot be easily resolved despite the ethnographerâs ability to engage with living and speaking subjects. As Ingold (2011:5) aptly asserts, âTo ask which comes first, production or consumption, is to pose a chicken and egg question.â
Social evolutionary approaches to surplus, however, can reduce the utility of the concept among archaeologists examining other aspects of society and change. The deployment of surplus exclusively in terms of topics like state formation and a division of labor may offer analytical tools that are either unproductive or poorly suited to many case studies. An understanding of, for example, the local and global dimensions of the African diaspora is poorly assisted by a concept wedded exclusively in social evolutionary terms. Further, archaeologists studying small-scale societies and foragers may find the concept of surplus of limited use; either these groups are denied the ability to engage in social surplus production, or surplus is seen only as a stepping stone that will cause them to settle down and abandon their ways of life. Even for archaeologists working in sociopolitical cases seemingly closely wedded to the surplus concept, ancient complex societies, its dominant usage limits the ability to reconstruct local people and the strategies of everyday life. Yet we argue that the notion of surplus, when disarticulated from an exclusive connection to social evolutionary models, offers a useful concept and framework to operationalize the roles of production, distribution, and consumption in multiple comparative situations. Surplus offers an analytical thread to connect areas of archaeological research often kept separate, and this volume attempts to foster this conversation.
We begin this conversation by first exploring the intellectual genealogy of surplus as an analytical construct and a historical phenomenon. Situating surplus within the emergence of materialism in philosophy, history, and economic theory constitutes our point of departure. This trajectory suggests a tension between idealist and materialist constructions of long-term change. Moreover, it demonstrates very different conc...
