Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 2(1): 109134 [1469-6053(200202)2:1;109134;020599]
MARK P. LEONE
Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland College Park
KURT A. JORDAN
Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
ABSTRACT
The application of Marxist theory in American historical archaeology
has expanded greatly over the past 20 years. More than just a theor-
etical tool, the rise of Marxism reflects an emerging consciousness
within historical archaeology that its subject matter is capitalism, an
interest obviously shared with Marx himself. We propose, however,
that historical archaeology has proceeded to study the emergence of
the modern culture of capitalism without engaging Marxs critique of
the political economy of cultural production in any direct way.
Instead, much of historical archaeology reifies past cultural formations
in place of maintaining a focus on the dialectical social processes
through which those formations emerged. We illustrate how a Marxist
109
KEYWORDS
African America archaeology critical archaeology critique
ethnogenesis historical hoodoo lifeworld Marxism Maryland
state
INTRODUCTION
Matthews, Leone & Jordan The political economy of archaeological cultures 111
Matthews, Leone & Jordan The political economy of archaeological cultures 113
to prove our identities. This penetration of the state into our daily lives
makes it difficult to imagine times and places where this was not the case.
Clearly both preconceptions need to be thoroughly re-examined. As
Skocpol (1979: 28) reminded us, Marx never claimed that states simply were
creations of the dominant class. The state, although closely related to the
class system, is at least potentially autonomous from it; the connections
between the class system and the state have to be investigated empirically,
not prejudged. The second misperception that of the naturalness of the
modern state is more difficult to correct. Abrams (1988) believed that the
conflation of two separate phenomena in the phrase the state is part of the
problem. One aspect is the state-system, the institutions and offices that
exist in a naive empirical sense (Abrams, 1988: 71), in other words the
state that can be looked up in a government telephone book and the state
that we practically experience every day. The other is the state-idea, a
tradition culturally inscribed into everyday consciousness by dominant
forces so that the state-system is viewed as an integrated expression of
common interest cleanly dissociated from all sectional interests (Abrams,
1988: 76). The inscription of the state-idea produces a contradiction because
it attributes unity, morality, and independence to the disunited, amoral and
dependent workings of the practice of government (Abrams, 1988: 81).
A fundamental task for historical archaeologists is to trace the origins of
the modern state, to penetrate its murky history in terms of the appropria-
tion of vast amounts of labor for the state-system and the genesis and repro-
duction of the selective tradition of the state-idea. Both aspects are
fundamentally cultural and fundamentally about power. To illustrate this
point, we re-examine the medieval-to-Georgian transition (Deetz, 1977;
more properly the post-medieval-to-Georgian transition, per Johnson,
1996) in Maryland.
Numerous studies (e.g., Deetz, 1977; Glassie, 1975; Yentsch, 1991) have
identified a dramatic transformation in Anglo-American material culture
around the beginning of the eighteenth century involving a switch from
naturalistic, communal forms (such as shared eating trenchers and asym-
metrical, accretional house construction) to mechanical, individualized
forms (such as personal place settings and precisely symmetrical architec-
ture). This transformation was also a transition from many regional folk
cultures to one encompassing popular culture. The hallmark of folk
culture is its local character: decisions, such as those about building and
adding on to houses, are made on the basis of knowledge rooted in local
conditions. Initially the spatial isolation of Britains North American
colonies (both from the mother country and from each other) generated
and perpetuated localism. Then, around the beginning of the eighteenth
century, the reintegration of British and colonial cultures in the new
Georgian order ended this folk period.
The transition from many folk cultures to one modern culture was far
Matthews, Leone & Jordan The political economy of archaeological cultures 115
the prison. Although the church triangle was distinct from the state tri-
angle, there is no doubt that the Calverts intended it to demonstrate the
fundamental importance of Catholicism to the proprietary colony, despite
the fact that Catholics could not even hold office in Britain and over 75%
of Marylands population was Protestant.
The St Marys City example illustrates that state-sponsored inscription
attempts do not always work. Since the state-idea behind the plan was
entirely overt, the symbolism of the St Marys City plan was representative
of the state-system and could be readily considered and accepted, rejected
or ignored by residents and visitors. The high visual profile of the massive
brick chapel and brick prison at St Marys City must have challenged
Protestant malcontents, a difficult strategy where Protestants were in the
majority. This inscription of highly charged local symbols in all likelihood
exacerbated rather than mollified political tensions within the colony.
However, some of the secondary aspects of the St Marys City plan pro-
duced more subtle and enduring effects on the colonial consciousness by
manipulating spaces that were used every day. The archaeology of the
Matthews, Leone & Jordan The political economy of archaeological cultures 117
Matthews, Leone & Jordan The political economy of archaeological cultures 119
Matthews, Leone & Jordan The political economy of archaeological cultures 121
dominant cultural order in response to a rupture in the system, but this was
only the first of a series of ruptures relevant to the ethnogenesis of African
America. Another stage is represented by the vessel forms of the
colonoware pots recovered from Virginia. Africans in Virginia were sub-
jected to white domination longer and under different conditions than in
other southern colonies, and Virginias colonoware vessels were more often
made in shapes resembling European forms than elsewhere. The presence
or absence of these copy vessels is usually attributed to the level of inter-
action between whites and blacks or Native Americans (Deetz, 1994;
Ferguson, 1992), with the greater number of copy vessels occurring in
areas of more intensive contact. Such a calculus, however, reduces the com-
plexities of social interaction to a factor of relative acquaintance. Such an
approach fails to consider that the production of these vessels may have not
been the result of market demands or cultural familiarity, but part of a con-
tentious cultural process of resistance. Rather than just reproducing famil-
iar forms, we suggest that Africans in Virginia were attempting to assert a
position within society that challenged the racial foundations of slavery. It
was certainly clear to enslaved Africans that Europeans were a different
sort of people based both on their superior economic, political and social
positions and their different cultural habits. To be more like them, such as
through the use of similar vessels, may have been a way to capture some of
what Europeans were and close the gap that not only differentiated
Africans from Europeans but subordinated them as well. These vessels
were thus used by Africans to critique the structures of domination and
challenge the cultural separation of blacks from white society. From the
dominant perspective, however, this practice identified another rupture
within the system and produced a new reaction that further removed blacks
from whites, through the invention of the slave quarter and the insti-
tutionalization of racism this represented and supported.1
We thus turn to consider the archaeology of racism (compare Babson,
1990) understood through the lens of cultural hegemony. The Marxian
notion of cultural hegemony articulated by Gramsci (1971) argued that
inscribed meanings such as state-enforced social order or the naturalness of
racial difference may be sustained even when such inscriptions are truly
contradictory to lived experience. In this sense, a belief in dominant cultural
ideals may outweigh and lead to a misinterpretation of actual material con-
ditions. Given this possibility for conflict between inscribed meanings and
lived experience, it is also true that the structured order of domination is
always positioned for change. The transition to a social order based on
racism in the Chesapeake exemplifies this process. The new order, never-
theless, was no more stable than the one it replaced. The new emphasis on
race simply required different positioning and thus opened new avenues for
critique. Now a social foundation, racism became an interstice in the social
system through which power could move from one group to another.
Matthews, Leone & Jordan The political economy of archaeological cultures 123
significance of the color. Blue, as it represented the sky and, thus, heaven,
was used by African Americans in different media such as house paint and
decorative beads to ward off ghosts and evil spirits.
We highlight the evidence these examples provide of the piercing of
boundaries. The actions undertaken were done in order to extend the
control of living people into the realm of the dead. The interpretation of
these efforts argues that these are examples demonstrative of the unique
development of African-American culture as a creolized version of West
African cultures in America. To date, however, there has been too little
emphasis on the American context in favor of understanding these practices
as continuations of West African traditions. Reconnecting these practices
to the attempted destabilization of institutionalized racism by African
Americans is important. We suggest that a Marxist perspective which argues
that if these actions represent resistance, then they must be a critique of
racial subordination, allows for an extension of this interpretation. The
boundaries being crossed were constructed in African-American belief
systems that spiritually animated physical features of the environment. On
the one hand, then, these practices reflect a distinct cultural order. However,
because these same physical features also acted, albeit in different ways, to
organize and determine the dominant white cultural order, we should not
overlook the social critique that was embedded within and shaped the form
of the African-American alternative.
Land, water, color, coins, stones and bowls were mute commodities in
the white, capitalist culture. Any enhanced meanings were, through a
cultural separation of the material from the spiritual, condensed and lost.
The meanings applied to these objects by African Americans, on the other
hand, reflect more than their utilitarian and exchange values and, in their
association with spiritualism, destabilized dominant meanings and chal-
lenged the legitimacy of the dominant order. Crossing spiritual boundaries
by venturing into forests and waterways and animating supposedly static
objects like earth, plants, water and sky did two things. First, it established
a new idea that the difference resulting from racism was as much a creation
of black as white action, in the sense that the creativity of Africans in
America identified alternatives to dominant sensibilities. Having suffered
in their earlier attempt to be like their masters, African Americans sought
to be increasingly unlike them as a way to challenge the claims to univer-
sality embedded within white cultural foundations. Second, these activities,
as they challenged the separations of the white cultural order, critiqued and
undermined the forces which established and relied on those separations.
We conclude this section with examples of this process.
Among others, McKee (1992) has shown that root cellars acted as hidey
holes in slave quarters where objects of special significance were stored or
stolen goods hidden. These features were common in slave quarters across
the American South, suggesting that they were a part of the African
This article has thus far reviewed applications of Marxist analysis in two
central problems in American historical archaeology. Here we wish to show
that the problems discussed have been embraced in historical archaeology
because they are relevant to defining the position of the discipline in the
modern world. Archaeology, as a way of constructing the past in the
present, is always entwined with current political contexts. Marxist critical
theory seeks to cast light on the origins of these modern conditions, specific-
ally those conditions that surround the information being interpreted within
the living, political context of its current use. Critical archaeology employs
Marxist critical theory to examine the tie between present and past so that
the politics of the research context are made visible in the routines of
archaeological practice. This is not normal either in prehistoric archaeology
or, far more particularly, in American historical archaeology.
Within historical archaeology, in addition to the examples presented
here, there have been several attempts to elucidate past social practices that
Matthews, Leone & Jordan The political economy of archaeological cultures 125
are early versions of practices today, which are themselves both invisible
and operate to preserve class relations and the modern state-system. Orsers
work on tenancy (1988), Mullins work on the contradictions of African-
American consumerism (1999), Purcer on marginal Western farmers (1999),
Epperson on the foundations of North American racism (1990, forthcom-
ing), and Deetzs famous, but not class-conscious, work on the origins of
time and work discipline within the Georgian order (1977), all illustrate the
beginnings of current repressive social practices.
The type of critical theory that invokes such archaeological studies was
outlined by Lukacs (1971) who sought to justify the place of the historian
in socialist society. As a Marxist, he saw class as a fixture of capitalism and
the historian as the creator and sustainer of elements of the consciousness
that would act to facilitate knowledge of allies among exploited but divided
groups. He believed that such knowledge among members of the middle
and working classes could produce an understanding that life could be
different, and that this socially catalytic tie could occur if people saw life
when, or before, it became fixed as it is now. Historical archaeology, for
example, could show life before the modern state, before racism, before the
five-day working week, before the clock and alarm bell, before the fork,
napkin and manners arose as measures of civility. It could also show how
these practices bred their own critiques which survive in the present.
In the hands of some scholars, ideas like those proposed by Lukacs pro-
duced powerful descriptions of what life could be like separated from the
modern institutions which structure our lives. If we look at the work of the
Leakey family and other researchers on human origins in the context of
over a century and a half of the operation of Darwins theory of evolution,
we can see a profound, popular reorientation of an answer to the eternal
question: Where do we come from? These discoveries have made estab-
lished Christianity uneasy and have dislodged the Bible as the sole and
unquestioned answer. No American historical archaeological study yet is
among this class, even though one could be. In fact, American historical
archaeology is poised to choose knowledge of domination, slavery and
emancipation as the domain which could be analogous to human origins.
The field has not, however, picked the questions its scholarship will address.
Will it be: Is American society also African?, Does racism have to exist?,
Are class and poverty inevitable in modern capitalism?, Can American
society be truly democratic? Even though the question has not yet been
isolated, we are sure the discipline will choose from among these and answer
by producing archaeological knowledge of what created African and other
subaltern Americas.
To explain, we illuminate the place of current political relations in our
own conception of archaeological cultures. Our use of critical theory,
although firmly planted in the Marxist critique of capitalism, explicitly
chooses to also advocate for greater participation in democratic institutions.
In this sense, we embrace the ideas of Habermas (1979, 1984) about reform
through the understanding and preservation of lifeworlds which are at the
edge of, or perhaps beyond, capitalism. This kind of critical theory takes a
given relation and shows that it does not have to operate as assumed
because alongside it exist other possibilities for living. As the struggle to
resist domination spurred the developments that make up the history of the
subaltern, critical archaeology optimistically seeks to identify archaeologies
that may produce work that challenges the status quo through the investi-
gation of alternative histories and an engagement with the present where
those alternatives are being put to use.
The example of Leones recent research on African-American Hoodoo
is a powerful illustration of this kind of critical archaeology. Hoodoo, long
understood to be a North American variant of Caribbean Voodoo and West
African Vodoun, is a set of religious practices that combines things as
metaphors and metonyms to manage the spirits of the dead. Hoodoo uses
charms called mojos, hands or tobys to get spirits to heal specific illnesses,
induce good luck, reverse bad luck and thereby control the future, as well
as to punish those who have unacceptable intentions. Hoodoos meaning is
revealed most completely in autobiographical narratives from the 1930s
collected from former slaves throughout the country (e.g., Rawick, 1972,
19729). The narratives describe why charms were made, who made them
and for what reason. The effects of curing, bringing luck, discovering the
source of bad luck or disease and bringing ill on someone are all clearly
available. The descriptions contain a world of mistresses, masters, wives,
neighbors, husbands, children, disease and hardships; a distinct world ready
for and filled with magical practices. Significantly, Hoodoo was neither
bound by slavery nor properly a slave religion; rather, it is best understood
as a lifeworld unconquered though shaped by plantation capitalism.
Hoodoo shows that African heritage survived in North American
slavery, that European Christianity has an alternative, and demonstrates a
way of thinking and acting that escaped white domination. Furthermore, in
its survival, it consistently contributed to the contours of the dominant
culture in America for its practitioners are frequently Christian themselves
and thus introduced critiques and reforms (through intended actions or not)
that mark the history of American Christianity.
Over the course of the 1990s sets of caches were excavated by Leone and
his colleagues throughout Annapolis by members of the Archaeology in
Annapolis project. These caches consisted of pins, crystals, ceramics, stones,
coins and other objects buried in the ground near doors and in corners. They
were identified as African American and to be Hoodoo artifacts. Hoodoo
operated using material culture (Leone and Fry, 1999; Leone et al., forth-
coming). To make and use a charm, several items were combined and placed
somewhere or on someone. Usually the combination included a metaphor
for the problem to be dealt with, such as a bent pin or nail for an aching
Matthews, Leone & Jordan The political economy of archaeological cultures 127
Matthews, Leone & Jordan The political economy of archaeological cultures 129
CONCLUSION
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Randall McGuire and the other anonymous reviewers for
the comments on an earlier draft of this article. We trust that they will see their
advice put to use in this revision. Matthews and Jordan would also like to recognize
the guidance and influence of Joan Vincent and Nan Rothschild of Barnard College
whose comments on versions of some sections of this article helped to bring focus
and caution to some of the interpretations. We also thank Henry Miller, who pro-
vided us with Figure 1, and Les Graves, who created and provided us with Figure 2.
Finally, we thank Lynn Meskell, Jeremy Toynbee and Matt Palus who aided us in
preparing and finalizing the article.
Note
1 This approach to material culture is reliant on an understanding of the deeply
situated perspectives of those actors who made, used and discarded what are
now archaeological materials which embraces the possibility for ambiguity
(Hodder, 1983; Howson, 1990). The meanings of objects, even more so than
words, are malleable and slippery, and a material thing can have many
meanings. However, given certain circumstances, some meanings may stand out
over others and many meanings may be condensed or lost. We suggest here that
racism, as an ideological construction formed to heal the rupture within the
dominant order of plantation slavery, produced such conditions. This is not to
say that the ambiguity of meanings is replaced by those defined in response to
racism, rather, that racism, as a structured manner of thinking (a distinct and
historical form of consciousness), brought about conditions which directed the
interpretation of the meanings of things.
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