Two paradigms that dominated political anthropology at its inception and that continue to flourish in modern archaeology are political economy and political evolution (Service 1975; Fried 1967, 1978; Sahlins 1972; Trigger 1998; Donham 1999; Wolf 1999). Although political theory in cultural anthropology has moved in the direction of both the symbolic and the interstitial workings of power, these two schools of thought have remained very influential in archaeology, providing the theoretical impetus for a predominantly materialist perspective on the past (Conrad and Demarest 1984).
Political economy remains by far the most successful concept in the field. Its central principle addresses how human labor and its products satisfy human needs and wants and how power relations affect the use of resources (Kurtz 2001, 113-31). At its heart, though, the concept of political economy explores the nature of the involvement of state governments in the economic process through political control over production and distribution in order to sustain itself (ibid., 14; Fried 1967; Claessen and van de Velde 1991; Smith 1991). There has also been increasing attention to how political agents even in stateless societies use control over production or exchange to advance their goals and gain more power (Polanyi 1957; Po-lanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson 1957; Sahlins 1963, 1972; Wolf 1999; Donham 1999). The world-systems model proposed by Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1989) and modifications of this model to precapitalist societies (Kardulias 1999; Stein 1999; Hall 1997, 1998, 1999; Hall and Chase-Dunn 1993, 1994; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997; Chase-Dunn and Grimes 1995) remain dominant in studies of political economy. At the same time, Marxist analyses of modes of production that engendered the debates over substantivism versus formalism2 (Terray 1971; Godelier 1978; Meillasoux 1981; Bloch 1983; Polanyi 1957; Wolf 1982) and cultural Marxism (Taussig 1980, 1987; Godelier 1988; Donham 1999; Kurtz 1996b) have influenced many other studies in political economy. In archaeology, the political economy paradigm has engendered broad studies of regional and/or site-specific economic patterns and of the role of elites in economic systems (Masson and Freidel 2002; Smith and Schreiber 2005, 2006; see Chapter 3 for specific examples). Although all these approaches have made significant contributions, they view political institutions through the lens of the economic structure, so they devote less attention to the details of how political power is manipulated, contested, and reshaped by active human actors or factions (with rare exceptions, e. g. Kurtz 2001, 128-31, Brumfiel 1983). Considerations of political economy provide a useful perspective on political power because they show the movement of economic goods and/or human labor from all members of society to the upper ranks, but they do not give the whole picture.
The second dominant paradigm, political evolution, considers the changes in political systems through time as societies become more populous and more differentiated economically and socially. Studies that focus on political evolution have often paid close attention to political centralization (Feinman 2001; Roscoe 1993) and to differentiation and specialization of political-administrative roles (Flannery 1972). The concept of political evolution has also been tightly integrated with classifications of political systems that began with Morgan’s and Tyler’s unilineal trajectory of savagery, barbarism, and civilization (which Boas and his students rejected at the turn of the twentieth century). Since the rejection of Morgan’s stages, theories of political evolution have identified multilineal evolutionary paths of change from egalitarian political systems such as bands and tribes to more complex ranked or stratified systems such as chiefdoms and states (Haas 2001b; Service 1962, 1975; Steward 1955, 1956; Fried 1967). However, the rather monolithic views of political power held by those who subscribe to versions of the political evolution paradigm and their implicit or explicit typologies of political systems have been criticized for being too simplistic and for devaluing significant differences among the cultures grouped within the same evolutionary type (Feinman and Neitzel 1984; Shanks and Tilley 1987; Trigger 1998; Haas 2001a, 2001b; Kurtz 2001; Smith 2003; Chapman 2003, 42-45; Yoffee 2005; Pauketat 2007; Vincent 1990). Furthermore, an emphasis on a static political structure rather than on the “practices of political agents” (Kurtz 2001, 16; Roscoe 1993; Donham 1999) has hindered this school of thought from explaining more fully the societal transformations of the past.
The political evolution model has also been critiqued for its adherence to functionalist assumptions. The functionalist paradigm that emerged from the work of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and other British social anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century envisioned human societies as well-integrated social systems consisting of structures or institutions that function together to maintain the stability of each society and the well-being of all its members (Malinowski 1961; Radcliffe-Brown 1965). In contrast to the functionalist paradigm, more recent perspectives have tended to view states as fluid and fractured entities that are characterized by competition and conflict among different socioeconomic classes, groups, and factions, “formed through differential and constantly shifting patterns of cooperation and competition among emergent elites and other groups” (Stein 1998, 6; see also Brumfiel 1992; Cowgill 1977, 1993). Although the functionalist model has been discarded, it had a significant impact on the last century of research (Kurtz 2001) and continues to be of some descriptive utility in archaeology that is concerned with discerning the functions of the artifacts, buildings, and sites that we encounter.
In the 1960s, the functionalist paradigm was replaced by processual-ac-tion models that shifted attention from the political structure to individual political agents whose strategies in the competition for power transformed the static political system of the functionalist school into a dynamic system of alliances, conflicts, and tensions (Swartz, Turner, and Tuden 1966; Barth 1959; Bailey 1969; Kurtz 2001; Donham 1999; Brumfiel and Fox 1994; Vincent 1990). The processual-action models of political anthropology should not be confused with the processual school in archaeology, because its principles are closer to postprocessualism in archaeology. Bailey (1969), one of the political anthropologists who promoted the processual model, argued that the political structure should be seen not as a set of static, functional positions but as a series of flexible rules that guided the “political game,” or competition for political power among active political agents, leaders, and factions (see Sewell 1992 for a similar treatment of “structure”). Vincent (1990) distinguishes between action theory and processual theory, although both theories emphasize the individual agent, conflict, tensions, and fractures. While the processual model considers political process as it unfolds in the interactions between “groups, roles, ideals and ideas” (Turner quoted in Vincent 1990, 336-37), action theory is about “individual actors and their strategies within political arenas” (Vincent 1990, 341).
The centrality of political agents and individual action in the political anthropology of the 1960s and 1970s remains at the core of political anthropology and postprocessual archaeology today (Bourdieu 1977, 1990; Gid-dens 1979, 1984; see also Roscoe 1993; Brumfiel 1992; Cowgill 1993; Haas 2001b; Dobres and Robb 2000). For example, practice theory as proposed by Bourdieu (1977, 1990) converges on the mutually determinative nature of the relationship between the actions or practices of political agents and the political structures of the larger community. Agents are constrained by political rules of the larger community, but their actions also influence and change political structures (Sewell 1992; see also Kurtz 2001, 149-57). According to this view of political action, political systems are fluid and are continuously reconstituted by the practices of competing or allied political agents (or factions), even though human actions are framed and constrained by the political structure itself and by their natural environments (Kurtz 2001; Brumfiel 1992; Cowgill 1993; Dobres and Robb 2000; Pauketat 2007; Sewell 1992).3 Although political anthropologists currently center their research on the interstitial arenas between formal political institutions (Vincent 1990), archaeologists have stayed close to the more visible political institutions in their exploration of ancient politics.
Thus, the most recent foci of political anthropology have been the fluidity of political power, the heterogeneity and conflictive nature of human societies and political structures, the importance of symbolic ways to negotiate conflicts, and the relational nature of power as it permeates all human relations (Miller and Tilley 1984; Foucault 1978a, 1978b; Wolf 1999; Fleisher and Wynne-Jones 2010; O’Donovan 2002a). Postprocessual approaches in archaeology and anthropology have also shed light on “the association of power and personal identity. . . particularly as they are constructed through symbolic meanings and movements of the body through space and the landscape” (O’Donovan 2002b, 28; Tilley 1994).
Political Power and Sources of Power
All theories that attempt to explain the nature of political systems must come to terms with the concept of “power,” which has proven slippery for political anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers alike (Kurtz 2001; Wolf 1990, 1999; Foucault 1979, 1991; Mann 1986; O’Donovan 2002a). The simplest definition is Weber’s: the ability to make others do one’s will (Weber 1964 [1947], 152). Kurtz (2001) astutely asks “what. . . attribute provides some with the capacity to force others to do things”? (22). According to Kurtz and many other scholars, it is control over resources, both material (or allocative, to use Giddens’s terminology) and ideational (symbolic, or authoritative, to use Bourdieu’s and Giddens’s terms, respectively) (Lasswell and Kaplan 1950; Earle 1997, 2004; Kurtz 2001; Miller and Tilley 1984; Rice 2009, 73; Bourdieu 1990; Giddens 1984; Foucault 1978a, 1978b, 1979). Mann (1986) echoes Kurtz’s definition of power: “the ability to pursue and attain goals through mastery of one’s environment.” Based on this definition, Mann states that power should be seen as a “generalized means” to attain one’s goals (6). Following Giddens (1979, 91) and Mann (1986, 6), Stein (1998) argues that “although power is a very abstract, volatile, and fluid phenomenon, it can be studied through an analysis of its sources, media, and effects” (6).
Mann (1986) identifies four sources of (social) power: ideological, economic, military, and political relationships (2; see also the discussion of Mann’s ideas in Whitmeyer 1997). Earle (1997) distinguishes four sources of political power: ideological, economic, military, and social (also see Earle 1991). Finally, Giddens (1981) recognizes four types of power institutions: symbolic orders or modes of discourse, economic institutions, a legal system or modes of sanction or repression,4 and political institutions. Mann’s, Earle’s and Giddens’s categories can be subsumed under Kurtz’s more general classification of material and ideational power (see also Blanton et al. 1996, 3).
Foucault (1978a, 1978b, 1979) sees power present in all social actions and relationships as an all-permeating “force” that defines the most basic ways we see the world and our role in it. This view of power as a diffuse resource is not very useful for understanding how ancient states controlled people and how people affected states. Wolf’s (1999) envisioning of power is of more utility here, in particular his definition of structural power: “the power to deploy and allocate social labor” or “the power manifest in relationships that not only operates within settings and domains but also organizes and orchestrates the settings themselves, and that specifies the direction and distribution of energy flows” (5). Mann (1986) also makes a distinction between diffuse power (where Foucault’s interest lies) and authoritative power that is “actually willed by groups and institutions. . . [and] comprises definite commands and conscious obedience” (8). My interest in ancient Maya politics focuses on authoritative power or the sphere of political power consciously wielded by human individuals, groups, and communities rather than on Foucault’s concept of power as something that is diffuse and omnipresent.
Scholars are interested in establishing the foundations of political power, whether the source is material or ideational or both. Material sources of political power include human supporters or followers and tangible resources (such as land, money, cattle, pigs, etc.). Elites can attempt to control land, natural resources, or food sources of particular importance for production or exchange, or the means of production. The decision of which resources to control varies among different societies, depending on a number of factors, and archaeologists can reconstruct material sources of power by recognizing which economic pursuits elites are intervening in as reflected in the productive activities that took place in elite households.
Ideational sources of power include symbols, ideology, ritual practices, moral codes, and information or knowledge (Mann 1986, 22-23). Control of ideas may take many forms: political leaders may control symbols or the exchange of information or access to the supernatural domain. Kurtz (2001) argues that ideational resources were critical because they helped “leaders to convince others of the legitimacy of their authority” and because they promoted “perceptions that the government is just, is concerned with the well-being of its citizens, and protects them from their enemies” (31, 35-36). Ideational resources create emotional as well as metaphysical links between the state and its subjects (Smith 2000). Leaders are constantly in need of more tangible resources to support their political strategies, but the use of coercion to obtain them is too costly, so they often must rely on ideational means (Kurtz 2001; see also Kertzer 1988). Thus, ideational resources are doubly important in the pursuit of political power (Miller and Tilley 1984).
Another important distinction in definitions of power is between “power over” and “power to” (Miller and Tilley 1984). The first term refers to the ability to get others to do one’s bidding (as we defined political power above), while the second refers to one’s ability to do what one wants (ibid.). While political scientists have traditionally emphasized “power over” others (Mann 1986; Miller and Tilley 1984; Wolf 1990, 1999) and have privileged the elite as the source of all such political power, recent perspectives have shifted attention to the “power to” that emerges from social interactions and relations that involve all members of society, not just elites (Miller and Tilley 1984; Foucault 1979; Wolf 1999; Dobres and Robb 2000). “Power to” can be seen as the positive, enabling power that relies on cooperation and persuasion and develops in alliances between individuals or groups, both non-elite and elite (Miller and Tilley 1984, 7). Mann (1986) defines “power to” as collective power, “whereby persons in cooperation can enhance their joint power over third parties or over nature” (6, following Parsons 1960, 199-225). But “power to” can also be seen as a limiting, negative force that defines the rules of interaction or as the “apparatus of social control [that] permeates and defines every aspect of social life” (Fleisher and Wynne-Jones 2010, 182). This negative version is more closely aligned with Foucault’s analysis of modernity. Although “power over” is clearly important in complex societies, we cannot deny the role of “power to.” Those who dismiss the concept of “power to” should consider the anti-communist revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe in which citizens with “power to” dismantled Communist states and their centralized apparatuses of economic, military, and political “power over” (Whitmeyer 1997, 213). This book aims to examine both “power over” and “power to” among the ancient Maya of the first millennium AD.
No matter how we define it, power now tends to be viewed not as a discrete and quantifiable substance that some people have and others do not but as a shifting relationship among an assortment of individuals that is not imposed exclusively by certain ones who have it over those who don’t (Wolf 1999; Blanton et al. 1996; Sewell 1992). Michael Love (2002) writes, “I model the dialectic of domination and resistance as a crucial element of why centralization waxed and waned and propose that elites eventually gained the upper hand by more effectively wielding institutional sources of power” (214-15). Furthermore, because political power is dialectical, “volatile and fluid” (Stein 1998, 6), the events, processes, and means by which it is embodied or materialized (DeMarrais, Castillo, and Earle 1996, 2004) become contested loci for controlling and reproducing political power (Kertzer 1988). It is to these means of maintaining power that I turn next.
Power, Leaders, Followers, and Authority
Power is now understood as a relational phenomenon between individuals or groups interacting with each other. No leader can continue to lead without followers. Supporters provide material and ideational resources to the leader. Thus, the relationship between leaders and their followers is critical in understanding political power. This relationship is founded on reciprocity, which by definition requires the exchange of material resources or services (Kurtz 2001, 32-33; Roscoe 1993; Feinman 2001; Schortman and Urban 2004; Foias 2007; Pauketat 2000; Marcus and Flannery 1996). But it can also center on emotional and ideological links between leaders and followers (Smith 2000; Kertzer 1988). The success of a political leader (or his or her ability to pursue his or her agenda and increase his or her power) is predicated on the size of his or her supporting group, so he or she must spend a great deal of time and energy to attract and maintain the allegiance of followers (Kurtz 2001, 40-41; Roscoe 1993). There are a number of capable individuals who can fulfill the role of political leader in any community, which suggests that competition is at the core of political organization in human societies (Brumfiel 1983, 1992; Brumfiel and Fox 1994; Kurtz 2001).5 Bradbury (1967) aptly describes this situation for the kingdom of Benin in West Africa during the nineteenth century: “It should. . . be clear that the Oba [king] of Benin was neither a mere ritual figurehead nor a constitutional monarch, but a political king, actively engaged in competition for power” (28).
Because a leader’s power depends at least in part on the number of supporters he or she can attract and maintain, the mechanisms that strengthen this relationship become the keys to successful political strategies. Thus, if we are to reconstruct political power, we must study the followers as well as the leaders. Political power has to be understood as a contested relationship between leaders and followers, rulers and subjects, both sides always looking for ways to gain an advantage or maintain a balance (Roscoe 1993; Gid-dens 1979; Pauketat 2000, 2003; Joyce 2000; Joyce, Bustamente, and Levine 2001).
Authority, a group’s public recognition of a leader’s right to make decisions on its behalf (Kurtz 2001, 40; Gerth and Mills 1960; Smith 2003), is one of the key strategies for attracting and maintaining followers. Authority and legitimacy are two sides of the same coin. Following Weber, we can divide authority into three ideal types: charismatic, traditional, and legal-rational (Gerth and Mills 1960; Weber 1964). Charismatic legitimacy is based on special “gifts of the body and spirit” of specific individuals who are generally believed to have supernatural powers and who instill in their audience emotions that convince them to follow the leader’s vision or mission (Gerth and Mills 1960, 245, 296). Traditional legitimacy draws from “an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of the status of those exercising authority under them” (Weber 1964, 328). Finally, legal-rational legitimacy is typical of modern states, which rely on state bureaucracies and impersonal systems of law that are presumably based on rationality. Legal-rational legitimacy is predicated on a rational belief “in the ‘legality’ of patterns of normative rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands (legal authority)” (ibid.). These three types of legitimacy are idealized, and in reality, societies and leaders exhibit a combination of them. For example, charismatic leaders are particularly strongly remembered, although their political power may also be sustained by traditional and/or legal-rational authority. Although traditional and legal-rational authority are typically seen as enabling the practice of political power of leaders, they can also be restrictions on the free behavior of these same leaders, as Lombard (1967) has noted in his study of the kingdom of Dahomey in nineteenth-century West Africa: “The [absolute] king’s powers were in fact limited by age-old traditions, established by his predecessors and bolstered by their great respect accorded the royal ancestors which precluded their violation” (78).
Just as views of power have shifted in the last decades, more recent studies of authority depict it as relational rather than imposed or coercive: the people participate and contribute to the authority of the state (Kus 1989; Smith 2000, 2003; Fleisher and Wynne-Jones 2010). Baines and Yoffee’s (2000) definition of legitimacy in early civilizations is especially apt: legitimacy is “the institutionalization of people’s acceptance of, involvement in, and contribution towards order” (15). Adam Smith (2003) writes that both power and legitimacy are necessary ingredients of authority. Emotions and affect are as important in creating political authority as rational persuasion based on calculations of costs and benefits (Smith 2000; Fleisher and Wynne-Jones 2010). Thus, legitimacy and authority, like power, become collective endeavors that involve both elites and non-elites (Fleisher and Wynne-Jones 2010, 184).
Although the evolution of the institution of permanent leaders in ranked and stratified societies endows political offices with inherent legitimate authority, competition for more power among political officeholders, agents, and factions continues, and those who gain more legitimacy will be able to attain more power and a larger following. Because of this continuous competition, political offices are not static and immutable entities; rather, they should be viewed as “inert abstractions, mere niches for incumbents of government” (Kurtz 2001, 176) who are ready to manipulate them. Gailey (1987) also echoes this “non-finality” of political officialdom: “the conflict between producing people [or commoners] . . . and civil authority, protecting the classes that siphon off goods and labor is a continual, ongoing process” (ix; Gailey’s italics). A better way to envision the state, then, is not as “a political form but a process” that is always ongoing and is never final (Vincent 1990, 414). The mechanisms and strategies used to achieve legitimacy and the variable success or failure of these mechanisms and strategies explain at least in part the rise and fall of political leaders and their governments, or, in short, ancient political dynamics.
Legitimacy is most often pursued through ideational mechanisms, although coercive methods are dominant in some societies (e. g., the Neo-Assyrian Empire and Nazi Germany). African archaeologists and anthropologists have also used the terms creative and instrumental power to define the distinction I use here between ideational-persuasive and coercive means of achieving authority (and power), respectively (Fleisher and Wynne-Jones 2010). Instrumental power is coercive power imposed from above by political elites and political institutions and can clearly be associated with definitions of “power over.” In contrast, creative power is based on ideological-persuasive means because it is about “manipulat[ing] and invent[ing] forms of meaning” (Schoenbrun 1999, 139, quoted in Fleisher and Wynne-Jones 2010, 183). Thus, it can be easily associated with positive views of cooperative power as “power to” (Fleisher and Wynn-Jones 2010; Arens and Karp 1989). Fleisher and Wynne-Jones (2010) write: “In many African examples, coercive forms of power and impositional forms of authority are shunned or resisted; instead, power is often constituted through ritual practices and alliance building. . . and authority is made legitimate through the performance and maintenance of these collective actions” (185).
A variety of ideational mechanisms can be used to gain legitimacy, such as naturalizing the political structure of the community and/or the political power of the leaders through rituals (Kertzer 1988), transforming or inscribing the landscape with political symbols of power (Smith 2003), creating a society-wide identity that all members share (Yaeger 2003a; Kus 1989), or forming affective connections between the polity and its members (Smith 2000; Kertzer 1988). The nature of the ideational (and/or coercive) strategies political leaders use to achieve legitimacy can be reconstructed through archaeological means.
World History
