Recent anthropological work demonstrates rising concern for understanding group-level autonomy, particularly the maintenance of opposition to expanding states and economic systems. Archaeologists are well poised to contribute to this effort, especially when aided by renewed attention to Eric Wolf's concept of process.Wolf's concept can be applied to indigenous-driven, broad-scale processes of intercommunity connection to help
The application of Marxist theory in American historical archaeology has expanded greatly over the past 20 years. More than just a theoretical 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 Marx’s 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 approach to cultural production improves the foundational historical archaeologies of the colonial American state and African-American ethnogenesis and is the basis for archaeologically-based critiques of dominant American society.
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