The Late Prehispanic Economy of the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico: Weaving Threads from Data, Theory, and Subsequent History

Collaborative and competitive strategies in the variability and resiliency of large‐scale societies in Mesoamerica

“…With explicitly comparative interests, Wolf and colleagues (Palerm and Wolf ; Sanders and Price ) understandably drew heavily on the models and conceptual frames that were predominant in much of anthropology at that time in their efforts to understand pre‐Columbian Mesoamerican polities (Feinman and Nicholas ; Wolf ). Inspired by elements of Marxist thought, these cultural evolutionary theoretical perspectives were heavily grounded in extant interpretations of the development of urban societies in Eurasia (Childe ; Marx ; Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson ; Wittfogel ).…”

“…Yet the same empirical investigations that were inspired by early cultural evolutionary frames subsequently have led to serious doubts regarding the presumed key tenets of those conceptual perspectives; in particular, there is little empirical support for the notion that despotic rulers centrally controlled pre‐Columbian Mesoamerican economic production or distribution (Baker ; Feinman and Nicholas ; Offner , 1981b). In fact, most production for exchange was carried out domestically (Feinman ; Hirth ), and markets were important across Mesoamerica long before the Aztec empire (Feinman and Garraty ; Garraty and Stark ; Hirth and Pillsbury ; Kowalewski ).…”

New Perspectives on the Political Economy of Great Zimbabwe

“…Following Wallerstein (1974), world systems theories have focused on the importance of existing relationships and networks of interaction between different areas and regions to document large-scale social networks (e.g., Stein 1998). While political economic theories continue to improve (e.g., Blanton and Fargher 2008;DeMarrais and Earle 2017;Feinman and Nicholas 2012;Stahl 2014), the major limitation of older approaches is that often they dichotomized the political economy into individual variables such as production and distribution without contextually integrating them to provide a comprehensive picture of how societies in different places functioned at different times (Hirth 1996;Feinman and Carballo 2018). Furthermore, the definition of cores and peripheries in approaches that used the "old" world systems thinking was often subjectively made without fully understanding local contexts in different world areas (Kohl 1989).…”

“…And yet, the inhabitants of some regions labeled as peripheries in parts of Asia and Africa (and virtually everywhere) made conscious decisions to be stateless and interacted with the so-called cores in their own ways, demonstrating variability in human strategies across space and time (Scott 2009). This and other limitations precipitated the emergence of newer approaches that explored the mix of strategies employed by societies through collective and individual action to produce, manipulate, mobilize, and allocate resources in different places and at different points in time (Blanton and Fargher 2008;DeMarrais and Earle 2017;Feinman and Carballo 2018;Feinman and Nicholas 2012;Hirth 1996;Smith 2004). These newer models that are based on the examination of the local context within a broader perspective reject the bifurcation of control of political economies into monolithic categories such as command based or decentralized and instead view them as a mix of strategies, collective action included, that could be adopted by households in state and nonstate societies alike (e.g., .…”

“…In a landmark publication, McIntosh (1999, and contributors to the volume) argued for the necessity of profiling local concepts in studying African political economies and perspicaciously revealed that the main theories used to explain economic processes in precolonial Africa were derived from older approaches adopted from other world areas, such as Polynesia and Mesopotamia, without much calibration to the local context (e.g., Berry 2007;Chirikure et al 2017a;Guyer 2004;Guyer and Belinga 1995). Consequently, adherence to older models of political economy, which have been shown not to work in prehispanic Mesoamerica and elsewhere (Blanton and Fargher 2008;Feinman and Carballo 2018;Feinman and Nicholas 2012;Hirth 1996), continues to produce elite-centric and exotics-fueled models of political economies in Africa south of the Sahara (Chirikure et al 2014;Klehm 2017;McIntosh 1999).…”