Clásicos y Contemporáneos en Antropología, CIESAS-UAM-UIA
Social Anthropology (EASA), No. 2, Vol 1, 1994, págs 1 -17.
EXPLAINING MESOAMERICA
Eric Wolf*
Anthropology is an unusual discipline - ‘impossible’, as Aidan Southall has said, ‘but necessaryi.
It’s objects of study are human beings, peculiarly polymorphous as creatures both biological and
cultural; behaving so you can observe them, yet also engaged in inaudible internal discussions;
transforming nature through production, while simultaneously using language and making symbols.
So far no one theory has done justice to this gamut of characteristics. Any one attempt at theory has
inevitably privileged some aspects over others, selecting these aspects as ‘figure’ and relegating the
rest to “ground”. The followers of any one of these approaches —temporarily hegemonic— always
hoped that the marginalized phenomena would someday be explained by means of the dominant
paradigm. Inevitably, temporary success was followed by a return of ‘the repressed’, often
accompanied by claims that the hitherto back grounded material actually contained the missing key
to solve all problems. These cycles of assertion and replacement have intensified as anthropologists
previously confined within particular national traditions increasingly communicate trans-nationally.
There is probably no one solution to this impasse in finding an all-powerful, all- embracing
theory, but several more modest alternatives suggest themselves. One is to become more eclectic, to
turn into a virtue what Marvin Harris has stigmatized as a vice. We might come to admit a range of
theoretical perspectives and treat them as so many 'discovery procedures’. In place of one imperial
master-paradigm, we could entertain the possibility of a set of micro-paradigms, each the source of
a set of methods that might teach us something new and interesting about the world. It is quite
possible to retain a master-paradigm as a general guide to knowledge, and yet diversify, vary or
even suspend its application if the heterogeneity of the material addressed warrants it. Such an
approach will not in and of itself lead to universally valid generalizations. It can be productive,
however, if you can train your tool kit of ideas and methods to explicate one problem or one
problem-area. Such focus and concentration allows you to test the limits of your discovery
procedures, and to envisage alternative forms of inquiry for data and understandings not covered.
One such recurrent problem of problem-area in anthropology has concerned the rise of
civilizations. How do we account for the parallel development in different parts of the world of
extensive, complex, hierarchically organized, spatially differentiated and yet encompassing systems
of socio-political relations and cultural forms? How do we study them? How do we connect and
relate the findings of the various research strategies employed? How do we compare such systems
encountered on different continents to assess their similarities and their differences?
To find answers to these questions it may be useful to look at the ways in which such studies
have proceeded in different parts of the world. I shall focus here on one such research effort, the
course of Mesoamerican studies that began in the 1930s and then quickened in the decades
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following World War II. I use the term ‘Mesoamerica’ here, in the sense in which it has become
conventional among anthropologists, to designate the region of the Amerindian civilizations that
spanned the area between the northern escarpment of the Mexican Plateau and the southern outliers
of eastern Honduras and northern El Salvador. These civilizations also reached beyond their
frontiers and affected their borderlands, to the north and south.
There are several reasons for such a closer look at Mesoamerican studies during this span of
time. Mesoamerica constitutes ‘the most different of the world’s early civilizations’ (Wright 1989:
89). It was located in a land difficult to inhabit and difficult to traverse. It lacked the large
domesticated animals that aided transport in the Old World and even in the Andes, and that
furnished additional energy for agriculture, population control, and war. Explaining Mesoamerica is
thus critical for any comparative understanding of social and cultural complexity.
Furthermore, the ways in which people settled and organized themselves in these lands up to the
present moment have a history that extends over millennia. To comprehend the development of
these patterns and arrangements social anthropologists must join with ecologists, archaeologists,
historical linguists, ethnohistorians, art historians, and many other scholars. An important element
in Mesoamerican studies has thus been the ongoing communication among varied disciplines with
their equally varied research strategies. These collaborative efforts have also had important
international dimensions. Ironically, these were due in large part to the forced exodus of European
scholars to the Americas in the 1930s as a result of the rise of fascism in Europe.
Mesoamerican studies reaped the benefits of this confluence of impulses and orientations. The
Mexican republic, especially, offered hospitable ground for the formation of new research concerns.
The Mexican Revolution has produced an important and influential group of intellectuals and
scholars who combined an interest in recovering the Mexican past with a commitment to learn more
about the conditions of the Mexican population, as a prerequisite to modernizing and transforming
the country. Manuel Gamio, Moises Saenz, Alfonso Caso, Miguel de Mendizabal, Vicente
Lombardo Toledano, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran and others looked to anthropology for instruction
and guidelines in revolutionizing the country. The Russian Revolution and the development of
socialist movements elsewhere gave renewed impetus to studies of society from critical and
historical materialist perspectives. At the same time, Mexican conditions and circumstances differed
enough from those of Europe, to prompt new questions about the validity of Eurocentric
understandings in making sense of life on a new continent.
These new perspectives found a common denominator in their focus on society and the nature of
social relations. This altered the questions asked of data and material. Instead of trying to define the
‘culture’ and ‘spirit’ of Mesoamerican peoples, the queries now centered on the material and
organizational aspects of their lives. What were the strategic social relations governing society?
How did they bind social groupings and entities into larger encompassing systems? What was their
grounding in the material circumstances of life? How did the social groupings involved, and their
societies as a whole, confront the challenges of materiality? How did they manage to coordinate and
integrate people, and how did they cope with the tensions and oppositions that accompany such
social mobilization? How did these material engagements and forms of social interaction shape the
ways in which people understood their world? What was the role of these understandings in
managing nature and society?
EXPLAINING MESOAMERICA
3
These new questions erupted in a field previously marked by very traditional concerns in
securing and widening the database available for scholarly study and interpretation. The period
before World War II had been devoted primarily to the recovery of colonial documents; to the
identification of prehispanic public architecture and art; to the study of prehispanic calendric
systems; and to the study of indigenous languages and scripts. For a long time, these studies were
formulated in the traditional terms of a unilineal evolution which sought to rank people on a scale of
evolutionary accomplishment, from savagery to barbarism to civilization. Scholars like Levis Henry
Morgan (1876) and his disciple Adolph Bandelier (1880) wanted to place the Mesoamerican
Indians as barbarians on a par with the Indian inhabitants of the lands to the north of the Rio Grande
River (see White 1940). For them the Aztecs lacked the diagnostic traits of civilization: states,
metal, and writing. Morgan and Bandelier ascribed to them an egalitarian and communal clan-based
social organization, similar to that of the Iroquois of Morgan’s upstate New York. They discounted
the reports of Spanish conquerors who spoke of complex, stratified, urban societies as merely selfinterested attempts to exaggerate the glories of their own accomplishments. Moctezuma’s
sumptuous dinner was simply the analogue of a tribal feast among the sachems of the Iroquois
(Morgan 1876). In contrast, others - such as Morgan’s antagonist William Prescott (1873) - argued
that the Mesoamerican towns were cities of wealth and glory, inhabited by people whose
accomplishments could well rank with those of the civilizations of the Old World.
These unilineal evolutionary schemes had great value in their time in calling attention to the
qualitatively different ways in which known human societies appropriated their natural
environments, organized themselves to carry on their activities, and set their minds to work to
engage with the problems of their worlds. This was modelled, however, in terms of successive steps
and landings on the stairway of progress from savagery to barbarism to civilization, and scholars
were encouraged to assign the different peoples to their appropriate slots of advancement or
backwardness. We now understand that we must pay close attention to the multiform and
multilineal interactions at work in these transformations. The points at which people are located on
their trajectories of development are the outcome of complex originating and reproductive processes
that take place in wider social fields or world systems, and that are internal and external at the same
time. Such processes may differ from region to region, and we cannot assume that they will
everywhere have the same causes, take the same form, and produce similar effects. We are required,
in Walter Dostal’s words, to reconstruct these processes ‘in the context of the results emerging from
comparative studies of regional evolutionary processes and their interaction’ (Dostal 1985: 172).
In the Mesoamerican case this was exacerbated further by focusing almost exclusively on the
known case of the Aztecs, and by treating their own history of themselves as a people who had
advanced from rags to riches, from the status of food-collecting and snake-eating Chichimecas to
civilized refinement, as a type case of evolutionary process and progress in situ. As a result, the
basic Aztec social unit, the calpulli, was for a long time treated as a supposedly egalitarian,
democratic and communal primordial kinship unit, a view that bedeviled further discussions. There
was of course little archaeology then which would have demonstrated that complex and stratified
societies predated the Aztecs by some 3,000 years, and that the Aztecs —and other people like
them— had for a very long time lived in complex interchanges with these more advanced
neighbours. There is further evidence that the Aztecs were also a composite people, some units of
which had acquired skills at irrigation in the course of such prior contacts (Boehm de Lameiras
1986: 207-36, 297-328; Zantwijk 1985: 14-18).
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Even where the civilised status of the Mesoamericans had been emphasised, stress was laid
primarily on their possession of literacy, scripts and calendars, on their artistic accomplishments,
and on the grandeur of their pyramids. But this enthusiasm for high culture carried with it no
equivalent concern with how "these societies sustained themselves economically, and managed
their evident complexity politically. The dominant consensus was that the central force for cohesion
in these Amerind societies consisted of their religions, their myths, their rituals, and their calendric
systems for telling time. Hence generations of scholars had worked on the premise that study of
these ideas and practices based on them would also reveal the central causal mainspring driving
these societies. The Maya were depicted as pacific, knowledge-bent astronomers and philosophers
of time; the Aztecs, in contrast, were characterised as sombre and fatalistic warriors bent upon
postponing the demise of their gods through the practice of human sacrifice. In each case the
springs of action were traced to the particular culture of the people; each was seen as motivated by a
body of singularly characteristic Volkergedanken of their own.
How did these people wrest a livelihood from nature, however, and how did they sustain the
political leaders and intellectual specialists who transmitted and elaborated their patterns of high
culture? How was society ordered to guide the relevant flows of energy, and how were needed
resources distributed among the populace? Such questions began to be raised seriously only in the
1940s and 1950s by new groups of anthropological questioners. These were set off from previous
investigators by certain common experiences that marked their generation. Many had witnessed the
crisis of European society after World War I; some - drawn to ask questions about the workings of
the capitalist order - began to think about societies as embattled and transitory formations in
historical time, subject to historical causes and historical effects; quite a few were political refugees
from fascism in Europe in the 1930s, notably from Germany and from Spain. Their expulsion and
flight between 1930 and war’s end, it is now clear, contributed much to the migration of social
thought from Europe to the New World (Hughes 1975).
Outstanding among these new questioners was the Australian-born archaeologist Vere Gordon
Childe. Childe had, in tracing the sequential development of archaeological horizons in the Near
East, returned to Lewis Henry Morgan’s model of successive evolutionary stages (1936; 1942). He
understood the transformation of food gathering societies into food producers as a revolutionary
change-over, which was followed in turn by a second revolution, the urban, state-making
revolution, which first established the processes that led to the development of high cultures. This
Urban Revolution underwrote the rise of civilization through centralised accumulation of resources
through tribute and taxes; through the development of monumental public works and
representational art; through the invention of writing and the sponsorship of exact science; through
long-distance trade in luxury goods; through class stratification, a social division of labour between
primary food producers and the craft specialists supported by them; and through the installation of
the territorial state in place of kinship in the ordering of society.
Childe’s work has been properly criticized for advancing such a checklist of elements as
indicative of the rise of civilization - not all the traits are found everywhere in the combination that
he postulated. For instance, it is now clear that, at least in Mesoamerica, writing first developed in
societies that show evidence of ranking, but were not as yet fully stratified, urban, and dominated
by state organization (Marcus 1992: 32).
Yet Childe accomplished three important things. He called once again attention to major,
EXPLAINING MESOAMERICA
5
qualitatively different human ways of engaging with nature and organising society; he pointed to
the functional interconnections among these elements; and he saw each qualitatively different set of
functionally linked elements as growing out of their predecessors. Despite what others have said
about him, moreover, he was not a simple-minded universal/unilineal evolutionist, but saw
evolution as moving through differential branches (Childe 1951: 166). As an archaeologist, he
advocated the study of society in all of its transformations in time; archaeology was for him a
means to that study, not an end in itself.
Another group of the new interrogators drew their inspiration from cultural ecology, initiated by
the American anthropologist Julian Steward. The approach built upon his intensive fieldwork with
hunting and gathering Shoshoni, Ute and Paiute in 1935-36 (Steward 1938). This defined Steward's
interest in showing in detail how people used their natural microenvironments by deploying their
non-genetic, culturally acquired technologies, in order then to trace out the organisational
implications of these technology-environment relationships. In contrast to earlier approaches his
was not an environmental determinism; in contrast to later efforts at explicating the relation
between technology and environment, Steward's approach was cast not as a theory but as an openended discovery procedure bent on revealing extant relations empirically. Even before he published
his detailed study of Great Basin food collectors, Steward had written ‘Ecological aspects of Southwestern society’, which he was unable to publish in the United States but placed in Anthropos in
1937 (personal communication). The main thesis of the paper was that variations in technologyenvironment relations in the arid Southwest of the United States - the Great American Desert - such
as food collecting, riverine horticulture, and horticulture by means of canal irrigation created a
range of variant possibilities for the development of different socio-political forms of organization
forms: unilineal localised bands in arid, unfavourable microenvironments; larger bands or multibands under conditions of an enhanced food supply; multi-band, multi-lineage villages of sedentary
cultivators; lineages which develop into clans where possession of a group name and common
ceremonies produce group solidarity; and, finally, the coalescence of such solidary clans into multiclan Pueblo-style villages in which the authority of the village supersedes the jurisdiction of the
constituent exogamous clans. These were understood as the possible outcomes of ecological
alternatives under conditions of enhanced intensification and productivity, and not arranged as
necessary steps in directional evolution.
These considerations also led Steward to relate technology to environment on the one hand, to
socio-political complexity on the other, when he undertook the task of editing the Handbook of
South American Indians in 1940. In the beginning, the volumes of that handbook were arranged in
purely areal terms: one for Marginals, another for Tropical Forest peoples, a third one for the
peoples of the Andean region. In the course of the work, however, these areal categories were
transformed into socio-political types: the bands and multi-bands of food collectors, the local
groups of swidden cultivators, and the chiefdoms of the Caribbean and Sub-Andean areas, the inhabitants of states in the case of the high Andes (Steward 1946-50).
Steward’s approach not only exercised an influence among ethnologists, but also gave rise to a
sequence of important research activities in archaeology, formalised as the archaeological study of
settlement patterns. Tracing the distribution and concentration of settlements in a region and noting
the techno-environmental characteristics of the various settlement nodes provided, first of all, an
entry into the study of ecological relations. Then it could be combined with a mapping of regions of
social interaction through transportation routes and networks of exchange, and used to locate points
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of regional economic and political control. Though isolated attempts in this direction had been
made in the nineteenth century, the major impetus for these studies in the twentieth century is
traceable to Steward, who suggested that the archaeologist Gordon Willey use this approach in his
path-breaking exploration of the Viru Valley in Peru (Willey 1953).
Gordon Childe’s model of the Urban Revolution proved immediately relevant to scholars who
visualised prehispanic sites in Mesoamerica not as ceremonial centres alone, but wanted to see
pyramids and temples as monumental structures in their relation to a pattern of settlement and
centres of population. Cultural ecology appealed to questioners who had begun to ask how food
producing villages had evolved into densely populated urban centres, but also how these centres
were fed and sustained, and what particular techno-environmental repertoires might have underwritten these changes. In pursuit of these questions the interests of the Stewardians coincided with
the concerns and ideas put forward by the German scholar and activist Karl Wittfogel.
Wittfogel had written a major historical analysis of China in which he had stressed the role of
water control in the development of Chinese agriculture and of the state built upon it (Wittfogel
1931). This ‘hydraulic agriculture’, he argued, had given rise to a centralised state, ruled by an agromanagerial bureaucracy. That state dominated Chinese society in a fashion which was quite unlike
European feudalism or capitalism. Instead, Wittfogel argued, it constituted a particular variant of
what Marx had called ‘the Asiatic mode of production’.
In Marx’s own writings, one can find two different versions of this Asiatic mode. One version
stresses the constitution of society by numerous autonomous communities, all brought together
under the rule and domination of a single ruler, who in his sacralised person represented the totality
of the encompassed whole. This view of the Asiatic mode seems to have emphasised structural
arrangements and the functions of ideology in the maintenance of societal unity. Wittfogel
discounted such an appeal to ideological cohesion as smacking of the idealism of Georg Lukacs
(personal communication). The version of the Asiatic mode strongly emphasised by Wittfogel laid
major stress on the technological and agro-managerial apparatus of society, its ‘hydraulic’
component.
Wittfogel had been the China expert of the old German communist party, and had defended his
techno-environmental view of Chinese society as a hydraulic complex based on the Asiatic mode
against followers of Stalin’s position at the so-called Leningrad discussion of 1931. The Stalinists
insisted on a unilineal and universal development from primitive society to slave society to
feudalism, capitalism and socialism. They opposed the concept of a separate Asiatic mode in part
because it visualised a dynamic role for capitalism in the dismemberment of ‘Asiatic’ social
formations. They also feared that Asiatic communist movements might develop political strategies
suitable to these different kinds of societies and yet independent of the supposed centre in Moscow.
Moreover, Wittfogel suggested that Russia, too, might best be understood as a secondary/peripheral
Asiatic society produced by the Mongol conquest. This conjured up the possibility that the Soviet
bureaucracy could in turn be seen as an ‘Asiatic’ phenomenon that would call into question
Russia’s role as the instrument of socialist transformation.
For people trying to understand the nature of Mesoamerican society, Wittfogel raised very
significant issues. The first of these asked about the relevance of hydraulic horticulture to
Mesoamerican development. Although Steward and Wittfogel differed considerably in their politics
EXPLAINING MESOAMERICA
7
and scholarly styles, their common stress on human relations to the environment through the
deployment of technology influenced the course of cultural ecological studies in anthropology in
general. For Mesoamericanists they posed the question of whether irrigation horticulture had played
any significant role in the development of the area. Wittfogel further prompted investigators to ask
how one was to understand the relation between the basic local units of society, the calpulli, and the
elite or class of rulers. What kinds of criteria governed membership in a calpullil What kind of
property relation existed between rulers and ruled? What kind of relation existed between the
paramount ruler and the lords that paid him homage?
The role of mediator of these questions and concerns for Mesoamerican studies fell above all to
the anthropologist Paul Kirchhoff, recently arrived in Mexico as a refugee from National Socialist
Germany. As an anthropologist, Kirchhoff had three rather different irons in the fire. One was a
concern with cultural distributions, with diffusion studies of the kind associated with the name of
Fritz Graebner; that included his abiding belief in trans-Pacific diffusionary contacts. Another was
an interest in calendar studies and research in the ethnohistorical sources of Mesoamerica, both
prehispanic and colonial, in the scholarly tradition of Adolf Bastian’s student Eduard Seler (on
Seler, see Nicholson 1973). Here he demonstrated, against general expert opinion, that each
separate Mesoamerican political domain had its own distinctive starting date for its calendar, a
distinctive mark of its separate history and identity. Yet joined to these quite traditional
involvements was an interest in the problems raised for anthropology by Friedrich Engels: the
postulated transition from primitive communalism to class society; the origins of the state; and the
evolution of civilization, complex society, Hockkultur. In trying to rethink the implications of the
German catastrophe he had also come under the intellectual influence of Karl Wittfogel.
Kirchhoff’s own involvement in trying to answer these questions led him to change the course of
the discussions on the nature of Mesoamerican kinship. He moved well beyond Morgan in drawing
an important distinction between what he called the unilateral, equalitarian, exogamous clan —
which he saw as an evolutionary blind alley, its classical greatness also constituting its
organisational limitations— and a second kind of clan in which degree of nearness to the founding
ancestor distinguished between a high-ranking core of direct descendants and the lower-ranking
descendants of collateral lines. These Kirchhoff called 'conical clans’, citing Franz Boas’ model of
Kwakiutl social organization as an example. Kirchhoff’s paper putting forward these important
distinctions was, however, for the longest time a victim of the political vicissitudes of the times.
First written in 1935, it did not see print until published (1955) in a rather obscure student journal at
the University of Washington where Kirchhoff briefly taught in the 1950s, and finally only reached
general distribution twenty-four years later through Morton Fried’s Readings in Anthropology
(1959). Kirchhoff’s suggestion was that kinship unit common to all members could nevertheless be
divided into a core-line of aristoi and collateral lines of lower-ranking common folks, and thus
contain the seeds of social differentiation into classes.
Kirchhoff’s thesis was subsequently applied to the analysis of the Aztec kinship unit, the
calpulli, by his student Arturo Monzon (1949). It has been used recently, and with great verve, by
Jonathan Friedman (1979) in his comparative evolutionary study of ‘Asiatic’ social formations in
Southeast Asia. But these studies have not exhausted the discussions concerning the nature of the
calpulli. What Kirchhoff did was to move the problematic of the discussion from attempts to
identify a stable form of kinship affiliation to a consideration of functional issues that address
problems of where the calpulli belongs in a system of stratification and domination.
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Subsequent work, notably by Kirchhoff’s student Pedro Carrasco, who had also fled from
republican Spain to Mexico, and by Carrasco’s student Hugo Nutini, has shown that the term
calpulli can mean different things in different regions (Nutini 1965: 621). A local unit so-called
may be endogamous in one place, exogamous in another, agamous in a third. It may be localised,
semi-localised, or non-local. Membership in it may be hereditary through kinship filiation, by
residence, or by choice. Moreover, as Carrasco has pointed out, in the ethnohistorical records the
term calpulli may refer to quite different levels of social segmentation: to a town quarter or
subdivision, to a subdivision of a subdivision, or alternatively to whole ethnic groups or tribes, such
as the constituent tribes of the Aztecs. In practice, it was most often applied to a subdivision of a
town or community, a ward, which acted as a land- holding corporation run by elders, carried out
functions of socialisation, maintained a training centre for young men, formed military companies
in case of war, and supported a temple for its own godling. It was at the same time an administrative
unit that owed tribute and service to the larger community or the state. If they had any kinship
aspects at all, these might well reside in stem kindreds, sets of related families that maintained
themselves through generations.
While our understanding of the calpulli has thus undergone revision, a new kind of important
socio-political-economic unit has emerged in the study of extant ethnohistorical sources. This is the
teccalli or tecpan, the noble house or stem kindred, the basic unit within the stratum of nobles. Such
a house was allocated as a corporate unit to support a lord (teuctli) and his descendants (pillt). The
work for these houses came either from a special group of noble house workers (teccalleque) or
from people who resided in the calpullis. In time such a noble house might give rise to several
subsidiary houses headed by various teteuctin who would remain allied to one another. Succession
to the title of ‘lord’ would be decided by a council of the house and confirmed by the ruler
(Carrasco 1976).
Kirchhoff was thus instrumental in opening up the discussion of Mesoamerican kinship and its
bearing on the organization of society. In stressing the role of the aristocratic line within the
stratified conical clan he also raised the problem of the chiefdom. Kirchhoff worked with Steward
on the preparation of the fourth volume of the Handbook of South American Indians, on the
Circum-Caribbean. This volume was first conceived in purely areal terms, to group together the
seemingly more complex societies of the Caribbean and the Sub-Andean regions as revealed by the
Spanish sources. These people were neither unstratified village dwellers like those of the Tropical
Forest nor the subjects of fully-fledged Andean-type states. Were they the products of arrested
development towards statehood, or of some retrograde process of political breakdown? By 1955,
Kalervo Oberg —writing about types of social structure in Lowland South America— began to
refer to them as chiefdoms; and by 1959 Steward —ever cautious— was willing to grant them the
status of a socio-cultural type in his Native Peoples of South America (Steward and Faron 1959).
There now existed the possibility of thinking of a developmental type or stage between the
communalism of the ‘primitive’ village and the state, a type that might maintain the forms and
fictions of common kinship, and yet stratify kinship units internally into a line of chiefs and
collateral lines of commoners. This also suggested one of the pathways through which ‘Asiatic’
formations might in fact have evolved. Conceivably, there may have been other multi-lineal
alternatives. This contributed to ‘operationalising’ the thinking about the ‘Asiatic mode’, both to
specifying the elements buried in that suggestive but amorphous concept, and to modelling the
multilineal pathways for the development of various possible and historically ascertainable
combinations of these elements.
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9
If Kirchhoff substantially changed our ways of thinking about Mesoamerican social organization
and about the important role of chief ship, he was also influential through his insistence that
Mesoamerica was urban in character. This located Mesoamerica as an area of cities, between the
encampments of food collectors and oasis village dwellers of the desert regions to the north, and the
Central American chiefdoms to the south. It made Gordon Childe’s model of the Urban Revolution
relevant to Mesoamerican studies. Envisaging Mesoamerica as an area of cities, archaeologists were
now prompted to focus their studies of settlement patterns on the temporal and spatial distribution
of urban layouts. Historical demographers were encouraged to search through the extant Spanish
documents for more reliable data on population figures. Within a short time, they came up with
astonishingly high figures both for population clusters and densities, leading in turn back to the
question of how such large populations had been sustained and controlled.
If Steward introduced cultural ecology, and Kirchhoff and Wittfogel added Marxian
perspectives, Karl Polanyi contributed ideas about forms of economic integration through the
patterns of reciprocity, redistribution, and the market. Polanyi had moved from Hungary to Austria
after the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet republic in 1918, and then from Austria to England, and
onto the United States. There he first taught and wrote on social and economic history, but turned
increasingly to the study of primitive and archaic economies, especially through the works of
Malinowski and Thurnwald (Polanyi 1944). Out of this came a series of seminars at Columbia
University that examined a number of different economies - ranging from those of ancient
Babylonia and Assyria, Egypt and the Hittites, Ancient Greece and India to those of Mesoamerica,
West Africa, and the Berber highlands. As a unifying conceptual scheme, these seminars utilised
Polanyi’s ideas about reciprocity, redistribution, and the market as different forms or patterns that
served to integrate the economy (Polanyi, Arensberg and Pearson 1957). The idea that proved to be
signally influential in anthropology was the notion of redistribution, of appropriational movements
towards a center and out of it again’, ‘collecting into, and distributing from, a centre’ (Polanyi,
Arensburg and Pearson 1957: 250, 254).
One of the participants in Polanyi’s Columbia seminars was Marshall Sahlins who would
combine Steward’s cultural ecology, Kirchhoff’s notion of the conical clan, and the Polanyian idea
of integration through redistribution in his thesis on social stratification in Polynesia (1958). He
defined two major patterns for the Polynesian islands. In the first ecological dispersion of resources
was correlated with household specialisation in differential resource use, redistribution through
chiefs, wide-ranging kinship ties through the use of conical clan structures, and multi-tier social
stratification. In the second pattern, where resources were concentrated instead of dispersed, one
was likely to find all necessary tasks carried on within households, with people relying on lineage
organization and chiefly allocation within lineages, and exhibiting much lower degrees of social
stratification. Chiefship and redistribution thus appeared closely linked, and the power of the
redistributing chief could be thought of as one of the strategic ways of accumulating further power,
capable perhaps of transforming a chiefdom into a state. Thinking about chiefly redistribution thus
also opened up ways of thinking about social formations organized in the ‘Asiastic mode’. It
allowed one to look for social organisational arrangements that furthered stratification and
centralisation, beyond the seemingly ideological causality implicit in Marx’s variant I and the
wholly technological causality implicit in Marx’s variant II, sponsored by Wittfogel.
It was Pedro Armillas who began the arduous task of locating prehispanic irrigation canals and
dams by practicing his ‘pedestrian archaeology’, taking long hikes over the ground, eventually
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aided by aerial photographs; and Angel Palerm who began to search through the records of the
Spanish conquest for references to hydraulic works. Both were veterans of the Spanish civil war and
had found their way to Mexico after the destruction of the Spanish Republic; both enlisted in
courses taught by Kirchhoff; both were inspired by reading Gordon Childe. Armillas also began to
stress the importance, in the Valley of Mexico, of the so-called ‘floating gardens’, cultivating
platforms built out into the lake basin at the centre of the valley. At the same time, Palerm and
William Sanders —who had come from the United States to study with Armillas at Mexico City
College— began to investigate forms of present-day cultivation that might throw light on the
productive potentialities of prehispanic horticulture. In the course of the years, Sanders would
expand these studies into •an ambitious programme of research into the ecological foundations of
social complexity in Mesoamerica, work that would make him one of the leading archaeologists of
North America (e.g. Sanders and Price 1968).
The general conclusion of this group was that rainfall horticulture alone could not sustain the
very large populations and habitation areas that had clearly existed before the Conquest. In the
highlands it was irrigation and intensive cultivation on chinampas, ‘floating gardens’, that had
supported the cities and societies of the altiplano. At the same time if the Maya centres proved to be
densely settled and urbanised, they could not have relied on slash-and-burn cultivation alone. On
logical grounds, Palerm and Wolf predicted in 1957 that Maya development too would be shown to
depend on forms of intensive cultivation other than slash-and-burn horticulture, most likely some
‘system of cultivation of swamplands’ (1957: 28). Since then such alternate systems have been
identified, exemplified by the construction of raised fields and canals in some areas, and of water
control and storage facilities in others (Puleston 1976; 1977; Scarborough 1992; Turner 1974).
These controlled aquatic resources also became habitats for waterlilies and fish that fed upon them.
Schele and Freidel (1990: 94) have suggested that the importance of this swamp and river-edge
horticulture is reflected in the metaphor of the waterlily as a symbol for royal power. One of the
Maya epithets for the nobility was ‘waterlily people’, ah nab. It is however unlikely that raised field
horticulture, with attendant canals, was ever of sufficient density to serve as the exclusive or nearexclusive base for large populations. While population estimates for the Maya areas are beset with
uncertainties, the largest settlement, Late Classic Tikal, is thought to have had a population of
between 65,000 and 80,000 people (Blanton et al. 1981: 196); the largest Post-Classic settlement,
Mayapan, contained 12,000 (p. 213). Copan had an estimated 18,000-25,000 (Sanders and Webster
1988: 543); most northern Yucatecan chiefdoms of the time of the Conquest held about 2,000-3,000
people. The scale of Maya towns and domains was thus smaller than those of the Central Mexican
highlands. This makes it likely that the Maya ahaw or king based his power on the scheduling and
management of very diverse resources and systems, involving slash-and-burn cultivation, raised
field horticulture, ramon tree arboriculture, and fishing and hunting in combination. If the Maya
kings had such managerial functions, these were probably closely interwoven with their ritual and
quasi-shamanic roles (Freidel and Scheie 1988).
At the time of the Conquest the Aztec capital city Tenochitlan had a population of between
160,000-200,000, crowded into 12-15 square kilometres. It was divided into about one hundred
‘wards’, each of them a unit of craft specialisation. Its people did not feed themselves, but the city located as it was in the midst of a system of lakes - could supply itself with food and other resources
by means of a highly effective system of porters and canoe traffic. At its core lay the administrative
and ceremonial precincts, housing the Aztec elite. The centre had both ritual and administrative
EXPLAINING MESOAMERICA
11
functions (Sanders and Webster 1988). The entire complex was fed by an integrated system of
chinampa cultivation, dams and irrigation canals, and extensive terracing.
The city, together with its allies Texcoco and Tlacopan, drew tribute from thirty- eight
provinces, but it is notable that seventeen of these at some point revolted against Aztec domination.
Ross Hassig (1988) has argued, very convincingly, that the Aztec did not aim at controlling an
integral territorial state, but pursued the goal of a ‘hegemonic empire’, which minimises the costs of
direct administration and control, but builds its power upon the ability to strike with massive force
when required to do so. This lowered the cost of empire, but it also increased the tensions and
stresses that go with a constant state of military preparedness. David Carrasco relates the inability to
pacify conquered or enemy states to the growing intensification of human sacrifice in Tenochtitlan
between 1440 and 1521: ‘Not only did the political order appear unstable but the divine right to
conquer and subdue all peoples also seemed unfulfilled ... In this situation, the ritual strategy to
rejuvenate the cosmos became the major political instrument to subdue the enemy and control the
periphery’ (Carrasco 1987: 154).
It has been argued, with some justification, that the research efforts I have discussed paid
primary attention to the material and organisational bases of Mesoamerican civilization, and only
secondarily engaged the issues posed by the ideational and ideological elements of its culture. This
is true enough, but perhaps less for lack of interest than for the absence until quite recently of
concepts and methods adequate to the task. Armillas wrote about the pantheon of Teotihuacan as
early as 1945; and Pedro Carrasco essayed an interesting analysis of the social basis of Mexican
polytheism in 1976. Yet until the advent of French structuralism there existed no very convincing
method for displaying and ordering ideational data; and our thinking about the relation of collective
representations to the structure of society had gone very little beyond the contributions of Emile
Durkheim. This situation is beginning to change on both counts.
Structuralist analysis has shown that Mesoamerican symbolic systems worked with more than
thirty separate, coded taxonomies or classes r>f symbols (Hunt 1977: 54). I will offer a brief
example. The Mesoamericans equated the beginning of the year with the spring equinox, the east,
the colour turquoise, with the start of the rainy season, first planting and the birth of maize; with
new growth of plants and children, and hence with presexual childhood, with child-growing rituals,
and with small or childlike godlings; but then also with the sacrifice of small children, especially
with double cowlicks in their hair, and with really sanguinary earth renewal gods like Xipe who is
depicted clad in a flayed human skin covered with flowers, and celebrated in a song which
associates the birth and ripening of the maize plant with the birth of the war-chiefs: ‘I shall rejoice if
it ripen early/ the war-chief is born’. Structurally these spring-like metaphors are counterposed to
the metaphors associated with winter: with the winter solstice, the sun defeated after its annual
journey, the north, the colour red, the cessation of rain and the beginning of the dry season, the turn
to hunting after the harvest, with old age, with barren, wrinkled post-menopausal women, with
games and rituals for old people, and with celebrations of post-sexual gods (Hunt 1977: 110- 111).
Such an unravelling of symbols, to clarify how signifier is coupled with signified, is, however,
only a first step. A second step might consist in relating these symbolic chains to their
functional
contexts in activity systems - household, horticulture, war fare, dancing, ritual, but do so without the
functionalist expectations that everything hung together functionally, or that functional relations
would always work. Not everything hangs together, and some functional relations work very badly
12
ERIC WOLF
indeed. Anothermethod would be to relate the all-encompassing Mesoamerican calendar
functionally to the annual round of activities and to the social groups taking part in them (see
Carrasco 1979).
Let us look more closely at the calendar. All the primary archaic civilizations developed
calendars and scheduled events in time. Whatever the explanation, however, one of the hallmarks of
Mesoamerican civilization was its concern —some say its obsession— with cycles of time. This is
by no means a novel statement, nor should it invite a return to the nineteenth century obsession with
solar, lunar, and other nature- myths which Edward Tylor characterised as all too often ‘wildly
speculative’ and ‘hopelessly unsound’ (1958 [1871], 318).
During the last decades a much more scientific and sophisticated archaeo-astronomy and
ethnoastronomy has yielded an increasingly dependable picture of the Mesoamerican symbolic
landscape, both in the layout of the built environment and in the activities within it. A solar
calendar, intertwined with a divinatory calendar, marked the passage of time by tracing the
movement of the sun through its way- stations in space, through solstices, equinoxes and zenith.
This calendar thus coordinated segments of time with directions in segmented space, and served to
plot the alternation of the ‘night sun’ for peaceful planting with the advent of the ‘day sun’ in the
dry season, the time for war. The calendar further scheduled the entry and exit of salient
supernaturals, the holding of the great collective rituals, and the mobilisation of specific categories
of people to carry out these ritual events.
We owe a number of excellent studies of such ritual performances to Johanna Broda, whose
trajectory in the post-war years took her from the University of Vienna to Madrid, where she also
encountered Angel Palerm, and on to Mexico. In these works (e.g. Broda 1978) she analyses the
social identity of the actors, the audiences addressed by the performance, the metaphors and objects
employed in them, and —above all— what they reveal about relations of power and domination at
work in the hierarchy of classes. Her aim has been to show how the symbolic constructs and
coordinates of space and time evident in Mexican cosmovision underpin an ideology, symbolic
schemata that function to legitimise the political economic ordering of state and society.
Furthermore, she sees as one of the important aspects of ritual action and cult their attempt to
reverse the causal relation between the phenomena of nature and the sequence of human action, to
make ‘natural phenomena appear to be the consequence of the proper performance of ritual’ (Broda,
1982: 105).
This is a third strategy in relating ideation and ideology to the economy, society, and polity. Its
most novel aspect lies in its departure from Durkheim, first in its critical unwillingness to take
collective representations at face value, and second to interrogate the collective representations
about their social relational context. In regard to the first point, they may represent cognitively,
misrepresent, or fail to represent at all. With regard to the second point, we may ask, with Maurice
Godelier (1973: 204-220) and Frances Berdan (1978), what these representations can tell us or
conceal from us about social, relations of equality or hierarchy; subjection or domination; owngroup and out-group; reciprocity, redistribution, or surplus extraction. We might also ask whether
these representations depict the relation of the human microcosm to the cosmos as co-ordinate or
subordinate, and what these models of representations then entail about the way social relations are
charged with sacredness and moral force (see Eder 1985).
EXPLAINING MESOAMERICA
13
Archaeologists, ethnohistorians, cultural astronomers, art historians and students of myth and
folklore from all six continents have also, in recent years, added greatly to our knowledge of the
symbolic dimensions of city plans, public art, and other structural contexts of ritual performance.
This task has received a major stimulus from the excavation of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, as
well as from the decipherment of the Maya script. The temple excavations tell us much about the
way the Aztecs visualised their role in the universe; the decipherments inform us how much Maya
public art was devoted to recording and glorifying the deeds of their kings. Like other archaic
civilizations, as the cultural geographer Paul Wheatley has pointed out (1971), Mesoamerica built
its cities and towns as replicas on the ground of cosmic order and destiny, in this case following the
directionalities of the calendar. Thus Tenochtitlan was divided into four quadrants by axes running
from east to west, and from north to south. Their point of intersection constituted ‘the navel of the
world’, the privileged central position of the great temples and palaces. Johanna Broda (1978) and
Luis Reyes Garcia (1979) have shown that this five-fold scheme, of four quadrants and the pivotal
centre, also organized the tribute-paying provinces of the empire into four groupings, all owing
obedience to the royal precinct; and the central palace itself was divided into four quadrants, with
the ruler standing at point zero, the ‘heart of the city. Sight lines connected the temples and
constructions in this centre to the peaks of the chain of sacred mountains encircling the city and the
valley below. This bears out the Rumanian scholar Mircea Eliade’s insight about the symbolic
significance of the centre as an imago mundi (1991 [1954]: 17). Yet this relation of the microcosm
to the macrocosm is more than a phenomenological replication of some putative human archetype.
Tenochtitlan was the hub of a system of power that ruled over resources and human beings, and the
sacralisation of organized space embodied a political claim to exclusive sovereign power over
nature and society.
We have traced in these pages the steady unfolding of a research effort aimed at explaining the
development of complex society and culture in Mesoamerica. I have tried to show how this effort
brought together a variety of research perspectives, drawn from separate and often distinctive
disciplines. The participants in this effort came from many countries and represented different
national traditions. In many cases they defended positions that had put them at risk in their countries
of origin. Yet this effort achieved a momentum of its own precisely through the successful synthesis
of these different endeavours. In this effort each step built upon the implications of its predecessor,
expanding the quest for knowledge from an initial focus on the material base of society to a
consideration of the symbolic worlds generated in that context. The motivation driving this course
of inquiry was not to develop universal generalisations, but to collate and connect answers to
important questions about a particular problem-area, in this case one of the significant world
civilizations. I submit to you not only that this can be done, but that it can lead to insight and
information that is both cumulative and new. In this way anthropology, as the comparative science
of what it means to be human, has both a mediatory and a synthesising role to play.
NOTAS
*Eric R. Wolf, City University of New York, 4 Blueberry Hill Road, Irvington, NY 10533-1402,
USA.
i An earlier version of this paper was presented in honour of Professor Walter Dostal at the
University of Vienna on 14 May 1993.
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