42 WOLF Explaining Mesoamérica

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 http//:www.ciesas.edu.mx/Clasicos/Publicaciones/Index.html 2 ERIC WOLF 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? http//:www.ciesas.edu.mx/Clasicos/Publicaciones/Index.html 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 self- interested 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

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