Reviews 35(2)
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120 REVIEWS in which a way of life, rather than just a commodity, is produced. Sometimes this consumption can amount to a fetishism that blinds the consumer to the social relations Edited by Vergil E. Noble that are the basis for their relations to things. Sometimes consumption can be driven by systemic logics external, and Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. possibly oppositional to, capitalist accumulation. Consump- MARK P. LEONE and PARKER B. POTTER, tion is a very local phenomenon, happening on scales that JR., editors are usually accessed in archaeological excavations, thus it Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New provides an important point to break into an appreciation of this larger process. York, NY, 1999. xiv + 248 pp., 6 tables. Viewing archaeology as part of the capitalism requires $85.00, $37.50 paper. addressing the question of the second section: where do our questions come from? Potter fi nds issues for historical Leone and Potter’s edited book is based on a 1993 School archaeology by first looking at his own identity, which of American Research seminar that considered “the use of includes that of weekend dairy farmer and purveyor of historical archaeology as a means for understanding the handcrafts, and with the help of Aronowitz, MacCannell, and origins, development, and modern condition of capitalism.” Daniel Miller, discovers how historical archaeology can help This charge is larger than even a weeklong seminar can his fellow citizens understand their contemporary identities exhaust. Nonetheless, the collection offers strong evidence in Annapolis and New Hampshire. Epperson surveys the of how historical archaeology is contributing towards those documentary history of the African Burial Ground in New ends. Though papers are primarily about the materiality of York City, and finds that historical archaeology all too class as a productive and consumptive process, this is not easily falls into painfully familiar ways of understanding and an exclusionary focus. Importantly, gender and race are thereby reconstructing the color line. Confronting histories brought into a number of the analyses. None of the authors that support power in the present is Wylie’s agenda, and she suggest they have had the fi nal say, nor do any suggest that develops clear epistemological guidelines for maximizing the all other says must be reduced to class. use of archaeological data to meet that democratic goal. There are four sections to the volume. The fi rst is an What in the case studies is learned about capitalism? introduction, authored by Leone, based on short position Variety is the keyword. For these authors, capitalism is papers on the themes of the seminar written by the partici- not a monolith, mechanically working itself out in the same pants. The second, acknowledging the cultural contingency way everywhere. Instead they conceive capitalism as an of historical archaeology, investigates “Where the Questions abstractly coherent, necessarily global, infi nitely fractured, Come From” and includes wide-ranging contributions by and locally specifi c phenomenon. Variation and difference Potter, Epperson, and Wylie. The third looks at case studies are due, in part, to time-space variation, as in Purser’s concerning “Integration into Capitalism and Impoverishment” insightful study of the replacement of local processing and and includes Purser on Paradise Valley, Nevada, Orser on maintenance economies by national assembly economies a comparative study of southern farm tenancy, Mullins on and Orser’s empirical assessment of regional variation in African-American life in Annapolis, Maryland, and Leone on tenancy patterns. Structural forces also drive variation, as the consumptive practices of Annapolitans over two centuries. Mullins documents in his study of how racist exclusion and The concluding section, “Beyond North America,” contains a community resistance shaped African-American consumer single, and singularly lucid, piece in which Matthew Johnson practices in Annapolis. Leone presents how the divisions refl ects on the directions and constraints that face a global between owners and workers, winners and losers, and archaeology of capitalism. participants and resisters result in markedly different ceramic Leone’s statement of key themes is a succinct and impor- assemblages. In his wide-ranging assessment, Johnson tant positioning of the signifi cance and promise of studying reminds us that time, space, historical context, and disciplin- capitalism for historical archaeologists. His complex argu- ary proclivities, when confronted on a global scale, will ment, in brief, begins with the precept that capitalism is a disclose even more variety in the history of capitalism social and cultural system based on private property that than is found in North America. The authors make their produces social inequality. The extremes of inequality are respective points by studying specifi c material objects, not contained in a significant way by ideological constructs. just theory, and by refi ning familiar methodologies to achieve Archaeology is part of this ideology and therefore archaeolo- theoretical insights. For instance, Leone and Orser rethink gists are either confronting or acquiescing in the maintenance how to do assemblage analysis; Purser works with new ways of inequality, through creating or deconstructing myths about to integrate assemblage and regional spatial analysis; and the origins and functioning of the modern world. Mullins derives meaning systems and practices from bottles, Capitalism is but the most recent form of culture on the bric-a-bracs, fi sh bones, and buttons. planet, and though it has a totalizing impulse, there are still Of all the features of capitalism, the act of consumption aspects of life that are outside of the grips of its logic. receives the most serious attention. Consumption is a This can be most clearly seen in the act of consumption, taken-for-granted aspect of any site’s formation, an action in which exchange values are converted into use values, previously plumbed by historical archaeologists for its Historical Archaeology, 2001, 35(2):122—144. Permission to reprint required. Main Body - 35(2) 120 01/27/01, 8:25 PM REVIEWS 121 insight into status position and diet. The authors investigate Material Culture. how consumption is more broadly part of the capitalist HENRY GLASSIE way of life. For instance, the introduction sketches the theoretical terrain of consumption theories, making it clear Indiana University Press, Bloomington, that consumption is necessary for the realization of profi t–but 1999. iii + 413 pp., 186 fi gs. $29.95. consumption by whom and for what ends? For Purser, consumption necessitates repair, something accomplished Younger historical archaeologists questioning the relevance by local craftspeople or national corporations, a difference of Henry Glassie’s work need look no further than the that has grave implications for the class structure of a dedication to Material Culture. The book is dedicated to community. Mullins considers consumption as part of the the late Warren Roberts and historical archaeology’s own meaning system of capitalism, a practice that allows people Jim Deetz, who has spoken of his exposure to Glassie in to come to symbolic terms with its contradictions. Leone the 1970s and the dramatic shift that resulted in his own sees considerable variation in the extent to which households perception of material culture. Henry Glassie presented a are willing to live the life of capitalist consumption in view of culture in which material items were symbols and their ceramic assemblages. These are very different, but grammar, a text through which one could understand the not contradictory, approaches to a topic that is receiving meaning and intention of historic actions and not merely increasing attention in the discipline. their historical and economic consequences. In its age, the What gives this book even more intellectual heft than the “Glassien” worldview was the counterpoint to the philosophy individual contributions is that these are recent points on espoused by the new, processual archaeology. what are in some cases decades-long research trajectories. Since the publication of Folk Housing in Middle Virginia Leone’s well-known work at Annapolis has considered how (University of Tennessee Press) in 1975, Glassie’s travels capitalism transformed this city’s objects, estates, and town have taken him farther afield, for extended periods of plan–studies that have contributed broadly to archaeology’s research in Ireland, Turkey, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. coming to grips with ideology. Wylie’s piece is the most Post-processualism has emerged as the apparent successor to recent installment in her generally signifi cant investigations the work of Glassie and Deetz, but much of the scholarship into an epistemology that should supplant the logical positiv- concerning material history in the United States, in histori- ism of the New Archaeology and the radical contextualism cal archaeology and in other fields, has drifted toward a of postmodernists. Potter has considered where our ideas normative, hierarchical, and socioeconomic view of material come from in a number of pieces and especially in his culture. As Glassie writes (pp. 72-78), history has become innovative and systematic archaeological ethnography of conservative and uncritical. Material Culture is Henry Annapolis. Epperson has a provocative series of papers on Glassie’s response; it is our wake-up call. the materiality