Harvard Archaeology Program Seminar Series Spring 2018 Schedule
Guido Pezzarossi, Syracuse University
Inspired by new materialist, and feminist critiques of capitalism-as-totality, this talk explores an assemblage approach to the longue duree archaeological analysis of capitalism/colonialism. Violence, coercion and inequality serve as common threads that afford and emerge from these accumulation projects and bind them across epochs and chronologies that isolate and elide their entanglements. This approach reorients archaeologies of capitalism –and colonialism- away from essentialist taxonomies and epochal frameworks, and onto the heterogeneous and situated assemblage of people, things, and “practices/doings/actions” (Barad 2003) that generated and materialized the (un)intended relations, inequities and damages attributed to an abstract capitalism.
Working from archival and archaeological research on colonial Maya sites in the piedmont and highland regions of Guatemala, I piece together the assemblage of economic and productive practices of which colonial Maya communities were a part, revealing a more diverse, anachronistic and “inappropriate” arrangement of co-existing economic practices and modes of production: some capitalist, some colonial, some coerced, some opportunistic, and others having little to do with the intrusions of capitalist/colonial practices and effects. In the process, affinities between the coercion, violence and effects of colonial labor regimes, and capitalist relations of production emerge, albeit as dispersed, situated doings. As Braidotti reminds us, here (and here, and here, and there), and not in a mirage-like Winter Palace of Capitalism, is where capitalism is “found” and where it must be engaged.