Law, private property, and the construction of the family in the archaeological record of colonial Moquegua

Summary

In 1884, Friedrich Engels attributed the development of the nuclear family unit to the rise of the capitalist state and the subsequent emergence of private property in 16th century Europe. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, he posited that private property resulted in the restructuring of kinship practices where women gradually lost authority over their own activities, spaces, and their lives, and where the division of labor became gendered and spatialized. In this paper, I draw from political economic theories of property and anthropological studies of the family to shed light explore the daily lived realities of indigenous social actors in colonial Peru. I explore private property and family materially by considering the adoption or rejection of nuclear households at two indigenous settlements of Sabaya and Torata Alta in the southern highlands in the department of Moquegua. I ask: to what extent did "Indios" at Sabaya and Torata Alta conceptually and materially embrace the concept of private property and how might archaeologists contribute to studies of private property?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Markets and Capitalisms in Indigenous Societies in the Colonial Americas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17629