Resisting Capitalocentrism: Heterogenous Assemblages of Market and Antimarket Practices in Colonial Guatemala

Summary

The consequences of Spanish colonial/capitalist intrusions into highland Guatemala is an emerging focus of archaeological investigation. While providing insight into the entanglements between colonialism and capitalism and their effects on Maya communities, it is critical to not fixate on finding capitalism and its effects to the exclusion of other patterns of practice and life central to the experience of people in the past. Overemphasizing capitalism in our analyses reifies the suffocating ubiquity of an abstract capitalism, foreclosing the possibility of other ways of being-in-the-world that were not capitalist, formed in relation to capitalism or in opposition to it. Instead, a holistic approach is needed that can examine instances wherein "capitalist" practices exist side side-by-side and/or articulated with other practices -traditional and innovative- that exist outside of the unproductive two-step of either resistance to or engagement with capitalism. In this paper I use archival and archaeological research on colonial Maya sites in the piedmont and highland regions of Guatemala to piece together the spectrum of economic and productive practices carried out by colonial Maya communities; some coerced, some opportunistic of the emerging colonial economic landscape, and others having little to do with the intrusions of capitalist/colonial practices and effects.

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)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15902