Household production as Glue: Insights from the Early Formative of Northwest Argentina

GERO, JOAN M.; SCATTOLIN, MARÍA CRISTINA

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Congreso; 60th Annual Meeting, Society American Archaeology; 1995

Society of American Archaeology

In discussions of prehistoric domestic labor arrangements, we find ourselves in a conceptually empoverished universe. Not only in archaeology but perhaps especially in archaeology, it has proven difficult both to differentiate among, and to pry open the individual black boxes of "household production" to examine variations of labor relations among household members. Descriptions of how monolithic household units perform their work are often squeezed into the binary categories of "specialized" vs. "domestic" arrangements, while within the impregnable walls of the individual household unit we find only (and always) the domestic (or sexual) division of labor. Not only does this overly simple typology hardly cover (much less exhaust) the range of household labor arrangements, but it creates a conceptual dichotomy between "specialized" and "domestic" work that may be more obfuscatory than useful. To gain new perspectives on this issue, we examine the concept of specialized labor and observe how it applies to a single housefloor in an early Formative household in highland Argentina. The notion of craft specialization -- generalized, abstracted, and by now well defined in various forms -- is commonly identified as an important component of social complexity. Indeed the existence of craft specialization is often argued to be both determinant of household structure and capable of catapulting a society into ranked or stratified arrangements (e.g., Hirth 1993:28). In this paper, we examine evidence of specialized craft production that challenges any simplified view of specialization as a disarticulated agent of change. We argue instead that all productive activities are shaped as much by the social contexts in which they are situated (that is, by the gender and kin arrangements into which production is integrated) as they are by the technical and material requirements of work. Moreover, in addition to understanding the ultimate material forms and material destinations of production (what was produced and how it was used), we must attend just as thoughtfully to the social forms and social outcomes of production (who undertakes production and how different work combinations affect social life) (Cross 1993). Finally, we want to show that where we identify a specific productive sequence as "specialized," we too easily isolate that activity from the surrounding matrix of productive activities that household members engage in, and we thereby distort the meanings that household members might have attached to each productive enterprise.