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The Turn to Agency:Neoliberalism, Individuality,and Subjectivity in Late-Twentieth-Century AnglophoneArchaeologyThomas C. PattersonPublished online: 19 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Thomas C. Patterson (2005) The Turn to Agency: Neoliberalism,Individuality, and Subjectivity in Late-Twentieth-Century Anglophone Archaeology,Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 17:3, 373-384, DOI:10.1080/08935690500122172

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The Turn to Agency:Neoliberalism, Individuality, andSubjectivity in Late-Twentieth-CenturyAnglophone Archaeology

Thomas C. Patterson

The aim of this paper is to consider why the idea of agency*/which was elaborated byRoy Bhaskar, Anthony Giddens, and others in the 1970s*/was adopted by and becameso popular among archaeologists in the 1990s. This involves examining not only theidea of agency itself, but also its connections with an array of closely related notionsin everyday and philosophical discourse: the individual, subject, self, and person. Italso requires consideration of the sociopolitical and ideological contexts in whichagency theory was developed and how changing notions of choice, determination,individuality, and subjectivity are implicated.

Key Words: Neoliberalism, The Individual, Agency, Subjectivity, Identity

The Individual:Socially Determined, Free Agent, or Something Else?

Karl Marx characterized the interconnections of the individual, society, and history in

quite modern terms in the 1850s when he wrote that ‘‘in the social production of their

life, men [and women] enter into definite relations that are indispensable and

independent of their will’’ (1970, 20) and that, while they ‘‘make their own

history . . . [they do so] under circumstances directly encountered, given and

transmitted from the past’’ (1963, 15). The relation between structure and agency

is still a central concern for social theorists today. Anthony Giddens, among others,

has pointed out that theorists concerned with this relation fall into two groups. Action

theorists, like Max Weber, focus on the individual and individual actor, occasionally to

the point where it is difficult to explain social institutions. Functionalists, like Emile

Durkheim, emphasize structures and systems, often to the point where the ability of

the individual to act seems completely shaped by those institutions. Not far below the

surface of this typology, as you might imagine, are wider philosophical and theological

issues. Two are particularly important for our purposes. One pits determinism against

freedom, predestination against free will, causality against choice. Another explores

what is actually meant by the term ‘‘individual’’ and its relation to the ideas of

‘‘agency’’ and ‘‘choice,’’ on the one hand, and their connections with seemingly

ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/05/030373-12– 2005 Association for Economic and Social AnalysisDOI: 10.1080/08935690500122172

RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 17 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2005)

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related concepts such as the subject, self, and social being, on the other. It is

important to keep in mind that the notion of freedom (free will) has strong ethical

and moral overtones, especially with regard to the responsibility of individuals for

their actions.

What is at issue in the first debate is the capacity to choose. As Roy Weatherford

notes, the mental states, decisions, and actions of socially determined individuals

‘‘are effects necessitated by preceding causes’’; their ‘‘futures are fixed and

unalterable’’ (1995, 292). They are contrasted with individuals who possess freedom

or free will*/that is, the innate capacity or ability to choose among an array of

possibilities. These free individuals have the power to launch new causal chains of

events that originate when they choose and decide freely among alternative courses

of action and are not compelled or coerced to adopt a particular one. In this instance,

freedom means either (1) voluntariness or (2) voluntariness plus origination

(292�/293).1 The concept of agency emphasizes the freedom or free will of those

actors who possess the power to choose or to act otherwise as opposed to things or

human beings that do not. Agency involves choice, and choice is the ‘‘domain of

voluntary action [that] is created beyond the reach of ordinary causal explanation.’’

Individuals are agents because they possess internal capacities or powers, which,

when exercised, allow them to be active entities that continually intervene in the

flow of events around them (Barnes 2000, 25). Thus, the notion of agency ‘‘capture[s]

the element of ‘indeterminacy’ or ‘contingency’ in social life, the ‘processual

moment’ wherein the potential for ‘transformation’ and not merely ‘reproduction’,

lies’’ (Lopez 2003, 4�/5). In short, choice is equated with autonomy, which yields the

undetermined individual.

This view presumes the ontological priority of the atomistic individual, who is a

naturally occurring, discrete unit (the biological organism). This human atomic unit is

indivisible and cannot be reduced to or explained in terms of other phenomena. It

also makes the ontological presumption that this individual is autonomous,

independent, and in possession of knowledge, free choice (freedom to act other-

wise), motivation, reflexivity, and agency. It further presumes that the source of the

individual’s knowledge as well as its capacity to act rationally reside in the individual

itself. The individual’s theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge (know-how) of

how to follow rules allow it to optimize pleasure or utility. Thus, the reflexive,

interpretive, motivated, desiring individual who is free to act otherwise is

simultaneously an agent and a subject in the sense that it continually makes

assessments of its social and natural environment. Thus, agency and subjectivity

become indisputable facts of personhood. This, as Nick Mansfield observes, is the

Enlightenment’s common-sense notion of the subject: the unique, autonomous

individual who, through experience and education, ‘‘develops as part of [its]

spontaneous encounter with the world’’ (2000, 11).

The Enlightenment view of the ontological individual, which conflates the

autonomous, self-made person with agency and subjectivity, is the foundation for

the rational economic man of utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham (see Morris 1991). This

1. Other formulations of the relationship between structure and agency are possible.

374 PATTERSON

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notion has been called into question on many grounds*/for example, by Karl Marx and

Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and, more recently, by psychoanalysts,

phenomenologists, existentialists, and poststructuralists (Bowie 1996; Critchley and

Dews 1996). If Marx wrote about the consequences of alienation and Nietzsche

pointed to the destructive drives of the individual, psychoanalysts brought to the fore

the impact of neuroses and the unconscious. If the phenomenologists (Martin

Heidegger, for instance) focused attention on intersubjectivity (the subject as partly

defined through the views it perceives others hold), existentialists (like Jean-Paul

Sartre) saw the subject (self) as constructed, situational, and impermanent.

Poststructuralists, most notably Michel Foucault, argued that the subject, the

psyche, and consciousness come into existence only through the interplay of language

and power as lodged in impersonal disciplinary institutions like prisons, academic

fields, or punishment. The twentieth-century challenge to the common-sense

Enlightenment notion of the subject also involved anthropologists such as Edward

Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Clyde Kluckhohn who, with others, laid the

foundations for culture and personality studies in the 1930s and for psychological

anthropology after the Second World War.

Although social commentators may draw clear lines between the socially

determined individual and the free agent, their distinctions are often blurred in

everyday discourse where we sometimes regard an agent as simultaneously free and

socially determined and an action as simultaneously chosen and caused. This results

in some interesting, internally contradictory notions, like those of the restricted free

agent in professional sports or the hungry proletarian opting to choose something else

instead of participation in the labor market. While philosophers and some social

scientists, including anthropologists, have been attentive to nuanced discussions of

subjectivity, individuality, and agency, most economists (and more than a few

archaeologists, I believe) have not. They continue to view subjectivity and agency in

terms of the actions of rational, motivated, self-reflexive individuals who make

decisions in order to optimize or maximize some desired goal. This is rational

economic man whose roots lie with Thomas Hobbes near the beginning of the

Enlightenment tradition, whose image was polished by the utilitarians at the end of

the eighteenth century, and whose likeness was dusted off again and recycled by the

neoclassical economists at the end of the nineteenth century.

Neoliberalism: Its Ideology and Political Economy

Social commentators of varying political and theoretical persuasions agree that

marked changes occurred in U.S. society in response to a structural crisis begun in the

late 1960s and early 1970s (see Harvey 1989; Jameson 1984a, 1984b, 1991; Phillips

1981). They agree about the many features of this crisis: high inflation, high

unemployment, falling rates of profit, a decline in industrial production, the

internalization of economic relations (especially finance and investment), the

breakdown of the unwritten compact between labor and capital that had appeared

in 1947, the concentration of wealth, the decline of the middle class, the rise to

prominence of various financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and

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the World Bank, the stalling of the civil rights movement, the appearance of new

social movements rooted in identity politics, devaluation of the dollar, and the

increasing implementation of neoliberal austerity programs from the mid-1970s

onward both at home and abroad.

The broadly Keynesian economic policies of the U.S. government from the late

1930s onward were based on state ownership and state intervention in the market;

the federal government was simultaneously a producer, a consumer, a promoter, and

a regulator of economic activity, scientific research, and education programs.

Through social security and various other health, housing, educational, and social

welfare programs, the government attempted to guarantee the well-being of its

citizens. Keynesianism underpinned the postwar economic growth and modernization

theories that acknowledged the existence of the noneconomic realms of society and

offered at least some support for them. If the Keynesian commentators were unable

to provide an adequate explanation of the crisis of the 1970s, then their neoliberal

critics had an explanation: the economic slowdown, high unemployment, and

increasing inflation resulted from the government’s intervention in the market,

which distorted the incentives of economic agents and obscured market signals

(Vlachou and Christou 1999, 1). The policy implications of their theory were that the

government should withdraw from the market, roll back regulatory policies, and

privatize state-owned enterprises. One practical effect of the implementation of

neoliberal policies was the withdrawal of state support for health, education, and

welfare program. For example, the cost of higher education was shifted from the

state to students and their families. The City University of New York charged tuition

for the first time in the mid-1970s, and the University of California raised its fees from

$85.00 per year in 1960 to nearly $6,000 per year for residents and more than $20,000

per year for nonresidents in 2003.2

Neoliberalism is based on the methodological individualism of neoclassical

microeconomic theory and on the approach of the new classical economists, both

of which make at least five questionable assumptions about the individual, human

nature, and society. The first assumption is that individual human beings always

pursue their own interests and make rational choices in order to maximize or optimize

pleasure or utility subject to constraints such as income or resource endowment;

thus, needs, preferences, and abilities are part of the innate nature of individuals.

The second assumption is that economic agents always rely on the best information

available to make rational choices. The third is that these rational choices occur in an

instantaneously clearing market in which an equilibrium between supply and demand

is achieved simultaneously in all markets by price movements. The fourth is that

social relations*/regardless of whether they are construed in terms of structures,

practices, or institutions*/are the unintended consequences of individual or

collective agents (firms) pursuing a goal. Social phenomena are not only emergent

2. Economists Richard Wolff (1999) and Anwar Shaikh (1999) have noted that Keynesianeconomic theory rose to prominence in the late 1930s and early 1940s because of the failure ofneoclassical economists to explain persistent high unemployment during the Great Depression ofthe 1930s. Since neoclassical economic theory is the foundation of neoliberalism, there is acertain irony in the theoretical shift from the 1970s onward.

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but also have no autonomy or explanatory value of their own, to paraphrase Margaret

Thatcher, a leading exponent of neoliberal policies, who remarked once that there is

‘‘no such thing as society, only individuals and families.’’ The fifth is that changes in

human nature are initiated by factors that are exogenous to the economy; such

changes have unintended consequences, the effects of which are resolved instanta-

neously in the equilibrium-seeking market (Callinicos 1988, 12�/9; Fine 2001, 7�/9;

Lukes 1973, 110�/9; Vlachou and Christou 1999, 2�/3).

Finance capital and its neoliberal policy-makers believe that the market, through

the competition it creates, is the most efficient means of allocating scarce resources

in ways that they see as most beneficial to the society as a whole. Individuals, acting

as individuals rather than as subjects enmeshed in complex webs of social relations,

acquire the goods and services they desire through buying and selling in the market.

The neoliberals do not discern differences between individuals; they perceive them

instead as if they were equals on a level playing field. If individuals fail to achieve

particular goals in the market, it is their fault; the individuals are victims of their own

irrational behaviors or have some deficit over which they have no control. Thus,

neoliberals are able to ‘‘blame the victims’’ by ignoring history, the effects of

inherited wealth, class differences, and power differentials in the market. For them,

the market of life is either an arena of harmony or the place where the truly

meritorious come to the surface. When they pay attention to culture, society, and

history, they want these accounts simple so they can use them as lessons for the

present and to chart courses of action in the future. Consequently, they find

explanations that universalize history or reduce the complexity of cultures and

societies to a few underlying, guiding principles particularly attractive.

This raises questions about the source of the rules that individuals follow. In the

view of neoliberal policy-makers, the theoretical and practical knowledge of

individuals is treated unproblematically as innate or learned. Rational human beings

have the ability to assess critically various options and to rank order the desirability of

each. As Steven Lukes (1973, 73) notes, these universal features determine the

behavior of the individual and specify its needs and interests. The rules that

individuals follow are set in the market. The market is independent of them and

does not determine behavior; it provides the social setting in which individuals can

deploy their knowledge to best fulfill their needs. Here, they compete with one

another to satisfy preferences for a variety of scarce things; their ability to satisfy

these desires depends on the price of the items and ultimately on the size of their

original contributions to the market. ‘‘The price mechanism reflects [their]

responses’’ (Pleasants 1999, 93). Above all else, these individuals appear concerned

with or consumed by consumption. Neoliberal perspectives tend to treat the market

unproblematically, even as they assert that the functioning of the market can be and

has been distorted at various times and places (see DeMartino 2000).

Neoliberalism: The Individual, the Agent, and the Subject

I believe this is the gist of a neoliberal theory of the individual, agency, and

subjectivity. Let us consider five consequences of neoliberalism with respect to the

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development of contemporary social theory. First, this individualistic, subject-

centered, essentially Kantian view of the individual is also shared by Bhaskar, Giddens,

and critical theorists like Jurgen Habermas (Pleasants 1999, 159�/60). It should not be

surprising that they are theorists of neoliberalism since all of them are grappling in

different ways with contemporary issues. What is surprising is their commitment to

ontological and epistemological individualism in light of comments they have made

about shared public worlds (culture) or shared intersubjective language (communica-

tion) as preconditions for knowledge (Lukes 1973, 109). In this view, the individual is

prior to and set apart from any community and only becomes part of the community by

virtue of association and exchange in the market. Furthermore, the individual so

described is often no more than a physical body with desires.

Second, in a series of contradictory moves, this effectively microeconomic theory

of the individual has simultaneously underwritten claims that the economy and

production were unduly privileged in earlier theories of society (e.g., Keynesian or

modernization) and that more attention should be paid to consumption and culture

(Fine 2001, 12; Miller 1995). Theories of the commodity, like those of Jean Baudrillard

(1981), blur important distinctions between productive consumption and final

consumption by focusing on the meanings attributed to a particular use value by

the final consumers. In the process, they remove the commodity, both culturally and

materially, from the social relations involved in its production, exchange, and

distribution; they focus more on the symbolic than the material properties of the

commodity (Fine 1995; Fine and Leopold 1993, 264�/73); however, there is more to

commodities than their symbolic exchange value or their signification of status,

symbol, or ritual. The cultural theories of consumption that have appeared in the past

twenty-five years also attribute power to the final consumer. The question is: Power

to do what? To purchase a use value? To create a commodity? To attribute meaning,

symbolic or otherwise, to its consumption?

Third, after emphasizing the importance of market relations, a number of

neoliberal theorists have drawn a sharp line between the economic and noneconomic

realms of behavior. Thus, activities associated with the market are economic and

nonsocial, and, conversely, those not associated with the market are social and

noneconomic. This allows them to reintroduce what they excluded theoretically in

the first place*/namely, the idea that the social, the cultural, and the symbolic exist

and that these epiphenomena (in their view) might be important. By extension, they

have adopted and promoted the view that capital is fluid and that it exists in myriad

forms besides the purely economic*/such as social, cultural, or symbolic. While the

forms of capital shift as they move or are exchanged between the economic and

social realms, for most rational choice continues to dictate how the various forms will

be deployed by individual and collective actors influenced by and in the contexts of

their networks of social relations.3 It is noteworthy that the same (market) rationality

3. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) differentiation of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital inlight of particular activities, social relations, and historical context in twentieth-century Franceis often implicated in discussions of social capital. However, his approach was quite differentfrom those of neoliberal theorists, and he was generally quite critical of their work (cf. Fine2001, 53�/64, 98�/105).

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operates in both the economic and noneconomic realms. Once again, this attributes

power to the individual actors, but power to do what? This view contrasts markedly

with that of Pierre Bourdieu (1998, 113), who writes that the capitalist economy

creates oppositional ‘‘anti-economic sub-universes’’ devoid of economic capital and

in which other sentiments (love, obligation, or honor) prevail. Bourdieu differs from

the neoliberal theorists in another way; he has a profound respect for and

appreciation of the significance of sociocultural complexity and historical specificity.

Fourth, crystallizing at the same time as neoliberal thought were identity politics

and the new social movements, such as the women’s, gay rights, antiwar, environ-

mental, or religious fundamentalist as well as various ethnic, separatist, or

nationalist movements. While they are often oppositional to features of hegemonic

cultural, social, or political-economic structures, neoliberal commentators have

tended to view the participants in each of these movements as sharing some

fundamental property or characteristic that makes them similar (identical) to one

another and different from nonparticipants. Simply put, all other constituents of an

individual’s identity are reduced to and described by reference to this single property.

These largely urban, decentralized movements are said to draw their members from

various social classes and express diverse perspectives, ideas, and values. They often

give voice to the grievances and sentiments of individuals and collectivities whose

identities are weakly developed, subordinated, or suppressed by the dominant

cultural, social, and political systems. Their grievances and the identities they seek to

construct focus on cultural and social issues that often involve the expression of

personal, intimate aspects of everyday life, such as sexual preference or abortion

rights. Chantal Mouffe writes that these movements are rooted not in the class

position of their participants but rather in the appearance of antagonisms that are

‘‘always discursively constructed’’ (1988, 95). Neoliberals see the identity politics

attributed to the new social movements as self-referential and self-representational.

It is the individual who elects to participate in them. However, if the identities are

not related to class position, then who really constitutes them: a plural subject, a

popular force, or some external agency? The class-based demands of demonstrators

which were clearly articulated with other issues at the meeting of the World Trade

Organization in Seattle and in subsequent venues call into question how new social

movements have been identified and characterized.

Fifth, there have been social commentators during the past thirty years who have

challenged neoliberal thought even as they used parts of its conceptual framework.

As already mentioned, Pierre Bourdieu was one critic; Michel Foucault was another.

The latter wrote that

the individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, aprimitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes tofasten or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues orcrushes. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certainbodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to beidentified and constituted as individuals . . . The individual is an effect ofpower, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is thateffect, it is an element of its articulation. The individual which power hasconstituted is at the same time its vehicle. (1980, 98)

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In Foucault’s view, the subject came into existence only through the interplay of

language and power lodged in impersonal, disciplinary institutions like prisons,

hospitals, or schools. Nick Mansfield described Foucault’s subject as ‘‘the primary

workroom of power, making us turn in on ourselves, trapping us in the illusion that we

have a fixed and stable selfhood that science can know, institutions can organize and

experts can correct’’ (2000, 10). Foucault’s perception of agency and subjectivity

contrasts markedly with neoliberal views of selfhood.

Agency, Individuality, Subjectivity,and Identity in Archaeological Discourse

The evolutionist-functionalist theoretical frameworks of the new or processual

archaeology were ascendant in Anglophone countries in the late 1960s and early

1970s (Patterson 1995, 2003; Trigger 1984). Kent Flannery’s ‘‘Archeological Systems

Theory’’ (1968) or his ‘‘The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations’’ (1973) were influential

examples of this trend. Critiques of the new archaeology began to appear with

increasing regularity from the late 1970s or early 1980s onward, perhaps culminating

with Elizabeth Brumfiel’s distinguished lecture, ‘‘Breaking and Entering the Ecosys-

tem’’ (1994). Concerns with human agency or with the relation between structure and

agency emerged in these critiques (Bell 1992; Hodder 1982; Johnson 1989). Dean

Saitta (1994) was an early critic of how archaeologists were conceptualizing agency

and its interconnections with social relations and structures. However, neither the

concept of agency nor the related concepts of individuality, subjectivity, and identity

were seen from a single perspective (Brumfiel 2000; Dobres and Robb 2000; Pauketat

2000, 2001). As time passed, it became increasingly apparent in the 1990s that there

are, in fact, diverse understandings of each concept, of their interrelations, and of

their potential relevance to archaeology.

This diversity of viewpoints refracts (1) varying degrees of commitment to the

tenets of processual archaeology or to one or more of the various postprocessual

critiques of it, on the one hand; and (2) a healthy dose of eclecticism, on the other

(Clark 2000, 107�/9; McCall 1999; Patterson 1990). First, many processual archae-

ologists objectify the subject; that is, they treat the subject as if it were a biological

individual possessing certain behavioral, genetic, or psychological characteristics.

Second, they are also advocates of methodological individualism, which asserts that

explanations of social phenomena must be couched in terms of facts about

individuals. Third, they believe that individuals act in accordance with conscious

mental states and are rational in the sense that they act to maximize particular goals.

Fourth, they view culture narrowly as behavioral rules or symbols that are learned and

transmitted by individuals or as adaptations that help individual members sustain

themselves and restrain their own self-interests in favor of the common good.

Keeping both the field of debate and the underlying structuring principles in mind, let

us consider briefly some of the disparate views about agency, individuality,

subjectivity, and identity.

Toward the processual end of the spectrum, human agents are viewed as biological

individuals possessing certain psychological characteristics. Flannery (1998, 14�/5)

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described them as political movers and shakers: calculating, aggressive alpha males

who ruthlessly and shrewdly pursued power. In this view, I believe, some individuals in

a society have power to bring about change, others do not; further, subjects are born,

not made in culturally and historically contingent circumstances. As a result, the

issues of subjectivity (in the sense of the inner dimensions of the individual deriving

from particular vantage points, feelings, beliefs, or desires) and intersubjectivity are

not particularly relevant for processual archaeologists. The issue of identity is most

frequently reduced to community or ethnic affiliation, less frequently to social status

(elite versus commoner) or class position.

Toward the postprocessual end of the spectrum lie the perspectives of John Barrett

(2000, 2001) and Lynn Meskell (1999, 2001). Barrett, for example, sees human agents

as knowledgeable and reflexive people who ‘‘do not appear upon the historical stage

as a given, [but] rather make themselves within and through their own specific social

and cultural conditions’’ (2001, 141). In his view, ‘‘agency cannot be analyzed in

terms of isolated beings . . . [and it] is not the study of the individual per se . Agency is

always situated in the resources of time/place, a being-in-the-world, whose actions

carry the past into the future and which reference to absent places in the locations of

its own operations. Through those actions agency knows itself and is known by

others’’ (Barrett 2000, 61). Here, questions about subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and

identity remain relevant and challenging for archaeologists. As Meskell observes,

Although some aspects of our identity are given to us as a starting point*/oursex, class, ethnicity, etc.*/this frames the self, it does not rigidly determinethe sort of person we might become or our actions in the future.Understanding social identity often requires a metanarrative, just asawareness of individual selves requires that identity and life experiencebe inserted into that equation. In fact, there are two levels of operation:one is the broader social level in which identities are defined by formalassociations and mores; the other is the individual or personal level where aperson experiences many aspects of identity within a single subjectivity,fluid over the trajectories of life. The latter is more contingent, immediate,and operates at a greater frequency, whereas society’s categories andconstraints take longer to reformulate. (2001, 188�/9)

Discussion

Social theory from the turn of the last century*/when imperialism, finance capital,

and laissez-faire liberalism reigned supreme and were first defined in modern

terms*/has been reappropriated or recycled by writers during the past thirty years.

This is true of neoliberal commentators whose roots lie in neoclassical economics and

marginal utility theory; it is also true of archaeologists who have consciously or

unconsciously appropriated its perspectives and introduced them into discourse that

operates in a distinct domain, one that is at least superficially different economics.

At this point, we as archaeologists might want to contemplate an exercise described

by economist George DeMartino. He asks us to complete the following statement: ‘‘‘A

good theory is one that . . . ’ In concluding this statement, consider what a good theory

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is to do, what features it should have, and/or what form it should take. All our lives

each of us has to make choices between contending theories. I’m asking you to reflect

for a moment on the criterion of theory choice that you bring to bear (or think you

should bring to bear) when confronting alternative theories’’ (2000, ix).

I would submit that reductionist theories that distort the complexities of the

human condition by oversimplification are not particularly useful. It is also important,

I believe, not only to examine the historically specific contexts in which concepts and

theories emerge, but also to consider carefully their implications.

Acknowledgments

This paper was prepared for the session ‘‘Archaeological Theories as Ideologies’’

organized by Reinhard Bernbeck and Randall McGuire for the annual meeting of the

Society for American Archaeology, held 31 March�/4 April 2005, in Salt Lake City. I

want to thank Wendy Ashmore, Reinhard Bernbeck, Joseph Childers, Stephen

Cullenberg, Michael Kearney, and Carlos Velez Ibanez for their thought-provoking

comments.

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