The materiality of social power: the artifact-acquisition perspective

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 13, No. 2, June 2006 ( C© 2006)DOI: 10.1007/s10816-006-9002-4

The Materiality of Social Power:The Artifact-Acquisition Perspective

William H. Walker1,3 and Michael Brian Schiffer2

Published online: 20 June 2006

This paper explores the materiality of social power relationally through study ofsocial interactions with artifacts. Specifically, it is argued that acquisition of anartifact instantiates social power by imposing interactions on groups taking partin that artifact’s life-history activities. We introduce the “performance-preferencematrix,” an analytic tool for systematically studying the effects of such acquisitionevents on activity groups. The use of the performance-preference matrix is illus-trated through an example: the acquisition of electric-arc lights for lighthouses inthe 19th century. Suggestions are offered for analyzing culture-contact situationsand for handling singularized artifacts such as heirlooms and monuments.

KEY WORDS: social power; social theory; material culture; technology and society; performancecharacteristics.

INTRODUCTION

Social power is a construct much employed across the social sciences andhumanities and, like “culture,” it sports a plethora of definitions and theoreti-cal intonations (e.g., Barry, 1976; Henderson, 1981; Mann, 1986; Stewart, 2001;Wartenberg, 1992; Wolf, 1990; Wrong, 1979). We join a rising chorus of schol-ars that laments the dearth of attention to artifacts in conventional social theory(e.g., Attfield, 2000; Buchli, 2002; Gell, 1998; Glassie, 1999; Latour, 1993, 1999;Meskell, 2004; Miller, 1987, 2005), particularly studies of social power insuffi-ciently grounded in the materiality of human life.

This paper, therefore, theorizes social power in relation to the people-artifactinteractions that comprise activities (cf. Preston, 2000:41–45; Shackel, 2000:233–234). Concretely, we propose that events of artifact acquisition materialize social

1Department of Sociology and Anthropology, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 80003.2Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721.3To whom correspondence should be addressed at Department of Sociology and Anthropology, NewMexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 80003; e-mail: [email protected].

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68 Walker and Schiffer

power. A case study of 19th-century electric illumination in lighthouses intro-duces the performance-preference matrix, an analytic tool for assessing social-power relationships in instances of artifact acquisition. We conclude by elu-cidating several implications of our formulations for analyzing culture-contactsituations and for handling singularized artifacts (sensu Kopytoff, 1986) suchas heirlooms and monuments. For purposes of this paper, “artifact” is definedbroadly, in material terms, to include any humanly made or modified object, de-vice, structure, place, or system and is used more or less interchangeably withtechnology.

ON SOCIAL POWER: SOME PRELIMINARIES

Most commonly, “social power” is taken to mean that individuals havingprivileged social identities can exercise their will or exert “power over” others(sensu Giddens, 1993:118). And so it is said that rulers and chiefs have “the ca-pacity to control and manage the labor and activities of a group to gain accessto the benefits of social action” (DeMarrais et al., 1996:15). More generally, itis believed that all status differences correspond to differences in social power(cf. Sassaman, 2000:150). That is, parents maintain some control over their chil-dren, police affect the perambulations of pedestrians, and clergy can commandparishioners. These kinds of characterizations illuminate the organization of nor-mative behavior in all societies, for none lack identity-based inequalities of socialpower.

Social power is also sometimes differentiated according to various spheresof action where it is exercised, such as economic, political, and judicial. Althoughthese distinctions are useful for some projects, they do not acknowledge that socialpower can also be construed relationally in terms of people-artifact interactions,phenomena that crosscut all spheres of action. The move of regarding social poweras all-pervasive resonates with trends across the academy to abandon analyticunits based on traditional spheres of action and Western cultural categories (e.g.,Foucault, 1973; Gell, 1998; Latour, 1993; Munn, 1986; Pollard, 2001:317). Therecognition that objects have power leads to all sorts of creative renderings of therelations between people and artifacts.

We believe it is necessary to rethink basic sociocultural constructs and toreformulate research questions in material terms. In making these moves, wenote the valuable contributions of scholars who maintain that artifacts havepolitics (Winner, 1985, 1986) and social lives (Appadurai, 1986), and requirethat we situate consumption behavior within social processes (Douglas andIsherwood, 1996; McCracken, 1988; Miller, 1995a,b; Miracle and Milner, 2002;Wilk, 2001). The hope is that, by refurbishing sociocultural constructs and ac-knowledging the centrality of artifacts in all human action, archaeologists can

The Materiality of Social Power: The Artifact-Acquisition Perspective 69

contribute to building new anthropological theories and models (e.g., Bradley,2000; Meskell, 2004; Pollard, 2001; Schiffer and Miller, 1999; Walker et al.,1995).

A few examples illustrate the modest progress made to date. Unsatisfiedwith conventional theories of communication based on language, Schiffer andMiller (1999) have crafted a fully general theory that highlights the roles arti-facts play in all modes of human communication—including language. Likewise,Walker (1995, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002) has reframed discussions of religious prac-tice to emphasize the employment of ritual technologies. In addition, Whittlesey(1998) and Zedeno (1997, 2000) have set forth frameworks for studying the ma-terial dimensions of territories and landscapes. And Hayden and colleagues (e.g.,Dietler and Hayden, 2001), drawing upon extensive ethnoarchaeological researchin southeast Asia, are modeling the material correlates and social consequences offeasting behavior. Morrison and Lycett (1994) also stress the importance of ma-terial correlates in their discussion of the difference between ideological claimsto power and actual power at Vijayanagra. Of particular relevance to the presentpaper is Nielsen’s (1995) work on the materiality of social power, which lays afoundation for the approach taken below.

Nielsen (1995:49) defines social power in terms of human practice “as theability of actors to pursue goals” by acquiring and deploying “resources (objects,information, and other people’s actions).” By focusing on an actor’s power to mo-bilize resources according to his or her “position in the social structure” (1995:49;see also Joyce and Winter, 1996:33–34), Nielsen highlights the relational na-ture of power. Once deployed in pursuit of an actor’s goals, artifacts—especiallyarchitecture—have “multiple and often unintended effects. . .on people’s behav-ior” (Nielsen, 1995:53). Indeed, Nielsen (1995:54) goes on to claim “that everyartifact and material cultural attribute has specific and, to a certain extent, pre-dictable effects upon social relations.” Thus, social relations are reflected in, andconsequentially affected by, for example, the capacity, accessibility, segmentation,and functional differentiation of particular structures. Nielsen specifies the socialcorrelates of these attributes in some detail, and concludes with a case study on thearchitecture of a pre-Hispanic community in the Argentinian Andes. He counselsreaders to engage in further “Studies of the active role played by material culturein the formation of power relations” (1995:66).

Nielsen in this work demonstrates the possible contributions that a relationalapproach to power can make to archaeological studies of the role that architectureplays in reproducing and structuring social relations. His analysis is a usefulstarting point for theorizing the materiality of social power; it remains for us toconstruct generalizations that apply to all artifacts, not just architecture. Beforeturning to this task, we present relevant theoretical premises and fundamentalanalytic units, which constitute the ontological context for materializing constructssuch as social power.


A MATERIAL FOUNDATION

We insist, along with scholars interested in practice-oriented approaches (e.g.,Bourdieu, 1977; Gell, 1998; Miller, 2005), that human life “consists of ceaselessand varied interactions among people and myriad kinds of things” (Schiffer andMiller, 1999:2, emphasis in original). Indeed, in ethnographic settings the onlyphenomena directly observable, at least in principle, are people and artifactsinteracting. Needless to say, one cannot observe an economy, kinship system, orreligion. Such constructs are theoretical, and thus are only indirectly related toempirical—i.e., material—reality.

For those interested in such materiality, the observables—people-artifactinteractions—are the basis of the activity, the minimal unit of analysis, whichestablishes an empirical foundation for fashioning abstract analytic units aboutpractice, behavior, or action (Walker et al., 1995). An activity is an aggregate ofspecific people-artifact interactions of limited duration usually confined to a place,such as feeding animal-spirit fetishes (Cushing, 1883), changing a carburetor inthe garage, or excavating a feature at an archaeological site (Yarrow, 2003). Anactivity can be characterized by the following components (Schiffer, 1975, 1976):(1) a social group (or simply “group”), consisting of one or more people, (2)artifacts and other nonhuman interactors (cf. Latour, 1994), such as wild plantsand animals, precipitation, and mountain ranges, (3) specific interaction patterns,and (4) particular times, places, and frequencies.

We emphasize that all human activities—from hunting rabbits to a weddingceremony—are composed of people-artifact interactions. Even activities that ap-parently are exceptions, such as verbal communication, involve artifacts. Not onlydo artifacts of activity and place define and signal social contexts, but artifacts suchas body modifications, ornaments, and clothing explicitly take part in the makingof meaning (e.g., Gell, 1993; Schiffer and Miller, 1999, ch. 3). In effect, the humanform as an interactor is turned into a communication technology. For example, onthe basis of a patient’s physical symptoms, a shaman infers that a malevolent spirithas caused sickness. In both interactions—of patient and spirit, and of shaman andpatient—the patient is treated like an artifact. Similarly, psychiatrists infer a rangeof individual, social, and biochemical causes from their patient’s performancese.g., vocalizations, physical symptoms, and interactions with people and things.

Moreover, in some activities artifacts can function like persons. People at-tribute spirits, souls, or magical energies to religious artifacts and then engagethose objects as power-laden beings (Walker, 1999). As we argue below, per-sonifications of objects and objectifications of persons—both metaphorical andliteral—are critical to understanding how social power is often manifest relation-ally in people-artifact interactions.

Activities can be combined to create many kinds of problem-oriented analyticunits (LaMotta and Schiffer, 2001). One versatile unit is the life history of artifacts,


which encompasses processes such as procurement of raw materials, manufacture,use, maintenance, reuse, and deposition (Schiffer, 1972, 1976). A behavioral chainis a fine-grained life history consisting of the entire sequence of activities inan artifact’s life (Schiffer, 1975, 1976). Artifact life histories are employed, forexample, as frameworks for inferring past activities, understanding the formationof the archaeological record (Schiffer, 1996), and building general models oftechnological change (e.g., Schiffer, 2005a; Schiffer and Skibo, 1987, 1997; Skiboand Schiffer, 2001). Life histories also track networks of people interacting withartifacts and other people. Latour (e.g., 1993, 1994, 1999) and others (Callon,1992, 1999; Law, 1994, 1999) have recognized that artifacts, people, and sets ofpeople-artifact relations can all be treated as social actors or actants. They havedeveloped actor-network theory (ANT) to explore these relations between peopleand things.

Cadenas

We also define people and artifacts as interactors and highlight the sets ofsocial groups interacting with an artifact during the entirety of its behavioral chainor life history (Schiffer, n.d.; Walker, 1996). This abstract unit of societal structurehas been termed a cadena, from the Spanish word for chain (Schiffer, n.d.). Forpresent purposes, we define the cadena to include all interactors involved in anartifact’s life history, both people and artifacts. Although it is counterintuitive toimagine an analytic group containing both people and artifacts that then interactswith other artifacts, such a relational approach has certain advantages over previousmodernist formulations of human activity.

The modernist worldview depends on a number of Enlightenment di-chotomies that assign society, nature, and religion to separate realms. Latour(1993) notes that this modern construction requires vigilant rhetorical policing ofits boundaries. Indeed, he defines modernism as inherently contradictory. On theone hand, it strives to purify theory of overt transgressions of these realms, as intreating people like artifacts and artifacts like people. On the other hand, despitethe purification processes naturalized by most modern theories that appeal to em-pirical reality, scientists and humanists alike breach these boundaries regularly.Indeed, he argues that, by establishing boundaries that fly in the face of actualhuman relations with the material world, it is easier to create hybrid thoughtsand actions that transgress these boundaries. Modern engineers design smart cars,houses, and appliances; social scientists speak of minds and symbols; and scholarsin the humanities treat texts as if they were sentient. Yet all might be surprised by,and decry, the consequences and ethical dilemmas posed by their creations (e.g.,human clones, societies of artifacts, or Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel).

By treating people and objects as socially equivalent or symmetrical (sensuLatour, 1994), cadenas highlight the fundamental fact that social power is


embodied in the material relations between people and things. Such relationsare particularly relevant when discussing groups that perceive artifacts as powerladen, often analogous to living beings—animate and possessing agency (Gell,1998). Cadenas reveal how that power can carry through the lives of objects evenas they move between groups of interactors. In Hopi culture, for example, mencommonly wove wedding mantas of cotton in animate kivas. The kivas as well asthe weavers contributed to the power that resided in these textiles, which persistedin activities long after they were given away in wedding ceremonies (Walker,1999).

Cadenas vary along two important analytical dimensions: size and hetero-geneity. Their sizes can range from one person and a few artifacts interactingwith just one artifact to thousands of people and artifacts participating in thelife histories of hundreds of objects. Cadenas also exhibit enormous variation insocial heterogeneity—overall differences in the composition of the group of hu-man interactors from activity to activity (Schiffer and Skibo, 1997). In the mosthomogeneous cadena, the very same person manufactures, uses, maintains, anddisposes of the artifact; that is, the person comprising the group is invariant acrossall activities.

A pattern of moderate social heterogeneity is illustrated by the manufactureof an artifact by one group of people and objects while its use, maintenance,and disposal are carried out by other people and artifacts; this kind of cadenacharacterizes many exchanged items.

For many industrial products, cadenas can assume an astonishing degree ofsocial heterogeneity. For example, in a multinational corporation making com-puters, design teams work on individual parts; these parts are manufactured bygroups and artifacts in several nations, and the finished product may be assembledby many groups and artifacts in another nation; it is then handled by shippers,distributors, wholesalers, and retailers, and afterwards is acquired by consumers,perhaps around the globe. Needless to say, there might be no overlap in the mem-berships of the many groups taking part in these numerous and diverse activities.

Obviously, larger and more socially heterogeneous cadenas offer greateropportunities for conflict, inequality, and the need for negotiation over relationswith artifacts. As such, the cadena—the set of people and objects specified inrelation to all of an artifact’s life-history activities—figures in our effort to discernthe exercise of social power in artifact acquisition.

If human behavior consists of people-artifact interactions at various scales,then research questions in the social and behavioral sciences should be reformu-lated to include a more symmetrical understanding of people and artifacts. One canno longer be satisfied to analytically separate people (and the “social”) from theirmaterial matrix. All human activities simultaneously involve interactions in thelife histories of artifacts and participation in cadenas. Separating human behaviorfrom artifacts always results in neglect of the latter. It is no wonder that even


the most thoughtful social scientists interested in power (e.g., Wolf, 2001) havescarcely tapped the potential of material things in their efforts to explain variationand change in human behavior.

MATERIALIZING SOCIAL POWER: THE ARTIFACT PERSPECTIVE

In considering how social power is manifest materially in everyday activities,one might be tempted to focus on incontrovertible symbols of social power andtheir immediate effects on interaction patterns. Thus, uniforms and ornaments inmilitary organizations enable a soldier to identify another’s rank nonverbally andto respond appropriately (or not). In hospitals, gowns of varying styles and colorsdistinguish different roles such as doctor, nurse, and orderly, thereby structuringsocial interactions in that context. That artifacts playing communicative roles cansymbolize statuses, roles, and other social identities, thereby denoting normativedifferences in social power and affecting interactions, is obvious not only toanthropologists but also to people living in every society.

Although a discussion of the materiality of social power could be confinedto symbolic phenomena, such a treatment would miss the ways in which socialpower is instantiated in the artifacts of everyday life, independently of their sym-bolic functions. Building on Nielsen’s study, we begin with the general premisethat social power is the ability to affect, prescriptively and proscriptively, the inter-actions of others with artifacts. Social power is exercised, for example, when onegroup starts, stops, or precludes another group’s activity, or chooses its activity’sartifacts. By tracing these kinds of intergroup relationships in cadenas, gener-ally and in specific cases, one begins to delineate through artifacts a pervasivemateriality of social power.

Researchers sometimes distinguish between “structures” of power and“actual” social power, a distinction that is especially useful in our project. Struc-tural social power is a group’s socially defined authority to make choices affectingthe artifact interactions of others, whereas actual social power is the practices, byone or more groups, that in fact influence a choice. Ascriptions of structural socialpower are based on a group’s social identity and context. On the other hand, attri-butions of actual social power, which are group- and choice-specific, are construedin the present study as the anthropologist’s inferences about actual practices asplayed out in cadenas of varying size and heterogeneity. (Although we choose notto use the same terminology, we are inspired by Wolf’s [2001:384–385] discussionof scales of power from the individual performance capabilities or characteristicsof a person to the “power that structures the political economy” on a worldscale).

A few examples can illustrate the distinction between the two variants ofsocial power. On the basis of structural social power one might assume, for exam-ple, that a household head affects its members’ domestic activities, that a colonel


dictates the military activities of her troops, and that a government determinesthe direction of a nation. But calculations of social power on these bases supplynothing more than normative expectations that might be unmet because affectedgroups always exercise social power and do not exist in isolation from othersources of power. Thus, parents do not select all of a child’s at-home activities;colonels can encounter soldiers that evade, undermine, or act without orders;and a nation’s laws are resisted by its own citizens (religious movements, riots,technological change), extranational forces (Internet, smugglers, armies), and un-predictable natural processes (epidemics, hurricanes). Paying attention to humanartifact networks exposes the diversity of power that goes unrecognized in theseexamples. The heterogeneity of household objects and opportunities for action,like the complexity of potential activities and artifacts in military institutions andnation-states, overwhelms structural approaches. Clearly, groups that are defined asstructurally subordinate to others are able sometimes to offer resistance—indeed,can exercise agency—because they inhabit cadenas that offer more heterogeneousperformance capabilities. Thus, a group’s actual social power, perhaps emergingthrough conflict and negotiation, must be inferred on an activity-by-activity basisat appropriate scales through explicit identification of the networks of people andartifacts we call cadenas.

ACQUISITION PROCESSES

That social power is the ability to affect, prescriptively and proscriptively,the interactions of others with artifacts is, we suggest, a premise pregnant withimplications and interpretive possibilities. An obvious example is the use of taboosand sumptuary rules, including dietary restrictions and warning signs, to precludecertain people-artifact interactions. In the present project, however, we exploreonly the instantiation of social power through artifact acquisition. Acquisitiondenotes an event: a potential user group comes into possession of an artifactthrough a mechanism such as purchase, exchange, loan, gift, inheritance, theft,or employer’s fiat. Acquisition results from a choice ostensibly made by onegroup of the cadena, the “selector,” which we stipulate–somewhat arbitrarily–possesses the social power to make the choice. (Acquisition should not be equatedwith consumption as defined by Douglas and Isherwood [1996:37], for their def-inition is based on free choice, and as such is a special case within a muchlarger array of acquisition events.) It should also be kept in mind that, in alarge-scale cadena, a “selector” may mean many people acting in concert withartifacts.

Crosscutting the differences in acquisition mechanisms is a fundamentalcommonality: a choice is founded on a forecast of one or more of an artifact’sperformance characteristics. Performance characteristics are the behavioral ca-pabilities of people, artifacts, and other phenomena that enable the constituent


interactions of an activity to proceed, thus facilitating its forward motion (Schifferand Miller, 1999, ch. 2; Schiffer and Skibo, 1987, 1997). In addition to famil-iar performance characteristics that permit mechanical, thermal, and chemicalinteractions—e.g., the bending strength of a steel I-beam, a storage pot’s heatingeffectiveness, the resistance of copper to corrosion by seawater—one can delineateperformance characteristics related to human senses. Sensory performance char-acteristics contribute to the ability of objects to interact symbolically in specificactivities, such as the American flag at a football game (visual), a roasted turkeyat Thanksgiving (visual, olfactory, gustatory), and the first clarinet in a concert(acoustic). In every case, of course, symbolic interactions depend on an artifacthaving appropriate sensory and other material performance characteristics. Sen-sory performance characteristics, which also facilitate aesthetic interactions, helpthe researcher to frame behavioral questions about cognitive phenomena (Schifferand Miller, 1999; cf. Nielsen’s [1995:52,54] “social performance characteristics”).

Performance characteristics are defined contextually in relational (activity-or interaction-specific) terms; they are not intrinsic properties of people or artifactseven though material and biological properties of interactors do affect many per-formance characteristics (on the distinction between properties and performancecharacteristics, see Schiffer, 2003).

Building on insights of Winner (1985, 1986), Foucault (1977), Bijker (1995),Lansing (1991), Nielsen (1995), and others, we now come to the key premise thatlinks social power to artifact acquisition. To wit, in all but totally homogeneouscadenas, the acquisition of an artifact redounds on the activities of a cadena’sgroups. A few familiar examples make this premise more concrete. In a house-hold, one person may obtain utensils for serving and eating food, but these verysame objects are used by all household members. Likewise, in an automobilerepair shop, the hydraulic lift and computer diagnostic equipment, purchased bythe shop’s owner, are used by the mechanics. Similarly, in large bureaucraciessuch as universities, corporations, and government agencies, employees work inbuildings and offices chosen by others and use “standard issue” vehicles, furniture,telephones, computers, forms, and even pens. The extreme example is the prison,where the selector’s acquisitions affect virtually all of an inmate’s activities (Fou-cault, 1977). Indeed, the loss of freedom occasioned by incarceration is perhapsbest expressed as an inmate’s legal inability to effect nary an acquisition. Veryyoung children also inhabit a material world not of their own choosing. Likewise,hospital patients are required to interact, often quite intimately, with specializedobjects that materialize the social power of administrators, insurance companies,physicians, nurses, and physical therapists.

Clearly, when one group imposes an artifact on another, the exercise ofactual social power can amount to oppression. Yet, power is not only about op-pression and resistance (Brown, 1996), for in principle the imposed-upon groupcould accept with equanimity or even embrace the changes. Indeed, it is possible


that diverse power-related processes can operate simultaneously, as Brown andFernandez (1991) found out in their study of the assistance Ashaninka Indiansprovided Marxist guerillas in a 1960s Peruvian insurgency. That study initiallyframed the acceptance of the guerillas and the associated cadena of guns, killing,and destruction as a straightforward case of repression and external domination.Brown, however, on later reflection realized their “resistance” focus obscured thecomplexity of actual power relations. “With the benefit of hindsight, I regret thatwe let an inspiring story of resistance distract us from a more thorough analysisof the specific content of Ashaninka prophecy” (Brown, 1996:731). A prominentAshaninka shaman inferred that the insurgent leader was a messiah come to fulfilla millenarian prophecy and this mobilized the people to embrace the fight. There-fore, Brown (1996:731) concludes that “the Ashaninka who inserted themselvesinto the conflict were not only responding to external challenge but also advancingtheir own vision of existential redefinition and or transcendence.”

One cannot assume a priori an identity between imposition and oppression,nor can the withdrawal or prohibition of an activity be equated automaticallywith deprivation. As we describe below in our case study of lighthouses andother examples (steel axes, ritual artifacts), negative social consequences can arisewhether or not the acquisition of an artifact is voluntary or imposed.

In heterogeneous cadenas, there is always a potential for conflict over ac-quisition decisions because each group has its own performance preferences. Itis a rare artifact or cluster of artifacts whose performance characteristics matchthe performance preferences of every group (Schiffer, 1992, ch. 2).4 As result,many groups may influence the selector and affect the artifact choice. Thus, inexercising actual social power, children do affect their parents’ purchases, auto-mobile mechanics can influence a shop owner’s acquisitions of equipment, and onrare occasions university faculty have a voice in choosing their office furniture. Itshould be noted that sometimes there is ambiguity about who is the selector.

A cadena’s groups can influence the selector’s choice through a variety ofovert and covert practices, including pouting and sulking, offering advice, whining,withholding intimacy, the silent treatment, coercion, persuasion, bickering, notcarrying out activities, offering tradeoffs, working more slowly, and actual orthreatened violence. Also, these practices, singly and in combination, can berepeated over long periods. Clearly, choices—as embodiments of actual socialpower—are often the precipitate of a complex, drawn-out, and nuanced negotiationprocess that might be little expressed in discourse. What is more, we doubt thatparticipants could always furnish a reliable and accurate account of how a choicewas made.

4Moreover, because of technological constraints, the performance preferences of any one group maybe incompatible. Thus, in traditional, low-fired cooking pottery, it is virtually impossible to achievethe user preferences of high impact strength and excellent thermal shock resistance (Schiffer andSkibo, 1997).


Consequently, we believe it is impossible to know with certainty whichinteractions, by which groups, influenced specific artifact choices—even in ethno-graphic settings. That is why we contend that a researcher’s claim about theexercise of social power in a given case is an inference. But these inferences canbe well founded if we make use of relevant evidence and employ appropriateanalytic tools. The starting point is the recognition that, in the acquisition of anyartifact, its performance characteristics may differentially satisfy the performancepreferences of the cadena’s groups. We can, in principle, infer the cadena’s con-stituent groups and their performance preferences along with diverse contextualfactors. Given this foundation, it should be possible to compare the performancepreferences of a cadena’s groups with the performance characteristics of the ac-quired (or nonacquired) artifact. This establishes a basis for hypothesizing whichgroups apparently exercised actual social power by affecting the choice. At thevery least, one can assess whether that choice ostensibly privileged or oppressedspecific groups. (In offering such assessments, one should be mindful that a givengroup, such as artifact users, might itself consist of subgroups. Thus, both den-tists and patients are “users” of dental drills, but each group has rather differentperformance preferences.)

STUDYING SOCIAL POWER THROUGH ARTIFACTS:ANALYTIC TOOLS AND CASE STUDIES

To assist in making the diverse comparisons needed for studying the man-ifestation of social power in acquisition events, the investigator can employ amodified version of the analytic tool known as a “performance matrix” (Schiffer,1995, 2000, 2004, 2005b; Schiffer and Skibo, 1987). A performance matrix is atable listing the performance characteristics of one or more artifacts in relationto life-history activities and (or a cadena’s groups). A performance matrix can beconstructed in many ways, depending on the investigator’s research interest andthe particulars of a case. For studying social-power relationships, we introducethe performance-preference matrix, which displays the performance preferencesof a cadena’s groups in relation to one or more artifacts.

One constructs a performance-preference matrix as follows: (1) specify anartifact or artifacts, (2) identify relevant cadena groups, including the selector,(3) list each group’s preferred performance characteristics with respect to relevantactivities, (4) denote with a plus (+) or minus ( − ) sign whether the artifactsatisfies each of the performance preferences, and (5) arrange the rows of eachgroup so as to highlight clusters in the columns of plusses and minuses. Any suchpatterns indicate which groups—if any—were advantaged or disadvantaged bythe acquisition decision.

Like any modeling exercise in science, this work combines subjectiveand objective processes. Identifying relevant artifacts, groups, and performance


preferences is a subjective modeling process and the product is apt to vary from in-vestigator to investigator. Once created, however, a performance-preference matrixcan be objectively examined, criticized, and if necessary refurbished. Its strengthlies in the investigator successfully corralling and synthesizing as much of theavailable information about the artifacts, cadena groups, and relevant activities aspossible.

Lighthouse Illuminants

In illustrating the construction and interpretation of a performance-preferencematrix, we draw upon a historical case: the competition between electric and oilillumination in 19th-century lighthouses. This case is suitable because the pro-cess is well documented in the historical record, involves diverse groups hav-ing differing performance preferences, and has been closely studied (Schiffer,2005b).

Throughout the 19th century, lighthouse lamps burned some kind of hydro-carbon oil (sperm whale, lard, rapeseed, or kerosene). Even so, major maritimenations, including France, England, and the United States, monitored the devel-opment of new illumination technologies and tested promising alternatives to oil.In the late 1850s and early 1860s, tests of the electric-arc lamp in England andFrance showed that this technology could function as a lighthouse illuminant.

The acquisition of electric-arc lighting presents an intriguing pattern: al-though the technology had been brought to market in the 1860s, England andFrance were the only nations to install it in appreciable numbers. By the mid-1890s, when usage of electric-arc lamps peaked, these two nations had acquiredaround 20 examples, usually very bright lights in prominent locations. A few othernations had one or two lights, but most had none. Indeed, oil lamps continued tobe emplaced in nearly all of the hundreds of new lighthouses built during the1860–1895 period.

In explaining this pattern of differential acquisition, Schiffer (2005b) sug-gested that the electric light was more than a navigation aid, for it also served as apolitical technology. Because these prominent and distinctive lights were visibleto mariners and navies of all nations as well as to ocean-going travelers, electriclights denoted in material form a nation’s commitment to modernity and under-scored its contributions to cutting-edge science and technology. Particularly fortraditional adversaries France and England, the electric lighthouse signified scien-tific and technological prowess at a time when, as imperial powers, these nationswere competing with each other on many fronts. Moreover, France and Englandwere also in competition with other industrializing nations, especially the UnitedStates and Germany, which were making significant contributions to science andtechnology, especially theoretical and practical electricity. The few nations thatacquired an electric light or two (including the United States) could conspicu-ously advertise their mastery of electricity at a time when other new electrical


technologies, such as the telegraph, telephone, and trolley, were transforming, orpromising to transform, daily life.

The electric light produced by far the brightest and whitest light, but relativeto oil lamps it had performance deficiencies in initial costs, ease of installationand operation, ease of repairs and maintenance, ease of administration, and soon. Many of these shortcomings stemmed from the need to install, operate, andmaintain an electrical generator and the steam engine to drive it. Steam engineboilers required a constant supply of fuel (coal or coke) and water, which usuallyhad to be transported by lighthouse tenders (specialized ships that periodicallyresupplied lighthouses) to remote locations inaccessible by road or rail. And,because illumination technologies had to be highly reliable, electric lights requiredtwo backup systems: another complete generator and steam engine and as well asa conventional oil lamp.

The selectors in most nations were governmental or quasi-governmentallighthouse boards. After the first experiments with electric lights in England andFrance, whose results were published in technical reports and journal articles andbecame widely known, the lighthouse board of any nation could make acquisitionchoices informed by unusually reliable forecasts of the competing technologies’utilitarian performance characteristics. Clearly, once a lighthouse board had in-stalled an electric light, other groups on the light’s cadena had to take part in theactivities that this choice imposed.

Patterns in the performance-preference matrix (Table I) suggest which groupswere advantaged or disadvantaged by the electric light’s acquisition. Namely,lighthouse keepers and tender crews had to drastically change their work practices,for operating and maintaining electric lights required new skills and complexinteractions with many new artifacts. Indeed, to enable the performance of theseactivities, a steam engineer and a stoker often had to take up residence in thelighthouse along with the keeper. Mariners’ activities were also affected: electriclights had greater penetrating power (a benefit under conditions of poor visibility),but also sometimes cast confusing shadows and could briefly impair night vision.One may also infer that electric lights disadvantaged tender crews because of theadded supplies that had to be handled during servicing visits. Moreover, when alighthouse board chose to install an electric light, it incurred a large increase inadministrative costs and hassles, which were offset only by symbolic performancecharacteristics. In acquiring an electric light, then, a lighthouse board placed addedburdens on lighthouse keepers and tender crews while simultaneously increasingits own burdens, perhaps made tolerable by accolades from political leaders,including Napoleon III, and greater international prestige.

What can be inferred about the exercise of actual social power in the acqui-sition of electric lights? In these cases, the lighthouse board’s structural socialpower, as the selector, translated directly into actual social power, for no othergroups seem to have influenced the choice. The acquisition of an electric light was


Table I. A Performance-Preference Matrix for Electric and Oil Illuminating Technologies Em-ployed in Lighthouses During the Late 19th Century

Performance characteristics oflighthouse illuminants

Performance preferences of relevant groups Electric Oil

Lighthouse Board (Selector)Symbolizes commitment to modernity + –Symbolizes cutting-edge science and

technology+ –

Furnishes an effective light + +Furnishes a reliable light + +Symbolizes a concern for maritime safety + +Inexpensive to acquire – +Easy to install – +Easy to administer – +Easy to repair – +Easy to operate and maintain – +Economical to operate and maintain – +

Tender CrewEasy to store supplies – +Easy to load and unload supplies – +

Lighthouse KeepersEasy to operate and maintain – +Easy to repair – +

MarinersFurnishes an effective light under most

conditions+ –

Furnishes a reliable light + +Does not cast confusing shadows – +Does not harm night vision – +

clearly an imposition on keepers and tender crews; indeed, a case could also bemade that the choice oppressed these two groups. This should not be surprising;after all, lighthouse boards in most nations were elite organizations, often staffedby political appointees, which lacked representation from keepers or tender crews.Members of these latter groups were treated simply as laborers who were expectedto perform their duties as dictated by the technologies that the lighthouse boardsimposed. Workers profoundly unhappy with their situation could simply resign,for any other form of resistance was essentially futile. In acquiring electric lights,lighthouse boards heavily weighted the symbolic performance characteristics thatcould serve their nation’s political interests, notwithstanding the oppressive ef-fects of the acquisition on keepers, tender crews, and even on the administrativeactivities of the lighthouse boards.

However, in the hundreds of cases in which electric lights were not acquired,one might argue that forecasts of that technology’s poor performance in relation tothe activities of keepers and tender crews might have affected the choice. But thisargument is weak because the disadvantages that accrued to the lighthouse board


itself might have sufficed to dissuade acquisition. In these cases of nonacquisition,uncertainties remain in inferences about the exercise of actual social power.

The performance-preference matrix itself rests on a host of inferences thatcover a large range of actual and potential interactions between a technologyand specific groups. We emphasize that there is no formulaic way to make theseinferences, for the investigator is obliged to exploit and integrate varied linesof evidence, and apply his or her creativity every step of the way. Despite theinherent subjectivity in this research process, another investigator can craft analternative performance-preference matrix for the same case and challenge the firstinvestigator’s inferences and interpretations. This kind of replicability-in-principleshould be a check on egregiously incorrect interpretations. At the very least,the performance-preference matrix appears to furnish a tool for systematicallyinvestigating the effects of an acquisition event on a cadena’s groups.

We noted above that imposition—e.g., the selector’s acquisition of an artifactwith which other groups of a cadena must interact—obviously implies inequalitybut does not necessarily equate with oppression, either in judgments of the affectedgroups or the investigator. An interesting example is furnished by the transmissionof artifacts under conditions of very slow technological change. At times in pastsocieties, as well as in some modern societal institutions such as monasteries,people get along without protest using artifacts whose acquisition they did notinfluence. This comes about when enculturative activities transmit activities alongwith associated artifacts over which no one apparently has a choice. One group, theselector, simply acquires (makes or obtains) the traditional artifacts and imposesthem on other groups. Because alternative technologies are lacking, the acquisitionof the artifacts is often naturalized (or supernaturalized), as in “That’s the waywe’ve always done it." We suggest that, in such a context, when the selector hasbut one customary “choice," the artifact’s performance characteristics becomede facto performance preferences for all cadena groups. It could be said that thecadena exhibits collective performance preferences.

The process of naturalizing artifacts and their performance characteristics alsoadds another dimension to the understanding of acquisition events in contexts ofchanging technologies, as in the lighthouse case where alternatives were available.We propose that selectors, who make forecasts about a technology’s utilitarian andsymbolic performance characteristics, often personify objects both literally andmetaphorically. Thus, in the lighthouse example, electrical technology personifiesa spirit of national modernity. This metaphorical animism was naturalized byappeals to a prophetic interpretation of scientific progress. Indeed, it would havebeen difficult at that time to choose a technology that personified a nation’s progressmore archetypically than the technological control and application of the brightestartificial light through electrical means. British and French lighthouse boards,representing the two greatest imperial powers of that time, could scarcely resistinvesting in some electric-arc lights, with their outstanding symbolic performance


characteristics, despite the obvious hardships that would be imposed upon othergroups.

In contact, acculturation, and colonial situations, indigenous groups are ex-posed to an array of new artifacts, which may be acquired through various mecha-nisms. These acquisition choices sometimes have disastrous effects on a cadena’sgroups—even on the structure of an entire society—because they can alter exist-ing social-power relationships and create new ones. The paradigmatic example ofthis process is Lauriston Sharp’s (1952) study of how the Yir Yiront, an aborigi-nal Australian group, underwent social disintegration following the acquisition ofsteel axes. (We have not reworked Sharp’s account, but merely acknowledge thatthe situation he described permits other renderings and interpretations.)

Prior to the early 20th century, the Yir Yiront had practiced hunting andgathering using stone and wood technologies, including polished stone axes. Stonefor the axes came from quarries 400 miles away and was obtained by older men, inexchange for spears, from partners in long-standing trading relationships. Theseexchanges took place during important and festive tribal gatherings. Men made,maintained, and stored the axes, and were treated as their owners. Women andchildren used the axes, for they were a critical technology for making other tools,gathering and processing firewood, and erecting huts.

To obtain an axe, a woman deferentially asked permission to borrow it froma husband or an appropriate kinsman. According to Sharp, stone axes were at thenexus of customary social relationships that embodied the actual power of themen to make this critical technology available to others: “Women and childrenwere dependent on, or subordinate to, older males in every action in which theaxe entered” (Sharp, 1952:76). Further, the “repeated and widespread conductcentering on the axe helped to generalize and standardize throughout the society. . . sex, age, and kinship roles, both in their normal benevolent and in exceptionalmalevolent aspects, and helped to build up expectancies regarding the conduct ofothers defined as having a particular status” (p. 77). Moreover, “The stone axe wasan important symbol of masculinity” (Sharp, 1952:78), the gender that in so manyactivities possessed structural social power. This artifact and the social relationsthat surrounded its life history were sanctified by myths, the totemic ideologythat chartered the present as a continuation of a past world in which marvelousancestors had founded the clans. Not surprisingly, as one totem of the Sunlit CloudIguana clan, the stone axe, infused with spiritual power, played a pivotal role inceremonies. The diverse interactions that took place during the life history of stoneaxes gave rise, we suggest, to collective performance preferences. But that wouldsoon change.

With the advent of missions in the 20th century, steel axes became available tothe Yir Yiront in large numbers. These axes were acquired, not by older males, whoavoided the missions, but by women, younger males, and even boys, who receivedthe new tools as gifts or in exchange for labor. Older men, their structural power as


selectors undermined, no longer monopolized the distribution of axes. The resultwas “a revolutionary confusion of sex, age, and kinship roles, with a major gain inindependence and loss of subordination on the part of those able now to acquiresteel axes when they had been unable to possess stone axes before” (p. 84). And,because the steel axe was not mentioned in totemic myths, this new technologylacked a defined locus in the clan system and was devoid of spiritual qualities.The Yir Yiront failed to create new myths to naturalize the behaviors involvingthe steel axe, nor did they develop new collective performance preferences. Theresults were catastrophic. Indeed, Sharp chronicles the resultant disintegrationof trading relationships, ceremonies, totemic ideology, and eventually Yir Yirontsociety, which he argues was set in motion, in large part, by the acquisition of steelaxes by newly empowered groups.

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS

The Yir Yiront case is an extreme example of how new acquisition patterns,especially in contact, acculturation, and colonial settings, can have major—and inthis case dramatic—effects on behavior that ramify throughout a society. In othercases, when supernaturalizing forces (gods, spirits, ancestors) are undermined,societies experience revitalization or millenarian movements. We see in theseprocesses a link between the emergence of new selectors and radical shifts inactual social power. In some cases, such changes will be followed by the rise ofnew collective performance preferences and the creation of new traditions.

Traditions are maintained, especially in more complex societies, by the con-struction of large-scale communal or public structures—e.g., platform mounds,temples, and pyramids. We suggest that it might be useful to regard these artifactsas the original mass media. In having these structures built, priests and kings, as se-lectors, placed heavy weight on certain visual performance characteristics, therebyprescribing what all members of a community and visitors had to view. Viewers ofthese political technologies were reminded of the immense structural social powerof the elite, which contributed to the reproduction of elite-maintaining ideologies(DeMarrais et al., 1996:16; Nielsen, 1995:55–56). Modern industrial societies areno different: factories, skyscrapers, houses of worship, sports arenas, capitols, stat-ues, and other monuments similarly function as mass media (in addition to otherutilitarian and symbolic functions they might perform). In some cases, these largeand visually distinctive structures reinforce and perpetuate social inequalities byimposing, on all who pass by, particular visual interactions that intone structuralsocial power; in other cases, the impositions are more benign, serving as symbolsof community pride and contributing to its integration. And, of course, the samestructure or monument may comfort some people while also oppressing others.

Kopytoff (1986) has suggested that certain artifacts have singularized lifehistories, in that their participation in certain exchange spheres is prescribed or


proscribed. Walker (1995) has applied this important insight to ritual technolo-gies, arguing that artifacts employed in religious rituals require specific modes ofdisposal when they are no longer serviceable. Thus, “ceremonial trash” is treateddifferently from ordinary trash. Typically this comes about because the artifacts areregarded as being animated like people. People are not simply thrown away but arehandled reverently out of respect or fear of their animate force (e.g., souls, ghosts,mana). And, we suggest, this is also the case for any singularized artifact. Indeed,the perceived animacy in singularized objects is a “residue” of the selector’s socialpower, which affects its interactions with other groups. These artifacts are treatedin a highly conventionalized, deferential manner because people attribute to themspiritual characteristics of the selector or others whom the selector is believed torepresent, including supernaturals (Walker, n.d.).

That artifacts can retain a residue of social power helps us to understand whymany heirlooms and mementos, which utterly lack religious uses and exchangevalues, can also be singularized, occasioning special treatment. For example,bestowed by an ancestor (the selector), an heirloom retains some residue of thatperson’s social power and, even when all uses (symbolic and utilitarian) haveceased, is not discarded like trash. Likewise, people continue to carefully curatecertain gifts long after they no longer perform their original functions. Thus, manyan American adult owns a beat-up teddy bear, doll, or similar childhood mementothat, by virtue of possessing some residual social power of the giver, is protectedfrom normal discard activities.

On the other hand, a residue of social power sometimes marks an artifact fordestruction, as in instances of kratophany (Walker, 1995). Kratophany is the violentdestruction of dangerously powerful persons or things such as witches, discreditedpriests, and kings and their associated religious or political technologies. Notsurprisingly, mass media such as a statue of Stalin or an Aztec temple becomethe focus of revolutionary changes in polities or religions. These behaviors can beinterpreted as follows: members of the new regime attempt to destroy the residuesof social power present in these artifacts for revenge and to prevent their use in acounter-revolution. Destruction (and or burial) of these structures and monumentsis also required because, otherwise, they will continue to broadcast unacceptablemessages to all viewers.

CONCLUSION

Social power is one of the most important and multivalent constructs in theacademic world. During the past few decades, especially, it has served anthropolo-gists well. Indeed, no modern researcher interested in social processes—regardlessof subdiscipline or theoretical framework–can do without it. In advancing thepresent project, we have argued that the exercise of social power has materialconsequences far beyond the identity-based inequalities that many artifacts come


to symbolize. Indeed, every event of artifact acquisition instantiates social powerin its effects on the activities of a cadena’s groups.

To assist in studies of the social power embodied in acquisition events,we introduced the performance-preference matrix. This analytic tool enables re-searchers to make explicit comparisons between the performance-preferences ofrelevant groups and the performance characteristics of given artifacts. Such com-parisons indicate which groups were advantaged or disadvantaged by particularacquisition events, and lead to hypotheses about which groups might have exer-cised actual social power by influencing the choice. We also explored additionalimplications of an artifact-based conception of social power for studying culture-contact situations, and for handling singularized objects such as monuments andheirlooms.

By elaborating on the materiality of social power, archaeologists can, webelieve, contribute to the development of new bodies of social theory.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Alex Carroll, Lisa Lucero, Barbara Mills, Axel Nielsen, ScottRushforth, Monica L. Smith, and James M. Skibo and for very useful commentson earlier drafts. Reviews by Catherine Cameron, Thomas Levy, and Mark Lycettalso provided insightful suggestions and criticisms.

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The materiality of social power: the artifact-acquisition perspective

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