13 City, State, and Market: Lessons from Mesoamerica

In evaluating the contributions to this issue, this chapter questions the predictable co-occurrence of cities with markets and states, a long-held position in western social theory. However, an extreme relativism is also flawed, and the projection of anti-capitalist fantasies on past, other peoples have equally distorted interpretations of the archaeological record and blinded researchers to the reality of market economies in societies including the Maya. Ultimately, the power of the comparative method entails more than the identification of commonalities between different market traditions. It can also serve to illuminate how market economics were embedded in distinct cultural, ideological, and material worlds. Calculating self-interest, supply-and-demand, and impersonal exchange do not operate according to a single behavioral logic but are shaped by ideologies of identity and desire specific to distinct regimes of value. Therefore, attention to the cultural and spatial context of economic transactions—in the original spirit of Polanyi—remains indispensable to interpreting how markets may have shaped historically particular constructions of personhood, community, inequality, place, and the ontological status of commodities. In the end, I argue that archaeologists also need to investigate the political affordances of markets as specific urban places and not simply as epiphenomena to a priori political or economic institutions.