Surplus
Subtitle
The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life
Edited by Kristin De Lucia and Christopher T. Morehart
The concept of surplus captures the politics of production and also conveys the active material means by which people develop the strategies to navigate everyday life. "Surplus: The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life" examines how surpluses affected ancient economies, governments and households in civilizations across Mesoamerica, the Southwest United States, the Andes, northern Europe, West Africa, Mesopotamia and eastern Asia.
A hallmark of archaeological research on sociopolitical complexity, surplus is central to theories of political inequality and institutional finance. This book investigates surplus as a macro-scalar process on which states or other complex political formations depend and considers how past people — differentially positioned based on age, class, gender, ethnicity, role and goal — produced, modified and mobilized their social and physical worlds.
Placing the concept of surplus at the forefront of archaeological discussions on production, consumption, power, strategy and change, this volume reaches beyond conventional ways of thinking about top-down or bottom-up models and offers a comparative framework to examine surplus, generating new questions and methodologies to elucidate the social and political economies of the past.
Bio
Christopher Morehart is an associate professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU. As an archaeologist, he conducts his research in the Basin of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Belize and Guatemala, where he studies the impact of state power and political change on the way people interacted with the environment.
Praise for this book
The book does what anthropology and archaeology do best, namely to unpack the variability of a term like 'surplus' and to illustrate the very many ways in which and reasons for which a 'surplus' may emerge.
Anthropology Review Database
This volume expands our understanding of the environmental context of surplus production and the institutional processes, relationships and frameworks through which it flows. It is theoretically and empirically rich, and a useful reference for scholars working in any area or time period."
Journal of Anthropological Research
