Ritual Economy Research Articles

Taking The Liberty: Toward a Theory of Copyright and Creativity

The justification for statutory copyright protection seems self-evident. Creators of copyrightable works invest substantial time, skill, and capital into the content they create, and therefore should have some legal recourse if others profit from their works unfairly or use them contrary to the creator's original intent. Yet, in the more than three-hundred-year history of copyright law key issues surrounding authorship, ownership, and public use of creative works continue to persist. This suggests that legal protection alone cannot construct an optimum environment in which creativity can occur. It also suggests that the theorization of the essential nature of creative work is still incomplete. This article will trace an intellectual history of copyright's theorization in two major theoretical frameworks: classical liberalism and cultural Marxism. Based upon this review, it will suggest a third framework, ritual economy, as capable of theorizing the economics of creative work more completely. It will also argue the necessity of rehabilitating authorship in theoretical literature, and will begin to develop an ontological foundation for legitimate authorship by drawing upon the ritual economy paradigm. It concludes with an application of the ritual economic view to the illustrative example of the popular music industry.IntroductionThe Statute of Anne, ratified into English law in 1710, is considered a seminal early copyright statute.1 It began with a statement of the central issue that it was enacted to address:Whereas printers, booksellers, and other persons have of late frequently taken the liberty of printing, reprinting, and publishing... without the consent of the authors or proprietors...to their very great detriment, and too often to the ruin of them and their families.2In the context of the time, this taking of liberties represented a cultural shift away from the practice of honoring the copyrights of authors as a moral-or at least a contractual-obligation. The technological innovation of the printing press, the rise of a literate public, and the economic opportunities in providing that public with written content turned a matter of honor into a matter of money.3 The primary beneficiaries of this turn were not necessarily authors themselves, but those with sufficient wealth and infrastructure to capitalize upon the production and dissemination of creative works. For authors and their designated rights holders, infringement had become detrimental enough that Parliament enacted legislation ostensibly on their behalf.Yet, after three centuries of statutory copyright protection the creative industries continue to operate in an environment where content creators supply the raw material-in the form of literature, artwork, music, photography, films, software, and other copyright protected mediums- while receiving only a fraction of the financial benefit their works produce. Technological advances may have made the shift from a copyright system based on moral rights and contracts to one based on case law and statute necessary, but that shift has done as much to entrench the power of those with the means to capitalize on the creative works of others as it has to effectively protect content creators. This is a result of the inherent paradox of legal protection. At the moment a citizen is protected from harm by law, they are also rendered dependent upon the State for the enforcement of that protection. Thus, while infringers of copyright may ultimately be held liable for their transgressions, liability can only be determined by time-consuming litigation that keeps copyright holders from pursuing their normal course of work, by an expensive reliance upon the legal system for adequate representation, and by submission to the uncertainty of the judicial apparatus that may or may not rule in the rights holder's favor.The entrenchment of power in the creative industries is also accomplished by the specialization of labor. …

Ritual economy and craft production in small-scale societies: Evidence from microwear analysis of Hopewell bladelets

Ritual economy provides a powerful framework for examining aspects of the organization of craft production, especially in the absence of a strong, centralized political economy. This paper outlines the basic tenants of ritual economy and describes how this framework can expand the understanding of the organization of production in small scale societies. I apply these concepts in a case study based largely on microwear analysis of Hopewell bladelets from the Fort Ancient earthworks in southwest Ohio. Microwear analysis from many different localities excavated within and near the earthworks demonstrates that craft production was an important activity conducted using bladelets. Each of the localities in which crafts were produced concentrated on media distinct from the others. These findings have important implications for our understanding of Hopewell economy and social structure as well as craft production in general.

Teotihuacan: Ritual Economy, Exchange, and Urbanization Processes in Classic Period Mesoamerica

Social networks and networking are highly dynamic processes within an urban setting. The archaeological site of Teotihuacan in the Basin of Mexico was the greatest urban center in Mesoamerica during the Classic period (C.E. 150–650). The dissemination of a new ideology related to major fertility and militaristic concepts served as an agent of social cohesion within Teotihuacan and throughout its interaction sphere. As a result, the Teotihuacan exchange network expanded onto an unprecedentedly vast area, and the ever‐increasing demand for ritual artifacts associated with this new ideology intensified exchange and the development of a highly complex economy. Specialized workshops produced thousands of artifacts laden with ritual symbolism that traveled all over Mesoamerica. The study of specific classes of artifacts reveals their importance in the local fabric. Ideology and its ritual economy had an impact on the configuration of the architectural landscape of the city itself with a high population density, sacred planning, and ethnic barrios. The Teotihuacan state developed successfully certain strategies that were able to sustain a metropolis of more than 200 thousand inhabitants for half a millennium.

Performing Peace-building - Conferences, Rituals and the Role of Ethnographic Research

This article explores performance and ritual theory in the context of anthropological research on peace-building institutions and knowledge discourses, as well as the process of writing up an ethnographic PhD thesis. Based on fieldwork in Germany and Nepal, the article's aim is to expand the theoretical scope of ‘aidnography’ and apply it to knowledge management, workshops, global conferences and the author's performance in these spaces. The article analyses how a potentially critical and contested concept such as liberal peace-building has been absorbed by an emerging ritual economy of indoor events, policy papers and transnational actors. These strategies of organisational and professional self-promotion create depoliticised action and products in the context of global aid chain management.

Ritual Change and the Distant: Mesoamerican Iconography, Scarlet Macaws, and Great Kivas in the Mimbres Region of Southwestern New Mexico

AbstractThe Mimbres Classic period (A .D. 1000–1130) in southwestern New Mexico was marked by dramatic and complex changes. The use of Great Kivas ended, and macaws and Mesoamerican-inspired iconography appeared. We argue that these events were systematically related and signify observable changes in Mimbres ritual economy. The presence of macaws, images of macaws, and representations of characters and motifs from the Hero Twins saga suggest that ideology accompanied macaws north from the Gulf Coast of Mexico. We recognize and discuss episodes and icons from the saga painted on Mimbres black-on-white bowls and propose that the macaws and narrative reached the Mimbres region through direct acquisition rather than down-the-line trade. This research has significant implications for the importance of long distance travel to faraway places and interaction with distant peoples, Mesoamerican-southwestern United States relationships, changing religious practices in non-hierarchical societies, and the adoption of extrinsic elements into local settings.

L'economia rituale. Dalla rendita alle celebrazioni (Lodi, età moderna)

This article deals with the ritual structure of the Ancient Regime's economy by analyzing two urban institutions in Lodi ( Spanish Lombardy):the Ospedale maggiore and the biggest brotherhoood within the city, the so-called Incoronata. Our analysis focuses on how annuities were used to build foundations of masses, some free, others incorporated in benefices and chaplaincies. This process created a real ritual economy whose financial and religious aspects ended up supporting each other while becoming interchangeable. Throught the analysis of some well-documented inheritances, this article stresses the variety of strategies that local elite families carried out towards the pia loca of the city. The benefactors were indeed usually exploiting local institutions to legitimate their annuities, which were very often based on uncertain rights. Explicitly connecting public and private debts to worship was an efficient way to both set up a reliable payment system and formulate a political strategy.

Composition, Production and Procurement of Glass at San Vincenzo al Volturno: An Early Medieval Monastic Complex in Southern Italy

136 glasses from the ninth-century monastery of San Vincenzo and its workshops have been analysed by electron microprobe in order to situate the assemblage within the first millennium CE glass making tradition. The majority of the glass compositions can be paralleled by Roman glass from the first to third centuries, with very few samples consistent with later compositional groups. Colours for trailed decoration on vessels, for vessel bodies and for sheet glass for windows were largely produced by melting the glass tesserae from old Roman mosaics. Some weakly-coloured transparent glass was obtained by re-melting Roman window glass, while some was produced by melting and mixing of tesserae, excluding the strongly coloured cobalt blues. Our data suggest that to feed the needs of the glass workshop, the bulk of the glass was removed as tesserae and windows from a large Roman building. This is consistent with a historical account according to which the granite columns of the monastic church were spolia from a Roman temple in the region. The purported shortage of natron from Egypt does not appear to explain the dependency of San Vincenzo on old Roman glass. Rather, the absence of contemporary primary glass may reflect the downturn in long-distance trade in the later first millennium C.E., and the role of patronage in the “ritual economy” founded upon donations and gift-giving of the time.

Alcohol Studies and Anthropology: Broadening the Venture

This collection of four books, published over the past decade, regarding anthropology and alcohol (and other drugs) studies continues to increase the value of anthropology in understanding the relationship between human societies and psychoactive substances. Pierre Bourdieu, Sidney Mintz, Victor Turner, and Eric Wolf are those scholars whose work is most centrally drawn upon in these manuscripts for their theoretical and methodological acumen. Authors recurrently reference the following concepts: comparative, cross-cultural, globalization, ritual, and political economy. In light of these four books and other recent publications, I note certain trends in anthropological research on psychoactive substances: (1) expansion from a focus on alcoholic beverages to an extremely broad range of psychoactive substances, including tobacco and prescription medicines; (2) increasing anthropological scholarship in this genre outside of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology to include a sizable and valuable literature by archaeologists; (3) a focus on the place of psychoactive substances within human societies as an essential—as opposed to a peripheral—component of anthropological research; (4) addressing the relationship between psychoactive substance use and health status; and (5) paying specific attention to substance-related problems (e.g., Carlson 2006).

5 Cultivated Landscapes as Inalienable Wealth in Southeastern Mesoamerica

ABSTRACTAnnette Weiner's theory of inalienable possessions, while bridging important gaps between meaning and materiality in archaeological studies of labor, gives short shrift to the potential role of landed property in constituting regimes of value. This chapter responds by exploring how archaeologists can study the social, political, and economic consequences of the inheritance of cultivated landscapes from estate ancestors. Drawing on Weiner's framework for “keeping‐while‐giving” and Parker Shipton's notion of “ideologies of attachment,” the chapter examines the ways and extent to which Maya families deployed agrarian rituals to embed identity in wealth and secure its intergenerational transmission. An archaeological case from pre‐Hispanic Honduras is used to evaluate these ideas with data on settlement, land use, and ritual economy.

Enawene-nawe ‘potlatch against the state’

The Enawene are sustained by the Juruena river in central Brazil, where multiple hydroelectric dams are under construction and in planning. The Enawene are fishermen whose highly ritualised economic life centres on feeding the demonic owners of hydraulic resources. In this paper, Nahum-Claudel takes us through tense negotiations between the Enawene and the para-state hydroelectric company, observing the former's adroit diplomacy as they repeatedly negotiate ‘wins’ of ever-larger hand-outs (motors, boats, petrol, money and even fish) in the lead up to what the company hopes will be a final compensation pay-out. In the era of hydroelectric ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey D. 2005. The new imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press), the Enawene enrol the state in paying the debt to the demon-owners, becoming – in a perspectival twist – themselves akin to these demons, engaged in an inflationary ‘potlatch against the state’. Diplomatic relations across this frontier are particular to the Enawene ritual economy, to the very recent onset of their relations with the state, and to the speed of resource capture in this region. Given the massive expansion of hydroelectric generation in Brazil, a nation currently achieving vastly accelerated growth, the analysis is likely to be of broader salience.

A Ritual Economy of ‘Talent’: China and Overseas Chinese Professionals

Since the Guangzhou municipality in south China organised the first Overseas Students Fair in 1998, large conventions aimed at recruiting overseas Chinese professionals (OCPs) have become a regular scene in major cities in China. These conventions constitute one of the most visible means of the Chinese government's engagement with the 800,000 OCPs who remain overseas after receiving tertiary education abroad. Characteristic of the conventions, and OCP policies in general, is a highly ‘materialistic’ thinking: it is argued that OCPs deserve generous financial rewards because they are economically and technologically beneficial to China, and that financial reward is the most feasible means to attract them back. My ethnographic data, however, reveal that the language of economism is communicated in a highly ritualistic manner and, conversely, political rituals serve as a crucial part of the conventions. The ritualised economic- and technological-determinist discourse appears apolitical, yet acquires strong mobilising and legitimating power, and is thus particularly effective in accommodating OCPs into the established political order. The concept ‘ritual economy’ denotes such deep intertwining between the economic, the ritualistic and the political.

Studies of the Subak: New Directions, New Challenges

It may seem excessive to devote this many articles to studies of the water management groups characteristic of one small island, but Bali is a rather special place. In the first issue of the first volume of Human Ecology, Clifford Geertz presented an article in which he compared irrigation practices in Bali to those in Morocco, demonstrating that in both locales the organizational approach taken to the creation of an agricultural ecosystem “extends in an overall way to the two societies as a whole” (Geertz 1972: 37). For the Balinese case, this meant that the careful regulation of the timing and distribution of water by irrigation societies known as subaks was both an adaptation to the environment (and the crop), and one of the many variables contributing to the formation of the “pluralistic collectivism” pattern of social integration that Geertz saw as characterizing many other facets of Balinese life. Subaks are recognized in social anthropology as irrigators’ associations that combine ritual and resource management. Inscriptions indicate that antecedent forms have been in existence for at least a millennium on Bali. Scholars estimate that there are now between 1,200 and 1,800 subaks on Bali, each controlling an irrigated field complex ranging from 4 to almost 800 hectares. In total, these groups oversee the irrigation of almost 18% of the island’s total land area (Sutawan et al. 1986: 1; 1990: 85). Today, subaks are also found on other islands of the Indonesian archipelago where sizeable migrant communities of Balinese agriculturists have settled. Subaks first came to prominence courtesy the writings of Dutch colonial administrators who studied them with an eye toward improving revenue collection in agriculture. Since then, these unique associations, and the so-called ‘water temples’ that structure and connect them, have attracted the interest of social scientists from Indonesia and beyond. Anthropologists, agricultural scientists and archaeologists have all contributed to a large body of work on the subak that deals with such diverse topics as ritual economy; management of paddy ecology; watershed-level organization; irrigation technology; historical developments; the autonomy of irrigation communities vis-a-vis elites; water politics and upstream-downstream power negotiation; and responses to external economic changes and governmental interventions.

Mesoamerican Ritual Economy: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives. Edited by E. Christian Wells and Karla L. Davis-Salazar. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007. Pp. xiv, 336. Illustrations. Index. $65.00 cloth.

Mesoamerican Ritual Economy: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives. Edited by E. Christian Wells and Karla L. Davis-Salazar. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007. Pp. xiv, 336. Illustrations. Index. $65.00 cloth. - Volume 66 Issue 2

Mesoamerican Ritual Economy: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives. Edited by E. Christian Wells and Karla L. Davis-Salazar. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007. Pp. xiv, 336. Illustrations. Index. $65.00 cloth.

Mesoamerican Ritual Economy: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives. Edited by E. Christian Wells and Karla L. Davis-Salazar. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007. Pp. xiv, 336. Illustrations. Index. $65.00 cloth. - Volume 66 Issue 2

Mesoamerican Ritual Economy: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives edited by E. Christian Wells and Karla L. Davis‐Salazar

Mesoamerican Ritual Economy: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives edited by E. Christian Wells and Karla L. Davis‐Salazar

The transition to farming and the ceramic trajectories in Western Eurasia. From ceramic figurines to vessels

In Eurasia the invention of ceramic technology and production of fired-clay vessels has not necessarily been related to the dynamics of the transition to farming. The invention of ceramic technology in Europe was associated with female and animal figurine making in Gravettian technocomplex. The fired-clay vessels occurred first in hunter-gatherer contexts in Eastern Eurasia a millennia before the agriculture. The adoption of pottery making in Levant seems to correlate with the collapse of the ‘ritual economy’, social decentralisation and community fragmentation in the Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic. In South-eastern Europe the adoption of pottery making was closely associated with social, symbolic and ritual hunter-gatherers’ practices.

The Needle and the Sword: Boatmen, Priests and the Ritual Economy of Varanasi

Varanasi, situated on the banks of the sacred River Ganges, is one of the holiest cities in India and a primary centre of pilgrimage in the subcontinent. The city stretches approximately seven kilo...

Recent Trends in Theorizing Prehispanic Mesoamerican Economies

Theoretical frames for modeling prehispanic Mesoamerican economies have been informed mostly by political economy or agency approaches. Political economy models examine the ways in which power is constructed and exercised through the manipulation of material transfers, mainly production and distribution. Research along these lines emphasizes regional redistribution, wealth and staple finance, debt and reciprocity, and regional integration through core/periphery relations. Agency models, on the other hand, explore the social aspects of manufacture, circulation, and consumption to infer the processes by which power is negotiated and contested. Work using this framework focuses on the manner by which meaning and value are assigned to, and become fixed in, social valuables, as well as the moral and emotional dimensions of allocation and consumption. Political economy and agency approaches are converging in Mesoamerican research to forge a new, hybrid theoretical construct, “ritual economy,” which strikes a balance between formalist and substantivist views by considering the ways that belief systems articulate with economic systems in the management of meanings and the shaping of interpretations.

Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place

This article takes up J. K. Gibson‐Graham’s call for a theoretical move away from a model of monolithic global capitalism and notions of one‐way “penetration” of capitalism. The notion of “economic hybridity” (derived from Bakhtin’s writing on linguistic hybridity) is proposed as an alternative to the Marxist concept of “articulation of modes of production” to account for the coming together of economic logics and practices from different epochs and cultural histories. The ethnography that sustains this discussion addresses the significance of popular religious revival in rural Wenzhou, on the southeast coast of China, and its role in the postsocialist market economy. Borrowing from Georges Bataille’s notion of “ritual expenditure” and from early Baudrillard on symbolic economies, the case study shows that rural Wenzhou’s ritual economy harbors an archaic economic logic which is subversive of capitalist, state socialist, and developmental‐state principles. The older strains of an alternative economic logic in this hybrid are shown not as complementing, adapting to, or serving capitalism’s expansion but as contesting it and rechanneling its movement toward other ends.

Sacrificial Economy and Its Objects

This paper examines the deposition and destruction of ritual artefacts in Oceania and positions the act of riddance in the ritual economy of sacrifice. A popular alternative to object destruction involves the sale of the object as a way to render it absent, and turning it into intellectual and image-based property, while at the same time eliciting the possibility for unspecified returns within an exchange of which we have become a part quite unknow ingly. Large ethnographic or archaeological collections of single cultural areas may thus not just reflect the degree of western interest in artefacts represented in such collections, but is symptomatic of ritual work which results in the fashioning of alienable objects, inalienable images and a form of property whose intellectual, generative and reproductive nature is known to have formed the basis for independence across the Pacific.