Wealth, Women’s Labour, and Forms of Value: Thinking from the Study of Ancestral Central America

A turn to the archaeologically documented past as a source of data for generalizing models explaining the roots of contemporary economic reality can involve treating pasts that were shaped under far different social conditions as equivalent to the contemporary world of nation states and global economies. Using case studies from ancient Mexico and Central America, I examine two sources of incommensurability that should be taken into account in any attempt to think from the past of economic relations to the present. The first is how labour is conceived of, counted, and understood in different situations. As feminist scholars of the contemporary economy have long noted, large areas of economic activity by women are routinely excluded in modern analyses, based on a tacit distinction between household labour (viewed as intimate, domestic, and ruled only by naturalized relations of sex and age) and extra-domestic labour. For the societies of ancient Central America, such a division simply did not exist. Accordingly, the standards of value and exchange that emerged in such societies were entangled in social relations that need to be accounted for before these societies are used as evidence for long-term human economic patterns.