Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 The Materiality of Practice in Ancestral Maya Economies
- 2 Situating Maya Societies in Space and Time
- 3 Feeding a Hungry Landscape
- 4 Gendered Labor and Socially Constructed Space
- 5 Ritual Works: Monumental Architecture and Generative Schemes of Power
- 6 Naturalized Authority of the Royal Court
- 7 Social Identity and the Daily Practice of Artisan Production
- 8 Places, Practices, and People of Commerce
- 9 Flowery Speech of Maya Tributary Arrangements
- 10 Skeining the Threads
- References Cited
- Index
4 - Gendered Labor and Socially Constructed Space
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 The Materiality of Practice in Ancestral Maya Economies
- 2 Situating Maya Societies in Space and Time
- 3 Feeding a Hungry Landscape
- 4 Gendered Labor and Socially Constructed Space
- 5 Ritual Works: Monumental Architecture and Generative Schemes of Power
- 6 Naturalized Authority of the Royal Court
- 7 Social Identity and the Daily Practice of Artisan Production
- 8 Places, Practices, and People of Commerce
- 9 Flowery Speech of Maya Tributary Arrangements
- 10 Skeining the Threads
- References Cited
- Index
Summary
Women are called in Quiché the rajau ja, literally “owners of the house,” not because they legally own the physical place but because it is their action domain.
Earle 1986:157You will be the heart of the house, you will go nowhere, you will become a person who goes nowhere. You become the banked fire, the hearth-stone. Here our lord plants you, buries you.
Nahua midwife addressing a baby girl in the Florentine Codex; Burkhart 1997:28Among the Lacandon, men pray whereas women prepare the ceremonial food.
Boremanse 1993:340[T]he archaeology of the individual household is an essential building block in the reconstruction of past societies.
Willey 1982:613 in the Foreword to an issue of American Behavioral Scientist dedicated to household archaeology, based on a Society for American Archaeology symposium organized by Richard R. Wilk and William L. Rathje in 1981
Within the last several decades, two research topics – germane to the study of ritually entangled economic practice – have witnessed significant growth within Maya archaeology. They are household and gender studies – the twin foci of this chapter. The former grew from recognition within ethnographic inquiry that households – while challenging to define – were a fundamental unit of farming societies (Orlove and Custred 1980:33; Wilk 1991; Wilk and Netting 1984; Wilk and Rathje 1982, among others).
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- Information
- Ancestral Maya Economies in Archaeological Perspective , pp. 99 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010