The perceptive potter: An ethnoarchaeological study of pottery, ethnicity, and political action in Amazonia (Ecuador)

This dissertation is an ethnoarchaeological study of women's social identity and material culture in Conambo, a small-scale, egalitarian community of about 200 indigenous Achuar, Quichua, and Zaparo-speaking people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This work is part of a larger collaborative project that applies techniques from cognitive anthropology to model an emic perspective of political alliances that structure people's understanding of the social landscape in Conambo.; Broadly, I elucidate how the actions of people involved in the production, distribution, and use of pottery can be understood to signify, structure, and materialize the political landscape; examine settlement organization, the distribution of clays and pigments, the style of pottery beer bowls, and domestic structures; and present data demonstrating that women's domestic pottery and domestic architecture can provide useful information in the reconstruction of active political structures. Specifically, I focus on a long-standing assumption in archaeology that pottery in the domestic context represents a form of “passive style” that does not enter into symbolic communication in the political domain. Analysis of individual variables of style shows that Achuar and Quichua women signify their political alliances in the painted decoration of their domestic pottery more strongly than they signify so-called passive processes of learning associated with early learning and ethnicity. Analysis of women's judgments of pottery as Achuar or Quichua indicates that they decode cues to political alliances in the pottery of other women, including cues to political differences within and between groups. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the principles underlying women's stylistic behavior as part of the political processes involved in the construction and maintenance of social identity and social boundaries. In this dissertation, I advocate a paradigm that emphasizes the role of human agency—individual choices and active strategies—at multiple levels of consciousness: “the model of the perceptive potter,” one who is constantly constructing and reassessing his or her own social relationships, paying attention to the cues of others, and at some level of consciousness making motivated choices about how and why to use cues to social identity.