A Dual-Processual Theory for the Evolution of Mesoamerican Civilization

The explanation of the development of ancient Mesoamerican civilization is in need of a new theoretical approach to replace the sterile debates between, for example, materialists and cognitivists or region-centered versus world-systems theorists. The foremost source of theoretical difficulty is that all of the arguments take place within the conceptual confines of a flawed neoevolutionism. Current theory has proved inadequate to the study of sociocultural evolution in Mesoamerica and elsewhere because it focuses on a directional development through evolutionary stages (from bands to states) (Flannery I972, Service I975) that are static societal types. In neoevolutionary theory the administrative subsystems of chiefdoms and states respond to socioenvironmental stresses by increasing political centralization (Flannery I972, Wright and Johnson I975), but there is no convincing theory of human behavior, especially the crucial behavior found in political competition (Brumfiel I992). Researchers should abandon its static ideal-type stages and instead investigate the varying strategies used by political actors to construct and maintain polities and other sociocultural institutions. In this Current neoevolutionary theory is inadequate to the analysis of past social change because it lacks a suitable behavioral theory and because its simple stage typology fails to account for variation among societies of similar complexity and scale. We propose a remedial program for neoevolutionary theory that will help it avoid these shortcomings. To accomplish this, we lay out a preliminary behavioral theory grounded in political economy, point to comparative situations from various world areas that illustrate the processes involved, and then apply the approach to preHispanic Mesoamerica. We argue that a productive xplanatory framework for Mesoamerica will be a dual-processual theory that elucidates the interactions and contradictions of two main patterns of political action, one exclusionary and individualcentered and the other more group-oriented.