The Organization of Chipped-Stone Economies at Piedras Negras ...

experience the world. This move toward anti-Cartesianism, embodiment, and critical
assessment of the mind versus body (see Meskell and Joyce 2003) dichotomy requires
that traditional anthropological categories of ideas must be reexamined, but for the
purpose of this thesis I use the above distinction between world view and ideology.
2.3: IDEAS, TECHNOLOGY, AND SYMBOLISM: THE SOCIAL SIDE OF
CRAFT PRODUCTION
The concepts of doxa, orthodoxy and heterodoxy allow for a discussion of the role
of ideas in long-term practices, and expose technological and symbolic change through
time (Bourdieu 1977; Silliman 2001; Sommer 2001). Doxic experience implies an
uncontested form of belief and knowledge that is reproduced through daily crafting
practice, and is a concept associated with hegemonic forms of control that tend to mask
social difference (Comaroff and Comaroff 1990). In politicized or contested fields of
cultural production, however, the naturalized inequality achieved by hegemonic control
can collapse doxic dispositions and beliefs (Bourdieu 1983). As Silliman (2001:194)
noted: “when the unquestioned orders of doxa are no longer shared or when individuals
try to reify doxic reality, opinion and action schism into orthodoxy and heterodoxy.”
Orthodoxy and heterodoxy denote particular ideologies of production that are contested
and politicized as either cognized forms of the previous doxic experience (i.e.,
orthodoxy), or as a point of view that opposes existing beliefs (i.e., heterodoxy). When a
hegemonic aspect of social control is questioned, a field of cultural production emerges,
and platforms for the social negotiation of symbolic power open up to various groups or
individuals in society. Wacquant (1993:134) described a field of cultural production as:
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