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

[A] relatively autonomous and structured space of positions and position-takings
defined by force lines and struggles for the monopoly over specific forms of
cultural authority, within which the logic of the economy has been suspended and
even inverted, and whose very functioning produces and reproduces the belief that
culture is a separate and “sacred” realm.
I argue that the field of craft production in ancient Maya society was an equally contested
arena of interaction in the competition for material and symbolic capital, possibly to the
level of individual or group ideologies. Symbolic capital, in particular, is an important
element of economic exchange in ancient societies because the social side of economic
interaction has an effect on the way goods are produced and consumed; that is, social
norms, mythologies, ritual elements of production not only mask the economic truth of
production, but also change the way goods are produced and exchanged (see Flad and
Hruby n.d.).
For Bourdieu (1977:178-179) symbolic capital is a nonmaterial form of wealth
(e.g., honor and prestige) that through social interaction can have a value that is again
convertible into material capital or tangible valuables. He contended that a material-
symbolic-material conversion takes place in which material wealth is invested to produce
symbolic capital that can later be reconverted into material wealth at key moments in
time. This conversion is a means whereby archaic societies socially repress economic
realities: “practice never ceases to conform to economic calculation even when it gives
the appearance of disinterestedness by departing from the logic of interested calculation .
. . and playing for stakes that are nonmaterial and not easily quantified” (1977:177).
Given the complex intersection between the material, nonmaterial, and agent in
technological practice as embodied experience (Dobres 2000), a formulaic
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