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

“comprehensive balance-sheet of symbolic profits” (Bourdieu 1977:181) may not hold
for all societies. The shortcomings of symbolic capital are that it encompasses too many
social phenomena under one rubric, and that it reduces human experience to a
competition for wealth and status (Dreyfuss and Rabinow 1999; Wacquant 1993:137).
Dobres (2000) brought a further dimension to the accumulation of symbolic and
material capital by stressing the inherent connectedness between people and the world
through the practice of technology. She elaborated the connection between the
Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world and how technology (i.e., the knowledge and
practice of craft production) is necessary to the formation of social relationships and
identities (Dobres 2000). In her discussion of the embodied practice of technology,
Dobres (2000:128) elucidated the complexity of technological engagement with the
world:
[A]n especially important feature of the “human-technology equation” is the
sensuous bodily experience of making and using material culture, because the
corporeal body is the mindful and social link between the making and using of
things, the making and use of practical knowledge and cultural knowledge, the
making and unmaking of subjects, the making and breaking of social relations,
and the making and transformations of the body politic.
Throughout her work she emphasized the importance of everyday technological practice
(i.e., the dispositions of habitus) in the bringing about of these kinds of social changes
and for “expressing and materializing larger cultural epistemologies, ontologies,
identities, and differences” (2000:139). However, Dobres also noted that the multifaceted
nature of technology and that “differences in experience, skill, knowledge, and one’s
awareness of being-in-the-world, as well as differences in explicitly articulated goals and
how they should be accomplished, all become resources through which political interests
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