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

materialize” (2000:140; my emphasis). This position brings her closer to the
Bourdieuvian notion of competition for material and symbolic capital in contested fields
of cultural production, but in technological practice, the transformation of the material
world is inseparable from production knowledge.
Dobres (2000:140) went on to argue that technology can be firmly entrenched in
the world views of a given society: “[t]he world views that structure detailed ways in
which people materially engage with and make their mark on the world also are
embodied in origin myths, principles of social organization, and even proscribed rules for
accessing the physical landscape and its resources.” This position is important in
conceptualizing the practice of ritualized production and the employment of mythological
charter (i.e., the framing of practice in mythological concepts) in technology, two
concepts employed in this study.
In some societies technological practices are related to local mythologies as part
of being-in-the-world and the creation of personhood and social identity. The practice of
the technological agent is thus explicitly connected to world view. An often related, but
distinct aspect of technological performance is ritualized production whereby elements of
world view, religion, and/or mythology become an indelible part of that performance.
Ritualized production, then, is one of the most elaborate examples of ideologically-
loaded production, and exemplifies how technology embodies the relationship between
people and the material world. It is a form of action, however, that is not necessarily tied
to a cultural field of production (i.e., orthodoxy or heterodoxy), and can be a part of
everyday, less cognized types of activities (i.e., doxa; cf. Monaghan 1998).
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