Mesoamerica as an Assemblage of Institutions

Abstract

The authors reviewed the ethnohistorical and archaeological literature to look for research describing institutions in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. They found consistent evidence for the following as social institutions: states, cities, districts or neighborhoods, rural communities, marketplaces, temples, irrigation societies, guilds, and households. These had a strong and recognizable material imprint, but they varied from place to place and over time. They were durable and persistent, some traceable to as early as the second millennium BC. In many cases, they persisted through the Colonial period and actually comprise a large part of the corpus of Mesoamerican ethnology and social anthropology. Temple institutions and their personnel were entwined in the activities of all the other important institutions, acting as a sanctioning lubricant. The authors argue that the reason we keep finding the same persistent institutions—in their variant forms—is that these were the means by which people organized their efforts to manage omnipresent human-ecological problems critical to social life in this part of the world. Yet these institutions also lasted because they were adaptable to changing circumstances. Mesoamerica was not structured by any one institution (such as the state). Instead, the jostling of the whole assemblage sets the course of social evolution. It may, therefore, be possible to predict variation in one type of institutions as a partial function of its relation to other critical institutions in its assemblage.