Surplus Matters: An Archaeologist's View

This is a blog post I wrote a year or so ago for the University Press of Colorado on the idea of surplus in archaeology. It's a stimulating concept I continue to think about as well as question. At the very least, I find the economic and political history of the surplus concept in economics, philosophy, anthropology, and archaeology to be intrinsically fascinating, but not every person is particularly interested in the historical genealogy of ideas. But it is also knowledge of this genealogy that makes me question it's "utility" (and that knowledge would also offer insight into why I place utility in quotation marks 😉).
 
Surplus Matters: An Archaeologist's View

 

The more I think about surplus, the more I think about the idea and phenomenon of rent. Last year I had the wonderful opportunity to give a guest talk at the University of Minnesota and met one of my favorite economic anthropologists, Stephen Gudeman. Coincidentally, he had just written a review of the book on surplus that Kristen De Lucia and I edited. It's a solid, constructive review. But when I read it, I was really blown away that he makes an observation that I had been leaning toward more and more as I continually was rethinking surplus:

I am left wondering, however, if the concept of rent might be equally if not more usefully deployed than surplus...The rent concept places a study in the framework of production encompassing distribution, or political economy, and is one part of the analysis of distribution in an economy. The concept also travels well across societies. Might rent, by placing social relationships at its core, be a useful way to explore the many processes described in this volume (Gudeman 2016, quoting directly from the manuscript he gave me in lieu of page numbers).

I was blown away because in a review article on the surplus concept in archaeology I had been (and have been) working on, I found myself doing just this: exploring rent and its application to archaeological (and anthropological cases) as a comparative concept. Doing so also made me realize that the idea of surplus, while important to the economics of Classical western theory (and hence part of our legacy) is not as central to understanding theories of political economy as is rent. Perhaps I'll post more on the rent concept later, tracing views from the French Physicrats, Mill, Malthus, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and George.