9Thinking about Production: PhenomenologicalClassification and Lexical SemanticsCathy Lynne CostinCalifornia State University, NorthridgeABSTRACTEvaluating and rethinking central disciplinary ideas is an essential part of the process of developing knowledge andunderstanding. Part of the process is the consideration of how we define and classify the phenomena we study. Manyof the chapters in this book explore the continuing salience of entrenched ideas about production and offer up eitherreworked definitions or new categories of objects and behaviors related to production. Careful reflection on theseessays reveals why it is equally important to consider how we identify these phenomena in archaeological contexts.Keywords: craft production, specialization, classificationIn her book, Philosophy in a New Key, SuzanneLanger remarks that certain ideas burst upon theintellectual landscape with a tremendous force.They resolve so many fundamental problems atonce that they seem also to promise that theywill resolve all fundamental problems, clarifyall obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up asthe open sesame of some new positive science,the conceptual centerpiece around which a com-prehensive system of analysis can be build. Thesudden vogue of such a grande id´ee, crowd-ing out almost everything else for a while, isdue, she says, “to the fact that all sensitive andactive minds turn at once to exploring it. Wetry it in every connection, for every purpose,experiment with possible stretches of its strictmeaning, with generalizations and derivatives.”After we have become familiar with the newidea, however, after it has become a part of ourgeneral stock of theoretical concepts, our ex-pectations are brought more into balance withits actual uses, and its excessive popularity isARCHEOLOGICAL PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, Vol. 17, Issue 1, pp. 143–162, ISSN 1551-823X,online ISSN 1551-8248.C2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissionto photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ap3a.2007.17.1.143.ended. A few zealots persist in the old, key-to-the-universe view of it; but less driven thinkerssettle down after a while to the problems the ideahas really generated. They try to apply it and ex-tend it where it applies and where it is capableof extension. It becomes, if it was, in truth, aseminal idea in the first place, a permanent andenduring part of our intellectual armory. Butit no longer has the grandiose, all promisingscope, the infinite versatility of apparent appli-cation it once had. The second law of thermody-namics, or the principle of natural selection, orthe notion of unconscious motivation, or the or-ganization of the means of production does notexplain everything, not even everything human,but it still explains something, and our attentionshifts to isolating just what that something is.—Geertz (1973:3–4)This volume is about “rethinking” some of the basicconcepts used in archaeological studies of production.As Geertz articulates, powerful ideas that “burst upon the144 Cathy Lynne Costinintellectual landscape” are often embraced wholesale andapplied widely; but as more data are accumulated and spe-cific cases analyzed, the limitations of these “grand ideas”become clear. This leads to reflection, evaluation, and per-haps redefinition. This process of rethinking a core disci-plinary idea involves considering when and where it works,when and where it does not, and why it does or does not.Geertz’s comments prefaced his redefinition of one of thecentral paradigms in anthropology: culture and its relation-ship to human behavior and human experience. While ar-chaeological studies of production do not have a grande id´eeon par with “culture,” the past four decades of research intoproduction have witnessed the introduction of several coreconcepts that have shaped the direction and character of ourinquiry. These include the whole idea of specialization as away to organize production, as well as related concepts suchas attached and independent production, prestige economies,prestige goods, and a whole host of notions about exchangeand consumption, which are, of course, inextricably linkedto production.The essays collected herein are part of a larger literature“rethinking” several of these key ideas that have becomede rigueur in archaeological studies of production. Beforecommenting on what is here, let me mention briefly whatis not. Although the charge to “rethink” production given tothe participants in the American Anthropological Associa-tion symposium from which this volume derives was open-ended, the resulting volume and its critique are far from all-encompassing. Virtually all the goods reported on are elite orritual goods; there is little attention to the clearly mundane.None of these essays is rethinking methodology—how wecollect, analyze, and interpret our data—in a fundamentalway. And although many of the chapters in this volume callfor a broader consideration of the role or roles of ideologyand social relations in structuring the organization of pro-duction, in fact we do not see here a major rethinking oftheory: elites are still implicitly or explicitly at the fore ofsocial action.The authors undertake their critique through a set ofprocesses I call phenomenological classification and lexicalsemantics. Phenomenological classification is the practiceof putting things into named categories; lexical semanticsentails how we parse the meanings of words and phrases,in this case, the labels we use for the categories and typescreated and populated during phenomenological classifica-tion. Individually and collectively, these essays exemplifywhat our practices of classifying and naming things entailfor how we—descriptively—reconstruct ancient productionsystems. In one way or another, each of the contributionsexamines an existing conceptual category used in the ar-chaeological study of craft production. These explorations—some of them a chapter’s primary focus and some a side-bar to the primary analysis—provide some insight into thestate of production studies today and valuable lessons abouthow we might most effectively move forward our researchprogrammes.Periodically rethinking conceptual categories, domains,and definitions