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Journal of Social Archaeology ARTICLE

Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)

ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 4(1): 81–98 DOI: 10.1177/1469605304039851

Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of

Oaxaca
RICHARD WILK
Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, USA

ABSTRACT
One of the most fundamental problems in archaeology is interpreting
the spatial distribution of artifacts and styles. There is a particularly
long tradition of argument about the meaning of widespread art styles
and artifacts assemblages, in other words, the spread of archaeological
‘cultures’ or ‘horizon styles’. In Mesoamerica, the spread of ‘Olmec’
and ‘Olmecoid’ artifacts, ritual practices and iconography is a case
that has generated many explanatory models. In this article, I draw
on studies of modern cultural practices like beauty pageants and the
marketing of consumer products to suggest some alternative modes
of archaeological interpretation. In particular, the idea of ‘common
difference’ may provide a richer and more complex way of thinking
about the spread of styles and practices.

KEYWORDS
anthropology ● archaeology ● diffusion ● Mesoamerica ● Olmec

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■ MAKING BOUNDARIES

One of the fundamental problems of archaeology has always been estab-

lishing the boundaries – in time and space – of archaeological ‘cultures’. It
is very rare that a capping layer of destruction is overlain by a completely
different material culture and rarer still to find a physical boundary on the
ground where a wall, mountain range, or river neatly separates one entire
cultural assemblage from another. Instead the real world is filled with ambi-
guities, transitions of varying speeds in different kinds and styles of material
culture and unclear boundaries that only exist for selected kinds of material
culture or styles (Hodder, 1982). Harder still is interpreting stylistic simi-
larities in the material culture of distant sites and the presence of imported
goods and raw materials.
The majority of sociocultural anthropologists have never paid very much
attention to these problems. They wrote books about ‘the Nuer’ and
‘Tikopia’ and did not worry very much about the boundaries of those
groups in time or space, though in fact Evans-Pritchard did go on at some
length in The Nuer on the problem of finding group boundaries and the
disturbing way the people he calls Nuer shaded into the neighboring people
he calls Dinka.1 But in the last 25 years, most sociocultural anthropologists
have belatedly recognized that we do have a problem with cultural bound-
aries in time and space that cannot be encompassed by terms like accul-
turation or diffusion; this is exactly the same problem that archaeologists
have confronted more directly for a much longer time.2
The reason sociocultural anthropology was able to avoid confronting the
boundary problem for so long was that the basic bounded taxonomic units
of culture seemed so ‘natural’, confirming expectations that each culture
had a territory. Later generations of ethnographers went out into a world
divided up into ethnic zones demarcated on maps, each labeled with a
name. In a blending of present and past, these maps were meant to repre-
sent the way things were before European contact and sometimes off on
the edges there would be empty areas where an anthropologist could still
explore and fill in the blanks with new lines and labels. We now know that
this world of neat cultural provinces, rather than being a primordial or
natural state of human affairs, was largely the administrative creation of
either indigenous or European colonial states.
In most of the colonial world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
European administrators and officials were very uncomfortable with the
ambiguity of the way indigenous peoples identified themselves. The indi-
genes called themselves ‘people’ in their languages, or sometimes they used
the names of a village or river or hill. People in a single village might speak
two or three different languages. Chiefdoms and other polities could be
named after rulers, lineages, totems or deities. There were far too many
names with many depths of historical meaning, shifting far too often. In
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Wilk Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca 83

response, administrators insisted that each person had to belong to one

cultural group, they named groups that seemed closely related and drew
boundaries around them. Sometimes their goal was to create areas with
unified administration and cultural homogeneity, like ideal little European
nation-states, but just as often ethnic groups were divided between admin-
istrative areas or colonies in order to make them easier to rule. In all this,
they had the help of missionaries, teachers, linguists, anthropologists and
local religious and political powers (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983).
Unfortunately, once created for analytical or political purposes, these
carefully bounded ‘cultures’ took on a timeless and frozen quality. Many
sociocultural anthropologists were willing to reinforce the primordial
fiction through numerous textual devices, selectively reading historic
accounts and discarding contradictory evidence as ‘recent introductions’,
often with the best of intentions (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Fabian, 1983).
By the mid-twentieth century, many indigenous peoples had themselves
become invested in boundary-making projects that connect direct ancestral
lines to named cultures and sites. The arbitrary names of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries became the accepted taxonomy of ‘peoples’ or
‘races’ in the twentieth. It is no surprise that archaeologists’ articles and
field reports also have maps where areas are divided into named territories
and phase charts where time periods have distinct beginnings and endings.
This is no more than a reflection of the best wisdom of mid-twentieth
century sociocultural anthropology about the state of the world before
European colonial expansion.
My own ethnographic work in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean has
confronted issues of boundaries from the day I walked into the field and
found myself taken captive in a Kekchi Mayan village as a possible
Guatemalan spy by a group of Gurkha (Nepalese) troops in the British
army patrolling the disputed Belizean border. At that time the people I
identified as ‘Kekchi Maya’ called themselves ‘Christians’ (kristianeb) and
‘people’ (gwink) and by one of the names of the village they lived in (Wilk,
1997). Only in the 1980s did they begin to follow the practice of govern-
ment officials and anthropologists, by calling themselves ‘Kekchi Indians’
and identifying themselves as ‘indigenous’ people (though this is a legally
contested issue; Wilk, 1999). By the late 1980s these same Kekchi were
starting to grow marijuana for the US market, watching Chicago Cubs
baseball on satellite television and developing rainforest healing trails for
ecotourists. Over the last 20 years of the twentieth century, anthropologists
working all over the world have had to face similar developments and
changes, as a discourse of rights based on ethnic identity has become an
international standard and global consumer culture has appeared almost
everywhere, transformations that in earlier times were inadequately
captured with terms like ‘diffusion’ and ‘acculturation’.
The fascinating contradiction in the literature about globalization is that
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on one hand there is a huge increase in the speed and volume of commerce,
transportation, communication, migration and travel. But on the other
hand, differences, contrasts, boundaries and distinctions continue to
abound and new kinds of cultural distinction continue to appear (Appadu-
rai, 1996; Watson, 1997; Wolff, 1997). My own work on the topic has
considered the way the small country of Belize, with very weak economic
and cultural institutions, has managed to create and maintain a distinctive
national culture during the last quarter-century, while inundated with
foreign capital, media, goods, technology and tourists (Wilk, 1995a). My
conclusion is that there is nothing incompatible about the formation of local
identity and even strong and discrete cultural boundaries, in a situation
where material culture, ideology and people move easily across those very
boundaries and in and out of local identities. In some circumstances, I
argue, localism and the defense of boundaries and borders is a strategic
response to globalization and may even be a constituent part of the larger
global process itself.
It says something about the intellectual relationship between sociocul-
tural anthropology and archaeology that changes in the way sociocultural
anthropologists understand cultural boundedness through history have
some parallels in archaeological theory (Bender, 2001). In many parts of
the world archaeologists have become more concerned with regions,
economies, trade networks, spheres of interaction, peer polities and other
concepts that draw away from the grid of culture, from analysis predicated
on connecting similarities between regions and phases. The fallacies of
‘marching potsherds’ and identifying cultures with diagnostic artifacts have
long been critiqued by archaeologists, most of whom recognize that
archaeological cultures are analytical constructs. Nevertheless, the prevail-
ing mode in many parts of the world is still to use monolithic cultural
entities like ‘The Maya’ and ‘The Khmer’ and to act as if these labels had
ethnic, linguistic and cultural unity, with frontiers and capitals just like the
imagined communities of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe
(Anderson, 1983). Whole epochs of prehistory are still recognized by
horizon markers, generally styles attributed to a single cultural origin that
become widespread, providing a temporal boundary, like a dated layer of
volcanic ash from a single eruption.

■ THE OLMEC HORIZON

The Olmec are one of the better examples of a horizon style in the New
World. Defined originally as an art style common to artifacts found in
various places in Mesoamerica, it was later attached to several large sites
with stone monuments in the gulf coast of Veracruz in the 1920s. Sites in
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Wilk Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca 85

the same area were further explored in the 1930s through to the 1950s, well
publicized by National Geographic as the discovery of a ‘lost civilization’.
During succeeding years better dating methods pushed these sites further
into the past, so they clearly preceded the Classic civilizations already
known elsewhere in Mesoamerica. After the gulf coast was identified as the
Olmec ‘heartland’, ceramics, carved stone objects and a few cave paintings
and carved stones with similar motifs and styles were identified at sites in
many other parts of Mesoamerica.
As would be expected, this situation led to many contending theories
and explanations, discussed in a long sequence of conferences, symposia,
texts and review articles.3 The standard view for many years was that the
Olmec was the ‘mother culture’ of all subsequent civilization in Meso-
america, inventing the calendar, writing system and most of the other
elements that distinguish all the later societies of Mesoamerica. At various
times the spread of Olmec culture and art has been attributed to religious
missionaries, militant kings and marching warriors, organized trading
parties and even a great political empire. There is no question that the area
over which objects with distinctive ‘Olmec’ iconography are found is vast,
covering most of southern Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. The question
of how the objects or styles got there and what they signify remains one of
the most contentious issues among Mesoamerican archaeologists.
Despite all the attention given the spectacular Olmec art objects and
monuments, very little actual dirt archaeology was done in the putative
Olmec homeland in the gulf coast until very recently. The largest finds of
Olmec portable objects from secure archaeological contexts came from
relatively small communities in temperate highland zones far away in the
basin of Mexico (Porter, 1953; Weaver, 1967). In the late 1960s, Kent
Flannery started to question the unity and coherence of Olmec culture or
empire, after digging at the formative period site of San Jose Mogote in the
valley of Oaxaca, where he found a workshop for making magnetite mirrors
(Oaxaca is also at a great distance from the putative Olmec ‘heartland’).
These small mirrors turned up in tombs and caches in the gulf coast Olmec
sites at about the same time (Flannery, 1968).
In some of the ceramics from his excavations, Flannery found stylistic
similarities with those identified as typically Olmec on the gulf coast and
in the basin of Mexico. A few figurines also looked ‘vaguely Olmecoid’
(Flannery, 1968: 85), but otherwise the pottery, houses and other artifacts
looked like other contemporary materials from elsewhere in highland
Mexico. His interpretation was that during the formative period, social
stratification was just beginning at San Jose Mogote in response to local
agricultural surpluses. As the local elite tried to solidify their position, they
acquired foreign ‘Olmec’ goods and trappings as a way to reinforce their
status. By trading their magnetite mirrors they took part in an inter-regional
trade in elite exotic goods, which gave them legitimacy in the local struggle
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86 Journal of Social Archaeology 4(1)

for power, especially in making that power hereditary through links with
the supernatural. Gradually the local elites would become ‘Olmecized’,
imitating Olmec art and culture, but never losing their local identity.
Flannery cleverly drew upon an ethnohistoric example of the cultural influ-
ence of the Tlingit of the Canadian west coast on their inland Athabaskan
neighbors to illustrate his case. Mary Helms later elaborated and developed
the idea that foreign goods have special powers in local competitions for
power in a lengthy comparative study (Helms, 1988).
Flannery’s attack on the Olmec mother culture model and the various
scenarios of Olmec conquest was startlingly original, in that it asked why
people might have wanted Olmec-style objects, rather than how they could
have been spread, broadcast, or imposed on people. He posed the possi-
bility of willing imitation through market participation (as in modern
consumer culture), rather than the epidemic spread of style through
ruthless empire, conquest, or conversion. His solution suggests that when
you find stylistic similarity, or even the same exact goods in two places,
there may not be simple domination or incorporation, but an internal
dynamic that drives external contact. What looks, therefore, like a flood of
foreign influence leading to the rise of local social complexity may in fact
be just the opposite – an indigenous and local growth of social complexity
that leads to an immediate demand for foreign symbols, goods and ideolo-
gies. Inspired by Flannery’s article, I spent most of a year in graduate school
writing a paper applying his model to the flood of Chinese cultural influ-
ence into Japan during the eighth and ninth centuries AD.
Flannery was actually describing a special case of a general principle
described much earlier by the sociologist and historian George Simmel. In
1904, Simmel published an article called ‘Fashion’, in which he states:
in addition to the element of imitation the element of demarcation
constitutes an important factor of fashion. This is especially notable
wherever the social structure does not include any super-imposed groups, in
which case fashion asserts itself in neighboring groups. Among primitive
peoples we often find that closely connected groups living under exactly
similar conditions develop sharply differentiated fashions, by which means
each group establishes uniformity within, as well as differences without the
prescribed set. On the other hand, there exists a wide-spread predilection for
importing fashions from without and such fashions assume a greater value
within the circle, simply because they do not originate there . . . . As a
matter of fact the exotic origin of fashions seems to strongly favor the
exclusiveness of the groups which adopt them. (Simmel, 1904: 141)
Simmel defines fashion as a system that thrives on inclusion and exclusion,
uniformity and differentiation. The dynamism of fashion emerges from
social games when people seek to imitate some ‘others’ and to be different
from and superior to ‘other others’. Fashion is about being both similar and
different at the same time – and as people strive to change their social
positions, fashions change. Because he thought that there was little social
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Wilk Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca 87

A FASHION SYSTEM

IMITATE

OLMEC VALLEY OF
HEARTLAND OAXACA

FLOW OF STYLES ELITE

ELITE
IMITATE

IMITATE
COMMONERS COMMONERS

Figure 1 A diagram of a basic fashion system, where flow is between elites

and commoners in each location and between elites in the two locations

differentiation among what he called primitive peoples, he did not think

nonwestern people had fashion systems, but he does note the fashion-like
aspect of primitive money and he describes the power of imported fashions
in local hierarchies of value.
Simmel and Flannery are describing the same kind of phenomenon, a
basic kind of fashion system where local social competition drives impor-
tation of objects, ideas and practices from elsewhere and the development
of local copies and variations of imports by lower ranking local competi-
tors, as shown in Figure 1. (Other, more complex fashion systems can also
be defined; fashions can flow from commoners to elites, or between
commoner groups in different places.) Through time, one would expect that
the local elites become more like the elites they emulate and admire; they
are Olmecized, but do not ever become Olmec. In fact, for this system to
operate it is not even necessary, eventually, for there to be a group of real
Olmec at the center, since the objects that circulate are made by the various
local elites, who can keep the system going on their own (Flannery and
Marcus, 2000).

■ FAST FORWARD

Good ideas have a way of resurfacing in new and distant contexts. Several
years ago, I co-edited a book about the contemporary florescence of beauty
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88 Journal of Social Archaeology 4(1)

pageants in different cultures around the world, as the form of the pageant
has spread outwards from its origins at the hands of Phineas T. Barnum in
1854 (Cohen et al., 1995). Pageants are just one excellent example of a
common set of issues that face anthropologists trying to understand what
is now called ‘globalization’ (Wilk, 1995a). One of the central controversies
among anthropologists and others looking at the relationship between local
cultures and new global forms of governance, media and commodification
is over the idea of cultural imperialism.
To simplify a long and complex argument, on one hand we have
proponents of global cultural imperialism who see globalization as a process
of centralization (Tomlinson, 1991), or even ‘McDonaldization’ (Ritzer,
1996). The new global culture will be a uniform consumer culture, domi-
nated by large multinational corporations, concentrated capital in ‘world
cities’ and a few powerful northern countries; a ‘McWorld’ to use Barber’s
(1995) term. On the other hand is the argument that instead of centraliza-
tion, the current trend is towards regionalization, fundamentalism, cultural
fragmentation and the proliferation of blended and mixed identities, multi-
culturalism, migration and ‘hybridities’ (Featherstone, 1990; Foster, 1991).
For some, the world is becoming an increasingly uniform and homogeneous
place, with a clearer center and periphery, while for others a brief period
of modern order is falling rapidly into postmodern chaos and a welter of
new hyphenated and sub-identities (Friedman, 1994).
Most sociocultural anthropologists in the age of Boas were true believ-
ers in the idea of cultural imperialism and saw it as the great enemy of
cultural diversity. Their mission was to save or at least document cultures
before they were bulldozed under or absorbed by an onrushing tide of
missionaries and Coca-Cola. Today, however, we have mostly lost our fear
that our research subjects are about to disappear for good and instead we
celebrate the ability of local people to resist, adapt to and eventually
localize and indigenize foreign objects, images and ideas that flow through
markets, televisions and schools. Watson (1997), for example, published an
edited collection that shows how McDonalds restaurants have been
absorbed and localized differently in East Asian countries and Tobin (1992)
shows how innumerable foreign objects and practices from baseball to
tango have been absorbed into Japanese culture without destroying or
threatening Japanese identity.
There is something gratifying about this kind of David-beats-Goliath
story and it gives us hope for the future. It certainly makes me feel better
when I go back to the Kekchi villages I worked in 24 years ago and find
that most of the rainforest is gone and everyone is running around on
motorbikes, speaking English and watching the same programs I see at
home on television. In many parts of the world it is now commonplace to
hear anthropologists say that what appears to be globalization is really just
the local appropriation of foreign goods, styles, ideas and culture. In other
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Wilk Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca 89

words, we have adopted Flannery’s argument about the Olmec! What looks
like empire or conquest is really the appropriation of a foreign symbolic
system and material culture into a very local cultural and political dynamic.
It may look like they are being conquered by Olmecs, but they are really
just using Olmec masks in their own local and regional affairs. Of course,
the key question is, how far do you have to go before you can actually
become or pass for Olmec?

■ COMMON DIFFERENCE

If local appropriation was really all that was going on in the process of
globalization, sociocultural anthropology could go on very much the way it
always has. Local culture would just constantly reassert itself and anthro-
pologists would never run out of villages. The common metaphor of ‘idols
behind altars’ (Brenner, 1929) used in Mesoamerica to describe the conti-
nuity in native cultures behind a superficial modern façade makes just this
argument. The dramatic changes of the present can be ignored, because
underneath there is an unbroken continuity to the past maintained by the
timeless spirituality of native religion.4
There is too much evidence to the contrary, showing that the kinds of
local cultural identities we see today are self-conscious, political and reflex-
ive, in ways that are quite distinct from the colonial world of the nineteenth
and much of the twentieth centuries. The current period of globalization is
marked instead by contradictory trends of unification and fragmentation in
economic, social and cultural systems. On one hand there is greater unifor-
mity, homogenization and centralization, for example in mass media, sports
and investment banking. On the other hand nation-states are fragmenting,
indigenous movements are growing and rich and poor parts of the world
are diverging rather than converging. What anthropologists have great
trouble articulating is the way that cultures can become both more
connected with one another, share more material culture, yet be more
distinctive and self-consciously different at the same time. How can
homogenization and differentiation, creolization and purification, be going
on simultaneously, when they seem to be opposite principles? Unfortu-
nately, this argument often devolves into a sterile debate about which trend
is more ‘real’ and which one is just an illusion or a temporary counter-trend.
When I began to work with beauty pageants in Belize, I encountered
exactly this debate, both among intellectuals and the organizers of and spec-
tators at the pageants. At a global scale you have two giant mega-struc-
tures, Miss Universe® Inc. owned by Donald Trump and NBC (who also
own Miss USA® and Miss Teen USA®), and Miss World® Inc. (also Miss
America®) owned by Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation, which
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includes Fox Entertainment. Each of these pageants reaches a global media

audience of over two billion people and has franchise holders in more than
150 countries. They control national pageants through an elaborate set of
contracts and rules that specify the physical, social and moral qualities
of all contestants. For many critics, beauty pageantry is just another form
of Euro-American neo-colonialism that commoditizes and essentializes
women, promotes a Western ideal of physical beauty in many places where
it can never be realized and gives poor people only an illusion of real
participation in a global sorority where all nations are on an equal footing.
Instead of real diversity, it presents 5 foot, 7 inch cloned Barbies in expen-
sive costumes as role models.
In Belize, I mostly heard this ‘hegemony’ critique of beauty pageants
from foreign residents, conservative church people and a few foreign-
educated intellectuals. Most Belizeans on the contrary did not seem to
resent the fact that there was little chance that Miss Belize was ever going
to win Miss World or Miss Universe, just as they never expected to see a
Belizean athlete winning a gold medal at the Olympics. This did not in any
way stop them from thoroughly enjoying (and arguing about and criticizing)
a plethora of local pageants that continue to proliferate in amazing diver-
sity. When I studied the history of pageantry in Belize, I found that, from
their start in 1946, the pageants were deeply involved in local politics and
ethnic rivalry, so there had been multiple and contending pageants from
the very beginning and often conflict over who was the legitimate Miss
Belize.
By 1990 when I did my fieldwork, in a country with only 15 towns of
over 1000 people, there were hundreds of beauty pageants a year. They
included ethnic contests (Miss Garifuna, Miss PanAmericana), commercial
ones (Miss Tourism, Miss Citrus) and those based on sporting events (Miss
Cycling), age divisions (Mrs Senior Belize, Miss Belize Pre-Teen), physical
size (Ms Big and Beautiful), as well as the conventional ones based in
schools, villages, cities and districts. Each had its own unique qualities,
which made them in some way very Belizean, though they also retain the
basic foreign form of the pageant. They feature local musicians performing
foreign songs, local dresses made from imported materials following models
in foreign fashion magazines and foreign-educated judges.
Here we have the Olmec problem in a contemporary form, with the same
central question at the end; how much does the spread of a cultural form
tell us about cultural similarity and difference, hierarchy and power? My
solution to this puzzle has been to try to unpack the idea of beauty that is
being used by the players, both in the pageants and in the debates about
the pageants (Wilk, 1995a, b). Before you can enter a beauty pageant, there
has to be some agreement about what beauty means. Even a smattering of
ethnology shows that there is no such thing as a cross-culturally universal
concept of beauty. The Kekchi people I worked with, like the Navajo, had
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Wilk Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca 91

no word that translated as ‘female aesthetic beauty’, or even ‘visual beauty’.

In some cultures, beauty is a spiritual concept, not a visual one, or it may
be a quality of old age and experience rather than youth, or of fierceness
and power. In some cultures, like the famous WoDaaBe of Niger, men, not
women, are the objects of aesthetic appreciation. The idea of a beauty
contest cannot be translated without an elaborate explanation and people
still might not understand what you really mean by it, or why you would
do such a thing.
Thus, before you can have a contest over who is more beautiful, you
need some degree of agreement about who and what constitutes beauty
and how it can be judged. Two cultures with completely incompatible and
untranslatable ideas can only look at each other and evaluate each other
according to their own standards. To a Kekchi, a white person looks pale
and bloated, like a chicken without feathers; at first they probably did not
look human at all. Similarly, at first contact, many Europeans wondered if
Amerindians were actually human. There can be no competition without a
common understanding of the limits, terms and rewards of the game.
Before you can have a Western beauty contest you have to take all of
the globally diverse and alien ideas of beauty and flatten them out to a
limited number of named dimensions and essentialize them as ‘natural’
aspects of women and youth. Euro-Americans emphasize visual beauty,
especially of the face and hair enhanced by cosmetics and of course the
sexual qualities of a woman’s body as revealed and concealed artfully by
clothing. Only by accepting that these are indeed the characteristics of the
category ‘beauty’ can you enter into a contest over the content of the
category. In the process, though, you have to discard all the other dimen-
sions of beauty, such as wisdom, intelligence, age, spirituality, etc.
This kind of framing through a common idiom is actually a specific
instance of a general process that I have called common difference. Two
cultures that do not share a common idiom cannot compete; they cannot
enter into any of those fascinating forms of gift-giving and economic
exchange characterized so well by Douglas and Isherwood (1979) as ‘tour-
naments of value’. What, to me, is a perfectly normal hat may, to you, be
so alien it is even hard to visualize or see and would certainly not be desir-
able or valuable. This is why, when first contacts took place in the Pacific,
island people rarely found very much on European ships that they wanted
(Thomas, 1991). The objects did not fall into recognizable categories of
valuables; they might as well have been Olmec pots or Dali etchings.
The world is full of institutions, often hierarchical ones, that create
common difference by providing standards and terminology that allow
disparate groups to compare themselves along a common set of dimensions.
It is not hard to think of organized sports, cookbooks, a population census,
or even a kinship typology as systems that make contests or comparison
intelligible, by narrowing and selecting the dimensions of difference. The
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framework of common difference can indeed spread through processes like

those called ‘cultural imperialism’, while the same framework provides (or
even demands) locally specific content.
Pageants therefore do not make Americans and Belizeans the same; the
pageantry system does not operate hegemonically by making everyone in
the world look American or European. In fact the very attraction of the
international pageants requires that the contestants from the various coun-
tries look different from one another in ways that are emblematic of their
national origins, within the common framework of female beauty. The
pageant promotes and thrives on difference of a particular and restricted
kind, much as modern tourism and other cultural markets thrive on cultural
difference, exoticism, tribalism and new identities. The pageant is no more
than a system that narrows (and domesticates) differences into a common
set of dimensions, standardizing and translating them so they are widely
intelligible. In the process, of course, other kinds of difference are
suppressed and eliminated, so it becomes unthinkable to have men and
women on the same stage competing with each other, for example, or
people of different ages, or couples, or women with no makeup and mastec-
tomy scars, or women who have had children. But at the same time, the
pageant makes it possible for everyone to participate in the contest and
share in the possibility of winning, providing a visible form of categorical
equality.
The common possibility of winning means that there really is a kind of
structural equality among all members, which explains some of the eager-
ness of even very small, poor, or marginal nations (like Tibet and East
Timor) to participate with their own expensive national franchise. During
the last 30 years, many small developing countries have pursued the possi-
bility of winning one of the major contests as well and this raises the
question of power within the global system. When Miss Jamaica became
Miss Universe, some Jamaicans claimed a victory for all black people, in
breaking the firm grip that white people held on international beauty stan-
dards up to that time. There were similar bursts of rhetoric around the
recent global victories of Miss India and Miss South Africa. In one sense
these are transforming global beauty culture. Today you do see many more
models of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and cosmetics are now
made for a much broader range of skin and hair colors and textures. The
content of the category of beauty has changed, but the dimensions have not.
The specification of what is meant by beauty and the huge business that
defines and feeds it has not changed very much at all. As a business, cosmet-
ics, fashion and other beauty products have become one of the fastest
growing sectors in developing and poor countries, expanding at a far faster
rate than other industries (Burke, 1997).
In a regime of common difference, there are two kinds of power.5 At
one level you can compete and win the contest and wear the crown and
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Wilk Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca 93

carry the scepter (or collect the biggest piece of jade, or stand on the big
stone head). The other kind of power works behind the scenes to set the
rules of competition, defines who can compete and what the stakes will be
(or read the glyphs, or decide who can play the sacred ball game). Both
types of power are real and both have value, but one acts within a set of
categories that are defined and controlled by the other. This is the story
that I brought back from my work with beauty pageantry in Belize:
pageants have indeed been locally appropriated and ‘Belizeanated’ and
they have allowed Belizeans to act on a global stage, but in the process
Belizeans have accepted a narrowed and commoditized idea of beauty. In
the long run, I think this has helped make them economically more depen-
dent on the USA for consumer products of all kinds and certainly less
culturally creative when it comes to alternative ideas of what beauty could
be. However, beauty salons are the most successful independent small busi-
nesses for female entrepreneurs in Belize, enabling many to survive and
some to escape from poverty. Now there is also a small and growing export
and tourist trade in ‘natural rainforest’ beauty products made from local
ingredients.

■ BACK TO THE VALLEY

My argument to this point has paralleled Flannery’s. We should expect

conquest and true colonialism to lead to a very different kind of consump-
tion pattern from that which we find in a system of common difference.
Instead of little Olmec colonies in Oaxaca, we find local groups who are in
various ways engaging in competitive ‘Olmecing’. The idea of common
difference can present an alternative way of thinking about these situations
that does not force us to answer the question ‘were they really Olmec?’
since that was exactly the issue that kept the system going and gave it
dynamism for so many centuries. Legitimacy was at stake and could not be
determined by any simple presence or absence of traits.
Common difference may also help rethink the internal dynamics of
ancient cultures whose uniformity has been relatively undisputed for far
too long. Even an easily recognizable ancient civilization like ‘the classic
Maya’ can be seen as a very complex entity that varied over time and space,
with both tremendous coherence and great differentiation. It has always
been a matter of choice whether to emphasize coherence and uniformity
or fragmentation and disunity, since one can find evidence for both in
different artifacts and styles at any period. Perhaps what we call ‘Maya’ was
a system of common difference that allowed a large number of quite
disparate and varied peoples to compete with each other and participate in
a single arena. This might help explain why, for example, some perfectly
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94 Journal of Social Archaeology 4(1)

prosperous areas used ‘Mayan’ pottery and lived in ‘Mayan’ houses, but did
not build big temples or carve monuments; they did not compete at that
level.
The concept of common difference provides one way to find order in
what is otherwise a welter of contradictions. If the elites in Oaxaca are
trying to look and act ‘Olmec’, they may certainly achieve their local goals,
but it does not necessarily mean that they gain the power to define Olmec.
The ‘Olmec’ art style was clearly a common arena of competition over large
parts of Mesoamerica, with many diverse players. As with any system of
common difference, though, some groups had more power to define what
Olmec art was and they had institutional channels for judging it, deciding
what met the standards and what did not. It is likely that the actual groups
that controlled the arena and the rules – the showroom – changed several
times over the approximately 650 years the style lasted. It would not be
surprising if there were two contending Olmec styles at some times (e.g.
Miss Universe – Miss World, National League – American League, USA –
USSR), or times when the whole system broke down into chaos before re-
forming under new management. One could also imagine various kinds of
hierarchy within structures of common difference. In the USA in the 1950s
through to the late 1980s, most country and state pageants were part of an
hierarchical ‘feeder’ structure managed by universities, Rotary Clubs and
other civic organizations, all leading up to the Miss America pageant. At
each level, this puts pressure on pageant organizers to suppress local stan-
dards, in hope of choosing a contestant who can win at the next higher level,
leading to greater overall uniformity in the contestants (Deford, 1971).
Clearly, these speculations could go on, but the main point here has been
made. What we think of as ‘cultures’ or ‘civilizations’ both in the present
and in the past might be better thought of as ‘arenas’ or even ‘circuits’ of
often linguistically and culturally disparate groups of people who partici-
pate in one or more structures of common difference. From the point of
view of an external observer, the participants appear to be both converg-
ing and becoming more alike in some dimensions and diverging or main-
taining degrees of difference in other dimensions. That is not to say that all
historical periods have been dominated by common difference; of course
there were conquest states that imposed uniformity in administration and
public architecture and confederacies that may not have had any kind of
common difference. Longstanding empires such as Rome or the Ottomans
actually did create large areas of cultural uniformity.
My goal here has been to provide archaeologists with another tool in the
intellectual project of understanding uniformity and difference in the
archaeological record. The next step might be to pursue specific ethno-
graphic analogies for systems of common difference that might resemble
those of the formative horizon styles like Olmec and Chavin. This may not
be fruitful, however, since it is quite possible that the ethnographic record
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Wilk Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca 95

contains nothing like these ancient widespread systems, for they would
have been very unlikely to survive even the earliest impacts of colonial
expansion. We might instead look to the archaeological evidence of public
spaces and the disposition of artifacts and monuments for clues to the kinds
of performances and settings where common difference could be displayed
and assessed. While the very detailed ‘backstage’ work of common differ-
ence may have taken place in very private settings, for such a system to
work there must also be public display, leaving a record that may still be
waiting for a new interpretation.

Acknowledgements
Anne Pyburn has been my intellectual partner on this project at every step to the
point where I really cannot separate my ideas from hers. She is entirely responsible
for showing me how to bring the idea of common difference to bear on archaeo-
logical issues, but cannot be blamed if I have done a poor job of it, since I wrote
the article myself. I also thank Fulbright and Wenner-Gren for supporting my work
on beauty pageants, Bill Rathje for inspiring me to think about the Olmec in
creative ways since he has always done so much of it himself and Howard Winters
for starting me off in the right direction.

Notes
1 Eggan, Kroeber and other archaeologically minded anthropologists of the
American Southwest did work hard to connect modern named Dine and
Puebloan groups back to archaeological sites, relating ethnohistory and legend
to archaeological findings. But it was never clear if their taxonomic units were
lineages, extended families, cults, political splinters, or cultural sub-groups. The
question of boundaries was certainly contentious for colonial period
anthropologists, but mainly as a political rather than theoretical issue.
Anthropologists knew the boundaries were artificial and wrongly placed, but
they were not in a position to challenge the idea that cultural boundaries always
exist.
2 Failing a thorough bibliographic essay on the history of recent sociocultural
anthropology, I will just touch on a few of what I see as the key sources in
rethinking the primal nature of indigenous groups. One of the earliest
arguments was made by Frank (1967) in an essay on Indians in the Americas.
Other important pieces of the argument appear in Fabian (1983), Fried (1975),
Kuper (1988), Said (1978) and Wolf (1982) and give a general discussion of the
way sociocultural anthropologists constructed primitive society as an ideal type.
Thomas (1994) is a useful source on the culture of colonial administration. In
the text, I use the Belizean spelling ‘Kekchi’ instead of the Guatemalan
Q’eqchi’.
3 The voluminous literature on the Olmec is summarized ably by Grove (1997)
and this synthesis is attacked with acid humor by Flannery and Marcus (2000).
4 Incredibly enough in the age of the Zapatistas, there are still ethnographers
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96 Journal of Social Archaeology 4(1)

working in Mesoamerica who do not see indigenous people through any lens
except the traditional past (Cook, 2000), despite clear arguments about the
perils of doing so (Hervik, 1999). The inability of anthropologists to recognize
that local identities do persist in modern globalization has led to a situation
where many indigenous peoples now have to tell anthropologists, with varying
degrees of politeness, that they do not need to be protected, or documented, or
treated like ‘disappearing remnants’ any longer.
5 The two dimensions of power here are precisely those defined by Frederick
Bailey (1969).

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98 Journal of Social Archaeology 4(1)

RICHARD WILK is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at

Indiana University. He has done research with Mayan people in the rain-
forest of Belize, in West African markets and in the wilds of suburban Cali-
fornia. He has published on topics as diverse as beauty pageants,
household organization, power and decision-making, economic anthro-
pology and the effects of television on culture. Most of his recent work
concerns the global environmental impact of mass consumer culture,
gender and consumer culture, and the history of the global food system.
He is now working on a book about gender and the origin of consumer
culture. His most recent publication is The Anthropology of Media, co-
edited with Kelly Askew (Blackwell, 2002).
[email: wilkr@indiana.edu]