Personhood, Agency, and Mortuary Ritual: A Case Study from the Ancient Maya Susan D. Gillespie Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 109 Davenport Hall, Urbana, Illinois 61801 Received August 4, 1999; revision received June 28, 2000; accepted June 30, 2000 The archaeological identification of individuals has been an important component of both processual attempts to characterize social organization by the treatment of individuals in mortuary ritual and more recent agency theory applications to studies of political economy and social change. Both approaches have been critiqued for failing to adequately define the indi- vidual, instead applying the Western concept of the individual to other societies. These short- comings are shown to be part of a larger problem in social theory: the continuing polarization between individualism and holism. They point to the need for renewed interest in the anthro- pological analysis of the “person”—a socially shaped construct—in order to better understand social relationships and recognize the collective aspects of agency. A case study from the Classic Maya civilization illustrates how emphasis on the individual, as represented in mortuary events, artistic depictions, and texts, has resulted in interpretive difficulties that can be avoided by viewing these data from the perspective of the social collectivity from which personhood was derived. Maya corporate kin-based groups, known as “houses,” were a major source of the social identities expressed in political action and represented in mortuary ritual and monumen- tal imagery. © 2001 Academic Press Key Words: agency; house society; individualism; Maya; Mesoamerica; mortuary ritual; per- sonhood. Social science theories have tended to cluster around two polar oppositions, “ho- lism” and “individualism” (Agassi 1960: 244; Gellner 1968; Ritzer and Gindoff 1994:3; Varenne 1984:295). Holistic theo- ries, the first to develop, consider society as an entity that exists beyond the individ- uals who compose it. As a self-regulating system, society constrains or determines individual behaviors and beliefs, treating individuals as epiphenomena and down- playing their role in social change (Ritzer and Gindoff 1994:12; Sztompka 1994a:30). Theories such as the Durkheimian super- organic, functionalism, structuralism, structural Marxism, behaviorism, systems theory, and cultural materialism lean to- ward this end of the polarity (Morris 1985: 724; Sztompka 1991:3). They have been labled “methodological holism” (Ritzer and Gindoff 1994:11) or “metaphysical ho- lism” (Brodbeck 1968:283; Sztompka 1994b:258). Some are still used today, in- cluding in archaeology, along with such holistic theories as Darwinian selection- ism and sociobiology. In reaction to the overemphasis in ho- lism on the social collectivity, the diverse theories labeled “methodological individ- ualism” 1, * were formally developed be- ginning in the 1950s, in which explana- tions of all social phenomena are based on individuals and their actions (Lukes 1970: 77; Ritzer and Gindoff 1994:11). Also grouped at this end of the polarity are interpretive sociology and phenomenol- * See Notes section at end of article for all foot- notes. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20, 73–112 (2001) doi:10.1006/jaar.2000.0369, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on 73 0278-4165/01 $35.00 Copyright © 2001 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.