Chapter 4 tests the theory through a perspectivist approach to the archaeological record of an Andean society of northern Argentina, the Aguada culture (600–1100 CE). The analysis focuses on the relationships of humans with animals, both domestic and wild, and with a particular class of ceramic objects from Aguada society. The evidence points to modes of relationship that bring into play constructions of otherness and an understanding of the world that accords with a perspectivist ontology. The capacity for transformation of animals and people expressed in ambiguous figures of wild felines and humans reinforces the idea of an unstable world where all is subject to movement, change and metamorphosis. In particular, the relationship between humans and domestic animals, especially the llama, is analysed in domestic contexts and cave paintings. An object-centred case study analyses ceramic models of human and animal heads and bodies made analogously; again, they are treated equally and include human attributes as if they were all entities of the same class. The ceramic evidence further supports the possibility that other species may also have been considered endowed with subjectivity, that is, non-human persons.

Interest groups are critical actors in American policymaking providing support or opposition to policy changes. This chapter investigates the opportunities that interest group constellations create for policymakers involved in public budgeting. We develop and empirically assess the impact of three interest group environments: capture (stable competition among very few groups over time), instability (variegated competition among a changing set of groups), and deadlock (stable competition among many groups over time). We match interest group data to expenditures for all states. Capture and deadlock environments see steady changes in spending on particular issues, while instable interest group constellations result in volatile budgeting oscillating between short-term gains and losses. Therefore, these patterns of policy changes associated with interest group competition provide different opportunities for policymakers.

In this chapter, we bring together motives (issues), means (gubernatorial powers), and opportunities (interest group compositions) using qualitative case studies of four states across several years: two with strong governors (New York and West Virginia) and two with weak governors (North Carolina and Vermont). The size of the budgets in these states varies, but they entail three subcategories that correspond with capture [corrections], instability [hospitals], and deadlock [welfare]. An investigation of twelve policy stories provide evidence for the mechanisms connecting governors and interest groups in periods of budgetary change. The policy stories cover similar temporal periods (2002–2004 and 2008–2010) controlling for national political context. We show that – large or small states – governors attempt to use their powers in all policy domains, but are met with much greater resistance in capture and deadlock categories.

Governors are motivated to change public policy in response to issues and have powers that influence the shape and direction of budgets; however, interest groups are ultimately providing opportunities for action. We conclude with some broad recommendations for institutional and political tinkering in the American states. Specifically, we argue that policymakers can embrace the inevitability of interest group involvement in policymaking and be more thoughtful about the way they structure policies. This process enables diversity – by which we mean more groups with difference and alternative policy concerns – in representation. In addition, we argue that decentralization of gubernatorial power over the budget to alternative institutions could facilitate budgets that are more responsive to problems.

Chapter 5 carries out a methodological experiment starting from perspectivism as a theory of reality, used as a heuristic device, producing a dialogue mediated by translating this native theory into our archaeological terms. The focus is on the relations between humans and things where materiality has all the qualities seen previously, non-human entities can be persons, and the capacity for agency relates to the possibility that objects will become persons. The focus is on anthropomorphic vessels from Ambato and their contexts, considered as objects that can be subjects with a point of view. Three relational situations are analysed: the manufacturing process, the contexts of use and abandonment. Manufacture, as the genesis of these vessels as subjects, is analysed through three procedures: as a copy of a model, as mimesis of a mythical object with human properties and as a form of quotation or reference to socially inscribed ways of making. It is argued that such object subjects could be de-subjectivized to turn them into pure objects. Finally, the chapter details how the relationships people established with such vessels responded to the principles of predation and commensality, just as other forms of relationship between humans and non-humans.

In this chapter, we first summarize literature in public policy process theory, political institutions, state politics, and interest groups. We leverage this scholarship to offer a detailed argument about state budgeting that proceeds in three steps. The first step is about how policy issues provide motives for action. The second step is about how the formation of interest groups around issues makes those issues more or less amenable to policy change. The third step is about how the institutional strength of the executive – in this case, a governor – provides the means to change policy given the interest group context surrounding issues. Our claim is that issues provide the motives, interest groups provide the opportunities, but the extent to which governors act on those opportunities depends on their means.

An example of another way of working with perspectivism is developed in Chapter 6, in which specific principles from the theory are adapted to specific problems based on geo-ethnographic affinity with current native ontologies. How far can one go with an interpretation of the archaeological record from that starting point? Two more examples are presented. First are the relationships between people and material culture in central Argentina’s pre-colonial societies (ca. 1200–1500 CE). In a characteristically perspectivist fashion, the use of referential fields on different media highlights a way of being in the world that was experienced as inherently unstable. The second example focuses on the relationship between people and landscape in the initial peopling of the same region at the beginning of the Holocene. What would the relationship with the landscape have been for a perspectivist people populating a space absent of humans but with other entities that had the capacity to be subjects? The relationship turns out to have been more social than ecological, established prior to any given interaction, which comes into conflict with the conventional idea of archaeological landscape as empty space.