Socialising Complexity

Approaches to Power and Interaction in the Archaeological Record

Sheila Kohring, Stephanie Wynne-Jones

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781785705045
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Socialising Complexity introduces the concept of complexity as a tool, rather than a category, for understanding social formations. This new take on complexity moves beyond the traditional concern with what constitutes a complex society and focuses on the complexity inherent in various social forms through the structuring principles created within each society. The aims and themes of the book can thus be summarized as follows: to introduce the idea of complexity as a tool, which is pertinent to the understanding of all types of society, rather than an exclusionary type of society in its own right; to examine concepts that can enhance our interpretation of societal complexity, such as heterarchy, materialization and contextualization. These concepts are applied at different scales and in different ways, illustrating their utility in a variety of different cases; to reestablish social structure as a topic of study within archaeology, which can be profitably studied by proponents of both processual and post-processual methodologies.

Part I

The complexity concept

Chapter 1

Socialising Complexity

Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Sheila Kohring

Complexity is negotiated through interaction between the differentiated parts of all social entities; it exists on many levels visible at different scales of view. In general, the anthropological sciences study organisational complexity at the level of societal structure, yet there is an appreciation that it exists at other scales as well (e.g. Barth 1978; Brumfiel 1992; Strathern 1995, 2004). Each person creates and reinforces a series of relationships through their every engagement with other people, with material culture, or with the world around them. These relationships, although negotiated through that particular action, will be conditioned by past experience, taken-forgranted understandings, present contexts and future intentions. If that complex web of interaction is viewed at a scale that incorporates two, three or four individuals, or perhaps a community or society, new and different interactions will be involved, between the individuals themselves and between the different groups to which they belong. Many of these interactions will be based on shared communal understandings of social rules and realities: although the individual interpretations will vary, interactions can create and reinforce these understandings, continuing to form the structuring principles for interaction. If scale is extended again, this time in temporal terms, whole new interrelationships may be viewed, as well as recurrent patterns of interaction that can be discerned among the chaos.

It is this complexity that as social scientists we must attempt to understand: the myriad, diverse relationships, the ways they interconnect and create new contingencies and how they are mediated through objects, individuals, and communities, creating the complex social realities embedded in all societies at all scales. Clearly different research agendas and disciplines are interested in different aspects of this complex web, varying from the semiotics of individual interaction to the organisational dynamics of large-scale socio-political structures. Regardless of the level of analysis, complexity is not an ephemeral concept or theoretical construct applicable to a single macro-scale, but a reality that we experience daily, in our every action.

An appreciation of this network of interaction operating at multiple scales is key to understanding social structure, yet it seems that every approach that attempts to generalise/define the various aspects leads to a narrowing of the concept: a simplification of diversity into a manageable form. The negotiation of exactly what constitutes complexity (or whether certain societies are complex or not) has been debated too long, and we are not about to add to this hackneyed dialogue. Yet if we employ complexity itself as a conceptual tool, viewing the interactions, multiple scales and multiple layers of meaning as a topic of study in their own right, and the various insights from different disciplines as complementary rather than antagonistic, we are able to expand our understandings in new ways. Thinking of complexity in this way provides a renewed vigour to theoretical discourse on the relational aspects of all human societies. It removes the need to locate boundaries and definitive identifications of what is ‘complex’, loosening the restrictive constraints on its application more broadly when discussing social relationships. Complexity as a conceptual tool for thinking about how societies integrate allows a flexibility to move between scales of interaction: from individual engagement with the social world to the organisation of social institutions within modern state societies. It opens up discussion along new avenues for exploration – the impact of agency, materialisation, and material culture studies – and suggests an inherent dynamism at work within all society.

It is this multivalent approach that we advocate in the pages of this volume. As such, we attempt to employ the notion of complexity with a wider degree of flexibility; as an heuristic device, to help us understand a number of different case studies, and to refocus attention at the different levels by which society structures itself.

Complexity with a small ‘c’

Insofar as complexity remains a topic of study, it is subject to the whims of fashion and the prevailing paradigm: it has been recast to fit the theoretical needs of numerous disciplines at various points in their history. The appreciation of social diversity has often been pushed aside for more narrowly-defined, and better-understood, models of social complexity. In archaeology this has meant a concentration on complex society, as the most fully-institutionalised manifestation of that diversity and hence apparently the easiest to study. Contrary to the intentions of the practitioners, who frequently attempted broadly encompassing and universalising definitions, this has tended to narrow the field to a particular type of social formation, reducing the complexity observable in the archaeological and anthropological records to a particular axis of interaction.

Complex society, as the resulting outgrowth of these discourses, has long been studied as the accessible and clearly delineated manifestation of social complexity. A veritable sea of ink and forest of paper have been lost to establishing working models, definitions and evolutionary trajectories to explore when and how this ‘Complexity’ emerges within a society (see Arnold 1996; Earle 1991; Feinman and Marcus 1998; Gregg 1991; Johnson and Earle 2000 for some of the more recent examples). Complexity is – from this perspective – a category, or a state of being that a society may or may not attain. The focus of study tends to remain at the level of sociopolitical organisation; the integration of different functional elements through hierarchy and social inequality are key features of the literature. These questions are of clear interest to archaeologists, among whom early states and the emergence of hierarchically-organised socio-political institutions are an appropriate and necessary arena for study, and are already firmly entrenched in the disciplinary discourse. Yet that is only one perspective: the theorising of complex society, as it stands, has focused primarily upon one scale of analysis based on the level of socio-political organisation and the degree of social integration within a given society. This is variously conceived, sometimes along socio-evolutionary continuums such as band – tribe – chiefdom – state (following Service 1962), or from egalitarian to stratified society (following Fried 1967), and sometimes in terms of ‘indigenous’ concepts such as ‘Big-Man’ society (Sahlins 1963). Intermediate terms have also crept in, as we find discussion of Complex Chiefdoms (Earle 1991) and Archaic States (Feinman and Marcus 1998), or of vaguelydefined Middle-Range or transegalitarian societies (following Hayden’s 1995 discussion). While these discussions are important in understanding how societies (and the people who constitute them) maintain their integration and cohesion, they at best mask, and at worst utterly dismiss, entire discourses of social complexity beyond the socio-political entity. For this reason, we suggest a re-evaluation of complexity studies within the anthropological disciplines and the introduction of complexity, not as a gauge by which to assess societies, but rather, as the conceptual tool for framing appropriately scaled questions and research agendas.

In this we differ from previous critics of the Complexity discourse, who have critiqued complex society as an exclusionary and over-prescriptive categorisation (see overview in Chapman 2003). A powerful tool for these critics has been the acknowledgement of examples which do not fit traditional models, often originating in the ethnographic record (e.g. McIntosh 1999a). Alternatively, researchers have attempted to find the subaltern voices within the record of hierarchical society, focussing on ‘resistance’ as a pivotal feature in relations of domination, which is perhaps masked by the universalising narrative of conventional definitions (e.g. Miller, Rowlands and Tilley 1989). However, these refutations of the universality of complex society nevertheless serve to reify debate by engaging with it through the terms set by its proponents: rather than exploring alternatives to a hierarchical structure, the concentration is on diversity within the hierarchical structure. They maintain the notion of complexity as a category of society even as they argue for broader criteria for inclusion or for the recognition of dissident voices within the system. These responses have been valuable and important in our developing understanding of social structure and in moving away from the socio-evolutionary agendas of the mid twentieth century (Fried 1967; Sahlins and Service 1960; Service 1962). However, their implicit acceptance of Complexity (with a capital C) as a type of society has done little to stave off disillusionment with the entire discourse, as can now be seen in the archaeological literature.

This disillusionment has manifested itself in a number of different ways. Those who maintain an interest in the structures and forms of social organisation have moved slowly away from complex society debates, per se, to instead focus upon the manners by which societies organise and maintain their integration – principally through the control of power, the establishment of inequalities and their contributions to the formalisation of social hierarchies (e.g. Diehl 2000; Gledhill et al. 1985; McGuire and Paynter 1991; Price and Feinman 1995). These approaches have specifically sought to distance themselves from the neo-evolutionary modelling still rife within certain sectors of archaeological discourse and instead address how societies (or the classes in societies) institutionalise social differences and relationships.

Another response to the perceived stagnation of the ‘complex society’ debate has been to sidestep the entire issue and instead focus on agent-based understandings linked to individual experiences of materiality and landscape (see for example contributions to Dobres and Robb 2000, Tilley 1994). These approaches have forced us to confront issues of gender, personhood, identity and motivation among ancient populations; they also require that we take into account the construction of meaning by past actors. Thus we must now acknowledge the idea that similar landscapes and material circumstances are open to multiple interpretations by social actors; and our experience of them as present day researchers will vary from those of the peoples we study. The construction of meaning is individually experienced, contingent on context and histories, and is continually dialectical. The interpretation of past lifeways becomes more subjective, or relativistic, but with a concomitant distancing from the analyses of structuring principles embedded at the level of societal organisation.

We feel that, despite the clear value of these developments and the new perspectives they have encouraged, an approach that favours either structure or agency at the expense of the other is an impoverished way of looking at the past, especially as one of the major foundations of agency theory is based on Giddens’ (1984) dialectic between individuals and their society. Much lip service is given to the fallacy of the objective/subjective dualism, yet few use the insights of agency to feed back into an understanding of social structure (some exceptions might include DeMarrais et al. (1996), which moves from an engagement with symbolism to an understanding of forms of social domination; or Ingold (2000), which demonstrates the way that social landscapes and technological and interpersonal understandings are built up from personal experience in a socially-created structuring environment). If we are to deal constructively with the interconnected nature of objective and subjective worlds, then we need to reengage with theories that can enhance our knowledge of structure, while retaining those with insights into agency. Complexity (this time with a small c), is inherent to that structure, created through the daily interactions between people and things, and we need a theoretical vocabulary that allows us to appreciate it and study it from multiple different angles. Three current and useful approaches can briefly help to illustrate the diversity of ways available to address the issue more innovatively while retaining a known vocabulary.

Heuristic tools

One school within which this less constrained view of complexity has already begun to emerge is in the study of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), using concepts of adaptation and evolution, and often analogising from biol...