The Archaeology of Personhood

An Anthropological Approach

Chris Fowler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134371730
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together a wealth of research in social and cultural anthropology, philosophy and related fields, this is the first book to address the contribution that an understanding of personhood can make to our interpretations of the past

Applying an anthropological approach to detailed case studies from European prehistoric archaeology, the book explores the connection between people, animals, objects, their societies and environments and investigates the relationship that jointly produces bodies, persons, communities and artefacts.

The Archaeology of Personhood examines the characteristics that define a person as a category of being, highlights how definitions of personhood are culturally variable and explores how that variation is connected to human uses of material culture.

1
THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

This chapter offers a brief history of the individual, exposing the problem with using one historically saturated conception of the person to refer to personhood throughout the past. This conception frames the person as a bounded, indivisible and self-determining social being who enters into relations with similarly bounded others. Here it is argued that such contemporary conceptions of individuals have consistently fed the archaeological imagination, but that it is time to change the diet. The second part of the chapter argues that ethnographic interpretations of personhood in non-western contexts produce constructs that can be compared to our common-sense notion of individuality.

Imagining individuals

Atlas of the individual: the body, the mind and the soul

Archaeologists frequently access personhood through the remains or depictions of past bodies. Yet the body is not all there is to a person, and if we study only the human body we miss out on other features that commonly compose a person. For example, in European philosophical and religious reasoning a person consists of a series of aspects, defined as the mind, the body and the soul. Scholars have repeatedly attempted to define these different aspects of the person and their relationships to each other. René Descartes (1596–1650) argued that the mind and body were theoretically separable, and that the mind sets humans apart from the rest of the world; he placed ‘I think therefore I am’ as the fundamental statement of human being. The mind was the ‘seat of reason’, the soul the enduring aspect of the person with overtones of spiritual value, and the body was the material location of the mind and the soul. For Descartes, animals had bodies but were not endowed with the ability to think or feel, had no souls or minds, and were not persons. He also argued that the soul was not a part of the body but an entwined feature of the mind (Morris 1991:11). All of the emotional and sensory faculties of the person were, he argued, matters of the body which could be separated from the soul. The soul was eternal and rational. The mind—as a faculty of the soul—possessed ‘those qualities which the human being shares with God: freedom, will, consciousness’ (Bordo 1987:93). Descartes was attempting to elucidate the composition of the person, clearly viewing the person as a composite being. Some of these components permeated the person but originated elsewhere, since the soul was an eternal connection with God.

Individual, world and society: the emergence of the indivisible individual

It was Descartes’s project to keep the mind separate from the inanimate matter of the world, including the body. His philosophy was not so much a description of commonly accepted reality as a manifesto. Bordo (1987:99) argues that this project had been more or less achieved by the time Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason in the latter part of the eighteenth century. She also argues that Descartes’s philosophy should be located within social trends of the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, which increasingly separated people from the natural world and placed renewed stress on intellectual reason and abstract measured analysis of the world. During the medieval period the term ‘individual’ had referred to the person as indivisible from God’s world (Palsson 1996:65), permeated by the properties of specific places such as sacredness. Contact with unseen features of the world, like spirits, might affect a part of the person like the mind or soul, and provide different sensations and perspectives. During and after the Renaissance more emphasis was placed on the unit, on the individual, which now could be more fully divided from the world —but not internally divided. Increasingly the individual was seen as distinct from the rest of the physical world and indivisible as an integral unit. The human mind and soul were increasingly seen as contained by the human body (see Chapter 5 for further discussion of medieval and post-medieval bodies and personhood).

The individual was redefined and reproduced through historical conditions that stressed an internalized will and unique sense of self located solely within the body (Bordo 1987: ch. 4). The elevation of internal thought and the fixed, constant perspective of the individual can be seen in the development of conventions for perspective painting. During the medieval period artworks had little sense of perspective, depicting rather the significant connections between figures in a story. The same figure could feature several times in one work (Bordo 1987:63). This allowed the artist to depict multiple relationships between that person and the world, and tell a story. From the fifteenth century, perspective—location in measured time and space— prioritized singular interpretations, and had come to replace embedded existence in places and events, absorption in the world. Portraiture, novels, recording dates of birth and death, diaries, headstones, private rooms, quiet introspection and scientific research, and mass-consumed private possessions were all social technologies through which notions and experiences of individuality were produced through the post-medieval period (e.g. Bordo 1987; Deetz 1977; Miller 1987:161–2). These can all be referred to as components in a ‘technology of the self’ (Foucault 1984; cf. Battaglia 1995:4–5), a technology that supported the internalization of the self and the individuation of the person. In focusing on the faculties of the mind, and on the study of external objects, the intelligensia of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created an ‘internal space’ for thought and reflection—the mind—separated from the external world of things. Descartes’s idea that mental work was required to understand existence stood at odds with the medieval world-view where engaging with the world involved ‘merging with rather than domination of the object, understanding as coded in the heart rather than the head, participatory, nonpatriarchal language’ (Bordo 1987:9). In the post-medieval climate the senses, the body and the soul no longer related directly to their participation in worldly events but were subject to the will of the individual. Genius was no longer a visiting spirit or epiphany which affected people, places and events, but instead was a feature of specific individuals like Leonardo da Vinci (Bordo 1987:53; Wolff 1981). Attributes of personhood that had been embedded in the world, then, like the self, became increasingly contained within the body. While invisible or spiritual qualities were embedded in places and events in the medieval world, like sacred relics or places with the power to heal, these capacities were increasingly accredited only to human agency (see Chapter 5). This trend individuated the person from the world in what Susan Bordo (1987) has described as a ‘drama of parturition’ from nature. It was through this process of separation between person and world that thought came to be located in the mind of the person and the mind fastened to the brain. Difference of opinion became a matter of subjectivity, an expression of the subject’s singularity and distinctiveness evident in their personal style and choices. Individual character was emergent from within each individual, rather than a result of, for instance, the coalescence of humours passing through them.

As the person became distinct from the natural world, from events tied to places, and from affecting spirits and conditions, so persons became more indivisible. The modular person, a being of different aspects, became less important as a focus of philosophical thought during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The body largely dropped into the philosophical background, and was appropriated by increasingly specialized medical sciences. As feminist historians have argued, the body (along with nature and the feminine) were rendered as passive and equated with unhelpful and irrational emotion, while the intellectual faculties of the person were masculinized (e.g. Hekman 1990; Irigaray 1985; Braidotti 1991; Bordo 1987). Philosophy focused on these masculinized facets (public life, reason, free will, ethics, empirical facts, the existence of God) in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and accorded increasing importance to the role of the individual in society. The exercise of individual will—an emergent property of the mind— took the foreground in philosophy, along with considerations of how to mediate between conflicting wills in society. The philosophies of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) accentuated the significance of the individual, respectively as a basic ‘machine’ which built society (a larger machine) or as a naturally unfettered creature constrained by the rules of society (Morris 1991:14–22; Thomas 2004). The idea of the social contract was postulated as a kind of agreement which individuals entered into in forming this mechanistic society. Society was thought of as a collection of individuals, and as functioning as an organism or machine since that is how each individual worked (see Chapter 5). Ideas like this, where social motivation is seen as originating in the will of individual bodies, which then group together to form a society, fall under the umbrella of methodological individualism. Scholars of the time, like Giambattista Vico (1668–1774), believed that the search for natural laws pioneered by men like Isaac Newton (1642– 1727) would lead to the designation of social laws, grounded in human nature. The principle taken up by early social scientists was that individuals acted reciprocally, returning kind with kind, and would agree to treat each other equally. It was the foundation of the ‘free market’ of western economic theory (Douglas and Ney 1998) which Adam Smith saw as serving individuals, and Karl Marx as enslaving them (Weiner 1992: 28). Strength of will and clarity of reason were key tenets of a successful individual, and therefore of society. In nineteenth-century social evolutionary thought, these features were marks of proper, good people, and would win through in the survival of the fittest, while the poor were clearly lacking in such qualities and would founder if left to themselves (Spencer 1857). This view was exploited in colonialism and the justification of social inequality. Each person therefore consisted of set and natural qualities. By the twentieth century the concepts ‘person’, ‘self’, ‘body’ and ‘human being’ became almost isomorphic.

Individuality and individualism

Individuality and indivisibility are two key attributes of western personhood, therefore. Historically, western personhood has been compressed within the physical body: the mind sits in the brain, which is part of the body, and the soul or spirit has been predominantly replaced by individuality as the essential spiritual component of each person in an increasingly secular society. Individuality is construed as foundational to human nature and fixed within each person (Cohen 1994). It is seen as a fundamental feature of human nature ‘after’ which relationships are formed (Strathern 1992a:22). Like nature, individuality is understood as the origin of diversity (ibid.). Individuality, the self-awareness essential to each distinctive individual, is seen as arising from within each of us, providing us with the will to go on even through considerable odds (Cohen 1994). Individualism refers to the celebration of individuality, and in its present incarnation individualism values individual expression, autonomy, uniqueness, self-determination and freedom to act (Lukes 1973; cf. Cohen 1994). Arguably, the form of individuality that is celebrated by individualism has itself changed over time (Strathern 1992a: ch. 1). However, the trend towards the indivisible person as a fixed and bounded entity has also incorporated the notion of individuality. Here individuality refers to an internal self, the locus of experience and understanding. Without denying past people individuality in the sense of conscious self-awareness and reflexive agency, it is necessary to recognize that these qualities do not require that the person be indivisible or recognized as predominantly self-authored. There may be different aspects of the person which provide the person with more than one self, and these features may emerge only in certain contexts (see Chapter 5).

The individual as a construct

Our contemporary conception of the individual as indivisible is an influential construct, which has been acted on, reflected upon and revised in everyday experience over the last few centuries. However, there are still times when more relational personhood is brought to the fore when individuals recognize their debts to others and the effects that others’ actions have on them, or the conflicting forces within them, or the way that an experience provides a new and unexpected understanding of things. The indivisibility of the individual is a construct, but an important one that pervades our lives and that we bear in mind when we act in the routines of daily life (Butler 1993; Fowler 2000; cf. Riches 2000:670). From the mid-twentieth century people were increasingly more likely to be called by their first names than surnames (Strathern 1992a:17–18), during what we would see as a period of ‘increasing’ individuality. Yet later-twentieth-century individuals were also individualized through social institutions like schools and workplaces, and through consumerism. These engagements make us aware of our boundaries and limitations, aware that we are at once equal and also distinctive, yet also show us to be in some ways evidently unequal, with uncertain boundaries, and subject to conflicting desires. The public presentation of personhood is, however, one of a unique, distinct, self-contained and well-defined individual identity. Commonly, what is a shifting, coping, learning personhood is projected as a fixed totalized individual (cf. Moore 1994:35). There are other ways to be individuals which do not accentuate the bounded unity of the person (as indivisibility does), nor value the uniqueness and self-determination of each person above the relationships and forces that compose each person (as individualism does). Our specific understanding of individuals and of individuality is coloured by contemporary individualism, and is therefore heavily implicated in it (for archaeological debates over this entanglement, see Meskell 1999: ch. 1; Tarlow 2000; Thomas 2000b).

Moving beyond the construct

Archaeological routes

Archaeologists have attempted to unravel this entanglement in various ways. On the one hand, it is possible to study past individuals and give a rich account of the multiple relations in which each individual engaged, placing this within appropriate cultural contexts and considering those lives against a myriad of others (e.g. Hodder 2000; Meskell 1999; Robb 2002). In some contexts it is possible to study the configuration and generation of personhood itself through textual and pictorial media, and account for indigenous understandings of body, person and spiritual or mental features of personhood (e.g. Meskell 1999: ch. 3; Joyce 2000). Alongside this—or as in prehistoric European contexts, in place or pursuit of this—it is possible to study trends in practices through which personhood is constituted alongside the inhabitation of specific material worlds (e.g. Brück 200la; Chapman 1996, 2000; Dobres 1999; Fowler 2001; Joyce 2000; Thomas 1996). Approaches focusing on trends in action and conceptions of personhood are generally more concerned with how personhood in the past differed from indivisible personhood and contemporary individualism than with focusing on individual lives, though these need not be completely incompatible. One major strand of research into past experience that directly concerns us here is the investigation of ‘being in the world’ (e.g. Edmonds 1997; Gosden 1994; Thomas 1996; Tilley 1994; cf. Ingold 1993, 2000e). These approaches attend to the way that human experience is immersed in relationships with other people, with things, and place, through tasks and activities. Strategies of action through which people are mutually authored have also come to the fore, alongside analysis of cultural patterns in social relations that do not operate by individualizing people (e.g. Chapman 2000). While Western society is not the only one to have stressed individuality, to recognize a concept of the individual, or exhibit a form of individualism (Bloch 1989:18), a focus on these traits should not be presumed to be sole or ascendant features of person hood in all past contexts. The approaches explored in this book are therefore a necessary step in considering the full range of factors relevant to past lives. It would be a significant limitation to the archaeological imagination if, to paraphrase Bloch, we imagine that people are nothing but individuals. While we should not divest past people of their individuality, we must also accept that concepts of the person and entwined social technologies existed that did not nurture this feature of human experience. There are ethnographic studies that suggest a wider world of personhood, in which individuals and individuality are a small and sometimes insignificant part.

The value of ethnographic constructs

Different conceptions of personhood are borne in mind by people living in other cultural contexts, and are bound up with the specific practices and technologies that shape their lives. Ethnographers have argued that many of these do not individuate the person as indivisible, nor promote individuality. Instead, personhood may be relational, so that relationships provide perspectives for people engaged in them. People’s identities may change as they move through successive relationships with prey, with their parents, with exchange partners. These positions of personhood can be occupied by animals and objects, and indeed the movement of objects like gifts may force people to change perspectives in relation with one another: to now be in debt, or now be owed (Strathern 1999:239). Relational notions of the person might seem particularly fashionable in academia during the post-modern era, but it is also apparent that far older traditions of thought weigh up the permanence of some aspects of the person against the contextual appearance of others. This is the case in Hindu thought, for instance, where the constant atman is present throughout life alongside a more mutable person whose identity is far more contextual and relational (Sax 2002:10). All of the communities discussed in this book do have notions of a fixed individual feature to the person, such as a notion of individual soul or commemoration of individual biographies. People in these communities are individuated as well as immersed in relations, and are aware of individuality as one attribute of their personhood (for examples of this debate, see Battaglia 1995:7–11; Carrithers et al. 1985; LiPuma 1998; Murray 1993 and Spiro 1993; for an ethnography, see Maschio 1994). However, the other relational and contextual features of personhood are those investigated most closely in this book since they afford archaeologists with a broader understanding of how people can be constituted and what concerns, other than individual interests, might have motivated social interaction. What interests me in this book is the impact that forms of social relations have on the constitution of the person. In the next chapter I will explore ethnographic accounts of how relationships constitute people in contextual ways, and how a change in relationships might have a profound effect on the internal composition and character of a person. Ethnographic accounts of personhood are also western interpretations. However, these accounts seek to recognise local narratives, metaphors, relationships and principles shaping personhood: anthropologists studying personhood write narratives about the constructs and narratives that people indigenously relate to both consciously and unconsciously.

Arguably, archaeologists studying personhood do something similar. Studies of personhood do not suggest that some humans are or were individuals while others are or were not, but rather illustrate how personal identity can operate in a variety of ways other than western individuality. Self-awareness should certainly be presumed for all human persons, but, as we will see, is also often indigenously attributed to non-human persons.

Obviously, then, there should be no hard and fast distinction between ‘the west and the rest’, and studies of personhood discussed in coming chapters illustrate the flaw in conceptualizing western people as fixed and bounded individuals as much as they demonstrate the problems in imagining western personhood as an absolute match for non-western conceptions. Each person is frequently permeated by outside influences and internally divided, and the idea that this is not the case for western individuals is itself part of the illusion of western personhood. Individuality and indivisibility form a lens through which we observe our own lives, but of course there are other ways to make sense of the plural relationships that make us who we are. By recognizing features of personhood undervalued in the west, through ethnography and through archaeology, we may also come to perceive some of the features of our own lives that are obscured by emphasis on the individual. Modern individuals are, to some degree, still relational persons. Equally, while the individual as a biographical unit remains a key feature of personhood, within any cultural context this attribute may only emerge to the fore on rare occasions, and be utterly rejected in others. The presentation of the person is not necessarily an expression of individuality ‘from the inside’, but an interactive affair dependent on the perceptions of others. In communities where personhood is stressed as a feature of the community (e.g. where a clan is a person; see Chapter 2) it may not be the individual that is the locus of diversity, innovation or decision-making, but a collective person. Houses or clans may constitute the ‘moral person’. Uniqueness and innovation are features of clans, expressed through its members. Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly for archaeologists, not all persons in the community are necessarily human, and an emphasis on the individual neglects the role of other social agents accorded personhood (like ghosts, spirits, houses, axes, standing stones), whether these seem real or presumed to contemporary archaeologists. Clearly then, an archaeology of personhood is quite a different project from an archaeology of the lives of specific past individuals, although the two need not be mutually exclusive.

Conclusion

If we recognize individuality as a natural feature of human beings, then, I submit, we should also see relationality and dividuality in the same light. People depend upon the ability to see t...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF PERSONHOOD
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
• 2: PERSONHOOD AND IDENTITY: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS
• 3: PERSONHOOD, EXCHANGE AND ARTEFACTS
• 4: PERSONHOOD, DEATH AND TRANSFORMATION
• 5: BODIES, SUBSTANCES AND COMMUNITY
• 6: PERSONHOOD IN LATER MESOLITHIC SCANDINAVIA: AN INTERPRETATION
• CONCLUSION: RELATIONAL PERSONHOOD IN CONTEXT
• REFERENCES