Manifesting Power

Gender and the Interpretation of Power in Archaeology

Tracy L. Sweely

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134738182
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Power relations among humans have likely been a topic of interest since long before any historical claims to its nature were proffered. This book recognizes that power and gender may be rooted in the experience of power in western society.

Part I

Exploring power through gender

1 A resort to subtler contrivances

Alice B. Kehoe

Introduction

Power is the capacity to impose one’s will upon another. Power is…imposing? We tend to assume that imposing appearance indicates power. Peacocks look imposing (and peahens not). Male birds of paradise display imposing plumes, strut aggressively, and repel invaders of their territories. The highly charged flamboyance of these cocks is not a simple sign of power, for as Darwin proposed, it is the smaller, plain females who have the power to accept or reject the gorgeous suitors. A century after Darwin’s startling insistence that conspicuous display may be associated with begging for favor, numerous field studies shifted the focus of selection from the cocks per se to the territories they maintained (Mayr 1972:95) and attributed hens’ drabness to their need for concealing nests (Selander 1972:205). That being said, it remains, as Darwin noticed, the imposing cocks have less power to effect their will than do the brown hens.

Darwin (1981 [1871]) wanted to draw conclusions that might illuminate “The Descent of Man.” His discussion of display dimorphism in birds makes a cautionary tale for archaeologists: conspicuous display associated with one sex does not automatically translate into power enjoyed by that sex. A generation after Darwin, American economist Thorstein Veblen (1931 [1899]) explored the associations between display and power, pointing out “subtler contrivances” through which the truly powerful signal their superiority over the vulgarly ostentatious.

Discerning gender through the archaeological record is challenging. Discerning loci of power is challenging. Discerning the intersections of gender, status, and power through archaeological data demands a sophistication far exceeding the usual practices of identifying ceramic types or even cut marks on bones. “Gender,” “status,” and “power” are relative rather than physical attributes; they cannot be simply “found” in our data (Cannon 1991:145; Fradenburg 1992). Duality need not reflect male/female distinctions (e.g. Eisner 1991). Gender may not be a decisive criterion in the ascription of rank and power (Nelson 1993; Weiner 1989:60). Common associations of occupation with gender meet too many exceptions readily adduced (Bruhns 1991). Gender is often subsumed under status and power classes, as Jack Goody (1982:101) noted when he compared Europe and the Mediterranean, where men cooked for the great courts, to Africa where a privilege of royal wives was to cook for kings.

As naturalists worked through their compiled observations, their confounding instances and anomalies, they came to realize that the social field—territories—rather than the individual actors held the elusive ordering principle. Joan Wallach Scott recommends:

we must critically analyze the categories we most often take for granted: history, women, men, equality, difference…. Rather than assume to know the meaning of these terms, we need instead to examine them as they have been developed and used in specific historical contexts as the products of culture, politics, and time…concepts through which a certain vision of social life is realized.

(Scott 1989:112–113)

Put somewhat differently, social life is a dialectic of being and becoming with signifiers functioning only through their unstated negations, every thesis implicitly its antithesis (Murphy 1971). In this chapter, I will use history, ethnography, and archaeology to illustrate conspicuous display associated with powerlessness, and also the contrary case of plainness signifying transcending power.

“Subtler contrivances” are designedly rarefied. Furthermore, the radical attenuation of cultural phenomena evidenced through archaeological preservation will render “subtler contrivances” particularly elusive. My purpose is not to hand out an algorithm for tapping in attributes, clicking out POWER, but to request thoughtful weighing of alternative explanations, freighted with sobering range of actual situations. Let archaeologists sing with Little Buttercup, “Things are seldom what they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream…. Jackdaws strut with peacocks’ feathers.”

Conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption

A century ago, Thorstein Veblen propounded his pioneering, radical analysis of the wealthy, Theory of the Leisure Class. He noted that:

By virtue of its descent from a patriarchal past, our social system makes it the woman’s function in an especial degree to put in evidence her household’s ability to pay…. The women being not their own masters, obvious expenditure and leisure on their part would redound to the credit of their master.

(Veblen 1931 [1899]:180)

Norbert Elias makes the same point when he emphasizes the servitude demanded of his courtiers by Louis XIV (Elias 1983:197). Extraordinary display may mark an individual, as Veblen says, to be no more than the chief ornament of another, more powerful, person. In the most extreme example, the beautiful and expensively dressed young man enjoying a year of utmost luxury impersonating Tezcatlipoca in Aztec Tenochtitlán was the most powerless man, doomed to be sacrificed at the end of the year. Ostentatious display and power are not isomorphic, and that possible disjunction constitutes a challenge for archaeological interpretation.

I think we should make a distinction between “theaters of power” and signs of power employed to signify to a discriminating elite.¹ Veblen expounded this distinction:

Conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure are reputable because they are evidence of pecuniary strength; pecuniary strength is reputable or honorific because, in the last analysis, it argues success and superior force.

(Veblen 1931 [1899]:181)

An example of Veblen’s thesis is provided by Simon Schama: “Baron Haussmann’s architectural reordering of the city [Paris] provided exactly the theatres of spectacle—the Opéra, Longchamp, the grands boulevards—in which the parade of expensively dressed women could serve as an advertisement of moneyed power” (Schama 1995:103).

Theaters of power must be awesome. They are generally on a superhuman scale, that is, stretching beyond what the human eye easily takes in. The palace and gardens of Versailles, St. Peter’s in Rome, the pyramidal mounds and plazas of indigenous American cities, the temple precincts of Egypt, the courts within courts of Beijing’s Forbidden City, L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, all overwhelm the ordinary person. Lords of these realms are enhanced by retinues, entourages magnifying the presence of the powerful. The lowly are kept back by armed guards; they may prostrate themselves. Grandeur informs even the stupidest onlookers that they have no recourse but obedience.

If social life were no more than command and response, symbols of power might be straightforward. Veblen reminds us that once

a sufficiently large wealthy class has developed, who have the leisure for acquiring skill in interpreting the subtler signs of expenditure…there arises a tendency to exclude the baser elements of the population…even as spectators whose applause or mortification should be sought. The result of all this is…a resort to subtler contrivances…which require a progressively nicer discrimination in the beholder.

(Veblen 1931 [1899]:187)

In 1616, such discrimination was spelled out:

[One ought] not account him a gentleman, which is onely descended of noble bloud, in power great, in iewels rich, in furniture fine, in attendants brave: for all these are found in Merchants and Iewes. But to be a perfect Gentleman, is to bee measured in his words, liberall in giuing, sober in diet, honest in liuing, tender in pardoning, and valiant in fighting.

(quoted in Shapin 1994:62)

Such finesse of self-control, supple rather than rigid, continued to define the ideal aristocrat into the nineteenth century (Loeb 1994:160).

Pierre Bourdieu observes,

Those who are held to be distinguished have the privilege of not worrying about their distinction…. Where the petit bourgeois or nouveau riche “overdoes it”, betraying his own insecurity, bourgeois discretion signals its presence by a sort of ostentatious discretion, sobriety and understatement, a refusal of everything which is “showy”, “flashy” and pretentious, and which devalues itself by the very intention of distinction.

(Bourdieu 1984:949)

A contrast between ostentatious pecuniary power and real high class was presented by Mike Parker Pearson reporting in 1980 on his examination of funeral monuments in Cambridge (England) City cemetery. Among the most impressive monuments in the City cemetery are those for gypsies and carnival workers. Parker Pearson says:

Showmen and their families favoured the distinctive and expensive polished red granite monuments standing up to two meters high in cross or block form. The gypsies commemorate their dead with large white marble angels which also stand to two meters or more. These groups hold the most expensive funerals in Cambridge with funeral director’s fees and monument costs sometimes amounting to over £3000 [compared to under £500 for other Cambridgensians].

(Parker Pearson 1982:104)

In his original 1980 conference presentation, Parker Pearson had noted, “Upper middle class burials are generally in…local churchyards rather than in the City cemetery” and had more modest markers. In this case, itinerant outcasts asserted their pecuniary power by erecting large showy monuments in the public cemetery, while the truly powerful upper class removed themselves from “the baser elements of the population” to signify to the nicer discrimination of their peers.

Of greater antiquity, a somewhat parallel phenomenon was the contrast between the relatively small, carved olive-wood cult statue of Athena in the north temple on the Athenian Acropolis, and Pheidias’ magnificent gold and ivory sculpture of the goddess dominating the Parthenon. The older, rather plain wooden image was dressed in an actual woolen peplos and golden ornaments. She had a shield and an owl, but the viewer particularly noticed the libation bowl in her hand (Herington 1955:23). Pheidias’ Athena seems to have been one of at least four such gold and ivory works of art, one of Zeus at Olympia, one of Hera (by Polykleitos) in the Argive, one of Dionysos (by Alkamenes) near the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis, and the Athena. The Hera, like the Athena, was in addition to an older wooden cult statue. Ridgway (1981:10) suggests that the expensive later fifth-century images by well-known masters were “propagandistic,” trumpeting the wealth and glory of their cities through advertising these deities’ patronage. The spiritually numinous older wooden figures of the goddesses received the devotions of the privileged cognoscenti, becoming subtle contrivances marking status.

There are two counterintuitive points here. First, Pallas Athena, the armed Virgin Warrior more narrowly emblematic of the Athenian city-state, occupied the showier Parthenon temple while the spiritually potent statue apparently was lodged in a smaller temple. Second, the Athenians symbolized the armed power of their vaunted state—victor in the Persian Wars—by a woman. (The myth of her origin explains that she issued from pure male power, unalloyed by any mother: Onians 1951:1111.) Classical Greek art assigned a perverse meaning to clothing: nakedness signified power (Ridgway 1981:13). Male figures aligned with the custom of soldiers and male athletes competing nude. Women properly should be clothed; women were subordinate to men of their social class. Sculptors were challenged by the contradiction of goddess patronesses of Athenian military power. In the Nike (winged Victory) by Paionios, the female figure wears a belted peplos that is carved clinging so closely that it totally reveals the figure’s body, the Greek equation of nudity and heroic power overriding the propriety of clothing females (Ridgway 1981:108–109). On the broader front of international dialectic, contemporary Western Asian societies chose the opposite signification, clothing their heroes and rendering the disgraced enemy naked (Ridgway 1981:91, n. 30).

Ornaments on pedestals

Pallas Athena and the Nike exemplify the practice of putting women on pedestals. Each symbolized power that issued from males, Athena literally from Zeus and Nike the embodiment of male warriors’ battlefield victory. Athena was not so much a goddess as a dialectical exercise of maleness affirmed through picturing its contained antithesis, quintessentially male because neither born of woman nor, by remaining Virgin, functioning as a woman. If, as Virgin, Athena may be thought of as woman symbolically castrated, at least she was neither mutilated nor hobbled. Actual women of high social position have often suffered pain through the instruments signifying the conspicuous leisure marking their families’ power.

Turning again to Veblen, he refers to the features of elegant women’s dress

making work impossible…this high heel obviously makes any, even the simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult…. The skirt …hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful exertion…. The corset is…substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject’s vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work.

(Veblen 1931[1899]:171–172)

Chinese foot-binding is parallel to corset tight-lacing. Bound feet would be unmistakable in skeletons; tight-lacing could deform ribs. I am not aware of any archaeological reports of skeletons showing systematic deformation creating incapacity,² but it would be interesting to compare indices of health that might indicate the confinement of women in purdah, demanded of upper-class women in Classical Athens as well as in so many other societies.

Sumptuary rules associating food and gender systematically caused women to be at high risk of malnutrition in a number of societies, especially in Asia and Africa (Kehoe and Giletti 1981:553), and ought to be recognizable in the skeleton (as should anorexia). American Indian populations were much less likely to institutionalize gender...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• LList of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I. Exploring power through gender
• PART II. Ideology and the negotiation of power
• PART III. Manifesting power through material culture
• PART IV. Discussions
• Index