Time, Culture and Identity

An Interpretative Archaeology

Julian Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134641659
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Time, Culture and Identity questions the modern western distinctions between:
* nature and culture
* mind and body
* object and subject. Drawing on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Julian Thomas develops a way of writing about the past in which time is seen as central to the emergence of the identities of people and objects.

PART ONE
A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY?

CHAPTER ONE
AFTER DESCARTES: ARCHAEOLOGY, CULTURE AND NATURE

NATURE, CULTURE, MIND AND BODY

From its earliest origins, the discipline of archaeology has been concerned with time, culture and identity. Material culture has been used as evidence for the existence of persons and ethnic and racial groups at some time in the past, and in order to document processes of social and cultural change across time. In this chapter, I will suggest that one of the major constraints upon archaeological inference has been the implicit acceptance of a Cartesian view of the world. By this I mean a set of philosophical ideas which became coherent in early modernity, and which are most clearly articulated in the work of René Descartes. The principal elements of this perspective are the categorical distinctions which are drawn between mind and body, and culture and nature. Both of these antinomies, I will suggest, are of relatively recent origin, and in their more developed forms are peculiarities of a western, metaphysical habit of thought. Both serve to limit our appreciation of materiality, and to impose a modernist understanding on the past. Moreover, the two are closely linked in the conception of human beings as ‘rational animals’: ‘natural’ creatures to which something else has been added. Even in the critical discourse of gender studies, human beings are frequently portrayed as consisting of a stable, biologically given material form (a sexed body) onto which a cultural identification (a gender) is grafted (Butler 1993, 4). Yet such a division appears to surrender a status of undisputed truth to biological science, as if the ‘facts’ of bodily sex were simply eternal and had not been produced by the operation of a scientific discourse within a given set of historical conditions (Butler 1990, 7). There is no way that we can gain access to the biological constitution of creatures which evades language and history. In this particular case another binary pair is evident: the body is solid, material, exists prior to language and is the prerogative of the natural sciences, whereas culture is immaterial, secondary and metaphysical (ibid., 28). Archaeology, since it concerns itself with material culture, has long been bedevilled by this opposition between the mental and the material. Where precisely does material culture fit in this scheme of things? There appears to be a constant unease over the status of archaeology’s object, presented as a choice between ‘materialist’ and ‘idealist’ interpretations. One of the intentions of this book is to demonstrate that this assessment of the discipline’s potential is not merely unnecessarily pessimistic, but actually incoherent.

We could argue that while archaeology is burdened by a particular mode of thinking which is characteristic of the modern era, the irony is that it was itself made possible by the emergence of modernity. With the parallel development of commodified, linear work-time and the nation-state, the establishment of the antiquity of particular population groups came to be of greater interest (Trigger 1989). However, rather than attempt to point to a particular stage in human history at which the world ‘became modern’, it might be more profitable to consider modernity as an attitude, a particular way of getting on with the world (Foucault 1984a, 39). This way of dealing with existence can be seen to have gained coherence over a very long period of time. As Foucault argues (1970), the pattern of thought which we associate with the Enlightenment was the product of the operation of a series of developing discourses whose functioning brought a number of the givens of our contemporary world into being. Perhaps a cardinal element in modern thinking was the separation of the messy and richly networked character of existence into a definable set of elements (Latour 1993, 7). The understanding is that these elements represent real units of analysis which have been found by science, rather than objects which have been produced by discourse. In the construction of discursive objects, further analytical fields were generated, amongst them archaeology. With its practice of uncovering the hidden past, stripping away layers of detritus in order to disclose older and more profound realities, archaeology provides the perfect paradigm for modern thought. Structural linguistics, in its search for the deep generators of language, or Freudian psychoanalysis, identifying the sedimented strata of the personality: both had recourse to the metaphor of archaeology in establishing the separation between surface and depth. Yet if these depths were not found but created, we could suggest that discourse itself was operative in a generalised process of alienation, involving not simply the separation of the worker from her product, but of humanity from the earth.

Recent ethnographic writings have stressed the way in which non-western (that is, ‘non-modern’) modes of thought emphasise the relational character of existence (Strathern 1988). Yet where an analytical separation can be made between the things of the world, many of the relationships in which we first find ourselves are severed, or at least covered over. People can appear to be self-sufficient and internally motivated units, and their ‘environment’ can be reduced to a series of boxes in a flow-chart. As separate entities, things or units can be valorised against each other. One entity can be held to be more solid than another, or to underlie another, or to give rise to another, or to be more fundamental than another. This is the principle which gives us the logic of economic base and cultural superstructure, unconscious and conscious self, essence and substance. Under this analytic, it can equally be argued that biology provides a more solid basis for the ideological or that deep structures underlie and determine material production. Whether one chooses to be a ‘materialist’ or an ‘idealist’ is almost inconsequential: in either case one thing is being posited as primordial in relation to another. One thing is a given, whose emergence is beyond analysis or question, and another-is derived from it. This way of thinking can be described as a metaphysics of substance or presence, since it presents particular objects as being so fundamental that they evade analysis.

Another consequence of this valorisation of analytical objects in relation to each other is that they can be held to be active or passive, dominant or dominated. In the opposition between culture and nature with which we are particularly concerned here, the things of nature come to be seen as a passive store of goods, dominated and exploited by humanity (Heidegger 1977a, 14; Haar 1993, 18). In the modern world, the domination of nature is presented as the price which must be paid for the emancipation of humanity. Ultimately, it is suggested that human beings will not have to work: they will have created a technological utopia in which the more efficient exploitation of resources has freed them from worldly concerns. Curiously, this utopia still shows little sign of emerging. Bruno Latour has recently pointed out that this conceptual ‘purification’, by which the human is rigidly divided from the non-human, has actually been elaborated over a period in which more and more complex hybrid processes have developed, in which it is impossible to separate out the technological, the social, the political and the material (Latour 1993, 10). Looked at from a ‘non-modern’ or non-western frame these processes of ‘translation’ might be thought of as forging and revealing unexpected relationships, and bringing new aspects of the networked character of our world into unconcealment (Heidegger 1977a, 11).

If we were to argue that the Enlightenment represented a conjuncture at which the distinctive elements of modern thought began to crystallise, it is significant that it was at this time that the meanings of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ began to change. As Ludmilla Jordanova (1989, 37) has argued, ‘culture’ had hitherto referred to the nurture and cultivation of living things, whereas it now took on a more abstract connotation, concerned with the development of human society. We should remember that this was also a period in which statecraft, as the management of large human collectivities in mathematical terms (and the very notion of ‘the society’ as a unit of analysis), emerged (Foucault 1984b). As culture came to be associated with the cognitive aspects of human progress, nature was increasingly opposed to it as representing the substantial. As Jordanova (1989, 25) suggests, both culture and nature were considered to represent aspects of the environment which surrounded the individual human organism: one concerned with tradition and governance, the other with biology and geography. However, if nature and culture were to be found surrounding human beings, they also both contributed to the ‘dual constitution’ of humanity. For Descartes, human beings were composed of both physical matter, characterised by its spatial extension, and an incorporate matter, characterised by thought. The proof of the existence of the latter lay in the manifestation of thought itself. Consequently, human beings are both of the world and otherworldly, physical and metaphysical.

One repercussion of the separation of culture and nature was a gradual division of intellectual labour, eventually formalised in Dilthey’s distinction between the natural and the human sciences. Yet even before this, a difference of emphasis is clear between those who chose to prioritise the encounter with the physical, and those who preferred the abstract logic of mathematics. The former would include the empirical natural science which derives from Bacon and Boyle, and the latter the rationalism of Hobbes and Descartes. As Latour (1993, 27) suggests, each of these is grounded upon a particular kind of bracketing or closure. Experimental science prides itself on empirical observation of the things of the world, yet abstracts itself from the ‘cultural’ part of its environment, such that power and politics are considered to be irrelevant. Mathematics and statistics are the ground for sciences of social order, yet base themselves on a logic which is entirely abstracted, and held to be prior to any worldly experience. Mathematics is timeless, universal, and a ground for all other forms of knowledge. Such an appeal to a ‘pure’ knowledge is, of course, a metaphysics (Heidegger 1993c, 299): but perhaps no more so than the metaphysics of substance found in natural science. Experimental science can only legitimately talk about experienced material things, yet its every attempt to do so depends upon a logical order existing within the universe which can be addressed only indirectly (Heidegger 1993f, 96).

In a certain way, rationalism and empiricism, and natural and human science, are the antagonistic yet complementary parts of a greater whole, which Latour calls the ‘Constitution of Modernity’ (1993, 32). This division of knowledge holds nature and culture apart from each other by maintaining a gulf between the modes of investigation which address either. Empirical science is left in its laboratory, untroubled by the possibility that it constructs rather than discovers its empirical facts, while culture is studied as if it were an attribute of the internal lives of sovereign individuals. While one discourse may attempt to invade the conceptual space of the other on occasion—as with the positivist naturalism that asserts that human beings are ‘just like other kinds of animals’ —this constitution is a form of collusion. For both the emerging natural sciences of biology, chemistry and physics, and the human sciences of economics and linguistics accepted that their objects of enquiry were pre-given and substantial (Foucault 1972). Moreover, both saw nature as passive, and dominated either by science or culture. The immersion of the modern world-view in the contingent politics of a particular historical era is made graphically clear by the explicit gendering of this relationship. Nature was a female realm, ‘unveiling herself before science’, the passive object of the male gaze (Jordanova 1989, 87; Rose 1993, 67).

Nature was taken to be that realm upon which mankind acts, not just to intervene in or manipulate directly, but also to understand or render intelligible, where ‘nature’ includes people and the societies they construct.

(Jordanova 1989, 41)

A close link thus came to be perceived between humanity’s scientific understanding of the natural world, and social developments which were based upon the domination of nature. Hence, ‘culture’ as the means by which people were able to control and exploit their environment was increasingly conceived as a realm of ideas. This realm included the ‘high culture’ of literature, music and the visual arts, since these represented instances of human mental life transcending the animal. By producing culture, it was possible for Man to stand outside of nature (Strathern 1980, 177). Such a position of exteriority then provides the necessary vantage from which to carry out operations upon the passive body of nature. None the less, the rupture is never complete, and nature remains a fundamental substratum upon which the layers of culture and society are built up (Heidegger 1962, 131). This way of thinking would seem to lie behind the model of infrastructure and superstructure, including those versions in which juridical and political superstructures are presented as ‘semi-autonomous’ of the economic base (Althusser 1969).

Modern thought proceeds by establishing entities, and placing them in opposition with each other. By professing to investigate the relationships between objects, it succeeds in naturalising them as given and beyond question (Strathern 1988, 69). Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, structured oppositions came to dominate western thought: town and country, public and private, objectivity and subjectivity (Jordanova 1989, 21; Haraway 1991, 8). Increasingly, these opposed pairs came to be overlaid in order to form a grid of classification and specification, which could be manipulated in a relatively flexible manner (Strathern 1980, 177). Of course, these binary pairs are not balanced. As Judith Butler indicates, each is composed of a presence and its Other. Classically, the gender order of the modern west is composed of man and not-man, beings distinguished by the presence or absence of a penis (Butler 1990, 12). The overlaying and recombination of opposed pairs in western thought draws upon their unequal character: thus in Freudian psychoanalysis the natural, inner self and its urges have to be dominated and domesticated by the conscious mind (Haraway 1991, 9). Interestingly, Gillian Rose has recently suggested that gender represents the paradigm of structured inequality which underscores the relative valorisation of other opposed pairs (Rose 1993, 74). Gender presents the metaphor for thinking through the relationship between mind and body, objectivity and subjectivity, culture and nature. In a sense, gender became the master discourse of the Enlightenment. It may have been the development of a nexus of linguistic connections linking women with the emotional, the subjective and the bodily which was responsible for an increased clarity in the definition of gender roles in the eighteenth century (Jordanova 1989, 20).

HUMANS AND ANIMALS

As we have seen, Enlightenment thought struggles to cope with the complexity of human existence by setting up the notion of the ‘rational animal’. The depiction of humanity as having a ‘dual nature’ is an attempt to encompass the way in which we are ourselves living entities, and yet we are also the means by which other beings register meaningfully (Heidegger 1993c, 234). In Descartes’ philosophy, substances become accessible through their attributes. In the manner that we have already discussed, these attributes are categories which are presumed to have a reality which extends beyond language and classification: they are real. To give an example, matter has the principal attribute of spatial extension. On this basis, addressing the problem of humanity, knowledge and culture begins by asking what are the main attributes of a human being. Descartes’ method here was to begin by defining the attributes of other creatures, and then to consider what differentiated human beings from these. Human beings are thus considered as a subset of other creatures, sharing some qualities, yet distinguished by some other elements which have been grafted on (Heidegger 1993c, 227). What this would imply is that the human body is very much the same kind of thing as the body of an animal, and that the only area of difference resides in some intangible sphere mysteriously connected with neurological activity. Indeed, in time science might prove capable of ‘explaining’ cognition in purely physical and chemical terms, such that culture would entirely have collapsed down into nature.

To provide an alternative argument requires some radical moves. In the first place, one must accept that human beings are not built ‘in layers’: a body providing the host for a mind, which conceals a soul (Heidegger 1993e, 228). The human body is not external and prior to history and language. While a human body can be studied by biology in the same way as an animal organism can, and will provide comparable results, it is important to note that what is acquired is knowledge of a particular kind. Its veracity and applicability will not be universal. Indeed, we might say that in order to scientifically treat a human body as an organism, it is necessary first to systematically forget that it is a human being. For what is most important about human bodies is that they represent the media through which a quite different kind of Being from animal existence is enacted. Only human bodies constitute the focus of the lived experience in which beings encounter other beings, and in the process interpret both themselves and others (Haar 1993, 29). The way in which animals come into contact with other creatures is categorically different, determined not by interpreting Being but by the animal’s absorption in its instinctual drives. In the full sense, there are no ‘other beings’ for animals (ibid.). Nothing in the world ‘shows up’ in a meaningful way for any kind of creature which is not human. It is only through human beings that the world gains its intelligibility, and what distinguishes humans is not any positive attribute of their physical presence, but simply this way in which they allow other things to ‘show up’ (Dreyfus 1991, 12; Zimmerman 1993, 243). As we will see in Chapter Three, this does not mean that the material things which we recognise would not exist at all if we were not here to see them. Rather, it means that they would not be recognised as parts of a significant world, let alone be studied by science. Only human beings ‘have a world’, in the sense of allowing things to stand out as embedded in relations of meaning (Olafson 1993).

Existing in such a way that other things are recognised meaningfully, interpreting those things, and in the process interpreting oneself is defined by Heidegger as ‘Being-in-the-world’ (Heidegger 1962). We will discuss this notion in more detail below, but it is important to note that it allows no distinction to be made between a mind and a body, an external and an internal world. Human existence is thoroughly embedded in the world, yet this world is not simply a set of material objects and spaces, as Descartes would suggest. What makes the world worldly is its character as a structure of intelligibility: we occupy and are engaged in a context which is constituted by language and meaning. Our only understanding of this world takes the form of language and meaning. Thus to say that the human body exists first of all as an animal organism, and only later becomes a site of interpretation and a gendered object is to suggest that we can somehow know something about that body which evades the worldly conditions of the production of knowledge. Where would this knowledge have come from, if not the world? Human beings are always already enmeshed in a structure of meaning, and the interpretation of their bodies as one thing or another is constitutive of what those bodies are. In this sense, a tenth-century AD human body is quite a different thing from a twentieth-century AD body.

The distinction between humans and animals is, in these terms, categorical, although in a sense this argument does not preclude a creature with an ‘animal’ body from ‘being human’. We may eventually have to accept that some species other than Homo Sapiens Sapiens are ‘human’, in the sense of being engaged in a meaningful world. The condition of Being-in-the-world cannot be derived from the corporeal development of the human physiology, since it has nothing to do with what is contained within the body: rather, it is concerned with the body’s engagement in the world (Haar 1993, 10). Conventionally, archaeology attempts to think through the emergence of ‘consciousness’ in evolutionary terms, as the putting in place of the ‘hard-wiring’ necessary for complex thought. Once again, this attempts to find an explanation for human Being encapsulated within the body. At a certain point, human beings must have become ‘anatomically modern’, and thus capable of sustaining advanced forms of culture (Ingold forthcoming). The stratified model of human existence is thus presented in a chronological form, with evolution consisting of the ‘adding-on’ of attributes to the physical body. However, it could be argued that the image of detachable ‘properties’ which this conjures up is inappropriate to human beings. Rather than attributes, humans have ‘ways of Being’ which saturate their worldly presence (Heidegger 1962, 67). These are not added on top of a set of biological qualities. The human body does not have an autonomous existence in the world, moving around and collecting sensory information to send to a mind which is located...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY?
• PART TWO: THREE HISTORIES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY