Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt

Material Biographies Past and Present

Lynn Meskell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: Social Sciences

Egypt looms large in the Western imagination. Whether it is our attraction to pharaonic art, the pyramids or practices of mummification, Egypts unique understanding of materiality speaks to us across space and time. Is it because the ancient Egyptians fetishized material objects that we find their culture captivating today? And what exactly do Egyptian remains tell us about biography, embodiment, memory, materiality, and the self? Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt takes New Kingdom Egypt (1539-1070 BC) as its starting point and considers how excavated objects reveal the complex ways that ancient Egyptians experienced their material world. From life to death, the material world instantiated, reflected and influenced social life and existence for ancient Egyptians. Thus, in Meskells unique approach to the materiality and sensuousness of subjects and objects, we uncover the philosophical, spiritual and human meanings embedded in these cultural artefacts. Meskells book explores the fundamental existential questions that not only preoccupied ancient Egyptians, but continue to fascinate people today. What is the essence of persons and things? How might we understand the situated experiences of material life, the constitution of the object world and its shaping of human experience? How might objects successfully mediate between worlds? In the final analysis, Meskell moves forward through time and examines the consumption and appreciation of these Egyptian material objects in the contemporary world. Materiality is our physical engagement with the world, our medium for inserting ourselves into the fabric of that world and our way of constituting and shaping culture in an embodied and external sense. From that perspective it is very much the domain of anthropology and archaeology.Drawing on a wide range of objects, artefacts, and artwork, from Valley of the Kings through to Las Vegas, Meskell provides an elegant analysis of the aesthetics of ancient Egyptian material culture

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Objects In The Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are

[C]ommodities are in love with money, but the course of true love never did run smooth.

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy

In our time there has come to the front a special study of human life through such object-lessons.

E.B Tylor, in F. Ratzel, The History of Mankind

In all cultures things exist which may assume the status of ordinary objects in our contemporary eyes, but are in fact treated very differently and are accorded an altogether other status for their creators; many of these were deemed to be enlivened. We confer enormous respect upon fabricated things; we are known by them and they in turn bestow prestige upon us. They materialize our engagement with the world, our understandings, and our desires to shape its physicality. Materiality subsumes the object world, its tacit thingness and virtuosity, which is difficult to define or contain. Even in a world of increasing virtuality and immateriality, the material realm remains just as germane to our worldly engagement. And yet we cannot privilege the material alone since materiality is ultimately bound up in creative cultural contexts and transformative acts that constitute in-between spaces. And in our current academic climate that celebrates postmodernism, postcolonialism, postnationalism and revels in hybrid positionalities and fluid categories, it seems imperative that we give contrasting and adequate weight to the intransigence of physical evidence and the material conditions constitutive of social life (Desmond 1999: 251). I have found in writing this book that materiality necessarily bleeds into the related domains of exchange, consumption, waste and excess. It links both to the radical ideas of mimesis, simulacra and agency and to the more mundane notions of goods, services and economic structures. While each deserves a monograph-length treatment, I have tried to understand, tease apart, and subsequently enmesh these topics in my understandings of materiality as it pertains to the object world of ancient Egypt and the concomitant objectification and fetishization of things Egyptian under modernity. Some objects have the presence of identity, others have the presence of excellence (Armstrong 1981), and this duality is what defines my comparative analysis of the reification of Egyptian things in their original settings as opposed to their voracious decontextualized consumption in the present.

"Material culture" has long served as a gloss or umbrella term synonymous to "artefacts"; it simply accounts for what archaeologists deal with in the archaeological record, yet it can signify much more. Artefacts have not been traditionally treated for their thingness or their sociality, but rather as a mediating window onto ancient life. Thingness lends objects an elusive inflection that impels us to think through the specificity and salience of the object world within the larger constitutive social frame (Attfield 2000: 15). Material culture is the physical marker of humanity's intrusion into the natural world and our way of demarcating the natural and cultural with the knowledge that they inhabit permeable categories. We can also refashion nature to our desire, shaping, reshaping, and arranging things during life. We live within material culture, enmeshed and dependent upon it, take it for granted and, through our most sublime aspirations, seek to attain it (Glassie 1999: 1). Anthropology, from its inception, had concerned itself with material culture and from the 1800s this was largely inseparable from the ethnographic project. Tylor used the word "object-lessons" in the foreword to Ratzel's (1896) magisterial three-volume work on ethnographic artefacts, modestly titled The History of Mankind (Buchli 2002b: 2). Yet with the historical particularism of Boas and the ethnographic tradition of Malinowski, anthropology began broadly to devalue materiality as a study of cultural phenomena in preference for more abstracted systems of belief and meaning (Ellen 1988: 232). But given the burgeoning corpus o f writing in an array of disciplines, material culture can no longer be treated as external or epiphenomenal to culture. A disciplinary chauvinism has long been in effect where sociologists, archaeologists and anthropologists have tended to read within their intellectual domains, irrespective of the benefits of cross-over scholarship (Miller and Tilley 1996). The Journal of Material Culture has been one vehicle designed to escape the enforced ghettoization and has effectively brought interdisciplinary work devoted to materiality to the fore. Despite this new surge of interest many valuable anthropological or ethnographic accounts focus more directly on exchange or social relations rather than on the specificities of material life (Appadurai 1986b; Hoskins 1998). More successful are a new generation of material culture specialists whose focus is firmly on contemporary Euro-American life (Buchli and Lucas 2001; Dant 1999; Graves-Brown 2000; Hallam and Hockey 2001).

Archaeology is usually glossed by those external to the discipline as a technical purveyor of data or ancient technology (ceramics, lithic, metalworking, art), whereas it should occupy a central place in developing sophisticated notions of materiality. Alternatively, archaeologists have become so enamored of description and classification that they have yet to pursue convincingly the implications of materiality as a defining relationship in social life. Others have desperately entered the fray with theoretical contributions yet lack the ancient data to evince a compelling connection. For the most part, my own work attempts to address this lacuna by uncovering the constitution of object worlds and assuming that material life is inflected with social relations and thus can be read as a window onto larger cultural structures. The objects under investigation have elusive properties and were infused with a power that demands our attention (Armstrong 1981: 6). My account of materiality stems from the objects and the social relationships that imbue and transform them, from the position that the material is constitutive and active, and that the taxonomies of people, things, deities, and so on, sometimes overlap or are at least complicated by porous cultural beliefs and practices. Unsurprisingly, none of this is entirely new despite the outpouring of recent scholarship that signifies it as de rigueur. As this chapter makes clear, we owe an enormous intellectual debt and, at the same time, we must acknowledge the centrality of materiality as a philosophical concern, repositioning archaeology as a discipline with something tangible to contribute.

Man Makes Himself

The project of understanding materiality and its central constitutive force in the phenomenal world was set very early on in the work of philosophers like Vico, and later by Marx and Mauss – so much so that it is quite striking to find how much recent work is simply a refining and reshaping of their original projects. Quite simply there is nothing new about our fascination with materiality. Before the influential work of Gell, there was Marx, Mauss, Weiner, Armstrong, Godelier and a host of other anthropological thinkers who struggled with the relationship between humans and their object world, with objects that transcended Western categories, and the circulation of things that retained biographical residues. I argue that these conceptual arguments have a long history in anthropology, and it is simply archaeology's reticence to engage that posits this is a new endeavour. While Gell has been a pervasive and, for the most part, positive force, much of his theorizing was deeply enmeshed in the seminal ethnographies and debates many decades before. He also retained the problematics surrounding attributing agency and intentionality to objects that was construed more excessively than asserting the human-like qualities of particular things, or that objects affect our lives (see Chapter 2).

Back in the early 1700s Giambattista Vico was already propounding the idea that man makes himself, or, to put it less succinctly, that human knowledge developed from the ground of fabrication, from the processes of creating, crafting and making and their concomitant materialities: "for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them" (Vico 1984: 130). In his understanding God crafted nature, while man was the God of artefacts. Termed syndesis by Armstrong (1981: 13), this captures the basic process of apprehending and constructing the world while enacting the self in tandem. For philosophers like Vico, the most sublime work of poetry is that of giving sense and emotion to insentient things. He suggested that "the first poets attributed to bodies the being of animate substances, with capacities measured by their own, namely sense and passion, and in this way made fables of them" (Vico 1984: 129). In his view real poems are made not of words, but of things. One might ask how different is this to the position espoused by Tim Ingold (2003) writing on the sensuous practice of crafting, proposing that the material forms we encounter emerge out of practical activity, crystallizations of activities within fields of relationships? Imagining and dreaming are all forms of creative production that have their material substrate. He goes as far as suggesting that doing anthropology could be equally a project of acquiring a craft and making objects rather than simply writing one's work. While the individual specificities of these works are notable, my point is simply that materiality has historically occupied a central place in a philosophy of being and the constitution of society, and that, secondly, scholars have been refining and re-tracing the steps of earlier theorists.

Hegel, for one, viewed society's self-creation through objectification and sublation (Miller 1987: 214). In Phenomenology of Spirit he spoke specifically of thinghood and the particular manifold properties of objects, realized by individual viewers in particular contexts. These multiple properties of things interpenetrate, each characteristic is everywhere and co-existent, but it was the very medium of thinghood that bound them together. The medium was crucial for Hegel, the constituent elements or matters that existed together in sensual form, albeit perceived subjectively: "since the object is the true and universal, the self-same, while consciousness is the variable and non-essential, it may happen that consciousness apprehends the object wrongly and deceives itself" (Hegel 1977:70). He acknowledged the diverse moments of sensual apprehending and the subjective perceptions of individuals, what archaeologists would later describe as being multiply constituted. Hegel was also interested in the relationship between spirit and matter, especially as embodied in artistic manifestation in the sphere of divinity. Spirit takes form through instinctive actions and objectifications embedded in cultural practice. Using the examples of pyramids and obelisks, he outlined the differences between manufacture as human activity, producing material effects, and the reception or suffusing of spirit that entered into these worksimbuing them with real significance. This results in a collapsing of the body:soul dichotomy, bringing both into concert and blurring the distinctions, the aim being to endow the spirit with embodied shape. In his discussion of divine being, the indwelling god (see Chapter 4) is a unity that must transcend both the elements of nature and self-conscious actuality, despite individuals realizing that the thing in itself is not an animated thing; instead the creator or onlooker must dispense with reality, forget themselves and dispense with certain moments of consciousness (Hegel 1977: 427-30). There are two sides to this abstraction, recognizing the characteristics of doing and of being a thing, resulting in a return to ultimate unity. In retracing Hegel's writing on material being it is clear that his initial theorizations reappear in the work of Egyptologists and anthropologists alike.

Objects and persons take on new hues with Marx's writing of Capital. To gloss superficially, things become personified and individuals are reified under capitalism. The fetishization of things also looms as a specter that haunts capitalist society, and Marx's writings on the subject have become set pieces in later work on person/object relations. Individuals are perceived as embodying capitalist society, further blurring the taxonomic boundaries: they are considered the members of the body of Capital (Pietz 1993: 149). The three key terms reappear throughout Marx and are similarly those that have informed contemporary treatment of materiality, whether based in antiquity or modernity: alienation, fetishization and reification. It is for these, and many other reasons, that we should look again at Marx's writing on the constitution of the object world and its mutually constitutive effects on the forging of society. This connection was certainly picked up by V. G. Childe who proposed that people transform natural materials into objects that satisfy their culturally embedded needs and in the process transform themselves as they create new desires and acquire new knowledge of their lifeworlds (Patterson 2003). While Marx's work has impacted significantly on archaeological theorizing for some seventy years (see Patterson 2003), it has yet to be fully appreciated within the new turn toward archaeologies of materiality (but see Miller 1987).

For Marx, the commodity is an object outside us, a thing that satisfies human desires. It is a way of doing things with things. The utility of a thing is its use value, and that is only determined by use or consumption. Exchange value, a quantitative relation, is the proportion in which value of one sort is exchanged for another sort and is shaped by contextual and temporal factors. The use values of commodities must afford expression in different qualities whereas the exchange value of commodities should be expressed in different quantities (Marx 1992: 45). When goods are transformed they can no longer be regarded simply in terms of their use value, rather they are the product of many forms of labor that coalesce into something relative to a system of exchange. Human labor is both embodied in the object and also abstracted. The object then assumes "value" by accruing crystals of social substance to itself: "as values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labor-time" (Marx 1992: 47). Thus every object, whether iron, paper or Marx's famous coat (Stallybrass 1998), has to be considered from this dual perspective. Productiveness is determined by circumstances, including skill, scientific knowledge, practical application, means of production, physical conditions, and so on. Productiveness also depends on time; good seasons or poor will obviously affect notions of value and so on. And so the value of a commodity is in direct relationship to its quantity. As Simmel and others have made clear, we have come to value objects because of their rarity and devalue those that are abundant and easy to extract.

Objects or goods always form embodied or sensual constructions for Marx, so that one cannot separate out the physicality that lies at the root of an object's making, as Hegel before him outlined. Goods are a synthesis of matter and labor and as such assume a bodily form encompassing their utility and residual value that might manifest as a physical form or as a value form. In a capitalist society money is a crystal formed of necessity, according to Marx – an external expression to the contrast between use value and value, which can be an independent category. Money is a vehicle of circulation that provides value with an independent reality. For Habermas, "Money is a special exchange mechanism that transforms use values into exchange values, the natural economic exchange of goods into commerce in commodities." Money has structure-forming effects only when it becomes an intersystemic medium of interchange (Habermas 1987). This is very different to ancient societies where pre-monetary barter systems were in effect, leading to different manifestations of complexity as we will see with Egypt. Simmel underscored that money is reified, abstract and relational and transforms social interaction into anonymous action on many accounts. This accords well with Marx's own concept of the detaching of products from their producers. Money comes to stand as a medium for all other relationships (Miller 1987: 71). For Godelier (1999: 137) the insertion of money as an independent apparatus characterizes our double existence; the inversion of relations between subject and object, between producers and products, is materialized in economic and political spheres. The processes whereby humanity and the world is split and duplicated are ultimately materialized in objects involving a mix of tangible and intangible realities, albeit embodied in matter.

But for Marx the commodity, or object, was "a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" (Marx 1992: 76). Some of his observations are directly relevant for the crafting of the Egyptian object world, he too marveled at the object, the everyday thing derived from natural materials, wood or stone for example, that was transformed through labor into something transcendent. It stands with its feet on the ground, but also in a sphere of relations with other commodities and individuals. Thus the mystical nature of goods does not originate with their use value because the social character of labor appears as an objective character, premised upon relations between the producers and their labor being presented to them as a social relationship existing primarily between the products of their labor. We desire things irrespective of the exploitative relations of labor in which they are embedded. From another perspective, the human agency of the maker is effectively erased in specific contexts of making. This was especially necessary for the production of ritual objects in the Egyptian context. From a Marxist perspective, one could posit that ritual operated as the overarching symbolic field that erased labor from the production of value within the political sphere. Thus a certain degree of opacity is deemed necessary, both in ancient and capitalist societies. How else would one reconcile the fabricating of the divine by the hands of mortals (see Chapters 4 and 5)? Egyptian goods were not authored in modern ways; they were not signed, for example, and the attribution to discernible individuals was irrelevant. For Marx these ancient trading societies existed in the interstices and, compared to bourgeois society, he claimed that they were simple and transparent. He found them to be immature in their development, or hopelessly collective in their connections to community or upon the direct relations of subjection (Marx 1992: 84). As I hope to demonstrate, this was an over-simplification.

Following on from his thesis of alienated goods Marx developed the concept of commodity fetishism that derived from the peculiar social character of the labor that produced them (Marx 1992: 77). It is the disjunct and ultimate displacement between human activity and the object that instantiates the notion of the fetish (see Chapter 2). Human labor sets up a material relationship between persons and social relations between things. Goods become the receptacles of human labor and assume the role of supra objects. Using a semiotic metaphor, Marx claimed that it is value that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic (Marx 1992: 79). With respect to consumerism and capitalism Marx imputed that the devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things. For Marx, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Objects In The Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are
• 2 Taxonomy, Agency, Biography
• 3 Material Memories: Objects as Ancestors
• 4 Statue Worlds and Divine Things
• 5 On Hearing, Phenomenology and Desire
• 6 Sketching Lifeworlds, Performing Resistance
• 7 Object Lessons from Modernity
• Bibliography
• Index