TEORÍAS DE LA INTELIGENCIA

The most frequent approach to mortuary practice within archaeology draws on the social theory of Tainter (1978), Saxe (1970) and Binford (1971). These three theorists are united in their view that the most useful thing the study of mortuary practice can bring to archaeology is access to social structure, hierarchy and rank. Ivison largely agrees with this – his analysis is very much geared towards attempting to reconstruct social structure or rank through an analysis of the position of the graves of the elite, consistently discussing grave goods in terms of value, wealth and the financial circumstances of the people burying the dead (e.g. Ivison 1993:106,204). These ideas are based on a variation on the representational theme that the status of the dead person within society is a reflection of the status of the living person. Tainter stated that wealth during life is proportionally represented by the monetary value of the grave goods (Tainter 1978:125) and this attitude is reflected in Ivison’s analysis of material culture in the grave (e.g. Ivison 1993:216). Binford used variation in mortuary practice as a proxy for societal complexity; the more layers of hierarchy there are in society the more diverse he expected mortuary practices to be (Binford 1971:14). Arthur Saxe pioneered the use of sociologist Ward Goodenough’s ‘social persona’ in archaeology, aiming to identify the elements of social persona (which term refers to the adoption of identity at a specific point in time) which were ‘reflected’ in mortuary practice (Goodenough 1965 and Saxe 1970 cited in

Fowler in press). More recently, both Peter Ucko (1969) and Mike Parker-Pearson (1982) have argued that there might be deliberate manipulation of mortuary contexts to ‘misrepresent’ status during life at death.

The goal of seeking ‘social status’ above all else in studies of mortuary practice has recently been critiqued by individuals engaged in relational approaches to archaeology. Chris Fowler’s approach to identity in mortuary practice emphasises the relational aspects of Goodenough’s work, shifting the emphasis from the discovery of which aspects of social persona are reflected in mortuary practice to identifying how mortuary contexts transform social persona (Fowler in press). This moves us beyond a discussion of rank and status as a consistent (and potentially innate and stable) element of a person’s identity to a discussion which is potentially more accurate. The relational approach of Fowler foregrounds the concept that identity is flexible, and constantly renegotiated within context. This repositioning suggests that although we cannot discuss the status of a person in a living society throughout their life course, we can use mortuary evidence to talk about the assemblage they are involved in at death. The relational concepts introduced here are discussed more thoroughly in section 2.3.

A general critique of structuralist approaches to death and society is at heart a critique of the theory of ritual and rites of passage put forward by van Gennep and discussed in more detail in 2.3. For van Gannep (and the vast majority of other archaeologists dealing with mortuary practice including to some extent, Chris Fowler) ritual is always used to move people from one state to another (van Gennep 1960[1909]:3, Fowler in press). The issue with the idea that ritual is used to move someone or something from one state to another is that for something to be moved from one state to another assumes that the states are pre-existing. If we blur the edges of van Gennep’s taxonomy slightly then it becomes more relational, a distributed moment of transformation marked by ritual. In a relational understanding of ritual, rites of passage do not move people from one state to another, but rather they are part of the means of creating categories of understanding. Actions reposition the self whether or not this is the intention (this is discussed further in section 2.3 of this chapter).

A further fundamental critique of discussions of hierarchy and status is raised by the question what do we mean when we discuss the ‘social’? This debate has been led by proponents of symmetrical archaeology notably Tim Webmoor and Christopher Witmore (2008). Webmoor and Witmore discuss how the term social reinvigorated post-processual archaeological dialogue. The discussion moved the debate from a position where society was conceived of as a functional response to environment, to a discussion of identity which took into account the way that the social and the

physical worlds interact. The ‘social’ goes along with the suffix –ity (seen in temporality, spatiality, materiality) to act as a shorthand for a block of theory which concentrates on understanding as a dialectic process, a reflexive forming and reforming of the physical world through understanding (e.g. Shanks and Tilley 1987). For two things to interact however, they need to be ontologically distinct, which means that implicit in this way of thinking is the concept that understanding, knowledge and the mind are somehow removed from the world. The crux of the matter for Webmoor and Witmore is that archaeological theory has continually swung between theoretical positions which prioritize the ‘human’ or the ‘natural’ whereas the relational perspectives of

Heidegger, Alfred North Whitehead and Latour suggest that we cannot separate the two (Webmoor and Witmore 2008:57). Some of these approaches (particularly those of Bruno Latour) are discussed further in the next section of this chapter, 2.3, on theoretical approaches to reality.

By using the term ‘social’, archaeologists implicitly purify nature from culture, removing ourselves and our understandings from the world in our discussions of past and present. While this might be acceptable when discussing how modern people rationalize the world (although there is some debate over whether this is how we experience it (e.g. Latour 1993) it is unlikely that prior to the enlightenment existence was rationalized or experienced like this. Using the ‘social’ as a catch all term to refer to the way that people interact with (and are therefore somehow separate from) the world is an example of an inappropriate use of a modern rationalization to understand a past context.

Webmoor and Witmore’s main point of contention with archaeologies of the ‘social’ is that the term adds nothing; it is “a mysterious force behind the scenes that accounts for all and for nothing. The social itself is not explained” (Webmoor and Witmore 2008:65). These types of analyses of social theory lend themselves to statements such as ‘the social construction of…’, but not inevitably to a greater understanding of the past. When they discussed ‘social persona’, archaeologists were trying to develop an understanding of how a specific individual interacted with other people, with the things and places around them acting as symbols, or measures of expended effort, which translated to status. Only part of this network (the relations that are person to person) is what we might refer to purely as the ‘social’. Even those purest of person to person interactions, which do not involve things (sex for example, or a handshake) happen enmeshed within the world in that they involve the physical environment and the past knowledge and experiences of the people involved.

If the social covers everything, then it means nothing. The term has become obsolete, as ‘social’ science has come to realize that all academic studies are social, that in fact everything humans do is social. During the process of becoming obsolete, thinking critically about the social has led to more

interesting questions. By including things, places and experiences in archaeological analysis we can expand beyond the questions of rank, hierarchy and status to begin to inquire into issues such as how specific objects affected the emotional state of people associated with a death, how physical practices related to beliefs about the afterlife and the extended life course, and how these details varied regionally and diachronically (all themes I try to address in chapter 4). These relational approaches (set out more thoroughly in section 2.3) work towards what I see as one of the key questions within humanitarian disciplines, the stated goal of Tim Webmoor and Chris Witmore, working out “what is it to be human?” (Webmoor and Witmore 2008:53).

In addition to these critiques of the general goals of the study of mortuary practice and the terms we use to address them it is necessary to mention non-representational theory (Thrift 2008). Mortuary practices do not reflect identity, even transformed contextual or ‘social’ identity; they are not a magic mirror through which we can view the true past. In section 2.3 I will begin to set out how I think mortuary practices emerged out of and created a series of statuses and transformations of status. Mortuary practices did relate to the lived identities of people and tacit knowledge held by communities about the person who died but were not inevitably conscious expressions of these identities. A change in theoretical methodology means that when examining mortuary practices we are observing the physical remains of moments in time, the relations behind which we attempt to unpick to say something about the way the people were. Those networks also include experience, and specifically emotion. We should explore issues of identity, even rank and hierarchy, through mortuary practices, but rank is not the only element of a mortuary network that has an effect on how people were buried; other elements of the network are worth exploring. I develop the themes of how emotion and belief can usefully be addressed by archaeology further in section 2.3.2 of this chapter.

Issues outside of ‘social’ status are already being explored by a number of scholars within the field, specifically by a tradition which aims to discuss emotion and experience, notably Sarah Tarlow, Oliver Harris, Roberta Gilchrist, Elizabeth Hallam and Jennifer Hockey (Tarlow 1999, Harris and Sørensen 2010, Gilchrist 2008, Hallam and Hockey 2001). Chris Fowler specifically points out that mortuary practices are “the media of specific belief systems concerning the nature of life and death” (Fowler in press). Approaching mortuary practice from the perspective that they can inform us about belief systems surrounding life and death is very much in line with the approach taken by another scholar of medieval archaeology, Roberta Gilchrist. Gilchrist’s approach to mortuary practice has moved from a 2005 study with Barney Sloane on the medieval monastic burials from Britain to a broader study of the medieval life course, which takes mortuary practice not as a separate source of

evidence to be dealt with at a distance, but as part of a wider whole, one element in a field which encompasses how people lived, and died, and the moments before and after death (Gilchrist and Sloane 2005, Glichrist 2012). Gilchrist’s study of death encompasses emotions and experience, memory and senses, following (among others) Hallam and Hockey, in broadening out the scope of what can be examined through mortuary practices to include issues other than ‘social’ status (Gilchrist 2012, Hallam and Hockey 2001). These alternative methodologies have been fundamental in moving the scope of this thesis from seeing mortuary practice as representative of status to a more relational approach.

In trying to construct a relational approach to mortuary practice, I endeavour not only to discuss rank and status, but also to inform on the life course. Relational ontologies not only imply methodological breadth but also a shift in what we assume can be explored from mortuary evidence. The aim to talk about mortuary practice in more open ways, beyond hierarchy and the social, has in great part grown out of reading about relational approaches to ontology in other disciplines as well as reappraising the sorts of things mortuary practice has been used to discuss. The next section of this chapter (2.3) will move on from a discussion of Ivison to address relational terms and concepts before focusing on how they can be combined with more traditional approaches to mortuary practice used by structuralist anthropologists.