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Hodder This Is Not An Article About Material Culture As Text
Hodder This Is Not An Article About Material Culture As Text
IAN HODDER
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street,
Cambridge CB2 302, England, United Kingdom
Received February 3, 1988
INTRODUCTION
I begin exploring the meaning of the title of this paper by arguing that
over the last 100 years archaeology has tolerated a particular confusion
which has led to polarized perspectives within the discipline. The confu-
sion results from a lack of clarity within the idea that material culture can
be seen as a language.
Archaeologists have long made a link between material culture and
language. There are close ties between the studies of typology, classifi-
cation, categorization, and language. Pitt-Rivers early made these rela-
tionships explicit when he argued (1874:12) for a science of the material
arts modeled on the science of language. It was possible, he thought, to
transfer analytical methods from one science to the other. For example,
every material form “marks its own place in sequence by its relative
complexity or affinity to other allied forms, in the same manner that every
word in the science of language has a place assigned to it in the order of
development or phonetic decay.” In much of the period since 1874, ar-
chaeologists have accepted that material culture expressed ideas in some
form or another. The language model was usually implicit, although it was
250
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MATERIAL CULTURE AS TEXT 251
The difficulties are increased among the many authors who further
confused the distinctions that were made by Pitt-Rivers, Jacobsthal, and
Crawford. Most archaeologists made a simple opposition between
thoughts, beliefs, and speech on the one hand, and the material world on
the other. If the “intellectual” and “automaton” minds were not distin-
guished, it was still less possible to argue that the rules for the production
of material culture meanings could be identified. The privileging of con-
scious speech resulted in an acute skepticism about accessing any mate-
rial culture symbolic meanings at all.
For example, Clark (1939), Daniel (1982), Childe (1925), Wheeler
(1933), Rouse (1972), and Willey (1953) all cited cases in which past sym-
bolic meanings could be reasonably reconstructed. In general they re-
ferred to artifacts as projections of ideas, and in detail they interpreted
Cretan Bronze Age art as “naturalistic” (Childe 1925), pre-Roman de-
fences as the works of men with power and arrogance (Wheeler 1933),
small objects as ritual, and rich objects deposited in bogs or springs as
votive (Clark 1939). And yet, as Hawkes’ (1954) ladder of inference clearly
shows, the discussion of these symbolic meanings was always seen as
difficult and dangerous, to be strongly constrained by the material evi-
dence. The underlying language model encouraged the conclusion that
archaeologists without access to verbal accounts would have difficulty
understanding the arbitrary meanings of symbolic practices.
Similar assumptions underlay the critical rejection of these
“normative” pursuits. For example, in claiming that cognitive systems of
extinct peoples were not useful for explaining the archaeological past,
Binford (1967:234) used the term “palaeopsychologist.” In fact, little of
the symbolic archaeology carried out by earlier archaeologists was con-
cerned with psychology. But Binford clearly equated such work with
attempts to reach the psyche of past peoples, and to touch the inner
thoughts and meanings of individuals. Since we could not talk to people
in the past, and since the inner meanings were historically conventional
and arbitrary, they needed to be excluded from the objective, compara-
tive science of archaeology.
The emphasis shifted to the functions of artifacts. Binford’s (1972) idea
of “cultural drift” perhaps continues some of the components of Pitt-
Rivers’ automaton mind. But for the most part, the rejection of work on
symbolic meanings assumed that material meanings were organized in
ways comparable to linguistic meanings and that the spoken words had
primary significance. For example, in most of the work “testing” the
notion that archaeological taxonomies corresponded to indigenous taxon-
omies, the latter were defined through language. For example, White and
Thomas (1972) compared tool production in Papua New Guinea with the
verbal classifications of the Duna-speaking peoples. Arnold (1971) com-
254 IAN HODDER
pared the etic mineralogy of clays used in potting with the emit verbal
categorizations of the clays. Hardin (1979) compared linguistic terms for
parts of pots with the decorated zones created in practice on the pots.
Indeed, the whole discussion in archaeology about the opposition be-
tween emit and etic tended to oppose an inner thought, best approached
through speech, and an outer behavior. For example, in attempting to
show the futility of searching for cognitive systems in archaeology, Eggert
(1977) emphasized that the lack of written sources in prehistory was a
major stumbling block. The emit was associated with the intentional, the
conceptual, and language. It could not therefore be reached archaeolog-
ically. The etic was associated with unintentional behavior. The parallels
between this distinction and Pitt-Rivers’ older contrast between the in-
tellectual and automaton minds are clear, except that for Eggert the au-
tomatic behavior is not seen as providing significant information about
mind.
The overarching assumption that emit meanings were closely tied to
thought, best approached through speech and language, limited the range
of ethnotaxonomic work that was done in relation to archaeological ques-
tions. In the examples of such work referred to above, little attempt was
made to compare clay, pottery, or stone-tool categories with other cate-
gories (for example in the use of space). The primary reference was al-
ways to the verbal linguistic categories. No attempt was made to see if
systems of categories might exist beyond or in contradiction to the verbal,
although Baines (1985) has demonstrated a clear case in relation to color
categories in which language and material culture categorical systems do
not coincide.
The logical result of the privileging of speech was that archaeologists
assumed that this lack of evidence of speech excluded them from any
discussion of emit meanings. Whatever the intellectual endeavor in-
volved in human adaptation, the measures of success were seen as func-
tional, long-term, and universal. Speech and emit symbolic meanings as
a whole were distanced from practical etic behavior. The subjective was
associated with inner thoughts expressed in language. The objective was
associated with the external world-the constraints and results of deci-
sion-making. Even in contemporary debates the same distinction is made.
For example, Barrett (1987:471) prefers a “contextual archaeology which
attempts to preserve the context of social reproduction over time and
space but does not depend on discovering ‘ideas in people’s heads.’ ”
It is unnecessary therefore to refer to contemporary semiotic research
on material culture to show that the language model has had profound
influence, often behind the scenes, in archaeology. Material culture
meanings, apart from functional meanings, have been assumed ultimately
to reside in the thoughts of humans. It has been supposed that these
MATERIAL CULTURE AS TEXT 255
There is only the play of signillers, each artifact, word, or event being
explained in terms of other artifacts, words, or events in an endless series
of similarities and oppositions. The subject is decentered in this free play
of signifiers, in this process of substitutive reference.
While I would reject the absolute priority given by Derrida to the de-
centering of the subject as well as his inadequate consideration of the
pragmatic and material, his critique allows us to consider the archaeolog-
ical assumption that material culture symbolic meanings are always else-
where, in the consciousness of artisans. We have tended to privilege
speech. But we could argue that the “etic” material culture itself consti-
tuted a text through which thought occurred and occurs.
A number of writers, including Foucault and Derrida referred to above,
as well as Barthes (1977) and Ricoeur (1971), have contributed in different
ways to the contemporary discussion concerning texts. It is particularly
the work of Ricoeur, very different from that of Derrida, that will be
described here as relevant to the archaeological debate. Ricoeur’s ac-
count allows a distinction between the model of text as language (within
structuralism) and the model of text as work (within certain forms of
post-structuralism)-a distinction frequently ignored in archaeology (e.g.
Patrik 1985).
According to Ricoeur, a text is a work of discourse, the latter to be
distinguished from language in four main ways (1971530-531). First, dis-
course is temporal and in a present, whereas language is general and
outside of time. Second, the question “who is speaking?” does not apply
to language, whereas discourse refers back to its speaker. Discourse has
a subject. Third, language consists of structured sets of differences which
are abstracted from the world, whereas discourse refers to that world.
Discourse is about something. Fourth, language is the condition for com-
munication, while discourse communicates to someone.
In sum, discourse might be described as situated communication. There
is an overall shift from language as a system of signs to the sentence as
utterance (Thompson 1981:49). “We actually change levels when we pass
from the units of a language to the new unit constituted by the sentence
or the utterance. This is no longer the unit of a language, but of speech or
discourse. By changing the unit, one also changes the function, or rather,
one passes from structure to function” (Ricoeur 1974:86). One moves
from sense to reference and from the signified to the intended. An ex-
pression has reference, according to Ricoeur, only in its use. There is a
contextual dependency of meaning, incorporating strategy and intention-
ality. Structuralist analysis is thus only a necessary first stage, a surface
interpretation which must be followed by a depth interpretation of con-
textual meanings (Thompson 198154; Ricoeur 1976:87).
A text is a production of discourse. To understand a text is to follow its
movement from sense to reference, from what it says to what it talks
MATERIAL CULTURE AS TEXT 257
MATERIAL MEANINGS
can be socially active in that it can create agendas and goals and it can
incorporate interests.
SOME IMPLICATIONS
cesses. Archaeologists who have not accepted the rather diflicult argu-
ment that all cultural products somehow become “selected” because of
some reproductive adaptive advantage, have tended to impute purpose to
material change in prehistory. For example, increased symboling behav-
ior has been linked to the need to signal group identity or enhance social
solidarity (e.g., Gamble 1982; Sherratt 1982; Wobst 1977). As another
example, the construction of big burial monuments in Europe has been
interpreted in terms of the purposes of the larger and more stable lineage
groups, which appear in the early and middle Neolithic, to mark social
territories (Renfrew 1976), legitimate access to the restricted resources of
lineage groups (Chapman 1981), or represent houses (Hodder 1984).
While the material objects may have been “read” in the past to have
such purposes, where does the idea of constructing these objects come
from? In the archaeological accounts, the objects appear to have been
created out of a preexisting intention, leaving untackled the problem of
the origin of the thought. The social groupings that produced the tombs
had to have been conceived in thought prior to their existence. Or else
somehow the larger social groupings of the Neolithic created themselves
first in order to have the thought of building the tombs. However one
looks at it, such arguments seem to fit well into a tradition which gives
primacy to thought.
A different procedure would be to argue that the megaliths themselves
suggested the idea of larger social groupings. (I, in my turn, am grateful to
Ian Bapty for suggesting this idea to me.) Megaliths occur extremely early
in the Neolithic in many parts of Europe, such as Scandinavia, Ireland,
and Brittany, and in some cases they have their origins in preagricultural
societies (e.g., Pequart et al. 1937) or in societies with neither fully de-
veloped agriculture nor clear evidence of lineages (Madsen 1982). It could
be argued that initially in Brittany or Scandinavia a stone chamber was
simply a convenient repository for human bodies. Whatever may have
been the initial reason for using the small stone dolmens of the S. Scan-
dinavian Early Neolithic (EN) for burial, the consequence was produced
that a stable, reusable structure was now available. EN settlement in S.
Scandinavia is dispersed and small-scale (Madsen 1982) but in the later
EN and following Middle Neolithic (MN), larger social groupings are
evident both in larger tombs which in some cases contain many bodies
and in larger settlements. The very practice of depositing bones through
time in the initial small tomb creates an increasingly large social grouping
linked through ties to those buried in the tomb. The tomb itself creates the
idea of larger social units. And since it is constructed through cooperative
labor and is used over a long period of time it creates the longer-term
social dependencies which Woodbum (1980) has shown are necessary for
the adoption and intensification of agriculture (see also Bender 1978).
MATERIAL CULTURE AS TEXT 265
CONCLUSION
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