[A couple of weeks ago I travelled to Ghent to give a lecture to their cohort of archaeology doctoral students as part of a course on theory in archaeology. My great thanks to Roald Docter and Maxime Poulain for the invitation and for an extremely pleasant evening, and to the students for their questions and discussion. I have posted the text of the lecture not because it is in any way profound or original, or possibly even interesting, but just in case it is of any use to anyone pondering these issues.]
1.
Introduction
a. What I am going to do today is
take you, in a way, on a journey through my own thinking about how we ought to
conceive of identity and go about exploring it in the archaeological record. I am going to start by setting the scene with
a brief overview of the ways in which identities were thought about in early
medieval archaeology up to about the 1980s in the UK, when I started my own
research, and which have persisted in many area (including in the UK) after
that. Then I will describe my approach
to the study of identities and their place in social history, as it was in my
own PhD, the book based upon it and as it was developed in my work, and
others’, up until about 2010. After that
I want to make a brief critique of that way of looking at the subject, before
setting out how I have – I hope – refined my thinking about identities since
then.
b. I am going to be talking mostly
about the evidence of early medieval cemeteries – mainly sixth-century
cemeteries and mainly in what I call ‘northern Gaul’ – but I will make some
reference to other areas of archaeological research, most notably in
settlements and particular types of artefact.
The cemetery archaeology of the early middle ages does provide an
exceptionally fruitful avenue into the subject because the practice of burying
the dead with grave-goods in the sixth century meant that we have some means of
associating people of various genders and stages of the life cycle with
particular types of objects and other aspects of the material cultural
record. We can compare those with other
sets of associations and perhaps begin to explore the issue of identity and how
it changed through time and space. We
can discuss how this might compare with other periods and places
c. Before I start, though, I want
to address the obvious criticism of the topic, which is that modern scholars work
a lot on identities, but did past people care as much? Certainly it can be argued that early
medieval people did not say very much about identities, and nor do modern
people, outside academia. But they did
not say very much about a lot of things that modern scholars obsess over, such
as gender, ethnicity, social age, or sometimes even aristocracy or nobility. The only social categories that they wrote
much about were ones with precise legal importance, status that had
implications for property and legal rights.
But I want to suggest that concepts of identity are implicated in all
manner of everyday dealings and lie at the heart of social change and the lived
experience of past (and present) people, even if they are rarely articulated as
such.
2.
Brief historiography of identities in archaeology
a.
Cemetery archaeology
As just mentioned, the archaeology of
early medieval cemeteries is a fruitful area in which to explore identities and
these types of evidence have indeed been associated with particular types of
identity since the earliest days of early medieval archaeology in Europe. I will briefly run through these for those
who do not specialise in this archaeology.
i.
Ethnicity
Probably the oldest, most venerable
form of identity which the cemetery archaeology has been employed to study is ethnicity. This is largely because of a historical
narrative that sees the Europe of the fifth and sixth centuries as dominated by
the migration of peoples (Völkerwanderung).
New peoples from Germania
established themselves in the former provinces of the western Roman Empire and
it was thought that the archaeology of the period could illustrate this
process. Burials with grave-goods,
especially weaponry and jewellery, were thought to be those of immigrant germani; those without were believed to
be the graves of native Romans, Romano-Britons, or Gallo-Romans.
Additionally, within the graves with
grave-goods, it was felt that particular styles of object could be linked with
particular ethnic groups: Franks, Alamans, Saxons, and so on.
This was of course no more than an
extension of the widespread archaeological belief in ‘Culture-Groups’ that
could be given a significance as relating to ‘peoples’, that was common in
other periods, prehistoric and ‘protohistoric’.
These ideas are still common in some
early medieval archaeology, although they have been extensively critiqued for
the past twenty years and more.
Sebastian Brather’s monumental volume on ethnic identity summarises a
lot of this work and should have put an end to it, but it has received
something of a backlash from traditional German archaeologists, encouraged by
much-publicised work by British historians of a conservative bent, and in
alliance with the misuse of DNA to – allegedly – explore ethnicity.
Suffice it to say that the empirical
basis for any association of the rite of furnished inhumation – burial with
grave-goods – with Germanic-speaking barbarians is all but non-existent. It must also be conceded that artefacts cannot
possibly have an ethnic identity in and of themselves. If there is an ‘ethnic’ symbolic content to
these burials it needs to be examined in a much more subtle fashion and it
needs to be demonstrated, rather than assumed.
ii.
Religion
Closely related to the ‘ethnic’
reading of these burials is a ‘religious’ one.
The rite of burial with grave-goods has often been assumed to be a
‘pagan’ ritual, so that graves with goods have been thought to be the burials
of pagans while those without have been assumed to be the resting places of
Christians. In 1975, Bailey K. Young
published his PhD thesis, which was a close and detailed exploration of the
links between grave-furnishing and specific religious belief especially in an
early medieval European setting but with much use of comparative material. He demonstrated amply that there was no demonstrable
link at all that could be assumed between grave-goods and non-Christian belief. The Church passed a reasonable corpus of
legislation about burial in this period but never outlawed the deposition of
grave-goods, other than church property, even if some Christian theologians believed
that the rite was pointless. In addition
to that, there were burials with grave-goods, sometimes with lavish
grave-goods, under churches, known from both written sources and archaeological
excavations: the famous burials under Cologne Cathedral and St-Denis in what
are now the suburbs of Paris are classic instances of the latter. Gregory of Tours describes a burial in a
church with ‘much gold and a profusion of ornaments’ – without any critical
comment – in his Histories.
All this – like Brather’s book on ethnic
identity – should have killed off the links between burials with grave-goods
and those without and pagans and Christians respectively, but the idea
continues to refuse to go away. One case
that might concern us today concerns Martin Carver’s proposal that the Sutton
Hoo ship burial and graves like it might be a conscious expression of an anti-Christian
stance in the context of early seventh-century England – the period of
Christian conversion. Robert Van Noort
has attempted to extend the theory to mound burials on the periphery of the
Frankish world. This is an interesting
idea but it suffers from a mass of empirical problems and has been much
criticised – although Carver continues to repeat it.
There may be other means of detecting
religious identity in early medieval burials but, again, they require a much
subtler analysis that demonstrates the links rather than assumes them a priori.
iii.
Rank and status
The third heading under which Early
medieval burials were linked with social identities was ‘rank and status’. If the inhumation rite could be understood as determined by ethnic custom and/or
non-Christian religious belief, then what did the differences in furnishing signify?
The obvious answer seemed to be that
they marked differences in wealth. That
does not seem an outrageous suggestion, especially if looking at the most
lavish ends of the spectrum.
Archaeologists like Rainer Christlein proposed particular
classifications of burials according to wealth and the types of object in them. The most famous of these Qualitätsgruppen is
Group C, which was held to be the graves of the aristocracy, and especially –
in a northern Gallic context – an incoming Frankish or Alamannic aristocracy connected
with the new barbarian kings of the period.
Other attempts to read status- or
rank-based identities from the graves were rather less subtle and made simple
linkages between particular combinations of artefacts and the legal statuses
attested in post-imperial law codes like Salic Law. In these readings a sword, spear and shield
might indicate a nobleman, a sword and a spear a freeman, a scramasax or spear
alone a half freeman and no weapons a slave.
The problems of these sorts of reading
are many, if the evidence is looked at closely or comparisons are made across
time and place. They would lead to the
suggestion that Alamannia had a lot more aristocrats than Francia, but Bavaria
was largely occupied by slaves, for example.
It would seem that there were far more aristocrats in the sixth century
than the seventh and that by the late seventh century almost everyone in
northern Gaul and Germany, and most of Anglo-Saxon England, had become a slave. If one looked at the age of the deceased, it
would seem that one was a slave in childhood, became a freeman in early
adulthood before achieving nobility between the ages of 30 and 40 and dropping
back into half-freedom or even slavery in old age!
Clearly these sorts of reading were
difficult to maintain but even Christlein’s more empirically-based, less prescriptive
proposition had its problems, when viewed in that sort of detailed and
comparative perspective. Most
importantly, it did not really explain why aristocrats would want to deposit that
quantity and qualitative level of material in their burials if their position
in society was as established as he seemed to want to imply. To answer that, as noted earlier, it had to
fall back on a religious or ethnic explanation for the rite, which was – as I
have suggested – unsatisfactory.
iv.
Sex/Gender
The last area where one could read
identities from the burial goods was sex and gender – although what the
distinction between these categories might be remained unclear. This is in some regards the least problematic
of the readings. There does seem to be a
distinction between graves buried with certain items of jewellery or dress
adornments – brooches, bracelets, earrings, hairpins, necklaces and so on – and
those buried with weaponry. It does seem
to be the norm that the former group are the graves of females and the latter those
of men. This is, overall, the case, but
it is far less straightforward than that makes it seem, as we shall see. Much early work made a lot of assumptions
that were not tested, assuming that knives counted as weapons, or that certain
forms of beads were always feminine jewellery, without considering the evidence
of the bones. These assumptions are much
more problematic and have to be rejected.
Similarly, sometimes the bones themselves were sexed on the basis of the
artefacts, which is inadmissible. It was
noted that far from all burials had either weapons or jewellery, so the link
between furnishing and biological sex had to be more complex than might have
been assumed.
Finally, the question had to be
posed, as for the aristocratic graves, of why people would be buried like this. Why did some people (but not others) have
their sex marked in burial?
For an extensive, detailed and
critical review of all of these early attempts to read identities from the
graves of early medieval western Europe, you can do no better than read Bonnie
Effros’ book, Merovingian Mortuary
Archaeology and the Making of the Middle Ages (2003).
b.
Artefacts
I have mentioned at various points
the ways in which certain types of artefact in graves were assumed to be
indicators of identity: ethnic, religious, class or gendered. But artefacts might have other connections
with identities. Ceramics for example
might have connections with processes of food-production that are gendered or
which are held to be constitutive of a particular ethnic world view. They might also, in the case of expensive
imports, or the containers of expensive imported food or drink, be markers of
wealth and status. Such aspects have
been – with the exception of imports – less thoroughly explored in early
medieval archaeology than in other areas.
There may be a lot more to be gained from them but these areas are
difficult to establish from the archaeological record. I am not going to be saying much about them
today.
c.
Settlements
Forms of settlement have also had
particular types of identity attached to them in early medieval
archaeology. The settlement forms that
emerge in the north-west of Europe around the end of the Western Roman Empire,
with timber halls and sunken huts – Grubenhäuser
– have also often been assumed to be markers of the settlement of incoming
Germanic-speaking barbarians. This
probably remains the most widespread area where ethnicity is read into the
excavated record in a straightforward way.
It is, however, problematic. As
the archaeology of rural settlements has become more evenly distributed across
western Europe a straightforward link between these building types and
barbarian incomers has seemed ever-less plausible. The ways in which cultural influences spread
between the Roman Empire and barbaricum
are probably much more complex and interesting than used to be assumed. Quite how a building expressed an identity is
also worthy of more detailed consideration.
I will return to this question briefly at the end.
3.
The approach in Settlement
and Social Organisation, and after.
a.
Background
This more or less sets out the state
of play when I started my PhD in the mid-late 1980s, although, as I have
mentioned, some of these issues have not changed as much as one would have
liked since then. My research project
was on the Merovingian diocese of Metz. It had no especial focus other than a survey of its history and
archaeology but luckily there was the cemetery of Ennery (Moselle) which had a
physical anthropological study as well as what seemed to be reasonably reliable
recording of the burial assemblages, and that allowed me to start to formulate
some ideas. At that stage there was very
little published work on French rural settlement archaeology – one of a number
of areas of French archaeology which have changed enormously for the better
since then.
By way of background, the debate on Anglo-Saxon
cemeteries at that date had suggested that there might be gender-specific
‘kits’ for men and women, so I started off by exploring this issue. I saw that one could separate out the
grave-goods into two groups that were never found together and that these two
groups were associated with biologically male and female skeletons. It was noticing that the most heavily
gendered burials were those of particular age groups that set me off onto
looking at social age and the life cycle and creating a model that could be explored
with other cemeteries.
b.
Reading the cemetery data as
active
Crucial to my reading was the notion
that had emerged in the then-current post-processual archaeology in the UK that
the archaeological record was actively and meaningfully created, rather than
being a simple, passive reflection of past society. I wanted to know why people would bury the
dead with grave-goods, especially as the ethnic and religious readings seemed
to me to be insufficient explanations of the practice.
The idea that the grave-goods
revealed a straightforward, passive, functional picture of the dead person was
also being criticised at that point.
Heinrich Härke, for example, had argued at length that not everyone who
was buried with weapons could have been a warrior in life.
But it nevertheless seemed plausible
that the grave-goods presented an idealised picture of what someone of a
particular age and sex might have been like.
The effort expended on the furnishing of the grave, I argued in various
articles, was linked to the stress in local society brought about by the death
in question. Thus the burials which
contained the most lavish grave-goods displays were typically those of women in
their teens, who we might assume – on the basis of written data – were of
marriageable age or married, women between 20 and 40, who we might assume had
died before their children had reached the legal age of majority, and men
between the ages of 40 and 60 – later work suggested that the ages of 30-50
might have been more significant – who had died before their sons had married
and settled down. The ideas about
marriageable age of men and women were largely drawn from contemporary Frankish
written sources. Tying the grave-goods
display to the life cycle, to marriages and other alliances between families
and to issues of inheritance allowed one to understand the blurred edges of the
categories created. It seemed
furthermore that claims to a higher standing in the community were made by
exaggerating the norms of what was suitable for particular people. If, for example, young adult males were
appropriately buried with weaponry, spears for example, then a family would
show its status by burying a young adult male member with several spears or
multiple types of weapon. If young adult
women were buried with jewellery, they buried a dead young woman with lots of jewellery,
or with jewellery of high value.
A couple of other issues need to be
mentioned. The first was that this
evidence was a sign of significant social competition at the local level, which
I have associated with the collapse of the Roman land-holding pattern in the
region, the villas and the imperial estates, in the crisis around AD 400 and
afterwards. That meant that it was a
manifestation of identities that might only be archaeologically visible in
certain circumstances, and not generalisable to other times and places in the broader
early medieval period. One objective of
my work was to show that evidence – written and excavated – needed to be kept
rigidly within its geographical and chronological context.
The second issue was that this
manifestation was related to those aspects of status which were of importance
in producing the burial evidence itself: in other words, they only related to
aspects of identity which were made visible when a death created tensions
within or between families that needed to be smoothed over via the burial
ritual. I suggested, for example, that
while the deaths of women over 40, or old people did not case this kind of
stress and thus were not marked with the sorts of display appropriate to other
groups, status and respect might have been manifested in other ways, such as the
construction of the tomb. It did not necessarily mean that there were no forms
of higher status available to people of those age-groups.
The fortunate thing about working on
Merovingian Gaul was that there was sufficient written data relating to age, gender,
marriage and inheritance, and on ideas about the different stages of the life
cycle to compare with the archaeological pattern and, using the two together,
produce a rounded image of society and to make the assumption plausible that
the images of particular social groups that one might extrapolate from the
patterning in the cemetery data could be related to idealised pictures of the
social roles and standing of people of those groups.
c.
Links and barriers on the
social map
The way I moved from the data drawn
from the cemeteries, combined with a separate study of the written data for the
period, to think about identities and social status was by means of thinking in
terms of links and barriers. A link
was a shared identity, which could be
stressed when trying to forge a bond or common cause with another social
actor. A barrier was something
that could be raised to stress difference
with another person, to create social distance, to reject claims at a common
interest, and so on.
To illustrate this I employed a
provisional vocabulary of vertical, horizontal and diagonal barriers, to refer
to barriers raised by different gender, rank and other aspects such as kin-group ethnicity religion. Every person stands at a unique intersection of these barriers
or, better, a space delineated by them on what I called the social ‘map’. In this thinking, I was motivated by a desire
to question the assumption that early medieval people only thought of
themselves as members of groups; it seemed to me that an individual (I will
come back to the issue of individuals or individuality) was always a member of
a number of different groups simultaneously.
Someone could be, for example, a
young adult male, legally not a slave or half-free person, claiming a Frankish
ethnic identity, a Christian, a member of a particular kindred by blood, with
certain other kin relations by marriage and other forms fictive kinship, a
member of some other person’s household or following.
I used the analogy of choosing to
play a card from a ‘hand’ that you had been dealt during a game of cards. Some cards one would have from birth, others
might be acquired or lost during the course of a life-time, or even changed for
others. An identity in this context
would be one of these cards, ‘played’ in social interaction. It would raise a barrier or stress a likeness
or bond depending upon the aim of the individual.
We could, to take a specific
historical example, look at the relations between Gregory of Tours and the
count of Tours, Leudast, which Gregory describes in his Histories. The two had many
shared identities or statuses but also a number of different ones. As things were, they chose to stress the
things that emphasised difference, but they could instead, had they so desired,
have focused on the things they had in common.
d.
Dynamism
What I wanted to do with this model,
however, was not just to stress the agency of the people of the time but also
find a way of explaining change through time, because it was quite clear that
things did change during the Merovingian period.
To this end I employed the work of
the French sociologist, ethnologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu and the
British sociologist Anthony Giddens.
Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice, especially the concept of the Habitus, and Giddens’ concept of structuration
seemed especially helpful in thinking about the relationship between agency,
structures and rules.
What seemed especially pertinent was
the stress laid by these two thinkers on the ways in which structures generate
action as well as constraining it. The
structures or the rules were themselves created by the cumulative knowledge of
what the correct or the wrong way was for a person of one ‘identity’ to relate
to someone of another specified ‘identity’.
Thus, implications of the
‘barriers’ on the ‘map’ were in effect performed
by people. Every modification that was
accepted rather than chastised, however subtle and whether towards a weakening
or strengthening of divides, added itself to a ‘memory bank’ of correct
interactions. The nature of identities
and the barriers they raised, their social worth or the sorts of status they
brought and in which situations, was thus constantly renegotiated, however
subtly. The ‘map’, therefore, was more
or less impossible to fix in a particular form.
4.
A critique of all that
a.
I now want to critique that
position and point out some areas where it was problematic – if you haven’t
spotted them already! First of all, it was a very functional way of thinking.
Much of the model was sociological – Weberian, with a dash of Gary Runciman and
Michael Mann – in its inspiration and formulation and was concerned with how
people achieve aims vis-à-vis other people.
It was concerned with status and power in that perhaps slightly
confrontational fashion. It was principally a theory of status, value, worth
and social roles.
b.
Following on from that, the model
seemed to work according to the idea that identity was a stable entity that could be communicated more
or less unproblematically in social relations.
It implied that identities were not only things that you had but also things that you were in a fairly straightforward way.
c. This meant that there was a
sense of free choice in the deployment
of identity, as is clear in the card-playing analogy. You picked an identity and invoked the power
that went with it in achieving your aims.
d. This implied a limited thinking
about what power was, restricted
simply to inter-personal relations and with a strictly utilitarian focus. This limitation should have been clear from a
closer study of some of the theoretical works that I based my thinking on.
e.
What an identity was,
therefore, was not properly critiqued or theorised. Given that it was
explicitly claimed in Settlement and
Social Organisation that social change were sought in the ‘interplay of
identities’ this was quite a serious problem but I don’t think that this was
untypical. A great deal of work in early
medieval studies, historical and archaeological, over the past twenty years,
has been overtly concerned with identity but with similarly little theorisation. It similarly sees identity as an
unproblematic category.
f. Finally, I think I was too
concerned with the notion of the individual, as opposed to the member of a
group. As I noted earlier, I wanted to
query the idea that medieval people only thought of themselves as members of
collectives, but I think that I moved to far in the direction of the
individual. This – the individual – is a
notion that I would now reject as a product of modern western capitalist
thinking. I do not accept that medieval
people had no notion of themselves other than as group members, and I continue
to see them as each standing at the intersection of a number of different
groups, but I think that the notion of identity itself undercuts the idea of individuality. As I will come back to discuss, the idea of
an identity implies something shared with others. As the Argentinian philosopher Miguel
Benasayag has written in his critiques of the idea of the individual, these
shared identities act as parts of the self which reaches out to incorporate
others. For this and other reasons to
which I will return, the social actor is very much ‘dividual’, that is to say
the social self can be divided into a
number of dimensions.
g.
I do not wish to suggest that
the things stressed in my earlier thinking on this subject do not matter or are
wholly wrong, but that they need to be re-thought and built upon or refined.
5.
Philosophical Approaches
a.
If the theory I was working
with in the 1990s and 2000s was mostly sociological in its inspiration, the
work I have drawn upon more recently, in revising it, has been much more heavily
based upon philosophy and, to some extent, psychoanalysis. These approaches have been very important for
my own work, because they have pointed up the shortcomings not only of my own
work but also of early medieval studies in general.
b.
Michel Foucault
The first approach that I want to mention is the one that I still
need to think most about. This might
seem odd, given that the work of Michel Foucault has been ‘domesticated’ by
historians and archaeologists for so many years now, to the extent that in many
areas historians mention Foucauldian thinking as a preamble to critiquing and
moving beyond it. It has almost become a
mainstream, fairly traditional approach.
I read some Foucault early on in my research but I appear to have
taken his ideas on board rather more in my general thinking about the world
than in my actual academic work. Yet
there are at least two main areas where I need to revisit Foucault and make
more explicit use of his thinking. The
first concerns power and discourse. The
conceptualisation of power in my early work, as I said a moment ago, is too
narrowly utilitarian and directly, consciously interpersonal. Such power exists, of course, and it is the
power one notices, but if I had made more use of Foucault’s thinking on
discourse and how networks of power exist in the very ways in which the world
is organised and spoken about, and about how a social actor positions him or
herself, this would have modified that view of interpersonal action in
important ways. I am currently working
upon a study of western Europe around 600 and, although this period of change –
and its importance – was something that I had recognised and spoken about in
the early 1990s, it occurs to me now that it might more helpfully be examined,
partly at least, in Foucauldian terms as a change in episteme. The bases upon
which the world was classified and in which those classifications were imbued
with power changed importantly in the late sixth century.
The second area where I have recently realised that I need to take
Foucault more into account is the body.
As with the networks of unspoken power, this is something that really ought
to have been apparent from the reading I did of Bourdieu. One of the key elements of Bourdieu’s notion
of the habitus is that it is spatial and bodily; it is not a simple matter of being a particular category; one
occupies space and disposes one’s body in such a way as to create that identity
or category. Similarly, the way that space
is organised produces
identities. I will come back to these
issues of ‘bio-power’.
c.
Jacques Lacan
More significant for the ways I have
revised my thinking about identity in recent years has been the work of the psychoanalyst
and philosopher Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s
work has been influential in many areas of the humanities, most notably,
perhaps, in literature and tends to produce almost hysterical reactions on the
part of historicists whenever his name is mentioned. It was largely this sort of reaction that led
me to suspect that Lacan must have something to say that was worth reading, if
only to see what all the fuss was about!
The important thing that I have taken
away from reading Lacan and especially work by Lacanians like Slavoj Zizek, is
the way that an identity is not something that one can be said to be or to possess
but something that one wants to be or
possess. Identity, therefore, is a
motion towards an ideal, which one never reaches. What matters here for the study of society
and the interplay of social actors is that that ideal is not simply a matter of
being what you want to be but also of trying to be what you think other people
expect of people in that role. Thus, in
a much quoted aphorism, Lacan said that a fool who thinks he is a king is no
crazier than a king who thinks he is a king.
What he meant is that a king is not something one can simply be by
virtue of occupying a particular place in society, but it is constituted by the
web of correct behaviours that make up ‘being a king’: how one is expected to behave
and how people will behave towards you.
I hope that you can see how this makes for an important modification to
the way I thought about social interaction earlier. It is no more about the instrumental deployment
of an identity in a situation by one agent with regard to or at the expense of
another. This is a significant modification
of the model I set out earlier. It adds
in a sense of constraint that in some ways can be assimilated with the Foucauldian
ideas I described a few minutes ago.
What Lacan calls the field of the Symbolic, the world of language, of
signifiers, is what he also calls the Big Other. The Big Other is the ‘they’ in the question
‘what do they want of me?’ refers to.
You could also elide it with the notion of ‘society’ in the model I
proposed earlier: structures made up of what people think are the expected
correct modes of behaviour.
d.
Jacques Derrida
Most of all, though, my work has been
influenced since 2009 or so by reading the work of Jacques Derrida. As far as identity is concerned, the insights
of Derrida that I found most helpful were those that form the very bedrock of
his philosophy: that meaning is inherently unstable; that there is no point of
origin where a concept is self-identical.
If we are thinking about identity,
as we are, then this point is of particular importance. It can be taken alongside the Lacanian (and
other) ideas I just discussed to emphasise the point that the identity, or the
ego ideal, towards which one is moving in social interactions, is inherently
unstable (I think Lacan would have disagreed with this but we can leave that to
one side). It complements the Lacanian thinking in seeing the world as a world
of interconnected signs in what
Derrida would have called a textual sense.
It is a collection of signifiers and Derrida showed that the
relationship between the signifier and the signified is slippery and cannot be
fixed. Most importantly, the meaning of
the identity in question is always rounded out by its position vis-à-vis all
the others; put another way, any identity aways has traces of its opposites,
its ‘constitutive other’. To give an
example from the period I study, the notion of what a Roman was (and how a
proper Roman behaved), was constituted in part by the notion of what a non-Roman (a barbarian) was and how they
behaved. There is always a level of
difference behind the concept, against which even the most original
conceptualisation has to be put. This is
what is meant when I say that there was no stable fixed point of meaning for an
identity; no point where it was identical and coextensive with itself.
It is important to correct the
misapprehension – often put about by people who do not seem to have read
Derrida – that Derrida was some sort of nihilistic linguistic idealist who said
that ‘anything goes’ or that any reading is as good as any other. There have been few readers of texts more careful
and attentive than Jacques Derrida. What
Derrida was saying is that, to use a geometrical metaphor, the coordinates of
any given system can all remain in place relative to each other if one accepts the
set of meanings that ground that system, at its point of origin, but that at
some point the acceptance of those meanings is a choice based upon something
other than empirical data. The point of origin is therefore not fixed and
stable.
The other key aspect of Derridian
thought, as far as identity is concerned, is his work on ‘performatives’. This is especially relevant as it dealt with linguistic
philosophy about statements that made something so in the act of saying them: the
phrase ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony, for example, or ‘I pronounce you man and
wife’, or ‘I name this child Jacques’, or ‘I crown you King of England’. These are statements where the truth
described by the statement was created by the statement itself. Analytical philosophers wanted to have this
as a fixed category of truth-statement, so you can see why Derrida, with his
interest in truth or meaning never being coextensive with itself, found it
interesting.
Derrida’s argument – in a nutshell –
was that there was never a point where you could be sure that a truth was
created by the statement; there was always scope for miscommunication,
deliberate or otherwise, and play. There
was always room for meanings to slide.
If you want to go beyond linguistic philosophy into the realm of social
history then the implications are quite clear and can tally with some of the
points made earlier. For one thing, they
add conceptual depth to our understanding of how social structures are
impossible to fix in a particular mode.
It gives us a way of understanding how epistemes, in Foucault’s terms, can change (something which
Foucault had difficulty accounting for, rather than just describing)
e.
Judith Butler
This led on to the work of Judith Butler,
who developed the idea of performativity, especially in gender identity. Butler’s work problematises the ideas that
there is a meaningful difference in terms of experience between sex and gender,
or that gender is the social construction of sex. Her work is important in stressing how we
perform not simply gender but our sex as well, and that there is really no time
when we experience the two as separate things.
In an archaeological context, Butler’s philosophy is interesting to
engage with because we have the biological and the cultural evidence to work
with. This allows us to explore areas
where the skeletal data for ‘sex’ and the material cultural evidence for ‘gender’
do not seem to coincide. This has been
important for my own work, in questioning traditional ideas about early
medieval sex and sexuality. The branch
of theory known as ‘Queer Theory’, which Butler’s early work played a big part
in establishing, has also been important in thinking about ideas of gender and
sexuality. We might be able to think
about multiple readings of the data, dominant and subversive ways of seeing the
idealised pictures presented in the cemetery data, which were available to
contemporaries and which further problematises the stable transmission of information
about the subjects of burials.
f.
Conclusions
I have also been interested in other works about the problems of the
term ‘community’, when associated with ‘identity’ but I do not have time to
discuss them. Overall, what my thinking
since 2009-10 has done is to complicate what had been too functional and
straightforward a picture but in a way that I find productive. Many of the bare bones of the initial theory
would remain in place. I still think the
dimensions of identity are valid and the notion of the interplay of identities
in local politics has some value for some purposes. So too does the reflexive relationship
between structure and action. The idea of performance is underlined and
extended however. We have added extra
levels to the description and analysis, resulting in the possibilities of a
‘thicker’ historical anthropology or sociology of early medieval communities. Furthermore, and here this links with other
thinking that I have done, we can envisage the outcomes of socio-political
action not simply in terms of the achievement or denial of aims but also,
moving away from the Grand Narratives beloved of students of the past,
historical and archaeological, as unintended, accidental, ironic outcomes.
6.
Mechanisms of change and (attempted) stasis
a.
In the last part of my lecture,
I will home in on the cemeteries of northern Gaul in the earlier Merovingian
period to examine possibilities of examining change, and perhaps look at a
couple of interesting examples, where multiple readings are possible.
b.
I have said something already
about how social structures can change through the constant interplay of
identities. I started off by saying that
we can imagine social structure as a mental image of how the correct modes of
behaviour between all the different categories on the social map. This means that it is a cumulative
performance. And yet, as I said, it is
very difficult to attempt to maintain that structure in any sort of ideal
form. There are means by which people
might actively try to modify it, through the subtle infraction of the rules,
and strategies such as humour, for testing the strength of boundaries or barriers
and for retreating from difficult situations when such attempts are met with a
strongly negative response.
c.
There are also mechanisms by
which the situation changes simply through the demands of everyday coexistence. In a society like that of northern Gaul, with
probably few slaves dwelling in households alongside their owners, it might
have been impractical to police all the harsher boundaries between slave and
free all of the time, something that might explain the Laws’ repeated concerns
about slave-free marriage.
d.
In addition to those factors,
which I discussed 20 years ago, we have to add the dimensions of
miscommunication and slippage, and the fact that any social actor’s performance
of an identity is not a straightforward enactment of a fixed set of roles but
something constrained by the social actor’s own expectations as well as by the
potential reactions of other agents. This
is another way of seeing each person as caught in a web of power relations, not
as a free agent, as was probably too strongly implied in my early work. The bases of legitimate social power usually lead
people to believe that it is correct for them to behave in a particular way
towards someone who stresses an identity associated with authority or another
form of higher status, not that they should try and challenge that authority or
difference in status. Actions designed
to produce one outcome might produce another one entirely.
e.
If we examine the cemeteries of
northern Gaul we can perhaps see some of these slippages through time. One area
where this might be possible is in the gradual spread of the custom of
furnished burial itself, from a small number of families of apparently high
local standing to, eventually, most of the archaeologically-visible community
(visible in the large cemeteries of the sixth century). What seems to have begun as a means of
cementing the local standing of locally-important families became a frequently
competitive rite in which families strove to maintain and perhaps enhance their
local standing, preserve or remake relationships through the display of their
ability to bury the dead with the appropriate attention.
f.
Another area where slippage
might be visible is in the material construction of gender. In Frankish burials of the sixth century,
plate- or plaque-buckles are generally found in masculine graves – something
which tallies with what we know of the symbolism of the belt in late and post-imperial
contexts. Around the end of the sixth century though we begin to observe them
in feminine burials. As they begin to
appear in the graves of women, the plaque-buckles in male burials get larger
and more decorated, in response. As a
symbol is taken over by a different group from that with which it was first
associated, we can observe a response aimed at maintaining a distinction.
g.
In thinking about more
significant change, that period around 600 is especially significant, not east
because it seems to result from the sort of fundamental change that resulted in
a major disruption of the webs of power alluded to earlier. The bases of status, authority and identity
were seriously challenged after the Wars of the Emperor Justinian and resulted
in a whole new set of ideas, that can be seen in a number of areas, not least
gender, ethnicity, aristocracy, the various grades of freedom.
h.
I have discussed the slippage
in the meaning of status an identity, which I have argued is inevitable. Might one at least attempt to preserve some
stability in the meaning of identities?
Here I think the most obvious area is in the social use of space. In the Roman period (and others, of course)
the élite lived in separate rural dwellings with elaborate approach routes and
imposing reception rooms. In these
circumstances a clear frame was
provided for social interaction and the performance of identity, which formalised
and made clear the norms and expectations involved. Areas of informal interaction were clearly
marked off.
i.
Outside what we can see of
early medieval churches, however, this aspect is less easy to find in sixth-century
Northern Gaul. Settlements are not very
archaeologically visible and those that we know do not seem to be particularly
clearly differentiated. As far as one
can see, there was much less use of space in the Roman fashion. Interactions between different groups do not
seem to have been as tightly governed in that fashion – perhaps even in the
royal court. This meant in important
ways that identity was potentially being performed in the communal gaze almost
all of the time that one was outside the house.
This must have meant that interactions could take place in all sorts of
settings. This, I think, is one reason
why so much effort appears to have been lavished upon the manifestation of
social identity in costume in this period.
The barriers or social distances and the correct, expected norms of
behaviour involved in interactions were flagged up by costume.
7. Conclusion
It is almost
certainly the case that the inhabitants of sixth-century northern Gaul did not
think of themselves in terms of many – perhaps most – of the categories that I
have discussed here, although some of those aspects of their identity were
remarked upon and thought of as important.
Nevertheless, even if entirely modern in its framing, I think that, if
theorised in sophisticated fashion, the concept of identities and their
interplay provides a valuable means of analysing past societies and, on that
basis, thinking about the present.
