Cultural Lenses and Subjectivity

One of the things that fascinates me is the tendency that all of us have to project the present of our culture onto other cultures and other points in time. This is, perhaps, most obvious when we see a politician claiming that the people of another nation want the very same political structure as the politician's nation, or that some aspect of modern culture (be it gender roles, the modern mode and trappings of marriage, the nature of our current economic system, etc.) is an eternal and fixed part of humanity and not the fluid and transient thing that it actually is. Similarly, many of the counter-narratives that are developed do a similar thing, projecting the struggles and points of contention of the modern U.S. and Europe onto the rest of the world and the past (viewing all past human societies through the lens of Marx's writings, or through modern political feminism, or through the lens of 21st-century fundamentalist Christianity).

It is often less obvious when historians and anthropologists do so, not because we don't engage in many of the same behaviors, but because we are very good at talking as if we are not. We layer our readings of the past with views gained from our own experience in the present, and then fold these within theoretical models (themselves derived at least in part from our experience of the present) and present them as if they were objective readings of another time and place. A common post-modern critique of mid-20th century archaeological models of hunter gatherer behavior is that these models often required the behavior of hunter-gatherers to conform to post-Adam Smith models of capitalism-steeped economics. And the argument was, to a degree valid, though those making it almost immediately began trying to build new models based on other 19th through 20th century social and political ideas thus proving that they really weren't as different from "the positivists" (as they often labelled the more traditional scholars) as they would have liked to believe.

This tendency is understandable. Human behavior is complex, often downright bizarre, and if we are going to make sense of other cultures we have to find some way in which we can enter the mindset of the people of that culture. As a result, we are forced to try to find something that we either have in common with them or else find some way to boil down some aspect of their culture into an understandable model or formula. Beyond that, we are human just as they are/were, and therefore have the same physical and cognitive capabilities, and therefore there should be similarities that we can understand. The problem lies not in finding similarities that allow us to understand others, but in making sure that these similarities are real and not the product of our failure to understand important and fundamental differences between cultures.

There are many ways to separate illusory similarities or explanation from real ones. One of my personal favorites, due of course to my training, is that of hypothesis testing. You suggest a possible similarity or formulaic way to expressing or explaining people's behaviors or culture, and you then begin to determine what testable conditions will result if what you are looking at is actually true. For example, there is a popular body of scholarship in archaeology referred to as Optimal Foraging Theory, and typically applied to hunter-gatherer cultures. It's fairly complex, but boiled down to it's essence, it holds that people will balance the amount of work required to obtain food vs. the amount of nutrition available from those foods, trying to maximize the nutrition (measured in any number of ways: calories, grams of protein, difficult to get vitamins, etc.) while minimizing the amount of work necessary*. By looking at the food remains found in archaeological sites or documenting the foods brought in by groups studied ethnographically, we can evaluate the success of a particular optimal foraging model for predicting and rendering comprehensible an aspect of human behavior.

Optimal foraging models are successful, but only to a point. There are many foods that people pursue that are of little nutritious quality, or may be highly nutritious but are so labor intensive to get that the gain is nullified, and yet people seek to obtain them. So, using what is essentially an economic model to make another culture comprehensible only works to a certain degree. You then have to look into the specifics of that culture top see why the model doesn't work all the way. And when you start looking for this, you will quickly find that you are alternately stuck between trying to find analogies to your own time and/or culture to make sense of behaviors, or else simply confused by what you are seeing and thinking that the people who you are studying are flat-out nuts.

Ultimately, we have to realize two things: 1) we will never understand others as they understand themselves (and vice-versa) and there will therefore always be room to modify and challenge our conclusions about other peoples and other times; 2) all of our understandings of other people will be, to some degree, dependent on our own position as viewers/interpreters. As a result, we should be wary of holding our views of other times and cultures as being anything but tentative and subject to change. But that doesn't mean that these other people are completely alien or incomprehensible to us. Again, we share our biology with them, and much of human behavior and human nature derives from our biology, however much we might like ot cling to romantic notions otherwise. Moreover, when we realize that we have projected ourselves into others, we have been given a reality check and shown a place where we erred, which means that anything and everything doesn't go. If we are open to having our beliefs about others challenged by our observations of them, if we don't simply succumb to the confirmation bias and ignore disconfirming information, we can move closer to the truth of reality, even if we never quite reach it.

A vocal minority of post-modern scholars and their acolytes outside of the academy claim that the fact that we can never have full and true objectivity means that we must reject the notion of objectivity altogether, even as an idealized goal. Robert Solow (as quoted by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz) has said that "that is like saying that as a perfectly aseptic environment is impossible, one might as well conduct surgery in a sewer." It's a good point - just because you can't remove all of your stumbling blocks and biases doesn't mean that you shouldn't get rid of as many as you can, while committing yourself to the process of removing others as you find them.




*This, incidentally, is one of the models often criticized for being based on modern capitalism. Note the similarities between the basic concept underlying the model, and the notion of a market supporting prices based on supply of a commodity.

The VA, Funerals, and Religion

So, a group of legislators and clergy are trying to force the families of all people who die in military service to observe Christian funeral rites, whether the dead or their families are Christians or not.

Read more here.

Of course, they are framing this as them "standing up an protecting the rights of Christian soldiers against the godless commie liberals!" But the fact of the matter is that Christian families/servicemen are free to have Christian funerals on federal land. They always have been. They have to request them, though, just as Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and members of every other religion have to request funerals that conform to their religions so that they don't have the views of another religion pushed onto them during the funeral. It is perfectly legal, and nobody is trying to stop it.

Contrary to what these people claim, religion isn't banned during military funerals. However, the families of the deceased are not forced to have the rites or rhetoric of another person's religion thrust upon the funeral of their family member.

If you look at what's going on, these legislators are actually pushing for rules that will make a religious ceremony the default for all military ceremonies, and allow VA staff and volunteers to push religion during funerals even if it is against the wishes of the deceased or their family.

This isn't an attempt to protect Christians, it's an attempt to force everyone else to accept a specific form of religion. It'll fail when it comes to court (if the legislation even passes), and the Veteran's Administration is doing the right thing in resisting it. But, as is so often the case, despite all of the rhetoric, this isn't about standing up for religion in general or Christianity in particular, it's about domination and beating down the people who are not members of the dominant religion. It's bullying, and nothing more, and if the legislators and clergy had any sort of a sense of shame or decency, they would provide and apology and back away. But, of course, that isn't going to happen.

This is dispicable, callous bullying.

Of course, it is also unlikely that any rule requiring religious funerals against the wishes of the deceased and their family will actually stand up in court, so this is also a case where those backing it who aren't purely delusional are clearly taking up time (and the tax-payers money) to grandstand and engage in divisive politics, which is, frankly, evil and destructive.


Edit: As I searched for more information on this, I kept coming across hysterical claims that the VA was banning mention of religion at military funerals. This is not true. Religious services are allowed for families who wish to have them. The VA does not allow VA staff or volunteers to push religion into funeral services where the family of the deceased does not want them. Again, the existing rules are about people having the funeral that is appropriate to their family, and NOT having a government agency push or prohibit religious rites on those who don't want them. The people wanting a change are not trying to allow religious funerals, they are already allowed, they are trying to force them on people who don't want them.

A Short Science Fiction Story

In the last moments of my life, I recalled my conversation with Dr. Johnson regarding the time machine. He had explained that the machine could travel through time, but not space. So I could go forward or backward in time, but would remain in the same location. Johnson had indicated the platform on which the machine stood, and said "this is the very height, down to the millimeter, of the land at this location prior to the construction of this facility."

He was proud of the machine, of the scientific work behind it, and, strangely, of having built the simple wooden platform. The USAF had sent me to be his test pilot, and I was getting ready to see this little corner of Nevada as it was in 1850, though I doubt it would be too terribly different from what it was now, other than the lack of pre-fab standardized government-issue buildings.

I thought of this after the laboratory had vanished, and was replaced with a starscape and a darkness more complete than anything I had ever seen on earth. I thought of this as the capsule exploded around me, it's internal air supply forcing it's relatively weak seems to break against the vacuum. And I completed my thoughts of this conversation as space sucked the air from my lungs and I could feel my eyes turning to ice.




Note: I have always been puzzled by science fiction stories that portray traveling forward or backward in time while remaining in the same spot on Earth as travel through space but not time. The planet, Solar System, and even galaxy are always moving. So, if you were to travel through space but not time, you wouldn't end up in the same point on earth but in a different year. Statistically speaking, you would most likely end up in the vacuum of space.

At Long Last, Publication!

So, finally, the paper that I had been writing and revising and re-writing for the last two years has seen the light of day.

Check it out!

My paper has the scintillating title of Exchange Links between the Coastal and Inland Chumash, and if you are interested in southern and central Californian archaeology, I hope you'll find it interesting...if you're not, it's guaranteed to be better than Sominex and have fewer side effects.

I was also informed by my boss that a paper she is writing for presentation at a conference will have me listed as a co-author as it will be based on a document that I originally wrote. So, on the whole, I'm doing okay on the "sharing information with my peers" front.

It's an important thing to me to do this. So much of the information that CRM archaeologists produce never gets any real circulation, languishing in government offices or regional information centers but unknown except to those who find it during a record search (and, in my experience, rarely read these documents) that one can reasonably wonder why we are bothering. Publishing papers synthesizing our results and speaking at public and professional conferences is probably the best way out of this particular pickle.

Anyway, I'm finally published, will soon have another paper at a conference, and am already working on another (hopefully to be published) paper.

Archaeological Cultures

A while back, a friend of mine was reading about the Clovis Culture and asked a pretty good question: why do we call it a "culture" when what we are really looking at is the tools, and the small sub-set of stone tools which preserve, and not other things that we would generally consider to be important to culture: religion, language, family organization, etc.

It's an excellent point, and one that begs the question of just what, precisely, culture is, at least archaeologically speaking.

Archaeologically, we use the term "culture" to describe related artifacts and groups of artifacts the consistently appear in a given place and date to within a given range of dates (so, the Clovis Culture appears in North America and dates to about 13,000 years ago and consists of sets of artifacts that include the distinctive Clovis Points. Based on the similarities of tools and other artifacts, it is generally assumed that the different sites at which these artifacts are found are related to the same or similar lifeways (the same tools=similar tasks, the thinking goes), and as such it makes sense to groups these sites and their assemblages together.

The archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, who is often considered one of the popularizers of the use of the term "culture" in this way, wrote:

We find certain types of remains - pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites and house forms - constantly recurring together. Such a complex of associated traits we shall call a "cultural group" or just a "culture". We assume that such a complex is the material expression of what today we would call "a people".

One problem is that these perceived cultures may be partially a product of the archaeological record rather than simply direct evidence of actual cultural groupings or peoples. For example, the Clovis Point seems to represent the remains of a highly mobile nomadic culture that engaged in, and likely was reliant on, big game hunting. And likely this was the case for most of the early American peoples. But there are numerous artifacts used by people that simply don't preserve, or at least rarely preserve, in the archaeological record, and so we are not seeing many of the tools, art, social signifiers, and other objects that would have been vital to the day-to-day lives of the Clovis peoples, and that's not even getting into the intangibles such as language, religious beliefs, social organization, etc. Some of this information can be teased out of the remains to varying degrees, but not all of it, and never with 100% confidence. We're putting together a jigsaw puzzle with several of the pieces missing. For this reason, many archaeologists refuse to use the term "culture" to describe the artifact groupings, opting instead for more accurately descriptive terms such as "technology-complexes."

Of course, the degree to which archaeology can describe an actual culture varies greatly. With the Clovis complex, we know little other than that they all used similar spear points and appeared to make extensive use of large animals for food and tool material. We can actually derive quite a bit of information from that, and speculate on quite a bit more, but there is so much that we can't know that it is fair to say that we may just as well be looking at many different cultures spread throughout North America who all used similar projectile points as to say that they were all related to a "stock" culture and shared a good deal more than hunting practices and nomadic land use patterns. Some may have been more reliant on hunting than others, there were probably multiple dialects, maybe even many different languages, and if it turns out that Clovis tool-making methods spread to many different groups of people already in North America (much as we know that later tool-manufacturing methods spread in the Americas), then it is entirely possible that there were multiple languages, religions, and regionally highly-adapted lifeways. In other words, Clovis may represent a solution to a common problem rather than a common culture.

By contrast, the Maya had such distinctive tools, architecture, and writing that we can say with confidence that there was a shared culture, likely a shared ethnicity, amongst the people living in Mayan sites. Even there, there is likely variations (some of them possibly quite important) that we are simply unaware of, but it is more reasonable to talk about "Mayan Culture" than "Clovis Culture." And these are two extreme ends of a spectrum.

Another problem is that artifacts that are perceived as being separate are sometimes actually closely related, and those perceived as being closely related might, on further analysis, prove to be separate. For example, in reading archaeology journals published in the 1920s through the 1950s, it's common to see certain types of artifacts grouped together as being part of the same "culture", distinct from other groupings of artifacts. After the 1950s, as radiocarbon dating became common, it was not unheard of for some of these "cultures" to turn out to be from the same time, not just the same place, and likely represent the remains not of separate cultures, but of separate work places or task sites belonging to the same group of people. While this wasn't too common, it did occur, and is a lesson to be kept in mind.

In the end, talking about archaeological "cultures" can often be nothing more than what my professors referred to as "confusing people with pots" - assuming that the recovered artifacts are more strongly indicative of the people who used them than they really are. If you are reading about archaeology, or watching a documentary, be aware of how the term "culture" is used - is it used to describe a group of people who are known to have shared a common identity - such as the Maya - or is it used to describe a set of artifacts without regard to how closely the people using them were related. It gets used frequently in both ways, but the two uses are not interchangeable.

Comparing the Primitives?

Several years back, I was at a panel discussion on Native American involvement in cultural resources management at the Society for California Archaeology's annual meeting. During the meeting, a woman on the panel, who was herself a member of a Native Californian group, said that she was offended at the tendency that anthropologists had to compare hunter-gatherer and early farmer groups. As she put it "I see what you guys are saying - you're saying 'let's compare the primitive people!'"

Did she have a point?

Well, yes and no.

During the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, there was a tendency for many anthropologists to view all human society as being on a linear path from the most "primitive" (mobile foragers) to the most "advanced" (usually considered to be the society of one of the European nations, sometimes conceived of European culture as a whole). In this sort of framework, comparison of two groups of people who made and used stone tools, who engaged in hunting and gathering as a resource base, and who spoke a non-written language would have been viewed as a comparison of two primitive cultures. And, it must be said, some of the writing produced during this era reflects the chauvinistic attitudes of the European and European-descended anthropologists.

However, even during this time, groups were not compared to each other because they were viewed as primitive, per se. They were compared based on similarities of resource base, tool production technology, and social organization. So, groups were not being compared because anthropologists wanted to "compare the primitives*, however arrogant the anthropologist might be. They were being compared because it was (and still is) thought that comparison of groups of people who live in similar ways might yield information about humanity in general.

If there are four different groups of people who all live in temperate zones, are mobile foragers, use similar tools, but some are matrilocal (men go to live with their wive's families/bands) while some are patrilocal (women go to live with their husband's families/bands), then this differences stands out in stark relief when compared to the similarities. Once you find this difference, you can begin looking for the source of the difference: is it essentially random chance? Is there some social or ecological factor at work favoring one pattern over another? Is there evidence for any of the groups as to the age of the practice?

Once one finds some answers (or, more likely, possible answers) as to why there are differences in patrilocality vs. matrilocality, it is then reasonable to look to other cultures which also share many of the similarities, and examine the reasons (or, again, possible reasons) for their practices regarding how couples and families organize. This may then provide information regarding basic human organization which can be applied more broadly.

So, in this sense, no, she was wrong, it wasn't just a case of "let's compare the primitives." Most of us who do this sort of comparative work don't even think of these people as "primitive", we usually think of groups of people as being adapted to different environments, and issues such as the alleged sophistication of a group of people don't even come into play. There are utilitarian reasons for comparing groups of people that have nothing to do with passing judgement on them.

At the same time, there is a reluctance to compare peoples who are quite different from each other, even though this might yield interesting results. Comparing the role of a chief within a community of eastern Native Californian farmers with the role of a senator in ancient Rome, for example, yields some interesting similarities: in both cases, there is someone who yields influence more often than outright power; both are reliant on the support of the people over whom they have power or influence in the way that a king, for example, is not; both need to exercise eloquence and patience in using their power in a way that a dictator does not; and both are likely to come from a lineage that produces people of their rank and often have been groomed for their position since childhood. Yet it is rare - not unheard of, but rare - to see someone who is researching complex chiefdoms in the American West look to Republican Rome for examples of the development and maintenance of power and authority. There are many reasons for this, but the fact remains that comparing two such vastly different cultures and finding the similarities can often reveal important information about common aspects of human behavior and culture that seem to be true across time and cultures, and might be hard-wired into us as a species.

In this sense, she sort-of has a point. The lack of comparisons across such vastly different cultures is due, in part, to the fact that anthropological archaeologists and ethnographers often have only the most limited understanding of the peoples who are usually treated by the field of history rather than anthropology. But another reason is that we are often so attached to our own narrow focus that we fail to see that there are lessons to be drawn from outside of our own sphere. In this sense, while we don't tend to think that we are "comparing the primitives" that is the effect of so much of what we do.

It should be noted, though, that this is not an absolute. Jean Arnold of UCLA has studied modern North American households with the intention of trying to apply information from them to prehistoric peoples the world over. Stuart Smith has drawn from the interaction of the Native Americans and the Russian outposts in North America in developing his ideas for how Egypt interacted with their neighbor Kush (I take issue with how Smith makes his comparisons, and with the material that he often cites from the Americas, but at least he's trying to do something interesting and worthwhile). As early as the 1960s, James Dietz argued for the study of historic Europeans and their descendants in the Americas as a way of generating theoretical models that could be applied to prehistoric archaeology.

Nonetheless, whatever the intention, I can understand why she would feel that there was an attitude that her ancestors were "primitive". I think that the situation is more complicated than that, but I can understand the feeling.




*Well, most anthropologists weren't doing it for this reason. There were, of course, some who were acting out of a desire to promote their own culture or nation by belittling others.

Another Hotel

So, I'm in the field again. This time we're working in the Sierra Nevadas, performing surveys and site record updates for a transmission line that stretches through a rather remote area of a national park. Thankfully, we're not camping - after a day spent working, a shower and hot meal for which you didn't have to build a fire are nice - but we are staying in a rather remarkably unremarkable hotel. It is, as far as I can tell, clean enough, and the location is convenient for our work. However, it is a the lone building for several miles in any direction, and is extremely isolated, meaning that we have little in the way of cell phone coverage (which doesn't seem like too big a deal until you consider that I have to be able to receive and send phone calls both with family members and with co-workers - being in the field on this doesn't mean that I am not still responsible for other projects), and the internet service, while obviously existing, is poor. It took me nearly an hour to upload this entry, which is a process that can normally be completed in under a minute.

So, the point of this is that while I had hoped that the relative isolation of our lodgings would allow me to actually write entries and post them, I will be able to write them but may not be able to post them. I will, however try to update as I can.

In the meantime, consider that I am a room barely large enough for the bed, in which it is impossible to use the shower without ramming one's knees into the toilet, and where there are a few odd stains in places where, frankly, I don't think there should be any. It's yet another hotel adventure for you to consider should you ever start thinking of archaeology as a glamorous career.