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Overview
A unique dataset for studying past social interactions comes from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery that linked sites throughout much of the Eastern Woodlands but that was primarily distributed over the lower Southeast. Although connections have been demonstrated, their significance has remained enigmatic. How and why were apparently utilitarian vessels, or the wooden tools used to make them, distributed widely across the landscape?
This book assesses Woodland Period interactions using technofunctional, mineralogical, and chemical data derived from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped sherds whose provenience is fully documented from both mortuary mounds and village middens along the Atlantic coast. Together, these data demonstrate formal and functional differences between mortuary and village assemblages along with the nearly exclusive occurrence of foreign-made cooking pots in mortuary contexts. The Swift Creek Gift provides insight into the unique workings of gift exchanges to transform seemingly mundane materials like cooking pots into powerful tools of commemoration, affiliation, and ownership.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817384845 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 03/22/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 247 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Swift Creek Gift
Vessel Exchange on the Atlantic CoastBy NEILL J. WALLIS
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 University of Alabama PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5629-3
Chapter One
What Is a Gift?
The gift has been a seminal idea in anthropology for the better part of a century, in its various guises informing considerations of economy, social solidarity, and human nature. Originally published in 1925, Marcel Mauss's The Gift is at once abstruse and rich with meaning, qualities that invite new readings of the work by each generation of anthropologists. In this way, interpretations of The Gift can be seen to follow, and in some ways shape, the contours of the discipline through time (Sykes 2005). The most recent spate of "Maussian revisionism" is foremost a critique of the anthropological considerations of gifts as the quintessential material of non-Western "primitive" economies that provide exception to the logic and motives of Western capitalism (Miller 2001; Sigaud 2002). Recent considerations of gifting have come to focus on the various ways that objects and people are engaged in processes of mutual constitution that give special impact and meaning to gift exchanges, not as a particular category of transaction that conforms to social classifications but rather as specific moments that are critical to the process of cultural construction in a variety of settings. The arbitrary nature of symbol- based behavior itself contradicts general models that attempt to predict what objects will take the form of gifts, the motivations for their exchange, or the significance of these transactions. In short, a gift is not a type of thing but part of a process by which things, social relationships, and persons are created. Accordingly, I do not view gifts as being characteristic of a particular type of economy (e.g., reciprocity) or type of society (e.g., small-scale) but as a process by which objects of exchange become variously integrated with social worlds in ways that are dependent on context. This chapter outlines the social process of gifting and important implications of theories of materiality in archaeological studies of exchange.
The legacy of Mauss
In The Gift, Mauss (1925) undertakes an explanation for prestations that are seemingly voluntary, spontaneous, and putatively munificent but that are, in fact, obligatory, premeditated, and carefully calculated. More specifically, Mauss attempts to explain why a gift obligates a return and what it is that structures the nature of the return gift. One answer that Mauss seems to offer is that the giving and receiving of gifts operates within a kind of original morality that stimulates systems of reciprocity. Indeed, Mauss's (1925) work has a distinctively evolutionary quality that betrays a deep concern with origins (Parry 1986), in which reciprocity can be understood as the primordial and inherently moral state of primitive economies. The idea of reciprocity in The Gift comes largely from Malinowski's (1922) work in the Trobriand islands, from which Mauss drew heavily. Malinowski himself believed that the gift "from its very general and fundamental nature ... Is a universal feature of all primitive societies" (1922:175). However, Malinowski presents an important difference: Mauss describes reciprocity as operating in all societies while Malinowski restricts its operation to a particular type of "primitive" society (Gudeman 2001:84). It has been the latter view that has garnered the most influence in anthropology until recent decades.
Claude Levi-Strauss (1969), Karl Polanyi (1944), and Marshall Sahlins (1972) were each influential in establishing what amounts to a law of reciprocity that conforms to evolutionary social typologies. Levi-Strauss (1969) made the claim that exchange was the primary fundamental phenomenon of social life, making reciprocity the very foundation of society. Polanyi (1944) introduced a three- part typology of economies that was implicitly arranged on an evolutionary scale: reciprocity was practiced in societies dominated by kinship concerns, redistribution pertained to "ancient" societies where religious and political authority were established, and market exchange occurred in modern capitalist contexts. In many ways Sahlins (1972) combined aspects of the work of Mauss (1925), Levi-Strauss (1969), and Polanyi (1944) to devise a typology of "stone age" economies based on social distance, with reciprocity as its foundation. Sahlins described generalized reciprocity as exchange that was ostensibly altruistic between kin, balanced reciprocity as less personal and "more economic" gift exchange between non- kin, and negative reciprocity as barter and theft. Each of these types of exchange was a version of reciprocity at its core but was defined by different levels of social distance, with negative reciprocity characterized by the greatest social distance and the least personal form of transaction.
Largely through the influence of these works, Mauss's idea of the gift enjoyed somewhat of an invented legacy in anthropology as it came to represent part of a dichotomy between reciprocity and market exchange that is probably best codified in the work of Chris Gregory (1982). Through perspectives that were deeply rooted in colonialist economics and politics, critics argue, the "gift" ultimately came to be synonymous with "reciprocity," understood as the natural, primitive, and inherently moral state of the economy of the ethnographic other, who stood in opposition to Western market economies (Hart 2007; Sigaud 2002; Weiner 1992, 1994). Mauss himself actually viewed the gift as a total social fact, a common reality that pervades all of society and all institutions, economic, political, religious, and aesthetic, instead of as a dichotomy between disparate economic systems (Hart 2007). For Mauss the purely altruistic gift was indeed the polar opposite of pure self-interest, but "gift" exchange systems are not purely altruistic, nor are capitalist markets based purely on self- interest. In fact, Mauss conceived of the "archaic" gift as a mixture of these two modes of exchange and rarely used the term "reciprocity" (Hart 2007).
Whatever Mauss's original intent, the idea of reciprocity as an inherent regulatory mechanism in "primitive" societies devoid of ownership, legal codes, or political hierarchy has confounded anthropological efforts to understand what motivates gift exchange. Other research has demonstrated a more calculative dimension among societies otherwise described as only concerned with solidarity (Appadurai 1986; Bourdieu 1977; Weiner 1992, 1994). For example, Weiner (1992, 1994) refocused the question of why a gift obligates a return by focusing on the inalienable qualities of exchanged objects. Mauss described "the spirit of the gift," most famously in the Maori hau, as a way that things create bonds between people by retaining inalienable qualities of the giver's person in the context of exchange. Gifts essentially embody the "nature," "substance," and "spiritual essence" of a person and thus become powerful, dangerous, alive, and personified (Mauss 1925:10). Weiner develops this idea further to argue that inalienability itself is the thrust of systems of exchange as people engage in a process of "keeping while giving" (1992:150). Weiner (1992) outlines how, through exchange of other objects, persons or social groups attempt to conserve their most valuable possessions that establish differences between themselves and other persons or groups. these items, such as Samoan fine mats or Kwakiutl coppers, are ranked against one another according to their relative "symbolic density," and some rarely circulate (Weiner 1994). In this way the exchange of fine mats or coppers is as much about the objects that are being offered as about the ones that are being kept out of exchange. These are the items that Mauss described as "immeuble," immovable objects that are heirlooms because of their close links to "soil, clan, the family, and the person" (Weiner 1992:46). Thus, according to Weiner, it is the "radiating power of keeping inalienable possessions out of exchange" that fuels reciprocal exchange networks (1992:150).
While invaluable items may be literally "kept," according to Weiner (1992), the other related implications of inalienability have to do with the qualities of place and person that adhere to an object even through changes in possession and geography. In this sense objects are inalienable not because they cannot be given away but because they represent linkages that are inextricable from their material form. Recognition of the spirit of the gift in terms of the entanglement of things and persons opens opportunities to understand specific social contexts in which objects are mobilized as more than their material parts. Indeed, some things matter in the profound sense that they are critical to the process of self- construction (Miller 1995b). As theories of material culture have long demonstrated, social worlds are constituted by the object world, not just the other way around (Appadurai 1986; Bourdieu 1977; Miller 1987, 1995b, 2005). Rather than reducing material culture to essentialized models of the social world, materiality can be seen as integral to the process of sociality. Things inevitably become "entangled" in peoples' lives in ways that bind them to particular ideas, meanings, memories, places, and persons and confer to them various degrees of agency (Thomas 1991:16). therefore, objects mediate social agency in ways that are contextually specific and historically situated. Although this realization is deceptively simple and far from new, anthropological research invested in this perspective of materiality, as the mutually constituting dialectic of people and things, arguably brings us closer to studying "the social" as a process in a continual state of becoming rather than focusing on analytical abstractions such as "society" and "culture" (e.g., DeMarrais et al. 2005; Meskell 2004, 2005; Miller 2005; thomas 1999). No less important, a materiality perspective with a focus on the engagement of objects within social worlds enhances the relevance of archaeology, transforming the discipline from an ineffectual attempt to understand past societies through the vestiges of long- gone thoughts and behaviors to resurrecting some of the very substance through which past socialities were constituted and transformed.
The Social Life of Things: Object Biographies
As Appadurai (1986) describes, material things have social lives in the sense that they are inextricably bound up in social process, perhaps most significantly in the intertwining of the biographies of persons and things. The concept of object biographies has become popular among anthropologists and, particularly, archaeologists, who often outline the life cycle of objects (e.g., Schiffer 1975, 1976; Schiffer and Skibo 1997). However, Appadurai (1986) was interested not just in the cultural biography, or individual life histories of objects, but also in the social history of things, the collective history of a particular class of objects and how it was imbricated with social life. In an effort to understand the relationship of material things to human actors, such a project is necessarily deeply contextual.
Because symbols are not inherently meaningful but depend on specific social practices (e.g., Leach 1976), there are different kinds of object biographies that pertain to particular social and cultural contexts. Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall (1999) distinguish between objects that gather biographies to themselves and those that serve mostly to contribute to the biography of a ceremony or body of knowledge. Some objects have the ability to accumulate histories, deriving significance from the people, places, and events to which they are connected. Most famously, Kula valuables in the Trobriands have this quality, maintaining links with named persons who possess and transact each object. The direct relationship between a person and an object is retained through each subsequent possession by another person, setting up a process whereby social relations and persons become defined by exchanged objects. John Chapman (2000) refers to this process as "enchainment," invoking an image of material linkages that bind identities and forge social relations through the distribution of objects. In the context of the Kula, the identities of people and objects are mutually created as objects gain value through their associations with powerful people and people build reputations through their possession of famous objects. Not only its attachment to people, but also where something is from (or perceived to be from) is a significant part of its biography. An object may be valued because of its procurement from an important place or simply because it comes from far away (Helms 1988). As "pieces of places" (Bradley 2000), objects can be seen to materialize distant places, events, and persons and, in their exchange, thereby constitute social connections and define social differences (Thomas 1999).
Objects that accrue biographies can also be distinguished by the level of specificity in their recognized histories. Gosden and Marshall (1999) point to Kula valuables as examples of objects that have very specific histories of association with named persons. In contrast, tabua, which are whales' teeth that are circulated (singly) through out Fiji, take on value through a rather generic under standing of their age. Over time, tabua become darker in color due to the oil from people's hands in contact with them. The darker the tabua, the older and more valuable it is, but this biographic quality is not linked to particular named owners or places, making its story generic compared to famed Kula valuables.
In contrast to objects with accumulative biographies, some objects hold little inherent meaning outside of performative contexts. For example, among the Kwakwaka'wakw on the northwest coast of north America, carved wooden masks were a means through which ceremonial privileges could be manifested in material form. However, possession of the mask itself was not significant because its meaning was tied to the context of performance. It was the act of showing the mask that was central to its power and meaning. thus, in material form the masks were alienable and the Kwakwaka'wakw were not wary of selling them to outsiders. However, neighboring Nuxalk groups to the north understood and performed the relationships between masks and people much differently, making their sale as commodities much more problematic (Seip 1999). Hence, the biographic qualities of objects are historically and culturally contextual to the extent that the same class of artifact used in similar ways can have quite different biographic capabilities.
Object Extension and Personhood
One productive way to explore contextual variations in the social lives of objects is in thinking about an artifact's extension in social space and time. this focus returns to the idea of a social history of things proposed by Appadurai (1986), recognizing that objects have a social habitat, a correct place and time of use (Robb 2005). Material objects are part of culturally specific practices that are associated with particular social roles for practitioners, a corpus of knowledge including bodily knowledge and comportment, and symbolic significance (Robb 2005:134). A common way that objects function in the social worlds of Melanesia is as extensions in time and space of the social life of a person or lineage (Munn 1983, 1986, 1990). Kula valuables that are associated with a person's name are viewed as representations of his physical presence, knowledge, age, and intelligence; and a Kula operator must carefully calculate how these parts of his self are distributed (Gell 1998:230–231). Objects such as these have referential qualities of personhood and of thoughts, intentions, and mental states; Alfred Gell refers to these as "indexes" (1998:231–232), thus conjuring up the complex webs of both systematic and implicit citations that connect written texts. Through the indexical qualities of objects, Gell argues that the "Kula system as a whole is a form of cognition, which takes place outside the body, which is diffused in space and time, and which is carried on through the medium of physical indexes and transactions involving them" (1998:231–232). In this way the Kula necklaces and arm-shells transacted by a Kula operator are a "distributed object," an object having many spatially separated parts with different micro- histories and with each disparate part connected to a whole through indexical qualities. By way of the dissemination of various parts of this indexically linked whole, the person who sets the objects in motion becomes a "distributed person," extended through time and space (Gell 1998:221). The Kula system is, in effect, an objectified social world in which social relationships between persons can occur beyond the face- to- face interactions of biological individuals.
The extension of persons is not a capability restricted to Kula valuables, but is also typical of many of the objects employed in mortuary ceremony. For example, in the Trobriands, when someone died their possessions (earrings, armbands, clan- associated feathers for men or skirts and earrings for women) or even bones from their body were carried for up to a year by members of the matrilineage of the spouse or father of the deceased. In an interview with Fred Myers and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2001), Annette Weiner convincingly interprets these actions as extending the social life of persons after their death, specifically by maintaining relationships between lineages that had been forged through marriage. By carrying part of the material identity of the deceased, reciprocal obligations originally forged by marriage were continued, and women's skirts and banana leaf bundles were subsequently given by the deceased person's lineage. The extension of the deceased person through exchanges maintained social relationships between lineages in anticipation of a new marriage between them in the future.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Swift Creek Gift by NEILL J. WALLIS Copyright © 2011 by University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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