To raise the question of the nature
of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture
and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself.
Hayden White
The Value of Narrativity in the
Representation of Reality.
Critical Inquiry 7(1), 1980.
Man is eminently a storyteller. His
search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is
largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his
life story--a story that is basically without meaning or
pattern.
Eric Hoffer
Jamaica lost a national treasure in
1992, the year that the Society for Historical Archaeology met in
Kingston, for that year Louise Jones died. She was affectionately
and respectfully known as Ma Lou, and she was one of the last, and
probably the most accomplished, of the traditional potters working in
what Roderick Ebanks has named the Afro-Jamaican pottery
tradition. Fortunately, Ma Lou, who once had given up the potting
trade, had made it her life's ambition to keep the traditional craft
alive. Not only did she revive her own skills later in life, she
taught her daughter to make pots the way she had learned from her
mother. Her daughter, and a handful of other women, continue to make
a variety of vessel types using ancient techniques. So precisely did
Ma Lou transmit the knowledge and skills of potting to her daughter
that she and they claimed not to be able to distinguish their
individual products.
Ebanks has divided the historic pottery
traditions of Jamaica into four groups: the Amerind tradition,
typified by the so-called boat pots made by the Taino-speaking
Indians who occupied Jamaica at the arrival of Columbus; the European
tradition, with which all historical archaeologists are familiar; the
Syncretic tradition, in which African and European and, occasionally,
American Indian attributes are combined; and the Afro-Jamaican
tradition which has clear precedents in and continuities with
specific pottery-making customs of some Western African peoples. The figure, below, shows an example of a "yabbah" made by
Ma Lou. The yabbah is a traditional African and Jamaican eating or
serving vessel used with a calabash spoon. The culture history of the
New World has left permanent marks in clay. Jamaica's national motto
is virtually the same as that of the United States: Out of many,
one people; E Pluribus Unum. The unity of our national
cultures is found in a diversity of expressions: a diversity which
bespeaks separate durable traditions existing alongside, and
entangled with, syncretic, creolized creations.
I first encountered Ma Lou's pottery in
1992, in Kingston and Port Royal, where it was sold in a number of
souvenir shops labelled as reproductions of ÒArawakÓ Indian
pottery. I purchased the pot in Figure 2.2 two years later from a
tourist shop at Devon House in Kingston. This time there were no
signs announcing the ÒArawakÓ origins or affinities of this vessel,
and when I asked about it, I was told, without hesitation, that it
was a piece made by Ma Lou Jones or her daughter, and an example of
traditional Jamaican pottery.
According to Roderick Ebanks (personal
communication, 1995) the first potÑthe ÒArawakÓ potÑwas a new
form created by Ma Lou specifically to pay homage to the Amerindian
Òboat potsÓ found in archaeological sites of the Taino speakers on
Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Despite Ma Lou's attempt to
mimic the Taino shape, her vessels would never be mistaken for
Amerindian vessels by a knowledgeable archaeologist. Ma Lou's
ÒArawakÓ pots bespeak an African heritage. The methods of forming
the pots, finishing their lips, tempering the clay body, finishing
internal and external surfaces, and firing the greenware are all
distinctly reflective of the Afro-Jamaican pottery-making techniques
passed down mother to daughter over countless generations.
Kingston was not the first place I had
seen almost precisely the same creolized pottery form. The
combination of this shapeÑperhaps more like a European tureen than
an Arawak boat potÑcombined with African-derived building techniques
almost precisely identical to those used by Ma Lou and her daughter
was evident in a unique vessel my colleagues and I had excavated from
contexts of the first or early second quarter of the 17th century, at
the site of Jordan's Journey, on the James River in Virginia (Figures
2.3 and 2.4). Portions of this vessel were recovered from a small
house we labelled Structure 17 (Figure 2.5). Sherds were recovered
from postmolds of the house and from adjacent trash pits. I believe
Structure 17, with its characteristic Òroot cellar,Ó and its
next-door neighbor, Structure 18, to be the earliest houses of
enslaved Africans yet excavated in the Chesapeake (Mouer 199*AF-AM
Paper and Òthis volume, JPÓ). I was immediately aware that this
pot was something quite different from either Protohistoric Virginia
Indian pottery or the ubiquitous Colono-Indian wares of the colonial
Chesapeake. I got my first hint as to the likely origin of this
vessel in my first visit to Kingston. A great many technological and
formal features of the Jordan's Journey vessel were repeated in
Louise Jones's pottery, and one form, the ÒArawakÓ pot, was a dead
ringer. I showed the vessel to Norman Barka and Barbara Heath, both
of whom have had extensive experience with the historical pottery of
the Caribbean, and both pronounced without hesitation that this was
probably a West Indian pot.
Ma Lou's act of personal creativity and
her conception of an Indian vessel form led to the ÒArawakÓ pot
shape produced with the technical knowledge of an African tradition.
It is incredible to think that a nearly identical vesselÑand I mean
identical in numerous technical details, not simply in a generally
similar shapeÑhad been produced by an African or African-Caribbean
slave in Virginia, 370 years earlier. I thought the Jordan's Journey
pot was a unique find until Robin Ryder showed me some specimens of
colonoware ceramics she had excavated from 19th-century slave
quarters at the Monroe Farm Site, near Manassas, in the northern
Piedmont of Virginia (*). Among the numerous sherds she showed me,
most of which looked for all the world like typical Colono-Indian
Ware, were some unusual specimens. Not all the characteristics were
the same, but there were enough specific traits shared by some of the
Monroe Site vessels, the Jordan's Journey vessel, and Ma Lou's
pottery to suggest that a common West African tradition was apparent
in all of these vessels. Katherine (*?) Parker and Jacqueline
Hernigle (*) had suggested as much about some similar vessels found
at late 18th- and 19th-century sites they had studied, also in the
vicinity of Manassas.
In an earlier project, Robin Ryder's
crews had discovered a small root cellar at a farmstead owned and
occupied between 1865 and 1917 by an unmarried African-American woman
named Susan Gilliam. The cellar was filled shortly after her death in
1917, but among the finds in it was a nearly complete whiteware
tureen (Figure 2.6). It was not possible to tell if the tureen was in
primary or secondary context, but its completeness suggests the
former (Ryder *Thesis, Equal portion). My colleagues and I had also
excavated a small root cellar under a former slave
house-cum-wood-shed at Magnolia Grange Plantation at Chesterfield
Courthouse, Virginia (Figure 2.7) (Mouer *Magnolia, and see Chapter
*, this volume). The house had been occupied in the 1910s and 20s by
an elderly black woman named Rhodie Goode. Rhodie Goode was said to
have been ÒallowedÓ to live in the cabin in exchange for keeping
the work yard clean, and for ministering as a healer to my
informant's mother, who suffered migraine headaches. Rhodie Goode's
root cellar had held a wooden trunk that had mostly rotted away by
the time we found it. Among the artifacts in trunk were the complete
bowl and lid to a Staffordshire whiteware tureen. The coincidence of
two English tureens in two 20th-century African-American women's root
cellars was interesting. The finding of a good bit of a tureen-shaped
pot made in an African or African-Caribbean creole pottery tradition
in a very similar early 17th-century house with a very similar root
cellar suggests something well beyond coincidence. Add to this that
the 17th-century pot is a very close cousin to Ma Lou Jones's
ÒArawakÓ pots, and we have most of the material for a very good
story.
***
In the past few moments I've taken you
to Africa, Jamaica, and Virginia. I've introduced you to some
interesting womenÑRhodie Goode, Susan Gilliam, and Ma Lou Jones.
I've dragged you from the 17th century into the 20th, and I've
plunked you down into one of the thornier thickets of recent
discourse in historical archaeology. If you are at all interested in
these ceramic objects, if you're at all knowledgeable about the
Òcolonoware question,Ó and if you have any imagination, I suspect
your mind is busily working away spinning stories to connect these
fragments, trying to make sense of the isolated pieces that seem,
somehow, to belong together in a meaningful context.iii
If there are connections among these
sherds of history, they are connections made of culture, and if you
are able to construct a meaningful story out of these isolated
observations, it is because you are a human being who, like all
competent human beings, constructs meaning from ambiguous and
disorderly observations by creating narratives. We all ÒdiscoverÓ
in disjunct pieces a story that resonates with other, previously
heard, stories, distinctive stories, mythical stories,
meta-narratives which draw upon and in turn shape culture.iv
Our understandings of colonowares and culture are constructed by
narrative, a process that is fundamental to human cognition (***).
Twenty years ago, when I received my
B.S. degree in anthropology, I thought I had become an initiate in an
exclusive club. When anthropology colleagues talked about humanity
with students of history, sociology, literature, or psychology we
knew, quite simply, that they didn't ÒhaveÓ the culture concept.
Culture is the central organizing principal of anthropology. It isn't
a concept that comes easily. When I first began teaching I used to
watch my students' faces as we struggled through those introductory
lectures about how many words Inuits have for snow, or how Navahos
don't experience time in the same linear fashion as do ÒAnglos,Ó
and other overly-simplistic relativisms. Eventually I would see the
light bulbs begin to blink on over the heads of students. A smile
would creep across their faces, as if they had just experienced a
beatific vision. When that happened, I knew, and they knew, they now
possessed the culture concept, and were among the select few.
These days it's a bit different.
Culture, it seems, is everywhere. I read it daily in the newspapers
and in memos from the Human Resources office. When our school
recently absorbed some departments from another unit in the
University, our dean cautioned us to be sensitive to the different
ÒculturesÓ of our new faculty colleagues, meaning everything from
their methods of awarding tenure to their customs for relating to
secretaries. Now I speak freely with colleagues from other
departments about our various efforts to enhance Òmulticultural
understandingÓ in our classrooms. My students hold lively seminars
debating the cultural differences of campus ÒethnicÓ groups they
call by such names as Òjocks,Ó Òskateboarders,Ó and Òfrat-boys.Ó
I receive by e-mail electronic journals on postmodern culture with
articles by literature professors discussing rap music while citing
Clifford Geertz's observations on Balinese cockfights.
Rather than rejoicing at the extension
of the culture concept beyond the discipline, I get a sense that some
anthropologists feel that sacred ground has been appropriated by the
uninitiated for profane causes. A certain smell of sour grapes has
wafted through the anthropological media of late complaining that
we've been left out of the great culture debate, that the culture
wars are being fought by undeserving fools who wouldn't know culture
if it bit them. We earned culture. We have studied it and talked
about it for a century or more. They just use it as if there weren't
a huge literature out there written by...why, by us!
I teach courses in both historical
archaeology and interdisciplinary culture studies. I am as likely to
be caught reading articles by literary critics and philosophers as I
am those written by archaeologists and anthropologists. And it
worries me that many of my colleagues in anthropology and archaeology
can only deride the ideas and intellectual products of culture
studies. Yes, there is some facile thinking and even some
charlatanism concerning culture out there beyond the anthro
departments, but there's also some great wisdom, some wonderfully
honed philosophy, and some really neat ideas. And, to be honest, many
anthropologists, and certainly many anthropologically trained
archaeologists, have abandoned the culture concept, or continue to
work with unworkable, dualistically conflicted, uncritical notions of
culture. We wear culture as a proprietary emblem; we don't wield it
as a well-honed tool.
What is this vaunted culture concept we
guard so dearly? Culture is not only the object of anthropological
study, it's the structuring paradigm that frames our inquiries. It's
both a theory and a method; both the end and the means to the end.
And yet it is so chimerical that one could argue it's not a thing at
all. Anthropologists have argued ceaselessly over what it is, and no
single perspective has ever held the field for long. We can't agree,
for instance, whether it is, in Kroeber's term, Òsuperorganic,Ó or
whether it is embedded in the fundamental structure of the brain. Is
it beyond individual control, like Leslie White's famous ÒbÓ at the
end of the word Òlamb,Ó or is it continually created in individual
actions?
A ÒtypicalÓ definition of culture in
anthropology is a paraphrase or extension of Tylor's, and it goes
something like this: ÒCulture is the sum of all the practices,
beliefs, customs, ways of life, etc., which are shared by the members
of a society and passed down from generation to generation.Ó Sound
familiar? Let's examine that definition. First, it is inclusive,
holistic: the sum of all practices...etc. That Òetc.Ó is crucial;
anything and everything is included: arrowheads and fear of the dark,
economic systems and hand stencils on a cave wall.
We define culture as the property of a
society, but then we use it as a descriptor; not a noun, but an
adjective. It is both a consequence of and a precondition for
membership in a group. Culture is not only shared by the members of a
society, it is passed down from generation to generation. Culture is
a state of being, but also a process of becoming; a system of
structures, and the chaotic unfolding of history. Its study can be
either synchronic or diachronic. It is both adaptive, changeable,
evolving, and the fundamental, changeless, character of a people,
transmitted, enduring, granting identity from heritage. It is
information and energy and yet it's also a mechanism, like an
elephant's trunk or leopard's spots, fine-tuning adaptations to the
natural and social worlds, permitting change and simultaneously
conserving the status quo. It is social organization, or ideas about
social organization, and it's the lies that informants tell
ethnographers about marriage partner preferences, or the role of
angry spirits and their relationships to drums or batiks or sex or
food. We conceive of culture as the personality of a group, and like
personality, we cannot decide if it is process, behavior, belief, or
chemistry; if it's learned in childhood or created anew in every act.
In preparing this chapter, I queried on
two different occasions the approximately 300 subscribers to Anita
Cohen-Williams's HISTARCH list on the Internet. I asked historical
archaeologists if they consciously use the culture concept in framing
or interpreting their research and, if so, I asked them to give me a
short working definition of culture. The first telling revelation is
that I received just nine responses, only six of which were from
historical archaeologists, suggesting either than the concept is so
fundamental as to be beyond discussion, or, conversely, that it is of
little importance to historical archaeologists; or maybe just that no
one wants to answer polls on the Internet. I really didn't have to
conduct a survey to determine the vitality of the culture concept in
historical archaeology today. Many of us have either discarded it, or
buried it in unspoken and unexamined assumptions. Meanwhile, many
other students of social studies and humanities have over the past
couple of decades re-invested the grand idea as a subject of study,
and this is in response to a broad public conversation about culture
which has, in the past few years, reached a frenzied pitch.
Culture has come under immense critical
scrutiny that has been enlivened by inter-disciplinary perspectives.
For instance, the idea of culture-as-heritage; that is, the abiding
transcendent aspect of culture, was recently investigated through a
fascinating essay by Walter Benn Michaels (*), a literary critic.
Through his readings of late 19th- and 20th-century American
literature, Michaels spins a chaotic web, dangling disorienting
threads, until the reader is ensnared in a forced realization that
we, anthropologists and others, have deconstructed race and have
supplanted it with culture. The only problem is, that culture,
heritage, roots, and similar notions have assumed most or all of the
same old properties as that discredited idea of race. We have
re-created the underlying means of defending and constructing racism
by giving culture enduring qualities, by viewing it as a property
belonging to a people, transmitted from generation to generation. I
cannot reconstruct in a paragraph the power of Michael's insight, and
that's not my intention at any rate. What I'm driving at is that some
important thinking about culture is going on right now, often without
anthropologistsÑor, rather, with only a few of themÑand some common
threads have emerged. Let me take a few pages to explore just one of
these: the idea that culture might be understood in terms of
narrative.
***
The events, or observations, which I
used to open this essay could be conceived as a sort of content-less
chronicle of observations about the recent and distant past. What
makes them potentially meaningful is the quality of connexity which
is provided by contextÑcontexts of the pots, the potters, and the
users of the pots, as well as contexts of the archaeologist, his
discoveries, his relation of his discoveries to you in this forum,
your interpretations of his relation, etc. But the glue that connects
chronicled events with context to make meaning is the process of
narrative. Chronicle becomes story. Actors count for something;
their individuality consists in their selection among a finite field
of culturally known options. Their acts are plot elements in stories
with unpredictable, but nonetheless familiar courses and outcomes.
The universal capacity of competent humans to produce meaning through
narrative has been investigated and discussed by a large and
disparate group of philosophers, critics, anthropologists, and
psychologists. This discussion has revealed or manifested some
important properties about human narrative and its relationship to
culture (***lots o refs).
In terms of narratology, there is
little conflict between chronicles of events past and their evocation
of meaning in the present. Narrative theory provides specifically for
pluralities of interpretation, for an understanding that stories
exist in time and in specific contexts in which time is
suspendedÑpart of the background, so to speak. Narrative assumes
that there is difference between the story once told and the story
retold, between the story told and the story heard. Anthropology has
often found consonance between linguistic theories relating to
sounds, words, and sentences, on the one hand, and more general
extra-linguistic cultural structures and semiotic practices on the
other. A narrative understanding makes it possible to view a largely
consistent body of theory which goes beyond mere utterances, and
views speech acts and social acts alike as the nexus of meaning
creation. This body of theory has been constructed out of the stuff
of many disciplines and it is the privileged property of none.
Now one thing which will drive many
archaeologists away from an acquaintance with this field of thought,
which I will reluctantly dub cultural narratology, is its
intransigent postmodernism. It is generally more concerned with
enhancing discourse than with seeking answers. It raises questions
and abstains from offering authoritative conclusions. It resists
categories and eschews foundational assumptions. It has a widely
accepted terminology, which is continually mutable, and accepted to
be such. It is equally suitable to be applied to modern poetry,
18th-century portraiture, Madonna videos, or Ndembu origin tales. As
a body of theory it contains few propositions, and nobody is spending
much effort defending these. Its sense of method is pretty firm, or
as firm as hermeneutics ever gets which, for neo-Darwinists and
hard-core Structuralists often seems pretty mushy. This mushiness,
this postmodern plasticity reveals the acceptance of the very notion
that theory can be non-dualistic, uncertain, conditional and
pragmatic. Conflicts and ambiguities are normal in human discourse,
and narrative assumes them to be so; otherwise, the stories get
boring.
I don't mean to imply that there is a
single unified narratology, for many theories of narrative exist, and
many of these remain Òtied to dualistic models of language and
confined to the examination of decontextualized structures,” in
the words of Barabara Herrnstein Smith (*) The cultural narratology
of which I speak is summoned by Smith who argues against dualizing
ÒstoryÓ against Òdiscourse.Ó Similarly, in archaeology arguments
can be made against evocations of transcendent or ÒdeepÓ
structuresÑwhether they be Marxian class models or a Deetzian
ÒGeorgian mind-setÑ which stipulate an essentialized culture
distinct from the actions in which it is instantiated. I am Ònot
defending traditional historical narrative...which denies difference
and ambiguity, fills an empty time of the past with coherent,
consoling narrative...Ó (Shanks and Tilley *). Quite the contrary.
But what about colonoware pots and
ÒArawakÓ pots and Staffordshire tureens and root cellars? What is
the truth? What do they mean? What do they say about culture and its
use by historical archaeologists?
Ma Lou taught her daughters well. Dare
we ask what stories did she tell?
What stories do we tell?
We, the keepers of the ancient relics,
guarders and inventors of cultural traditions?
Do we tell trivial, cryptic, arcane
stories to ourselves,
or bloody and beautiful ones to all who
will listen?
And many will listen.
In a well-known reading by author and
poet Ursula K. LeGuin, given to an interdisciplinary symposium on
narrative held at the University of Chicago in 1979, the reader told
a story of a man and a woman who killed the woman's husband and how
he, the dead husband, reaped his revenge. In concluding, she had this
to say:
There may be some truth in that story, that tale, that discourse,
that narrative, but there is no reliability in the telling of it. It
was told you forty years later by a ten-year-old who heard it, along
with her great-aunt, by the campfire, on a dark and starry night in
California; and though it is, I believe, a Plains Indian story, she
heard it told in English by an anthropologist of German antecedents.
But by remembering it he had made the story his; and insofar as I
have remembered it, it is mine; and now, if you like, it's yours.
***
When I thought the idea of culture was
the privileged space of anthropology and I was among those who were
privy to its secrets, I told those who asked that archaeologists
discovered the cultures of the past. Over the years I have become
doubtful of claims such as this. More recently I have taken to
telling those who ask that my job entails digging sites and telling
stories about them. A respected colleague heard me say that once too
often and, somewhat impatiently, remarked, ÒWe can't just dig sites
and tell stories!Ó
I suggest we can't do anything else.
The question is: do we tell good
stories? And do we tell them well?
i.
This chapter was expanded from an oral presentation given in the
plenary session, ÒThe Culture Concept in Historical Archaeology,Ó
at the 1994 Society for Historical Archaeology Conference in
Washington, D.C.
ii
. Retrieved from Microsoft Bookshelf 1994, Quotations
iii
. For more about the Òcolonoware question,Ó see my article on
Chesapeake Creoles elsewhere in this volume. For an extensive review
of the scholarship on colonowares in the Chesapeake, I refer you to
***.
iv
. I have used the word “myth” (along with its numerous
derivatives) very frequently throughout the pages of this book. In
popular usage the word often implies a false belief. In
anthropological usage, however, a myth is a story that is widely--or
universally--shared by a society’s members. The story may exist in
various forms, and it may be a careful recounting of an actual
event, or a “purely” allegorical or metaphorical tale. It
generally describes or embodies some cultural norms or ideals, or
distills some set of shared beliefs. Members of the society may
“believe” the story or not, think its lessons good, bad or
indifferent. The key point is that they cannot plead ignorance about
it. It is probably fair to say that the view presented here is that
all history which is told as such is at least potentially mythical.
