2

AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF RESISTANCE. MATERIALITY AND TIME IN

AN AFRICAN BORDERLAND

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Outline of the book

Chapter 1. Time and materiality

1.1. Archaeological ethnographies.

1.2. Archaeologies of resistance.

1.3. Borderlands: archaeological and anthropological approaches.

1.4. Time.

Modern temporality for the nonmodern subject.

History and the time of the subaltern.

Rearticulating the archaic.

1.5. Materiality.

Ontology.

The unconscious.

The textures of things.

Chapter 2. Ecology of a shatter zone

2.1. Landscapes.

The escarpment.

Badlands.

Weather-worlds.

2.2. States.

City states.

Complex chiefdoms.

Predatory organizations.

Colonial states.

Totalitarian states.

3

Multicultural states.

2.3. Deep rurals and peasants.

Deep rurals.

A deep rural tradition.

People of the Lowlands.

Peasants.

An African peasant tradition.

People of the Highlands.

2.4. Bandits, missionaries and travelers.

Bandits and outlaws.

Missionaries and holymen.

Travelers and explorers.

Chapter 3. Direct action against the state: the Gumuz

3.1. Resisting the state north of the Blue Nile.

Centuries of violence.

Feuds and raids.

3.2. The enemy’s point of view: origin myths, things and knowledge.

3.3. Making a community of equals: technology, consumption, exchange.

Making the community.

Dealing with others.

3.4. Bodies of resistance.

Body art.

Granaries and anxieties.

3.5. A sense of danger.

Immaterial invaders.

Polluting agents.

Cleansing agents.

Material invaders.

An architecture of fear.

Archaic weapons.

4

Chapter 4. Between domination and resistance: the Bertha

4.1. Memories.

Funj memories.

Settlement memories.

Jallaba memories.

4.2. A fractured identity.

Mayu: the mixed.

Fa-Kunkun: the pure.

Fadasi: the in-between.

4.3. Double belief: Between paganism and Islam.

Neri: from diviner to medicine man.

Feki: the magic of writing.

Sheki: power and religion.

4.4. Double materiality.

Pots

Women’s pots.

Men’s pots.

Houses: home of hegemony, subaltern homes.

Bodies.

The orthodox body.

The pagan body.

4.5. Double performance.

Dancing to resist.

Dancing to comply.

Chapter 5. Of mimicry and Mao

5.1. The making of a subaltern people.

The Southern Mao.

The Northern Mao.

5.2. Invisibility and hybridity.

Making the Other invisible.

Hybrid technologies.

Camouflage dress.

5

Pots.

5.3. The gender of resistance.

5.4. A space for resistance.

The moral economy of space.

House of resistance.

From the house to our house.

House of resistance, house of the past.

The phantasmatic house.

5.5. Remembering the forest.

Still hunter-gatherers.

The hunter’s threat.

Epilogue: becoming citizens

Conclusions: equality and resistance

References

6

INTRODUCTION

This book revolves around one question: what are the strategies and circumstances that

have allowed a group of egalitarian societies to survive in one of the earliest areas of state

formation in Africa? The question of how minority groups resist the state is certainly not

new: for the last three decades at least, it has been asked by anthropologists, sociologists

and historians. It has also been asked by some of the ethnographers that have worked in the

Sudanese-Ethiopian borderland, which is the area covered in this book (James 1979; Jedrej

1995). However, there are three differences at least that are worth pointing out. First, this is

a book about living peoples that is written by an archaeologist. This implies a particular

way of looking (Shanks 2012). Second, if archaeology is the science of things from the past,

an archaeological approach to living peoples should necessarily focus on materiality and

time. These, in fact, are two relevant topics to explore notions of resistance. My point is

that many non-state communities that resist the state in its margins do so because they do

not want to change. In order to arrest change, they find a valuable ally in material culture.

Things make history slow and stabilize relations (Olsen 2010: 139-141; Lucas 2012: 201-

203). Third, while most historical and ethnographic research on resistance has examined

either a single group or a large area where different communities seem to have developed a

similar mode of resistance (e.g. Scott 2009), this book examines how different groups

display different attitudes of resistance. A student of the region has noted that the ‘cultures

of resistance’ of the Sudanese-Ethiopian borderland ‘can vary enormously, even with the

relatively small area of a single region’ (Jedrej 1995: 114). However, a systematic

comparison of those ‘cultures of resistance’ has never been attempted.

This book is about the present but also about the past. During the last decades,

ethnographers have been increasingly concerned with incorporating history into their

narratives. It is my contention, however, that the way ethnographers have made sense of

history is still often couched in unilinear perspectives, and that an archaeological approach,

with its focus on materiality and the multiple temporalities of things, can provide a useful

critique of historicist ethnographies. I believe that archaeologists can help understand the

present in a different way (González-Ruibal 2006a; Harrison 2011). In part, this is because

they do not exactly work with the past, but with what is left of the past in the present

(Olivier 2008; Shanks 2012)—traces and fragments. This book is archaeology because it

deals with what is left from the past in the present: pots and spears, houses and granaries,

words, landscapes, origin myths, technological knowledge and bodily gestures. These are

fragments of a very ancient history at times, which survive today, sometimes transformed

7

into weapons of resistance, tools for keeping certain political values and a sense of

community under the pressures of the state, more powerful groups or globalization. Traces

have to be understood as residues as well, in psychoanalytic terms—a sort of pollution, a

traumatic remnant from the past that haunts the living. Walter Benjamin (1994: 505) called

for a history made with the detritus or rags of history. Archaeology may well be the name

of that history.

Archaeology, then, can become both a complement to purely ethnographic

perspectives on contemporary societies and an alternative to unilinear historical accounts.

The idea, however, is not to alienate archaeology from anthropology—or history, for that

matter. Quite the opposite: a hundred years ago, archaeology and anthropology were not too

different in the way they examined society, in their enthusiasm for things and in their

concern for the long term. Thus, the idea is also to reclaim, through archaeology, what was

valuable in culture-historical and diffusionist anthropology. While this work intends to be

archaeology in a very explicit way, it is also so in a Foucaldian sense. An archaeology of

resistance has necessarily to be a genealogy of modes of countering inequality and their

conditions of possibility.

Finally, this book is also a reaction against the emphasis on discourse that has long

characterized the humanities and social sciences. More specifically, my dissatisfaction is

with the equation between the right to narrate and political emancipation. Many of the

peoples I have worked with do not have a well-articulated W.E.B. Du Bois or an Aimée

Césaire have, does not mean that they do not deploy very powerful, and often successful,

forms of resistance. Non-verbal forms of resistance are not necessarily ephemeral or

intangible: false compliance, feigned ignorance, foot-dragging, etc (Scott 1990: xiii). The

forms of resistance that I will explore here are as deeply inscribed and enduring as the texts

studied by postcolonial scholars and as independent from discourse as the actions described

by anthropologists.

Outline of the Book

This book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter deals with theoretical issues

related to time and materiality. This includes a reflection on the relationship between

archaeology and ethnography, which is necessary to locate the present work; the ways in

which archaeology has approached resistance and contributed—or not—to understand this

phenomenon more widely, and a review of archaeological and anthropological perspectives

on borderlands. Time and materiality define archaeology at large, but they are particularly

8

important in an archaeology of the present that intends to be of consquence beyond its

disciplinary boundaries. Regarding time, first the concepts of history are revised that

prevail in anthropology and postcolonial historiography. I argue that historians and

anthropologists have fallen into modernist tropes, which prevent us from fully

understanding the temporality of nonmodern communities. My point is that, contrary to the

ideas of change and connection that prevail in the language of the social sciences, concepts

of isolation and stasis are fundamental to better grasp the particular temporalities (and

spatialities) of many nonmodern and marginal peoples. These temporalities are inextricably

related to things, as materialized memories that abolish time.

This leads me to the next issue: materiality. I propose an approach to materiality that

is based on three related foundations: French anthropology of technology, a symmetrical

perspective and psychoanalysis. The first stresses the necessity to look at structural

relations between different kinds of artifacts, techniques and bodily gestures, instead of

looking at them in isolation, as it has often been the case. It also emphasizes the relevance

of the technical choice, which is also a political decision. The second approach adds an

ontological emphasis that insists on the mutual constitution of people and things and their

radical inseparability. The third perspective, psychoanalysis, stresses the unconscious

nature of material culture. A psychoanalytic perspective is needed to counterbalance the

excess of confidence in purposeful human agency of the last three decades.

The second chapter delves into the cultural history of the Sudanese-Ethiopian

borderland as a shatter zone: a murky area of contact between state and non-state peoples. I

will address the long-term ecology of the frontier. The narrative will take into account

hunters, kings, bandits and peasants, but also forests, rocks and rain. I will present, thus,

some of the main historical actors that have shaped, and still shape, this wide area and that

will appear along the book, including its social formations. The Sudanese-Ethiopian

borderland has been inhabited for millennia by a bewildering array of societies, both state

and stateless. I propose a typology of state and para-statal organizations that tries to make

sense of the variability of ranked polities that can be found in Northeast Africa, from their

origins in the early second millennium BC to the present. What interests me most is the

nature of power in these polities and their behavior with regard to the borderlands, which

can be more or less benign or predatory. Those who have suffered from the consolidation of

ranked polities are two kinds of subaltern peoples: those who live within the state and those

who live in its margins. I use the widely accepted label ‘peasants’ to describe the first group.

For those who live in the periphery of the state I resort to the notion of ‘deep rurals’ that

has been first used in the region by anthropologist Charles Jedrej (1995). Their egalitarian

9

ethics are similar to those of peasants, but they have managed to avoid full incorporation

into the state. Deep rurals are my main concern: all the peoples studied in the third part of

the book can be considered as such. Sparsely populated borderlands are also an ideal place

for outcasts, holymen, adventurers and criminals. Local populations, either peasant or deep

rural, often protect them, sometimes absorb them and, more frequently, suffer their abuses.

Chapters 3 to 5 examine in some detail three cases of resistance in the Sudanese-

Ethiopian borderland: three strategies that are exemplified by as many ethnic groups:

Gumuz, Bertha and Mao. The Gumuz offer a case of open resistance along the state line.

They (or their forebears) are among the first egalitarian groups to have suffered from the

emergence of stratified and expansive polities. Although they have retreated from the more

exposed areas, which have been conquered by the state, the Gumuz have mostly stood firm

in their ancestral land and have often reacted with violence to attempts to drive them off,

raid them or subject them. This has led to an obsession with boundary maintenance, which

is played out in rituals, beliefs and material culture. With a long history of slavery and

abuses, traumatic memories (and their materialization in artifacts and landscape) are an

inherent part of being Gumuz and today shape their reactions to new threats—including

multinationals and development projects.

The situation of the Bertha is quite different. For the last three hundred years, they

have acted both as dominators and dominated and the same strategy that may be deemed of

domination in one context can become a form of resistance in another. This ambiguity is

obvious in the case of Islam, which has been used to legitimate their depredations on their

‘pagan’ neighbors, but has also as a weapon of resistance against the state. Islam, however,

has also created a rift within the Bertha themselves. The split consciousness that

characterize them is not a state of mind alone: it is impossible to understand without paying

attention to material culture and the way in which it articulates different temporalities and

modes of being.

The Mao are a society (or rather societies) made up of a mishmash of ethnic

communities who have in common an experience of subalternity. Their history is one of

gradual marginalization. Today, they do not react to external hegemony with open

confrontation, but with subtle strategies, which involve bodily gestures, dress and the use of

space, among other things. I would argue that mimicry, in the sense proposed by Homi

Bhabha, is a good way of describing the attitudes of resistance among the Mao. There is,

however, a wide spectrum of practices, depending on the group of Mao considered, from

those that have been incorporated into the hegemonic regime, to those that resist more

strongly in the margins. If the Gumuz are one and the Bertha two, it could be argued that

10

the Mao are multiple. For the Mao, material objects—such as houses and spears—are a way

of relating to core values in their culture, which revolves around notions of an epic past, the

forest and the wild, in stark opposition to the peasant world of their conquerors.

The last section of the book is an epilogue (or an epitaph). It deals with the last

communities that have dodged the grasp of the state until very recently: the Koman groups

(Komo, Gwama and Opuuo) that have chosen to live in voluntary isolation in the remotest

lowlands. As opposed to the other three cases, I have been able to witness here the sudden

incorporation of the last ‘wild’ people into the nation-state.

11

CHAPTER 1. TIME AND MATERIALITY

1.1 Archaeological Ethnographies

Describing contemporary societies is widely considered to be the preserve of ethnography,

but the present work is avowedly not this kind of research. When I say that this, I do it with

the utmost respect towards ethnography, but with no regret. In recent years, ethnography

has become the method par excellence in the social sciences and it has achieved an

enormous aura of respectability. Everybody wants to do ethnography: historians,

psychologists, sociologists, archaeologists and, perhaps significantly, capitalist companies

(Arnould and Wallendorf 1994). It is in this context that the term ‘archaeological

ethnography’ has become widespread. Its meaning, however, is far from straightforward. I

would suggest that it is possible to identify at least four types of archaeological

ethnography, each with its own advantages and shortcomings.

The first model of archaeological ethnography was provided by ethnoarchaeology.

This consists in work carried out by archaeologists, usually with nonmodern communities,

with archaeological questions in mind, an archaeological methodology and analogical

purposes (e.g. Binford 1978; Watson 1979; Hodder 1982; Roux 2007; Lane 2006; Politis

2007). Ethnoarchaeology intends to take into account all those material aspects that have

been usually neglected by ethnographers, such as technology, the management of waste,

landscape, the abandonment of settlements, the construction and organization of domestic

space, and the biography of ordinary things (see David and Kramer 2001). The ultimate aim

of these studies is to provide analogies that allow to interpret the archaeological record, to

propose and test middle-range theories (Raab and Goodyear 1984; Wylie 1985; Schmidt

2010) and to understand the transformation of systemic—or living—contexts into

archaeological ones (Schiffer 1972). While the nomothetic, positivistic basis that

characterized New Archaeology and thence ethnoarchaeology has receded in the last few

years (but see Roux 2007; Gallay 2011), archaeological ethnography as practiced by

ethnoarchaeologists is still not interested in studying living peoples per se, or not as a

primary goal, but as providers of archaeological lessons that can be applied to other

contexts, preferably prehistoric. The problems inherent in analogical reasoning, from an

epistemological point of view, have been hotly debated (Wylie 1985; David and Kramer

2001: 43-54), but the ethical problems had been the object of less controversy (but see

Gosden 1999: 9). It seems obvious that studying other people for their potential to deliver

analogies is not the most postcolonial thing that comes to mind and that the

12

ethnoarchaeological procedure itself is a good example of the denial of coevalness in its

crudest way (González-Ruibal 2006a, 2009).

In this book, no analogies are sought nor proposed. I am not interested in the people

I study as purveyors of archaeological information, but in themselves, their culture and

their history, and in wider anthropological issues of resistance, power, materiality and

temporality. This does not mean that one cannot tap the case studies for archaeological

comparisons, but, after all, archaeologists do that all the time with anthropological and

historical works, without these being ethnoarchaeology for that reason or the work of

comparison itself ethnoarchaeological. Although I find the archaeological ethnography of

ethnoarchaeologists problematic this does not mean that it does not have anything to offer

beyond analogy-seeking prehistorians. Some of the classical work of ethnoarchaeologists

(and some new work as well) was able to deal with the rich materiality of nonmodern

societies in original ways (Watson 1979; Binford 1991; Horne 1994; Politis 2007). In the

case of Lewis Binford, he showed the possibility of linking together data from interviews,

participant observation and material evidence gathered using archaeological methods. This

work, on the other hand, has also been influenced by post-processual ethnoarchaeology, as

espoused by Ian Hodder (1987), which has been little practiced in general (but cf. Lane

1994, 1996): as opposed to the expedient studies and short stays of processual

ethnoarchaeologists, Hodder insisted in the need of taking contextual history and culture

seriously and doing long-term studies. His comparative approach to large geographical

areas shared by different groups has also been influential in my research (Hodder 1982;

also Lemonnier 1986, 1992).

A second kind of archaeological ethnography has developed during the last decade

or so is a self-reflective practice with two variants. It can be an attempt to bring to the

foreground what was traditionally perceived as the (picturesque) background of any

research: local communities, alternative discourses and practices (Hamilakis and

Anagnostopoulos 2009; Castañeda and Matthews 2008). According to Hamilakis and

Agnastopoulos (2009: 67): archaeological ethnography is ‘a highly contested and thus

fertile cross-disciplinary as well as transcultural, politically loaded space; a space for

multiple conversations, engagements, interventions, and critiques, centred on materiality

and temporality. This space encourages the downplaying of the distinction between past

and present, and between diverse publics and researchers of equally diverse backgrounds’.

A second subtype is an ethnographic study of archaeological work—rescue archaeology in

an American metropolis or an excavation in the Maya lowlands (Edgeworth 2006). This

13

streak of archaeological ethnography shows the way in which archaeological knowledge is

also constituted through its practices, tools and sociotechnical interactions.

If ethnoarchaeology was triggered by scientifist concerns and was not much worried

by the local context, this second type of archaeological ethnography is just the opposite: it

is critical with scientific aloofness and characterized by self-reflection and public

engagement (Meskell 2005; Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos 2009). While I find this kind

of archaeological ethnography a badly needed check on archaeology’s disengagement with

local stakeholders, I find two issues that deserve some criticism: in the first place, some of

this work is far too centered on narratives (narratives about the past, about monuments,

about rights), rather than on materiality and material practices (but see Hamilakis 2011).

The weight is too much on ethnography and too little on archaeology. Secondly, as in other

self-critical practices of postmodern and postcolonial archaeology and anthropology, there

is a risk of navel-gazing (a discourse on discourse) and granting to much relevance to

archaeology and heritage in people’s life. In any case, this book is not archaeological

ethnography for the mentioned reasons, but because it does not attempt to scrutinize the

relationship between the people I study and local and foreign concepts and practices of

heritage. However, I would like to conserve what I find most necessary and appealing of

this endeavor: its critical, postcolonial concern for the subaltern and the attention it pays to

forgotten or repressed cultural practices.

A third kind of work that sometimes goes by the label of archaeological

ethnography is a strategy pursued by post-processual archaeologists to come with fuller and

richer accounts of the past and ‘to plunge deeply into people’s lives’ (Sinclair 2000: 475).

This latter quest has deeply marked archaeology since the 1970s (Deetz 1977; Hodder 1986)

and is behind a variety of archaeological accounts of the past with the word ‘ethnography’

in the title or subtitle (Tilley 1996; Verhoeven 1999). In my opinion, however, post-

processual archaeologists have not been looking for thick descriptions in the right place.

Whereas archaeologists tend to associate thick description with ethnography and more

particularly with the work of Clifford Geertz, the truth is that historians of the Annales

School were producing richly textured narratives—and of the past!—well before Geertz

came up with the term: Michael Shanks is the only archaeologist I am aware of who has

explicitly associated thick description with the Annales School rather than with symbolic

anthropology (Pearson and Shanks 2001: 60). Furthermore, unlike Geertz, the Annales

historians were keen to material culture, perhaps not in an archaeological way, but they

certainly incorporated things into their accounts (cf. Braudel 1966; Leroy Ladurie 1972).

Geertz’ thick description is not so much concerned with the actual account of things and

14

facts, either material or immaterial, or the density of lived lives, as with unveiling symbolic

structures that orient thoughts, discourses and actions. Cultural analysis, he says, is

‘guessing at meanings, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses’

(Geertz 1973: 20). The gist of a semiotic approach to culture would be ‘gaining access to

the conceptual world in which our subjects live so that we can, in some extended sense of

the term, converse with them’ (Geertz 1973: 24). It is, basically, learning another language.

Of course, a symbolic approach to social life (unravel meanings) is not incompatible with

thick descriptions of another, more material kind. My intention here is to prove that

guessing at meanings and manifesting the material world should be part of the same

endeavor: making our accounts of the social world richer and deeper. I do not think

ethnography is the best way, despite recent developments (including visual anthropology

and material culture studies), to offer descriptions of social worlds, which are thick

simultaneously from a symbolic and material point of view. I do not find a real engagement

among most ethnographers with materiality (rather than things), although there are

exceptions (Taussig 2004).

A fourth type of archaeological ethnography, however, tries to deal with this

material lack of conventional ethnographies by resorting to an archaeological perspective

that is applied not to the past, but both to the past and the present, in (materially) thick

descriptions of specific regions (Forbes 2007; also Hamilakis 2011). This is the kind of

archaeological ethnography that better fits the present volume: an archaeological

ethnography that takes into account materiality, multitemporality and alternative

experiences of history and place. In any case, I still think that the work presented here can

be simply labeled archaeology.

If I feel uneasy with the concept of archaeological ethnography, it is not just for

theoretical reasons. Methodologically, this work does not fit the usual standards of

ethnography (nor has ever attempted to). For standard ethnographic practice I understand

the work of a single researcher (or at most two), living with a particular community for

protracted and continuous periods of time, during which he or she learns the language and

is able to know the community in some depth and to establish relations of trust with some

of its members. My fieldwork in Ethiopia was carried out interruptedly in nine field seasons

between January 2001 and March 2010, totaling around 12 months in the country, in

addition to a preliminary one-week visit in 2000. During this period, I visited western

Ethiopia during eight different months (January, February, March, April, June, October,

November and December) and some of the groups I worked with were only visited during

one or two of those months. The area where fieldwork took place occupies around 85,000

15

square kilometers (the size of a small country, like Austria). There are around 21 main

ethnic groups in this large tract of land (Bertha, Gumuz, Boro, Gwama, Komo, Bambasi

Mao, Hozo, Seze, Sith Shwala, Anfillo/Busase, Opuuo, Añuak, Nuer, Sabu, Majangir,

Agäw, Oromo, Amhara, Kambata, Hadiya and Shekkacho). Unlike a classic ethnographer, I

did not spend all the time with the same people or in the same village: in fact, the gist of

this project consisted in visiting as many different villages, areas and peoples as possible, in

order to compare them. And I should not say ‘I’, actually, because, as I said in the preface, I

was never alone. At all times I was accompanied by colleagues, drivers, guides and

translators, although our group never involved more than six people (two or three

researchers and two or three assistants) or less than three. Besides, our work also involved

some conventional archaeological research, including excavation, mapping and survey of

prehistoric, historic and contemporary sites. I mention this so that it is clear that research

has been a collective (and multidisciplinary) work and, in this sense, it is, again, quite

different from classic ethnography—a lonely undertaking.

The nature of our investigation has prevented me to become acquainted with people

in a more personal way. We never spent more than two weeks in a single village, and the

more usual figure has been three or four days. There is little intersubjectivity in this work

and very little of the processes through which anthropologists go during their fieldwork. I

did not make friends in the communities and always remained a total stranger, although my

relations and that of my colleagues with the people we worked with were almost always

very friendly. I have not learnt any of the languages of the diverse communities (beyond

civilities, greetings and many names of pots, agricultural implements and house parts). The

quality of my information is, however, better when interviews were carried out in Amharic

(of which I understand something) than when they were carried in Oromo or Sudanese

Arabic, the other linguae francae used in western Ethiopia. Also, my information is better

when I had to rely on just one translator than when we needed two. Fortunately, this

happened only in rare occasions—for example, with a Ganza talking in Gwama to a

Gwama talking Oromo to my colleague mentally translating from Oromo to Amharic and

then to English (and myself translating mentally from English to Spanish, although all my

notes were directly taken in English). As it will become obvious, I have relied heavily upon

the work of historians, sociologists and anthropologists who have worked in the region.

There is not, however, a single proper ethnography of any of the main groups with which I

deal (Bertha, Gumuz and Mao).

My research, then, cannot be portrayed as ethnography, archaeological ethnography

or ethnoarchaeology. Yet I am not pretending to invent something new. On the contrary, as

16

I said in the introduction, it is archaeology that I do, and I defend it as such, without trying

to find atonement for its limitations in the promise of ethnographic (or other) methods. I

find necessary, however, to explain what my particular vision of archaeology is and why I

consider it useful to understand the present. The next chapters will try to clarify this.

1.2. Archaeologies of Resistance

Archaeologists have invested huge efforts in understanding the nature of power. From

different theoretical perspectives, they have approached the origins, development and

maintenance of rank and social inequalities. They have looked at political economies and

explored landscapes, architectures and artifacts of power. Much less emphasis has been put,

until recently, in examining resistance to power and the production of equality (see Osborne

2007) and, in fact, it is surprising that a proper archaeology of the phenomenon has not

been defined so far. There was an early interest in post-processual archaeology (and

ethnoarchaeology) for material strategies of resistance (Parker Pearson 1982; Welbourn

1984; Miller et al. 1989; Hodder 1991; David and Kramer 2001: 397-398), but the approach

was soon dismissed as too simplistic. Nevertheless, the study of resistance, although not

necessary by this term, continued in historical archaeology sensu latu—that is, in the

archaeology of those periods for which we have written records. Sometimes resistance in

historical or contemporary contexts has been approached from a feminist or Marxist point

of view (e.g. Casella 2001; Leone 1995; McGuire and Larkin 2009). The concern with

resistance in historical archaeology is understandable, since the origin of writing is linked

to the origin of the state and this to stronger inequalities and, therefore, starker forms of

resistance, which, in turn, can be explored more easily through a variety of sources—

material and textual. We have to distinguish here between two different archaeologies of

resistance: on the one hand, we have the study of ancient colonialism and imperialism; on

the other, historical archaeology proper, that is, the archaeology of modernity and European

expansion.

The first kind of archaeology has mostly renounced to the concept of resistance and

substituted it by other terms, such as ‘discrepancy’, which is more polite—and less political

(Mattingly 1997, 2010; Van Dommelen 1997, 2006; Hingley 2005). The focus is on the

fuzzy boundaries between dominators and dominated, fluid encounters, entanglements,

creativity and hybridization. ‘A stress on creativity’, notes Gosden (2004: 25) ‘takes us

away from notions such as fatal impact, domination and resistance or core and periphery

emphasizing that colonial cultures were created by all who participated in them, so that all

17

had agency and social effect, with colonizer and colonized alike being radically changed by

the experience’. I have argued elsewhere that this rejection of ‘fatal impact, domination and

resistance’ is far from politically innocent and, in fact, it unwittingly endorses the

neoliberal ideology and, more specifically, its celebration of multiculturalism, individual

agency and fluid identities, which conceal real power asymmetries (González-Ruibal 2012).

Many archaeologists stress that an emphasis on creativity does not have to downplay

severity, power and violence (Silliman 2005: 62-65; Dietler 2010: 117-182; Cañete and

Vives-Ferrándiz 2011). While I totally agree with this point of view, the fact is that many

studies do downplay domination and hegemony by offering an overoptimistic vision of

agency (where people seem to negotiate power even in situations of genocidal colonialism

or totalitarianism), by identifying resistance with often subtle cultural disagreement, or by

mixing both perspectives.

The ‘discrepant experiences’ school of Roman provincial archaeology (Mattingly

1997, 2010) is particularly prone to grant too much conscious agency to communities and

individuals (subaltern or not) and does not usually allow enough space to power and

political asymmetry. The result is the uniformization of practices of resistance (or rather

cultural disagreement) all over the Roman Empire (e.g. Hingley 2005). Thus, in these

studies, almost any allodoxic use of things is identified with discrepancy and discrepancy

invariably cast in terms of identity—seldom in political terms. From this perspective, the

use of Roman iconography in non-canonic ways or of a vernacular language becomes a

conscious form of disagreement and even a veiled threat to representatives of the imperial

order (Mattingly 2010: 241). The same can be said of forms of consumption: differential

rates of acquisition of particular kinds of imported pots are taken to show the enduring

cultural autonomy of the subjected with regard to Roman or Greek hegemony. This

paradigm is a faithful, yet largely unacknowledged, reproduction of Miller’s theories for the

capitalist world (e.g. Miller 1991). To put it in a very simplified way, Daniel Miller states

that people are not passive victims of capitalism, but creatively, and sometimes

subversively, consume mass-produced goods and re-appropriate them for their own

needs—namely, constructing individual identities, often at odds with dominant ideologies.

The idea of reappropriation and negotiation of social meanings has also been influentially

developed, for non-Western peoples, by Nicholas Thomas (1991), who in turn has had an

important impact on the archaeology of colonialism and cultural encounters (Dietler 2010).

Following these lines, archaeologists in recent years have constructed narratives of social

discrepancy that have a rather bening conception of colonial power and sometimes an

anachronistic flair (see Chapter 4). They tend to assign values to nonmodern communities

18

that are alien to them—most notably a very postmodern sense of identity. I do not intend to

invalidate Miller’s theories on consumption, though, and in fact, his work has been

influential here to understand choices among the borderland peoples (e.g. chapters 3.3 and

5.2). What I intend to add is a more political dimension, a stronger concern with power.

Regarding power, it is true that ancient colonialism and cultural encounters did not

usually have the devastating character of modern phenomena. While Romans enjoyed

massacring and looting other peoples, they were also ready to accept them as equals, once

vanquished, something that never occurred to a Belgian or a Spaniard in Africa during the

twentieth century. The atrocities of colonial states from the sixteenth century onwards are

impossible to deny and their functioning is often that of a continuous state of exception: in

some cases, they engaged in veritable genocidal strategies (La Cour Grandmaison 2005). It

is not surprising, then, that the study of resistance in historical archaeology has acquired a

more political character and that there has been a stronger interest in open conflict, despite

a growing concern with consumption. The two groups that have received more attention are

slaves (Ferguson 1992; Hall 2000; Orser and Funari 2001) and indigenous groups (Silliman

2001, 2005). Research has focused mostly on everyday forms of resistance: Martin Hall’s

excellent book on colonial Chesapeake and South Africa is probably the best exponent of

this line of investigation (Hall 2000). He resorts to the theories of James C. Scott and Homi

Bhabha to unravel the complex relations between colonizers and colonized, masters and

slaves, in two different colonial settings. However, open rebellion has been also studied: the

most thoroughly researched case is the Pueblo Revolt in the United States Southwest

(Preucel 2002; Preucel 2006: 210-246; Wilcox 2009; Liebmann 2012). The Pueblo Revolt

is comparable to the cases studied here, because it is an example of long-term resistance to

colonial rule, in which a combination of accommodation, rebellion and revitalization where

employed throughout the seventeenth century and even later to deal with Spanish rule and

to express political, economic and religious discontent. The persistence of an attitude of

resistance explains the survival of a strong indigenous identity to our days and casts doubts

on the very notion of ‘conquest’ (Wilcox 2009). Historical archaeologists have also studied

communities that have been able to escape power and survive in the margins of states: this

is the case of maroon communities of slaves and indigenous peoples, which have been

explored in the Americas (Weik 1997, 2012; Orser and Funari 2001) and Africa (Marshall

2012). The material evidence, however, is often flimsy and ambiguous (see overview in

Weik 2012) and many historical archaeologists have been more interested in confirming or

refuting written sources than in developing a true archaeology of resistance. There are some

parallels between communities of escaped slaves and those studied in this book. Some of

19

the groups of the Sudanese-Ethiopian borderland have a ‘maroon mentality’ and have

developed material strategies similar to those of maroon groups in the Americas and

elsewhere: they have fled to remote regions in a conscious attempt at escaping domination

and reproducing their egalitarian way of life.

It is useful to draw a distinction here between resilience, resistance and rebellion. It

has been argued that the end of political utopias with the fall of real socialism brought an

increased interest in resistance, which became a trending topic in the social sciences

(Brown 1996; Hollander and Einwohner 2004). However, as Brown (1996: 729) has argued,

these studies focus on ‘the political nuances of daily life’, at times to the point of triviality:

in some cases, it is difficult to ascertain in which way watching soap operas or having a

particular hairstyle can be mobilized as a successful practice of resistance. The same can be

said of the things that have been described as ‘discrepant’ by archaeologists. This emphasis

on gentle resistance is not surprising, since political conflict has been mostly crossed out by

the post-political agenda of the social sciences. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the

influential work of James Scott (1985, 1990) has mostly focused on ‘hidden transcripts’,

veiled forms of resistance that allow the subaltern to get their way to a point, without

openly opposing power (which can be dangerous). The word that better describes this

attitude is resilience, rather than resistance: the capacity to adapt, psychologically and

socially, to power through the development of cultural coping mechanisms (see also Rubin

1996: 241). Thus, when Ortner (1995: 186) speaks about ‘the ability of social beings to

weave alternative, and sometimes brilliantly creative, forms of coherence across the

damage [inflicted by power]’, it is resilience what she seems to be describing. Rebellion

lies in the other extreme of the spectrum of resistance: it is usually violent and heavily

politicized.

Whereas resilience may happen all the time, rebellions explode in particular

moments, when the pressure of domination is no longer bearable. Resilience works often at

an unconscious level, beyond discourse, whereas rebellion implies a political consciousness,

which can be emancipatory (as the Pueblo Revolt of 1680) or reactionary, as in the case of

the War of Canudos in Brazil (1893-1897) and the Cristero War in Mexico (1926-1929).

Both resilience and rebellion are usually found in groups that have been incorporated into

states (see Scott 1985, 1990). Resistance proper, instead, is more often found among

communities that have managed to survive in the periphery of state formations (Scott 2009).

In fact, their attitude of resistance can be perceived in their ability to escape external rule

and their decision not to be incorporated into hierarchical political structures. Sometimes

societies that resist are nominally conquered, but they continue to live virtually outside the

20

state (except for the payment of tribute). This is the case with the groups studied in this

book, which have only started to fall under state control while this study was being carried

out (see Markakis 2011).

Thus, the archaeology of resistance that is espoused here is not one that looks at

mere ‘discrepancy’ or an ability to adapt to power to survive, or that explores sudden bursts

of violence against the state. It rather interrogates resistance structurally—as a form of

being: that is, a political ontology of resistance. This archaeology of resistance tries to

examine resilience, resistance and rebellion as different forms of being against domination.

This does not mean, therefore, that trivial gestures, forms of consumption or veiled actions

have to be overlooked. Quite the contrary: the idea is to study them not as isolated, and

rather harmless, phenomena, but as signatures of a more complex system of resistance.

Unlike many studies on subtle modes of opposition, I am interested in resistance that works

and for me this does not mean necessarily one that results in social change—as Rubin

(1996) defends. Sometimes what the social actors want is that things do not change: in the

cases studied here, it is the agents of power who are interested in transformation (making

the other into law abiding subjects). I agree with Rubin, though, in that resistance must

have an effect in power, but this can be simply making power uncomfortable, to destabilize

domination and force dominators to develop new power strategies. To study resistance as a

form of being does not imply understanding that resistance is ‘pure’ (Hollander and

Einwohner 2004: 549) or free from internal divisions (Ortner 1995: 175). A social life of

resistance can be as troubled and complex as any other, if not more.

There are precedents of archaeological studies on societies of resistance. Some

archaeologists have been looking at egalitarian formations in worlds dominated by

hierarchical polities. The aforementioned studies on the Pueblo Revolt or on maroon

communities are a good example of this. I would like to draw attention here to the work

that has been carried by my colleagues at the Institute of Heritage Sciences from the mid-

1980s onwards on Late Prehistoric societies in Europe, under the influence of Pierre

Clastres (Criado 1989: 80-82, and forthcoming; Parcero-Oubiña 2003; González García et

al. 2012): this book is much indebted to their approach to egalitarian polities and their use

of Clastres—a thinker that has been unjustly ignored by mainstream social sciences (Criado

forthcoming). Clastres (and Criado) show us that lacking a state is not a failure, but an

achievement. That societies are not stateless, but against the state—against social division

and all its consequences.

Nevertheless, one of the main problems that we face is the lack of a true

archaeological framework for understanding the phenomenon: there is no archaeology of

21

resistance in the same way as that there is an anthropology of resistance (Clastres 2001;

Scott 1985, 1990, 2009; Graeber 2004). We import theory from outside, instead of looking

at the strengths of our discipline (González-Ruibal 2013a). This book is of course not a

general overview of forms of resistance from an archaeological point of view. However,

through an examination of particular case studies in the present, it intends to offer

theoretical tools for such archaeology of resistance, which is also, in a sense, an anarchist

archaeology (Angelbeck and Grier 2012). It is so because it intends to expand the political

imagination of archaeologists, to offer a critique of authoritarian forms of power, and to

vindicate the achievings of egalitarian societies as viable forms of organization in the past

and in the present. David Graeber (2004: 95) has argued that anthropologists have much to

offer to anarchism, since they are the only group of scholars who know anything about

actually-existing stateless societies. This is not exactly true: archaeologists have not only

studied a bewildering variety of anarchic societies in the past but, as this book tries to prove,

they can also study them in the present. I said before that this is ‘in a sense’ an anarchist

archaeology, because it is not concerned so much with anarchist political theory, with

modes of fighting the state or with alternatives to it. If I am not too concerned with the state

as such, this is because, as Žižek (2007) has pointed out, it is great capitalists who ‘resist’

the state today. Thus, under the umbrella of the state, it is actually multinationals, warlords,

missionaries, and slave traders who threaten or have traditionally threatened the freedom of

egalitarian peoples in the Sudanese-Ethiopian borderland. This work, then, is rather a

reflection on egalitarianism and forms of social existence without domination—irrespective

of whether it comes from the state or any other form of political or economic institution,

public or private.

Archaeology’s contribution to a theory of resistance has to be in the realm of

materiality and time, since both issues are at the heart of the discipline. Archaeology’s

approach to things and the past is what makes it unique with regard to other forms of

knowledge. An archaeology of resistance, then, should look at how the material world and

the past are involved in the production of resistance: how things and memories—especially

habit memories and incorporating practices (Connerton 1989: 72)—are mobilized to resist

oppression, exactions or assimilation, as well as to reproduce egalitarian and relational

values. There are two other important issues that are inherent to an archaeological approach:

first, archaeology, through its focus on things, has a particular ability to look at the unsaid,

at what lies beyond discourse (see Chapter 5). As Clark and Wilkie (2006: 358) note ‘When

people’s personhood is denied through sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression, the

material world is the location of struggles and yields evidence of strategies of resistance’.

22

Therefore, it is not narratives of resistance that we should try to find (or not just), but rather,

material practices of resistance. This means paying attention both to the everyday and the

trifle (as archaeologists usually do), but also to the unconscious: what is performed or

enacted without fully realizing it or without the support of an articulate verbal discourse. It

is a visceral resistance that is played out in bodies, gestures, proxemics and the making and

use of things. Secondly, archaeology has traditionally worked with the long-term.

Resistance is not something that simply emerges ex nihilo: all resistance (or lack thereof)

has a history, often a very deep one, as deep that we may be tempted to think that it does

not even exist. Archaeologists, as Foucaldian genealogists, should delve into what we tend

to feel is without history (Foucault 1984: 76).

1.3. The Archaeology of Borderlands

The study of resistance is often linked to the study of borderlands, since liminal areas are

often a sanctuary for peoples against the state (bandits, disgruntled peasants, indigenous

communities, nomadic pastoralists). Thus James Scott’s (2009) study of Zomia is the

analysis of an immense borderland, inhabited by communities that exist close (and in

relation) to states. The study of borderlands has understandably acquired relevance in the

social sciences during the last few decades, since these have always been spaces of intense

creativity from a political and cultural point of view. We have to distinguish here a variety

of borders: those between states, between states or empires and non-state peoples, and

between ethnic and other social groups. In archaeology, the buffer zones of empires and

states have been receiving quite a lot of attention during the last decades, in some cases due

to the influence of postcolonial theory, in others due to the interest of processual

archaeology in state-building and the integration of expanding political economies.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have been interested in boundaries for a very

long time: culture-historical archaeology and Kulturkreis anthropology had as their main

goal the definition of the limits between different ethnic groups or cultures. The (usually)

fuzzy frontiers in themselves where not of much interest, except to know where a group

ended and started another one. After the decline of culture history, boundaries became

again a matter of concern during the 1970s, in the guise of spatial patterns of material

culture distribution, an issue related to the question of style (Sackett 1977; Wobst 1977;

Hodder 1982; see critique in Lemonnier 1986). This time, more emphasis was put on

contact situations and on zones of cultural friction (Wobst 1977), ethnicity was ruled out as

the only explanation (Hodder 1982), and other forms of social boundaries were explored

23

(see examples in Stark 1998). Particular attention has been paid since the 1990s to the daily

production of material boundaries through practice (Dielter and Herbich 1998; Lightfoot et

al. 1998).

Postcolonial approaches have focused mainly on the creation and negotation of

identities in imperial borderlands, which are ideal environments because they are both

zones of cultural contact and at the same time are removed enough from the state core as to

allow the emergence of alternative forms of life and social identity. Roman archaeology

and historical archaeology have been the two areas where these approaches have gained

greater currency. In historical archaeology, the seminal articles by Kent Lightfoot (1995;

Lightfoot and Martínez 1995) have to be mentioned. While not properly postcolonial, in the

sense that it does not cite the canonical texts (Bhabha, Said, Spivak, etc) (for a postcolonial

approach to borders in historical archaeology see Naum 2010), his concerns are similar as

are his findings: complex, hybrid cultures that emerge in the liminal space in-between the

colonizer and the colonized’s worlds. Lightfoot has demonstrated how native identities and

cultural practices in California survived and developed in new ways in what was essentially

a multicultural frontier (also Silliman 2001). He has also stressed the inherent creativity of

border zones, whose inhabitants are far from being pasive consumers of the innovations

produced in the imperial core. To better understand the cultural logic of the frontier,

Lightfoot proposes to change the focus from the macro to the local.

This perspective is shared by Roman archaeologists interested in boundaries. A

similar move away from simplistic narratives of acculturation (‘Romanization’) has

occurred in the archaeology of the Roman empire, which has gone hand in hand with a

greater attention to the imperial peripheries (Hingley 2005; Mattingly 2010). Here, the

concepts of postcolonial theory have been more widely incorporated (Jiménez 2010), but

the approach is not inherently different to that of North American historical archaeology: as

we have seen in the previous section, a similar interest is found in hybridity, identity and

cultural negotation. Although not cast in postcolonial terms, the works of Peter S. Wells

(1999, 2005) on the Germanic frontier share similar concerns (mainly, the contribution of

‘Barbarians’ to the making of imperial culture) and a comparable focus on small

communities and local experiences versus imperial narratives.

It is probably worth noting that both in North America and Europe many of the

archaeologists that are leading this postcolonial turn on imperial frontiers have a

background in Prehistory. This is not a coincidence: they are researchers with an interest in

non-state societies and an anthropological sensibility. However, the critique that can be

raised of these frontier studies is similar to that of the archaeology and anthropology of

24

resistance: by looking too much at the local, daily life and indigenous communities (an

understandable bias in a Prehistorian), dominant approaches tend to downplay power

asymmetries, violence and the long term effects of imperial politics. However, these issues

are taken seriously by other approaches. Ferguson and Whitehead (1992), for instance, have

focused on war, a common reality in tribal borderlands of states and empires, while

Facundo Gómez Romero (2002) has studied the technologies of power (such as forts)

deployed by the post-colonial Argentinian state in its frontiers with indigenous groups. In

turn, Parker (2006) has emphasized the many faces of borderlands, which comprise a

variety of ‘boundary sets’ (geographic, political, demographic, economic). These, in turn,

lay in a continuum between fluidity and fixedness. While postcolonial approaches have

rightly emphasized the porosity of frontiers, which explains the cultural mixtures to which

borderlands give rise, we should not forget that some boundaries are much less porous than

others, and that political and economic imperatives often make them almost impregnable

(Weizman 2007; McGuire 2013).

There is no reason why the study of politics and culture should exclude each other.

In fact, one of the things that I will try to prove here is that, in the shatter zone of states,

politics produce culture and culture produce politics. Differing historical experiences of

violence and disempowerment are behind the way in which people in the Sudanese-

Ethiopian borderland appropriate, hybridize, use and discard material culture. ‘The

problematic process of identification’ (Naum 2010: 126) is a reason for much less anxiety

than the maintance of political equality and the survival as autonomous peoples against the

pressure of the state.

This alliance of culture and politics is very present in the production of the ‘internal

African frontier’, according to Kopytoff (1987), which, despite its enormous relevance, has

been largely overlooked by archaeologists (both in Africa and elsewhere). The

anthropologist notes that in Africa minor movements of existing societies to the frontiers,

caused by internal or external struggles (ibid.: 20), may result in their territorial expansion,

but it can also lead to the creation of new polities and eventually the emergence of distinct

societies (ibid.: 6), once they have disengaged from the metropole. Despite the separation

from the original society, social and, above all, cultural ties remain that account for the

similarities found across large regions of Africa in political and religious institutions and

cultural traditions. The original homeland remains important in the collective memory of

the new polity, and reference to it is made through ritual and royal paraphernalia (ibid.: 75)

and other material elements, as we will see. This model of frontier is compatible with the

concept of the borderland as a dynamic and hybrid space that has been defended from

25

postcolonial standpoints, although in internal African frontiers social actors are in a more

symmetric situation, as compared with empires and colonial states. In fact, it is the shared

background that explains the success of frontier societies in the continent (ibid.: 27).

What distinguishes African frontiers is both the fact that they have been traditionally

unpoliced and that the people from the core areas that settle in the periphery are not

colonial agents, a prelude of an invasion to come: it is more an issue of small groups of

‘political entrepreneurs’ that mix with local populations, even if they eventually subject

them (ibid. 49). This peculiar situation favored the formation of small, autonomous polities

(ibid.: 11), where emigrants could construct their desired social order: this is the case both

for egalitarian groups, that found shelter in mountainous areas (Froelich 1968) and

disgruntled aristocrats aspiring to power (Caulk 1984). Irrespective of their origins, state

societies have produced stateless communities in the frontier and vice versa (Kopytoff 1987:

76). Regarding the local communities that migrants encounter, if not always assimilated,

they arre always ‘tamed structurally’ (ibid.: 55). In the case of those communities with a

hierarchical tradition, they have been made into a subaltern class, put into a special niche as

providers of specialized services, transformed into outcasts or kept in the geographical

margins of the new society—situations widely documented in Sudan and Ethiopia.

Kopytoff’s work, in fact, is very pertinent to the present work. His description of

ethnogenetic processes in the peripheries of established groups or states tallies well with the

culture history of some of the societies studied here. Thus, both the Mao groups and their

masters, the Busase, are classic examples of frontier societies, and the label can be extended

to the Bertha. All of them have in common a history of migration that gave way to new

polities and cultural forms. In addition, it can be argued that if the Koman groups have not

disappeared altogether (as anthropologists have been warning since the 1930s), it is

undoubtedly due to their capacity to attract ‘the ethnic and cultural detritus produced by the

routine workings of other societies’ (Kopytoff 1987: 7). Ethiopia also fits the concentric

model of the ‘deep frontier’ developed by the anthropologist, with a core area, surrounded

by a ring of closely integrated dependencies, itself bordered by vassal polities, tribute-

paying communities and finally the marches, which were only reached by raids and the

sporadic collection of tribute. It is this final ring with which we will be dealing most of the

time here.

The question of frontiers (both internal and external, state and tribal) has been in the

agenda of Northeast African studies for quite a while. This is understandable, given the

history of border wars (Tronvoll 2009), ethnic conflicts (Fukui and Markakis 1994), and

weak states that have only recently consolidated their power in their unruly borderlands

26

(Markakis 2011). Yet here, too, borders are spaces of immense cultural creativity, not only

of violence and conquest. It is the many boundaries (cultural, political, geographic and

economic) that criss-cross the countries of the Horn that explain their endless cultural and

social diversity and their essential hybrid nature. A stunning hybridity that is also produced

by a mixture of diverse times and things.

1.4 Time

An archaeology of the present seems paradoxical and it seems so for a question of time:

archaeology is the study of things from the past, whereas what is apparently proposed here

is to study things that are not from the past but very much alive. With other archaeologists,

I would argue that the temporality with which archaeology works has its own peculiarities

(Lucas 2005; Witmore 2006; Olivier 2008). It is different, among other things, because it is

not historicist and it is precisely because it is not historicist that an archaeology of the

present is feasible: an archaeology that studies a multiplicity of times through its

materialization in a plurality of things. In this section I will try to demonstrate three things:

first, that the historical discourse of anthropologists and postcolonial historians is still too

much tinged with a modernist and historicist bias, which is visible both in their insistence

on constant change and global connections, and in their abhorrence of ‘the archaic’.

Secondly, I will argue that the temporality that anthropologists and many historians tend to

reject on epistemological and moral grounds is actually the nonmodern time of the

subaltern (including indigenous peoples and marginalized communities). Finally, I contend

that some of the essential characteristics of materiality (durability, ability to stabilize

collectives, resistance to change) are crucial in constituting nonmodern temporalities and in

effecting resistance.

Modern Temporality for Nonmodern Peoples

Since the publication of Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other it has become common

currency to criticize classical anthropology for denying coevalness to the subjects that it

studied: ‘a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a

time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse’ (Fabian 1983: 31).

This temporal distancing of the Other is what he calls allochronism. According to Fabian,

from the very origins of anthropology as a discipline the Other has been located in an

archaic time, different (and far) from our own: to do fieldwork was to engage in time

27

travelling (Fabian 1983: 7). Others, described as ‘primitives’, have been considered

undeveloped embryos of ourselves—the Moderns—failed embryos, in fact, because of their

inability to go beyond their archaic stage of development. These stages of development

have been described at length in the most historicist, unilineal fashion, first by evolutionary

anthropologists like Tylor and Morgan in the nineteenth century, and again—in a more

complex and non-racist way—in the 1950s and 1960s by neo-evolutionary anthropologists.

Locating the Other in a particular stage of the unilineal scale of development has had

sinister colonial implications, but anthropologists not involved in the colonial enterprise, in

the way functionalist and evolutionist ethnographers were, did not escape allochrony either,

according to Fabian: Lévi-Strauss, for instance, is ruthlessly criticized, among other things,

for his use of the taxonomic-allochronic terms ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ and for his denial of

historical time (e.g. Lévi-Strauss 1966): ‘structuralism contributes to the Time-distancing

conventions of anthropological theorizing and writing (Fabian 1983: 60) and in the last

instance, to neocolonialism’ (ibid.: 69). I will try to redress this view and show that by

using terms like ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’ Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres (2001) were

much closer to anticolonial, emancipatory discourses than those who reclaim “history” for

all non-Western communities and who might be unwittingly backing neoliberal agendas.

Many authors have followed Fabian’s critique in different disciplines, including

history and archaeology, and it has become now part of the common sense of the social

sciences and the humanities to insist that Others are our contemporaries, that they are not

primitives and that they have a history. In Fabian’s book, two of the recurrent themes that

we will find repeatedly in anthropological and historical works of the last three decades are

eloquently expressed: the critique of the archaic and the conception of history as change.

With a third theme—connections—they make up the triad that informs the historical

imagination of (most) anthropologists and (many) historians today. Reviewing the way in

which these themes have been deployed in current social thought would need a book in

itself. Here, I will only look at some representative examples to show how the critique of

the archaic and the preoccupation with change work and are ever-present.

Fifty years ago, Lévi-Strauss (1966: 234) wrote: ‘It is tedious as well as useless... to

amass arguments to prove that all societies are in history and change: that this is so is patent.

But in getting embroiled in a superfluous demonstration, there is the risk of overlooking the

fact that human societies react to this fact in very different fashions’. However,

anthropologists still seem worried with demonstrating that all societies go through

transformations. Marshall Sahlins (1985: viii) argues, referring to Hawaii and as a way of

minimizing the novelty of Captain Cook’s voyage, that ‘cultural change... has been going

28

on for millennia’. While Sahlins (1985: vii) eloquently proves that ‘History is culturally

ordered, differently so in different societies’, it seems to me that he fails at showing

different temporalities in the making of history. The very notion of history as change on

which Sahlins focus is a culturally ordered way of perceiving history. Horrified by

ahistorical visions of ‘primitive cultures’ characteristic of colonial sciences, anthropologists

have ended up in the other extreme of the spectrum, portraying nonmoderns in an endless

process of creative transformation, scarcely different from our restless modern existences

(cf. Bauman 2000). There is a modernist bias in privileging, as most anthropologists and

historians do, history as change. There are other possible histories—histories of continuity,

of the very long term, histories of slow rhythms and ancient remnants—but these have been

condemned as politically incorrect during the last decades. Yet these histories of refusing

change and innovation can be the most progressive: for egalitarian groups, resisting

alterations in the social fabric means resisting inequality, division and the state (Clastres

2001). Unlike the perspective of some colonial anthropologists, which saw nonmodern

communities as deprived of history, ‘trapped in repetitive cycles of structural time’

(Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 24), I will argue that they do have a history, but one that

cannot be modeled on our own temporality. In fact, we ought perhaps to rethink what

history is in the first place.

The new wave of historical anthropology of the 1980s was inaugurated, among

others, by Eric Wolf (1999). He was one of the first in calling attention to the intricate

history of nonmodern peoples, but at the same time also contributed to shaping the history

of nonmodern societies in Western terms. This is apparent in the way the history of extra-

European peoples are described as marked by continuous changes and connections, but also

in the emphasis on the strong relationship between non-European societies and the modern

world. Wolf, drawing upon world-systems theory and Marxism vindicated the history of

non-European communities, showing both the radical changes underwent by those

communities and their contribution to the modern world. Wolf’s main concern is to show

that ‘pristine survivals from a timeless past’ do not exist and that the history of the global

processes set up in motion by Europe and that affected non-European societies is also their

history (Wolf 1999: 385). ‘So anthropologists look for pristine replicas of the precapitalist,

preindustrial past in the sinks and margins of the capitalist industrial world’, criticizes Wolf

(1999: 18). But do they? Not any longer. I would say, paraphrasing Wolf, that they look for

pristine replicas of the capitalist, industrial present in the sinks and margins of the capitalist

industrial world.

29

A similar emphasis on both change and modernity can be found in recent books:

Hardt and Negri, for example, celebrate that ‘precolonial civilizations are in many cases

very advanced, rich, complex, and sophisticated; and the contributions of the colonized to

so-called modern civilization are substantial and largely unacknowledged’ (Hardt and Negri

2009: 68). Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), in turn, stresses both processes of transformation

and the interplay with modernity in his portrays of Indian communities. The list of authors

that, from the early 1980s, have insisted in the historicity of non-Western societies and their

relationship to the expansion of modernity and capitalism is long (e.g. Sahlins 1985;

Thomas 1991; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992), but the schema underlying those works is

quite similar: native communities have a long history of change; their traditions and

historicity affected the way cultural contact took place between them and the colonizers;

native communities intervened in the course of modernity; native communities did not

disappear after contact nor were ‘acculturated’, they simply changed (as they had been

doing before the conquest), and have arrived to our days, transformed as we, Westerners,

have been after contact as well. The historicity of the modern and the nonmodern were

parallel and homologous, until they encountered each other and became intertwined in one

single temporality. This is all very politically correct, if it were not for the fact that the

master referent is modernist history.

Among the anthropologists who have confronted history during the last decades,

Jean and John Comaroff stand out. They have criticized the subaltern position of other

cultures vis-à-vis modernity in our historical imagination. They argue that ‘peripheral

populations do not acquire history only when they are impelled along its paths by the

machinations of merchants, missionaries, military men, manufacturers, or ministers of state.

Bluntly put, a truly historical anthropology is only possible to the extent that it is capable of

illuminating the endogenous historicity of all social worlds’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:

24). I could not agree more with this perspective, but I am not sure that the Comaroffs

follow their statement to its last consequences. On the one hand, they have paradoxically

devoted their greatest efforts to understanding the (rather short) history of entanglement

between the Tswana and colonial agents (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). They are

interested in the first place in exploring how non-Western peoples ‘fashioned their own

visions of modernity’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 5). In this, they follow the trend of

historicizing colonial encounters from the native point of view, which has been outlined

above.

On the other hand, and more importantly, the Comaroffs’ insistence on

transformation and dynamism betrays a modernist conception of history, which might be at

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odds with local temporalities. They claim to rupture with the basic tropes of Western

historiography, which they identify with biography and event (Comaroff and Comaroff

1992: 27), but forget three other basic tropes: change, connection and the negation of

remnants. The first two tropes are characteristic of positivist historiography, the third of all

historiography. Like Benjamin’s (1968: 257) unrelenting Angel of History, who ‘keeps

piling wreckage upon wreckage’ in its wake, the Comaroffs perceive change in every

culture as ‘perennial, ongoing, inevitable’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 23). This might

not be the empty time of modernity, but it certainly is the empty time of postmodernity,

where everything is fluid, fragmentary, complex and ambiguous (Bauman 2000)—another

sort of neutral time, now fit for the colorful histories of little peoples, rather than universal

narratives of progress. Historical anthropology, for the Comaroffs, ‘is dedicated to

exploring the processes that make and transform particular worlds’, but why would a

historical anthropology not study what is left from the past in particular worlds, what is not

fluid, but thick, sticky and persistent?

The problem is that the Comaroffs, like most other social scientists today, abhor the

archaic. They criticize the divide between the ‘primitivist fiction’ of self-perpetuating

traditional orders, on the one hand, and the unbounded worlds of modernity, dismissing that

view as ‘pastoral archaism’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 32). Not surprisingly, the

Comaroffs’ book opens with a mockery of a newspaper article describing ‘mystic warriors’

who fight with magical objects in the Mozambican civil war—the quintessence of exotic

archaism (ibid.: 3-5). My point is that anthropologists have dealt with the archaic all too

rapidly and, in so doing, they have ironically ended up espousing a historicist time. From

this neo-historicist perspective, remains from the past are, if not completely annihilated,

transformed beyond recognition. No prehistoric remnants are perceived to exist or at least

they are put under suspicion—this is also the spirit of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983)

legendary book The invention of tradition. The denial of tradition is quite clear in James

Scott’s outstanding study of highland communities of South-East Asia. The author argues

that foraging (the oldest of all subsistence practices), far from being something from the

deep past, is a rather recent adaptation to historical conditions of flight from the State (Scott

2009: 185, 189), an argument that has been made already for hunter-gatherers of South

America (Balée 1994; Clastres 2001). The same applies to slash-and-burn agriculture,

which was invented after escaping from the irrigated rice fields of the State (Scott 2009:

197); tribal organizations, which are a response to hierarchical and centralized political

organizations (ibid.: 210), and the absence of literacy. One wonders if anything existed

before the state, beyond a proclivity toward resisting it.

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How is it that social scientists perceive the words ‘prehistoric’ and ‘archaic’ today

as insults? What is wrong with what does not change, what remains from the deep past?

The only problem I can see is that it does not fit our modern(ist) sensibilities. We have

internalized too much the image of the Angel of History and we find now difficult to

imagine the Other as having a history that is not cast in Western temporal terms, that is,

marked by continuous change, interaction, sophistication and complexity. I have the

impression that, in a more subtle and democratic way, we are repeating the mistake of

Afrocentrists, when they tried to find the world-history of the state—in Ranajit Guha’s

terms (2002)—everywhere in Africa, as if the absence of the state prevented the Other to be

part of history proper (González-Ruibal 2009: 124). Now, having generally admitted that

history exists beyond the state, the question is to go a step forward and fully accept a

historicity of other temporal rhythms. We have to accept the historicity of societies against

history, to paraphrase Clastres (2001), and this means making sense of temporal mixtures

(heterotemporalities) which are different from our own. Appraising these particular

heterotemporalities is necessary for an understanding of ‘endogenous historicities’, using

the Comaroffs’ words. Yet what they offer us is (a masterful) ‘endogenous history’, rather

than historicity, because an exploration of temporality is largely absent. The time of the

Tswana and that of the white settlers fit together. It is their cultures (and culture-histories)

that do not, and what the anthropologists study: the ways in which the Tswana and the

missionaries struggle, negotiate, cooperate, seduce and fight each other and produce novel

cultural products and historical settings. At the end of the day, though, the framework is

the time of modernity. The time of ‘perennial, ongoing, inevitable change’. The time that

leaves no one behind.

We refuse anything that may be taken for primitive or archaic. Thus, when an

isolated group of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon forest is found by invading settlers, we

are not willing to accept it in our epistemological and ethical master narratives until it has

been proven that its members were originally living in settled villages as intensive

agriculturalists, before being chased away by the turmoil brought by the Portuguese

colonization. Paradigmatic examples of this widespread procedure abound (e.g. Clemmer

2009). Although we consider this historicizing procedure a rather new invention, it was

already used by Lévi-Strauss more than half a century ago. The French anthropologist

already talked about ‘pseudo-archaism’ to refer to groups that had been mistakenly

considered as very primitive in Brazil. He considered that their situation could be explained

by a historical process, very much in line with current anthropological thinking. ‘We have

seen..., writes Lévi-Strauss (1987 [1952]: 152), that in a vast region of the world... those

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societies that might look like the most archaic are all affected by contradictions in which we

can discover the mark of the event, impossible to ignore’. Wolf and Clastres further

inquired into what used to be a rather counterintuitive discovery. Today, however, it has

become common knowledge: ‘primitives’ do not exist, they are just the effect of the state

and/or modernity—a conclusion that neither Lévi-Strauss nor Clastres would have ever

endorsed. We do not want to hear about ‘primitives’ anymore. This is eloquently shown in

the controversial case of the Tasaday (Hemley 2007), the alleged group of isolated foragers

from the Philippines who were discovered in the 1970s. They were first presented as a

pristine group of Stone Age peoples. This image was counterattacked with a very

postmodern view that they were pure hoax. It seems that the truth is somewhere in the

middle. However, the radically historicizing stance of the postmodern anthropologists

focuses immediately in change and contact. Why not look at what links the Tasaday with a

non-state, nonmodern past? With traditions of foraging that have existed for millennia? The

point is not that many anthropologists deny the supposedly archaic character of any society

as a whole (something with which I wholeheartedly agree); they also try to deconstruct any

trace of ‘primitiveness’ in any particular group and are not very interested in examining the

cultural mechanisms employed to keep things ‘primitive’ (or cold). This way of reasoning

explains that some anthropologists seem more enthralled watching Australian Aborigines

watching Hollywood videos (Michaels 2002), than by the unique fact that they have

managed to keep an artistic expression rooted in the Pleistocene (Mulvaney and Kaminga

1999: 367-368), that thrived until well into the twentieth century (Layton 1992: 17-27) and

that still bears meaning for contemporary indigenous communities. Similarly, most scholar

seem to be more keen to show that Native Americans have been always changing since they

arrived to America (an obviousness, as Lévi-Strauss remarked), whereas the fact that they

have kept traditions that can be tracked back to ten thousand years ago (Echo-Hawk 2000)

seem to produce less excitement. These outstanding achievements of preservation and

reproduction are downplayed by (post)modern anthropologists for whom only

transformation and change reflect human creativity and genius. I consider, instead, that

resisting change requires as much ingenuity as producing it.

This emphasis on transformation, which emerged in the 1970s and especially after

the rise of postmodern anthropology, was a countermeasure against imperial narratives that

denied the history of indigenous and subaltern peoples. However, many societies insist in

proving colonialists right and are tremendously amnesic with regard to their own historical

experience. They rejoice in the abolition of history as change, which is equated with trouble,

ontological insecurity, and political inequalities (Hernando 2002: 69-79; fig. 8, 2012: 73,

33

fig. 3; Scott 2009: 275-276). Interestingly, the first thing a Sabu elder told me in my first

interview with his people—to the uneasiness of the postcolonial ethnographer—was: ‘I

want you to know this: that we live exactly as our ancestors did’1—the fact that this was not

exactly the case is secondary. Yet despite much fuzz about hearing or not hearing the voice

of the subaltern, we are not actually paying attention to them—both because we are too

afraid of committing the colonialists’ mistake and deny history to indigenous communities

(Suzman 2004: 214) and because it contradicts our rationality. I agree with James Suzman

(2004) when he points out that we have to distinguish more carefully between historical

consciousness, on the one hand, and the past as exposed through historical inquiry, on the

other. He argues that some societies, such as the Kalahari San, may be ahistorical in

important ways. James Scott also points out that ‘how much history a people have, far from

indicating their low stage of evolution, is always an active choice’ (James 2009: 237).

Whereas nineteenth-century anthropologists could not bear the idea of an historical

nonmodern society, it seems that today most anthropologists and historians cannot stand the

prospect of a group that has not had a history, which can be mirrored upon our own, at least

in rhetorical terms. Birth rightly points out that much contemporary anthropology desires to

document and see change (Birth (2008: 14), but this is actually a desire that permeates all

social sciences and humanities. The answer to the question that I posed above (why do we

reject the archaic?) is simply: because we love history—understood as perpetual change.

But why do we love history? Basically, because it is at the heart of our identity as

(post)moderns (Birth 2008: 15). Amor fati. As (post)moderns, we have replaced evolution

(the universalistic trope of the classic modernism), for history (which leaves room for

diversity, small narratives, and the local), but the concern for change as essential to being

human remains the same (see Hernando 2012).

Along with change and the negation of remnants from the past, the third element at

work in the historical imagination of anthropologists and archaeologists is interaction. Like

change, contact is also crucial for our modern identity: we live immersed in a network,

physical and virtual, that brings together all the corners of the world (Castells 1996). It is

therefore not strange that our concern for networks is extended to the past (e.g. Van

Dommelen and Knapp 2010; Knappet 2011). This supermodern spatiality and temporality

(Harvey 1990; Connerton 2009) is so deeply ingrained in our worldview and in our identity,

that it is hard for us to conceive Others (of the present or of the past) as living outside an

intensely interconnected existence. Furthermore, as it occurs with change, connection

(which implies mobility) is good; it is cosmopolitan. Rootedness, instead, is perceived as

1 Interview conducted in the village of Yeri (Gambela region), March, 2010.

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reactionary (Friedman 2002: 30). Nations, ethnic groups and rooted senses of belonging are

things of the past. It is time for routes not roots (Clifford 1997). Tim Cresswell (2006: 25)

notes that ‘In contemporary social thought, words associated with mobility are

unremittingly positive. If something can be said to be fluid, dynamic, in flux, or simply

mobile, then it is seen to be progressive, exciting, and contemporary. If, on the other hand,

something is said to be rooted, based on foundations, static, or bounded, then it seen to be

reactionary, dull and of the past’. If we do not value roots anymore (after the lessons of

Nazism, the Rwandan genocide and the Balkan wars), we would not want them for the

people we study. We want them to be cosmopolitans, not nationalists (Friedman 2002: 29).

Nevertheless, many groups not only have tried (and sometimes managed) to avoid contact

and exchanges with other peoples, they have even built a discourse and developed an ethos

around it. In some regions of South America, indigenous communities are in ‘voluntary

isolation’, refusing all contact with the modern world (IWGIA 2007). Refusing contact, as

refusing change, is part of the identity of many nonmodern communities—less and less so,

as the nation-state and capitalist multinationals encroach upon their last sanctuaries. It is

more than identity: as Harvey (1990: 432) reminds, ‘attachment to a certain conception of

time and history is a political decision’. I agree with Fabian (1983: 51) that the

anthropology of Time becomes the politics of time. If that is true, therefore by imposing on

the peoples we study a notion of time as change and fluidity, we are also imposing a

particular politics (those of late capitalism). As social scientists, we have to be very aware

of the space and time we wish to promote (Harvey 1990).

To conclude, during much of the nineteenth and twentieth century Western identity

was exclusivist—the pure Other, the primitive par excellence, had no history and was

isolated. Postmodernity, and the associated discourse of multiculturalism, brought a

necessity for inclusiveness. This has meant temporal inclusiveness, in the guise of history,

and spatial inclusiveness, in the shape of multi-sited ethnographies, which explore

interactions in the real and virtual worlds (Marcus 1995). I argue that truly respecting the

temporality of the Other—and, by extension, Others themselves—means overcoming the

anxiety of making the Other historical in modernist terms. My impression is that, in the end,

making the Other our contemporary is not done for the Other’s sake, but for our own, for

the uneasiness that it produces in us real difference—in this case, experiences of time that

abolish the very idea of time as we live it. Fabian (1983: 35) writes that ‘It takes

imagination and courage to picture what would happen to the West (and to anthropology) if

its temporal fortress were suddenly invaded by the Time of its Other’. Since Fabian’s book,

however, the Other has still been invaded by our time—now the time of multiculturalism.

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For truly appraising difference, we have to acknowledge that the alterity of the Other

cannot be neutralized or made it amenable to our own fantasies. We have to admit that

Others live in their own time and although part of it can be translated into our own, another

part, a core of radical difference, cannot and should not. This core can be somewhat

equated with what has been termed ‘the archaic’, a deeply problematic and connoted

concept that I will try to reclaim in a later section.

History and the Time of the Subaltern

A step forward to do justice to other kinds of history is to take multiple temporalities into

account. In recent years, the idea of heterotemporality or multitemporality has been gaining

adepts, including archaeology (Witmore 2006; Olivier 2008). Among the strongest

proponents in the field of history is Dipesh Chakrabarty. ‘The writing of history—writes

Chakrabarty (2000: 109)—must implicitly assume a plurality of times existing together, a

disjuncture of the present with itself’. This applies not just to history, but to other social and

human sciences as well. Chakrabarty channels multitemporality through a double concept

of history inspired by Marx. What he calls History 1 is the universalistic and abstract

history of capital (Chakrabarty 2000: 63). History 2, in turn, is what Marx describes as

‘remnants’ of ‘vanished social formations’ (ibid.: 64). Chakrabarty contends that both

histories cannot be separated: the multiple pasts of History 2 ‘inhere in capital and yet

interrupt and punctuate the run of capital’s own logic’ (ibid.), by suggesting ‘another time

that is not on the same, secular, homogeneous calendar’ (ibid.: 93). However,

Chakrabarty’s approach tends to privilege, metadiscursively, History 1 in that it sets the

pace and framework of the historical narrative. The protagonist of History 2 is still just ‘a

minor term in a dialectic that will emerge into a more equitable universality’ (Bhabha 1994:

341). Besides, concepts that are ultimately Western, such as labor and capital, and

European dating systems still furnish the orientational frameworks for structuring the past

(Birth 2008: 14). History 2 is, as Chakrabarty himself notes, an irruption/interruption of the

hegemonic abstract history of capital. A similar line is followed, as we saw, by Eric Wolf

(1999), for whom the historicity of the non-Europeans is marked by the master referent of

European history (or the expansion of capital, to be more precise), and Hardt and Negri

(2009: 67-70), who consider the antimodern stance of indigenous peoples resisting

modernity as already-always encompassed by modernity, even before modernity itself. The

outstanding prevalence of History 1 is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in Scott’s

anarchist history of Upland Southeast Asia. According to the anthropologist, we should not

36

see Hill Peoples as ‘pre-anything. In fact, they are better understood as post-irrigated rice,

postsedentary, postsubject and perhaps even postliterate’ (Scott 2009: 337). In this way, the

Other cannot be conceived to live in their own temporality: a time that is neither pre- nor

post-. It is always dependant on the temporality of the state or capitalism: History 1.

This symbolical and totalizing preeminence granted to History 1, either as an

enabling or disabling space of historical agency, has to be displaced. Vernacular histories

and nonmodern experiences cannot be continually overshadowed by the hyper-referentiality

of modernity, either explicitly or implicitly. Yet the agency of the subaltern that many

scholars investigate and celebrate today always exists in strict dependence to the

temporalities of History 1. It is a historical agency within modernity, the colony or the state.

With Bhabha, I argue that we need a re-inscription of the sign itself (history as the sign of

modernity)—a transformation of the site of enunciation; otherwise, we run the risk of

falling into a mimetic discourse that maintains the hegemonic structures of power (Bhabha

1994: 337).

Privileging History 2 does not mean to forsake the burden of dominance and

violence that is ever-present in History 1. It implies going to the site and moment of

enunciation, before the split of History between modernity and its subaltern epiphenomena.

It means making nonmodern temporalities the sign that prevails in the inscription of

History: delving into vernacular experiences of rooted stasis and deep time, revaluing the

remnant and the archaic. Deep time, in fact, is what lacks in most historical ethnographies,

focused on cultural encounters between indigenous peoples and colonial modernity or the

nation state. Anthropologists see the effects of the European expansion of the late 15th

century onwards and the multiple and contradictory historical experiences unleashed by it:

this is their horizon of historicality. But they are less interested in engaging with deep

temporalities—the very ancient in the very present. After the demise of diffusionist

anthropology (which was indeed interested in deep history), the only master referent for the

historically-minded anthropologist would be History 1 (state and modernity), which looked

much more manageable and empirically sound—the state history of the written letter.

Looking at History 2 is risky, because in a sense it implies retaking the path in which

diffusionist anthropologists once got lost—with often nefarious consequences.

Emphasizing History 2 also implies a political move. By crossing out the master referent,

we can avoid the anxiety of making the subaltern stand to its demanding needs. We do not

have to make the societies we study fit history-as-change-and-interaction. We do not have

to find a way of making people vernacular modern or alter-modern. It does not mean that

they are not struggling with modernity or that they have not changed in centuries, but these

37

master referents of historicity—modernity and change—are downplayed here. In this

narration, thus, History 1 will be always present, but it will be more like a menacing

shadow, behind the slow, dense temporalities of History 2.

In closer inspection, it turns out that the two histories of capital that Chakrabarty

retrieves from Marx to build postcolonial theory are not much different from temporal

dualities (or multiplicities) suggested by other scholars These perspectives, however, are

perhaps more radical, in that they suggest ways of debunking the primacy and

naturalization of History 1. These theories come from an anthropologist and a philosopher

that are less anxious about the state and capitalism than Chakrabarty—and most current

social scientists, for that matter. When one talks about dichotomic historicities, one that

comes readily to mind is Lévi-Strauss’ famous distinction between hot and cold societies.

According to the anthropologist, cold societies tend to salvage the ‘debris of past events’

and ‘annul the possible effect of historical factors on their equilibrium and continuity’

(Lévi-Strauss 1966: 234), as opposed to hot societies, which resolutely internalize ‘the

historical process, making it the moving power of their development’. The object of cold

societies is ‘to make it the case that the order of temporal succession should have as little

influence as possible on their content’ (ibid.). Therefore, it can be said that hot societies are

those that make themselves at home in History 1, whereas cold societies are those in which

the rhythms and temporalities of History 2 prevail. Unlike Chakrabarty, Lévi-Strauss did

not make cold history dependant on hot history. Cold history is a political and cultural

achievement: the art of stopping time.

Another take on double temporality is that of philosopher Jacques Rancière (1992).

Rancière puts back politics in the dual temporality: History 1 is the history of the powerful,

History 2 that of the subaltern. They do coexist, but one is hegemonic and silences the other.

According to the philosopher, the new way of writing history of the Annales School

reversed the equation, killing the king and allowing the repressed temporality of the

subaltern classes to emerge. When the historian metaphorically enters the king’s office and

examines his desk, he finds two kinds of paperwork, ambassadors’ dispatches and the futile

papers of the poor, ‘those who speak outside the truth, invading the lost time of history’

(Rancière 1992: 50). This ‘invasion’ is akin to Chakrabarty’s ‘interruption/irruption’, but

the difference between both metaphors is not trivial: the historicity of the subaltern in

Rancière invades, eats away and gobbles up the time of the king, it makes its truth prevalent

over that of History 1.

Although their theories differ, Lévi-Strauss, Rancière and Chakrabarty agree in that

History 2, or cold history or the futile paperwork of history, is the time of the subaltern:

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workers, peasants, indigenous people, stateless peoples, the poor. Another point of

agreement that unites Rancière and Chakrabarty is the vehicle of expression of History 2.

The historian considers that the pasts of History 2 ‘[are] partly embodied in the person’s

bodily habits, in unselfconscious collective practices, in his or her reflexes about what it

means to relate to objects in the world as a human being and together with other human

beings in his given environment’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 66). Rancière, in turn, writes that the

history of the subaltern is the world of ‘objects and tools, the practices of the everyday, uses

of the body, symbolic behavior. The entire domain, in short, of the great regularities of

material life’ (Rancière 1994: 58; also Connerton 1989: 18-19). History 2, then, is not just

the time of the subaltern, it is also de time of things. The time of the subaltern, then, is the

time of things and this is so among other reasons, because, as Michel Serres (1995: 87)

reminds us, ‘[t]he object... stabilizes our relationships, it slows down the time of our

revolutions... The object, for us, makes our history slow’. The time of things has

traditionally been a time of resistance, the time of that which moves slowly and drags with

it the weight of the past: this is why Marinetti and the futurists wanted to burn down

museums and monuments and celebrated those things that apparently escaped the fate of

things: airplanes and cars, artifacts of speed and movement. Ironically, even those things

have ended up slowing down history’s pace: the late Victorian machinery of cars has

changed little for well over a hundred years and there has been no major breakthrough in

aeronautics for over half a century (Edgerton 2011). Even the supermodern is archaic.

Reclaiming the Archaic

Those who explored for the first time the relationships between deep temporality, the time

of the subaltern and the time of things were evolutionist and diffusionist anthropologists.

The work of Baumann and Westermann (1948), for instance, can be considered

archaeological, in that they try to reconstruct, mostly through material culture, the deep

history of all African cultures: the artifacts existing in the present allow us to know the past.

That the culture-historical school produced flawed narratives and was suffused with

colonialist intentions should not detract from the value of some of their insights. The

problem is that the way in which they understood the particular temporality of the

nonmoderns was mediated through a historicist concept of the ‘archaic’, which saw most

elements of the past in the present as incoherent remnants, debris from particular historical

trajectories (Marvin Harris 2001: 164-168; Lucas 2012: 29-33). The study of cultural

remnants was perceived more or less like historical linguistics (Froelich 1968: 25; Lucas

39

2012: 32). Thus, there are elements in contemporary Indoeuropean languages that preserve

traces of a past of ancient warriors, nomadic pastoralists or Roman emperors that have no

concordance with present societies but somehow managed to survive in modern languages.

In the same way that philologists tried (and still try) to recover history through the lexical

traces of remote pasts, anthropologists felt capable of retracing the historical evolution of

traditional societies by looking at awkward institutions and archaic artifacts. The work of

archaeologists, linguists and anthropologists was quite similar (Lucas 2012: 31): they all

studied relics, survivals and remnants that, although absurd in the present, offered a

window into the past.

This of course is a very historicist perspective that creates a strong divide between

past and present. Still, it admits that the past is not completely over but lingers through

material and immaterial traces in the present. In the case of anthropology, the archaic

remnants could be tangible or intangible. Relictual artifacts (such as elements of dress,

adornments or digging sticks) were sometimes considered to have survived because they

are too unimportant (Froelich 1968: 33). I will try to show here that it is rather the opposite:

they were too important to just let them go, although their importance is not always obvious.

Archaism did not affect isolated elements, some groups were perceived as remnants

in themselves and accordingly named with the temporal prefix pre- or ur-: they were

considered the living ancestors of other, more developed groups. These pre- peoples are a

perfect example of the allochronic practices of anthropology that, as we have seen,

Johannes Fabian (1983) criticized. In the case that concerns us here, the ethnic groups of

the Ethiopian-Sudanese borderland were called ‘Pre-Nilotes’ (Grottanelli 1948, 1966;

Murdock 1959: 170-180), a term which implied a double primitiveness: they were the

primitive ancestor (pre-) of a primitive people (the Nilotes). Grottanelli’s Pre-Nilotes added

to an already long list of prehistoric fossils in Africa that were the object of an abundant

literature during the first half of the twentieth century. Culture-historical anthropologists

struggled to define large cultural circles that comprised what seemed the most archaic

civilizations of Sub-Saharan Africa. Some of those proposals seem absurd today. This is the

case of the boomerang culture circle or afro-australian culture, with origins in the

Palaeolithic and that spread, as the name indicates, between Eastern Africa and the Pacific

(Ankermann 1905: 82-83). Other culture circles are less bizarre, but still have the problem

of trying to find common historical origins and cover impossibly extensive areas: the Euro-

African hunters of the steppes that stretch from Southern Africa to Morocco from the Late

Palaeolithic onwards are a good example (Baumann and Westermann 1948: 40-48). Other

attempts were more realistic: Grottanelli’s concept of ‘Pre-Nilotes’, despite its errors,

40

singled out a variety of peoples that clearly had a lot in common: they are more or less the

borderland communities that are examined in this book. One of the last efforts at defining

(and refining) archaic cultural circles—that of Jean-Claude Froelich (1968)—had some

useful points as well. Froelich looked at mountainous pockets in the northernmost part of

Sub-Saharan Africa and explained the cultural peculiarities of the peoples who inhabit them

not as the result of their supposed common cultural origins (like Baumann and Westermann

1948: 65-71), but rather as the product of their ability to escape from the control of the state

and ‘civilization’. These paléonigritiques are described as ‘peoples apparently passive,

conservative, attached to the land and closed up in islets surrounded by younger

populations and subjected to continuous pressure by these more active elements’ (Froelich

1968: 10). In this way, he somewhat anticipates later anthropological models, such as those

of Wendy James (1979, 1980) or James C. Scott (2009).

Anthropologists have criticized the unscientific and speculative nature of culture-

historical reconstructions and their emphasis on insignificant material details to reconstruct

ambitious long-term histories. The critique was often correct, the counter-proposal not. The

riposte to culture-historical anthropologists consisted, on the one hand, in replacing culture-

history with either no history at all—the choice of structuralism and functionalism—or with

the homogenous empty time of historicism—the choice of postmodernism. Regarding

things, the solution was to abandon them altogether. Things were for museum curators, not

for real anthropologists (Lemonnier 1992: 11; Pfaffenberger 1992: 492-493).

A similar biography of disengagement with archaic traces and deep history can be

suggested for other disciplines. In their obsession with origins and their attempt at

reconstructing history, culture-historical anthropologists were not alone: psychoanalysis

was engaged in a similar quest during the same period, often with homologous results.

Anthropologists and psychoanalysts shared the same premises: the past leaves traces in the

present; by looking at these traces, we can discover the origins of contemporary phenomena

and reconstruct their historical processes. Although Freud himself doubted his own

reconstructions (Brenneis 1999: 189), psychoanalysis, for many, became associated with

wildly speculative history as much as culture-historical anthropology. As with this later

discipline, a widespread solution was to abandon or downplay history: this was the case

with Gestalt, behaviorism and cognitivism, mainly in the United States. The problem with

psychoanalysis and culture-historical anthropology’s notion of the archaic was their

insistence in specific origins: a moment in time and a geographical location. Consider

Freud’s famous analysis of “The Wolfman”. He explicitly reconstructs a very particular

moment and place, an Urszene, to which the neurosis of his patient can be traced back: the

41

cogitum a tergo of his parents in a warm summer afternoon that took place while the 18-

month old child was present in a cot located in the parent’s bedroom (Freud 2006: 225-226).

The neurotic patient later transformed the original material in different ways throughout his

life, through varying associations of the repressed experience to different things, people and

places. Freud later qualifies in different ways this Urszene, but the detailed original

reconstruction remains baffling.

When psychoanalysis and culture-historical anthropology fail, therefore, is not when

they call attention to the apparently incongruous fragments of the past in the present. They

fail when they try to fit historicist temporality: a temporality that is plotted along a lineal

trajectory, which begins in a very specific moment in time and is punctuated by equally

specific historical episodes. Those disciplines work best when they detach themselves from

historicism, when they reveal temporal mixtures and pleats and forget about specific origins.

How does anthropology conduct its critique of the archaic? A good example of the

procedure is offered by Scott (2009: 189). He resorts to the example of the Sirionó of

Bolivia, which were depicted as a Palaeolithic survival by its first ethnographer (Holmberg

1969 [1950]). The group was revisited by Stearman (1984) who discovered that they have

been in fact crop-growing villagers until the 1920s, when they became hunter-gatherers

after a series of epidemics that killed a large part of the population—again the master

referent of modernity introducing change and history into a people without history. The

story, however, might be more complex. As far as we know, the Sirionó have never stopped

being horticulturalists, not even when they were studied in the 1940s, but the weight of

agriculture and foraging has varied through time, depending on the circumstances. As

cultural practices, they are both very ancient, neither of them an invention of colonial

encounters—although colonial processes have had a role in shaping them. The important

point, though, is that a heavy reliance on hunting is far from being a recent innovation

among the Sirionó and the key to its importance is given by material culture and

specifically their bows and arrows. The relevance of these objects among the male Sirionó

was such as to become the identifying sign of the community in the eyes of outsiders:

Holmberg called them ‘Nomads of the Long Bow’. Obviously, this is not something that

could be improvised overnight or after an epidemic.

More importantly, the bows and arrows and the high number of arrows that the

Sirionó carry with them recall the situation of other Tupi-Guarani groups who live

thousands of kilometers away, in northeastern Brazil. This is the case of the Awá, with

whom I had the occasion to work (González-Ruibal et al. 2011). They make an extremely

similar kind of bow and also carry with them a huge number of arrows. The extraordinary

42

care invested by the Awá and the Sirionó in making, mending, using and even discarding

bows and arrows, and their manifold structural connections with other phenomena in their

cultures, have been interpreted by my colleagues and I as an index of the ontological

importance of these weapons (and hunting) among them. Bows and arrows make the

Sirionó and the Awá as human beings. As the Awá and the Sirionó were separated during

the Tupi-Guarani migrations and they did not have the chance to meet again at least since

the sixteenth century, the only way their bows and arrows can be so similar is because they

were similar before they parted company a thousand years ago. There is no need to deny

that the Sirionó and the Awá had a complex history of interaction with the state or that their

livelihoods have been dramatically affected by it. However, too much emphasis has been

placed already on these external agents—in History 1—and very little on what remains

against all odds. There is something ‘archaic’ among the Sirionó and the Awá, remnants of

the deep past that are active and important in their present lives—not mere relics. It would

be wrongheaded to make of the bow just another invented tradition of the sort that

anthropologists and historians cherish so much: an English-made Scottish kilt (Trevor-

Roper 1983) or an Aboriginal Australian spearhead for British collectors (Harrison 2002).

To reduce the bow or hunting to a kind of invented tradition does not only devalue the

culture of the Sirionó and Awá. It also overlooks the fact that maintaining alive the

archaic—in the sense of ta archaia, old things (Witmore 2009b; Olsen et al. 2012: 3)—is

something that requires enormous efforts of care and curation (Olsen et al. 2012: 203-207).

The refusal to accept the archaic is based on a very modernist notion of time and materiality.

For some historians and anthropologists it seems to be difficult to accept that a thing from

the remote past is not exclusively from the past but also from the present (Witmore 2009b:

31). The fact that a technology is ten millennia old does not make it less contemporary than

the latest digital device. We should not try to deny its archaic character, but rather wonder

at the continuous work that has been invested in maintaining ta archaia among us. There is

growing awareness that pasts must be worked for in order to endure (Witmore 2009b: 33;

Olsen et al. 20012) and also that things are continuously changing, decaying and falling

apart and therefore huge efforts are needed to produce stability (Hodder 2012: 64-70, 209).

To maintain a pottery technology or a throwing stick from the Neolithic to our days is an

impressive feat. We owe those feats of stabilization more often than not to subaltern

peoples: women, slaves, servants, indigenous peoples and the working classes.

It is probably for this reason that maintenance activities have been traditionally

marginalized in the humanities and social sciences, as opposed to the activities geared

toward transformation and innovation (Montón-Subías and Sánchez-Romero 2008).

43

Almudena Hernando reminds us: ‘[m]aintenance activities are vital for the support of the

group, but they are structurally opposite to activities that are associated with individuality

and power. Because of this, they have not been recognized by History’ (2008: 13). Old

things have been forgotten, new things have been given precedence. This is obvious in

archaeology. The study of the European Bronze Age, for instance, has traditionally

revolved around the things that change: masculine artifacts of war and work (spears, swords,

axes). The objects made or used by women and that changed much less, such as pottery or

quern stones, the things that speak of slower temporal rhythms, ancient times, nurturing and

cooperation, these have been marginalized from archaeological discourses until very

recently. Reclaiming the archaic, then, means also reclaiming the labor and experience of

the subaltern.

1.5. Materiality

In the previous section, we have seen how the temporality embraced by anthropology

rejected deep time and remnants. This move also implied a rejection of things, as deep time

and material culture were closely linked in the culture-historical discourse, which used

objects to reconstruct wildly speculative historical trajectories. Anthropologists, however,

threw the baby with the bath water and the baby has not yet been fully recovered (Olsen

2010). There has been, of course, a reawakening in the interest for material culture in

cultural anthropology (Miller 1991), but this interest has been partial for at least four

reasons: 1) it has massively focused on the symbolic qualities of things and selected only

those things that were more easily amenable to a hermeneutic approach (Olsen 2010); 2) it

has overlooked materiality itself (Olsen 2003, 2010; Hodder 2012); 3) it has done without

collectives of things and their manifold relations (Hodder 2012); 4) it has largely forgotten

production and discard (but see Douny 2007) and privileged consumption instead

(González-Ruibal 2006a). These problems affect the different schools of modern material

culture studies differently (González-Ruibal 2006a: 119-120). Thus, the German tradition

has kept a totalizing view of material culture, which can be seen in the diverse

monographies of sub-Saharan African communities that are still being published (see a

critical overview in Hahn 2003). Even if they have kept and sometimes developed the

material richness of early anthropology, the problems with their approach are threefold:

first, they do not deal with people and things anymore (as in late 19th and early 20th

century ethnography), but just things; second, they seldom take into account Western

44

technology; and finally, they usually work with outdated sociological frameworks (but see

Hahn 2005).

The French or French-speaking tradition, following Durkheim’s and later Mauss’

legacy, is much richer from a sociological point of view, but it is rarely totalizing (see the

journal Téchniques et culture). Thus, the Pétréquins study axes (Pétréquin and Pétréquin

1993) or pots (Pétréquin 1999) in impressive detail and with remarkable sociological

sensibility, but they do not explore the relations between them, the whole ecology of things

in the Melanesian societies that they study. In fact, with a remarkable exceptions

(Lemonnier 1992), few authors deal with full material assemblages, despite Pierre

Lemonnier bemoaning ‘how little chance there is of understanding the material culture of

any society by studying just a few artefacts, or, worse, by studying artefacts of only a single

type’ (Lemonnier 1992: 9). On the other hand, classic anthropologists such as Godelier,

Meillassoux or Clastres rarely take material culture into account; at the most, they see

objects as material metaphors of wider social facts (e.g. Godelier 2002).

Finally, the British school, with its prevailing focus on Western artifacts, after the

postcolonial turn, reflected on the Journal of Material Culture, has also deprived us of the

holistic approaches of early ethnographies. They have even led us further away from other

ways of using, thinking and engaging with material culture. This is what happens when

anthropologists return home from the tropics, as Latour (1993: 100) criticizes. Thus,

material culture specialists have studied mostly industrial objects, from cars (Miller 1991).

And even when they look beyond their country, material culturists seem to be interested

mostly in partial studies—see, for example, the otherwise wonderful work of Glassie

(1999), with chapters on carpets and pots—or on Western commodities in non-Western

contexts (Miller 1998, 2001). Contrary to what Lemonnier recommends, home decorations,

blue jeans, cars or cell phones are usually studied in isolation in this tradition.

Ethnoarchaeology has been, in some cases, a way of engaging more fully with the

materiality of traditional communities and with complex assemblages of people and things,

as we have seen, but the problems in this case are the analogical uses to which the materials

have been usually put and the scarce social interpretation of the data.

It can be argued that archaeology is in a good position to overcome these flaws,

because the discipline has traditionally dealt with symbols as well as with matter, with

entire collectives of humans and things, and with complete chaîne operatoires (Skibo and

Schiffer 2008; Olsen et al. 2012). In that, archaeology has kept the indiscriminate interest

of early ethnography in the whole materiality of social life, from the way of tying a knot to

a ritual house. This interest is perfectly captured by Marcel Griaule, when he says that ‘all

45

human activities are translated into objects, and we can say that, theoretically, it would be

possible to achieve knowledge of a society by founding the observation on everything it has

created or used and by surrounding it with a maximum of documentation’ (Griaule 1938:7).

Having remained faithful to materiality in all its variety and complexity, archaeology

should be able to undertake the study not just of past material cultures, but present ones as

well (Harrison 2011). To make justice to the relevance of things, however, three issues have

to considered: ontology, the unconscious and texture.

Ontology

Since the late 1970s great attention has been paid by archaeologists and anthropologists to

the symbolic aspects of material culture (Hodder 1982). Artifacts are considered to be

meaningfully constituted and, as symbols, to be actively manipulated by social actors to

attain certain ends, such as acquiring or legitimating status, contesting power, marking an

ethnic identity, negotiating the individual self, or performing gender (Hodder 1982: 85-86).

At the same time, it has been argued that things have to be granted a more active role in

culture. From the post-processual point of view, material culture is not a mere reflection of

society, but is deeply involved in its constitution and transformation: ‘material culture

transforms, rather than reflects, social organisation according to the strategies of groups,

their beliefs, concepts and ideologies’ (Hodder 1982: 212). Despite talk about ‘symbols in

action’ and the active role of material culture, what post-processual theory mostly

encouraged were studies of human actors manipulating artifacts for diverse purposes. Thus,

for instance, Ian Hodder (1982: 121) wrote that ‘The Lozi example shows how the

dominant group may consciously and carefully manipulate material symbols in order to

justify and legitimate its power’ (my emphasis). From this perspective, artifacts are but a

medium in the hands of people who use them in their manifold social engagements—a view

similar to that maintained by behavioral archaeologists (Skibo and Schiffer 2008). These

views are still quite dominant. For Christopher Tilley (2006: 63): ‘Creating things is a

fabrication of the social self’, and the same is argued for the exchange and consumption of

things. Thus, Kula shells are an example of things used in making social identities through

the intertwining of the biographies of both shells and people in continuous circulation

(Tilley 2006: 63).

Recent critiques, often stemming from post-processual perspectives, insist that there

is more to material culture than meaning and also that symbolism is but one facet of the

nature of things, not necessarily and not always the most crucial (Knappett 2002, 2012;

46

Olsen 2003, 2010; Jones 2007; Hodder 2012). This does not mean that meaning is not

important: the interpretation of social meaning is, in fact, an important aim of this book.

Rather, the critique to hermeneutic excesses reminds us that things are more than a blank

and malleable surface on which to project our needs, desires, ideas and values: things are an

inextricable part of us, an extension of our bodies (Witmore and Webmoor 2008). We are

not only through the use of things, but also through the making of things (Dobres 2000;

Olsen et al. 2012: 157-195). This latter aspect has been forgotten, due to the limited agency

of people in the production of artifacts in industrial and post-industrial societies, which is

reflected on material culture studies’ focus on consumption. One of the interests of looking

at nonmodern communities is the chance of understanding the ontological relevance of

making (Ingold 1990; Dobres 2000; González-Ruibal et al. 2011). Taking materiality

seriously implies rethinking some assumptions taken for granted among many practitioners

of the social sciences, such as the absolute centrality of human agency: social roles are

distributed among human and non-human actors alike (Latour 1992; Knappett and

Malafouris 2008; Hodder 2012; Olsen et al. 2012).

An ontological approach to things, as will be defended here, considers ecologies of

humans and non-humans woven into the same existential sphere (Webmoor and Witmore

2008), but these ecologies are wildly different from one society to the other: ontological

approaches in recent years precisely emphasize this diversity (see Alberti and Marshall

2009; Alberti et al. 2011). What does not vary is the fact that humans and things cannot be

separated. This means that a bow does not have to be less important than a spirit and a pot

deserves, a priori, as much attention as the mother’s brother. This does not mean that all

artifacts are equal, as no anthropologist would believe that all kinship positions or ritual

performances have the same relevance in a given culture. Therefore, although I will refer to

very different kinds of things throughout the book, there will be some artifacts that will

play a more prominent role in the narrative than others, because they have a more crucial

ontological role. Those artifacts could be considered in some cases material technologies of

the self. Elsewhere, we have defended that a technology of the self could be identified by

the following traits (González-Ruibal et al. 2011: 14):

(1) It has preferably to be built by his or her owner.

(2) Its fabrication, use and maintenance have to take time and require intellectual

concentration and educated sensorimotor skills.

(3) It must be recognized by others as personal (even inalienable) property.

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(4) It has to be individualized to a certain degree (that is, to be clearly distinguishable from

similar items belonging to other people).

(5) It has to be intimately tied to its owner (it might be often carried away with him or her,

even when it is not used).

(6) It must have a corporeal, prosthetic character, as an extension of the human body.

(7) Its making and use must be frequent and imply routine: the repetition of the same acts is

fundamental to the maintenance of ontological security and the continuity of being.

(8) When the owner dies, it has to be buried with him or her or destroyed; it is not usually

inherited or used by other persons after death.

It is important to bear in mind that this self does not have to be the individual self of

Western Modernity: it can be the relational self of nonmodern communities (Hernando

2012). Some of the objects to which I will refer here can be properly considered

technologies of the self: for instance, bows and arrows for Gumuz men, and necklaces and

baby bags for Gumuz women. However, not all artifacts that are ontologically crucial in the

constitution of a certain group of people can be easily described as a technology of the self.

There is another concept that is useful for describing things that have ontological value,

independent of whether they are technologies of the self or not: core objects. Ernst Boesch

(1991: 333) defines a ‘core object’ as ‘one which, by its usages and ritual connectedness,

appears to be vital for the self-definition of a culture’. A core object is the ritual hut of the

Mao or the beer pot of the Bertha, which do not fit well the concept of technology of the

self. However, artifacts that constitute a technology of the self are always core objects.

The Unconscious

A turn to ontology requires another shift in perspective that has not been fully performed

thus far: from the realm of the conscious to that of the unconscious. This is a change

implicit in the turn from a focus on symbolization and communication to a concern with

ontology. Ontology implies a relation between humans and non-humans that is prior to

symbolization and therefore deeper and less obvious for the human actor. A turn to

ontology implies rethinking and evaluating critically the vocabulary so common in post-

processual archaeology and material culture studies that includes terms such as ‘strategy’,

48

‘negotiation’ and ‘manipulation’, which inevitably implies a conscious human actor and a

rather passive material world. From this perspective, things are only activated by human

agency. However, from an ontological point of view, non-human actors are already-always

activated and at work, independently from symbolic action. They can be further symbolized,

of course, and, in some contexts (such as culture contact or social crisis), actively

manipulated. But this latter situation, at least in traditional, nonmodern societies, should be

considered the exception, not the rule. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of doxa is useful here (cf.

Pauketat 2001; Silliman 2001). According to the sociologist, ‘when there is a quasi-perfect

correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization

(as in ancient societies) the natural and social world appears as self-evident. This

experience we shall call doxa, so as to distinguish it from an orthodox or heterodox belief

implying awareness and recognition of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs’

(Bourdieu 1977: 164). The problem with archaeological and anthropological studies in the

wake of postmodernism is that their emphasis on orthodoxy and heterodoxy has eclipsed

the much more common state of things, that is, the doxa, the unreflective reality of ordinary

social life. This unreflective reality is stressed by another sociologist, Paul Connerton

(1989), when he talks about ‘incorporating practices’, such as bodily gesture and movement.

These are essentially unconscious, as opposed to ‘inscribing practices’, which have been

traditionally prioritized by the hermeneutically-leaned social sciences (Connerton 1989:

100-101). Connerton is wrong, though, when he considers that these incorporating practices

are ‘largely traceless’ (Connerton 1989: 102; see critique in Olsen 2010: 123-124).

Archaeologists regularly document these practices: when they map the interior of a house,

with their distribution of artifacts and activity areas, they are mapping bodily movements

and, thus, incorporating practices (Hodder and Cessford 2004).

In a sense, a turn to the unconscious implies for the archaeologist to behave like a

psychoanalyst. It is well known that psychoanalysts do not simply want their patients to tell

what they know but do not tell other people. They also want to know what the patients

themselves do not know. By looking at mteriality and material practices, archaeologist

should also be able to discover what the people that they study do not know of themselves

or barely know. That material culture and the unconscious are strongly related has already

been pointed out by other anthropologists and archaeologists. Leroi-Gourhan noted that

‘crepuscular consciousness’ (conscience crépusculaire) was the most common state in the

more habitual technical practices (Leroi-Gourhan, 1965: 20). Henry Glassie (1975: 11), in

turn, argued that ‘occurrences [in material culture] cannot be explained by appeal to

consciousness alone, because the historic pattern is at least as much the product of the

49

unconscious as it is of the conscious’. As we have seen, the unconscious is also crucial in

the theory of practice, despite the Anglo-Saxon hijacking of the theory to suit their

concerns with agency. According to Schwartz (1997: 10), for Bourdieu, the ‘sociologist is

to the “social unconscious” of society as the psychoanalyst is to the patient’s unconscious’.

Bourdieu himself was aware of the parallelism. In his Masculine domination (2001: 3-5) he

argues for ‘an objective archaeology of our unconscious’, a socionalysis that is capable of

objectifying the categories of the androcentric unconscious.

It is not necessary to look among scholars inspired by structuralism to find

statements that emphasize the unconscious. Evans-Pritchard (1970: 232), for example,

considered that Nuer spears were invested with a ‘deeper symbolism’ (as compared to

sacrifices, rites of passage and healing rituals) of which the Nuer were not fully aware:

‘there is a deeper symbolism which is so embedded in ritual action that its meaning is

neither obvious nor explicit’. Ian Hodder himself (1982: 180), in his study of Nuba personal

art, states that ‘it is difficult to see how verbal information could add to the analyses. In this

respect the archaeologist is in the same position as the student of art and design of modern

societies’. Elsewhere, the same author argues that ‘it should be clear however that the ideas

that archaeologists reconstruct are not necessarily the conscious thoughts that would have

been expressed if we could travel backwards through time and talk to people in Prehistory’

(Hodder 1992: 18). What is said does not exhaust meaning. If this is so in prehistoric times,

it has to be the case also in the present: things can convey non-explicit meanings.

Furthermore, ‘There are gaps, shadows, silences, and absences which are not simply

outside discourse, but are often structurally excluded by discourse’ (Lucas 2004: 117).

These silences can be traced through material behaviors. Most archaeologists, however,

have preferred to schew absences and interruptions and focus on active negotation and

agency, thus forgetting the relevance of the unconscious. I think that archaeology can make

an important contribution in this area, among other things, because the gist of archaeology

is to work, as Deetz (1977) famously put it, with ‘small things forgotten’.

Small, forgotten things are also the material with which psychoanalysts work: ‘The

very things that are new about psychoanalysis and are most characteristic of it are the ones

that are neglected, dismissed as a mistake’, wrote Freud (2006: 242). Psychoanalysis found

those neglected things ‘in the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations’ (cited in

Ginzburg 1980: 10). In a similar vein, Walter Benjamin refers to the ‘inconspicuous corners

of existence’, the overlooked materials—‘detritus of history’—that are able to reveal the

nature of the past powerfully (Benjamin 1994: 505). Carlo Ginzburg (1980) puts Freud to

the late nineteenth century art critic Giovanni Morelli, who called attention to ear lobes,

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fingers, toes and even nails in the paintings of great masters in order to ascertain their

authorship. We could add still another category of scholars: again, the forgotten and vilified

culture-historical anthropologists. As Freud, Morelli and Benjamin, they also looked for

traces, forgotten things, mistakes and lapses, and the banal more generally. The

anthropological traces were frequently material: a way of tying a knot, or weaving a basket,

a scarification design, a type of hearth, or a thatched roof. With these materials, culture-

historical anthropologists built their histories. That they were often far-fetched or wrong

should not make us overlook the fact that they belong to the same evidential paradigm

(Crossland 2009). ‘Even buried, even maimed, even ignored, the remote past of which

memory is lost continues to express itself in the present, in some way “across” [à travers]

all the subsequent evidence’, writes Laurent Olivier (2008: 216). What he says comparing

psychoanalysis and archaeology could have been defended by any anthropologist of the

early twentieth century trying to arrange his or her material data from African or South

American societies.

Archaeology similarly works with banal details, the neglected and the repressed. As

the archaeology it intends to be, this book pays attention to the rubbish-heap of our

observations: more specifically, it digs up the dump where evolutionist and diffusionist

anthropologists started to excavate. It looks at huts and fences, bows and arrows, spears,

honey gourds and beehives, pots and scarifications. Unlike the prehistorian who only has

artifacts, however, I can compare material traces, practices and gestures with discourses:

those of the dominant groups, those of the dominated and still those of the people who were

neither masters nor slaves: the travelers and chroniclers who wrote about the peoples with

whom I have worked. Yet even the prehistorian can compare the hegemonic uses of

material culture and those that escape conscious appropriation.

A focus on the unconscious might be argued to go against the goals of this book:

examining resistance. Many authors argue that there cannot be resistance without

consciousness (see debate in Hollander and Einwohner 2004). How is it possible to do an

archaeology of resistance? My point is that when one resists it does so not only in an active

conscious way, but also unwittingly. This is related to the political ontology of resistance to

which I referred in a previous section (1.2). Bodily gestures and manners of doing and

using things (technical gestures), which are fully and unreflectively incorporated into one’s

being, can become daily acts of resistance that are recognized as such by others. For

instance, one may consciously go bare breasted in defiance of hegemonic rules that

prescribe concealment of the body in public and at the same time display an unconscious

bodily hexis (such as a way of carrying a pot) that makes members from the dominant

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group aware of a different ethos at work. Resistance in egalitarian societies facing the state

is a full-time activity, which keeps working, as does the brain when one is sleeping.

The Textures of Things

In the previous two sections, I have explored what could be called the depth of things, what

is beyond the surface and has to be ‘excavated’: the deep ontological relations that tie

people and things together, and the unconscious nature of an important part of our material

engagements with the world—including, sometimes, resistance. We will return to the

surface now (Harrison 2011). One might wonder, in the first place, whether the surface of

things is important at all. Even those who do not usually take things into consideration

admit that objects, or at least some of them, are important, in the way they materialize

social meanings and social relations, but the surface of things is hardly considered. By

surface I understand here what can be sensorially experienced: the texture of things.

Sensoriality (sound, taste, touch and smell) has been quite absent in ethnographic accounts

until recently (see critique in Witmore 2006) and when it has, ethnographers have been

mostly interested in interpreting and translating the cultural meaning of sensorial

experiences in different contexts (a remarkable exception is Taussig 2004). But what about

these rich sensorial textures of the world that resist inscription (Witmore 2006: 271; also

Hurcombe 2007; Witmore 2009a)? The things in themselves have been quite absent from

ethnographic monographs since the demise of material culture in the 1920s. Directly related

to this is the limited amount of images present in typical ethnographies, a situation

confirmed in every monograph produced in our area of study (Evans-Pritchard 1970, 1992;

James 1979, 1988; Jedrej 1995; Theis 1995). In the few images offered in these studies,

people invariably occupy the foreground, whereas the thingliness of daily life can hardly be

grasped in the blurred fragments of background that we are permitted to see. Pots are, at

best, mere props and huts a shallow scenario where humans ring the tune. If there is a sense

that describing the materiality of things, bodies and landscapes is not the proper job of

ethnography, picturing them, is perceived, in addition, as colonial and reifying. This has

been, of course, true: it is not mere chance that the most lavishly illustrated monograph

belongs to the most colonial of the anthropologists who worked in the region (Grottanelli

1940). That ethnographic photos are voyeuristic and inquisitorial has been abundantly

proved, but so are ethnographic texts (Rosaldo 1986), and this has not prevented

ethnographers from keeping interviewing people (often on very intimate things) and

exposing the private lives of their research subjects. The critique of the visual and of the

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ethnographic inquiry has encouraged more ethically-conscious forms of fieldwork.

However, the truth is that the critique of the visual has erased visuality from conventional

ethnographies (images have been mostly ghettoized in special journals and monographs),

whereas the critique of ethnographic texts has instead encouraged new ways of writing and

engaging with the subjects under study.

In stark opposition to the sobriety of conventional ethnographies stand coffee table

books of ‘wild tribes’—for Ethiopia see Giansanti (2004). There is a bias here towards

those raw materialities that are associated with a world perceived as primitive, but the truth

is that one can imagine better how is to live physically in a pastoralist village through

popular photography books than from a typical ethnography. It is not my intention here to

defend these books, though, but to bemoan the fact that manifesting the material richness of

specific worlds has been traditionally left in the hands of untrained travelers. I think that we

have to recover the textures of the world and ‘the noise, ruckus and commotion associated

with things—those qualities that otherwise recede into the background’ (Witmore 2009a:

521) and make them a relevant part of our research. Archaeologists are well suited to do

this, given that they have never abandoned material textures.

What I am proposing is simply transferring the way archaeologists mediate the

ordinary materiality of past worlds into the present. This, in fact, is nothing new: it is what

ethnoarchaeologists have been doing since the late 1950s, although with other aims in mind,

as we have seen (see 1.1). The plan of a reindeer butchering site of the Nunamiut (Binford

1991) conveys as much information about a daily activity as a detailed account of the

symbolic and social aspects of hunting. I have already mentioned the several

ethnoarchaeological projects carried out during the 1960s and 1970s that documented

settlements of nonmodern communities in rich detail (Watson 1979; Horne 1994), but the

tradition was unfortunately discontinued. Gustavo Politis’ stunning monograph on the

Nukak is an exception (Politis 2007). The photographs and maps included in the book are

as much part of the narrative as the text itself (also Mans 2012). In the world so depicted,

we see people, we see their rainforest, their animals, their houses, their blowpipes and

hammocks. As it has already been pointed out, however, well before ethnoarchaeologists

began drawing and photographing pots, scatters of artifacts and kilns, anthropologists had

been doing that for decades. In the case of Ethiopia, the works of Eike Haberland and

Straube (1963), among others, have rich textual and visual information of almost every

aspect of material life.

The relevance of material textures is, in my opinion, clear. For manifesting a lived

world, meaning is not enough (Olsen 2003). My interest in textures emerges simultaneously

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from a fascination for early ethnographic accounts and a dissatisfaction with ethnographies

where one can hardly obtain an impression of how people’s material life actually is, except

by prying the background noise of photographs. One might be able to know almost

everything about cosmology, perceptions of illness, spirits, forms of social violence, land

rights, rites of passage, and the political imagination. It is not my intention to downplay the

enormous intellectual feat of ethnographic thick description. But these complex and

nuanced narratives often fail to convey, at the end of the day, the sense of lived life: they

are thick in meaning, but this, for me, is not thick enough. We still need to capture the

immediacy of things: the rhythmic sound of the grinding stone and the rough touch of an

old pot.