I. Introduction

3

1. The Durable House: Material, Metaphor, and Structure

Robin A. Beck, Jr.

“At last,” Claude Lévi-Strauss proclaimed in The Way of the Masks (La Voie des Masques, 1982:172), “the word is out.” The word, of course, is house (or mai-son), and Lévi-Strauss’s concept provides the framework for this volume, based on papers delivered during the 2005 Visiting Scholar Conference held at Southern Il-linois University Carbondale’s Center for Archaeological Investigations. Although ethnographers have for some time found the house concept useful for analysis of social practice (Boon 1990; Carsten and Hugh-Jones, eds. 1995; Errington 1989; Fox 1993; Helms 1998; Macdonald 1987; McKinnon 1991; Waterson 1990), archaeolo-gists have only recently begun to develop house models for their research on prac-tice and social change (Chesson 2003; Gillespie 2000a; Henderson and Ostler 2005; Hendon 2002; Hodder and Cessford 2004; Hutson et al. 2004; Joyce and Gillespie 2000; Moore 2005; Weiss-Krejci 2004). The goal of this volume, then, is to show that archaeological data are particularly well suited to advance anthropological per-spectives on the house concept. By drawing together a diverse group of scholars, case studies, and theoretical approaches across a broad range of complex societies throughout the Old World and the Americas, the volume provides a timely, com-parative collection of archaeological insights on the social house. Much of the focus that archaeologists have shown on houses is due to the ener-gies of Rosemary Joyce and Susan Gillespie, who together edited the volume Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies (2000). Gillespie (2000b) provides a richly detailed historical examination of the house concept in that vol-ume, and I will not try to duplicate her effort here. Rather, my aim in this chapter is to offer a foundation for viewing the house as a specific form of social structure—following the theory of structure developed by William Sewell (1992)—while also introducing some of the broader themes that readers will encounter throughout the The Durable House: House Society Models in Archaeology, edited by Robin A. Beck, Jr. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 35. © 2007 by the Board of Trustees, South-ern Illinois University. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-88104-092-4.

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subsequent chapters. After a brief introduction to Lévi-Strauss and the origins of the house concept, I discuss four distinct expressions of the house’s material estate. Afterward, I show the importance of metaphor in how people create and conceive one of these material expressions, house architecture. Finally, I draw these perspec-tives on house resources and metaphors together, using Sewell’s ideas about social change to model the house as a form of structure. I conclude with a short summary of the chapters that follow and how they are organized.

Lévi-Strauss and Sociétés à Maisons

The social house, as envisioned by Lévi-Strauss, should not be con-fused with and need not coincide with the household. While the latter is usually considered the minimal unit of economic production and consumption, Lévi-Strauss (1987:151) saw the concept of the house as a general kinship category, a “type of social structure,” comparable to other kinship categories such as family, lineage, and clan. He defined the house as a

personne morale détentrice d’un domaine composé à la fois de biens matériels et immatériels, qui se perpétue par la transmission de son nom, de sa fortune et de ses titres en ligne réelle ou fictive, tenue pour légitime à la seule condi-tion que cette continuité puisse s’exprimer dans le langage de la parenté ou de l’alliance, et, le plus souvent, des deux ensemble [Lévi-Strauss 1979:47].

moral person, keeper of a domain composed altogether of material and im-material property, which perpetuates itself by the transmission of its name, of its fortune and of its titles in a real or fictive line held as legitimate on the sole condition that this continuity can express itself in the language of kin-ship or of alliance, and, most often, of both together [translation from Gil-lespie, this volume].

Some scholars have critiqued the typological dimension of Lévi-Strauss’s mod-el, using his terminology in reference to any corporate entity that is emically or analytically identified as a house (e.g., Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Gibson 1995:129). Gillespie (2000b:48), on the other hand, has been an advocate for his original restrictions, observing that he “never intended his definition of the house to apply to virtually every pre-modern society” but rather meant to distinguish the concept from comparable social structures. The concept of the house developed as Lévi-Strauss examined the problems that many ethnographers had faced in classifying societies according to their kinship systems. Boas, for example, discovered that although the Kwakiutl were primarily agnatic in their principles of descent—a feature at odds with the matrilineal principles of societies farther north—certain property rights among the Kwakiutl aristocrats could be passed along both patrilineal and matrilineal lines. Initially, Boas viewed this apparent discrepancy as part of a historical shift among the Kwakiutl from patrilineal to matrilineal descent principles. This ap-proach proved unsatisfactory, however, and Boas finally concluded, upon find-

Material, Metaphor, and Structure 5

ing himself unable to identify the Kwakiutl descent group as either matrilineal or patrilineal, that only their own term for the principal kinship unit, translated as house, was sufficient (Gillespie 2000b:24; Lévi-Strauss 1982:163–170). Kroeber had encountered such a case while trying to classify the California Yurok according to familiar kinship terminologies. Although the Yurok were nominally patrilineal, Kroeber learned that their descent groups formed along bilateral principles that stretched in a multitude of different directions. He surprisingly concluded that the Yurok, who lived in villages and bestowed formal names upon their large plank houses, lacked social organization and political units (Gillespie 2000b:25; Joyce 2000:194–198; Lévi-Strauss 1982:172). Lévi-Strauss (1982:173–174) argued that these anthropologists lacked an ad-equate theoretical vocabulary for interpreting social relationships among certain North American societies, dependent as they were on familiar anthropological taxa such as the lineage and the family. Native Yurok and Kwakiutl informants, how-ever, had consistently described their social interactions as relationships between houses, and Lévi-Strauss recognized this point of convergence as a possible solution to the difficulties faced by Boas, Kroeber, and other ethnographers. In documenting Yurok and Kwakiutl descent, these anthropologists had viewed their informants’ repeated discussion of houses (Kwakiutl numaym [Gillespie 2000b:24]; Yurok mahlä-math [Joyce 2000:197]) as pertaining only to the structures where they lived (Lévi-Strauss 1987:151). Lévi-Strauss repudiated this narrow view and moved exactly in the opposite direction, treating the house as a form of social organization while ig-noring the building itself (e.g., Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995:12; Joyce 2000:195). He illustrated the comparative strength of this idea by showing that the aristocratic houses of native North America were structurally comparable to nobilities of medi-eval Europe, and by expanding his analysis to include feudal Japan, Southeast Asia, Polynesia, and Africa, he offered a comparative discourse on what he referred to as house societies, or sociétés à maisons (Lévi-Strauss 1982:176–187, 1987:151–152). The house concept provides a flexible alternative to traditional kinship cat-egories. These categories, bound by fixed, formal rules of descent, are static governing principles that ideally specify (among other relations) succession, in-heritance, exchange of marriage partners, and postmarital residence. Gillespie (2000c:7) notes, however, that “[h]ouses turn all these classificatory assumptions on their head.” Houses are dynamic structures with governing principles that are subject to manipulation through time, and membership may be founded in “virtually any type of kinship-defined social organization, whether . . . sibling ties, lineal or bilateral descent principles, or cognatic networks” (Helms 1998:15). Social houses also display a great range of spatial flexibility and in different so-cial contexts may incorporate a household, a clan, a village, or a regional polity (Gillespie 2000b:39). More important, as Gillespie notes,

Utilizing the house model eliminates the problem of trying to interpret what configuration of kin or descent group occupied physical houses or house compounds, with the understanding that the house is an institution that used multiple strategies to recruit members whose everyday practices integrated kinship, economics, religion, and politics [Gillespie 2000c:15].

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Materializing the House

One of the key features of the social house concept—one that should be especially appealing to archaeologists—is the degree to which it emphasizes property, including both the material and immaterial wealth that constitute the house estate. While the immaterial wealth of ancient houses (narratives, songs, dances, and names, for example) may be less accessible to modern scholars, the material wealth of the house estate constitutes the very substance of archaeologi-cal inquiry, from architecture to animal bones to potsherds. As the chapters in this volume attest, archaeology is uniquely suited to reveal how the social lives of people shaped, as they were shaped by, the substance of their house estates. This is not merely to privilege the material over the immaterial but to note that archaeological advances will ultimately derive from the material consequenc-es of social relations within and between houses. Lévi-Strauss contended that houses are manifested most apparently in social relations with other houses: the house as institution “is a dynamic formation that cannot be defined in itself, but only in relation to others of the same kind, situated in their historical context” (Lévi-Strauss 1987:178). In everyday life, relations between the people of differ-ent houses, between people within the same house, and between the people of houses and the often “houseless” masses are mediated through the materiality of the estate. Such relations may be transferred along with the estate from one gen-eration to the next, perpetuating not only inequality and class but also reciprocity and complementarity. The ideology of the house is therefore materialized in the wealth of its estate (e.g., DeMarrais et al. 1996; Gillespie 2000a; Joyce 2000). This ideology—and that which sets order to the myriad relations among linked houses—emphasizes dura-bility, fecundity, and cosmological potency. A house’s wealth, then, representing as it does the materialization of its ideological claims to persistence and prosper-ity, may be said to constitute the house itself through time. Among the most du-rable and power-laden materializations of a house are its architecture; the bones and bodies of its ancestors; its origin narratives, along with those places in the landscape that figure prominently therein; and finely crafted heirlooms of exotic substances. These expressions of a house’s wealth, best conceived of as bundles of related practices, hold particular significance for its social reproduction. That is, if the house in proper context is a moral person rather than a corporate group—and Lévi-Strauss (1982:173) notes, “it is not the individuals or the families that act, it is the houses, which are the only subjects of rights and duties” (see Gillespie, this volume)—then its reproduction is, in large measure, the successful mainte-nance and transfer of the estate. Ultimately, the house estate is bound to its politi-cal economy: the surpluses from its agricultural lands, its livestock herds, and its fishing, hunting, and gathering grounds fund both the creation and continuity of most other forms of wealth. In the following subsections, I offer a broadly com-parative treatment of the four house expressions noted above—architecture, an-cestors, origins, and heirlooms—all of which are treated in greater, more specific detail throughout the subsequent chapters of this volume.

Material, Metaphor, and Structure 7

Architecture The architecture of the house is perhaps its most ubiquitous material ex-pression. This physical space within which house members embed common iden-tities and through which they structure social relationships within and without the house may take different forms from one society to another. Often, the domicile itself serves as the locus of house identity and ritual (e.g., Bloch 1995; Gibson 1995; Gillespie 2000d; Hodder and Cessford 2004; Joyce 2000; McKinnon 2000; Marshall 2000; Waterson 1995). In such dwellings, bones of house ancestors are often buried under the domicile or in the immediate vicinity of the structure or are curated in above-ground boxes or shrines within the dwelling, and house property in the form of heirlooms and images of the ancestors may be displayed or stored within the living space of the domicile. In other settings, however, the domicile is archi-tecturally and symbolically distinct from a specialized temple or shrine that serves in a similar capacity for the house’s membership (e.g., Bloch 1995; Gillespie 2000d; Howell 1995; Isbell 1997; Kirch 2000; Marshall 2000). Whatever its particular lo-cus, though, the architecture of the house anchors its members both to place and past (Gillespie 2000c:3): among the northern California Yurok, sacred houses had “stood since the time when there were no men in the world; the planks, it is true, are replaced, but the structures occupy the identical spot” (Kroeber 1925:53–54). The architecture of the house is more than a locus of corporate identity, for it also positions its members in relation to a hierarchy of other houses. Hierarchy and inequality were essential to Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the house (e.g., Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Gillespie 2000b, 2000c; Lévi-Strauss 1982, 1987), and he noted (Lévi-Strauss 1987:178) that the house only exists in relation to others of its own kind. Not surprisingly, then, the architecture of the house offers a key medium for materi-alizing wealth hierarchies among associated houses. In Tana Toraja, Indonesia, the origin houses of the ruling aristocracies tower above their respective communities, becoming so elaborate that living space inside these structures diminishes “even as the symbolic messages of the social status conveyed by the exterior[s] become more and more impressive” (Waterson 1995:60). On the islands of Tanimbar, eastern In-donesia, noble houses were also significantly more elaborate than commoner dwell-ings, and while the former occupied the community center, at its place of origin, the latter were relegated to the community’s periphery (McKinnon 2000:163–170). The top plank of a Yurok great house’s side wall extended several feet from the front face of the building, thereby setting great houses apart from lower-ranked houses; great houses also had more roof ridges than their less prosperous neighbors, and their doors were often carved with geometric designs (Joyce 2000:197). Clearly, not all houses are equal—some acquire more material and immaterial property than others—and not all house architecture is embellished at equal expense.

Ancestors It is easy to see why the bones of the dead, particularly long bones and skulls, are so vital to the life of the house. These human bones are “strong, dry, hard, and relatively impervious” (Helms 1998:28) and as such are believed to be

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endowed with the power of perpetuity. They provide tangible access to a time of primordial origins and thereby link a living house to its past (e.g., Helms 1998:50; Hodder 1990:245–246; McAnany 1995:8; Spalding 1984:69–70). Often there is a close spatial relationship between the architecture of the house and the remains of its ancestors, so that the dead become part of and indeed are indivisible from the buildings and shrines that situate the house (Gillespie 2000c:19). Curating the dead in this manner legitimizes house rights to contested resources like land and water, and the planting of ancestors near house architecture maps such claims on the landscape (Goldstein 1981; Morris 1991; Spalding 1984). Houses often ascribe magical powers to bones of their dead, especially to those of individuals famous for their exploits in life (Helms 1998:28). Such bones are often regarded as sacra and usually constitute an important part of a house’s wealth. It comes as no sur-prise, then, that one of the principal ends of interhouse conflict may be the cap-ture or destruction of a rival’s cherished bones, as their loss deprives the house of its identity and its legitimacy (e.g., McAnany 1995:12). As Freedman (1966:139) notes with regard to the significance of the ancestors’ bones in south China, “the surest way to destroy a rival for good is to tear open his ancestral tomb and pul-verize the bones they [sic] contain.” The qualities that make the bones of its ancestors so essential to a house also find expression through the crafting of human figures and statuary as iconic rep-resentations of the dead. Such icons, “a material embodiment” of house ancestors (Brown 2001:77), are usually crafted in fired clay, stone, or wood—media that are, like bone, resistant to rot and decay—and are usually maintained in the same contexts as the bones of house dead. Prior to the early years of the twentieth century, named noble houses of Tanimbar, eastern Indonesia, were distinguished by their possession and maintenance of the intricately carved wooden panels called tavu (McKinnon 1995, 2000). The main part of the tavu rose from the floor of a noble house to a roof beam and was most remarkable for its exquisite hu-man shape, with its arms curved up to the roof beam and appearing to hold aloft the roof of the house (McKinnon 2000:163). The roof beam itself was also part of the tavu and formed a shelf upon which house members maintained the skulls, neck bones, and small wooden statues of their ancestors, along with a plate for offerings (McKinnon 2000:163–165). McKinnon (2000:169) describes the tavu as “a pathway that related the actions of the past and the ancestors with the actions of the present and their descendants.”

Origins Essential to a house’s status and legitimacy are the origin narratives that celebrate its primordial beginnings and the deeds of its illustrious found-ers. The specific tales that comprise house origin narratives are, of course, less durable than the physical materiality of the house’s architecture and ancestors, but narratives too are often expressed in durable media. Mary Helms (1998) sug-gests that houses access their primordial past through two expressions of house origins: prior house origins and first-principle origins. Prior house origins situate the house in reference to conditions or contexts that are “relationally prior” to

Material, Metaphor, and Structure 9

its existence in the here and now (Helms 1998:74–75). This relational quality of prior house origins is manifested in the structural ties that bind house mem-bers to one another and that bind different houses, for, as Helms (1998:75) sug-gests, “something can only be ‘prior’ with respect to something else.” Just as some house members may enjoy relational priority to their fellows with respect to house origins, so too are some houses relationally prior to others of their own kind. Relations of seniority, such as parent–offspring or elder brother–younger brother, may also be expressed through prior house origins. The concept of first-principle origins, according to Helms, references “times and conditions that came into being first, preceding the house in an absolute sense” (Helms 1998:74, emphasis in original). First-principle origins may therefore be expressed in contexts that lack the relational qualities intrinsic to prior house origins and that are associated instead with conditions of ultimate or absolute creation (Helms 1998:77). As such, first-principle conditions bind not through structure, where status and rank divide, but rather through the expression of a common identity that Victor Turner (1969) has referred to as communitas (Helms 1998:66, 77). First-principle conditions tether the house to other houses and bind house members to one another through reference to a moment or time of com-mon, shared creation; prior house conditions bring relational order—or struc-ture—to this context. First-principle conditions usually derive from the deeds of creator beings or culture heroes and may be associated with the particular land-scape features—especially mountains, bodies of water, and caves—where their actions took place (Helms 1998:77). Such locales may also be associated with the in situ emergence of the first humans, who are typically believed to have sprung whole-cloth from the place of origin (Helms 1998:77; Urton 1990).

Heirlooms The crafting, exchange, and display of valuable goods, particularly those made of rare and exotic raw materials, are key strategies through which houses forge relationships with other houses, exhibit for neighbors and rivals alike the measure of their renown, and situate members in reference to shared history and individual status (e.g., Helms 1998:164–173; Joyce 2000:202–212; McKinnon 2000:172–173; Weiner 1985, 1992). Such goods may be treated as heir-looms, a form of inalienable possession:

[W]hat makes a possession inalienable is its exclusive and cumulative identity with a particular series of owners through time. Its history is authenticated by fictive or true genealogies, origin myths, sacred ancestry, and gods. In this way, inalienable possessions are transcendent treasures to be guarded against all the exigencies that might force their loss [Weiner 1992:33].

Inalienability, however, is best seen as a matter of degree rather than as a fixed and stable quality, in that the degree to which any particular valuable good is alienable (intended for exchange) or inalienable (intended for retention) may change over the course of the item’s history (Lesure 1999:25). Valuable items pro-

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duced by one house for exchange—in which case the knowledge of production is likely part of the house’s immaterial estate—may later be conceived as sources of immutable, cosmological authority by another house. There is thus a dynamic and always unfolding relationship between the production, exchange, and dis-play of valuables, one that may remain hidden behind or glossed over by such terms as elite good, prestige good, or status marker that imply a greater social weight for the act of display than for the acts of crafting and gifting (Brown 2003:88–89). A broader approach to the social histories of valuables and heirlooms, as Lesure notes, takes us from inquiring whether any specific item was an elite good “to asking a question of even more interest to archaeologists: How did this become an elite good” (Lesure 1999:27, italics in original). Heirlooms and other valuables, like the bones of the dead, provide the house with what Helms (1998:164) refers to as “tangible durability.” In fact, she sug-gests that house valuables and ceremonial regalia are “symbolically equivalent” to ancestral bones (Helms 1998:166), in that all of these materials offer access to the Other—entities that exist outside or beyond the house in its here and now, including ancestors, animals, and distant peoples. Finely crafted items and exotic raw materials therefore link the house to its own past through vertical bonds (i.e., prior house origins) and to outside beings such as remote or more distinguished houses through horizontal bonds (i.e., first-principle origins). The expressions of the house estate that I have outlined here—its architecture, its ancestors, its origins, and its heirlooms—are closely related and may often prove difficult to disentangle in archaeological practice. Indeed, disentanglement as an end in itself is hardly the point; rather, for analytical purposes it is useful to examine each expression independently, with the ultimate end of drawing them back together into a more complete and coherent vision of the house and its ma-terial estate.

Metaphor and the Personne Morale

Susan Gillespie (2000b, this volume) has stressed the importance of Lévi-Strauss’s observation that the house is not merely a corporate group, the lo-cus of its social identity constrained to the bodies of its members, but is rather a moral person with jural claims and obligations in its own right. For the house as agent, then, a “metaphor of life” is essential for its maintenance and perpetuation beyond the individual lives of its members. Ideally, the house lives on in the wealth of its estate, its reproduction being the successful transfer of the estate from one generation of house members to the next. That is, the moral personhood of the house is literally personified in the body of its estate. The material substance of the house—its fields, its architecture, the bodies and icons of its ancestors, its places of origin, and its carefully crafted heirlooms (often and perhaps misleadingly identi-fied as prestige goods)—is thus a living body in which creation is birth, use history is life, and destruction and re-creation are death and rebirth. These metaphorical associations become especially clear in the ways that people conceive of and relate to the architecture of their respective social houses (Gillespie 2000b:46–47).

Material, Metaphor, and Structure 11

The embodiment of a house’s architecture—its rendering as a human body—clearly elaborates a metaphorical transfer of personhood (i.e., social life) from house members to the physical structure of the house: the materiality of its body unites the individual bodies of its members and confers upon them continuity of life. Tlingit people of the Northwest Coast used human body terms to denote the different parts of the dwelling, describing the door as the mouth of the structure and using the same terms for the beams and posts of its framework as for the eight long bones of the human body (Joyce 2000:198). Houses, like bodies, were identi-fied as containers among both the Tlingit (Kan 1989:63–64) and the Yurok (Joyce 2000:198): as a human body contained a person’s spirit and knowledge, so too did the house’s body—its architecture—contain the corporate spirit of the house and the bodies of its members, often both the living and the dead. Quiché and Tzotzil Maya own similar views about the architecture of the house (Gillespie 2000d:143–144). With the Quiché, as with the Tlingit, a house’s door is its mouth and its porch posts are its legs. Tzotzil Maya take this embodiment further: the wall of the house is its stomach, its corner is an ear, the foundation stone is its foot, and the build-ing’s roof is its head (Gillespie 2000d:144; Vogt 1969:71). Vogt (1969:465) notes that the Tzotzil plant their own hair daily into cracks in the walls of the house, a highly personal way of binding their lives and bodies to those of the building (Gillespie 2000d:144). Human body terms used in reference to the house are often applied as well to places in the landscape such as mountains, caves, and agricultural fields (e.g., Gillespie 2000d; Helms 1998; Hugh-Jones 1995; Vogt 1969). As the house/body metaphor elaborates the idea of the house as a living be-ing, so too does the metaphor of the house’s architectural history as a life cycle elaborate the idea of the house as a human body. Specific rituals typically accom-pany the unfolding stages of a house’s use history/life cycle, and these are often directly analogous to the rituals and events that accompany the stages of house members’ lives. In Ara, a Makassarese village in South Sulawesi, Indonesia (Gib-son 1995:140–141), a ritual specialist, or oragi, initiates house construction by first distinguishing the male central post from its female mate, after which he cuts a sliver of wood from the former. This sliver of wood is kept in a bottle of house oil (minyak bola) and, like a child’s placenta, is placed in the house’s attic. The oragi then imparts to the house its spirit or life force (balapati), as Allah is believed to impart life force (nyaha) to human bodies. Before the male and female posts are raised, at which point they become the house’s body, each is garbed in a gender-specific sarong analogous to the bohon, or caul, wrapped around a newborn’s head. Gibson (1995:140) notes that “the erection of a house is thus closely analo-gous to the birth of a child.” As the status and maturity of a house increase—as its members multiply, aug-ment its property, and ensure its welfare through time—the scale, durability, and ornamentation of its architecture are often highly elaborated. Among the Zafi-maniry of Madagascar, for example, new houses are flimsy and insubstantial, having two central posts, a hearth, and walls of “roughly woven bamboo” (Bloch 1995:78). Over time, the man of the house and his wife’s brother replace the bam-boo weave with massive wooden planks, a practice they call “hardening [the house] with bones” (Bloch 1995:78). According to Bloch,

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the wood that is used in such house building is not only particularly hard, it must also have what the Zafimaniry call teza. This refers to the darker, im-pacted, inner core of some woods which gradually appears in older trees. . . . For the Zafimaniry the teza of trees is like the bones of humans, but a bone which continues to grow and thereby transcends the mortality of the bodies of people [Bloch 1995:78].

The Zafimaniry house is built (i.e., born) in a state analogous to that of a new-born human being, fragile and weak. As the house matures, its body hardens (as a person’s bones and body mature), and in the particular features of its embel-lishment it gains the attributes of an individual. After the deaths of its founding couple, a Zafimaniry house may become a holy house, if its members come to identify the original founders as the living body of the house rather than as man and woman (Bloch 1995:80). To ensure the house’s proper growth and maturation, its members often nour-ish its architecture with food. In the Makassarese village of Ara discussed above, an initial food offering is buried at the spot where the male post is to be erected; this offering consists of red, white, black, and yellow uncooked rice, both a cooked egg and an uncooked egg, and a single bamboo shoot (Gibson 1995:141). Once the male and female posts are lifted into place, they are decorated with coconuts, bananas, and palm sugar. Some weeks later, this food is removed from the posts, made into cakes, and eaten by the house members, an act that likely symbol-izes the building’s consumption of the food (Gibson 1995:141–142). At periodic intervals, these same foods—all of which are tied to ideas about the elements and the human body (Gibson 1995:133)—are fed to the house by female ritualists (sanro) who leave their offerings at the base of the house’s posts and in its attic. Among Tzeltal Maya, also, a new house must be nourished. Nash (1970:13) notes that a “meal for the house” is offered when its construction is complete, and it is during this dedication that the building receives its spirit inhabitant (Gillespie 2000d:144). Under certain circumstances, house architecture—or parts thereof—may ex-perience ritual death. In some Yurok communities studied by Kroeber, for ex-ample, at least every six years house members replaced the wooden beams, the ridge pole, and the central post of their respective ceremonial buildings (Joyce 2000:198). The old beams and posts were buried overnight in a shallow grave (a ritual specialist stating, “I will bury you here”) and, as with human corpses, were placed with their heads (i.e., their tips) oriented downstream (Joyce 2000:198; Kroeber and Gifford 1949:5, 91–94). In eastern South America, the life of a house is unambiguously bound to that of its leader. The Ye’cuana of Venezuela view the leader of a house as its “soul” (Barandiarán 1966:63), and when the leader dies, so too does the dwelling, which is subsequently destroyed (Rivière 1995:198). Wa-terson (2000:183) illustrates a house society, the aforementioned Toraja of Indo-nesia, in which the constant rebuilding (i.e., renewal or rebirth) of a house—even when the architecture is not in a state of disrepair—guarantees its status as an origin house (tongkonan). If an origin house meets accidental destruction, such as by fire, or if its renewal ceases because of poverty or strife among its members, it

Material, Metaphor, and Structure 13

may temporarily lose origin house status, but its name will be remembered, and it will maintain the rights to all of its ritual titles. Here, I have described the metaphorical embodiment and life history of the house in reference to its architecture, but this treatment is relevant to many of the other elements that constitute the house estate (see, for example, Brown 2001:77 and McKinnon 2000:168–169 on ancestral icons; Helms 1998:27–29 on ancestors’ bones; Bastien 1978:xx and Hugh-Jones 1995:240 on places of origin). Why, then, should the personification of the estate be such a prevalent motif in house socie-ties? Houses exist only insofar as they are perpetuated by successive generations of legitimate heirs, as culturally construed: if heirs should cease to exist, then so would the house, as such, cease to exist, though pieces of the estate may pass into the estates of other houses. As long as a living house membership actively keeps the names, titles, honors, and narratives bound to a particular material estate (even should the material itself be lost or dismembered) then the house will persist as a moral person. This ongoing transfer—not of an estate from one generation of heirs to the next but of personal identity from house members to the house—is reflexive, in that as people confer a persona upon the house, so too does the house situate the personas of its different members within a collec-tive and ideally perpetual existence. The personification of an estate, I suggest, is but the extension of this reflexive transfer into material domains of the body, in which the substance of the estate takes on the qualities of its members’ bodies, while simultaneously conferring to its members a durability and permanence their own bodies lack.

House As Structure

As is, I hope, conveyed in the preceding parts of this chapter, houses consist of both an estate of resources (human and nonhuman, material and im-material) and various generalizable schemas or procedures (the metaphor of em-bodiment, for example) through which house members enact and inhabit their social lives. I suggest that houses are thus a particular, cross-culturally recurring form of social structure (Giddens 1979, 1984; Sewell 1992). Although this iteration of the structure concept is closely associated with Anthony Giddens, here I pro-ceed from the work of William Sewell, Jr., whose analysis provides an important critique and reformulation of Giddens’s approach. According to Sewell:

Structures, then, are sets of mutually sustaining schemas and resources that empower and constrain social action and that tend to be reproduced by that social action. But their reproduction is never automatic. Structures are at risk, at least to some extent, in all of the social encounters they shape—because structures are multiple and intersecting, because schemas are transposable, and because resources are polysemic and accumulate unpredictably. Placing the relationship between resources and cultural schemas at the center of a concept of structure makes it possible to show how social change, no less than social stasis, can be generated by the enactment of structures in social life [Sewell 1992:19].

14 R. A. Beck, Jr.

Each part of Sewell’s argument is relevant to my treatment of the house as a spe-cific kind of structure, and in the remainder of this section I relate the constituent parts of Sewell’s argument to the particular case of the house.

Schemas and Resources Sewell’s schemas, like Giddens’s rules, are “generalizable procedures applied in the enactment/reproduction of social life” (Sewell 1992:8). Schemas may be invoked or used throughout a wide array of social situations (i.e., they are not context dependent) and may be transposed beyond the context in which they were learned to new settings, given either the opportunity or the need. The general concept or metaphor of embodiment is a schema in this sense, in that it may be extended from the physical bodies of house members to the domicile and other forms of architecture, such as specialized shrines, or to ancestral icons and house valuables that are similarly treated as living, embodied beings. Also, Gil-lespie (2000d:158) sees the “nestedness or encompassing concentricity” of houses as a schema in Sewell’s sense: in many house societies—and across a wide range of contexts—nestedness is treated as “a means to represent the self-containment and unity” of the house (Gillespie 2000d:158). Schemas are not only applicable to such unifying concepts, however, but also may likewise reinforce and enable relations of hierarchy and inequality. The transposable and generalizable quali-ties of structural schemas render them virtual, as Sewell (1992:8) suggests: “To say that schemas are virtual is to say that they cannot be reduced to their existence in any particular practice or any particular location in space and time: they can be actualized in a potentially broad and unpredetermined range of situations.” Resources constitute the actual component of structural duality, and this is one of the main points where Sewell’s formulation departs from that of Giddens. While Giddens (1984:17) defines social structures as “virtual” resources and rules (i.e., schemas), Sewell (1992:10–11) observes that resources—particularly mate-rial resources, both human and nonhuman—are actual rather than virtual, in that any opportunities to invoke them in social life are bound by the specificities of place, time, and quantity. The structural resources of the house include both the material and immaterial wealth of its estate (land, architecture, heirlooms, names, and honors) and the knowledge, skills, and labor of its members. Such resources are never distributed equally, however, with the result that inequalities are inherent to any structure, whether it is institutionalized or not and whether it assumes the form of the house or that of a different mode of organization. Sewell offers a more robust theory of structure, one in which duality references more than the bond between structure and practice—with structures seen as “the medium and the outcome of the practices which constitute social systems” (Giddens 1981:27)—but references instead the very constitution of the structures themselves, emphasizing that they are composed both of virtual schemas and actual resources, each of which validates the other (Sewell 1992:13). The recursive, mutually sustaining effects of structural schemas and resources are readily apparent when we view the house as social structure. The schema or

Material, Metaphor, and Structure 15

metaphor of embodiment—when applied to house architecture or transposed to various other resources in the house estate—acts to bind individual house mem-bers to a shared and common body and thus to a common identity. By furnishing the house estate with an embodied persona (the house as personne morale), this particular schema unlocks and activates the inclusive or corporate properties of its resources, and by extending to these resources the quality of completeness (making a unified and indivisible body from the house estate), it fosters the per-petuation of these resources as a consummate whole. Simultaneously, these resourc-es that constitute the house estate incorporate schemas such as the metaphor of embodiment, leading them from a virtual existence into the tactile substance of everyday life. Schemas are materialized in resources—as, for example, those schemas by which a Zafimaniry man and his wife’s brother bind their respective houses while “hardening” the new couple’s home with wood or those by which Yurok specialists renew a dwelling and thus its social house by periodically re-placing and burying the old parts of the building.

Houses and Structural Change How, then, are structures transformed in social practice? Or, to put it another way, what prevents schemas and resources in houses from merely repro-ducing one another in a monotonous and perpetual cycle? Sewell (1992:16–19) provides five axioms to his model that reveal why structural transformation is not only likely but also inevitable: the multiplicity and intersection of structures, the transposability of schemas, and the unpredictability and polysemy of resources. In the first of these, social agents inhabit and enact a diverse array of structures, each of which may derive from different sets of cultural schemas and resources. Some of the structures available to any specific social context are likely to be ho-mologous—a point implicated in Lévi-Strauss’s dictum that houses exist only in relation to others of their own kind—but other structures will exhibit entirely dis-tinct modes of practice and organization (Sewell 1992:16). Thus, the same people whose actions make and perpetuate houses may also forge structures for craft and trade guilds, secret societies and religious sects, age and gender sodalities, or the political and military regimes of cities, states, and empires. Because all practicing social agents inhabit a multiplicity of structures, these very structures typically intersect and overlap (Sewell 1992:19). The intersection of structures means that the resources claimed by one house (e.g., cultivated fields, heirlooms, honors, religious knowledge) may overlap those claimed by another or that a house member may claim the same resources differently, de-pending upon the cultural structures that he or she is enacting in a particular context. Moreover, schemas also intersect, as when an array of rules, procedures, and metaphors—or any part thereof—that provides meaning and context for one structural complex is used to validate another (Sewell 1992:19). The intersecting and overlapping qualities of resources and schemas facilitate structural transfor-mation, in that the reproduction of structures is always effected by the range and kinds of knowledge that social agents bring to any context of interpretation and

16 R. A. Beck, Jr.

action. The broader the range of intersecting resources and schemas that people draw upon for social action, the greater the risk to existing structures and the greater the potential for structural change. Schemas intersect and overlap because they are transposable; that is, social agents often broaden the range of domains to which any particular schemas ap-ply, using them in different ways than the contexts for which they were learned (Sewell 1992:17). Bourdieu (1977:83) argues that the transposable nature of sche-mas (or dispositions) is limited, applicable only to “the solution of similarly shaped problems.” Sewell, however, counters this restrictive approach and sug-gests instead that “the real test of knowing a rule is to be able to apply it suc-cessfully in unfamiliar cases” (Sewell 1992:18, italics in original). Transposing or extending the metaphor of embodiment from a house estate to the actual, living body of a particular person, for example, in which said person’s body represents the personification of a city or a state, may validate and reinforce the concept of kingship (e.g., Louis XIV of France’s famous proclamation, “L’état, c’est moi”). Likewise, schemas based in the blood relations among biological kin, enacted in kinship concepts such as older brother/younger brother or uncle/nephew, for example, can be transposed to—and used to justify—relations of hierarchy among junior and senior houses (e.g., Helms 1998:105). The transposability of schemas implies the polysemy of resources, which is to say that resources carry a multiplicity of social meanings: different people inter-pret resources differently, such that the schemas embodied in a particular array of resources may change from one domain of social action to another (Sewell 1992:19). Also, the accumulation of resources is unpredictable—crops may fail or yield unexpected bounties; surpluses may be gathered but lost to rot; new heirlooms may be gained or old ones may fall into the hands of rivals; the keeper of specialized knowledge may die before an apprentice is ready. The contingent quality of resources means that schemas are always subject to change. Sewell (1992:19) uses this relation to define agency as the “capacity to reinterpret and mobilize an array of resources in terms of cultural schemas other than those that initially constituted the array.” Structural change—whether in the house or in other forms of structure—is thus a direct outcome of human agency. Social houses emerge and are inevitably transformed because knowledgeable, practic-ing agents enable and enact the reproduction of structures, applying schemas in creative ways to existing resources or modifying schemas when met with novel or changing resource arrays. It follows, then, that each instance of structural transformation is both his-torically contingent and context dependent: there can be no general evolution of structures such as houses, no universal path along or through which all house societies pass. Paradoxically, perhaps, while any particular instance of structural transformation is contingent, different instances with different histories may be convergent on the same or similar solutions. If this were not so, then we could hardly recognize houses as houses. This implies, as Lévi-Strauss (1963:10) noted and as Mary Helms reiterates in her closing chapter, that there is a finite range of practicable or effective solutions to similar forms of structural crisis and that these solutions are what we as anthropologists recognize when we distinguish

Material, Metaphor, and Structure 17

among recurring forms of structure such as the social house. While we may iden-tify the house as a distinctive constellation of resources and schemas—a general solution to certain kinds of structural crisis, particularly those involving property and the allocation of resources—and while we may seek comparative cases from an array of geographic, cultural, and temporal contexts, we must also recognize that each case, each house and each house society, owns a particular history, how-ever entangled it may be with the histories of others.

Organization of the Volume

The task before archaeologists, simultaneously a challenge and an op-portunity, is to illuminate and explain the long histories of houses using diachron-ic trajectories that are more readily available to archaeology than to ethnography. It may seem that archaeology is at a disadvantage in this task, with access to a range of the material resources but none of the schemas that together constitute the house as structure. Sewell (1992:13) suggests, however, that because resources actualize schemas, the schemas may be “inferred from the material form” of their respective resources. Of course, many kinds of resources are but rarely preserved in archaeological contexts and others never at all, precluding analysis of their relation to particular schemas. Nevertheless, given that the house as social struc-ture evinces such concern with durability, with maintaining the body of its estate, archaeology can provide access to much of what constitutes the house through time, both its resources and its schemas. The following chapters corroborate this point and show the contribution of archaeological perspectives toward a method and theory of the house. The volume is organized in five sections. Part I contains first this introduction, which offers theoretical context for the volume. Susan Gillespie (Chapter 2) contin-ues this section by posing the question, when is a house the maison of Lévi-Strauss? Her chapter provides a forceful defense of Lévi-Strauss’s original definition of mai-son and distinguishes between general “house-centric” models and those rooted more firmly to Lévi-Strauss. In offering thoughtful comments on the chapters, she also emphasizes some of the implications—both the perils and the opportunities—of using an ethnographically derived concept such as the house for archaeological interpretation. Part II is “House and Home”; Part III is “Displaying the House”; Part IV is “Private House, Public House”; and Part V, with a critical perspective on temporalities of the house by Mary Helms, is “Time and the Social House.”

House and Home From the wide ethnographic literature on houses, it is clear that the do-micile itself is one of the most visible loci of house membership and organization, and the studies that make up Part II all examine the social construction of houses from the perspective of the domicile or home. In Chapter 3, Rosemary Joyce uses data from the early Formative site of Puerto Escondido in Honduras, particularly its long sequence of house construction, to explore the relationship between the

18 R. A. Beck, Jr.

construction of a permanent and durable house estate and the forging of lasting personal and group identities. She suggests that as the material estates of these ear-ly houses became loci for greater investments of work—in architecture, in the pro-duction of heirlooms, and in the cultivation of cacao trees—so too did the people of Puerto Escondido place new values on durability and endurance in their relations both with one another and with their lasting house estates. Jeanne Lopiparo, in Chapter 4, also draws upon data from Honduras, focusing on the Terminal Classic (A.D. 800–1000) Ulúa Valley. She finds heterarchy a useful concept for examining domestic production and the integration of households within a range of scalar networks, during a period characterized as collapse in much of the Maya area. Turning from the Americas, Dušan Borić (Chapter 5) links the theoretical con-cept of narrative identity, borrowed from Paul Ricoeur, to Lévi-Strauss’s treat-ment of the house as moral person, illustrating how these concepts complement each other and together help to explain the role of memory in the transmission of house estates. He applies these ideas to the emergence of social houses at Lep-enski Vir and neighboring sites along the Danube River during the mid-eighth to sixth millennium B.C. In Chapter 6, Bleda Düring reviews the subject of analogy in archaeology and offers criteria by which we may treat the social house as a form of strong—rather than weak—analogy. His case study is the famous Neo-lithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, and he uses his criteria to follow the develop-ment of unremarkable domestic structures into focal buildings associated with Lévi-Straussian social houses. In Chapter 7, Fokke Gerritsen looks at dramatic transformations in the Southern Netherlands through the Late Iron Age (250–12 B.C.) and the Roman period (12 B.C.–A.D. 230). His diachronic perspective uses a modified version of Lévi-Strauss’s model to understand why a pattern of farm-house relocation was substituted by one of farmhouse replacement in the century preceding Roman conquest. Jeffrey Fleisher and Adria LaViolette (Chapter 8) examine the rise of aristo-cratic houses among the Swahili people of the eastern African coast from the four-teenth to nineteenth centuries A.D. Their analysis uses Michel Foucault’s concept of “technologies of the self” to consider the evolving role of elaborate stone hous-es—and particularly of the innermost sanctum, or ndani—in Swahili elites’ efforts to constitute themselves as a social class. While drawing upon different theoretical knowledge, their theme articulates especially well with those of Hendon (Chapter 13, on Copan) and Couture (Chapter 19, on Tiwanaku). Jennifer Kahn, in Chapter 9, considers variability in status and rank within and between social houses in the Society Islands of Polynesia. Her case draws upon ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence to understand the role of historical “precedence” in the formation and maintenance of houses and house estates.

Displaying the House While the domicile is often the heart of the house, other forms of ar-chitecture and material culture, especially those with public visibility, may also play a significant role in materializing house relations. James Brown (Chapter 10) offers a novel interpretation of the Mound C burials from the Etowah site (A.D.

Material, Metaphor, and Structure 19

1250–1375) in Georgia. Although most scholars have viewed these lavish burials, particularly their elaborately embossed copper plates, as evidence for a chiefly hierarchy with a single paramount lineage, Brown argues that the distribution of these burials in Mound C suggests a heterarchical organization for the Etowah polity (as in Lopiparo’s Chapter 4), in which power was shared among rival, if interrelated, social houses. Carrie Heitman’s essay (Chapter 11) uses a house per-spective to critically examine the traditional distinctions between great houses and small houses in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. She concludes that the vari-ability and common elaboration of both architectural forms undermines much of this dichotomy and that the house model allows her to reintegrate these types into a cosmological landscape. In Chapter 12, I discuss the construction of early platform complexes (800–400 B.C.) in the Lake Titicaca Basin; I suggest that these complexes materialized rela-tions of hierarchy and complementarity among emergent social houses, mediating the scale-related tensions in their early agricultural communities. Julia Hendon (Chapter 13) compares diachronic trajectories in three river systems in Honduras, the Copan, the lower Ulúa, and the Cuyumapa, to demonstrate the flexibility of the house model for examining diverse social practices in Mesoamerican societies with disparate modes of scale, political centralization, and inequality. Meredith Chesson (Chapter 14) examines the formation of Early Bronze Age (ca. 3600–2000 B.C.) walled communities on the Dead Sea Plain. Her chapter details how the social fabric of these walled towns depended on kinship, political, and economic alliances among and between houses and how such interhouse relation-ships intersected with other civic institutions. Ron Adams (Chapter 15) offers an ethnoarchaeological approach in his analysis of traditional sociopolitical structure in West Sumba, Indonesia. Although West Sumba is part of a modern nation-state, Adams shows how traditional conceptions of clan (parona) and ancestral house (uma) continue to situate and order social life. In particular, his chapter indicates the vital role that large feasts play both for promoting the fortunes of host clans and houses and for maintaining cohesion at local and regional scales.

Private House, Public House In Part IV, each of the contributions moves comfortably between the private and public realms of the house considered by Parts II and III. First, Lisa Nevett (Chapter 16) turns our attention to the oikos of the Greek Iron Age (1000–300 B.C.), showing how the favored locus of monumentality within the oikos gradu-ally shifted from funerary contexts, to religious sanctuaries, and finally to the do-micile itself. She suggests that the place of the domicile as a preferred location for public displays and status competition emerged with the growing significance of oikoi as social units within Greek society. Next, Matthew Johnson (Chapter 17) considers house layout and design during a time of religious transformation in sixteenth-century England. He argues that changes to the experience of church going transformed how people experienced—and made—their homes, and while he views the Lévi-Straussian house as a useful heuristic tool, his chapter differs from most of the others in questioning its utility for understanding particular

20 R. A. Beck, Jr.

instances of structural change. In Chapter 18, Douglas Bolender surveys the ini-tial occupation of Iceland by Norse settlers in the mid-ninth century A.D., one of the few cases in which the settlement of a previously uninhabited land mass was accompanied by written accounts. He incorporates both archaeological evidence and testimony from these sagas to pose the house as a theoretical bridge between the principal Icelandic kin group (or ætt) and the estate farm (aðalból). Nicole Couture (Chapter 19) contrasts the concept of the house with Max We-ber’s “status group” in her analysis of a royal dynasty at the city of Tiwanaku (A.D. 500–1000) in Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca Basin. Her contribution demonstrates that monumental space and ritual practice—especially feasting and mortuary rites—were used to maintain increasingly exclusive lifestyles within Tiwanaku’s royal houses. In Chapter 20, Douglas Craig draws upon recent fieldwork at the Grewe site in southern Arizona to examine the emergence of social houses among the Hohokam. His innovative and diachronic analysis allows him to track the for-tunes of particular courtyard groups, which he identifies as social houses, and to tie the emergence of large house estates at Grewe to the introduction of ceremo-nial ballcourts during the ninth century A.D. Finally, in Chapter 21, Christopher Rodning considers the long-term histories of protohistoric Cherokee domiciles and communal architecture at the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina. Rodning illustrates the different social scales at which house models operate, suggesting that both specific household groups and the town as a whole were conceptually organized as houses.

Time and the Social House Mary Helms’s far-reaching essay (Chapter 22) draws the volume to an appropriate close, providing a detailed commentary on the themes of house life and house death. She binds these themes to that of the house as a symbolic rep-resentation of temporal order, its durability joining people and estate—in their heres and nows—to cosmological domains of past and future, destruction and re-birth. This brings us again to durability, a principle that runs through this volume as an axis, from its title to its final chapter. This is fitting, for if social durability is what makes the house (or something rather like it) both necessary and possible, then so too does it make the archaeology of houses necessary and possible. The range of particular cases and perspectives that follow reveals the potential—and, I hope, the necessity—of the durable house in archaeology.

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