“Keep withstanding”: Territory in the body,home and market in Xinjiang,China

Geographic literature has explored how territorialization occurs by multiple actors in material and symbolic spaces, especially in the home and body. Building on the important research in feminist geography concerning the body as territory, important questions remain: How do Uyghurs in China respond to state territory in their everyday lives? How does fear, pleasure, and mistrust constitute the social relations of territory? How do people experience and navigate state dispossession of territory? I use long-term ethnographic fieldwork to study these questions. China is a strong, authoritarian state with a monopoly on power and seemingly unlimited surveillance and policing capabilities. Uyghurs explored survival strategies that constituted social relations of territory as a node in overlapping networks in Xinjiang. My main argument is that despite a strong government presence, embodied Indigenous practices enabled survivance for the Uyghur people. People escaped the stress of government surveillance and policing by turning to material and symbolic modes of constituting embodied territory.     

Crafters of Kingship: Smiths,Elite Power,and Gender in Early Medieval Europe

IN THE EARLIEST CENTURIES of the Middle Ages, skilled metalsmiths were greatly valued by cult leaders who required impressive objects to maintain social links and the loyalty of their retainers. Despite their clear importance, smiths were peripheral characters operating on the fringes of elite communities. Such treatment may reflect an attempt to limit the influence of metalworkers, whose craft was seen as supernatural and who themselves were probably spiritual figureheads; archaeological evidence associates smiths and their tools in symbolic processes of creation and destruction, not only of objects but also of buildings and monuments. The Church clearly appropriated these indigenous practices, although conversion eventually saw the pre-eminence of the sacred smith and their practice wane. Anthropological study provides numerous comparators for skilled crafters acting as supernatural leaders, and also suggests that as part of their marginal identity, smiths may have been perceived as a distinct gender.     

The nation in bronze and granite: Creating national monuments in post-Soviet Bishkek

Scholars of nationalism have long looked to material forms of symbolic power to understand the politics and cultures of nations, and national monuments specifically have been studied as reflections of ideological programmes of political regimes. However, these approaches have paid insufficient attention to processes of creation. Given the importance of material symbols as sites through which the nation is understood, I argue that analysing the dynamics of creation expands our understanding of symbolic nation making. Using the case of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and focusing on moments of creation and the actors involved in them, I build a conceptual framework for understanding the construction of national symbols on the ground based on three interconnected and co-constituting dynamics: spatial, temporal and aesthetic/semiotic. Using this framework, I demonstrate how meaning and materiality are related to one another both as component and consequent in the creation of national monuments and how it is their very imperfection as material representations that provides the context for the nation to emerge as a category of discourse.     

From the Ground Up: Agency,Practice, and Community in the Southwestern British Bronze Age

Embodied, sensual, engagements between people, earthly elements, and celestial bodies during focused, periodic acts of ritual construction and artifact deposition in the southwestern British Bronze Age resulted in the remaking of identities, local communities, symbolic/mythical knowledge, and the landscape itself. To appreciate how material culture, time, and space were employed to define the criteria by which people understood themselves and their world necessitates an archaeological focus upon shared practices in particular settings that served to define rules of engagement with the environment based upon shared human perceptions. Agency appears in this encounter as central in the construction and perpetuation of symbolic perception, shared social memory, and community identity.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 32, Number 5. October 2016

Front and back cover caption, volume 32 issue 5 Front cover CHÁVEZ'S AFTERLIVES Amid widespread crisis and uncertainty today, political symbols are pivotal in the shaping of political subjectivities. In today's widespread crisis and uncertainty, political symbols, ranging from national flags and monuments to mausoleums and street names, are regaining prominence as objects of public display, debate and contentious activity. Some of these symbols have become strongly associated with the shaping of increasingly polarized political publics across the globe. In this issue, Luis Angosto‐Ferrández examines the intensification of an ongoing struggle over political symbols in contemporary Venezuela, focusing on the figure of Chávez as the epitome of a contested national symbol. At a conjuncture of political readjustments in the country, the fate of Chávez's corpse, currently located in a mausoleum, is at stake, but also the configuration of the institutionally sanctioned symbolic order with which political actors aim to condition political manoeuvring in years to come. The figure of Chávez has been transformed into a ‘master symbol’ with political afterlives. This helps explain the strength of Chávez‐as‐symbol among those who resort to it in support of their political hopes: as Christianity continued without Christ, political Chavismo is said to live on without the flesh and bone Chávez, transubstantiated in his supporters. Does the manipulation of symbols imply a degree of creational (social) power, or do symbols represent and mobilize already existing social groupings? Are symbols exclusively generated and manipulated by elites who use them to control social demands, or are symbolic and material political practices intertwined in a more dialectical way? In exploring these questions we are invited to interrogate the nature, potential and challenges facing contemporary democracies. Back cover Walls, barbed wire, spiked and electric fences as well as CCTV cameras are prominent components of the South African securityscape, especially in middle and upper‐class areas. It would not be an exaggeration to say that in post‐apartheid South Africa, the previous socio‐spatial segregation along racial lines has been replaced by one based on economic inequalities. In this issue, Thomas G. Kirsch discusses the semantics and internal logic of security discourse. The securitization of South Africa has a material, tangible side that endows security concerns with an omnipresence, even if it is not talked about explicitly. Here, the text and photographs combine to illustrate and exemplify why security discourses and practices are proliferating worldwide.     

Perceptions of Consumption: Constituting Potters,Farmers and Blacksmiths in the Culinary Continuum in Eastern Tigray,Northern Highland Ethiopia

Despite the integrated and co-dependent nature of crafting vessels and tools and the production of cuisine, the entangled identities of artisan, farmer and cook are rarely envisioned as part of a ‘culinary continuum’ in which the production of culinary equipment, food and cuisine constitutes different categories of people. Studies of cuisine tend to focus on the role of cuisine in negotiating social status and power in feasting contexts or in constituting normative social identities of gender, personhood and ethnicity. Presented is a study of potters, blacksmiths and farmers in eastern Tigray, Ethiopia. Similar to marginalized and casted occupational specialists in many societies across Africa, eastern Tigray’s potters and smiths are marginalized, avoided and demeaned in contexts where food, drink or sex is shared. Normative gender identities are constituted in the enculturation of boys as they learn to grow food and in girls as they learn to cook. Men and women perform these gendered tasks in daily life using separate gendered technological practices and spaces. Potters and blacksmiths transgress normative gender expectations by using technological skills and space differently. The embodiment and performance of their respective crafts are perceived to transform them into different ontological categories of men and women who also are attributed with the dangerous capacity to consume fertility, landscape and people.     

Some remarks on ethnicity in medieval archaeology

Recent critiques of the culture‐historical approach to ethnicity have denounced the idea that archaeological cultures are ‘actors’ on the historical stage, playing the role that known individuals or groups have in documentary history. But the critique has gone as far as to claim that, because archaeologists supposedly have no access to the meaning of cultural traditions, medieval ethnicity cannot be studied by archeological means. Ethnicity should be banned from all discussions, if medieval archaeology is to make any progress in the future. The paper examines the theoretical malaise at the root of this scepticism verging on nihilism. The understanding of the archaeological record not as an imprint, but as a text allows for much learning about meaning in the past. Symbols, style and power are the key concepts that currently guide anthropological research on ethnicity as a ‘social construction of primordiality’. As several archaeological examples show, medieval ethnicity was a form of social mobilization used in order to reach certain political goals. Ethnic identity was built upon some pre‐existing cultural identity, in a prototypic manner.     

THE DOUBLE-AXE: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF A CRETAN SYMBOL IN THE NEOPALATIAL PERIOD

The Double-Axe has always been considered as one of the most important religious symbols in Minoan Crete. This paper reassesses the significance of the Double-Axe and puts forward a new interpretation for it. It recognizes the great potential for change in symbolic meanings during the Bronze Age and seeks to understand the Double-Axe in as narrow a period as is realistically possible by filtering out evidence from other periods. Central to the argument is the principle that the meaning of symbols is contextually dependent. It builds, therefore, a new interpretation of the Double-Axe on the basis of as wide a range of contextual associations as possible, both within iconographic sources and in the wider material record. From these contextual associations, it suggests that in the Neopalatial period the Double-Axe was a symbol primarily associated with a social group which exercised power in the economic, military and religious realms and that it became a solely religious symbol only later.     

Inconspicuous Consumption: Non-Display Goods and Identity Formation

In the study of ancient material culture, archaeologists have primarily focused on the use of objects for display and communication. This social function of material culture could only have developed on the basis of individual cognitive capacity for the use of goods as materializations of symbolic behavior. To explore the deeply held relationship of identity to material culture, this paper focuses on goods that are utilized away from the gaze of others. Using examples from the ethnographic present such as pharmaceuticals, underwear, and hygiene products, I develop the idea of “reflexive identity” to describe how people use material objects in private to define themselves prior to and independent of their social roles as perceived by others. The act of daily identity creation and affirmation through goods, particularly those that are inexpensive and disposable, indicates the extent to which human cognition and psychological sense of self are inextricably linked to the handling of material culture. The archaeological application of a reflexive identity enables us to understand how ordinary goods are a fundamental component of identity formation prior to and independent of individuals’ engagement with others.     

THE SYMBOLIC AND SOCIAL MEANINGS OF THE INTERMEDIATE BRONZE AGE COPPER DAGGERS

Abstract

The transformation of hard, durable natural substances, such as stone or metal, into cultural objects with symbolic value has played an important role in human social development. This paper attempts to understand the symbolic and social meanings of copper daggers during the Intermediate Bronze Age, and the reasons for their widespread use within a burial context. A multidisciplinary approach is taken, combining and processing different areas of research, and employing a range of archaeological and ethnographic parallels. This paper allows also for a more comprehensive understanding of the social organisation during the Intermediate Bronze Age.     

Wild Cattle: Red Deer in the Religious Texts,Iconography, and Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland

Humans use animals as a means of creating and manipulating relationships with other human beings. This process occurs both through the use of animals for food or raw materials and through the use of animals as literary and artistic symbols. Cervus elaphus is Irelands only indigenous deer species. It is also unique in being the only native Irish, wild animal to appear frequently in medieval texts, iconography, and archaeological deposits. This paper brings together diversesources of information to illuminate how early medieval monasteries used reddeer to establish an identity for themselves and to conceptualize socioeconomic relationships with others.     

Understanding Rituals: A Critique of Representationalism

The explanations of ritual practices observed in archaeological contexts often proceed on the representationalist basis that the human mind contains the social constituted ideas or representations that underpin the practice of rituals. Such a view remains widespread and, despite the often proclaimed rejection in contemporary theory of the Cartesian mind-body and other dualisms, it perpetuates the Enlightenment representationalist heritage according to which mental contents represent social reality and, as such, drive ritual practices and human action more generally. This article illustrates the meaning and value of rejecting such a representationalist view of human (ritual) action in favour of what we call an institutional view. In such a view, a ritual can be conceived as a form of recurring activity involving temporally and geographically dispersed actors active in differing roles and hence also with differing interests and levels of knowledge of the ritual and the associated belief system.     

The Production and Exchange of Marine Shell Prestige Goods

Marine shell ornaments have several characteristics that make them significant for archaeological analysis. Made from a raw material valued by cultures throughout the world and imbued with water, life, health, and fertility symbolism, shell objects have functioned as prestige goods. Shell prestige goods circulated between individuals, groups, and societies and materialized interpersonal relationships, making them valuable for archaeologists shifting focus from objects to the people in past societies. Shell ornaments had multiple roles, including ornamentation, wealth, marking status, and as ritual paraphernalia, and had varying symbolic associations even within a society. The rich ethnographic literature on shell use provides a source for archaeological model building. Marine shell artifacts often moved between societies and across long distances, offering a way for archaeologists to explore regional relationships and the interactions between ancient societies. To do this requires using several scales of analysis to investigate archaeological residues of a system that includes marine shell ornaments, the social organization of their production and exchange, and the people who made, displayed, and circulated them.     

In Search of the Social: Steamboats, Square Wheels, Reindeer and Other Things

This paper examines the concept of the ‘social,’ particularly from an archaeological perspective, and explores how it relates to the ways in which we seek to understand the processes of technological innovation and change. It is demonstrated that the concept ‘social’ is far from well defined and that enquiry is bedevilled by artificial polarization between subject-centred approaches and object-centred particularism. Through the medium of early United States steamboat technology a different approach is forged through the melding of people and things with the idea of viewing artefacts as active social actors along with people. Ultimately, it is argued that maritime archaeologists should be more bullish in their approaches to material things—instead of adopting social theories ‘wholesale,’ we should insist that they include the things we study: boats, material objects, people, artefacts, landscapes and animals.     

Heritage spectacles: the case of Amphipolis excavations during the Greek economic crisis

This article explores the ways in which the archaeological excavations at Amphipolis, Northern Greece, were transformed into a ‘heritage spectacle’ during the summer of 2014. The article argues that the spectacularisation of Amphipolis excavations constituted a powerful, political medium for dis-orientating the wider Greek public from issues related to the severe economic crisis of the country. Although the practice of heritage spectacularisation is not new, the media spectacle of Amphipolis introduced an advanced mechanism for spectacularizing archaeological research and the past. The article deconstructs this mechanism through a thematic content analysis of about 100 newspaper articles published in the Greek press, filtered through the lenses of spectacle theory. As it is demonstrated, the spectacularisation process of Amphipolis excavations is embodied by emotive dramatisation, banal cultural symbols, escapism and power imbalances. The article concludes with an interpretive framework for heritage spectacles while highlighting ethical and practical implications regarding the role of archaeologists and heritage practitioners towards political ‘abuse’ of heritage in times of socio-economic and political crises.     

Nation-building and Canada's national symbolic order, 1993–2015

This article examines the symbolic construction of Canadian national identity by the 1993–2006 Liberal governments and the 2006–2015 Conservative governments. To do so, it employs the concept of a ‘national symbolic order’, which refers to the complex set of public symbols that invoke, transport, and define claims to a shared national identity. Within Canada's national symbolic order, we focus on the state's use of national symbols across two domains: Speeches from the Throne and banknotes. Our analysis shows that Canada's recent Conservative government has used both of these domains to reshape Canadian national identity in ways that accord with neo-conservative values and ideology, and that it has done so in a coherent, consistent, and comprehensive fashion. This analysis highlights the symbolic strategies employed by state actors in linking particular ideologies to their nation-building projects; these strategies span multiple political and policy spaces.     

The adoption of culturally contentious innovations: The case of citizen oversight of police

Cultural contentiousness is defined as an attribute of innovation due to which it encounters resistance because of its incompatibility with hegemonic cultural assumptions. I argue that culturally contentious innovations are likely to be adopted when antecedents have productive symbolic force, i.e., they reveal contradictions between dominant cultural assumptions and the material outcomes of existing institutions or empower social actors to resolve such contradictions. However, antecedents with incapacitative symbolic force tend to obfuscate the above contradictions or decrease social actors’ capacity to resolve them, encouraging the adoption of less contentious innovation. Applying these arguments to citizen oversight agencies (COAs) for the police, I examine the antecedents of contentious (i.e., investigative) as opposed to less contentious (non-investigative) COAs. In support of the above argument, I find that productive antecedents (e.g., a consent decree, an increase in civil rights nonprofits) are associated with adopting investigative COAs. In contrast, incapacitative antecedents (e.g., a Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights, an increase in the violent crime rate) are associated with adopting non-investigative COAs. The findings broadly demonstrate that policy adoption scholars ought to distinguish policies in terms of cultural contentiousness and account for the symbolic force of antecedents. Further theoretical contributions are discussed.     

Sampling for Provenance: Tailings from Prehistoric Stone Quarries in the South Pacific

Stone is a principal component in archaeological assemblages across the Pacific. It provided a major element in architecture, used as trade goods, and was fashioned into implements and ornaments, monolithic monuments, statues, money, and emblematic symbols of victory, status and ethnicity. In short, stone is a pervasive element in the economic, social, and political fabric of Pacific cultural traditions. However, provenance of rock quarries, the source of this raw material, has received limited attention in Oceania. Provenance studies have been sidestepped or short-changed in the rush to analyse artifactual materials. Here we establish a foundation for more robust provenance studies and field sampling strategies through a discussion of (1) quarry identification and (2) sampling within prospective sources. A model of quarry identification, sampling, and characterization is drawn from work on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and the fundamental precepts are outlined for future sampling experiments and provenance work in stone quarries generally.     

Placing social interaction: An integrative approach to analyzing past built environments

A growing recognition of the vital role that built space plays in social reproduction has created a need for analytical methods and interpretive frameworks with which to investigate this relationship in archaeological datasets. I address this by developing an integrative approach that emphasizes the role of the built environment as the context for interactions through which social structures are created, transformed and reproduced. This approach uses access analysis to examine how buildings structure patterns of movement and encounter that allow social actors to engage in or avoid particular forms of interaction. With its focus on the topological properties of built space, however, access analysis does not take adequate account of a building’s symbolic aspects, especially architectural characteristics and furnishings that social actors mobilize in the creation of meaningful contexts for interaction. I therefore integrate access analysis with an examination of how built environments encode meanings and nonverbally communicate them to inhabitants and visitors, potentially influencing their actions and interactions. The integrative approach allows determination of probable contexts for various types of social interactions during which social identities could be displayed, negotiated and reified. I conclude by demonstrating the potential of this approach with an analysis of the monumental Ashlar Building from the Late Bronze Age (c. 1650–1100 BC) site of Enkomi, Cyprus.     

Moments of Proximity: Former Political Prisoners,Postmemory and Justice in Indonesia

This article builds upon recent anthropological engagements with postconflict transitional justice processes, suggesting that ethnography can illuminate the ways in which these processes involve the negotiation of both physical and symbolic space, and intergenerational, postmemorial identities and relationships. This is demonstrated through my fieldwork observations of a 2005 class action lawsuit filed by eks-tapol (former political prisoners) in Indonesia against current and former heads of state. Tracing the symbolic resonances and the sometimes confrontational relationships brought into play around the court case, the article examines how a significant aspect of the ways in which victims of state violence situate themselves after the violence has ceased involves locating themselves, other citizens and state actors in intergenerational relationships.