Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications (London,Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Vol 2(2): 269–275 [1469-6053(200206)2:2;269–275;023966]

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

269

CommentarySocial theory and archaeological ethnographies

SETHA M. LOW

The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA

■ INTRODUCTION: CROSSING FIELDS

My romance with archaeology began with an undergraduate field excursionto Chalphaupa, El Salvador and ended when I passed out working with atrowel and brush in the tropical sun. Robert Sharer had brought me alongas a student physical anthropologist to collect bone and animal materialsand had I been able to tolerate the heat and bugs, I might have become anethnoarchaeologist looking at faunal remains.

This early initiation provided enough knowledge and practice so that Iknew to look to the archaeological literature to revise accepted theoriesabout meaning and power on the Latin American plaza (Low, 1995). Thearchaeologists and landscape historians represented in the issue have madethe reverse trip, borrowing from social theory and cultural anthropology,in order to illuminate their archaeological and landscape data and problemsof interpretation of outdoor spaces.

In this commentary I briefly discuss the four articles in this issue, high-lighting their use of social and cultural theory, and then suggest additionalanthropological approaches to further their efforts to ‘spatialize culture’(Low, 1996). I conclude by discussing my own struggle to read the social

07 Low (JG/d) 1/5/02 1:13 pm Page 269

270 Journal of Social Archaeology 2(2)

meaning of a contemporary landscape of a walled and gated community,noting how similar our theoretical projects really are.

■ SOCIAL THEORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Spatial strategies and tactics

I start with what is the most familiar for me, Mesoamerica, where thecrossing of cultural anthropological and archaeological boundaries hasalways been important (Ashmore, 2000). Cynthia Robin’s observations ofthe continuous use of exterior and interior house spaces in the Mayafarming village of Chan Nòohol in Belize draw parallel conclusions to myown study of Maya weaving-village house sites outside of Guatemala in1972. What I learn from her article is that the Mayan word nah, glossedover as ‘house’, incorporates all core home spaces including the house andyard.

Robin takes these observations further by using the insights of Michelde Certeau to illustrate the ‘interpenetration of social construction andsocial experience in the everyday lives of Maya farmers . . .’. I particularlylike the image of people listening across the pole walls as a way to recon-struct experientially the daily outdoor/indoor fluidity of village space.Traces and paths on porous soil illuminate how residents’ daily behaviorsstructure space and culture rather than the social and political forces ofthe state. Further, the ‘imprint of walking’ breaks down inside/outside,domestic/non-domestic and public/private dichotomies through the spatial-izing practices of everyday living.

There are other social theories Robin could draw upon to add to heranalysis. For de Certeau (1984), power is about territory and boundaries inwhich the weapons of the strong are classification, delineation and division(what he calls ‘strategies’), while the weak use furtive movement, short cutsand routes (his term is ‘tactics’) to contest this spatial domination. Tacticsnever rely on the existence of a place for power or identity; instead theyare a form of consumption, ‘never producing proper places, but alwaysusing and manipulating these places’ (Cresswell, 1997: 363). Thus, thespatial tactics of the weak are mobility and detachment from the rational-ized spaces of power – the Chan village pathways and traces.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1986) are also concerned with howpeople resist the spatial discipline of the state. They distinguish betweenthe ordered and hierarchical machinations of the state and the ‘warmachine’ of the nomad, who moves by ‘lines of flight’ or by ‘points andnodes’ instead of place to place. The nomad escapes the state bynever becoming reterritorialized, slipping through the ‘straited spaces’ ofpower and remaining undisciplined, a metaphor for all the forces that

07 Low (JG/d) 1/5/02 1:13 pm Page 270

271Low Commentary

resist state control. The smooth space of the ‘nomad’ is continuous andundifferentiated, not unlike the kind of space that Robin is trying totheorize. Using Deleuze and Guattari to think about Chan village spacemight liberate house, yard and field even further, and suggests that thekinds of spatial/political struggles imagined by these authors are inherentat this and other Maya sites.

Transnational/translocal spaces

Minette Church’s study of the homestead landscapes in the late nine-teenth-century borderlands of southeastern Colorado explores the waysthat Anglo, Hispano and Native American groups inscribe the land withtheir different cultural views of appropriate patterns and subsistencestrategies. Church is concerned with rereading an ethnically complex spaceusing Arjun Appadurai’s concept of ethnoscape in which ‘people engagein a dialectical relationship with places that they inhabit for any length oftime’. Using the notion of the recreation of homelands allows her toexplain the evolution of land claims and ranches using both historical andarchaeological materials. By contrasting the three different homelandstrategies and uncovering intermarriage and inheritance patterns, sheportrays a more complex analysis of this landscape, and points out howarchaeological evidence tells a different story from that of the historicaldocuments.

Aihwa Ong (1999) employed the term ‘transnational’ to denotemovement across spaces and formations of new relationships betweennations states and capital. She defined transnational spatial processes asbeing situated cultural practices of mobility that produce new modes ofconstructing identity and result in zones of graduated sovereignty based onthe accelerated flows of capital, people, cultures and knowledge, not unlikethe southeastern Colorado situation that Church describes. Thinking abouttransnational, or translocal, spaces might contribute to her theorizing of thedifferent landscape patterns and the possible conflicts in cultural norms andlocal knowledge that occurred on these sites.

Within cultural anthropology, the term transnational, was first used todescribe the way in which immigrants ‘live their lives across borders andmaintain their ties to home, even when their countries of origin and settle-ment are geographically distant’ (Glick-Schiller et al., 1992: ix). Part of thiseffort was to understand the implications of a multiplicity of social relationsand involvements that span borders. Eric Wolf (1982) laid the theoreticalgroundwork in his landmark history of how the movement of capital andlabor has transformed global relations since the fifteenth century, dispellingthe myth that globalization is a recent phenomenon. However, while Wolf’sapproach to the issue of global connections is seminal, it deals primarilywith issues of power and its allocation, and only indirectly with the spaces

07 Low (JG/d) 1/5/02 1:13 pm Page 271

272 Journal of Social Archaeology 2(2)

of daily life. It is much later, through the detailed ethnographies of therhythms of daily life in transnational migrant communities, that a sense oftransnational spaces emerges, approaches comparable to Church’s land-scape analysis.

There is a tendency to conceive of transnational spaces as sites of resist-ance, and to depict cultural hybridity, multi-positional identities, bordercrossings and transnational practices by migrants as conscious efforts toescape control by capital and the state. For instance, Michael Kearney(1991) traced the counter-hegemonic creations of autonomous politicalspaces by Mixtec migrant farm workers in California and Oregon. RogerRouse (1991) imagined a social terrain that reflects the cultural bifocalityof migrants and describes a fragmented reality made up of circuits andborder zones. These migration studies dissolve conventional notions ofborders, boundaries, nations and community. In doing so they reformulatesocial and political space, supplanting static concepts of center andperiphery, as well as of cultural core and difference at the margins, to createfluid, transnational space produced by ‘ordinary’ people. These culturalanthropological theories of ‘transnational’ space complement Church’s useof landscapes and ethnoscapes, and would move the analysis of ‘the grantand the grid’ to question the relationship of the nation states involved andthe power that they hold.

Embodied spaces

Lesley Head, Jennifer Atchinson and Richard Fullagar with the assistenceof Biddy Simon and Polly Wandanga, of the Marralam community, explorethe Keep River region in northwestern Australia through an analysis of theethnobotanical and archaeobotanical evidence. Using Anthony Gidden’sconcept of practical consciousness, they theorize an interplay of countryand garden without the ‘false separation’ of the social and the ecological asdistinct or separate categories of interaction. Working with local collabo-rators in the project, they combine ethnographic fieldwork and ethno-botanical analyses to trace the circuits of movement and meaning in thelandscape. From these analyses new interpretations of plant manipulationand changes associated with European arrivals are identified. In this article,the role of the archaeologist is the same as the ethnographer, in that theyboth utilize what informants say and do as a way of understanding the largercultural pattern.

Cultural anthropologists also have noted the importance of movementin the creation of place, conceptualizing space as movement rather than acontainer. Melanesian ethnographers work in a cultural context that accen-tuates the importance of spatial orientation: in greeting, the passage of time,the definition of events and the identification of people with land and/orlandscape. Working with the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, Nancy Munn

07 Low (JG/d) 1/5/02 1:13 pm Page 272

273Low Commentary

(1996) brought aspects of this work together by considering space/time ‘asa symbolic nexus of relations produced out of interactions between bodilyactors and terrestrial spaces’ (1996: 449). Drawing in part on Lefebvre’s(1991) concepts of ‘field of action’ and ‘basis of action’, she constructs thenotion of a ‘mobile spatial field’ that can be understood as a culturallydefined, corporeal-sensual field stretching out from the body at a givenlocale or moving through locales. Her ethnographic illustrations are spatialinterdictions that occur when Aborigines treat the land according to ances-tral Aboriginal law. She is interested in the specific kind of spatial formbeing produced that creates a variable range of excluded or restrictedregions for each person throughout their life. Munn applies this idea tocontemporary Aborigine encounters with powerful topographic centersand ‘dangerous’ ancestral places.

The importance of this analysis is the way Munn demonstrated how theancestral law’s power of spatial limitation becomes ‘embodied’ in an actor-centered, mobile body, separate from any fixed center or place. The notionof Aboriginal space as embodied complements and amplifies Head et al.’sanalysis of the social dimensions of landscape and adds another dimensionto their work.

Public/private space

Scott MacEachern combines many techniques – ethnohistorical, archaeo-logical and ethnoarchaeological – to construct the evolution of ritual andpolitical systems in the northeastern Mandara Mountains. He uses oralhistories and descriptions of political and ethnic relations within andbetween montagnards and plain-dweller communities and four seasons ofarchaeological excavations to understand the degree of spatial segregationand changing spatial definitions of public and private. He then adds theterms ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces to what in the other articles is considereddomestic, agricultural or community space and illustrates how the atten-dant meanings of ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces vary historically and betweenmontagnards and plain-dweller communities. However, the concepts of‘public’ and ‘private’ do not capture the historical distinctions that he wantsto make.

Similar to MacEachern in the northestern Mandara Mountains case,within cultural anthropological theory on space and place the terms ‘public’and ‘private’ have been re-evaluated within specific contexts and culturalsituations. These terms often gloss over finer discriminations and do notallow a third category – ‘semi-private’ or ‘semi-public’ – to emerge, nor there-analysis of what is domestic space or a space that represents the state. Ithink the lesson here is that with ethnographic material, particularly emicor ‘experience-near’ data or transcripts, conceptual categories derived fromother disciplines may not provide the best analytic fit.

07 Low (JG/d) 1/5/02 1:13 pm Page 273

274 Journal of Social Archaeology 2(2)

■ CONCLUSION

As I struggle to bring architecture and spatial analysis into cultural anthro-pology (Low and Lawrence, 2002), I marvel at the success of archaeologistsat melding these very different worlds and types of data. I find that thehardest part is convincing my colleagues that I can read between the linesof what is visible, and in some cases even read what is said to get at whatis not said.

In my work on gated communities – middle-class residential enclaves ofsingle family houses surrounded by walls and with secured access by elec-tronic keys or guard – I am attempting to expand the co-production modelbegun in On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. In my workon the Latin American plaza both the social production and the socialconstruction of space are used to understand cultural meaning. The psycho-logical meaning of spaces, however, was not clearly developed. In the gatedcommunity research, I focus instead on the confluence of talk about theplace with its physicality and use, integrating what people say about theircommunity, what they feel about living there, and what is not said butenacted in everyday life (Low, 2001). I argue there are spatial meanings inthe landscape that are latent, even obscured, by social and cultural conven-tion. By adding the discourse of space with its material production andsocial construction, I uncover underlying interpretations of spatial relationsand architectural form. Like so many of the archaeologists and historiansin this issue, I draw upon these multiple sources of data to enrich my under-standing of place and space. We share an interest in historical documents,ethnographic exegesis, cultural contexts and spatial traces. The only differ-ence is that I ask people to offer their own accounts as well.

Even so, the marriage of archaeology and ethnography – or of linguis-tics and ethnography – can be rocky because of misunderstandings in theuse of data and application of theory. The articles in this special section,though, demonstrate how productive this cross-fertilization and exchangeof ideas can be. I suggest that even more integration of cultural anthro-pology and archaeology is possible through the application of social theory,and I hope there will be more collaborative work between archaeologistsand anthropologists in the future.

References

Ashmore, W. (2000) ‘Decisions and Dispositions: Socializing Spatial Archaeology’,Distinguished Lecture in Archaeology, American Anthropological Associationannual meeting, San Francisco.

Cresswell, T. (1997) ‘Imagining the Nomad’, in G. Benko and U. Strohmayer (eds)Space and Social Theory, pp. 360–82. Oxford: Blackwell.

07 Low (JG/d) 1/5/02 1:13 pm Page 274

275Low Commentary

de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practices of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia.

Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986) Nomadology: The War Machine. New York:Semitext.

Glick-Schiller, N., L. Basch and C. Blac-Szanton (1992) Towards a TransnationalPerspective on Migration. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.

Kearny, M. (1991) ‘Border and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire’,Journal of Historical Sociology 4(1): 52–74.

Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.Low, S.M. (1995) ‘Indigenous Architectural Representation’, American Anthro-

pologist 97(4): 748–62.Low, S.M. (1996) ‘Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and Social Construc-

tion of Public Space’, American Ethnologist 23(4): 861–79.Low, S.M. (2001) ‘The Edge and the Center’, American Anthropologist 103: 45–68.Low, S.M. and D. Lawrence (2002) The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating

Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.Munn, N. (1996) ‘Excluded Spaces’, Critical Inquiry 22: 446–65.Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.

Durham: Duke University Press.Rouse, R. (1991) ‘Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism’,

Diaspora 1(1): 8–23.Wolf, E. (1982) Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

SETHA M. LOW is Professor of Environmental Psychology and Anthro-pology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York andDirector of the Public Space Research Group at the Center for HumanEnvironments. She has published extensively including, most recently,The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture (with D. Lawrence,Blackwell, 2002), On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture(University of Texas Press, 2000) and Theorizing the City (RutgersUniversity Press, 1999). She is currently completing Behind the Gates: TheNew American Dream and writing and lecturing about open space,security and gated communities.

07 Low (JG/d) 1/5/02 1:13 pm Page 275