In 1988, I spent the summer in Turkey with my wife Mary-Jo and a group of Turkish colleagues interviewing persons who had been identified as suffering seizure disorders by members of an epidemiological research team. The researchers were conducting a four nation study of the community prevalence of epilepsy, types of treatment and social disability associated with the disease, and the response of the condition to various medications, with the support of the Pharma International Division of Ciba Geigy. Our goal in collaborating with this project was to develop a set of anthropologically oriented case studies, drawn from a community sample (in contrast to more common clinical studies). The community base for the sample, the availability of neurological data on all individuals, and the link to an epidemiological study made this a special opportunity. We invited persons identified as suffering seizure disorders, along with their families, to tell us stories about their illness and to describe their illness experiences – to tell us about their seizures, their efforts to find effective treatment, the responses to their condition by persons in their community, and the effects of the illness on their lives.

The larger project began with a public health concern. Figures indicate relatively low utilization of anti-convulsive medications in much of the Third World, although clinical evidence suggests that seizure disorders are prevalent. Anecdotal data and a few published reports indicate that epilepsy is not only prevalent but highly stigmatized in many societies, that it produces significant psychosocial disability and often leads to physical injuries suffered during seizures.

Throughout his work, Cassirer asserted that symbolic forms are “organs of reality,” that they are formative of what we apprehend as real and available to human knowing and acting. In Language and Myth (1946: 8), he wrote:

In this chapter I continue my reflection on medicine as a symbolic form through a discussion of medical semiotics. The argument that human biology or disease is “very much within culture” and best understood as a symbolic form is strongly counter-intuitive, unless we interpret this as a rather trivial recognition that all consciousness and therefore knowledge is symbolic or meaningful. Cassirer made a much stronger claim, however, when he argued that science, aesthetics, and religion are each distinctive forms of knowledge, and that mythology, for example, is a special form of reality (rather than a psychological or symbolic distortion) and a mode of apprehending the world (1955b). Cassirer's philosophical position is closely akin to the historicist theory of culture that emerged in the Boasian tradition, sharing a concern for how historically evolving cultural forms mediate experience and knowledge.

In his book Objective Knowledge, Karl Popper (1972: 106) outlines a “three world” theory, which serves as the basis for his epistemological arguments:

What I have described as biomedicine's “folk epistemology” is consistent with such an ordering of reality. Disease is located in the body as a physical object or physiological state, and whatever the subjective state of individual minds of physicians and patients, medical knowledge consists of an objective representation of the diseased body. I have argued for an anthropological alternative to such an analysis of medical knowledge, based on a critical examination of how medical practices and ontologies shape the objects of medical attention. However, the difficulties with the objectivist account are more immediately evident when we look closely at illness and its experience. For the person who is sick, as for the clinician, the disease is experienced as present in the body. But for the sufferer, the body is not simply a physical object or physiological state but an essential part of the self. The body is subject, the very grounds of subjectivity or experience in the world, and the body as “physical object” cannot be neatly distinguished from “states of consciousness.”

For the past three decades, the prevailing “model” that has been used by archaeologists to investigate the rise of the earliest states is that of “neoevolutionism” – the stepladder model of bands becoming tribes, then chiefdoms, and finally states (Fig. 6.1). In the late 1970s and the 1980s, however, some – but not by any means all – archaeologists (see below for references) questioned the utility of the received model, leaving the situation unresolved for the 1990s. For example:

In this essay I briefly review the arguments that have been made both for and against the typological stage–level neoevolutionary model; I further consider the social and intellectual contexts that help us understand why many archaeologists who once accepted the model now seem ready to jettison it.

Introduction

The social archaeology of non–state agrarian societies emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a concern with the growth and differentiation of social institutions within a neoevolutionary framework. Such societies were characterized as tribes or chiefdoms; or as ranked societies, a category which largely obviated the need for distinguishing between the other two. Criticisms of this approach have been of various kinds. “Processual” attacks criticized typologies in general for a failure to recognize that there is a continuum of social complexity and for bundling together a variety of different social attributes, regarded as characterizing particular social types, instead of explaining the contingent social relations between them. Other attacks have been more radical, in both substance and political intent. It has been suggested that the discourse of social complexity in which recent discussions of social evolution have been framed is merely a re–expression of the ethnocentric emphasis on progress which characterized the nineteenth century, and which Rowlands (1989) suggests is typical of the Judaeo – Christian tradition. The view may be summed up in the statement by Giddens (1984: 236) that “Human history does not have an evolutionary ‘shape’ and positive harm can be done by attempting to compress it into one.” Giddens intends this statement in both an empirical and an evaluative sense.

In search of the truly critical

Post–processual archaeology is an amorphous phenomenon; it assumes many different shapes and forms, deriving inspiration from fields as diverse as contemporary literary criticism, women's studies, and human geography. As Earle and Preucel (1987) have recently suggested, post–processual archaeology may, in fact, constitute more a radical critique of the long dominant, “new” Anglo–American archaeology of the sixties and seventies than a unified research programme or disciplinary paradigm in its own right simply due to this diversity. It is such a mixed bag that it is difficult to define a common core, a new orthodoxy that has already replaced or, at least, is trying to dislodge the positivist, systemic ecological functionalism (or what I prefer to dub “animalism” – as opposed to the overused “vulgar” or the misnamed “cultural materialism”), championed most stridently by L. Binford and his disciples.

Yet if the adjective new had the most positive connotations in American culture and American archaeology in the late sixties, defining a rebellion against all that was old, traditional, and therefore suspect, the adjective critical today seems to be accorded the highest status, possibly uniting the diverse strands of post–processual archaeology into a single critically self–conscious, reflexive enterprise.

Abstract

Archaeological theory is not independent of the problems that need to be solved: it arises out of particular problems and articulates them with others. This volume explores how widely discussed bodies of theory relate to the major problem–domains studied by archaeologists.

There has never been a unified school of archaeology: just as today, the subject has always been characterized by competing theoretical stances that often arise from different bodies of data and attendant problems of interpretation.

If “archaeology” is more than a word that completely changes its meaning according to context, however, there should be some common ground among its practitioners in various branches of the discipline. One expects some community of ideas and approaches, especially an explicit understanding of how “appropriate theory” is matched to the various problems with which archaeologists have to deal.

Typically, however, “theoretical schools” have arisen and claimed to have a privileged status in determining what constitutes valid explanation in archaeological research, and the recent literature shows that this is still the case. In historical perspective, such schools are clearly seen not only as grounded in partial bodies of empirical material but also as reactions to preceding theoretical positions and are themselves likely to be superseded.

Despite the evident dangers of advancing universal prescriptions, however, a significant part of the explicitly theoretical literature in archaeology today consists of polemical claims to novel and exclusive sources of truth.

A post–processual archaeology is, by the definition of its name, something that arises out of a processual archaeology. Post–processual archaeology itself is a reflection, in our own little discipline, of the larger post–modern movement that has so influenced academics and intellectuals in the 1980s; the “modern movement” in archaeology itself seems to have been provided, in large measure, by the American school of the New Archaeology, and by contemporary work in Britain. As post–processual has arisen both out of and against processual, so it has come largely to be shaped by processual habits – either to develop those manners further, or to turn against them. A great deal has been written about the character of post–processual archaeology, by the “pp”s themselves and now by their several critics; some of that debate is now conveniently brought together in Preucel's excellent edited collection (Preucel 1991), to which this book adds more. This paper therefore looks not at postprocessual by itself, but at four elements in the intellectual climate within archaeology of which post–processual is a part.

I chance to have been in the University of Cambridge, the place where the “p” versus “pp” argument has been most openly fought, at some busy periods: first as an undergraduate during 1970–73 when David Clarke held an intellectual initiative; and again from 1982 onwards, as a graduate student and in junior staff positions, in the era when “pp” has arisen there.

We begin with some notes from a hospital ward:

Those are the opening words of a novel by Doris Lessing, Briefing For a Descent into Hell. It is not a novel that I like, but its theme is curiously apposite to this volume, for the man found wandering beside the Thames has experienced a mental breakdown, and the book follows his case history. Eventually the patient is identified as a Cambridge Professor of Classics. His crisis begins when he meets an archaeologist who has come to doubt whether he can know anything at all about the past: so much so that whenever he tries to lecture he is afflicted by terrible attacks of stammering. His experience has a familiar ring:

The brilliant compiler of The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History quoted above, Colin McEvedy, set himself the task of constructing a set of maps illustrating the development of Europe and the Near and Middle East from prehistoric times. In so doing, he had to make use of the evidence of archaeology, and his continued characterization of the subject is worth pondering.

Since the 1960s archaeology has become more disputatious than at any other time in its history. Practitioners openly debate conceptual and epistemological issues which lie at the core of the discipline. Archaeology exhibits such internal dissension that we are entitled to ask whether there are any disciplinary cultural norms left, whether there are any bedrock goals and understandings that can survive such disputation, and whether these norms of disciplinary behavior are necessary for there to be a productive future for the discipline. By extension, if what has served in the past as a basis for discourse is outmoded, can we replace it with a new account of disciplinary approach and purpose which facilitates communication and recognizes the diversity of the community of producers and consumers of archaeological knowledge?

Ironically, the prime cause of dissension, a positivist move to establish firmly that archaeology could be both scientific and relevant to the analysis of human affairs, was seen by its proponents as having the clear potential to reduce dispute by providing a generally agreed–upon basis for archaeological logic, archaeological epistemology, and archaeological ontology. Instead of this, our contemporary experience is of debates where archaeological logic is contextual, where archaeological epistemology veers wildly between varieties of positivism and relativism, and where archaeological ontology is a quicksand of mutually exclusive “commonsense” propositions about human behavior and the nature and significance of the archaeological record (see for example Patrik 1985; Sabloff etal. 1987).

Skepticism about the archaeological past

Archaeologists have debated a remarkably consistent core of issues since the turn of the century. In 1913, for example, Roland B. Dixon inveighed against research that showed “too little indication of a reasoned formulation of definite problems” and an inexcusable “neglect of saner and more truly scientific methods” (1913: 563); “the time is past,” he insisted, “when our major interest was in the specimen … We are today concerned with the relations of things, with the whens and the whys and the hows” (1913: 565). The problems he recommended for archaeologists' consideration had to do with “the development of culture in general,” with what he described as cultural processes, and the scientific methods he recommended were explicitly those of hypothesis testing: archaeologists should proceed by formulating “a working hypothesis, or several hypotheses” and then seeking material that might fill available gaps and “prove or disprove” them (1913: 564). Four years later, Wissler advocated a very similar (problem–oriented, hypothesis–testing) program, and explicitly aligned it with anthropology; he described it as “the real, or new archaeology” (the article was entitled “The New Archaeology”).