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Culture History: a Culture- Historical Approach

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Culture History: a Culture- Historical Approach CHAPTER 2 Culture History: A Culture- Historical Approach GARY S. WEBSTER The history of ideas is concerned with all that called culture-historical. And it distinguishes culture- insidious thought, that whole interplay of rep- historical from alternate contemporaneous types of resentations that flow anonymously between texts (e.g., functional-processual, evolutionary) on the men. basis not of age or author or sociopolitical function, -Michel Foucault, but rather on the basis of the formal characteristics The Archaeology of Knowledge displayed by their statements. As with any classificatory approach, culture his- CULTUREHISTORYCAN be variously conceived. Many tory has benefits and weaknesses (Mayr 1995). On the have considered it the dominant twentieth-cen- positive side it puts order to the unwieldy variation tury paradigm prior to the New Archaeology of the displayed by the massive culture-historical literature. 1960s-at least among Anglo-American trained ar- In doing so it makes possible comparisons with other chaeologists (Strong 1952; Trigger 1989:206; Lyman such traditions, as well as their accompanying dis- et al. 1997b:v, 1997a:1; Binford 1965, 1968; Caldwell course. A classificatory approach also seems especially 1959; Meltzer 1979; Dunnell 1978; Flannery 1967). suited to a phenomenon of such uncertain historical Others, like Clarke, have seen it as a preparadigmatic integrity. For it is important to realize that culture- "disconnected bundle of inadequate sub-theories" (D. historical archaeology-its tenets and principles-was Clarke 1968:xiii). It is often written about as though largely defined in retrospect, and usually by its critics synonymous with the research histories or biographies (Lyman et al. 1997b:vii). Archaeologists who actually of certain key figures, "culture history is what culture practiced culture history were little aware of it, at least historians do;' or, as Lyman et al. (1997b:vi) note, as prior to the 1950s. They rarely referred to themselves "the thinking of a group of archaeologists character- as culture historians, nor saw what they were doing ized by processual archaeologists as 'culture histori- as particularly culture-historical, as opposed to other ans'" (Daniel 1950; Fitting 1973; Willey and Sabloff kinds of archaeologies. "Culture history" as a term 1974; Trigger 1989:414, bibliography). and concept would have been better understood as it Culture history has also been variously referred to was used in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ger- as a period or stage in archaeological evolution (Willey man ethnology, to denote the product of research: a and Sabloff 1980); as a movement (Trigger 1989:table Kulturgeschichte, or culture history (Trigger 1989: 148). 1), an approach (Trigger 1989), a perspective (Preucel Archaeologists seem not to have used the term them- and Hodder 1996:6), an interpretive trend (Trigger selves until the 1930s (Kidder 1932) and only rarely 1989:12), and as an intellectual adaptation to specific before the 1960s to differentiate a distinctive kind sociopolitical circumstances (Trigger 1989: 148, 1978; of approach (Taylor 1948; Willey and Phillips 1958). Patterson 1986). Alternatively, its texts have been ex- Rouse's (1953) often cited programmatic essay "The amined as literary tropes (Hodder 1989) and exploited Strategy of Culture History" is a review of "research for literary effects (Webster 1999). planning with respect to the study of culture history," Instead, I have chosen to conceive of culture his- and not a description of one particular paradigm com- tory-as a culture historian should-as one among pared to others. lt is likely that most archaeologists of several archaeological traditions to which archaeolo- the period saw themselves simply as archaeologists gists contributed, mainly during the first half of the doing archaeology-as studying the archaeological twentieth century. This view approaches archaeologi- record, with the only real distinction being whether cal texts of the period as artifacts-the material ex- they were dealing with prehistoric or historic re- pression of the shared ideas or norms governing a mains. In contrast to later periods there was less re- particular kind of archaeological thought and practice flection, less self-awareness; the modern (or rather 11 postmodern) idea of alternate archaeologies (Hodder Partitive Culture or Cultures 1999) would have been foreign. A central notion of culture history is that cultures con- This has several implications. It raises first a ques- stitute real or empirical divisions of the cultural whole, tion about the wisdom of undertaking any project which E. B. Tylor (1871:1) defined as "that complex which hopes to characterize in some concise and whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morais, useful way a phenomenon which could in reality be law, custom, and other capabilities and habits acquired no more than the label which history and historians by man as a member of society." As Trigger states it have hung on nebulous congeries of poorly articu- (1978:76), "From this holistic or processual view of lated concepts, ill-reported methods, and badly re- culture it was an easy step to a partitive one of indi- membered personalities. At the same time it warns vidual cultures as ways of life transmitted by specific of the potential dangers of studying any such phe- peoples from generation to generation." The resulting nomena typologically. The greatest one is certainly parti tive or unit concept of culture came originally frorn the ramifications of confusing typological creations German ethnology and geography (Trigger 1989:162) with empirical reality; assuming that people lived and was used by the mid-eighteenth century to denote in a prehistoric past where the units archaeologists customs of individual societies and published as cul- recognize and navigate by in the present are the same ture history (Kulturgeschichte and Kulturwissenschaft) as those used by their prehistoric subjects. In the (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952). By the late nineteenth present chapter the risk is of lending historical real- century Friedrich Ratzel and Franz Boas promoted the ity to what may be largely a typological creation. It is idea of cultures as geographically discrete entities- easy to confuse the illusion of a consensus of opin- culture areas or "blocks" with unique characteristics ions produced by typologically reducing variation braught about by chance combinations of traits (Trig- with some real consensus originally present. There ger 1989:148-163). Taylor summed up the concept are risks to taking the subject of culture history as a (1948: 110) as follows: distinct body, when the ideas could be an arbitrary chunk of the normative continuum between cul- By culture as a partitive concept, I mean a historically ture history, and contemporaneous traditions such derived system of culture traits which is a more or less separable and cohesive segment of the whole-that-is- as functional-processual or evolutionary traditions. culture and whose separate traits tend to be shared by Culture historians worry about just these problems ali or by specially designated individuais of a group (Lyman et a!. 1997a). or society. In the remainder of this chapter, 1 will describe the diagnostic features of a culture-historical tradition as The unit-culture concept gained popularity in 1have defined it. American ethnology in culture area and age-area concepts (Mason 1896; Wissler 1923:61-63; Kroeber NORMATIVE THEORY 1931) which reinforced similar notions in archaeology Culture-historical texts are first distinguished by state- (cf. Holmes 1914). The distinction between holistic ments which reveal common notions about the nature culture and parti tive culture became thus a central of ancient cultures; about their qualities; about how tenet of culture history (Kluckhohn 1960:139; Childe they related to the material record; and thus about 1956a:26). how archaeologists might effectively study them. As Trigger (1978:100-101, 1989:161-163) has Normative Cultures chranicled, by the turn of the twentieth century ar- A second concept-perhaps originally from Durkheim chaeologists were looking for new concepts to put (1895)-is the idea that cultures are bound together order to increasingly numeraus and diverse collec- by common and distinct sets of norms, the normative tions of remains. As classic evolutionism lost influ- view of culture (Willey and Phillips 1958:18). As Childe ence, archaeologists adopted concepts from ethnology (1956a: 17-18) described it, culture (in a partitive sense) and human geography (Daniel 1963:98). One was the denotes patterns of behavior common to a group, to belief that it is possible to group archaeological col- ali members of a society ("every society of men does lections-assemblages, aggregates-that are compa- impose on its members close conformity to more or less rable on some measure to form cultural units that are rigid standards or norms of behavior") in traditional analogous to eth nological cultures (Trigger 1978: 100). standards of behavior. Culture, then, is a mental con- Several interrelated assumptions are involved. struct consisting of ideas (Taylor 1948: 101). 12 GARY s. WEBSTER This aiso implies that cultures are to be stud- Archaeological Cultures ied as whole entities, since as natural packages they Culture history typically views the archaeological are normatively homogeneous (Willey and Phillips record as not the culture itself, which is a fluid-norrna- 1958:18; Binford 1965:204; Rouse 1953:84).
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