Module 9: Material Culture and Ethnicity: Alternative Views

Reading: Rogers, "Tribes as Heterarchy"; Warner, "Collective Otherness"

On board:

• Primordial/ isolationist
• Interaction/instrumentalist
• Domination/power

In this class we are continuing our efforts to understand these three approaches to ethnicity by examining case studies. Like chemists, we have these theories and now we are looking at real life cases, "experiments," to see which theories can explain the cases and which can't. So we've looked at ethnicity in nineteenth-century Tucson, at Parting Ways, here in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina on the eve of European contact, and next time, in nineteenth-century Annapolis and Oklahoma. I wanted you to read the Rogers paper because

(1) It has a very interesting set of data with regard to the archaeology of ethnicity.

(2) It challenges our assumptions about ethnicity—which is part of the reason
they're hard to understand.

"Tribes as Heterarchy": Rogers started out in what theoretical camp? Primordial/isolationist.
Why did she take that position?

Because Anglos generally think of Indians as belonging to tribes, and when they think of tribes, they think of little nations: exclusive, ascribed members, exclusive territory, and cultural distinctiveness (p. 8).

Historical record: repeated existing numerous political units, with distinctive languages, at war with one another (p. 10-11).

Why did she abandon this position? Because of archaeological evidence:

Stone: people had direct access to lithic outcrops outside their territories (p. 12). How does she know? Probably different households with different amounts of different kinds of stone; therefore, no exclusive territories.

Ceramics: continuous distributions of different attribute combinations indicate no sharp boundaries of culture, or even regular interactions with the nearest settlements (p. 12). This indicates a lack of exclusive territories, local isolation overcome by marriage ties.

Features: a lack of substantial housing; many subterranean storage pits indicate mobile settlements, groups crossing each other's territories—"non-residents traveling through" (p. 14).

At the end, what position does Rogers take on ethnicity? Ethnicity did exist, as "momentarily spatially integrated residential groups" (p. 12), i.e. villages on floodplains of Yadkin and its tributaries, but with membership crosscut by other social groupings and identities: lineages (which may be groups at war), marriage ties, trade partners. (This is true in America today: ethnicity is crosscut by age, gender, class, and religion. In fact, ethnicity/nationalism is often appealed to by politicians to overcome other existing loyalties.) Alliances indicate choices, choices that lead to egalitarianism.

What can we conclude from Rogers' case study?

That the primordial/isolationist view of ethnicity really is not a good model of social relations in "tribal societies," i.e., those based on kin ties, not states. It is probably best suited to situations of immigration, like ours in the United States, where people come from very different regions of the world with highly distinctive characteristics.

Be suspicious of the word "tribalism" used to describe ethnic conflict in Third World Countries, especially Africa. "Tribalism" suggests that such conflicts (1) are part of human nature in its "less advanced" (i.e. non-Western) state; and (2) exist because Africa is "less advanced." There is nothing "natural" about ethnic conflict—clearly, it's within human nature, otherwise it wouldn't exist at all, but in the absence of colonialism, states, and nationalism, ethnicity is less pronounced in mobile hunting and gathering lands of the type that characterize 99.5% of our existence. Ethnicity existed only as the name of the composite group to which all kinsmen had access; 33% of the population moves from month to month (Lee, 1984, Ju/'hoansi).

Which theory best fits Rogers' situation? Not the interaction/instrumentalist approach, because it predicts that interaction should lead to the formation of strong coalitions to protect resources, coalitions that take the form of ethnic boundaries. In this theory, interaction creates boundaries. And in the Yadkin Valley, while there is lots of evidence for extensive interaction between villages, there is little evidence for strong ethnic boundaries. On the other hand, the power/domination approach asserts that social inequality is the only factor that produces strong ethnic boundaries. Since power and domination is absent from the Yadkin villages, we would expect to see an absence of a strong sense of exclusive ethnic identity. And this strong sense of ethnicity does, indeed, seem to be lacking. The association of little inequality and little ethnicity is what this theory should lead you to expect.

And what would you predict about ethnicity in the neighboring Mississippian chiefdoms (which have social hierarchy)?

This suggests that if we want to minimize ethnic and racial awareness in American society we should what? Eliminate inequality, create really equal opportunity. Do we have equal opportunity in the United States today?