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- Convenors:
-
Julian Thomas
(Manchester University)
Irene Garcia Rovira (University of Manchester)
- Location:
- Wills 3.31
- Start time:
- 17 December, 2010 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
It is now twenty years since the issue of tradition was explicitly addressed in a session at TAG. How far has our understanding developed in the intervening period?
Long Abstract:
Our view is that while cultural and social traditions are continually evoked in archaeological writings, explicit theorisation of the concept is surprisingly scarce. One reason for this is that tradition is often simply used as a placeholder for concepts that have fallen into question. Thus we might talk about 'material traditions' instead of 'cultures', or about 'traditional societies' as a means of side-stepping crude forms of social evolutionism. Yet in both cases, 'tradition' is reduced to a neutral term, which carries little interpretive force. Equally, within the social sciences at large, tradition has been treated with some ambivalence, perhaps because of its centrality to some forms of conservative thought. Although it was fundamental to aspects of practice theory in the 1970s and 1980s, tradition has faded a little from anthropological and sociological concern in the past two decades, possibly as a result of the complementary rise of interest in social memory and materiality.
In this session we seek to promote a focused discussion of the following issues:
• How has the notion of tradition been conceptualised within the human sciences?
• What is the relationship between cultural tradition and the crafting of material things?
• How does the 'style' of artefacts relate to cultural tradition?
• Does cultural tradition provide the basis for a critique of accepted models of cultural transmission?
• How useful is the notion of 'traditional societies'? Is tradition more significant in some social settings than others?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Julian Thomas (Manchester University)
Paper short abstract:
Tradition has proved a problematic term within the human sciences, as a result of its critical position within a series of political arguments.
Paper long abstract:
For many conservative thinkers, tradition shelters established forms of life, maintains values and social relationships, and is to be protected from both social engineering and the incursion of markets. Conversely, in Enlightenment thought tradition stood alongside religious superstition and arbitrary authority as one of the obstacles that needed to be overcome in order to achieve a free and rational society. In this contribution, I will explore the ways in which this political burden complicates the explicit use of the notion of tradition in archaeology and anthropology.
Keith Ray (Herefordshire Council)
Paper long abstract:
Archaeological heuristics has long been a feature of investigation and discourse in the discipline. In the Anglophone world, the use of heuristics reached its zenith with the explicit generation and discussion of 'models' in archaeology in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Throughout the past century, discourse has routinely featured the deployment of particular heuristic devices to aid interpretation. 'Culture' is one among such devices, and the concept of 'cultural traditions' underpinned historicist approaches to archaeological interpretation that were labeled by the advocates of a 'New Archaeology' in the 1960's as the 'culture-historical' tradition of archaeological research.
This later observation pinpoints two aspects of the use of 'tradition' in archaeology: as a label for 'schools of thought', and as a short-hand for the descent of cultural practices. It is primarily with the latter that I shall be concerned here. The focus is nonetheless upon interpretive writing in archaeology, rather than with genealogies of practice per se. Nor is my study one that concerns itself with historiography as such. The questions that I wish to investigate are: "how has the use of the term 'tradition' worked in practice as a heuristic device in archaeology? Has the term outlived its usefulness as a heuristic for the descent of practices and for the existence of cultural continuity within a 'framework' of continuing change?" In order to throw light on the use of 'tradition' as a heuristic device, I shall review the 'chaine operatoire', to isolate some general characteristics of heuristic usage in archaeology.
Tobias Richter (University of Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
Situated learning is presented as a handy concept to rethink the role of tradition in archaeology. It is argued that a concern with learning provides an avenue to think through the relationship between people, social structures, knowledge, material, cultural change and stability.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I argue that theories about cultural tradition and transmission are hollow, if we do not pay more attention to the central role played by processes of learning in the propagation of cultural traits, structures and forms. If discussed at all in archaeology, learning has usually been approached within evolutionary archaeology frameworks, in which case it is commonly considered as a fairly static, uni-directional transmission of cultural information, governed by natural selection and genetic drift.
I would like to advance a somewhat different conceptualisation of learning processes, by drawing on the work of Etienne Wenger (1999; Lave and Wenger 1991) and his concept of situated learning. Inspired by crucial work in practice theory, in particular Pierre Bourdieu , Wenger argues that learning is situated within and takes place amongst the members of particular communities of practice. He describes learning as a progression of individuals from the periphery of a practice toward its centre as their experience of the communities' enterprise increases and their social relations with other members of the community are augmented.
Communities of practice illustrate how particular practices, knowledge, norms and ideas are propagated within definable social constructs, without losing the essential focus on agency and practice. This focus on learning avoids falling back onto loaded and static concepts such as 'culture' and provides a useful avenue to rethink the idea of traditions in archaeology.
Lesley McFadyen (Birkbeck)
Paper short abstract:
N/A
Paper long abstract:
One of the main ways in which to approach the subject of building is as an architectural object. Here building is not only concrete as a material thing; it has very definite parameters in how it is perceived in its design, from an initial idea to a final form. It is defined by the expectation of a building as something that is thought about, those plans are put into action, and then it is made as a complete entity. With this view of things, the source of creativity is located in the idea, and in the object, and so meaning can be read back from the final form.
An emphasis on Architecture and Design has resulted in the sidelining of other kinds of construction: they are set up as unequally opposed to Architecture as the Vernacular or Primitive. The production of these forms is understood through Tradition rather than Design. However, there are many architectural historians that write about the human value of building traditions, and this is articulated in contrast to 'Western constructs of Architecture'. Indeed, one architectural historian has stated that it is at this point that you can mark the move of a more reactionary 'non-pedigreed' architecture into anthropology in the works of Rapoport and Oliver.
I would argue that prehistorians have read design from form, whilst at the same time assuming that they are dealing with primitive material because of the nature of their evidence as 'pre-classical'. And so design has been replaced by the notion of building traditions. If we shift our understanding from architecture as object to architecture as practice, and locate creativity in the process of making, what does that do to our understanding of design and tradition? This paper will argue that there are other kinds of architectural thinking that prehistorians can connect with. For the 'As Found' movement there was the perception of inhabitation as a creative part of the design process itself, creativity was to do with attentiveness and a concern for that which already exists, the task of making something from something. There is an awareness of the importance of the already there in the creative practice of architecture. My question is: should prehistorians extend and develop a critical understanding of building traditions, or could it be more effective to reenergize design practice? The paper will debate this topic.
Irene Garcia Rovira (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to shed light onto the underlying effects resulting from the modern opposition of 'reason' to 'tradition'. These are still latent in contemporary theoretical issues that, in turn, constrain the development of alternative approaches to the study of prehistoric contact.
Paper long abstract:
In its most basic sense, tradition is "anything which is transmitted and handled down from the past to the present" (Shils 1981: 12). Nevertheless, it is not difficult to glimpse that if our use of the concept would follow accordingly to its definition, many practices that are not considered part of (or) a tradition would become traditional.
In this consideration attention is given to the historical trajectory that concluded with the opposition of the notion of 'reason' to that of 'tradition'. The creation of this dichotomy was central to the institutionalisation of the different social disciplines during the ninetheth century (Wallerstein 2002). It has also been fundamental for the characterisation of the West, and, most importantly, for the delineation of the so-called 'Other'.
In this paper, I will examine how the characterisation of the 'Other' has played against the development of alternative strategies to explore contexts of prehistoric contact. An analysis concerning both the use of ethnographic analogies and the incorporation of the notion of agency are central for this discussion.
Ana Vale (University of Porto)
Paper long abstract:
Following J. Thomas (2004) I would like to propose the term "traditions of practice" as an operational concept that seeks to question the transmission of ways of doing through practice, more specifically, through the making of architecture. I am not referring only to the digging of a ditch or to the construction of a wall, but to a broader constellation of relationships in which they became built spaces; and to the way those spaces themselves are under permanent construction and transformation. Tradition will not be understood here as a non-reflexive continuation of actions or icons, as a set of crystallized and formalized practices that are meant to give identity from the exterior to a certain community. I would rather like to discuss the study of traditions of practice of specific architectural devices that through this approach do not reveal functions, but the construction of stories through processes of repeated practice. As Derrida said, repetition is never imitation of the same, but repetition is always different from what was previously repeated. So, tradition is created and recreated, revisited every time by practice through the construction of circular units at Castanheiro do Vento, a III millennium walled enclosure, (where slabs and ceramic fragments, land and water, wood, and small animal bones meet, inserted in a network of relationships between past and present), or through the excavation, by trowel, of those circular structures at Castanheiro do Vento.
Frances Liardet (Cardiff University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores an apprenticeship in core-formed vessel-making to suggest that, far from being packaged knowledge which is firstly transmitted and secondly imbued with ‘culture’, craft ‘tradition’ is a kinaesthetic experience of interaction with materials possessed of intrinsic cultural meaning.
Paper long abstract:
When the term 'tradition' is used to refer to craft production it has often been conceived of as 'knowledge which is passed on'. This reification and abstraction of craft has made it easy for it to be treated as a thing which is transmitted and helps to explain why the activity of making, and particularly the process of becoming dexterous, is comparatively unexamined in some theoretical approaches to, and ethnographic accounts of, craft production. This missing dimension has led to craft production being 'informed' extrinsically with cultural values borne out of social relations. This paper aims to unpack the notion of a 'craft tradition' through a study of an apprenticeship in an archaic form of glass working, that of core-formed vessel-making. (Instead of being inflated these vessels were moulded around a clay core which was then scraped out.) It is suggested that becoming dexterous is of itself a value-positive process and that craft activity is a shared kinaesthetic experience which is temporal as well as spatial, possessed of intrinsic cultural meaning, and formed through interaction with materials.
Stella Souvatzi (Open University of Cyprus)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the role of multiple kinds of tradition in the creation of a long-term and continuous yet constantly changing archaeological landscape in Greece, extending from the early Neolithic (7th millennium BC) through to Classical Greece and up until today.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the role of multiple kinds of tradition in the creation of a long-term and continuous yet constantly socially changing archaeological landscape in Greece, extending from the early Neolithic (7th millennium BC) through to Classical Greece and up until today. It aims to reveal that although spaces, scenes and memories from the great prehistoric cultures were preserved and transmitted over thousands of years through architecture, representational arts and oral tradition, giving way to claims for cultural origins and continuity, in reality little remained the same. Cultural, material, symbolical, oral and mythological tradition constituted primarily a powerful medium for establishing models for changing cultural and social ideals. The central argument of the paper is that cultural tradition and transmission always co-exist with social and ideological change. Tradition is not simply a passive continuation of notions, ideas, spaces and material things. It is socially, culturally, politically and historically contingent, and thus itself subject to change.