Casey's response

The second half of seminar discussion raised questions about the link(s) amongst ideology, material culture, and archaeology. In a common critique against DeMarrais et al., it seems that we were fairly united in how "not" to discuss these relationships. For instance, Brad pointed out that DeMarrais et al. treat material manifestations of ideology as directed, monovalent purveyors of meaning; Tom noted that any potential agency of an object was omitted or ignored by the authors. These comments effectively raised the question how symbolic objects could be reinterpreted or reappropriated to work against their intended message. In my opinion, both points are valid and appropriate given the largely discredited notion of the artifact as a passive object.

The discussion was less clear, however, with respect to how archaeologists can productively investigate ideology in the ancient past. The decidedly top-down, elite-centered approach adopted by DeMarrais et al. seems insufficient, assuming as it does that a unified controlling group were self-consciously and deliberately using events, landscapes, objects, texts, etc. towards the sole purpose of establishing, exercising, and maintaining 'social power' over another group—whether the latter consisted of non-elites in the highly-ranked society of Early Neolithic to Bronze Age Europe; Moche peasants; or cultural outsiders being incorporated into an expanding Inca empire.

Without wishing to defend this type of analytic framework, I don’t think we should lose sight of the fact that it is not unique to archaeological studies of ideology. Although there is now an active and fruitful interest in the activities of non-elites, much field archaeology is still focused on the material found in elite contexts. This emphasis likely remains in part due to genuine scholarly interest in these types of artifacts, including texts, yet practical factors may also explain the bias. Monumental architecture, royal inscriptions, 'elite' art—all tend to be more visible and better preserved in the archaeological record. Given this, it hardly seems surprising that the models for understanding ideology are linked, in increasing orders of magnitude, to high-status individuals, the controlling elites, the state.

These observations lead me to ask how archaeologists can develop research questions and methodologies well-suited to addressing ideology in the past. Even if we don’t agree with all of Eagleton’s assertions, his work prompts us to ask foundational questions about ideology that I feel would be relevant to exploring this topic archaeology. Is ideology uniquely linked with 'the dominant', as our archaeological case study implies? Is ideology something that can even be 'located' in a society, or is it pervasive and ever-present? What would one look for in the material record to study ideology? Would the answers to these questions change based on where we conduct our research, both temporally and geographically? If we can begin to formulate responses—not necessarily correct answers—to these questions, we might be in a better position to think critically and realistically about how ideology may become a valid topic of archaeological inquiry.

This final statement brings me to a question Tom raised in the last paragraph of his response: Is ideology actually a useful term? I’ll end with the same question, and a similar opinion about its answer. If part of the reason for beginning a class on the state is because of the overuse, abuse, and misuse of the term in Near Eastern archaeology, there seems to be, at the very least, some semantic ambiguity to tackle. A superficial cross-cultural observation: the Maya are rarely discussed in terms of The State; scholars have discussed their geopolitical organization and structure with varied and vaguely defined conclusions, but the state model that defines much of Old World archaeology is absent here. Interestingly, discussions of ideology are commensurately absent—yet Maya propaganda, Maya worldview, 'indigenous notions of history' are all valid topics of study. However, the way in which these are discussed in Mayanist literature does not seem so different from the ways we’ve been discussing ideology. Maybe we have to work on the basic—defining, suitably, ideology and distinguishing it from other catchphrases—before moving on to the more complex—developing a research strategy to uncover ideology in the archaeological record.