Analogy and Comparison: Reconsidering Key Techniques in Cultural Analysis

Sunday, May 2nd
9:00 am-12:30 pm

Session Organizers: Chris Fowler ([email protected]) and Oliver Harris ([email protected])

Session Abstract: This session will explore the use of both inferences made on the basis of ethnographic, historical or archaeological analogies and the process of cultural comparison. It aims to promote discussion about the mechanisms by which analogies are constructed and comparisons drawn. Anthropologists and historians rarely frame their cultural comparisons as analogies, yet archaeologists have often drawn analogies to make inferences without presenting these as cultural comparisons that are part of a larger theoretical project in understanding human societies. Some uses of analogy in archaeology are therefore focused on patching together an understanding of a specific past context without considering what this process tells us about other contexts (even those deployed in the analogy). Yet many other archaeological uses of analogy draw relational analogies which connect together groups of practices as the result of shared underlying principles (e.g. beliefs about ancestors among small-scale agricultural communities). Cultural comparison has clearly come to play an important role in building archaeological theories about social relations, economies, belief systems and so on – theories that can be translated across contexts. This poses fundamental questions about whether or not we can posit types of communities or social phenomena that are characterised by certain principles (for instance, are there certain principles structuring the routines of those who live in longhouses, or pastoralists, or underlying extended sequences of mortuary practices?).

While anthropologists compare cultural contexts in order to show up the specific principles underlying the communities they study compared with others, they do not present this as analogy. However, they seldom compare present and past communities. Archaeologists do compare past and present communities, yet only comment on what this adds to our understanding of the past communities. What is the value of combining both inferences based on analogies with cultural comparisons which consider the role of certain practices across many communities disparate in time and space? What are the pitfalls of such approaches? What kinds of social phenomena or practices ought to form the basis for such comparisons? How can such techniques of comparison retain an appreciation of context?

Session type: a 10 minute introduction followed by 6x 20-minute papers and a 40-minute open discussion chaired by organisers. Audience members will be encouraged to discuss how they use analogy and comparison and to make statements from the floor.

Rethinking Analogy and Comparison: An Introduction to the Session

Chris Fowler (Newcastle University) and Oliver Harris (Newcastle University)

Is Archaeological Inference Inherently Analogical? An Application of Alison Wylie's Definitions of Analogy to Key Archaeological Studies Published over the Last 70 Years.

Pamela Jane Smith (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge)

In the early 1980s, Alison Wylie, as influenced by her Ph.D supervisor, the scientific realist Rom Harre, defined analogies as positive (based on compared similarities), negative (based on differences) and neutral (built on unknown likenesses). She distinguished relational analogies and 'paramorphic' models from formal, isomorphic analogies built on similarities only. Wylie argued that archaeologists reason 'abductively' to produce ampliative arguments and that most archaeological inference remained analogical in some form.

In this paper, I examine rather archaeologists actually have, over decades, argued explicitly or enthymatically from analogue. Can we find examples of archaeological inference which are clearly analogical? Starting with D.F. Thomson's classic 1939 study, "The Seasonal Factor in Human Cultures", I work through decades of articles including Lewis Binford's 1970s efforts at ethnoarchaeology, Barbara Bender's early Marxist analyses of prehistoric social structures, Grahame Clark's work on "Neothermal Orientations: David Clarke's well-known 1976 analysis of Mesolithic Europe, Geoff Bailey's refinement of the transhumance model at Epirus, Glynn Isaac's work on "Bones in Contention" during the 1980s. I will finish the survey with Mike Parker Pearson's use of relational analogy in his analysis of Stonehenge.

It appears from these examples that our use of analogical reasoning could be strengthened. I conclude with a review of the most recent work on the evaluation and construction of analogical arguments from the philosophers, Paul Thagard and Paul Bartha.

Bases of Comparison: What is Gained in Making Collages of Practices?

Chris Fowler (Newcastle University)

Spriggs (World Archaeology 2008) recently suggested that archaeology’s goal should be the production of comparative analyses of long-term change. He is critical of the role of ethnographic analogy in this pursuit, suggesting that because contemporary social formations are the result of a history of modern colonialism these social groups are inappropriate analogies for past communities who were not formed through similar historical processes. Spriggs further argues that ‘modes of production’ are comparable across time and space. In this paper I will argue that the comparison of cultural practices – rather than the comparison of social 'types' perceived to share economic, social or political systems – provides a vital first basis for exploring similarities and differences between cultural contexts. This need not lead to the identification of types of societies, but can draw out points of connection across societies otherwise categorised according to such types.

The paper will focus on the practice of using comparisons to identify recurrent cultural practices. I will argue that Spriggs is correct to critique the use of analogy, and will echo his call for a comparative archaeology, but I will also argue that the way he frames comparison is problematic. Spriggs’ perspective reifies communities, practices and material culture into a social and historical type before carrying out comparison. His approach also promotes comparing only similar social types – and that similarity would imply that they shared the same kind of historical processes (Spriggs determines that social relations similar to those in ‘big man’ societies can only be a result of colonial impact, for instance). By contrast, I will explore the benefits of creating collages of practices and tracing both connections and differences between differing cultural contexts where these practices appear. Such comparison of practices or relationships avoids a continued reliance on social evolutionary narratives, providing a sound basis for exploring cultural phenomena which appear across social types and in many different cultural contexts or social types (e.g. gift giving, certain mortuary practices, dwelling in houses, slavery).

Slavery, Comparatively Speaking

Jane Webster (Newcastle University)

Archaeology is an inherently comparative discipline, in the sense that analogy plays a central role in archaeological reasoning. As all students know, one can only infer that 'this is an axe' by drawing on knowledge from living or near-contemporary societies that have also made and used axes. Some archaeologists acquire that knowledge empirically, by undertaking ethnoarchaeological fieldwork for themselves, but most rely on data collected by anthropologists and ethnographers. One way or the other, since the advent of processualism in the 1960s, engagement with anthropology has played a crucial part in driving forward key theoretical developments in the archaeological interpretation of past societies. But how far is that statement true for the classical world?

Classical archaeologists very rarely stray on to comparative ground. Their reluctance is traceable in part to an underlying belief that comparison undermines the 'uniqueness' of the classical past and its perceived ancestral value for the West. At the same time, the continued privileging of the textual record plays a part here: the mere existence of written texts - however limited in quantity and range, however flawed or biased by authorial intent, naivety or prejudice - seems to be enough to ensure that, for many classical archaeologists, cross-cultural analogy - and most other methodologies favoured by anthropological archaeologists - remain irrelevant: a-historical weapons of very last resort in the armoury of 'text-aided' archaeological interpretation.

Employing the archaeology of Roman and early modern (Transatlantic) slavery as a case study, this contribution asks: what is lost by this 'failure to compare'? What more might we achieve by making diachronic comparisons between ancient and modern slavery, particularly in exploring the material world of the enslaved themselves?

BREAK

Beyond Excavation: Using Ethnography to Support the Discovery, Use and Preservation of Slave Trade Relics and Landscape Artifacts in Lagos and Ogun States, Nigeria

Alaba Simpson (Crawford University)

The paper observes that archaeology’s ability to discover historical facts that are absent from written records has been a major contribution of the discipline in Africa. It notes further that although a vast number of excavations have been carried out in Nigeria, recent ethnographic documentations in the Lagos and Ogun state areas of the country have pointed attention to dimensions of archaeological interest that may inform convergence between the two disciplines. The paper emphasizes as examples, the activities guiding the running of local museums in Badagry, Lagos state, which are overseen by the custodians of the materials that were retrieved, not from the earth, but from the private possessions of local slave trade dealers during the period of the Trans Atlantic slave trade. While such relics are continuously curated by the community in which they had served during the social process of slave trade, the support of archaeology in further giving improved meanings to the existence of such implements will no doubt enhance the historical information on the area. Also in some other parts of Lagos state and the Ota area of Ogun state in the country, the presence of sculptors as typified by the essence of their work in relation to the improvement of landscapes is increasingly yielding information on the culture of the people in the two areas. Some of these artworks are gradually being covered by the earth in the light of new road constructions in the areas. The paper concludes that a working together of ethnographers and archaeologists will prove more profitable for the analysis of the culture of the people in Nigeria. Finally, the paper provides images of slave relics and works of art that are being discussed.

Sensory Comparisons: Phenomenology of Landscape and Cultural Analysis

Clarissa Sanfelice Rahmeier (University College London)

The aim of this paper is to discuss to what extent the phenomenology of landscape can contribute to the construction of cultural comparisons and analogies. Although it does not explicitly propose a methodology to be followed, by considering our body our primary research tool phenomenology has provided a universal technique (or methodology) which allows us to approach any given social context and, in particular, to compare and contrast different realities. In this way, the phenomenological approach can be considered a key technique in cultural analysis. To what extent can we compare different cultural contexts and the different social roles played by people through our own senses and socio-historical bodies? In the case of past societies, how can we use our senses when performing a phenomenological walk on a landscape which is not entirely there anymore? To what extent can historical and anthropological sources, as well as our imagination, help us link our own experience of the landscape with the experience lived by people in the past? Through a case study developed amongst the remains of a 19th century society in Southern Brazil, this paper aims to address these questions as well as to discuss how the outcomes provided by phenomenology of landscape are combined, defied and confirmed by historical and anthropological methodologies and interpretations.

The Empire Strikes Back?

Oliver Harris (University of Newcastle)

In recent years the pendulum has swung back and forth between competing views of the value of ethnographic analogy to archaeological interpretation. Over the last ten years or so within the study of the European Neolithic in Britain, there has broadly been a turn back to ethnography with studies of personhood, landscape, monumentality and daily life that have drawn explicitly on analogies to inform, provoke and enliven our understandings. Yet this turn to ethnography has not been universally welcomed, and indeed increasingly seems to be attracting criticism, most notably from those who have decried the European Neolithic’s increasingly ‘Melanesian flavour’. Furthermore, the recent call for archaeologists to pay more attention to things in themselves, whether through symmetrical archaeology, thing theory, non-representational theory or materiality, seems to be part of a broader move away from reliance on anthropology to support interpretation, not least because of that discipline’s adherence to the latest bugbear for some archaeologists: the concept of the social. If archaeologists have recently sought to colonise the European past with people from elsewhere in the world, it seems now that the empire seeks to strike back, to expel the Melanesian/Amazonian/Malagasy peoples from the Neolithic and back to where they belong: their own particular time, their own particular space. This paper seeks to explore where next for these analogies, and asks: is there room in archaeology to combine a theoretical commitment to historicity, context and to things with the clear interpretive benefits that ethnographic analogies have brought?

Discussion