Part 1

BODIES, SELVES AND INDIVIDUALS

INTRODUCTION

Sarah Tarlow

The fIrst group of papers in this volume explore in various ways the
relationship between the body, as variously understood, and other ideas
clustered around the concept of person, particularly 'self, 'subject' and
'individual'. All the authors included here have been influenced by recent
cultural theory which destabilises and de-naturalises the tenet of
Enlightenment thought that a single person - an individual - will, as a
necessary aspect of his [sic] human nature, inhabit a single, natural and
bounded body. From Foucault's extensive and highly influencial studies of
the body as the (mutable and various) result and medium of historical and
cultural process, to Butler's radical feminist approaches which threaten at
times to dissolve the body altogether into wisps and trails of discourse,
whilst all the time insisting on its materiality, new philosophical and
theoretical work means that archaeologists concerned with 'the body' need
to question some of our fundamental assumptions and traditional practices.
All the contributors to this section are concerned in some way with dead
bodies. Dead bodies have provided archaeologists with an apparently solid
foundation for social interpretations of the ancient past. Traditionally, as
Bazelmans, Fowler and Thomas all note, the body of the dead has been
assumed to index the single living individual whose remains are examined.
Treatment of the dead body by a past society was held to be analogous to the
treatment accorded to that individual in life, and to represent the "fossilized
terminal status" (Peebles 1971 :69) of an individual. For this reason, the work
of all authors in this section is of great importance in problematising and
undermining those assumptions. For example, argues Bazelmans, 'splendid'
treatment of a corpse in the early medieval period does not simply encode
the 'status', 'wealth' or 'religion' of the deceased individual. Rather, the
meanings of bodily adornment were variable throughout the period he
considers and relate to changing understandings of the body, especially the
development of a distinction between 'inner' and 'outer' self. Bazelmans
encourages us to move beyond sometimes simplistic ideas about identity
(self-defInition in relation to others) in the interpretation of the adorned and
enculturated body. Particular historical meanings involve consideration of
morality and theology - aspects of past experience which archaeologists

Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality

Edited by Hamilakis et al., Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2002 23
24 Sarah Tarlow

often shy away from, in favour of narrow analyses of contested power and
status. Bazelmans also reminds us of something that many social
archaeologists of a more marxist bent underemphasise - that living human
beings are not the only important beings in most past societies. Very
significant relationships between humans and 'the supernatural' may also be
relevant, and articulated through the body.
What is key in Bazelmans's work, as in many of the other contributions,
is that the human body exists in complex and multiple. forms, both physically
and conceptually. There is no universally-conceptualised 'basic' body, onto
which are layered social meanings and identities in the form of clothes,
jewellery and other ephemera. Instead, the body itself and what it represents
may be very differently conceived, and those different conceptions made
manifest in material adornment or modification ot the body.
In an innovative and thought-provoking piece, Fowler critiques the notion
that the body is only, or necessarily, about the 'individual', as we would see
it, who 'had' it. Instead he explores the possibilities that are opened up by
throwing away our 'common sense' ideas of what the forms and limits of
being are. Stimulated by a number of challenging 'burials' (though the use of
normal archaeological context descriptions like 'burial' are profoundly
challenged by the implications of this material) from neolithic sites on the
Isle of Man, Fowler suggests that it is necessary to abandon conventional
distinctions, such as those between the living and the dead, people and
animals, body and artefact, in order to explore the 'otherness' of the past.
Such exploration may lead us well beyond the limits of experience, both
personal and vicarious, to places where our language is inadequate and our
categories of understanding may be irrelevant.
Thomas, too, explores the breadth of possible conceptions of 'self or
'person', critiquing the widespread evocation of the 'individual' in
prehistory. The 'individual', he argues, is a particular, historical
understanding of personhood produced in Europe by the Enlightenment. It
carries such conceptual baggage - gender exclusivity, a particularly strategic
and asocial kind of agency and inappropriately circumscribed notions of
subjectivity - that its introduction into pre-modern archaeologies is deeply
problematic. Thomas calls for a rigorous re-examination of the concepts of
personhood which are brought to the consideration of the past. Although he
shares with some of those he criticises here the aim of writing something
meaningful about past experiences, he believes that the kind of self that is
the locus of experience needs to be divested of specifically modernist
accretions.
Tarlow's paper is concerned in some ways with the development of those
modern ideas of the self and what the body comes to signify in the highly
individualistic context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. As the
Bodies, selves and individuals 25

individual self became more and more strongly associated with the unique
and bounded body, the death and decay of that body presented an
increasingly serious problem to those left alive. The beautification of the
corpse as an aesthetic object was a response to this. Like the other
contributors to this section, Tarlow demonstrates the contingency of the
meanings of, and relationships between, body and person. Before the period
considered here, the 'self resided in, but also transcended the body. The
death of the body could no longer be regarded as the loss of so much waste
matter when that kind of self was conceptually replaced by the identification
of person with body - the body is the self. This paper also demonstrates the
comparative recency of some modem ideas about death, the body and the
individual.
In their various ways all the papers in this section, and indeed in this
volume, defamiliarise and problematise the body: its constitution, its
boundaries and its capacities. As Foucault (1971: 153) remarked "nothing in
man - not even his body - is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-
recognition or for understanding other men." In much recent writing on the
body, the body described is the body in late, Western modernity (itself a
more heterogeneous cultural location than that glib phrase suggests). Thus
the body is seen as, for example, "project" (Shilling 1993). The universality
of such approaches is tempered by awareness of criticism from feminist and
post-colonial theorists, whose bodies are differently situated, politically,
conceptually and relationally. That bodies are historically situated, that they
could be other than they are, is also evident through the sophisticated work
of historians, classicists and other scholars with an orientation towards the
past (e.g. Bynum 1995, Monserrat 1998). Here is a potential contribution of
archaeologists to the interdisciplinary enquiry into the body: negotiation
between the undoubted difference of the past and of past people, and the
materiality of the body itself. All the papers presented here attempt to engage
with actual material and allow their reflections on bodies, persons and
subjects to be infonned by, and to proceed from, the encounter with things
that is archaeology.
The authors of these papers present pasts and past bodies that differ from
widespread modem ideas about bodies. Where Tarlow challenges the
archaeologist to think that decomposistion and bodily decay is more
upsetting in some historical contexts than others, Fowler presents a radically
dislocated past, where 'bodies' do not seem to map onto 'people' in any way
at all familiar to us. Thomas's critique of modernist assumptions about
people as individuals is complemented by Bazelmans's evocation of a
specific set of non-modem beliefs which posit an alternative relatiosnship
between self and body.
26 Sarah Tarlow

Until comparatively recently, many of us in archaeology have used the

terms 'person', 'indiivdual', 'subject' and 'self interchangeably in their
colloquial sense as synonyms for human being, necessarily existing in a
single (and by implication, universal) human body. In itself, to use language
in modem conversational senses is not a problem, and many academics
would be advised to do so rather more often. However, along with
conventional use of language goes, especially in this case, a raft of
assumptions about what a human being is and does. We need to draw out
and consider those assumptions, and the papers in this section, directly or
indirectly assess the relevance of these various concepts in different
historical situations.
Mauss, in an early and influential exposition on the subject of the self,
distinguishes between 'personne' and 'moi', suggesting that 'self (moi/soi)
has a 'from-the-inside' quality. The self is not a unit of analysis, but the
locus of experience and awareness. The person (personnage) might be
understood as a 'character', whose attributes are determined relationally. The
'person' may thus exceed the body; artefacts, other people, animals, places
and ideas may all participate in one 'person' (Mauss 1985 [1938]). La
Fontaine explains Mauss's position thus:

If the self is an individual's awareness of a unique identity, the 'person'

is society's confirmation of that identity as of social significance" (La
Fontaine 1985:124). Mauss considers the case of the Kwakiutl, whose
'persons' - including their names, goods, duties, inheritence, rights and
spirits, may be appropriated by somebody else. If a man is killed, for
example, his killer acquires his 'person' (Mauss 1985 [1938]:6-9).
Mauss concludes, from wide ethnographic study and historical reading, that
'person' only came to develop its particular meaning of conscious individual
comparatively recently and in the West.
La Fontaine uses the term 'individual' to refer to the 'mortal human
being', and 'person' to refer to the concepts which give it social significance.
That still leaves the word 'individualism' and 'individualist', he says, to
refer to the specifically Western variety of the concept of person.
When discussing the particular and variable conceptions of person, Mauss
nevertheless is unambiguously certain that "there has never existed a human
being who has not been aware, not only of his body, but also at the same
time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical", and uses terms like
'self (moi) or 'individual' to refer to this bounded and aware human. Moore
has recently argued that it has been epistemologically necessary for us to
assume that 'individuals' in the past were at least endowed with agency
insofar as they were 'competent social actors' (2000:260):
Bodies, selves and individuals 27

In spite of all the talk of the importance of not assuming that individuals,
persons, selves, and sUbjectivities are constant across time and space, it
does indeed turn out that agency is crucial in the past because it is
significant in the present ... And we could not live with ourselves if our
archaeology produced accounts of individuals, cultures, and societies that
left no space for individuality, freedom of choice, will, self-
determination, creativity, innovation, and resistance. No archaeologist
could live with such a view because humans would then have no role, or
very little, in the making of their own history. What would then be the
point of being human? (Moore 2000:260--1)

REFERENCES

Bynum, C.W. (1995) The Resurrection ofthe Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, New
York: Columbia University Press.
Foucault, M. (1971) 'Neitzsche, genealogy, history', in D.F. Bouchard (ed.) Michel Foucault:
language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews, Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press.
La Fontaine, I.S. (1985) 'Person and individual: some anthropological reflections'. in M.
Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds) The category of the person, pp. 123-40,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mauss, M. (1985) [1938] , A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of
self (trans. W.D. Halls) in M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds) The
category ofthe person, pp. 1-25, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Montserrat, D. (ed) (1998) Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human
Body in Antiquity, London: Routledge.
Moore, H. (2000) 'Ethics and ontology: why agents and agency matter', in M-A Dobres and J.
Robb (eds) Agency in archaeology, pp. 259-63, London: Routledge.
Peebles, C. (1971) 'Moundville and surrounding sites: some structural considerations of
mortuary practices' in J.A. Brown (ed.) Approaches to the social dimensions of
mortuary practices, pp. 68-91, Washington D.C.: Memoirs of the Society for
American Archaeology 25