The Archaeology of Personhood: An Anthropological Approach

“References: Canuto and Yaeger (2000); Dietler and Herbich (1988); Fowler (2004); Inomata and Coben (2006); Jones (1996); Nielsen and Walker (2009).”

“Persons may consist of multiple spiritual aspects, connected with materical media, which ultimately become separated in mortuary practices (see Fowler 2004, 87–92).”

“Embodiment and social identities Much work on the bioarchaeology of identity draws implicitly on theoretical approaches to embodiment, in which social meaning and personal expression is incorporated into the body (e.g., Fowler 2004; Hamilakis et al. 2002; Joyce 2005).”

“They also ignore the fact that many anthropological and archaeological studies support the idea that burial practices are deeply connected with rituals of transformation (rites of passage) (e.g. Karsten 1955; Bell 1997; Nilsson Stutz 2003; Fowler 2004, 130–54; Mannermaa 2008; Garwood 2011).”

“Drawing on this point, Fowler thus argues that communities too may be constituted not only by humans, but by animals, places and things as well (Fowler 2004a, Chapter 5, 2004b, p. 95; see also Jones and Richards 2003; Ray and Thomas 2003; Pollard 2006).”

“90 Fowler 2004, 116.”

“Following recent archaeological theory (e.g. Hodder, 2000; Fowler, 2004), a focus on the person allows for interpretations that more fully consider the role of individual agency in prehistory.”

“Instead we suggest it is more appropriate to consider multiple forms of both dividual and individual modes of personhood, constituted through different historical and material contexts (cf. Fowler 2004, 2008).”

“(Fowler, 2004, p. 33) Inalienability endows the gift with a part of each person who held it previously (Godelier, 1999, p. 105).”

“Discussions of personhood seek to problematize the application of Western notions of the individual to the past (Brück, 2001; Fowler, 2000, 2004) and to investigate the set of relations out of which persons are composed.”

“Early attempts to challenge dichotomies came both from readings of phenomenology, especially that of Martin Heidegger (e.g. Thomas, 1996), and broadly related engagements with the critical issue of personhood (e.g. Fowler, 2004).”

“We use the term “individuality” to capture the Western concept of personhood that has an indivisible core and clear boundaries and in which social relationships are separate and exteriorized (Fowler 2004).”

“…538–552 Debates in World Archaeology ª 2008 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online DOI: 10.1080/00438240802453161 mined for supposed ethnographic parallels to elucidate the European Neolithic with its ‘Big Man’ societies and ‘dividual’ individuals (for the latter, see Fowler 2004).”

“For the mortuary record of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, this has been used to highlight the relationship between the treatment of the body and ancestral rites and monuments (for example Brück 2001; 2004; Fowler 2004; Thomas 2000).”

“The need for such an investigation is prefigured in calls for an archaeology of personhood (Fowler 2004), although this call can itself all too easily be reduced to treating personhood as a kind of social identity that clothed, rather than transformed, a form of life.”

“Indeed, since the 1980s archaeology has embraced a multifaceted understanding of identity (Diaz-Andreu and Lucy 2005; Fowler 2004; Jones 1997; Voss 2004).”

“Narrating individuals’ death histories contributes to an expanding body of archaeological and bioarchaeological literature that addresses the symbolic significance and social viability of the biologically dead (Chapman 2000; Fowler 2002, 2004; Robb 2002; Tiesler 2004; Tiesler and Cucina 2007).”

“Within this Buddhist worldview, artificial intelligence or robots may not be drastically different from humans (Morioka 1991, 85–87; Fowler 2004).”

“There is a considerable archaeological literature concerning the body (e.g., Hamilakis, Pluciennik, and Tarlow 2002; Fowler 2004; Gilchrist 2004; Joyce 2004), and historians have examined medieval and early modern aspects of the body in art, literature, and social contexts (Kay and Rubin 1994;…”

“Namely, it relies on the sociohistorically specific (modern Western) assumption that the individual—characterized by autonomy and indivisibility—is a primary locus of identity (Fowler 2004).”

“…species are regarded as another kind of ‘people’, or ‘kindred beings’ with minds, motives, personhood, individuality, intelligence and agency, transcending the species barrier (Myrstad 1996; Ingold 2000, 69–72; Fowler 2004; Descola 2005, 41; Willerslev 2007; Alberti and Bray 2009; Fijn 2009).”

“The research on Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe in particular has demonstrated the potential of studying the construction and deconstruction of personhood through analyses of fragmentation and wholeness in relation to burial customs (Brück 2004, 2006; Fowler 2001, 2004, 2010, 2011).”

“The archaeological record often counters our ‘self-evident’ truths – such as the idea of the delimited, non-objectified, inherently valuable, Western subject (Fowler 2004), yet this is not always acknowledged in archaeological discourse.”

“Among others, Fowler (2004) challenges the universalism of the modern idea of the individual, and in line with Levi-Strauss points out that the clan or the house may constitute ‘a moral person’.”

“Put simply, these concepts suggest that by signifying animals in ritual contexts, people are signifying something about themselves (e.g., Busatta 2008; Fowler 2004; Mullin 2002).”

“Interestingly, Mesolithic European sites of Ertebølle, Skateholm, and Vedbaek document several instances of burial associations between humans and animals (Fowler 2004).”

“Many scholars have suggested that the notion of a premodern individual is incorrect because it is based in Western concepts of essentialism (Fowler 2004; Garvey 2001:64–65; Moore 1993) and ideals of “rugged individualism” that are misplaced when applied to the past (Csikszentimihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981:189–190;…”

“47 Cf Fowler 2004a; 2004b. 48 Charles-Edwards 1993; Curta 2006; Etchingham and Swift 2004; Karl 2005.”

“…towards an emphasis on the individual seems anchored in northern and western Europe (although other forms of personhood than the individual may have prevailed; see Fowler, 2004) and does not fit central and eastern Europe in my opinion, where single graves have a much longer pedigree.”

“(Fowler 2004), landscape (Thorpe 1996: 82; see also Pollard 2000), ritual practice (Nilsson Stutz 2003), animal symbolism (Mannermaa 2008; Larsson 2009) and shamanism (O’Shea & Zvelebil 1984; Meiklejohn et al.”

“In contrast with the finality of biological death, dying was a social process of transition that transformed the status of the deceased from one state of being into another state of being (Bloch and Parry 1982; Janzen 2002; Fowler 2004; Robb 2013).”

“Chris Fowler (2004, p. 8) provides the clear-est discussion of these concepts: ‘ dividuals ’ describe a ‘ state of being in which the person is recognized as being composite and multi-ply-authored ’ .”

“We cannot hope to do justice to this literature here, but see, for example, Belk (1988, 2014), Chevalier (2014), Fowler (2004), Shields (2003), and Strathern (1988).”

“The relational position these metaphors personify is supported by anthropological research that argues that personhood is always relational and processual, manifesting itself in interaction and as people perform different micro-scale activities in changing domains of life (Fowler, 2004, 2016).”

“…been accompanied by a model of personhood which was situational or contextual, rather in the manner of so-called “Great Man” societies (Godelier and Strathern 1991): authority or capacity in one sphere of action did not necessarily convey power in other spheres (Fowler 2004; Robb and Harris 2018).”

“Similarly, while the scope of this paper does not allow for a discussion of such aspects here, significant research regarding such issues in other chronological periods in both the UK and north-west Europe is also beginning to demonstrate that, in these periods too, understanding of bodies, objects and identities were…”

“…of Melanesia (Malinowski 1922; see also Munn 1986; Mauss 1990; Weiner 1992), in an ongoing process of gifting that ultimately tied people together in a materially mediated social entanglement/enchainment through space and time (cf. Appadurai 1986; Fowler 2004: 53–78; Lazarri 2005; Hoskins 2006).”

“Segmentation is a structural process, where the need for segmentation and sharing and redistributing essences plays an important role in renewing and perpetuating the social and cosmological order (Fowler 2004).”

“Scholars’ investigations of groups ranging wide in time and space—from modern Melanesia (Busby 1997; Strathern 1988) to Medieval Europe (Geary 1986) to Mesolithic Scandinavia (Fowler 2002, 2004) to Neolithic peoples in Southeast Europe (Chapman 2000; Chapman and Gaydarska 2007)—have elucidated the active social lives…”

“This prevailing modernist perspective led to further mutually exclusive distinctions between mind and body, culture and nature and others (Fowler 2004; Viveiros de Castro 1998; cf. Alberti and Bray 2009; Haber 2009).”

“Both may indicate a radically different concept of personhood, in which people were conceived of as ‘partible’ or relational beings (cf. Fowler 2004; Brück 2004).”

“In this sense they are presented in manners suggesting that they were recognized as possessing personhood (Fowler 2004; 2010; 2011).”

“In archaeological scholarship on personhood, Western assumptions of the independent individual are challenged, nuanced, and refuted (e.g. Brück 2004; Fowler 2004, 2016; Jones 2005).”

“It may be that it was their status relative to, and potentially integrated with, other social identities that was paramount (Fowler, 2004; Brück & Fontijn, 2013: 207).”

“The linking of barrow and cairn monuments in Pictland may have been one other way in which individuals — or dividuals (Fowler 2004; Strathern 1988) — were understood through a relational conception of self, in which one’s kinship relations were central to how people were understood in a society where bonds of clientsh…”

“Also, if we consider the totality of Bronze Age stelae and the statue-menhirs of western Iberia (c. 260 exemplars), there are grounds to suggest that they were not devised to represent unique and bounded beings, that is individuals in the western sense (Fowler, 2004: 16–17).”

“…2020; Sterling 2015), anti-colonial (Atalay 2006; 2012; Cipolla et al. 2019; Colwell 2016; Watkins 2005), queer (Blackmore 2011; Blackmore et al. 2016; Dowson 2000; Geller 2017; Voss 2000), and to explore difference (Moore 1993; 1994) and personhood in the past (Fowler 2004; Marshall 2008; 2012).”