the limitations of doxa

8/4/2019 The Limitations of doxa

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Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications(London,Thousand Oaks,CA and New Delhi)Vol 1(2):155171 [1469-6053(200110)1:2;155171;019032]

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

155

The limitations of doxa

Agency and subjectivity from an archaeological point of view

ADAM T. SMITH

Department of Anthropology,University of Chicago

ABSTRACT

In recent years, archaeological discussions of agency have relied quite

heavily upon Pierre Bourdieus rendering of doxa in discriminating

between those phenomena resulting from habit and those from active

intention. However, doxa presents considerable problems for

archaeological analyses as it rests upon a troubling theory of history

and fails to assist in promulgating an archaeological account of sub-

jectivity. This article presents an explicitly archaeological critique of

Bourdieus doxa, utilizing a decorated silver-plated goblet from theMiddle Bronze Age site of Karashamb, Armenia, to explore future

directions in the theorization of subjectivity.

KEYWORDS

agency q Armenia q Caucasia q doxa q ideology q Karashamb

q Middle Bronze Age q representation q subjectivity

In a parenthetical remark buried deep in the pages of his Outline of aTheory of Practice (1977), Pierre Bourdieu raises a troubling problemfor archaeologists and historians interested in representing the past as a
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156 Journal of Social Archaeology 1(2)

creation of reflective individuals who actively produced and reproduced

social formations. Bourdieu writes, when there is a quasi-perfect corre-

spondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of

organization (as in ancient societies) the natural and social world appears as

self-evident. This experience we shall call doxa (Bourdieu, 1977: 164,

emphasis added). With a casual parenthesis, Bourdieu consigns the prac-

tices of the denizens of ancient societies to the realm of doxa, their lives cast

as rout ines predicated upon the mis-recognition of social orders as natural

ways of life, rather than political products. The persistent opposition

between structure and individual is historicized, lent temporal depth as not

only a synchronic array of sociological forces but as an emergent feature of

(world) social transformations.

Bourdieu is arguing (at least) two points with this parenthesis. The first is

historiographic in that descriptions of doxa are posit ioned as exhausting

studies of social life in the more remote past . The focus of archaeological

analysis is therefore restricted to iterations of the highly scripted routines

that reproduced the existing world as the only conceivable order of things.

Bourdieus second point is historical in that he posits a broadening of the

horizon of agency somewhere between the ancient and the modern.

Archaeological theory has tended towardsjust the opposite view in the years

since the publication ofOutline of a Theory of Practice, dismantling the

systems that once compressed the past into rigid models of st imulus and

response in order to locate the complicity of individuals in social production,reproduction and transformation (cf. Barrett, 2000; Brumfiel, 1992; Dietler,

1998; Dietler and Herbich, 1998; Hodder, 1986: 69; Knapp, 1996; Miller,

1982; Saitta, 1994; Shanks and Tilley, 1987: 712). In the context of a move

within both archaeology and general social thought to re-consider the restric-

tions of subjectivity (cf. Foucault, 1978; Jameson, 1992; Z izek, 1999), we must

ask whether the tyranny of doxa that Bourdieu posits for ancient societies

represents a satisfactory way of thinking about the limitations of agency.

It is important that we critically examine Bourdieus account of the limi-

tations of agency for (at least) three reasons. First, Bourdieus move to vestagency in a substantive understanding of will presents great problems for

an archaeological view where actions may be manifest in the extant record,

yet intentions obscure. Thus an inquiry into Bourdieus conceptualization

of doxa is central to identifying an approach to agency that can flourish

within archaeological thought rather than simply reproduce, in D obres and

Robbs phrase, an ambiguous platitude (2000: 3).

Second, Bourdieus account of doxa provides the historical foundation

to his formulation of practice theory, a theoretical approach that has gained

increasing popularity within archaeology. It is thus important that the impli-cations of doxa for studies of the past be fully elaborated, given the chang-

ing frameworks within which archaeologists have begun to confront the

problem of action (Wobst, 2000).


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157Smith The limitations of doxa

Lastly, Bourdieus account of the correspondence of the social order and

the natural world in pre-modern contexts has already begun to fashion a

new formulation of a dramatic historical rupture between the pre-modern

and the modern, as in Timothy Mitchells account of the novelty of modern

subjectivity imposed on Egypt by European colonial powers (1988: 5960).

If archaeology is to succeed in articulating the past with the present in

meaningful ways, then we must actively resist the construction of rigid

boundaries that set the ancient apart from the modern as an ontologically

distinct other.

This article out lines a theoretical response to Bourdieus assertion of the

primacy of doxa in antiquity. In the first half I develop a critique of

Bourdieus substantive sense of agency (that is, his definition of agency as

a capacity for action vested within individuals) and a historiographic

argument against represent ing ancient societies as inherently more enslaved

to routine than those in the present. The second half of the article employs

a silver goblet from Middle Bronze Age A rmenia to extend the critique of

doxa into an explicitly archaeological domain of theory and to suggest a

conceptualization of action in the past, rooted in a multidimensional, rela-

tional sense of the creation of subjects within daily practices.

s

AGAINST DOXA

Like the critical theorists of the Frankfurt school, Bourdieus overall philo-

sophical project centers on an account of how culture, understood as

practices of symbolic manipulation and consumption, contributes to the

reproduction of social (class) privileges. As Gartman rightly points out,

Bourdieu improves on the abstract conspiracies of the Frankfurt school (e .g.

Adorno, 1997; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1993; Marcuse, 1964) by creating

a highly empirical blueprint of a structure of class and culture whose logic

produces its effects behind the backs of individuals (G artman, 1991: 422).Bourdieus steadfast empiricism has much to do with the productive ways

in which archaeologists have engaged with his thought, mustering his

account of practice to bat tle various forms of extra-social determinism that

remain a prominent part of the intellectual terrain of the discipline.

However, in theorizing the restrictions on agents that stave off upheavals in

social orders (the logic of practice), Bourdieus Whiggish conceptualization

of doxic history ultimately alienates actors in ancient societies from their

activities in a far more self-conscious and programmatic way than many of

the traditional archaeological determinisms.Let me begin by briefly exploring what Bourdieu means by doxa. Doxa

refers to the field of activities that are taken for granted, those so thoroughly

regularized that their pursuit cannot be considered agency as they are


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deprived of intention. As doxa incorporates fields of knowledge in which

the existing order of the social world appears self-evident, it is a political

instrument, ensuring reproduction of existing formations. Doxa emerges in

the mis-recognition of a field of possible courses of action as an unchange-

able singular routine (Bourdieu, 1977: 1646). Agency, in contradistinction,

rests upon the will to supersede such limits, to recognize the arbitrary nature

of the objective order and to refuse to accede to its demands. Agency is thus

defined as a substantive concept, a capacity of the individual to recognize

ingrained socio-cultural traditions as political constructions and to over-

come such orders through the exercise of will (Bourdieu, 1977: 166; 1990:

689).

Bourdieus description of agency and doxa can be read in a number of

different ways. On the one hand, by basing doxa on the mis-recognition of

politically created orders as natural worlds, Bourdieus account can be read

as a reworking of classic Marxist ideas of false consciousness (e.g. Althusser,

1969; Lukcs, 1971; Marx and E ngels, 1998). Indeed there is a clear sense

in which doxa emerges as a but tress to the division of labor and apport ion-

ment of power amongst social groups (Bourdieu, 1977: 165). On the other

hand, by predicating agency upon the will to exceed limits on the refusal

to take the world at hand for granted as a natural order doxa can also be

read as a retelling of the Nietzschean account of herd morality. Agents,

through their embrace of will to power, supersede the limits of the doxa,

elevating themselves above the herd who remain blind to the myriadalternatives to their dull routine (Nietzsche, 1989: 2018; cf. Foucault, 1984).

These readings are by no means mutually exclusive. However, each brings

with it a legacy of critique that undermines the utility of Bourdieus sub-

stantive conceptualization of agency and its limits.

By predicating doxa upon mis-recognition, Bourdieu takes on the prob-

lems attendant with identifying false consciousness, of which I would like to

briefly touch on three. First, by holding motives to action in deep suspicion,

the concept of doxa alienates the subject from his or her own decision-

making process. The analyst, in our case the archaeologist, inserts him orherself between the individual and their everyday practices, evaluating the

degree to which the link between the two was informed by a fully conscious

understanding of alternatives. Analysis of agency is founded not upon an

understanding of the contextual situation of actors but rather upon a claim

of pr ivileged knowledge of the actors intent ion vis-a-vis the existing struc-

ture of class relationships. This knowledge is not based on a real sensitivity

to motives, emotions or convictions but rather is entirely prefigured within

theory such that a choice for the existing way of things is emphatically not

a choice but slavish devotion to routine.This leads us to a second problem with Bourdieus account of doxa.

Reproduction of the existing order within a doxic account of the limitations

of agency can never be a conscious, considered choice out of an array of


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options but merely the misjudgment of an insufficiently self-conscious

subject. The critical impetus to analysis in the doxic mode lies in the drive

to limit agency to the revolutionary subject. Unfortunately this leads Bour-

dieu to conflate agency and praxis, the latter of which specifically denotes

transformative activities within Marxist thought (Gramsci, 1971: 3646;

Marx, 1998: III). A s a result, agency is left a rather anemic concept, limited

to spectacle, inured to the quotid ian. While I have some sympathy with

the desire to locate revolutionary sensibilities in the past, to limit agency to

radicalism precludes the development of a parallel understanding of the

conservatism of social production in ancient contexts. To dismiss the indi-

vidual who assents to the doxa as simply part of the herd is to miss the

analytical mark as the forces behind the active desire for the continuance

of the existing order are as compelling and vital for social analysis as the

logic of deviance.

The psychological locus that Bourdieu assigns to agency raises a third

objection to his account of doxa. The agent, according to Bourdieu, is

defined, a priori, in reference to a restricted set of socio-political structures.

Agents and non-agents are distinguished solely on the basis of their (political)

stance towards a monolithically conceived structural order intent on their

subjugation. The result is to obscure the contextuality of assent and the

meaning of deviation. After all, the assent of a wealthy elite to relations of

inequality surely holds different implications than that of an impoverished

farmer, factory worker or minimum wage service-sector employee.Alternately, an individual who attempts to b low up a government building

may be radical or reactionary, Adolf Verloc or Guy Fawkes, depending not

upon intention to subvert the existing order but on multi-dimensional

relations to political institutions, economic resources and cultural traditions

(real and imagined). Indeed, Gramscis (1971: 1802) more highly devel-

oped temporal view makes clear the centrality of the historical moment to

an adequate account of the political act, a contextual sensibility entirely

absent from the concept of doxa.

A second set of theoretical problems arises from Bourdieus attempt tobase agency in a sociologically moderated sense of will to power. In so

doing, Bourdieu redescribes the historical view as one focused upon those

who transcended the doxa. The sort of history that results would presum-

ably pair an account of what did not happen in history that is, the alterna-

tives not embraced with biographies of those who dared, in the words of

Apples grammatically regrettable slogan, to think different. On the one

hand, Bourdieu may be accused of overestimating the unthinkable, as not

even slavish devotion to rout ine can be said to preclude tolerance, or at least

awareness, of alternatives. As Giddens (1993: 812) points out, constraintsupon action cannot be presumed to imply a lack of awareness of choices,

since constraints are not all identical. On the other hand, Bourdieu over-

privileges the will, as sources of revolution must be constituted within the


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existing field of political power. Even those who tear off the mask of natu-

ralness assumed by political practices do so within a field of possibility

limited by the very historical formation which they aspire to overcome

(Abrams, 1988; Corrigan and Sayer, 1985). As Holston (1989: 1213)

cogently argues in his study of the modernist city, intentions are conceiv-

able only in relation to the instruments and practices within which they

emerge as realizable possibilities. They are thus intelligible not as substan-

tive components of a generalized sense of will but only as dimensions of sub-

jectivity set closely within contexts of practical activities. Unless we wish to

return archaeology to the service of great man history in which the subject,

qua revolutionary hero, provides the privileged locus of social transform-

ation, we must center analysis on the relations amongst various structural

positions and actors that create opportunities for both assent and praxis.

The central question of analysis is thus shifted from the limits of agency

established in a simplified dialectic between structure and individual to a

consideration of the social creation of subjects, by which I mean individuals

complicit in a broad cultural process of self and social formation.

In both its Marxist and Nietzschean threads, Bourdieus definition of

agency as will to supercede the doxa creates a host of theoretical diffi-

culties for an examination of the human past. Of most immediate concern

for archaeology is his exclusion of agency from ancient societies. Why does

Bourdieu place this condition within his argument? I think the answer lies

in his implicit historical argument regarding the development of fields ofknowledge over time. While every social order tends to produce . . . the nat-

uralization of its own arbitrariness it is only in the ancient world, he writes,

that the arbitrary and the natural essentially fuse together (Bourdieu, 1977:

164). Human history, in a doxic mode, is an account of the cracks that have

been forced between the objective order and the subjective principles of

social organization in the oscillation between orthodoxys drive to reinforce

the doxa and heterodoxys instinct to broaden the field of what is simply

opinion. By enslaving the more remote past to routine, this impetus to

question the existing order is not simply a structural possibility but takes onthe pale echoes of a Marxist historical imperative. If Bourdieu does not

damn the ancient world to mindless routine, his account loses its sense of

moral urgency, its revolutionary drive to heresy. However the price for

creating this rather thin sense of temporality, in what is otherwise a rather

ahistorical philosophical corpus, is the utility of doxa for an archaeology

interested in constraint but opposed to determinism.

In turning away from an account of action located in a dialectic between

agents as wilful transgressors and structures as formalized jailors, the

creation of personal identity, and the limitations placed upon this project,emerge as integral to the reproduction of social orders as well as their con-

testat ion. Self-format ion and the formation of social worlds are inte lligible

as indivisible elements of one another. As a result, agency does not hang on


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the intentions of the isolated revolutionary, but rather is entailed within

intertwined projects for producing political subjects, for developing cultural

frames of subjectivity, for promoting social structures of subjectivization

and for art iculating all of the preceding into a shifting sense of subjecthood.

This is not to argue, following a trend in cultural studies led by Judith Butler

(1990, 1997), that a focus on personal transformation (identity politics)

should replace a consideration of political economy or the power of

institut ions (cf. critique in Z izek, 1999: 2604). Rather, the conclusion that

should be drawn is that subjectivity, and thus the parameters of action, are

constituted in multidimensional contexts that are simultaneously personal,

social, cultural and political. Within these overlapping realms the subject

emerges as more complex than either agent or patient, actor or dupe. What

is more, descriptions of subjectivity are not constrained to substantive

accounts of possibility and intention. Instead, the creation of subjects is

understood as an intensely public process, locatable within daily practices.

As a result, it provides an account of action and constraint that is more

accessible and potentially productive from an archaeological perspective.

Despite the foregoing objections to Bourdieus account of doxa, there is

most certainly a need within archaeology for an understanding of the par-

ameters that restrict how individuals make choices about their daily lives.

Yet such a theorization should not simply replicate stale structure-actor

dichotomies what Dietler and Herbich term (with palpable impatience)

the persistent centra l paradigmatic dichotomy of the social sciences (1998:245). But how can this problem be framed such that we neither remove

aware individuals capable of making decisions from the past nor create a

reliance upon a substantive sense of intention?

The foregoing discussion has primarily confined itself to a consideration

of the theoretical implications of Bourdieus account of doxa for archaeo-

logical studies of the past. However, the interpretive possibilities opened by

an examination of subjectivity and foreclosed by a theoretical allegiance to

doxa warrant grounding within the realm of material culture. The following

discussion considers doxa and subjectivity from the point of view of a singleartefact a Middle Bronze A ge goblet found in a kurgan1 at the site of

Karashamb, near the Razdan river in modern Armenia. The purpose of

limiting discussion to a single artefact is not to restrict the archaeological field

of vision to the purely art historical, but rather to allow material culture to

bear upon the formulation of theory without the former overwhelming the

latter. The following discussion is not intended as a case study of the preced-

ing theoretical discussion, as is the dominant formal aesthetic within

contemporary archaeological writing. I do not want to suggest that the

Karashamb goblet in itself provides sufficient empirical grounding for thetheoretical case described above. Instead, consideration of the Karashamb

goblet is intended as a further extension of the critique of doxa developed in

the preceding pages within an explicitly archaeological frame of reference.


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s THE KARASHAMB CUP

Set between the Black and Caspian Seas, Caucasia is a broad isthmus

linking southwest Asia to the Eurasian steppe. Southern Caucasia is mostreadily defined as the highland regions between the Middle Araxes and

Middle Kura river drainages (Figure 1). It is a region of rugged mountains

and elevated basins shaped by the tectonic action of the Arabian and

Eurasian plates. The legacy of this geologically active landscape can be seen

in numerous volcanic peaks, such as Mount A rarat and Mount Aragats, and

in the large deposits of basalt, tuff and obsidian found across the region

(Milkov and G vozdetskii, 1969). Average elevations within southern Cau-

casia are between 1200 and 1800 m above sea level, dipping below 1000 m

only in the Ararat p lain.D uring the E arly Bronze A ge, southern Caucasia lay near the geo-

graphic center of a mater ial culture horizon known as the Kura-Araxes

complex that was distributed in a broad arc from the eastern Mediter-

ranean (Khirbet Kerak ware; Amiran, 1965) to the northern slope of the

Caucasus range (e.g. Velikent; Gadzhiev et al., 1997), to the central Zagros

mountains (e.g. Godin Tepe; Young and Levine, 1974). Kura-Araxes

Figure 1 Map of southern Caucasia


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settlements in southern Caucasia in general were small villages with a sub-

sistence economy based upon plough and irrigation agriculture and sea-

sonally migratory stock herding (Kushnareva, 1997: 181). In the last

centuries of the third millennium BC, extensive transformations in

economy, culture and society provoked the dissolution of Kura-Araxes

communities and a broad alterat ion in the archaeological record for the

succeeding Middle Bronze Age.

The most conspicuous archaeological feature of the Ear ly to Middle

Bronze transit ion is the extensive shift in sett lement pattern that led to the

abandonment of a large number of late Kura-A raxes communities.

Although the st rat igraphy of sites such as Metsamor (Khanzadian et al.,

1973), Garni (Kushnareva, 1997: 141) and Uzerlik-Tepe (Kushnareva,

1985) indicate some continuity between Kura-Araxes and Middle Bronze

Age levels, the large majority of late Early Bronze Age sites appear to

have been abandoned near the end of the third millennium BC. A s a

result , most of our evidence for the early second millennium comes from

cemetery rather than settlement contexts. Mortuary customs also changed

dur ing the Middle Bronze Age as kurgans such as those documented at

Trialeti (Kuftin, 1941), Vanadzor (Kirovakan; Piotrovskii, 1949: 46), and

Karashamb (Oganesian, 1992a) became the dominant form of burial

architecture.

Ceramic styles and forms shifted in the Early to Middle Bronze Age

transition, most noticeably in the disappearance of the characteristic black-and brown-burnished wares of the Kura-Araxes horizon and the appear-

ance of the painted wares of the Trialeti-Vanadzor and subsequent

Karmir-Berd (Tazakend), Karmirvank, and Sevan-Uzerlik horizons.2 These

new ceramics were accompanied by changes in metal tools, weapons,

vessels and jewelry, including new daggers and swords, socketed spear-

points, flat axes, chisels and drinking vessels. During the Middle Bronze

Age, a broad differentiation in burial treatment, including massive kurgan-

style funerary monuments and rich artefactual complexes, indicates the

emergence of a new elite. The association of this elite with the trappings(weapons, shields, chariots) and the iconography of warfare (discussed

below) strongly suggests that social stratification in the Middle Bronze Age

hinged upon a martial culture where the values of social violence had

become the legitimating values of a newly formulated social hierarchy

(Badalyan et al., forthcoming).

In the autumn of 1987, a team of archaeologists excavated a large Middle

Bronze Age kurgan at the northern end of a well-known burial ground at

Karashamb, on the west bank of the Razdan River. The kurgan was a raised

earthen and stone mound built atop a funerary area delineated on theground surface by a ring of stones. Within this funerary area, the excava-

tors uncovered the cremated remains of the deceased accompanied by

numerous animal bones, weapons, ornaments and utensils. The architecture


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of the kurgan and its inventory indicate substantial parallels with similar

tombs at Vanadzor (Kirovakan) and at Trialeti (Oganesian, 1988: 145).

Current periodizations of the extant materials suggest that this Trialeti-

Vanadzor complex dates to the first centuries of the second millennium BC

(Avetisyan et al., 1996, 2000; Oganesian, 1992a).

Figure 2 Photo of a silver-plated goblet from Karashamb,Armenia (source:courtesy of the Armenian Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography,Yerevan)


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Amongst the finds in the Karashamb mound was a silver-plated goblet,

its exterior surface divided into six registers, separated by raised bands, each

decorated with images in relief (Figures 2 and 3; Oganesian, 1992b: 86). The

top register depicts a boar hunt. A n archer, attended by a dog with a collar,

prepares to loose a second arrow into a wounded boar that is also being

attacked by a lion and a leopard. The second register depicts a battle, a

parade of a captive and a banquet, most likely providing a narrative order

in which the scenes are to be read. The batt le scene is composed of two sets

of two foot soldiers fighting with spears and daggers. In the adjacent pro-

cession, three soldiers trail behind a single unarmed captive pressed forward

by a spear in its back. The banquet scene is bracketed by a large stag on one

side and a seated figure with what appears to be a musical instrument on

the other. At the center of the scene, two attendants fan a seated figure

(generally interpreted as a king) who sips from a cup as servants attend to

offerings set atop two large tables (Oganesian, 1992b: 86).

The third register presents a group of scenes related to the aftermath of

conquest. At the center of the composition stands a winged creature with a

lions head. To its right we find a defeated foe being killed with a spear and

a seated figure sharpening an axe next to a pile of decapitated heads.

Following that we find a pile of weapons, presumably left strewn upon the

bat tlefield, and another captive being killed. To the left of the winged lion,

Figure 3 Drawing of Karashamb cup scenes (source:Kushnareva,1997)


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three headless figures stand adjacent to a superimposed lion and ram. Inter-

estingly, all of the enemy por trayed in the register have been given bushy

tails.

In the fourth register, a row of leopards and lions parades from right to

left. Only the interjection of a single shield ties this scene of predators to

the battle depicted above. The fifth register, which completes the body of

the goblet, is ornamental, consisting of relief-engraved rosettes with pointed

ends. The last register , encircling the foot of the goblet, depicts a single lion

with its head en face flanked by four lion/leopard pairs standing on hind

legs.

Similar metal drinking vessels are known from kurgans V and XVII

at Trialeti and from a burial at Maikop (Dzhapar idze, 1988: 8; Kuftin, 1941:

8, 90). Echoes of this tradition in stylistically similar ceramic cups from

Uzerlik Tepe have led Kushnareva (1997: 112) to suggest that the vessel

form and aesthetic tradition were locally developed even as certain

symbolic motifs suggest diverse influences from southwest Asia (e.g. the

hunt scene in register one) .

The most compelling aspect of the Karashamb cup is its representation

of a rather limited set of practices central to the reproduction of political

order : war and conquest, feasting and celebration, punishment and ritual,

hunting and the technology of violence. The central theme of the piece is

clearly the conquest of enemies and the glorification of the ruler and the

apparatus of political authority. That the martial scenes on the centralregisters are bracketed by images that depict violence in the natural world

would seem to support Bourdieus description of the equivalence of natural

and political orders. Indeed a number of studies of royal art from south-

west A sia have revealed a great concern by rulers to embed their regimes

and activities within sets of naturalistic symbols (Kantor, 1966; Marcus,

1995; Russell, 1991; Smith, 2000; Winter, 1981). If we are to accept a doxic

interpretat ion of the Karashamb cup, then we are forced to understand its

imagery as purely mimetic as representations of the real state of things in

which nature and state conjoin unproblematically, just as Bourdieusuggests. Such a position would preclude an account of the production of

the vessel as an ideologically conditioned instrument; production, exchange

and consumption are necessarily intelligible only as performances of highly

scripted roles.

We can see from the organization of the composition, the use of ellipsis to

reduce the number of figures and the inclusion of fantastical elements that,

while the scenes depict concrete, perhaps even historical, activities, there is

considerable distance between the real and the represented. And it is in

this distance that decisions were made as to how activit ies should be rep-resented, that is, what argument the images should make. In the case of the

Karashamb cup, the most obvious argument seems to be that the political

violence of the era was an extension of the violence of the natural world.


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But if the images are an argument as to how the world should be seen,

then the implication is that the equivalence of the objective natural world

and the subjective political order was by no means taken for granted as

Bourdieus account of doxa demands. Rather , such sources of legitimization

had to be actively produced within political practices, of which the cup is

one instrumental manifestation. This demands a relational view of action,

such as that forwarded by Feldman who argues: Political agency is not given

but achieved on the basis of practices that alter the subject. Political agency

is relational it has no fixed ground it is the effect of situated practices

(Feldman, 1991: 1). Analysis of action, as a result, cannot be vested in the

substantive intentions of a single, isolated actor, but rather can only be

understood in the confluence of both first and third person views that come

together in the identification of the subject and the constitution of subjec-

tivity (O Shaughnessy, 1980; Ryle, 1993).

The central concern for an archaeological account of action is not

simply agency, either in its seemingly forgotten Hobbesian sense of a

relationship between agent and patient or in the extant formulations of

structure/agent dialectics. Rather, the problems that the Karashamb cup

poses center on the creation of subjects of political regimes, of economic

systems, of social orders that carry out actions. This is a problem not

simply of opposition to an existing structural power, as Foucault (e.g. 1978,

1979) cogently demonstrated, but of multiple relationships amongst

various structurally embedded social positions (e.g. elite institutions, grass-roots social groups) and plurally sited individuals ( that is, individuals

located as profoundly in heterarchical roles as hierarchical ones) . Nor

would it seem a particularly compelling interpretive stance to yield agency

itself to the Karashamb cup, as Gells (1998: 1719) vision of things as

social agents would advocate. Such anthropomorphism tends to obscure

the dist inction between act ion and inst rument, between subject and the

apparatus of subjectivity. Instead, the Karashamb cup should be thought

of as instrumental within a broader framework of culturally shaped

subjectivity.Here we might do well to consider Thomas Franks (1997) highly engaging

analysis ofThe Conquest of Cool, of the appropriation of 1960s counter-

cultural symbolics by Madison Avenue in the production of hip con-

sumerism. In his account of this ongoing process of cultural production,

Frank does not reduce Madison Avenue to a unidimensional structure

inseparable from the guiding political currents (indeed the appropriation

of countercultural icons to sell consumer goods coincides with a neo-

conservative backlash against the 1960s). Nor does Frank portray con-

sumers as a mass of dullards. Rather, we find in Franks analysis amultidimensional account of the creation of subjects in which cultural

productions are shaped by grassroots discourses (such as a constantly shift-

ing vernacular avant-garde and enduring identity affiliations that structure


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niche marketing) even as they endeavour to appropriate those discourses

to a specific end (selling commodities).

The Karashamb cup can be seen in this light as a cultural production

directed towards the creation of particular kinds of subjects actors who

accede to the putative rulers claim to the naturalness of the existing order as

they go about their daily activities. This relational process of cultural produc-

tion entails a host of practices, each of which presents opportunities for

decisions, both grand and quotidian, that potentially implicate subjects in

social reproduction, revolutionary praxis or, most likely, something in

between. As it is produced, the cup embeds material and compositional

decisions of the maker within the decisions of the ruler as to the appropriate

representational strategies for securing legitimacy;as it is exchanged, the cup

articulates decisions about form and representation with decisions as to the

intelligibility of symbols and marks; as it is visually consumed, the cup enters

yet another set of relationships as variously delineated audiences embrace,

scorn or ignore its representation of the order of things possibilities which

then recursively impact subsequent directions of cultural production. Such a

view on the limitations of subjectivity allows us to approach the past with an

understanding of social transformation less exclusively focused upon the

revolutionary moment and hence less skeptical in its description of social

actors in the past.This isan unapologetically liberalemplotment of the ancient

world, one that looks to human action in the creation of social conditions but

does not hang all transformative possibility on the isolated revolutionary.In bringing the Karashamb cup into the production of archaeological

theory, it provides an effective reminder that limitat ions upon agency do

not arise out of a pre-existing universally held field of restrictions but rather

are produced within a complex set of practices that shape subjects and

recursively alter the conditions of subjectivity. If archaeology is successful

in defining the instrumental roles played by material culture in creating sub-

jects, we will have gone far towards building a more profound account of

possibility and constraint within ancient societies.

Notes

1 Russian term for a large stone and earth mound erected over an interior

chamber.

2 A tradition of black-burnished pot tery does continue in the Middle Bronze Age

in some places, as reflected in the wares from the Meskheti kurgans

(D zhaparidze et al., 1985).

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ADAM T. SMI TH is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthro-pology at the University of Chicago.He holds degrees from Brown Uni-versity, the University of Cambridge and the University of Arizona.He iscurrently co-director of Project ArAGATS,an international archaeological

programme focused on the archaeology and geography of ancient trans-caucasian states that is investigating early complex societies of the LateBronze Age in the Republic of Armenia.[email:[email protected]]

the limitations of doxa

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