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ARTICLE

Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 2(2): 269275 [1469-6053(200206)2:2;269275;023966]

Commentary
Social theory and archaeological ethnographies
SETHA M. LOW
The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA

INTRODUCTION: CROSSING FIELDS

My romance with archaeology began with an undergraduate field excursion
to Chalphaupa, El Salvador and ended when I passed out working with a
trowel and brush in the tropical sun. Robert Sharer had brought me along
as a student physical anthropologist to collect bone and animal materials
and had I been able to tolerate the heat and bugs, I might have become an
ethnoarchaeologist looking at faunal remains.
This early initiation provided enough knowledge and practice so that I
knew to look to the archaeological literature to revise accepted theories
about meaning and power on the Latin American plaza (Low, 1995). The
archaeologists and landscape historians represented in the issue have made
the reverse trip, borrowing from social theory and cultural anthropology,
in order to illuminate their archaeological and landscape data and problems
of interpretation of outdoor spaces.
In this commentary I briefly discuss the four articles in this issue, highlighting their use of social and cultural theory, and then suggest additional
anthropological approaches to further their efforts to spatialize culture
(Low, 1996). I conclude by discussing my own struggle to read the social
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meaning of a contemporary landscape of a walled and gated community,

noting how similar our theoretical projects really are.

SOCIAL THEORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Spatial strategies and tactics
I start with what is the most familiar for me, Mesoamerica, where the
crossing of cultural anthropological and archaeological boundaries has
always been important (Ashmore, 2000). Cynthia Robins observations of
the continuous use of exterior and interior house spaces in the Maya
farming village of Chan Nohol in Belize draw parallel conclusions to my
own study of Maya weaving-village house sites outside of Guatemala in
1972. What I learn from her article is that the Mayan word nah, glossed
over as house, incorporates all core home spaces including the house and
yard.
Robin takes these observations further by using the insights of Michel
de Certeau to illustrate the interpenetration of social construction and
social experience in the everyday lives of Maya farmers . . .. I particularly
like the image of people listening across the pole walls as a way to reconstruct experientially the daily outdoor/indoor fluidity of village space.
Traces and paths on porous soil illuminate how residents daily behaviors
structure space and culture rather than the social and political forces of
the state. Further, the imprint of walking breaks down inside/outside,
domestic/non-domestic and public/private dichotomies through the spatializing practices of everyday living.
There are other social theories Robin could draw upon to add to her
analysis. For de Certeau (1984), power is about territory and boundaries in
which the weapons of the strong are classification, delineation and division
(what he calls strategies), while the weak use furtive movement, short cuts
and routes (his term is tactics) to contest this spatial domination. Tactics
never rely on the existence of a place for power or identity; instead they
are a form of consumption, never producing proper places, but always
using and manipulating these places (Cresswell, 1997: 363). Thus, the
spatial tactics of the weak are mobility and detachment from the rationalized spaces of power the Chan village pathways and traces.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1986) are also concerned with how
people resist the spatial discipline of the state. They distinguish between
the ordered and hierarchical machinations of the state and the war
machine of the nomad, who moves by lines of flight or by points and
nodes instead of place to place. The nomad escapes the state by
never becoming reterritorialized, slipping through the straited spaces of
power and remaining undisciplined, a metaphor for all the forces that

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resist state control. The smooth space of the nomad is continuous and
undifferentiated, not unlike the kind of space that Robin is trying to
theorize. Using Deleuze and Guattari to think about Chan village space
might liberate house, yard and field even further, and suggests that the
kinds of spatial/political struggles imagined by these authors are inherent
at this and other Maya sites.

Transnational/translocal spaces
Minette Churchs study of the homestead landscapes in the late nineteenth-century borderlands of southeastern Colorado explores the ways
that Anglo, Hispano and Native American groups inscribe the land with
their different cultural views of appropriate patterns and subsistence
strategies. Church is concerned with rereading an ethnically complex space
using Arjun Appadurais concept of ethnoscape in which people engage
in a dialectical relationship with places that they inhabit for any length of
time. Using the notion of the recreation of homelands allows her to
explain the evolution of land claims and ranches using both historical and
archaeological materials. By contrasting the three different homeland
strategies and uncovering intermarriage and inheritance patterns, she
portrays a more complex analysis of this landscape, and points out how
archaeological evidence tells a different story from that of the historical
documents.
Aihwa Ong (1999) employed the term transnational to denote
movement across spaces and formations of new relationships between
nations states and capital. She defined transnational spatial processes as
being situated cultural practices of mobility that produce new modes of
constructing identity and result in zones of graduated sovereignty based on
the accelerated flows of capital, people, cultures and knowledge, not unlike
the southeastern Colorado situation that Church describes. Thinking about
transnational, or translocal, spaces might contribute to her theorizing of the
different landscape patterns and the possible conflicts in cultural norms and
local knowledge that occurred on these sites.
Within cultural anthropology, the term transnational, was first used to
describe the way in which immigrants live their lives across borders and
maintain their ties to home, even when their countries of origin and settlement are geographically distant (Glick-Schiller et al., 1992: ix). Part of this
effort was to understand the implications of a multiplicity of social relations
and involvements that span borders. Eric Wolf (1982) laid the theoretical
groundwork in his landmark history of how the movement of capital and
labor has transformed global relations since the fifteenth century, dispelling
the myth that globalization is a recent phenomenon. However, while Wolfs
approach to the issue of global connections is seminal, it deals primarily
with issues of power and its allocation, and only indirectly with the spaces

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of daily life. It is much later, through the detailed ethnographies of the

rhythms of daily life in transnational migrant communities, that a sense of
transnational spaces emerges, approaches comparable to Churchs landscape analysis.
There is a tendency to conceive of transnational spaces as sites of resistance, and to depict cultural hybridity, multi-positional identities, border
crossings and transnational practices by migrants as conscious efforts to
escape control by capital and the state. For instance, Michael Kearney
(1991) traced the counter-hegemonic creations of autonomous political
spaces by Mixtec migrant farm workers in California and Oregon. Roger
Rouse (1991) imagined a social terrain that reflects the cultural bifocality
of migrants and describes a fragmented reality made up of circuits and
border zones. These migration studies dissolve conventional notions of
borders, boundaries, nations and community. In doing so they reformulate
social and political space, supplanting static concepts of center and
periphery, as well as of cultural core and difference at the margins, to create
fluid, transnational space produced by ordinary people. These cultural
anthropological theories of transnational space complement Churchs use
of landscapes and ethnoscapes, and would move the analysis of the grant
and the grid to question the relationship of the nation states involved and
the power that they hold.

Embodied spaces
Lesley Head, Jennifer Atchinson and Richard Fullagar with the assistence
of Biddy Simon and Polly Wandanga, of the Marralam community, explore
the Keep River region in northwestern Australia through an analysis of the
ethnobotanical and archaeobotanical evidence. Using Anthony Giddens
concept of practical consciousness, they theorize an interplay of country
and garden without the false separation of the social and the ecological as
distinct or separate categories of interaction. Working with local collaborators in the project, they combine ethnographic fieldwork and ethnobotanical analyses to trace the circuits of movement and meaning in the
landscape. From these analyses new interpretations of plant manipulation
and changes associated with European arrivals are identified. In this article,
the role of the archaeologist is the same as the ethnographer, in that they
both utilize what informants say and do as a way of understanding the larger
cultural pattern.
Cultural anthropologists also have noted the importance of movement
in the creation of place, conceptualizing space as movement rather than a
container. Melanesian ethnographers work in a cultural context that accentuates the importance of spatial orientation: in greeting, the passage of time,
the definition of events and the identification of people with land and/or
landscape. Working with the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, Nancy Munn

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(1996) brought aspects of this work together by considering space/time as

a symbolic nexus of relations produced out of interactions between bodily
actors and terrestrial spaces (1996: 449). Drawing in part on Lefebvres
(1991) concepts of field of action and basis of action, she constructs the
notion of a mobile spatial field that can be understood as a culturally
defined, corporeal-sensual field stretching out from the body at a given
locale or moving through locales. Her ethnographic illustrations are spatial
interdictions that occur when Aborigines treat the land according to ancestral Aboriginal law. She is interested in the specific kind of spatial form
being produced that creates a variable range of excluded or restricted
regions for each person throughout their life. Munn applies this idea to
contemporary Aborigine encounters with powerful topographic centers
and dangerous ancestral places.
The importance of this analysis is the way Munn demonstrated how the
ancestral laws power of spatial limitation becomes embodied in an actorcentered, mobile body, separate from any fixed center or place. The notion
of Aboriginal space as embodied complements and amplifies Head et al.s
analysis of the social dimensions of landscape and adds another dimension
to their work.

Public/private space
Scott MacEachern combines many techniques ethnohistorical, archaeological and ethnoarchaeological to construct the evolution of ritual and
political systems in the northeastern Mandara Mountains. He uses oral
histories and descriptions of political and ethnic relations within and
between montagnards and plain-dweller communities and four seasons of
archaeological excavations to understand the degree of spatial segregation
and changing spatial definitions of public and private. He then adds the
terms public and private spaces to what in the other articles is considered
domestic, agricultural or community space and illustrates how the attendant meanings of public and private spaces vary historically and between
montagnards and plain-dweller communities. However, the concepts of
public and private do not capture the historical distinctions that he wants
to make.
Similar to MacEachern in the northestern Mandara Mountains case,
within cultural anthropological theory on space and place the terms public
and private have been re-evaluated within specific contexts and cultural
situations. These terms often gloss over finer discriminations and do not
allow a third category semi-private or semi-public to emerge, nor the
re-analysis of what is domestic space or a space that represents the state. I
think the lesson here is that with ethnographic material, particularly emic
or experience-near data or transcripts, conceptual categories derived from
other disciplines may not provide the best analytic fit.

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CONCLUSION
As I struggle to bring architecture and spatial analysis into cultural anthropology (Low and Lawrence, 2002), I marvel at the success of archaeologists
at melding these very different worlds and types of data. I find that the
hardest part is convincing my colleagues that I can read between the lines
of what is visible, and in some cases even read what is said to get at what
is not said.
In my work on gated communities middle-class residential enclaves of
single family houses surrounded by walls and with secured access by electronic keys or guard I am attempting to expand the co-production model
begun in On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. In my work
on the Latin American plaza both the social production and the social
construction of space are used to understand cultural meaning. The psychological meaning of spaces, however, was not clearly developed. In the gated
community research, I focus instead on the confluence of talk about the
place with its physicality and use, integrating what people say about their
community, what they feel about living there, and what is not said but
enacted in everyday life (Low, 2001). I argue there are spatial meanings in
the landscape that are latent, even obscured, by social and cultural convention. By adding the discourse of space with its material production and
social construction, I uncover underlying interpretations of spatial relations
and architectural form. Like so many of the archaeologists and historians
in this issue, I draw upon these multiple sources of data to enrich my understanding of place and space. We share an interest in historical documents,
ethnographic exegesis, cultural contexts and spatial traces. The only difference is that I ask people to offer their own accounts as well.
Even so, the marriage of archaeology and ethnography or of linguistics and ethnography can be rocky because of misunderstandings in the
use of data and application of theory. The articles in this special section,
though, demonstrate how productive this cross-fertilization and exchange
of ideas can be. I suggest that even more integration of cultural anthropology and archaeology is possible through the application of social theory,
and I hope there will be more collaborative work between archaeologists
and anthropologists in the future.

References
Ashmore, W. (2000) Decisions and Dispositions: Socializing Spatial Archaeology,
Distinguished Lecture in Archaeology, American Anthropological Association
annual meeting, San Francisco.
Cresswell, T. (1997) Imagining the Nomad, in G. Benko and U. Strohmayer (eds)
Space and Social Theory, pp. 36082. Oxford: Blackwell.

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de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practices of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of

California.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986) Nomadology: The War Machine. New York:
Semitext.
Glick-Schiller, N., L. Basch and C. Blac-Szanton (1992) Towards a Transnational
Perspective on Migration. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.
Kearny, M. (1991) Border and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire,
Journal of Historical Sociology 4(1): 5274.
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Low, S.M. (1995) Indigenous Architectural Representation, American Anthropologist 97(4): 74862.
Low, S.M. (1996) Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and Social Construction of Public Space, American Ethnologist 23(4): 86179.
Low, S.M. (2001) The Edge and the Center, American Anthropologist 103: 4568.
Low, S.M. and D. Lawrence (2002) The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating
Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Munn, N. (1996) Excluded Spaces, Critical Inquiry 22: 44665.
Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Rouse, R. (1991) Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism,
Diaspora 1(1): 823.
Wolf, E. (1982) Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of
California Press.

SETHA M. LOW is Professor of Environmental Psychology and Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and
Director of the Public Space Research Group at the Center for Human
Environments. She has published extensively including, most recently,
The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture (with D. Lawrence,
Blackwell, 2002), On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture
(University of Texas Press, 2000) and Theorizing the City (Rutgers
University Press, 1999). She is currently completing Behind the Gates: The
New American Dream and writing and lecturing about open space,
security and gated communities.

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