Materiality, Personhood and Monumentality in Early Neolithic Britain

Abstract

Archaeological studies of the material and historical conditions of life have in recent years stimulated discussion of the relationality of people and material culture. Engagement with the material world is one context in which senses of personhood and identity emerge and are transformed. People and materiality are interanimated in the more or less transient events and actions of daily life. Personhood and the material world are loaded with sense and made meaningful through citation and reanimation of cultural values and tradition. This contribution discusses the contingent and possibly transient senses of personhood that may have been constituted in some specific material and historical circumstances relating to early Neolithic monuments in southern Britain. A case study focuses on the relationality of people, animals, earth, stone, architecture and material culture.

The Domestication of Personhood: a View from the Northern Iroquoian Longhouse

“…Relational personhood approaches in archaeology (Fowler 2004;Thomas 2004;Knapp & van Dommelen 2008;Kirk 2006;Jones 2005), and social anthropology (e.g. Strathern 1988;Busby 1997;Hacking 1986;Wagner 1991;Lambeck & Strathern 1998;Viveiros de Castro 1996) have critiqued a modern absolutist vision of the indivisible, physically-bound, autonomous, 'free man' by exploring how non-Western and past persons were differently delimited, composed, associated, and imagined through their routine social and bodily engagements.…”

“…(e.g. Chapman & Gaydarska 2007;Fowler 2004;Meskell 2001;Thomas 2004;Kirk 2006;Jones 2005). Fowler, drawing on Melanesian and Indian ethnographies, defines several broad modes of personhood (individual, dividual, partible, permeable, fractal) to describe 'the overarching logic of being a person within any social context and the specific longterm trends in the practices that support that logic' (2004, 7).…”

Past Practices: Rethinking Individuals and Agents in Archaeology

“…The material record cannot 'prove' that people in prehistory held a concept of themselves as individuals, even if the material conditions of individual people are represented in media such as architecture, rock art, clay and stone figurines, frescoes and pottery, or reflected in everything from stone tools (Dobres 2000) to monuments (Brück 2001;Kirk 2006) to skeletal remains (Robb 2002). Despite the practical and theoretical issues that complicate any definition of analytical or real individuals in a prehistoric context, we believe it is necessary to move beyond attempts simply to identify social groups or categories, or to break them down into opposing binary classifications, or to argue that they are only modern reconstructions cast in our own image (cf.…”

“…Self(hood), finally, represents the collected attributes of a person, the 'site' or perspective from which a person perceives the surrounding world and acts upon and within it (Mauss 1985(Mauss [1938). Fowler (2004, 7), followed largely by Jones (2005) and Kirk (2006), uses the term 'personhood' instead of selfhood, defining it as a person's state of being in any specific context. He also adds as key features of personhood 'dividuality' and 'partibility', derived from Strathern's (1988) study of the composite, multiply-authored, divisible persons in Highland New Guinea society (Fowler 2004, 8-9).…”

Becoming persons, becoming ancestors. Personhood, memory and the corpse in Roman rituals of social remembrance

“…Concepts of the bounded and autonomous individual, the product of post-Enlightenment thought concerning the body, have been rejected recently in favour of persons who are rarely fixed or static but ‘dividual’ or ‘multiply-authored’ (Chapman 2000; Fowler 2001; 2004; Kirk 2006). According to Fowler (2004, 8–9) ‘dividual’ persons ‘owe parts of themselves to others’, and may be partible (reconfigurable through the extraction or receiving of objects or substances), or permeable (permeated by qualities which alter the composition of their own substance).…”