Download PDF | (Routledge Handbooks) Tamar Hodos (Editor) - The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization-Routledge (2017).
995 Pages
This unique collection applies globalization concepts to the discipline of archaeology, using a wide range of global case studies from a group of international specialists. The volume spans from as early as 10,000 cal. Bp to the modern era, analysing the relationship between material culture, cultural change, and the complex connectivities between communities and groups. In considering social practices shared between different historic groups, and also the expression of their respective identities, the papers in this volume illustrate the potential of globalization thinking to bridge the local and global in material culture analysis.
The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization is the first such volume to take a world archaeology approach, on a multi-period basis, in order to bring together the scope of evidence for the significance of material culture in the processes of globalization. This work thus also provides a means to understand how material culture studies can be utilized to assess the impact of global engagement in our contemporary world. As such, it will appeal to archaeologists and historians as well as social science researchers interested in the origins of globalization.
Tamar Hodos is Reader in Mediterranean Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, UK.
Acknowledgements
This volume is the result of a tremendous collaborative effort. While some of the editorial team had discussed globalization and archaeology previously in person and in print, we are very grateful to Lynn Meskell and the proposal peer reviewers for encouragement and introductions, which enabled us to provide global coverage more readily than we would have achieved otherwise.
We are indebted to our good-natured authors, who have waited patiently for this book to appear. We are also grateful for their intellectual engagement. Globalization thinking was new to many of them. We are pleased that they have embraced the ideas, and we value their diverse views. We appreciate the anonymous peer review feedback on the manuscript, as well as that provided by Alison Carter and her Archaeology of Globalization graduate students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who adopted the volume as a textbook prior to publication.
Matt Gibbons has been an exemplary commissioning editor. He has supported this project from the beginning, including facilitating an editorial meeting at the 2014 European Association of Archaeologists’ annual conference in Istanbul, which enabled many of the editorial team to meet in person for the first time. Lola Harre has overseen the final stages of publication with tremendous care. We are also indebted to Anne Leaver, who has redrawn many of the maps with patience and attention to detail, an undertaking not to be underestimated.
Finally, Tamar Hodos must thank the co-editors, without whom this volume simply would not be. Their support, especially during the period of the illness and passing of her mother, helped sustain her and the project. We have enjoyed the friendships that have developed through working together on this book, and we look forward to collaborating further.
Globalization
Some basics. An introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization , Tamar Hodos
Globalization is one of the most potent theoretical frameworks of the moment, for it provides a means by which we can make sense of our socio-cultural connectivities, and the networks through which those connections are developed and maintained. The impact of works such as Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat: a brief history of the twenty-first century (2005), Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism (2007) and Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0: global prosperity and how to achieve it (2011) illustrate the timely and relevant nature of globalization thinking.
Similar complex connectivities and networks also existed in the past, but rarely has scholarship assessed their impulse and nature through the lens of globalization explicitly. This is surprising given the evidence for the development of shared social practices between different groups, the expression of their respective identities, and the connective networks that facilitated such developments — all of which are considered key factors in today’s sense of globalization. The present volume addresses this, for it is the first collection of the explicit application of globalization theory to a wide-ranging series of world archaeology case studies.
What is globalization?
Globalization is more than just another way to describe connectivity, trade, migration, internationalism, or diffusion. It has also become more than the idea of complex connectivity, as per Tomlinson’s succinct definition in 1999. As case studies in this volume demonstrate, not all examples of complex connectivities in the past are necessarily examples of globalization. Nevertheless, there is considerable disagreement about not only how to define globalization but also when it begins in world history. Many regard globalization as a post-sixteenth-century phenomenon and feel that our use of the term must encompass the world in scale (e.g. Giddens 1990; Wallerstein 1991; Robbie Robertson 2003, this volume). Other contemporary critics argue against any concept of truly worldwide engagement and suggest instead that the term and its ideas serve as a synonym for Westernization (e.g. discussions in Tomlinson 1999; Appadurai 2001b; Ghemawat 2011). For others still, it implies homogenization, standardization, and uniformity, obscuring or downplaying variation and difference (e.g. Giddens 1990; Steger 2003; Beck 2004; Ritzer 2004). Close study of the processes that underpin the sense of global connectivity demonstrate that none is wholly accurate. Such analysis demonstrates that the idea of ‘global’ refers to a particular scale, often substitutes for ‘international’, and that it is not restricted, or even necessarily related, to Westernization (Hirst and Thompson 1996; Tomlinson 1999: 89-97; Appadurai 2001a, 2001b; Ghemawat 2011; Nederveen Pieterse 2015).
There is often no consensus on the definition of globalization, although many characterize it. It is widely agreed that one of globalization’s most defining features is increasing connectivity. Specifically, it is of a type that encompasses a wide-scale flow of ideas and knowledge alongside the sharing of cultural customs, civil society, practices and the environment. This may manifest itself through closer economic integration via increased movement of goods and services, capital and labour, and it may be shaped by politics (Steiglitz 2006: 5). Many debate its features, however, such as whether it is informed by technological changes, involves the reconfiguration of states, goes together with regionalization, or includes the sense of time-space compression (Nederveen Pieterse 2015: 7-25). Usually it is described and discussed within its experiential sphere, so that we hear of different kinds of globalization, such as financial, commercial, economic, or political. Most will agree, however, that globalization is uneven and asymmetric in pace, scope, and impact. There are clear ebbs and flows of various connectivities that work in tandem economically, socially, materially, and politically. Some understand these developments as a process (e.g. Robbie Robertson and Jan Nederveen Pieterse), as a system (e.g. Jonathan Friedman and Immanuel Wallerstein), or as a discourse (e.g. Manfred Steger).
Roland Robertson defines globalization as the process by which the world increasingly becomes seen as one place and the ways in which we are made conscious of that process (Robertson 1992: 8). This should not be taken to imply that there is a unified world society or culture, however (Featherstone 1995: 114). For this reason, Jan Nederveen Pieterse defines globalization as ‘a process of hybridization that gives rise to a global mélange’ (2015: 67), and he argues that globalization can be understood as an open-ended synthesis of a number of disciplinary approaches to such developments, in which there are as many globalization modes as there are agents, dynamics, and impulses (Nederveen Pieterse 2015: 68).
Since there are many circumstances in which this synthesis takes place, we should really speak of processes, and globalizations. In other words, globalization itself may be defined as processes of increasing connectivities that unfold and manifest as social awareness of those connectivities. It 1s more than just complex connectivity. That it is about the processes themselves makes globalization an active concept rather than a descriptive one. The idea suggests a world-scale, which is why some argue that it can therefore only be a phenomenon that begins with the period in which we have had the means of global circumnavigation. More often the term is used to signal wider changes within a conceptual or experiential world. Most commonly, this involves increasing integration and cooperation, with evolving, facilitating commonalities. There is often also the sense that the world is shrinking because distance communication and movement are both faster and wider reaching. Of course, the world itself is not diminishing, but it seems to become more accessible physically, socially, and/or temporally to those who operate within the sphere of experience. Studies have already demonstrated, however, that neither rapid communication, mobility over distance, nor technological advancements are necessary to convey a sense of one-placeness. For the past, the feeling of one-placeness is achieved more effectively by shared practices (e.g. Hodos 2015: 249-50; Pitts and Versluys 2015).
An important corollary to the increasing senses of similarity and accessibility is the awareness, and even development, of more pronounced differences and inequalities with those not so closely integrated into the experiential sphere (or not involved at all). This corollary indicates that there are two primary aspects of globalization processes. One is the development of shared practices and values that contribute to the sense of one-placeness; these often derive from a variety of increasing connectivities. The other is an increasing awareness of and sensitivity to differences, especially cultural ones. Growing awareness of cultural difference is a function of globalization, not just a feature of it. It manifests itself often as a resurgence of local identities in explicit contrast to the increasingly shared practices of the globally connected level. That these local expressions of identity are also commonly linked to widely divergent levels of wealth, health, and political power often only serves to heighten such contrasts and the degree of social investment in maintaining cultural difference. Thus, with globalization there is a balance between shared practices that bind and diversities that distinguish participants. Indeed, cultural convergence cannot exist without cultural differentialism, since we cannot converge unless we start from divergence. The two are not only in tension with one another, but also interdependent. Together, they are part of the paradox of globalization. However, many discussions of globalization, both in the popular press and academia, pay lip service only to the former and neglect the latter.
Hybridization
One reason for this partial perspective is because there are often different notions of ‘culture’ under discussion. One accepts culture as essentially bounded, and assumes that culture derives from a localized, contextualized learning process (habitus). In this lies the notion of a cultural group. The other is the idea of a translocal learning process that involves an outward-looking sense of place. In both contexts, the notion of hybridization plays an important role (Nederveen Pieterse 2015: 87—90).
Hybridization has been defined as ‘the ways in which forms become separated from existing practices and recombine with new forms in new practices’ (Rowe and Schelling 1991: 231). The idea of hybridity was adopted by the social sciences from the natural sciences to characterize cultural blendings that reconfigure and develop into new practices. Its active form, hybridization, plays a role in globalizing processes as ‘the making of global culture as a global mélange’ (Nederveen Pieterse 2015: 86). Hybridization has often been criticized, however, for being based upon a sense of purity of the contributing parties and that it implies passive developments without agency (for an overview, see van Dommelen 2006). What is lacking in many of these critiques, however, is the historical depth that makes up cultures and the features by which we identify, categorize, and distinguish them (there are also questions about our notions of hybridity and past people’s actions: did what we regard as hybrid appear as such to their agents? See Pappa 2013; Silliman 2015). Silliman notes that with hybridity, we have been overly concerned about origins and the short-term mixing of cultural elements; he argues that hybridity and hybridization are best used with regard to practices anchored in social memory and multiscalar explorations of culture change and continuity (Silliman 2015).
While hybridity may be based upon differences between the categories that go into the mixture, the process of hybridization reveals those differences to be relative. We are just as bounded by similarity as we are distinguished by difference. The two cannot be separated from one another. Furthermore, hybridity transcends binary categories. Indeed, as Nederveen Pieterse notes (2015: 125), boundaries are historical and social constructions that serve as cognitive barriers whose validity depends on epistemic orders, which are ultimately arbitrary, or at least contingent. As such, hybridity critiques essentialism. Thus, hybridization, as the active voice of hybridity, refers to a wide range of practices that involve both accident and agency. It references social and cultural strategy, rather than merely observing objects combining different technological or cultural traditions (Suliman 2015: 288). Hybridization, therefore, is a factor in the reorganization of social spaces and practices, and it applies as much to dominant socio-cultural groups as to the less dominant (e.g. colonized; subaltern). For this reason, globalization processes can be described partly as hybridization processes, and result in something much more complex than simply homogenization.
Variability
This complex result exists because of variability: there are variations in practices that we see within any particular group. Yet despite the variability, collectively members may still identify themselves, and be identified by us, as belonging to the same group. Difficulty arises when a practice falls outside of the normal range we expect to see within the boundaries of the defined group. As a result, we spend considerable effort in explaining such phenomena in contrast to our definition of the group.
Our need to accommodate variability better when defining groups becomes significant when we assess the nature of past complex connectivities through material culture, the building block of archaeology. Awareness of others is not the same as feeling connected to them. Often literary sources are too politically administrative or positional (biased; oppositional) to indicate any such perception, and for more distant eras we rarely have personal documents that reveal individuality. Yet feeling connected surely was a feature during certain periods, especially those that included substantial mobility of individuals and groups. The challenge is how to interpret the nature of past connectivities from material culture.
This is because the convergences we experience and characterize in specifically globalization connectivities are not identically replicated practices. Instead, they are shared practices. They are based on a thread of common understanding that transcends a culture’s own values, beliefs, and practices. This enables different groups to operate together at the level of the global for mutual benefit. This is not, however, a simple moving towards uniformity. If it were, we would all be the same by now. The synchronization we associate with globalizing processes is incomplete, ambivalent, and subject to agency. It also downplays counter-currents and ignores the fact that much of what is being synchronized is of mixed origins to begin with. Even the idea of a global mélange, which characterizes this complexity better as the blending of diverse elements in a specific context of use/application by involved parties, cannot fully acknowledge the unevenness, asymmetry, and inequality that happens in global relations.
Glocalization
As those globally common practices reverberate through a cultural group — in the form of new shapes, styles, or goods — social practices within that group evolve to build upon the initial thread that facilitated global-level understanding in the first place. Often, such evolutions are adapted in a way that speaks directly and explicitly to that group, which increases their appeal locally. This is the idea of glocalization, or the local adaptation of those widely shared practices and values, which appears in the convergence most popularly associated with globalization (Roland Robertson 1995).
This global-outlook-as-adapted-to-local-conditions has its origins in business micro-marketing, in which goods and services have been tailored and advertised to differentiated markets. As a process, however, it can be driven just as much by the consuming market, which chooses to use goods and practices that accord with local traditions. Conceptually, glocalization emphasizes the local responses to global engagement, and focuses on the ways in which broadly shared ideas, goods, and practices are modified and adapted locally to accord with local practice, customs, habits, and beliefs. The variability of such responses is immense, and these should not be regarded somehow as lesser or misinformed performances of global practice. Instead, they need to be regarded on their own cultural terms. Glocalization is thus an integral aspect of globalizing processes.
Grobalization
A companion to this is the notion of grobalization (Ritzer 2004). This is a more imperialistic, homogenizing perspective, as it derives directly from the ambitions of organizations, nations, and corporations to grow (hence grobalization) their power, influence and, in the case of businesses, profits in geographic areas. It is more focused on the expansion of producers and entities to find new locales, and thus new markets and consumers. It therefore emphasizes geographical extent and consumer opportunities, striving for homogeneity, rather than cultural impact and the variations in practice emphasized in glocalization. Conceptually, grobalization is part of the dominating aspect that we often associate with -izations, such as when globalization is considered proxy for Westernization (or Romanization, Sinicization, Islamicization, etc.). Thus, it, too, is an integral aspect of globalizing processes.
Globalization as a concept balances these competing processes of influence and response. It creates a framework in which the inter-relations of culture, power, and economics, and the diversity of actions and responses within those inter-relations, can be habilitated. These brief explanations here provide a context to the present volume, for while all of these might intrinsically be modern ideas, there is strong evidence of such practices and developments at various times in the past in regions around the world.
Globalization and the past
The widening cooperation and deepening inequality we see in today’s globalization processes can be found together throughout history. But even in the past, such processes occurred unevenly temporally, unequally geographically, and unfairly socially. Not all examples of complex connectivities can be regarded necessarily as globalization. We should not expect globalization experiences in the past to be part of an evolutionary continuum. The trend towards human integration and cooperation is a dialectical process, but also one that unfolds inconsistently. Furthermore, the past is an incomplete record with biased, partial remains that give only clues to the nature of complex social interactions between individuals and groups.
Despite debates about the start date of globalization, many nevertheless acknowledge that the ideas that underpin today’s globalizations are applicable to the past on different scales (including Robbie Robertson in this volume). For this reason, scholarship of the past is increasingly using globalization thinking to better interpret past connections between individuals and groups (e.g. Clark 1997; Tomlinson 1999; Hopkins 2002; O’Rourke and Williamson 2002; McNeil 2008). They draw particularly on contemporary analyses of the processes through which the world is regarded as a coherently bounded place, and the ways in which we are made conscious of this sense of one-placeness (Roland Robertson 1992; Waters 1995: 1-25; Tomlinson 1999: 1-31).
What is particularly appealing about globalization is that it rehabilitates competing, sometimes oppositional perspectives on the nature of connectivity. For instance, in the 1980s, postcolonialism emerged as a major paradigm of critical analysis. It sought explicitly to deconstruct the narratives of the colonizers, and to articulate the voices of the colonized and so-called ‘others’. It impacted within archaeological discourse during the 1990s (Liebmann 2008), evidenced in the dismantling of interpretative frameworks such as Romanization and Hellenization (see the discussion between Versluys (2014) and Hodos (2014)). Hybridization became popular as a means of interpreting cultural changes during these eras, instead. However, post-colonialism has been criticized for homogenizing experiences, not acknowledging sufficiently the role of history in cultural change, and, at times, disregarding the impact of the colonists to such an extent that they are written out of the narrative altogether (for discussions, see Liebmann 2008: 10-13). Globalization thinking rehabilitates these competing perspectives. It enables us to consider the commonalities that gave rise to the -izations in the first place alongside the diverse expressions of those shared practices. It also allows us to recognize the tension between shared practices and the rejection of them, which can happen in the resurgence of local identities in contrast to the merging of practices at the global level. Globalization enables us to consider the interconnections between all these different levels of interaction in a united perspective.
To date, such studies in the field of archaeology have been patchy in terms of application. Many focus on a single cultural group or period/era (e.g. Hingley 2005; De Angelis 2013; Pitts and Versluys 2015) or a more eclectic collection of case studies (LaBianca and Scham 2006; Jennings 2011). Some regard only the evidence for long-distance contact (Harris 2007), with little consideration of the nuances of shared practices or the paradoxical resurgence of expressions of distinctive local identities (De Angelis 2013). These, in particular, use globalization simply as proxy for the similarities of practice across a particular scale. They do not consider additional aspects that make the connections and reactions complex.
In contrast, the present volume is the first to assess the shared practices, the localized differences, and the networks that underpin them. Thus, it brings together the scope of evidence for connectivities in the past. Furthermore, it takes a world archaeology approach on a multi-period basis. In some respects, therefore, the present volume on globalization is truly global.
Of course, as with the very critiques of ‘globalization’, this volume does not cover every place in every period in human history. It cannot. No volume could. But, significantly, for many of the places, periods, and social groups discussed, this volume represents the first time that their social developments have been considered through the lens of globalization and the processes that underpin it. The chapters here are not synthetic narratives of the kind usually associated with the handbook/companion model. Instead, each has been specially commissioned to provide a focused case study. Thus, one aim in the selection has been to expand the scope of application beyond the few well-known, theoretically informed archaeological examples (e.g. Jennings 2011; Pitts and Versluys 2015; Boivin et al. 2012).
To further encourage consideration of less obvious periods and places, we also shy away from widely discussed historical examples, such as slavery in the Americas (e.g. Falola 2013), opium and trade in the nineteenth century (e.g. Schoonover 2005), or the importance of global capital markets in supporting economic growth in the modern world (e.g. Weiss 2002). Nevertheless, within the sections, which are geographically oriented, we have also sought a temporal scope from prehistory to today. The volume spans from as early as 10,000 cal. Bp to the modern era; its contemporary contributions consider global trade in commodities and technologies primarily from a material culture perspective (globalization of the heritage industry, which is also touched upon in this volume, is well-discussed elsewhere: e.g. Labadi and Long 2010; Meskell 2015). Collectively, these illustrate a tremendous range of connectivities that people have experienced, and a variety of evidence for those relationships, not all of which necessarily can be considered globalization. Therefore, what is and what is not globalization are also reflected upon.
The volume begins with four introductory chapters that establish different perspectives on globalization theory and its application to the past. Jennings provides a clear methodology for recognizing globalization processes in action. Knappett explores how networks provide the tools for analysing connectivities across space and time, arguing for the social nature of these connections, beyond material and spatial ones. Feinman emphasizes the macro-scalar aspect of globalization. For Robertson, globalization remains a matter of scale that, for him, must encompass the world, and thus is an inherently modern phenomenon. Nevertheless, he acknowledges similar patterns of connectivities on smaller, local, and regional scales and recognizes that they epitomize human society. He appreciates that the theories that underpin today’s thinking about globalization can be a useful tool for understanding similarly complex connectivities in the past. Thus, even within these four framework papers, the diversity of definitions and conceptualizations of globalization is illustrated.
Contributing authors were asked to engage directly with globalization theory, as raised through the following four chapters, in their reconsiderations of developments in their respective periods, places, and cultural groups. For many, this has been an exercise in original analysis and interpretation, since globalization theory within archaeology has not been widely applied to date. For this reason, authors have also often reflected back to consider how globalization thinking offers new perspectives on understanding the complex connectivities of their case studies that may be masked by alternative theoretical approaches. Collectively, therefore, this volume presents the discipline with an alternative paradigm with which to reassess the complexities and impacts of cultural connectivities in the past. To avoid any sense of a master narrative that locates a particular time period or continent as the epicentre of globalization, the sections themselves have been ordered alphabetically; cross-references to other contributions within the volume link the regions directly.
This volume has two additional aims, which address archaeology but also serve a broader purpose. The first is to illustrate the potential of globalization theory to bridge the local and global in material culture analysis. In other words, the volume highlights what globalization can do for archaeology. There are many examples from various archaeological periods in which the presence of ‘exotics’, ‘trade wares’, ‘prestige items’, and ‘social valuables’, new technologies and so on are highlighted in analyses of local settings. Such settings are often individual sites (villages or cities) or at best regional trade networks. The chapters in the present collection offer a broader reflection on the places of origin of those exotics, and the consideration of such objects as a factor in the analysis of social and cultural identities. The roles of objects and object agency in cultural change arising from connectivities come to the fore in this regard.
This, in turn, gets compared and contrasted with the role global engagement plays as a force of cultural change alongside its impact upon cultural resilience in spite of and in reaction to it. Such processes raise questions concerning how local communities responded to globalizing forces between the flexible local (cf: Ong 1999) and the friction viewed elsewhere (Tsing 2004).
The second aim is to highlight the distinction between modern and premodern globalizations as one of scale and, perhaps, intensity, rather than viewing the difference as one of kind. This is a point made by Jennings (2011), but case studies presented here illustrate this much more broadly. In other words, the volume demonstrates the significance and utility of the past to today’s society and social theorists. Even though globalizing tendencies in the nation-state era are leading to more poignant forms of border crossings, cultural and natural borders were always being crossed. Diffusionist theory and World Systems Theory both make this point, but the former fails to ask ‘how’ and ‘why’ and the latter replies only through economic motifs. Globalization theory offers more room to introduce social and cultural elements into analysis of the material record of the past. This is because globalization is about processes rather than a way of being.
Therefore, other disciplines beyond archaeology can draw from the studies here. Evaluating, analysing and interpreting material evidence patterns from the past provide us with an opportunity to model the future in a unique way. Archaeology provides a long-term record of broader social practices, and a trajectory of impact that arises from the complex connectivities we do, and do not, associate with globalization. This volume draws together case studies from world archaeology that reconsider the processes and networks that underpin ideas and processes of globalization, as seen in material culture. We need to identify these phases and shifting centres of globalization in the past to understand such processes in the long term, including going forward from today. As such, examples in the present volume serve as a model for contemporary globalization analyses that seek to map outcomes of our own, current connectivities in a variety of sectors in today’s society, and societies. We need the past to understand the future; archaeology provides us with a means of shaping that future as we strive to anticipate the consequences of our own connectivities today for ourselves and our children.
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