Beyond the “Savage Slot”. Examining Colonial Blind Spots in Global Prehistories (Double Panel) Part 1

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C Expanding the Global Archive

Beyond the "Savage Slot". Examining Colonial Blind Spots in Global Prehistories (Double Panel) Part 1

Event Details

Date

V. Friday, 12th September, 08:30-10:30
Location
M1076
Theme
C Expanding the Global Archive

Convenor

Liv Nilsson Stutz (Linnaeus University )

Chair

Peter Jordan (Lund University)

Panelists

Paulina Blaesild (University of Gothenburg)
Mikael Fauvelle (Lund University )
Markus Fjellström (Lund University)
Daniel Groß (Museum Lolland Falster)
Peter Jordan (Lund University)
Liv Nilsson Stutz (Linnaeus University )
Astrid Nyland (Archaeological Museum, Stavanger University)
Aaron Stutz (Bohusläns Museum and Linnaeus University)

Papers

Paulina Blaesild

Ecological ethics in the not-only-human humanities. Unsettling intra- to post-colonial heritages in hunting-gathering: environmental research through the case of wetland archaeology

Ecological ethics in the not-only-human humanities. Unsettling intra- to post-colonial heritages in hunting-gathering: environmental research through the case of wetland archaeology

Archaeology has been weakly invested in accounting for critical theoretical frameworks and ethical consideration in the narration of environment within archaeology, through engagement with fields of environmental and ecological ethics, or intersections with fields of environmental humanities and posthumanism. The field of wetland archaeology is characterized by excellent preservation of organic material; hence studies of vegetation development has become an evident aspect of its inquiry. Another conditioning yet contradicting trait for wetland archaeology is the various European proceedings of historical wetland management, highly pertinent in the Nordic countries of Finland and Sweden, where the mercantilist and cameralist logic behind prevailing 18th and 19th century perspectives on environment—fueled by the cross-imperialist competition in nationalist branding—paved way for destructive drainage campaigns in the service of agricultural and forestry requirements (and aesthetics). These utilitarian and transcendental attitudes towards particular ecological niches (where wetlands early were discarded as “pollutive”, “disgusting” or “dangerous”) has elsewhere been connected to the colonial enterprise, in its turning of imperial expansive principles towards the “wilderness” of the colonies and inter-European peripheries of civilization. The focus of this paper will be to relate these infected histories of wetland management and environment-national identities to the issues of wetland archaeology, stipulating that archaeology share the responsibility to critically engage and position itself within political discussions of climate activism, wetland reclamation and the ethics of environmental narration.
Mikael Fauvelle

Decolonizing Hunter-Gatherer Economics

Decolonizing Hunter-Gatherer Economics

Hunters and Gatherers are often described as having a “subsistence economy”, which is defined as being focused on the provisioning of food, clothing, and shelter. This stands in contrast with the economics of more presumably complex agricultural peoples, who are often described as trading in ritual, prestige, money, or market goods. This focus on subsistence exchange over other currencies lies at the heart of many behavioral ecological frameworks which remain popular explanatory models for hunter-gatherer research. Furthermore, it is common to describe hunter-gatherer economies as “small-scale”, focused mainly on intra-group provisioning without much organized long-distance exchange. Ethnohistoric and archaeological data from many hunter-gatherer cultures around the world, however, paints a very different picture in which hunter-gatherer societies trade far and wide in many of the same currencies as all other human groups. This paper draws on case studies from Scandinavia and North America to highlight the large-scale, interregional nature, and non-subsistence focus of many ancient hunter-gatherer economic systems. I argue that 1. Hunter-gatherer economies were often dominated by the exchange of non-subsistence goods. 2. Many hunter-gatherer economies were large in scale, spanning hundreds of kilometers and multiple political and ethnic boundaries, and 3. The persistent characterization of hunter-gatherer economics as “small-scale” and “subsistence-focused” perpetuates the colonial othering of hunter-gatherer societies in a way that promotes overly simplified teleological narratives of human history.
Markus Fjellström

Colonial Narratives and Sámi Identity: Reframing Medieval Power Dynamics and Trade Networks in Fennoscandia

Colonial Narratives and Sámi Identity: Reframing Medieval Power Dynamics and Trade Networks in Fennoscandia

The history and ethnicity of the Sámi have long been debated, particularly in archaeology and historical studies. In the 1980s, Bjørnar Olsen and Audhild Schanche questioned nationalist and ethnocentric biases in Norwegian and Fennoscandian archaeology, initiating discussions on Sámi archaeology and ethnicity with works like "Were They All Norwegians?" To some extent and despite these efforts, colonial and outdated narratives about the Sámi past persist, partly due to limited awareness. Olsen (2016) notes that researchers often rely on Anglo-Saxon postcolonial frameworks, which may not align with Fennoscandia’s colonial history. Here, I would like to focus on Fennoscandian and northern European models of medieval and early modern colonial histories for a more relevant analysis. Rather than offering a definitive solution, this study seeks to enhance a discussion and an understanding of the complex medieval power dynamics impacting the Sámi, who were a diverse and geographically widespread socio-economic group. Focusing on Lappviken, a 13th–14th century marketplace in northern Sweden, the study examines its role as a Sámi social and economic centre within a larger medieval trade network, including the Hanseatic states and the birkarls. This approach seeks to highlight the rich socio-economic and cultural interactions from a Sámi perspective.
Daniel Groß

Constructed identifications: how the bipartition of the Danish Stone Age forms narratives of the past and present

Constructed identifications: how the bipartition of the Danish Stone Age forms narratives of the past and present

The terms “jægerstenalder” and “bondestenalder” (Hunter-Stone Age / Farmer-Stone Age) are prevalent not only in Danish museum outreach but also in official communications of the Cultural Heritage Agency. This terminology is not only undifferentiated and overly simplistic, many finds and studies (not only) from Denmark show that this segmentation also ‘reduces’ the Older Stone Ages into one entity that is commonly seen in contrast to the Neolithic. This is commonly done to highlight the incorporation of new methods and techniques for livelihoods in the younger Stone Age. Apparently, this is closely connected to the notion of “us” still being a farming community and, hence, more relatable to Neolithic people than those of a different cultural sphere. In this presentation, I’d like to bring forward the mistakes and logic flaws of the bipartition and the consequential impact it has on us as professionals, furthermore I’d like to discuss what such a framing potentially has for our own as well as our outreach concepts and professional as well as public narratives.
Peter Jordan

Exploring Hidden Histories and Indigenous Voices: ‘Primitivism’ meets the ‘Noble Savage’ in Archaeology, Anthropology and Contemporary Society.

Exploring Hidden Histories and Indigenous Voices: ‘Primitivism’ meets the ‘Noble Savage’ in Archaeology, Anthropology and Contemporary Society.

The image of a ‘hunter-gatherer’ remains a powerful, provocative and controversial notion in academia and across contemporary global society, often stereotyped, frequently simplified and sometimes celebrated. This paper explores the historical classification systems that created the idea of an ‘original’ kind of human existence, comparing and contrasting Western, Soviet and also East Asian perspectives, looking at how these taxonomies drew on archaeology and ethnography to inform divergent colonial and imperial policies and practices. We then look at how this ‘progressive’ mode of social evolutionary thinking also emerged out of the ‘internal’ socio-economic colonialism that played out within Western European nation states, establishing internal hierarchies via assumptions about ascending levels of moral and cultural achievement. Given these striking parallels, the paper explores how models, debates and questions generated by intellectual discourse on hunter-gatherers and their ‘original affluent society’ might be used to explore indigenous histories and descendent communities in regions and cultures long ignored and often despised by professional anthropological enquiry, which has primarily focused on documenting ‘exotic’ cultures in remoter corners of the imperial world. To what extent does these complex legacies inform the writing of multivocal postcolonial histories in an increasingly globalized and polarized world?
Liv Nilsson Stutz

Moving archaeological theory beyond the savage slot. A critical discussion about the use of ethnography in European prehistoric archaeology.

Moving archaeological theory beyond the savage slot. A critical discussion about the use of ethnography in European prehistoric archaeology.

Ethnography has had a strong influence on American archaeology since Boasian “Four-field Anthropology” became a well-established discipline in the early 20th Century. Ethnography became a significant influence on European archaeology with processualism in the 1960s. But in the 1980s, European archaeology abandoned ethnography in favor of approaches informed by philosophy, social theory and sociology. Theorization was elevated to a general level, seeking to understand humanity and human culture beyond the concrete examples provided by ethnography. In recent years European prehistoric archaeology has rediscovered ethnography as a valuable source to understand the past, and in particular hunter-gatherer-fishers of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods. Interestingly, this turn to ethnography goes hand in hand with the mainstreaming of decolonization discourses in Europe, and it is often presented as part of a package that highlights the problem of the explicit or implicit presence of Eurocentrism, cultural evolution, teleology, and even primitivism in our epistemologies. The critique is not without merit, but does it go far enough? Drawing on Trouillot’s concept of “the Savage Slot,” this paper critically examines the selection of models and examples, the deployment of concepts of indigeneity and colonialism, and cautions against the unconscious reproduction of an Other as part of exoticizing and extractivist attitudes.
Astrid Nyland

Finding homes – a museum exhibition of the Stone Age with stories of Others and Us.

Finding homes – a museum exhibition of the Stone Age with stories of Others and Us.

In this talk, ideas embedded in a newly opened Stone Age exhibition at the Museum of Archaeology in Stavanger, Norway, are used as a point of departure to explore which stories may feels relevant to a broad audience, including people who do not consider regional archaeological material to represent their ‘cultural’ heritage. In a world that turns increasingly nationalistic, awareness to this is a current challenge for archaeology. We are telling stories, but whose? Are we telling ‘our’ stories, or stories about Others, or Others’ stories in their stead? This endeavour comes with ethical responsibility and opportunities: to challenge existing stereotypes regarding for example ideas of developing societal ‘complexity’, or presumed gender roles. Stories may fester or inspire – there is also power in stories that sticks. At the Museum of Archaeology in Stavanger, we attempted to make a regional Stone Age exhibition with stories that moves beyond origin stories and evolutionary or inevitable linear developments. We called our exhibition ‘Finding homes’, something that that can universally related to. What makes a place become home - the material on display are also telling stories of travels, migration, hence meetings between people made histories.
Aaron Stutz

A Critique of Leisure Narratives: Rethinking Work, Play, and Progress from a Prehistoric Perspective

A Critique of Leisure Narratives: Rethinking Work, Play, and Progress from a Prehistoric Perspective

Later 20th Century anthropology underwent a complete inversion in how researchers claimed to understand the relationship between work and play in non-industrial small-scale societies. The discipline-founding view articulated by E. B. Tylor in the late 19th Century was that leisure time generated the potential for creativity, invention and development. After the turn of the century, Tylor’s view was repeatedly amplified by influential anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic, including Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Kroeber, establishing a key theoretical dichotomy between utilitarian and expressive cultural activities. After 1950, ethnographic and archaeological data drove a wave of re-evaluations of the work-leisure and utilitarian-expressive distinctions, along with their roles in narratives about leisure and progress. This paper updates a review of this work. There is, at best, no clear relationship between factors such as economic mode of production, complexity of technological systems, or complexity of socio-political organization and time allocated to technological production, food acquisition, food processing and waste disposal. Nor is work-time allocation clearly inversely correlated with well-being. Moreover, prehistoric transitions from foraging and agriculture, while often involving new expressive technologies, were demographically irreversible transitions marked by broad declines in health and well-being. In reviewing recent decades of research on the anthropology of leisure, this presentation considers how, since the 19th Century, projections of leisure and expressiveness have constituted effective demonstrations of power and alliance, while also staking claims to intrinsic social value or status. Within the academy and beyond, leisure tropes and narratives have proven highly adaptable cultural tools for diverting attention from the biopolitics—and real necropolitical costs—economic growth, often still cast as development and progress.

Abstract

This double panel critically examines the writing of global prehistories and its implications. Prehistory encompasses the human past before written documentation. Studied through archaeology, prehistory began to shape later modern versions of origin stories for “civilization,” “culture,” “society,” and “humanity” in the 19th Century. Established in a context of increasingly globally entangled European colonial domination, later 19th Century accounts as diverse as those of Engels and Tylor had an explicit teleological character. Still today, tropes and narratives about the journey from the prehistoric primitive to a civilized or improved humanity are reproduced in contemporary media, teaching and even research on hunter-gatherers. This panel critically examines this teleological stance, its impact on origins thinking and cultural evolution frameworks, and the implicitness with which these templates have persisted in our epistemologies. We explore how the teleological stance may be critiqued and prehistory re-understood. We consider not only engagement with broader publics in media and through museums and school programs, but also our role and responsibilities as co-creators of narratives about prehistory—and especially, about prehistoric hunter-gatherers—in a postcolonial (but, ironically also an increasingly nationalist) world. The overarching focus will be the potentials and forms for decolonizing prehistory, emphasizing the opportunity for discussing stakes and aims of decolonizing work across this field. Paper presentations will address theoretical and interdisciplinary methodological critiques of persisting teleological framing of topics as diverse as the origins of money, the origins of leisure, boundaries between prehistory and history, and the relationships between narratives of cultural evolution and internal as well as external colonization in later modern nation-state formation. The double-panel will highlight ethical concerns surrounding whose prehistories are told, and by whom. Here, we aim to explore how research and engagement in public discourse can have an impact, not only on unlearning the teological stance, but also on dismantling what Michel-Rolph Trouillot described as “The Savage Slot,” which influential narratives continue to force onto hunter-gatherer people and cultures, prehistoric as well as living.