FIVE - MATERIAL CULTURE AND PROJECTS OF THE SELF

Summary

I used sometimes to despair that I never discussed anything with the young men but livestock and girls, and even the subject of girls led inevitably to that of cattle.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer. (Evans-Pritchard 1940, p. 19)

Listen again. One evening at the Close

Of Ramanán, ere the better Moon arose,

In that old Potter's Shop I stood alone

With the clay Population round in Rows.

And strange to tell, among the Earthen Lot

Some could articulate, while others not:

And suddenly one more impatient cried –

“Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”

Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, first edition: LIX–LX (FitzGerald 1859/1957, p. 48)

ARCHAEOLOGICAL CLASSICS

Evans-Pritchard went to the Sudan hoping to study Nuer social structure. Instead, he found himself becoming an expert on Nuer cattle because that is what the Nuer wanted to talk about. This neatly captures the relationship between the archaeologist and her materials. We want to learn about people, but what we have is broken pottery and thrown-away stone tools. The redeeming aspect of the situation is that things were important to ancient people, probably in a much more intimate way than in our world, where systems of production distance people from material things and disposability and substitution are rife. The challenge is to walk a fine line, learning enough about cattle or pottery or axes to understand the material conversations they formed part of without succumbing to the specialists' myopia that the artefacts themselves are the most important thing.