Langford tradition and the process of tribalization on the middle Mississippian borders, The

Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Spring 1999 by Emerson, Thomas E

The link between "ethnic markers" and a culture's material composition derives from a common origin in habitus. Ethnicity is constructed out of the material culture (a la habitus, after Bourdieu 1977) through a self-conscious accentuation or diminution of selected attributes (Bentley 1987; Jones 1997:115-122; Shennan 1989:14-17). It is a shifting, twisting consciousness that is generated from the habitus that forms and reforms a group's material culture. Unlike habitus, ethnicity is reactionary and comes into being vis-a-vis the other. Thus it represents only a portion of the cultural repertoire-a subsegment that specifically comes to mean us.

Jones (1997:84) ultimately concludes that ethnicity is a viable concept with which to address the archaeological record because it focuses on "social process." However, she is somewhat more equivocal as to how the researcher operationalizes this concept to recognize "culturally ascribed identity groups, which are based on the expression of a real or assumed shared culture and common descent." She believes we should seek ethnic expressions through a contextual and historical approach to material culture that focuses on "existing cultural practices and modes of differentiation characterizing various social domains, such as gender and status differentiation" (Jones 1997:125). Ethnographic research has shown that ethnic symbolism tends to be generated from existing internal categories of differentiation. It is the identification of such markers in the archaeological record that is the challenge.

Archaeologists should recognize the inherent problems raised with current uses of terms like "ethnicity" and "tribe" since they are identical to those tied to the traditional concept of "archaeological culture." Shennan (1989a:5-14) documents the concerns that attend the uneasy correlation of "archaeological cultures" created from a homogeneity of material culture with "societies as historical actors." This correlation is false since archaeological cultures are not real entities (Shennan 1989a:114). However, like Jones, Shennan (1989a:17-22) argues that ethnicity can be recognized in the archaeological record through the identification of material culture variations. Following the work of Wiessner (1989), identification focuses on variation in emblemic, assertive, and isochrestic aspects of style.

Ultimately it appears that, although more difficult than we might have imagined at first, it may be possible to identify ethnicity and tribalism, not, as is often attempted, as discretely bounded material clusters, but as processes reified in the material remains of past societies. While it may be impossible to relate a material cluster to a specific "tribe" or "ethnic group," it may be possible to identify, in archaeological remains, the process of tribalization and ethnogenesis. Such studies are critical to understanding past cultural transformations. Therefore, despite the myriad problems of implementing a study of tribalism or ethnicity, the conceptual shift in interpretive paradigms to one that examines the internal processes of "self-definition" vis-a-vis the other is critical in identifying the "origins" of many late prehistoric groups. Whether one frames this research in terms of peer-polities, frontiers, boundaries, or other models of group interaction, the critical determinant is to examine intragroup developments with respect to both interacting parties, to define these nodes of tribal and ethnic genesis across a broad social and political spectrum within well-defined chronological and spatial parameters, as the primary source for comprehending social transformation. This requires that archaeologists build strong historical sequences in those areas where we seek to understand ethnic and political developments, interactions, and transformations.