A Dialectical Marxist Approach to Archaeology
by Randall H. McGuire
Department of Anthropology
Binghamton University
Binghamton, NY, 13902-6000
fax 607-777-2477,
This paper was published in Catalan in the journal Cotra Zero: Revista d Arqueologia I Ciència 1998 vol. 14, pp. 61-72, with the title Una Aproximació Marxista Dialèctica a lArqueologia.
Marxism is a rich intellectual tradition that originated with the ideas of Karl Marx and has matured, developed, and grown for more than 100 years. Like other grand theories of humankind and society it has come to include a great variety of different perspectives, drawn insights from other theories, and served as a source of inspiration for persons outside of the tradition. Also, like other grand theories, it has been bent and hammered into an instrument for pernicious purposes. For social science in general, and archaeology in particular, this tradition is a rich source of insights, theories, concepts, and ideas about the nature of cultural change. More specifically, a Dialectical Marxist perspective offers scholars a way to escape the irresolvable oppositions of science and humanism, evolution and history, materialism and mentalism, and determinism and relativism, that bedevil archaeological theory today (Ollman 1976, 1993; Sayer 1987). It lays the foundation for a praxis of archaeology that critiques the social world, seeks knowledge of the world, and that takes action to change that world. We realize this praxis in the study of particular historical cases such as the Ludlow Massacre in the state of Colorado, USA.
Dialectical (or Hegelian) Marxism speaks to the role of archaeology in science and in society. My consideration of this theory springs from my perspective as an English speaking archaeologist working primarily in the Anglo-American tradition of archaeology. After World War II a distinctive Western Marxism developed in Europe, Latin America, and in the United States (McGuire 1992a). This article focuses on Western Marxism with no consideration of Marxist theory or archaeology in the former communist countries of Europe, and Asia.
The Place of Dialectical Marxism in Archaeological Theory
The theoretical space of modern archaeology seems more crowded and contentious today than it has ever been in the past. Fundamental disagreements about the proper scientific and social role of archaeology in the modern world fuel this debate. Marxism occupies a unique space within this debate that integrates many of the concerns and goals of other theoretical approaches. Marxism as a whole includes a grand expanse of ideas and positions. Within this expanse Dialectical Marxism tends to lie at the contact between scientific and humanist variants of Marxism. From this juncture it resolves some of the fundamental theoretical dilemmas that archeologists face.
I would identify at least four major non-Marxist theoretical approaches in archaeology today. Culture history is the oldest and most established theoretical approach (Trigger 1992). The general goal of this approach is to describe the distribution of archaeological remains in time and space and categorize them into archaeological cultures. Often scholars link these archaeological cultures to modern groups of people and employ them to justify nationalistic programs. In the mid-1960s a positivist scientific theory developed in the United States that stresses the scientific explanation of cultural change. Today this perspective incorporates a varied group of approaches including processualists (Redman 1991), advocates of complex adaptive systems (Gumerman and Gell-Mann 1994), and Darwinian selectionists (Boone and Smith 1998). All positivists share the notion that through a scientific method archaeologists can come to an objective knowledge of the world. In the 1980's a post-modernist theory arouse in England which argued that the archaeological record could be read in many ways, like a text, and that objective knowledge was thus impossible (Hodder 1996). Their focus has been on critiquing our interpretations of the world. Finally, there has developed in Europe and in the United States a feminist archaeology that puts the study gender at the center of archaeology (Gilchrist 1994).
Marxism creates a unique space in this landscape by incorporating a variety of goals (McGuire 1992a). It is at once a way to know the world, a critique of the world, and a means to change the world. The tension between these three goals warns us away from the sterile scholasticism we sometimes see in Culture History, the nihilistic skepticism we see in post modern archaeology, and the hubris of objective knowledge that the positivist archaeologists embrace. Western Marxists seek to integrate these three goals in a unified praxis, that is in a theoretically informed practice.
Marxism is not a single, coherent, theory of society. It is instead, a philosophy, a tradition of thought, a mode of theoretical production, that has, and will, produce many theories. What the many theories, or readings, of Marxism share is a tradition, history, and process of development; not a set doctrine or creed. Scientific approaches within Marxism tend to emphasize the goal of knowing the world as the primary basis for changing the world, while humanist approaches stress the critique of the world as the route to change. These are differences of emphasis, not kind, because all Marxist approaches maintain some tension between knowledge, critique, and action.
We see a variety of both scientific and humanist perspectives within current Marxist approaches to archaeology in the west. During the 1970s, a group of Latin American scholars who came to be known as the "Grupo Oaxtepec" developed a scientific approach to Marxism that was directly linked to socialist party programs in Latin America (Politis 1995). The 1980s saw the independent development of a scientific Marxist approach in Catalonia (Lull 1983). Numerous individuals in the United States, Canada, and Great Britian apply scientific Marxist approaches broadly similar to those in the Hispanic world (Patterson 1989; Trigger 199 ). In recent years in the United States and Great Britian Marxist humanist approaches that emphasize critique have been growing in popularity. Many archaeologists have taken up the Critical Theory of the Frankfort School and applied it to critiques of archaeological interpretation (Leone 1982). In England a number of archaeologists have adopted the interpretive and critical perspectives of Cultural Marxism and used them in the interpretation of archaeological phenomena (Bender 1997).
A Dialectical (or Hegalian) Marxism uses the logic of the dialectic to give equal weight to both knowing the world and to critiquing the world as means to changing the world. The Hegalian dialectic is just one of many concepts of the dialectic that exist in Marxism, and in Western thought in general. It focuses on the internal relations that structure the social world, both the worlds of the past that archaeologists study and the world that we live in. These relations are made up of contradictions that bind individuals and social groups with conflicting interests together. Since small changes in any part of this social whole will alter the structure of relations, the whole is forever in flux. The dialectic offers us an ongoing process of dialogue between ourselves and the archaeological record, a dialouge that builds understanding and knowledge through a never ending series of approximations of the past. It forces us to abandon absolutes; absolute truth as well as absolute relativism and it leads us to examine the ambiguities and contradictions that surround us to continue the process of understanding.
Because the dialectic is above all the study of becoming and transforming, it finds its proper dimensions in historical time, that is in the study of history. A dialectical history begins with the premis that the study of the social world should start, and end, with the real-life experience of human beings. Abstractions, such as theories, generalizations, and laws, are necessary tools for this method but they are not the goal or end point of our study. Such abstractions are generalizations grounded in specific cases that constantly change as we move from case to case. From this perspective developmental or evolutionary change must ultimatly be understood in the context of specific historical sequences.
A Dialectical Marxism addresses the current theoretical needs of archaeology in four ways:
1. The dialectic offers us a way to escape the oppositions that define so much of the theoretical debate in archaeology (as well in the social sciences in general). These are oppositions between science and humanism, evolution and history, materialism and idealism, and determinism and relativism. Scholars escape the trap of these oppositions not by choosing one pole over the other, but rather by recognizing that a dynamic understanding of the social world comes from the tension that they create and not in one or the other of the poles that they offer.
2. The dialectic also offers us a method for studying change. It is a method that finds the dynamics of change in the contradictions that exist in all human relations, those between social groups and those with the natural world.
3. Marxism is a rich source of theories, concepts, ideas, and insights into the nature of cultural change.
4. A dialectical approach to theory and practice leads to a self-reflexive praxis. It allows us to examine how archaeologists make pasts both from our observations of the archaeological record and from the social contexts we find ourselves in. Such knowledge is intricately made and not reducible to either the subjectivities of the researcher or the reality that we study.
A Dialectical Marxism
At least three major aspects of the Marxist perspective taken here have important implications for the practice of archaeology: (1) the substitution of a dialectical view of the human condition for a systemic view, (2) an emphasis on understanding the lived experience of people (everyday life) as opposed to the description of artifacts or a search for abstract models, laws, or theories of cultural change, and (3) a self-reflexive awareness of archaeology's place in the modern world. Each of these aspects has implications for the practice of archaeology both in how we collect data (make observations of reality), and how we communicate our interpretations of the world.
The Hegelian Dialectic
One of the most widely accepted principles imparted by Positivist approaches to archaeology is the notion that culture is a system that serves to integrate a society with the environment and other societies. Such systems are made up of interconnected parts that form a whole so that change in one of the parts or subsystems of the whole affects changes in the other parts. Because such a system is functionally integrated the parts and subsystems that make up the whole must be compatible; that is, they must fit comfortably together.
This notion of a system shares with the dialectic, the idea that society is an interconnected whole but differs in a fundamental way. In a systemic approach social entities, the parts, exist prior to, and apart from their interconnection with other social entities. A systemic view atomizes the whole into its parts and sees changes in the parts (variables) as the source of change in the whole. Since parts can exist separate from their linkages we can speak of some parts as being causal to others and we can speak of some aspects, subsystems, variables, or levels of the system as determining other aspects, subsystems, variables, or levels. The dialectic, on the other hand, views the social whole as a complex web of internal relations within which the relation of any given entity to others governs what that entity will be. You cannot have teachers without students; each social entity exists because of the relationship that creates them both, and if that relation is broken the entities dissolve away, or more properly, are transformed into something else. By this same token, causes do not exist free of their effects and no variable is ever independent. This social world has an intrinsic dynamic because change in any part of the world alters the whole of the relations, sustaining all elements forever in flux.
In a dialectic the entities that make up the social whole are not expected to fit comfortably together; they may, but the dynamics of change are not to be found in these functional relations. Rather, they lie in relational contradictions that spring from the fact that social categories are defined by and require the existence of their opposite. Thus, a single underlying relationship of slavery defines both the master and the slave. For one to exist so too must the other, yet they are opposites and as such potentially in conflict. Each has contrary interests and a different lived experience in the context of a shared history. Change in these relations is never simply quantitative nor qualitative. Quantitative changes can lead to qualitative change, and qualitative change necessarily implies a quantitative change. Conflicts that result from relational contradictions may result in quantitative changes in those relations that build to a qualitative change. Rebellion by slaves may lead the masters to enforce stricter and stricter discipline, thereby heightening slave resistance until the relation of slavery is overthrown. The social relations that result from such a qualitative change are a mix of the old and the new; the old social form is remade not replaced.
Understanding the Lived Experience of People
People make history. They do not, however, make it as individuals free to act as they please. They make it as members of social groups whose common consciousness derives from the shared social relations, lived experiences, cultures and ideologies that link them to each other and oppose them to other social groups in the world around them. Their actions are constrained by material conditions and social structures inherited from their past, the products of past human action. These constraints never determine in any direct or simple way what history will be because these constraints, whether they be in nature, the economy, social structure, or in culture are, at the same time limiting and enabling. That is, even as they inhibit some forms of action they must be present to empower other forms of action. Contradictions arise from this ambiguity of limiting and enabling and it is in those contradictions that we will find the dynamics of history. We gain access to this dynamic by looking at the nature of power (the universal ability of all humans to act) in real societies, and how it works in the production and reproduction of everyday life.
A dialectical archaeology should start and end with the real lived experience of people and seek an understanding of how that experience changed over time. Much current theory in archaeology transforms real human experience such as the San family or the Inka state into abstract categories, the "family" or the "state", and treats these abstractions as what should be explained; what is a household mode of production, or what caused the rise of the state? In the dialectic a cover term, such as the family, refers to things and their interrelations and as such these terms acquire a substantive meaning only from the particular context in which they are applied. To call a variety of real social forms families - the San family, the Hopi family, the American family, etc. - does imply certain commonalities of scale and form between these concrete social realities. Such similarities of form frequently, however, spring from radically different underlying social relations. The San family is nuclear with a man, a women, and their children and so too is the ideal modern U.S. family, yet the underlying social relations that link these individuals and the larger sets of social relations that the families are embedded in are radically different. The contradictions that drive social change will lie in these relations and not the social forms. The abstract notion of the family may assist us to define a scale of analysis in the study of a concrete case or it may help us to compare historical processes of change between cases but it cannot be the object of explanation. Thus in the dialectic, abstractions are tools for understanding the production and reproduction of real social forms, not the end of our analyses. The goal of our analyses is to understand history as a material social process. This process involves both changes in the relations between social groups and transformations of whole social orders. To do this kind of history we ask about the commonalities and differences between social groups and the larger historical and environmental context in which these commonalities and differences emerged. We also need to look for unevenness in historical developments. Uneven development begets social groups that have different interests within a social order, and as they try and act to meet those interests they create conflicts that drive social change. Such a history should be multi-scalar. As we change our scale of analysis we frame a different set of relations; the unevenness in these relations will disappear at a new scale as a fresh pattern of unevenness appears. Social groups also live and act in a world of varying scales and their relations change as their scale of reference changes.
Historical process is both contingent and unpredictable. The prior conditions of a historical sequence, material relations, social structures, culture, and ideology define a range of possible actions that people can both conceive of and perform. Which of this possible range of actions people will undertake, however, is not determined but contingent. The conditions that structure human action leave broad channels and lots of room for actions and consequences that cannot be known in advance. Small changes in events or circumstances, actions taken or not taken, can, over time, have dramatic and unforeseeable consequences for the course of history.