Thoughts on the Archaeology of Identity
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” This little gem attributed to Aristotle pops up in training workshops, motivational posters, and even tattoos — but, as it turns out, those words were not written by Aristotle but by the philosopher Will Durant in 1926. It’s too bad for Durant that a well-expressed idea travels farther under a famous name.
Where Aristotle had waffled pedantically on the question of whether virtue was attainable, Durant offers hope of attaining it (“Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit”). Where Aristotle narrowly focused on describing virtue, Durant describes a broad model of human identity (“We are what we repeatedly do”). No wonder we forgot the hand-wringing and went with the sound byte.
The idea that identity is best understood as a byproduct of repeated actions (rather than, say, an attribute of one’s soul) appeals to a materialist like me, and it shows up all over the place once you start looking for it. A quick review of popular and popularized science on the topic yields facial feedback theory, power posing, “fake it ’til you make it,” and of course the mind-brain problem of personal identity, among other manifestations. The first time I consciously encountered this way of thinking was as a teenager reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel, The Wild Shore. In it, one of the characters muses (after meeting a parallel version of himself, no less!):
“Has it ever occurred to you that other people see you in the same way you see them, as a collection of appearances and habits and actions and words — that they never get to see your thoughts, to know how wonderful you really are?”
Well, it had occurred to Erving Goffman, as I would later find out. While we might like to think that one’s internal sense of self is what matters, both sociologists and the rest of us recognize that the perceptions of others are important, maybe even paramount, to identity. This is because we have direct access only to others’ actions, speech acts included, but not to their internal senses of self.
Your friend who smokes is a smoker. Your friend who flirts is a flirt. Your friend who doesn’t put on deodorant smells. How many times do you need to see someone leave a small tip before you think of them as a bad tipper? How often do I need to give you a gift before you think of me as a generous person? As you can see, this brutally honest conception of social life is great fun to use on your family and friends. It also happens to yield fruit in a slightly less contentious field: archaeology.
Over the last fifteen years, communal identity (or better, with the academic preference for plurals, “identities”) has arrived and remains a hot property in ancient Mediterranean history and archaeology, a development probably related to the rise of contemporary identity politics. How Roman did the inhabitants of the Empire feel? Just how Greek were the ancient (as opposed to modern) Macedonians? How Phoenician were the Carthaginians? Here I should confess that I myself am writing a book that explains changes in group identity in ancient Sicily.
Identity is a slippery concept though, first because it appears to be a question of mental state, and second because identity itself is not static but fluid. But since we will never know what most people in antiquity actually thought about anything, I would suggest that we are better off following Robinson and looking at identity in practice, as a collection of habitual actions, since archaeologists are good at finding evidence of repetitive actions. And we can happily accept that identity is contextual, because archaeologists are (usually) good at paying attention to context. The material record of what people repeatedly did is a record of who they were, practically speaking.
With this in mind, the archaeological record can lead us some way toward the identities of our ancient subjects. Non-Greeks made dedications in Greek sanctuaries all the time (as did Greeks in non-Greek sanctuaries), and this routine gave them a practical identity that did not respect any ethnic division. Humans tend to take death very seriously, so examining how families and cities dealt with their dead is a good way to see them putting their identities into practice. Wear patterns in teeth and bones can speak volumes about what ancient individuals spent their lives doing. Just as the butt groove in the Simpsons’ living room couch tells us something about who Homer is, ancient physical and metaphorical grooves tell us about the people who formed them.
This is why archaeologists love trash so much. Individuals and groups routinely discard the remains of their habitual activities. Illegal drug use in Europe can, for example, be mapped by city through an analysis of sewer water. Closer to home, Wilson and Rathje’s classic study “Garbage and the modern American feast” showed that garbage and recycling bins turn out to be pretty eloquent about the people who filled them. The discard heaps of antiquity are full of bones, implements, and organic remains that testify to the diet and food cultures of their creators.
We’ve heard it before. “You are what you eat” is just a more popular flavor of Durant’s proposition. “Clothes make the man,” since clothes cover most of our bodies, most of the time. “Actions speak louder than words” reflects a dichotomy that goes back to Thucydides. If you keep making that face, one day it will stick (Calvin didn’t mind). These aphorisms point to the same uncomfortable truth, which is that we judge books by their covers all the time, because book covers contain lots of information about their contents. And so we judge people by their actions. After all, if it walks like a duck…
None of this is particularly new, but looking at identities forged through practice (rather than those debated in ancient poems, plays, and prose) can be a helpful way to bypass the assumptions and received wisdom that restrict discussions of identity in antiquity. Ancient literature does a fine job documenting the shifting identities and affiliations of the authors that are preserved, but one doesn’t want to generalize. Archaeological evidence, despite its own issues of interpretation, gives us the people as they lived.
Bourdieu answered the question that arises from Durant’s equation: if people are what they repeatedly do, how does an observer who knows what someone does figure out who they are? In everyday life we make such inferences about other people casually. But a scientist, even a social scientist, has to be more rigorous.
Bourdieu’s insight was to look at actions as manifestations of a cultural logic (which he called the habitus) in the same way a linguist views speech as a manifestation of a language. By examining what the Kabyle ate, drank, and wore, how they relaxed, worked, and interacted with each other, he would proceed inductively to the rules and values that produced those preferences, i.e. to who they were. Then he did the same for his contemporary Parisians. While he did not write primarily in terms of identity, he provided a blueprint for finding identity in action.
This inductive imperative, to follow and document one’s subjects in minute detail, was more recently taken up by another French philosopher-sociologist, Bruno Latour. In Reassembling the Social (2005), Latour directs the scholar to move slowly and blindly across the social landscape, tracing connections among and between people and objects without preconceptions about what those connections must mean. While he doesn’t discuss habit or identity explicitly, habitual or repeated actions are exactly the connections that practically scream out for attention in his framework.
Now, it is significantly harder to find good archaeological evidence for everyday practices than to collect data on living people. But that doesn’t mean theoretical tools developed with an abundance of data won’t be valuable in situations where the record is more scarce. Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley saw the possibilities written on beer cans almost thirty years ago now. Michael Dietler and Ingrid Herbich, along with the other contributors in Miriam Stark’s volume The Archaeology of Social Boundaries (1998), know it too; habitus is a way forward.
Archaeologists working in and around the Mediterranean are paying attention to practice theory again, too. Jonathan Hall has been doing it for more than fifteen years (chapters Five and One, respectively); he both outlines and executes a responsible interpretation of material evidence for Greek identities. Naoíse Mac Sweeny’s excellent Community, Identity and Archaeology (2011) not only traces the evidence for practical identities in Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Anatolia, but sets out a developed theory of community and identity. Her focus is on intentional team-building within groups — what she calls “enactments of community” — but in principle her approach can handle multiple competing identities as well.
So while there are lots of ways to think about identity, one way is to look at habitual and repeated actions, which define people in the eyes of others, including dispassionate observers, and of themselves. The football team you root for isn’t usually the only thing that defines you. In fact, I know some very nice Patriots fans. But it can be important — in combination with your preferred food, drink, spiritual activities, music, and news sources, your pet peeves, white whales, and vices, it is a sign of who you are. The same goes for people who lived and died thousands of years ago, even if we rarely find their replica jerseys.
This way of thinking about identity and society may be a bit unsettling, to say the least. In that respect it’s not much different from Maus’ theory of the gift, Marx’s theory of value, or any honest appraisal of American democracy — an inconveniently accurate description of how things really work, despite all of the cultural and ideological effort aimed at covering it up and smoothing it over.
If it’s too hard to turn this gaze on yourself, there’s plenty of archaeological material in need of attention.
Randall Souza is an archaeologist and historian who studies shifting populations and dynamic communities in ancient Sicily and the wider Mediterranean world.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.
