Abstract
Today, there continues to be an enormous epistemological gap between the lively discussion on the phenomenon of cultural hybridization in cultural anthropology and the reality of methodological approaches in archaeological interpretation. The diversity of human interaction and the hybridization processes connected therewith, on the one hand, and the fragmentary and silent character of archaeological source material on the other have been seen as insuperable obstacles to the translation of this concept into a practical method for archaeology. In my contribution, I shall attempt to overcome these barriers by breaking down a complex anthropological discourse into components that may be useful for archaeological sources. My aim is to unravel hybridization processes, which I call processes of entanglement, into distinct stages and consider the potential of each stage to be materialized in the archaeological record. I shall further attempt to distinguish between the entanglement of objects and the entanglement of social practices, because foreign, but in their materiality still unchanged, objects can be used in already entangled social practices. Subsequently, I shall examine what stage of the process of entanglement has given rise to an entangled object or social practice. Finally, the application of the concept of hybridization in recent studies on the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean will be reviewed and my own approach demonstrated on the basis of a case study.
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Notes
- 1.
Stewart 2007a presents a broad range of perspectives on “creolization”. However, the editor himself refrains from any distinct definition of the term, which he sees exemplified by processes of restructuring in contexts of migration and adaptation to new environments under the experience of disease and deprivation (Stewart 2007b, 18).
- 2.
cf. Stewart 1999 for an intense discussion of the problems connected with the term “syncretism”.
- 3.
The term “glocalization” originates from Japanese business practices and was popularised by Robertson (1992, 173–174; 1995) in order to accentuate a spatial perspective (cf. Wicker 2000, 208–209). However, the interconnectedness of the local and the global does not permit a clear distinction in most contexts (Loimeier et al. 2005).
- 4.
In Ackermann’s (2004, 152) view, the differentiation between “hybrid” and “original” cultures has led to a new and unjustified essentialisation of the concept of “culture”. It is, therefore, a fallback to the nineteenth century’s construction of cultures as pure and homogenous political entities (cf. Wagner 2001, 22–25).
- 5.
This etical perspective is also enforced by Thomas 1998, 109: “Hybridity may be an appearance salient to an outside viewer rather than a condition that is in any way significant to local people engaging in a particular practice or producing a particular form.”
- 6.
Bhabha (2007, 212) states that a liminal space “is internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference”.
- 7.
Hahn (2005, 107) further states: “The object is invested with meanings and contexts, it is transformed in order to be newly invented as part of the appropriating society” (translation by P. W. Stockhammer). Although appropriation cannot exist without creativity, I consider it necessary to distinguish between the invention of a context and the creation of a new object, because it makes a huge epistemological difference in archaeology whether one is dealing with the object or with social practices and meanings possibly materialized in the object’s context of finding.
- 8.
I am totally aware that my concentration on the Eastern Mediterranean Late Bronze Age can do no justice to the discussion on issues of “hybridity” in archaeology as a whole. There are vivid discussions on this topic with relation to the Phoenician and Greek expansion in the first half of the first millennium BC in the Western and Central Mediterranean (e.g. Antonaccio 2003; 2010; Vives-Ferrándiz Sánchez 2005; 2007; 2008; van Dommelen 2006) and in the field of Romanization studies that Peter van Dommelen kindly pointed out to me (e.g. Webster 2001; Hodos 2006; van Dommelen and Terrenato 2007). For reflections on “colonialism” and its different realizations from a comparative archaeological perspective cf. Gosden 2004.
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Acknowledgments
This article is part of my current research project on the entanglement of materiality and practice in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean which is part of the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”. I would like to thank Hans P. Hahn, Markus Hilgert, Susan Sherratt, Peter van Dommelen, Joseph Maran and Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer for intensively discussing the topic with me. Carol Bell and Andrea Hacker kindly helped me to improve my English.
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Stockhammer, P.W. (2012). Conceptualizing Cultural Hybridization in Archaeology. In: Stockhammer, P. (eds) Conceptualizing Cultural Hybridization. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21846-0_4
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