1.5: Practice - Text as Process and Outcome

Practice is another conceptual theme which underpins the studies in this volume. Theoretical approaches to practice (e.g. Bourdieu 1977; Foucault 1979; Giddens 1979; 1984) have been brought to bear on the study of archaeological data for more than three decades (e.g. David and Kramer 2001; Dobres 2000). A dominant concern among these studies has been with technology and charting innovation, change, and continuity. Particular emphasis has been placed on agency, identity, and the body, but in keeping with traditional disciplinary divisions, writing has been largely omitted from this discourse. The recognition engendered by a material practice perspective — that the act of writing and its material products are fundamentally technological — makes it incumbent upon archaeologists to study the marks of inscription in the same way that lithic, ceramic or other types of data are examined.

Similar to analyses of these archaeological data types (Schlanger 1996; Tite 2008), it follows that explanatory frameworks developed for studies of mark-making should also incorporate theories of practice. Etienne Wenger’s concept of “communities of practice”, with its emphasis on learning, and participation and reification (1998: 58–62), offers ways for exploring writing on the levels of both individual and collective practice. Practices are reified, or not, depending on accumulations of individual participation. Reification in everyday life may remain abstract in its manifestation, such as the practice of taking a tea break at an appointed time or shaking hands upon meeting, but reification also shapes experience and meaning in more materially enduring ways. The computer and printing technologies used to produce this volume constitute the nature of writing and reify a particular view of it materially, in contrast to many of the writing practices addressed in the contributions themselves. The concept of “communities of practice” draws on Anthony Giddens’ notion of “structuration” — the negotiation of the relationship between individual agency and social structures through situated practice. This concept of agency as constituted by, and constituting of, social structure ensures a framework for understanding practice that is neither over-individualising nor over-generalising (cf. Gardner 2004: 2–4 with e.g. Barrett 2001: 149; Hodder 2000: 25).

While a concept of agency that is set in relation to social structure can be fruitful for explaining how individuals choose to act and participate (or not) in writing cultures (see Piquette 2013), archaeological theory is also well-equipped to provide new explanatory frameworks for addressing writing in the context of bodily practice. One direction in which engagement with material practice leads us is a concern for the senses, through which human beings experience the material world. The broader spectrum of human sensory experience of past materialities has been investigated within archaeology since the early 1990s and has become more prominent in recent years (Fahlander and Kjellström 2010; Skeates 2010), albeit with limited concern for past writing. The emergence of Visual Cultural Studies during the late 1980s as its own discipline, and the field of Image Studies as well (Mitchell 2002: 178), represents an important move to treat imagery and its materiality from a more multisensory perspective (Jay 2002: 88; despite the visual bias implied in its name), but here too writing has been sidelined. Perhaps some insight into why certain barriers persist for work across some disciplinary boundaries is required. Marquard Smith (2008: 1–2) makes an interesting observation with regard to publication in his discipline, Visual Cultural Studies, which parallels our experience in bringing this volume to press. It is commonplace to encounter numerous books with ‘visual’ and ‘culture’ in the title in university libraries, bookshops or online booksellers, but where they are shelved or how they are otherwise categorised ranges widely. From Art History, Aesthetics and Anthropology to Critical Theory or Sociology, no one is quite sure where to put visual culture or where to find it. The present volume seemed to present a similar classificatory conundrum (and thus marketing difficulties according to one publisher we approached). The ontological challenge presented by the notion of writing as object, and an object that is embedded within the full spectrum of human sensory experience, presents an interesting paradox. If one pauses to survey one’s surroundings, graphical culture of all sorts is clearly embedded in the material world. In the present day we cope easily with the interweaving of writing and associated image types in day-to-day life. Whether we are checking text messages on a phone, flicking through a magazine, licking a stamp, struggling to unfurl a newspaper on a crowded bus, or reading this very text as part of a paper-based or e-book, it is easy to see how these material contexts and sensory experiences beyond the visual are important to writing-related practices and meanings. Yet, as long as we fail to develop an epistemological infrastructure which supports investigation of these complexities, we cannot develop an understanding of the wider networks which constituted past written meaning or properly evaluate its cultural significance. Likewise, archaeological thought on decision-making processes, choice and intentionality also stands to contribute to research on the selection of writing materials, and the choices past people made for how to write, read, view or otherwise engage with written surfaces.

However we understand material practice in general, in any given case study we need to ask both who were the practitioners and how they practised. Here we come up against another set of problematic terms — literacy, reading and writing — on which there is a substantial literature. In the more linguistically oriented studies devoted to the subject of literacy there is a strong emphasis on ‘reading’ and ‘writing,’ understood very much in present day terms (see Collins and Blot 2003 for an overview). Archaeologists and ancient historians have devoted much time to discussion of the extent of literacy in any given society (by which they usually mean the number of people who could read and write, rather than what is indicated by these terms; see, for instance, Harris’s seminal work Ancient Literacy (Harris 1989) and the responses of a number of other scholars (Beard et al. 1991). However, the kind of approach adopted in this volume requires the reconsideration of definitions of both ‘writer’ and ‘reader’ and also to consider a wider range of practitioners than can be encompassed in these terms, for instance the people who made the artefacts, who may well have been different from the people who wrote on them.

When thinking about ‘writers’ we need to be explicit about whether we mean the people who wielded the pen, stylus, brush or chisel, or those who composed the message. These may have been the same people, but equally may not have been, especially where materials were used that required complex technologies and specialist artisans. We also need to consider the role of people commissioning an inscription who might not themselves have been able to write or read. For instance, the production of a bronze tablet to be put up in a public place, as known from the Roman world, might involve four different types of maker: a member of the political or religious establishment to commission the work, a literate bureaucrat to compose the text, a bronze smith to fashion the tablet, and probably a different bronze worker to chisel the letters. Of these people, only the bureaucrat had to be literate, in the sense of understanding the sense of the text. The person who produced the actual writing (whom one might think reasonable to label the ‘writer’) might have been copying a prototype and have had little understanding of what the text meant. Maureen Carroll (2009: 47) mentions a splendid example of this, the Roman stone funerary inscription from Annaba that reads hic iacet corpus pueri nominandi (here lies the body of the boy... insert name): the letter cutter had failed to notice that he was meant to insert a specific name!

‘Readers’ are equally difficult to define. We might identify fully literate (in the modern sense) readers, who could understand texts completely; we might also consider those who could perhaps read a little, but could not decipher a text in detail. There would be others who could not read at all but who ‘consumed’ writing through oral performance by others. Or those who did not even do this but who viewed the texts and knew they were important in some way. And who were the readers of hidden inscriptions (those on the inside of sealed tombs or even built into the construction itself)? If the intended viewers were dead people or supernatural beings, in what sense were they ‘readers’?