Harris and Sørensen's paper is a welcome attempt to address the question of ‘finding’ and interpreting emotion in the deep past. Their contribution to this emerging area of debate is particularly valuable in that it treats upon a prehistoric context, and is thus unaided by the rich contextual information provided by historical sources; and it moves the debate away from the mortuary context towards other areas of lived experience – here the processes of constructing, inhabiting, engaging with and ultimately destroying an architecturally defined space. These are more ambitious and less obvious contexts for constructing emotional pasts. Where the authors are most successful is in the identification of cultural loci where emotions are developed and are involved in the construction of experience – such as in the production and reproduction of ‘sense of community’. Less convincing, for me, were the places where they follow the (mainly British prehistoric) ‘phenomenological’ tradition. My own view is that shared and expressed emotional values are more amenable to archaeological identification and analysis than personal emotional experience, and I shall try to explain why. I think by separating the social meanings of emotion from the physical experience of emotion the authors of this article might be able to pursue more fruitful kinds of enquiry.
The archaeological study of emotion cannot begin with the experiencing self. It has to begin, especially in prehistory, with the conditions through which experience is created, expressed and reproduced. The authors take the physical action of the human body, being inseparable from the experience of emotion, as the crucial juncture and the focus for much of their exploration. Accordingly, they invite us to consider the experience of entering the site, of moving through it, seeing new frames come into view, smelling the new wood of the palisade. In so doing they draw upon an established tradition of ‘phenomenological’ scholarship in archaeology which posits that the encounter with material conditions (landscapes, monuments and architectures, most usually) is a useful point of contact through the layers of insulation that separate contemporary archaeologists from their subjects of study and where windows of meaning can be opened up.
I think, however, that this line of enquiry is now close to being exhausted, in British prehistory, at least, for two reasons. First is the question of empathy, and the degree to which ‘phenomenological’ interpretations assume continuities and universalities between past and present. This has been amply critiqued elsewhere (e.g. Brück 2005). The limits of empathy in emotion research are encountered very soon. That might sound odd coming from me, since my work is here characterized as proceeding from my own feelings, and using them as ‘proxy’ for the feelings of people in the past. However, that is certainly not what I intended to say, and not what I believe! The search for emotion in the past is an intellectual challenge which requires rigorous thinking and sophisticated philosophical analysis; while the creative imagination is a key part of developing new theoretical insight, ungrounded and woolly exercises in imagining oneself into the past are not the province of academic archaeology. The ethnographic and anthropological study of emotion has demonstrated that emotions themselves are differently experienced and are variable cross-culturally, not just in terms of the cues which provoke particular responses, but in the nature of the emotional response itself. The lexicography of emotion tells us that emotion-words are not directly translatable, and that most languages have words for emotional states that are not recognized in other languages. Therefore using our own emotional responses can be no guide to understanding the emotions of others: as we mostly know from personal experience, even close family members can surprise us in their emotional responses, and they are people with whom we share (usually) a cultural background, a geographical and temporal context and a language.
Second, the kind of experience that is generally favoured by such interpretations seems to me to be curiously bloodless, to miss the most important and interesting aspects of human emotional (and experiential and intellectual) experience. Harris and Sørensen write of ‘the emotional qualities of embodied locomotion’ (p. 156), a rather mechanistic phrase for a rather bland experience – is this really the most exciting aspect of emotion? Walking through gateways, seeing new views open up, smelling fence posts? It sounds more like a touristic sightseeing trip than a three-dimensional fully meaningful part of human existence. I find here none of the euphoria of running or dancing, the physical pain and intense emotion surrounding the physical moments of birth and death – only a colourless and superficial engagement with the world.
This tendency towards the banal is a part of the authors’ decision to bracket the actual meaning content of emotion and experience from these, concentrating instead on physicality. But that produces an account of the past which is strangely unmotivated and also, although I am sure this is not the authors’ intention, ahistorical. The authors depend on a universal body as the interpretive space where past and present can meet – a body whose walking, seeing, (e)motion is not that different from their own. But what space is then left, in such a conception, for a past that might be different or unfamiliar? How does the experience of a person 4,000 years ago differ from that of 7,000 years ago, or from 500 years ago? Is it only in the changing spaces and places through which people moved? Are the conditions of motion deterministic?
I do not think the authors would accept such a contention. But the potential ‘otherness’ of the past, in cultural terms, arises from beliefs, understandings, meanings. This is not a hopeless situation for the archaeologist, and it certainly does not necessitate a retreat to empathy and a universal emotional self as the only approach. This is because meanings, values, understandings and beliefs are shared and social, as well as personal and interior. They are constructed, expressed and reproduced through discourses of material culture and practice, as shared traditions. I have suggested elsewhere (Tarlow 1999) that the development of a theory of metaphor in material culture would be one approach to meaning in the past. Whatever the methodological approach, it seems clear that some contextual, interpretive and historical way of looking at meaning is absolutely necessary in order to write pasts that are as deeply textured as Harris and Sørensen would like to see. In effect, meaning content can never be bracketed – but interpretive meanings always creep in. This paper, for example, suggests that destruction of the palisade by burning might offer an insight into the building and strengthening of community bonds. But destruction by fire does not, at first sight, seem good evidence of people being bound together. It would traditionally be interpreted as evidence of probable conflict, which I suppose could still be potentially a ‘bonding experience’ perhaps commemorated elsewhere in the putative relocation of the posts. But the construction of such an interpretation needs contextual evidence from contemporary sites which can be interpreted as suggestive either of heightened local conflict, or of a social value attached to communality, or both. Divested of such meaning context, the activities of erecting and burning the palisade are rather anaemic – just motiveless and meaningless action.
Harris and Sørensen's characterization of emotions stresses its bodily dimensions. Refusing, wisely, to prioritize the mental, they emphasize the sensual and physical aspects of emotional experience – sadness, they say, is not entirely separable from crying. While I accept that of course emotions have physical dimensions, I do not accept that they are not only or are primarily physical. I believe, in other words, that emotion can exist without motion, and that the thought dimensions of emotional experience give them as much weight as – and more specificity than – the active ones. One can feel sad without crying. While accepting that there is no boundary between physicality and emotionality, I do not accept that they are always indistinguishable.
To sum up, then, one of the valuable contributions of this paper is that it starts out with a recognition of the enormous importance and significance of emotion in human experience, and then, rightly, recognizes that an understanding of emotion as purely interior and subjective is not a productive direction for archaeological interpretation. Their solution to this conundrum is to elaborate the physical and material aspects of emotion. There is certainly methodological potential in this resolution: it gives us some way of proceeding other than empathy; it foregrounds the encounter with the material world, which has obvious attractions for archaeologists. Is it enough? I would still argue that we need to wrestle with the actual content of emotion and meaning if we are to get beyond the superficial.
From that standpoint, some of the most promising aisles of exploration here are the emerging consideration of sense of community, and the emotional significance of tradition/long-term timescales. The authors’ consideration of how the meanings of grooved ware might attach to its long tradition of use and might promote something akin to, perhaps, nostalgia seems to me to capture some of the richness of human relations with the material past. Similarly, the curation of older pottery forms evidences the attraction of patina/age/tradition, and might point us towards a shared emotional value. Wearing black is indeed not necessary to show that particular kinds of emotion are being experienced. And wearing black does not mean that particular emotions are being experienced. But wearing black is part of the material discourse of an emotional value (social and shared).
I welcome Harris and Sørensen's truly original attempt to increase the ambition of an archaeology of emotion. I hope that their intelligent and optimistic explorations will encourage further debate and inspire others to work on this challenging and complex problem.
