Socialising Complexity: Approaches to Power and Interaction in the Archaeological Record

Part I

The complexity concept

Chapter 1

Socialising Complexity

Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Sheila Kohring

Complexity is negotiated through interaction between the differentiated parts of all social entities; it exists on many levels visible at different scales of view. In general, the anthropological sciences study organisational complexity at the level of societal structure, yet there is an appreciation that it exists at other scales as well (e.g. Barth 1978; Brumfiel 1992; Strathern 1995, 2004). Each person creates and reinforces a series of relationships through their every engagement with other people, with material culture, or with the world around them. These relationships, although negotiated through that particular action, will be conditioned by past experience, taken-forgranted understandings, present contexts and future intentions. If that complex web of interaction is viewed at a scale that incorporates two, three or four individuals, or perhaps a community or society, new and different interactions will be involved, between the individuals themselves and between the different groups to which they belong. Many of these interactions will be based on shared communal understandings of social rules and realities: although the individual interpretations will vary, interactions can create and reinforce these understandings, continuing to form the structuring principles for interaction. If scale is extended again, this time in temporal terms, whole new interrelationships may be viewed, as well as recurrent patterns of interaction that can be discerned among the chaos.

It is this complexity that as social scientists we must attempt to understand: the myriad, diverse relationships, the ways they interconnect and create new contingencies and how they are mediated through objects, individuals, and communities, creating the complex social realities embedded in all societies at all scales. Clearly different research agendas and disciplines are interested in different aspects of this complex web, varying from the semiotics of individual interaction to the organisational dynamics of large-scale socio-political structures. Regardless of the level of analysis, complexity is not an ephemeral concept or theoretical construct applicable to a single macro-scale, but a reality that we experience daily, in our every action.

An appreciation of this network of interaction operating at multiple scales is key to understanding social structure, yet it seems that every approach that attempts to generalise/define the various aspects leads to a narrowing of the concept: a simplification of diversity into a manageable form. The negotiation of exactly what constitutes complexity (or whether certain societies are complex or not) has been debated too long, and we are not about to add to this hackneyed dialogue. Yet if we employ complexity itself as a conceptual tool, viewing the interactions, multiple scales and multiple layers of meaning as a topic of study in their own right, and the various insights from different disciplines as complementary rather than antagonistic, we are able to expand our understandings in new ways. Thinking of complexity in this way provides a renewed vigour to theoretical discourse on the relational aspects of all human societies. It removes the need to locate boundaries and definitive identifications of what is ‘complex’, loosening the restrictive constraints on its application more broadly when discussing social relationships. Complexity as a conceptual tool for thinking about how societies integrate allows a flexibility to move between scales of interaction: from individual engagement with the social world to the organisation of social institutions within modern state societies. It opens up discussion along new avenues for exploration – the impact of agency, materialisation, and material culture studies – and suggests an inherent dynamism at work within all society.

It is this multivalent approach that we advocate in the pages of this volume. As such, we attempt to employ the notion of complexity with a wider degree of flexibility; as an heuristic device, to help us understand a number of different case studies, and to refocus attention at the different levels by which society structures itself.

Complexity with a small ‘c’

Insofar as complexity remains a topic of study, it is subject to the whims of fashion and the prevailing paradigm: it has been recast to fit the theoretical needs of numerous disciplines at various points in their history. The appreciation of social diversity has often been pushed aside for more narrowly-defined, and better-understood, models of social complexity. In archaeology this has meant a concentration on complex society, as the most fully-institutionalised manifestation of that diversity and hence apparently the easiest to study. Contrary to the intentions of the practitioners, who frequently attempted broadly encompassing and universalising definitions, this has tended to narrow the field to a particular type of social formation, reducing the complexity observable in the archaeological and anthropological records to a particular axis of interaction.

Complex society, as the resulting outgrowth of these discourses, has long been studied as the accessible and clearly delineated manifestation of social complexity. A veritable sea of ink and forest of paper have been lost to establishing working models, definitions and evolutionary trajectories to explore when and how this ‘Complexity’ emerges within a society (see Arnold 1996; Earle 1991; Feinman and Marcus 1998; Gregg 1991; Johnson and Earle 2000 for some of the more recent examples). Complexity is – from this perspective – a category, or a state of being that a society may or may not attain. The focus of study tends to remain at the level of sociopolitical organisation; the integration of different functional elements through hierarchy and social inequality are key features of the literature. These questions are of clear interest to archaeologists, among whom early states and the emergence of hierarchically-organised socio-political institutions are an appropriate and necessary arena for study, and are already firmly entrenched in the disciplinary discourse. Yet that is only one perspective: the theorising of complex society, as it stands, has focused primarily upon one scale of analysis based on the level of socio-political organisation and the degree of social integration within a given society. This is variously conceived, sometimes along socio-evolutionary continuums such as band – tribe – chiefdom – state (following Service 1962), or from egalitarian to stratified society (following Fried 1967), and sometimes in terms of ‘indigenous’ concepts such as ‘Big-Man’ society (Sahlins 1963). Intermediate terms have also crept in, as we find discussion of Complex Chiefdoms (Earle 1991) and Archaic States (Feinman and Marcus 1998), or of vaguelydefined Middle-Range or transegalitarian societies (following Hayden’s 1995 discussion). While these discussions are important in understanding how societies (and the people who constitute them) maintain their integration and cohesion, they at best mask, and at worst utterly dismiss, entire discourses of social complexity beyond the socio-political entity. For this reason, we suggest a re-evaluation of complexity studies within the anthropological disciplines and the introduction of complexity, not as a gauge by which to assess societies, but rather, as the conceptual tool for framing appropriately scaled questions and research agendas.

In this we differ from previous critics of the Complexity discourse, who have critiqued complex society as an exclusionary and over-prescriptive categorisation (see overview in Chapman 2003). A powerful tool for these critics has been the acknowledgement of examples which do not fit traditional models, often originating in the ethnographic record (e.g. McIntosh 1999a). Alternatively, researchers have attempted to find the subaltern voices within the record of hierarchical society, focussing on ‘resistance’ as a pivotal feature in relations of domination, which is perhaps masked by the universalising narrative of conventional definitions (e.g. Miller, Rowlands and Tilley 1989). However, these refutations of the universality of complex society nevertheless serve to reify debate by engaging with it through the terms set by its proponents: rather than exploring alternatives to a hierarchical structure, the concentration is on diversity within the hierarchical structure. They maintain the notion of complexity as a category of society even as they argue for broader criteria for inclusion or for the recognition of dissident voices within the system. These responses have been valuable and important in our developing understanding of social structure and in moving away from the socio-evolutionary agendas of the mid twentieth century (Fried 1967; Sahlins and Service 1960; Service 1962). However, their implicit acceptance of Complexity (with a capital C) as a type of society has done little to stave off disillusionment with the entire discourse, as can now be seen in the archaeological literature.

This disillusionment has manifested itself in a number of different ways. Those who maintain an interest in the structures and forms of social organisation have moved slowly away from complex society debates, per se, to instead focus upon the manners by which societies organise and maintain their integration – principally through the control of power, the establishment of inequalities and their contributions to the formalisation of social hierarchies (e.g. Diehl 2000; Gledhill et al. 1985; McGuire and Paynter 1991; Price and Feinman 1995). These approaches have specifically sought to distance themselves from the neo-evolutionary modelling still rife within certain sectors of archaeological discourse and instead address how societies (or the classes in societies) institutionalise social differences and relationships.

Another response to the perceived stagnation of the ‘complex society’ debate has been to sidestep the entire issue and instead focus on agent-based understandings linked to individual experiences of materiality and landscape (see for example contributions to Dobres and Robb 2000, Tilley 1994). These approaches have forced us to confront issues of gender, personhood, identity and motivation among ancient populations; they also require that we take into account the construction of meaning by past actors. Thus we must now acknowledge the idea that similar landscapes and material circumstances are open to multiple interpretations by social actors; and our experience of them as present day researchers will vary from those of the peoples we study. The construction of meaning is individually experienced, contingent on context and histories, and is continually dialectical. The interpretation of past lifeways becomes more subjective, or relativistic, but with a concomitant distancing from the analyses of structuring principles embedded at the level of societal organisation.

We feel that, despite the clear value of these developments and the new perspectives they have encouraged, an approach that favours either structure or agency at the expense of the other is an impoverished way of looking at the past, especially as one of the major foundations of agency theory is based on Giddens’ (1984) dialectic between individuals and their society. Much lip service is given to the fallacy of the objective/subjective dualism, yet few use the insights of agency to feed back into an understanding of social structure (some exceptions might include DeMarrais et al. (1996), which moves from an engagement with symbolism to an understanding of forms of social domination; or Ingold (2000), which demonstrates the way that social landscapes and technological and interpersonal understandings are built up from personal experience in a socially-created structuring environment). If we are to deal constructively with the interconnected nature of objective and subjective worlds, then we need to reengage with theories that can enhance our knowledge of structure, while retaining those with insights into agency. Complexity (this time with a small c), is inherent to that structure, created through the daily interactions between people and things, and we need a theoretical vocabulary that allows us to appreciate it and study it from multiple different angles. Three current and useful approaches can briefly help to illustrate the diversity of ways available to address the issue more innovatively while retaining a known vocabulary.

Heuristic tools

One school within which this less constrained view of complexity has already begun to emerge is in the study of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), using concepts of adaptation and evolution, and often analogising from biological system (Bentley and Maschner 2003, Lansing 2003). These approaches attempt to model the adaptation of a society, as an entire system, arguing that while societies do express peculiarities, there are certain general similarities which can be explored and quantified. As such, they are in some ways similar to the systems modelling approaches popular among processualist archaeologies of previous decades (per Flannery 1972; Watson et al. 1971, 61–107). However, today’s complex systems have evolved since those rather mechanistic models, which served mainly to articulate the contemporary concern with studying all parts of a culture. Current approaches are much more sophisticated and flexible in their modelling, capable of incorporating dissident voices, conflict and multiple belief systems: in this they attempt to mirror social realities, which can contain numerous disparate groups while nonetheless retaining cohesion at different scales. Complex Adaptive Systems can also incorporate the impact of the various types of power relationships, demonstrating how these can function as organisational principles in a wider society through the incorporation of actor network theory and analytical modelling of regional (and interregional) adaptive systems. Indeed, heterarchy is a key concept employed by creators of complex systems (Crumley 2005).

The concept of heterarchy provides a second device for exploring the multiple sources of power – based on context, value and open to reorganisation – inherent in most societies (Crumley 1987a, 1995). These sources may not all be socio-political or economic: the concept leaves room for other forms, such as religious power, labour power or client power. It recognises the many ways that a society can be shaped and directed by input from non-hierarchical sources, without discounting the possibility of hierarchical socio-political structures as one of the guiding forces. Indeed, structures may move along a continuum between heterarchy and hierarchy as context and values change. A heterarchical system such as an interlinked group of peer polities (Renfrew and Cherry 1986) might develop into a hierarchical structure such as a formally-delineated state, and may later revert to heterarchy: to view change over time in this way avoids the ‘rhetoric of collapse’ (Crumley 1995, 4).

Crumley (1995) identifies various types of heterarchy: relationships of power, of scale and of meaning. As such, the concept need not apply only to social structures in the past, but can also apply to our present reconstructions. Thus, we can use the concept of heterarchy to mediate between understandings at different scales or resolutions, and to illuminate the interplay between agency and structure already discussed. This makes heterarchy a key tool with which to re-examine complexity: it can be used to relate understandings at different social and temporal scales to a larger picture and can itself be seen in operation at multiple levels. The concept is currently popular across the social sciences and has been applied to a growing number of archaeological case studies, such as the strongly differentiated society at first millennium AD Jenne Jeno, Mali (McIntosh 1999b), or the diverse relationships at work in within Celtic Iron Age polities (Crumley 1987b).

As is clear from the above, we view complexity as a way of understanding both social structure and individual experienced constructions of meaning. Crucial to our approach is the ability to move between these scales and appreciate complexity as a multi-layered phenomenon – the web of interactions fundamental to human society exist at many scales and can be envisioned in multiple different ways. Thus, agency approaches, far from being removed from discussions of structure, actually provide a third and necessary link between individual experience and societal organising principles, contributing significantly to the conceptualisation of complexity as a scalar phenomenon.

In moving between these aspects of society, we draw upon the discourse of social structure in anthropology and sociology. In particular, Giddens (1979, 1984) and Bourdieu (1977) have illuminated the mechanism by which societies structure and reproduce themselves through intersecting engagements between individual actors. From Giddens, in particular, we are able to link scales of analysis from a single individual to the social institutions in which they engage – through the process of structuration – in the recursive production of social institutions through daily activity. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus refers to a similar process, locating the means by which this structuration occurs. Habitus is defined as the

‘systems of durable transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them’ (Bourdieu 1990, 53);

it is the place where social structure and individual agency meet in practice. An individual’s habitus is structured by the social rules and institutions in which they exist and interact with others in their social environment. Thus, social engagement at the level of the individual is an embodied experience dialectically inextricable from society writ large. The idea of individual-institutional dialectic lays a foundation for thinking through social complexity as a web of engagements which continually inform and reproduce each other at various social scales.

Both Gidden’s and Bourdieu’s approaches reinforce the need to consider material culture; it is in the material world of everyday life that people engage with their worlds, both natural and social. Searle (1995) emphasised the inherently social nature of all material culture through the concept of institutional facts, where meaning is solely an agreed-upon construct of the members of a society, which can apply to both the social rules which structure society and the material objects used to reinforce these rules and practices. In a much stronger relational consideration, Latour (1991, 2000) has asserted the inextricable interrelationship between material culture and the social being, arguing humans and their material culture are simply extensions of each other, thereby embedding material culture and making it an active contributor to the web of complexity which we wish to explore. It is clear that in any approach that stresses the importance of daily practice and interaction, there should be an emphasis on the role of the material culture in constructing and making real the social environment in which humans continually engage. The meaning extending beyond the object structures human behaviour much more than the institutional facts of the rule itself. Habitus and structuration are only truly mediated through the institutional fact of material culture and how it, itself, influences our behaviour and relationships with society. Thus we are able to draw upon materialist approaches to help us engage with social structure. Sociological, anthropological and archaeological approaches have begun to reassess the value of social structure and agency as it is created and reinforced in daily engagements, providing the potentialities of individual agents’ choices, decisions and actions. The importance of these views on the entwined nature of structure and agency are returned to again when we apply complexity as a conceptual tool.

Conceptualising Complexity

We do not advocate a singular approach or model for discussing complexity; this would be futile as by doing so we would immediately close the doors on other potentially useful and pertinent perspectives. Thus, we are returned to the deployment of the term as a conceptual tool – a way of thinking about social relationships and how people, objects, and their realities interact within communities – and jettisoning the long list of evolutionary baggage that it brings along with it. This is not to say that evolutionary approaches and relationships of inequality are not pertinent or important (in fact, various strands of both can be found in the following contributions). What we are trying to make clear is that by viewing complexity as a conceptual tool, we do not require a specific repertoire of definitions and discourse to frame and constrain it. One can question and locate complexity within various social organisations, scales of analysis and temporalities.

As we have tried to outline, such an approach has its own genealogy; to regard complexity as a property common to all society and human interaction is only possible within a scholarship that has embraced inclusivity and multivocality. To do so is to reflect upon the reaction to the certainties of modernism, as the relativism and phenomenological emphasis on experienced realities have contributed to the recognition of the pervasive hegemonic character of western thought as truth. This kind of reflexivity has only become possible in recent years, as post-structural and post-modern hermeunetical writing has alerted us to our own cultural embeddedness (there are many references for this, but the classic text is Shanks and Tilley 1987; see also contributions to Hodder et al. 1995). A key feature of any critique of the complexity debate must therefore be a recognition of its historicity; as Chapman reminds us in his opening chapter ‘when grappling with history, we must first grapple with the history and utility of the concepts with which we think’ (Chapman this volume, p. 13). His contribution to the volume provides this history, simultaneously recasting our own approach as a product of a particularly Western European historical trajectory of scholarship and recognising the theoretical underpinnings of our rejection of ‘Complexity’.

That approach, with its focus on organisational complexity rather than reified categories of what is Complex, has room for multiple organisational structures. Although we have removed the possibility of claiming universality of application for any of these models, a truly valuable context-specific/heuristic model can yield new insights into various scales and different features of a society. The concept of heterarchy has already been discussed as one such way, offering a means of moving between different scales, groups and forms of authority, recognising a diverse web of interacting facets to any social arrangement. Crumley’s contribution to the volume develops this theme, demonstrating the applicability of the heterarchy concept to a range of situations and structures, from computer programming to societal power relationships. Heterarchical principles also feature in Souvatzi’s contribution, which is concerned with the internal dynamics of the organisation of craft specialisation, often a feature of past society strongly associated with hierarchical control. Drawing on a scalar perspective pivoting on households and communties, Souvatzi presents us with a complex system of craft relationships, apparently based upon different organisational principles, providing an important example of how such complex formations can be interpreted from archaeological data when approached relationally.

The other contributions to the section on ‘the organisation of society’ move away from the heterarchy concept to look at different power formations and ways of understanding authority. Kristiansen’s chapter on decentralised chiefdoms offers a new way of understanding power and monumentality within Bronze Age Scandinavia, while introducing what will become a recurrent theme within the volume: the way that our own conceptions of power structures are mapped onto evidence, often predetermining the results of our investigations. His conclusion that the monumentality of Early Bronze Age Sweden was a veneer, masking a much more egalitarian social network, has echoes in Lane’s chapter in which he examines the enduring qualities of community as a structuring principle of society. Drawing upon data from the Peruvian Highlands, he demonstrates how Andean colonial states masked considerable organisational complexity at a lower level, and how by moving up from the level of the community, we can appreciate significant continuity underneath the rhetoric of rise and fall associated with larger scale societal entities.

The preoccupation with scale continues into the section concerned with complexity and practice. A significant theme here is in the ways that complexity is created through the performance of social roles. In the arena of craft production, Kohring, Odriozola and Hurtado show how complexity is reflected in practice and when moving across scales, technological systems can yield insights into the structure of Chalcolithic Spanish society. Material culture and its creation build and maintain multiple layers of social relationships through daily interactions. Performance must also be set against a background, which is created, structured and given meaning by the interactions that occur within it, just as it provides a structuring influence on those interactions, helping to define their form and meaning. DeMarrais examines the use of space among small-scale polities of the pre-Hispanic Andes, demonstrating how ‘setting’ both defined and was defined by social organisation, informing the practices and movements conducted in different spaces around a community.

The theme of performativity, of how embodied practice can both consolidate and create social arrangements, has already been a key feature of recent anthropologies – particular those concerned with the construction of gender (e.g. Butler 1990; Foucault 1988) and of developing archaeologies of identity (Jones 1996, 1997; Meskell 2001); here we see how those ideas can inform an appreciation of complex social structures/ engagements, as they are created and maintained through daily practice. A similarly interactive approach informs the section on ‘complexity and landscape’ as landscapes are seen as an active force in the everyday interactions that create social complexity. Wynne-Jones discusses these ideas with regard to urbanism, often seen as an immutable – though hard to define – form of settlement, looking at it instead as a concept that can structure social relations. Herrera looks at the agency of the landscape itself, as sacred places and key landscape features are seen to have interacted with humans to create and maintain social reality among pre-Columbian populations of the Andes, providing a history and sense of lineage with the natural world. A similar approach is taken by Robinson, who argues that the discourse of ‘emergent complexity’ among the Chumash has masked significant organisational/cultural diversity and complexity, linking the landscapes of southern California and the use of rock art to the appropriation of space and the regulation of activity and different spheres of interaction.

The final section deals with our encounters and precepts of complexity, a subject already alluded to throughout the volume. It is clear that we understand the societies we study in terms intelligible to ourselves. These contributions remind us that this has always been the case, but that it can nonetheless represent a significant impediment to our understanding. Giedelmann-Reyes explores this with reference to Spanish colonial encounters with the Muisca of Colombia, whose diversity of societal organisation was glossed as a reflection of structures of kingly authority understood by the invaders, their interpretations continuing to inform present nation-building, but lacking material substantiation. Sneath reminds us that this still occurs in the present, as contemporary nomadic groups in Mongolia are misunderstood by analyses that associate complexity with economies of sedentism, and organisational structures of hierarchical authority, so pastoralists and the ‘nomad aristocracy’ are excluded from discussion of complex society and, due to the masking effects of existing views, duly confined to the discourse of tribalism.

We must therefore recognise that ‘complexity is in the eye of the beholder’. Indeed, many of the forms of complexity we ourselves seek to understand would not be considered of interest to many researchers of past and present ‘complex societies’. Yet, in our attempt to recognise complexity in all its guises, to use the concept as an enabling rather than a restricting force, we hope that we can finally return to an analysis of social structure, in all its complex and mystifying glory, bringing our knowledge of agency and diversity along with us.

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