[This is a draft version, without proper footnotes, of the paper I mentioned in my previous post. It attempts to expose the evidently widespread confusion between alterity (otherness) and difference and to make clearer the important distinction between the two notions and their different interplay with identity. On that basis it argues that otherness cannot be visible in the archaeologically-visible diversity within the early medieval cemetery. It then goes on to demonstrate that further through a closer examination of different types of, er, difference and the contexts within which they were made manifest, concluding with the discussion of 'gender-inappropriate' artefact-kits included in the previous post. It sums up by arguing that this discussion has important implications for the politically-committed in the present.
The theoretical discussion at the beginning, by the way, goes some way towards explaining why I like the concept, much used by Levinas, of the 'autrui', the other person, differentiated from the 'autre', the other.]
***
In this essay, I wish to ask whether it is possible
to study the late antique or early medieval construction of ‘the other’ via the
analysis of the archaeological remains of the period’s cemeteries and, if so,
how. By viewing early medieval data,
mostly but not exclusively from Merovingian northern Gaul, through the prism of
modern philosophy, largely that of Jacques Derrida, I will attempt to show that
– at least in the terms usually envisaged – otherness, unlike identity, is not visible in early medieval cemetery
evidence. By their very nature, the processes
involved in the creation of the early medieval western European cemetery,
especially the classic communal Reihengräberfelder
and their analogues, exclude the notion of ‘alterity’ from the range of issues
overtly spoken about by that evidence.
At issue, fundamentally, appears to be some confusion
between ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ and the relationship between those two concepts
and that of identity. To blame may be
some fashionable but (at best) analytically vague, usually meaningless and
largely euphemistic employment of the term ‘othering’. Conceptual ground-clearing is therefore necessary. Identity and difference are simultaneous
creations. The establishment of an
in-group always involves the definition of an out-group or groups. At the same time, however, the ‘inside’ – the
identity – is itself constituted by the ‘outside’, by what it is not. These points are absolutely elementary but
the fact that they are yet to make a significant impact upon discussions of
archaeological cemetery data requires that they be spelt out. No social identity is immanent. All are imposed as means of organising the
world, as categories. As such, social
identities are constructed as signs or groups of signs. Even where those signs are based upon
differences that are, or might be, naturally-occurring or visible regardless of
categorisation (hair-, skin- or eye-colour for example; or differences in
genitalia; or physiological stages of ageing), the choice to use them as
categories, their precise definition, the way in which they are employed and
therefore the ways in which the people of the categories so created experience
their lives, depend upon their position in a historically- and socially-contingent
system of signs. As signs they function
textually, within chains of presence and absence, of similarity and
difference. The term ‘textually’ is used
in its Derridean sense, following his argument that all signifying systems
share the essential features of writing or, in his terms, ‘écriture’. This point is one to which I will return. Because no concept can be understood
separately from those signifying chains, comprehended apart from its relationship
with other signs, there is always something of the ‘different’ within the ‘same’. Concepts of the ‘different’ and the ‘other’
therefore begin from analogous starting points.
However, at that point they start, crucially, to
diverge. The ‘other’ is not simply the
‘unlike’; it is the very negation of the ‘same’. In a situation of difference, a particular
category of the world, a dog for example, may be constituted within a
socially-contingent sign-system by all the categories that are outside and
relate to it, in our example all the ‘non-dog’ categories. We might, provisionally at least, like to
think of this as a situation of taxonomy or classification. By contrast, in a situation of otherness, the
‘constitutive outside’ is concentrated in a single categorical term. So we arrive at something more like binary
opposites. That, however, binds the
opposed concepts more, not less, closely.
Inside and outside, ‘same’ and ‘other’, function like the two sides of a
single piece of paper. The ‘other’ is
the supplement without which the ‘same’ cannot exist. Without adopting a rigidly structuralist
position, these oppositions can nevertheless be seen as organising the whole
system, acting as fixed points within it.
Concepts of good and evil, law and freedom might be considered as
examples, as, in a slightly different way, might light and dark or night and
day.
These points are perhaps best illustrated, in a late
antique context, by the Roman:barbarian dichotomy. This operated at a quite different level from
the taxonomic ethnic difference between a Gaul and a Spaniard, between an
inhabitant of Tours and a citizen of Bourges, between a Frank and an Alaman or
even between a Roman citizen and a Vandal. Obviously, in some circumstances (most
famously the Roman state’s treatment of Stilicho after his downfall) the
Roman:barbarian dichotomy could be mapped onto the difference between the
Vandal and the Roman. In particular
situations, however, it could equally be laid over the difference between the
Gaul and the Spaniard, the Tourangeau and the Berruyard or even the Frank and
the Alaman.
However, like many other oppositions of the type
discussed, what is at stake in the antique opposition of Roman and barbarian is
not a simple binary polarity. This
scheme of ideas in fact has only a single pole: that of the Roman. There is no separate, single pole of
attraction represented by the barbarian as opposed to the Roman. Everything is judged by nearness to or
distance from that ideal. In the corpus
of Graeco-Roman ethnography positive comments about barbarians almost always
revolve around Roman virtues that the
citizens of the Empire have lost or run the risk of losing, through social or
political corruption. The barbarian who is freer or more civilised
than the Roman is a cliché of Roman socio-political critique. Even where, in late imperial politics, we
find instances where barbarian tropes are actively employed to create a
political identity, this is still done entirely within Roman politics and its
traditional norms. Thus, as a means of
creating an identity when the traditional discourse of civic Roman male
identity became circumscribed within the imperial civil bureaucracy, the
‘barbarizing’ Roman army adopted and valorised a number of features ethnographically
held to mark the non-Roman (whether barbarian or animal), above all wild
ferocity. But there can be no doubt that this
performance was entirely ‘scripted’ by traditional ideals, or that civic Roman male
identity remained the pole against which one was ultimately judged. Similarly, in fifth-century politics, when
military leaders performed their non-Roman ethnic origins (or in some cases
adopted the latter), this was when they found themselves cut off from the
traditional pole of imperial political legitimacy, the court, when the
barbarian was the only legitimate role they could play.
In all this, unlike the dialogue between taxonomic
identities (as above), the discourse of Roman:barbarian did not take place
between actual Romans and barbarians, but within
the Roman polity. It was not a dialogue between opposed
identities: ‘we are like this and you are like that’. Instead it was a discourse around a single
positive ideal: ‘we are (or should be) like this because they are like that; you are bad because you are like them; if you wish to bracket us with them, by excluding us (and breaking up
the community of ‘the same’), then we
will act like them.’ In this regard, the discourse of barbarian
and Roman was analogous to the classical discourse around gender, as revealed
in recent studies. Indeed, the two often ran side by side.
In the taxonomic situation, identity could be based
around various objectively measurable markers: language, descent, place of
birth, costume, ritual and social practices, and so on. Most of these things have, of course, been
the staple of traditional attempts to locate difference within the
archaeological record. Classical and early medieval descriptions of
peoples were far from uninterested in such matters,
but it is important to recognise that Graeco-Roman ethnography itself operated
at a taxonomic level as well as dealing with the organising civilised:barbarian
dichotomy. Nonetheless, it is a basic mistake of
primordialist views of ethnicity to view even these identities as immanent. They functioned in the imaginary as well as
the symbolic registers. That is to say
that there remained (as with all signifiers) a notion of the ideal member of
the category. Normally that was
structured by some of the aspects which helped define the category (social and
ritual mores, etc.) to create concepts of the ideal member of a sub-group
within it (young woman, male elder, etc.).
This has two very important implications. The first is that social identities are
constituted by performance and citation. The second is, if anything, even more
crucial: the performance of identity is itself a motion towards an ideal. The
ideal can never be attained, because it never had a pure, originary existence. It is fundamental that, in order to have been
capable of communicating any sort of information, any concept or category, even
on the very first occasion it was ever used, had to be capable of iteration,
that is to say it had to refer not simply and exclusively to that specific
instance but rather had to have the capacity to be used in others too. To that end it already had to relate to an
ideal, which was (and is) never coextensive with that which instantiates it,
and to its constitutive outside (all the things which, ideally, it was not). Thus – crucially – even the identity (the
sameness) being performed by an individual is, to some extent, a difference from him or her. In other terms, it is the ‘constitutive
lack’. Once again, there is no simple distinction
between identity and difference. There
is a difference within the subject,
and ‘identity’ lies outside. These
points leave aside the fact that those ideals are always themselves changing in
the course of social practice. They can never be entirely recreated, not
least because, as I have just mentioned, there was never anything there that
was susceptible to pure recreation. It
is thus critically mistaken to talk of the maintenance
of a Gothic or Frankish identity by a particular class; no such thing had ever existed
that was capable of maintenance in the first place. It may be argued that the only time when
subject and identity are coextensive is in death: a point of considerable
relevance to this paper.
With a situation of alterity, all these points are
even more significant. Here the concepts
operate entirely within the register of the imaginary. The subject strives towards an ideal, as
before, and imagines him or herself performing that identity in the gaze of,
and judged by, others. The measure of
any identity – even one stressing sameness and community – lies to some extent
in an imagined other to which one addresses the performance. That other can be envisaged in several ways –
as God, the Law, ‘society’, the Lacanian ‘Big Other’ (the symbolic order), the doxa in Bourdieu –
but always plays fundamentally the same role.
What importantly distinguishes the ‘other’ from the simply,
taxonomically ‘different’, is that the ‘other’ is always central within the
imagined audience in whose gaze identity is performed. Thus, Romanness is performed not only in the
imagined gaze of the ideal Roman but of the barbarian – not members of specific
gentes (those these may doubtless be encompassed
within a specific action’s imagined social audience) but the stereotypical, idealised
barbarian figure. Similarly, masculinity is performed in the
imagined gaze not just of ideal manhood but of ideal womanhood.
These points emphasise another crucial distinction
between the ‘different’ and the ‘other’.
In the taxonomic register any person possesses a range of identities,
based on age, gender, family, ethnicity (at various levels), profession,
religion and so on. Many of these are
visible in the archaeological evidence recovered from furnished inhumation
cemeteries. All are crucially ‘different’ from each
other, not least in that all can be used situationally, strategically, in
social interaction. People who may share
a gender but be divided by familial connections, or who may have different
ethnic identities but the same religion, can decide either to overcome
potential difference by stressing the shared, or to negate what is held in
common by emphasising that which differentiates. In other words, within the taxonomic
register, any particular role or identity can register either sameness or
difference depending on the situation.
This is not the case with alterity.
The oppositions around which the truly ‘other’ is constructed represent
the fixed points, the poles with reference to which other identities can be
situationally evaluated. I further
contend that alterity can never properly be performed, even to the extent that
identity can (reiterating that the performance of identity is only ever a
motion towards an ideal). Alterity
cannot be performed without one of two things: reducing it to a metaphor in the
taxonomic register (a particular barbarian identity, for example, to represent
the barbarian),
or through the inverse citation of the ideal (that is, performing the barbaric
by enacting the bad Roman). It is precisely this feature, this location
in the sphere of the imaginary, which gives racism and anti-semitism their
resilience in the face of empirical observation. The character of actual, known, individual
black people or Jews can be talked down as exceptional, or can be incorporated
within the negative stereotype (as an example of treachery or slipperiness) or,
conversely, be used as a basis for the denial of racism (‘some of my best
friends are black’). In a late antique context, these features can
be seen in practice in some of the examples referred to earlier.
These points, taken cumulatively, make it clear that
it is a serious category error to think of variations in the mortuary
presentation of different social identities as representations or constructions
of the ‘other’. The argument can be underlined
via a different route, which considers the processes by which the
archaeological record of the early medieval cemetery was constructed. Especially when looking at the furnished
inhumations of the late and post-imperial period in western Europe it is of
fundamental importance to remember that these displays of identity were – in an
important sense – transient. Although
Howard Williams has correctly drawn attention to the fact that the semiotic
richness of a multi-sensory performance allowed important memories to be
created,
it obviously remains the case that, once the grave was filled in, the display
of grave-goods was no longer visible.
For the message created by the ritual to convey information about the
deceased (and his or her family), therefore, an audience was required at the
funeral and burial itself. The furnished inhumation cemetery was,
therefore, a communal cemetery, a shared ritual focus. Someone interred in a communal Reihengräberfeld, in a costume and accompanied
by goods (and other archaeologically-invisible elements of the performance) that
were intended to make clear their position or role within that community cannot
possibly – because of that very fact
– be considered as representing the ‘other’, according to the discussion above. Identity and difference are inherent in the
process; otherness is not.
If one were attempting to seek alterity, the
‘other’, properly conceived, in the early medieval burial record one would have
to look outside the cemetery, at
isolated burials removed from the community of the living or the dead. Andrew Reynolds’ discussions of execution
burials in Anglo-Saxon England later in the first millennium might constitute
an example of such an enquiry. Studies of the topography of burial might
also allow us to identify those regarded as somehow outside the community and
thus perhaps more representative of a concept of otherness. Obviously, however, there are different forms
of removal from the main communal cemetery.
The deliberate inhumations increasingly known from settlement sites,
commonly with significant grave-goods, do not represent that sort of exclusion. Similarly, the processes of Separierung attested around 600, which
led to local élites being interred in their own burial-grounds or churches,
away from the earlier communal cemeteries, cannot be regarded as a
manifestation of the ‘other’, rather than an attempt to create difference.
Where we are certainly not on firm ground in looking
for ideas of the ‘other’ is in alleged ‘ethnic’ differences in burial style. I have repeatedly argued in the past that the
empirical grounds for interpreting ethnic identity from difference in burial
ritual – whether from the presence or absence of grave-goods, the forms of
object deposited or the forms of costume in which the dead were buried – are
mostly very weak indeed. There is little to be gained from repeating
those arguments. More satisfactory,
perhaps, would be to adopt an approach that could be followed independently of any
subscription or opposition to the ethnic interpretation. It is in any case surely obvious that, even
if one accepted (as I do not) that the observable distinctions in furnished
burial in this period relate to incoming ethnic groups, not all of the incomers
were interred in that fashion. They are
too few, even for minimalist views of migration. From that fact one has to conclude that
something other than the barest fact of an ethnic identity must have lain
behind the decision to bury the deceased in a particular way. Some other sort of distinction was (at least)
simultaneously being made manifest. If that was the case, then we should consider
what statements about the dead are being made within the funerary ritual. One must examine the issue of why the burial
took that form.
The obvious starting point is that the dead do not
bury themselves. Those directly responsible for the interment were presumably the
deceased’s family, although close study of later sixth-century northern Gallic Reihengräberfelder suggests that the
broader community probably played a determinant role in governing appropriate
and inappropriate forms of ritual expression.
Both points underline that made earlier about the fact of inclusion inherent in burial in the
communal cemetery. Although there were
many means by which identity and difference could be manifested within the
post-imperial furnished inhumation rite, it is important to remember that all
were developed on the basis of a common ritual.
All the inhumations within a Reihengräberfeld
followed a shared, basic script, including the choice to inhume (rather than
cremate), the orientation of the burial, the shared cemetery, the supine
deposition of the corpse and a corpus of grave-goods that could be found in
burials of all types. The number of
types in this non-diagnostic, ‘neutral’ corpus might very well outnumber those
used to mark difference. Even the latter, however, operated within the
community norms mentioned earlier. The
community’s role in establishing the norms for inhumation of individuals of
particular types – and there would have to be such norms for any communication
of identity to succeed – means that subscription, however general, to those
norms implied active inclusion within
society.
There are instances where those rules may be
breached or inverted but, again, the point being made by such strategies can
only be made by reference to the normal grammar of display. For example, when the family of the occupants
of graves 70 and 71 in the cemetery of Ennery (Moselle) chose to demonstrate
their distinction from the community by burying their dead accompanied by an entirely
masculine assemblage of artefacts including two weapons, that point can only
have been effective with reference to the communal norm (on that site, at that
time) that the age-groups to which deceased belonged, a young boy and an old
man, were not, or were only rarely, associated with weaponry and masculine
artefacts. The same point stands for their choice to
orient the graves differently from those surrounding them. Here, the bereaved family demonstrated
inclusion in the community, by playing with its rules, but simultaneously
manifested a claim to be different from it.
That claim, however, is most unlikely to have been based around any sort
of alterity; quite the opposite. This
point can be made for a number of ‘rule-breaking’ burials, especially in the
phase of aristocratic Separierung,
c.600, mentioned above, and in the seventh century.
There are other unusual burials within cemeteries
where the issue is more blurred: where the subject was supposedly immobilised,
headless or prone. The data need close
examination before the claim can stand; many alleged instances are very
dubious. Even with examples that are established
beyond doubt, the fact that these individuals were nevertheless interred within
the community’s grave-yard speaks heavily in favour of a certain level of
inclusion. So does the fact that grave-goods often
accompanied such burials. We may, of
course, have an instance of dialogue here, with a family making an argument,
via the burial, for their continued inclusion within the community in spite of
one of its members evidently being somewhat unusual or excluded in some
way. A simple argument for ‘otherness’
cannot stand, unmodified, in such an instance.
At best we have an occasion where an attempt, within a community, to
place someone in a category of ‘otherness’ has been contested.
The other point made earlier was that the act of
burial is organised as a public act by the bereaved family. Inscription evidence makes clear that a
family could be joined by that of the deceased’s spouse in commemorating the
dead. This supports the reading of furnished
inhumation as an attempt to smooth over the tensions caused by a death within a
community. Thus, as I have demonstrated
before, the most lavish funerary displays tend to be those of people whose
death would create the most tension: young adult women (betrothed or in the
earlier years of marriage, before children had come of age), and mature adult
males (dying before their sons had come of age). Therefore, what is at stake in the creation
of the archaeological record of post-imperial burial is not to the attempt
establish or reflect alterity or ‘otherness’, but the effort to maintain a form
of community, although the latter
obviously includes taxonomic difference.
The argument can be pursued by a consideration of
the artefacts employed within the burial ritual. A good example where what might be seen as a
manifestation of ‘otherness’ in fact demonstrates the opposite may be found in
the late fourth- and fifth-century ‘Föderatengräber’
of northern Gaul. Whether or not these graves are those of
incoming settlers from barbaricum is
fortunately an issue that can, for now, be bracketed. What is at issue is the choice of object
employed to represent the deceased’s status within society. In male burials these objects make statements
about traditional sources of legitimate power and authority within Roman
society. This is clearest with the items
of metalwork (crossbow brooches, buckles and other appliqués from belt-sets,
strap-ends and so on) which were associated with imperial service, whether in
the army or in the civil service. The
weapons deposited with the dead also made a claim to legitimate power and,
probably, an association with the Roman military. Weapons like spears might also have referred
to the characteristically aristocratic pastime of hunting, also depicted in
some artefacts deposited in the grave. The glass, bronze and ceramic vessels placed
with the dead were surely connected to the traditionally élite practice of
banqueting and the distribution of food.
These items were also deposited with female dead, otherwise more notable
for the items of a more archaeologically-visible costume marked principally by
brooches of various sorts, together with other items of jewellery. Whether or not this costume marked ethnic
identity (I do not believe that it does, but that can as noted be left aside
from the current argument), we can plausibly suggest that it was also intended
to depict the deceased woman as a virtuous daughter or matron. Some of the items of jewellery were decorated
in the same ‘chip-carved’ technique as was typical of the official belt-sets
and other metalwork and doubtless made the same reference. While I should reiterate my view that there
is no prima facie evidence that these
burials were of immigrants from Germania,
that, as I have always argued, does not exclude the possibility that at least
some of the dead were of non-Roman origin.
However, even if one believes that these graves were those of outsiders, the conclusion cannot be avoided that the
ritual display involved in their burial was intended to make clear their inclusion within traditional imperial
power-structures. In other words, even
if these burials are those of
‘barbarians’, their funerals were attempts to play down any possible
‘otherness’.
An analogous point can be made for the overwhelming
majority of post-imperial funerary displays involving the burial of
grave-goods. For example, the
distinction between younger adult males buried with weaponry and those buried
without in sixth-century northern Gallic cemeteries makes reference to accepted
roles and identities in that society.
One may hypothesise that, because of the association of the Franks with
the military at this time, the weapon-graves might be those of ‘Franks’. Nevertheless, it must be stressed that at
this point, although there were legal and other benefits associated with
Frankish identity, the Roman and Frankish free population existed as parallel
groups. The display represents difference and some
sorts of power relations but one cannot read it as manifesting any idea of
‘otherness’, not least because, in their funerary, displays both groups were
essentially playing according to the same set of semantic rules. This leads us back to the point made earlier
about the shared basic grammar according to which all funerary displays were
made.
There may be one category of burials about which we
can say something a little different.
This is constituted by burials which have grave-goods which generally
seem to be inappropriate for people of the biological sex in question. A discussion of this group will lead me to my
concluding points. It must first be
conceded that this group of graves is very small; the vast majority of alleged
cases may be questioned either on the basis of inadequate osteological data-survival
or analysis or, more commonly, because of insufficient contextual examination
of the normal gender-associations of objects on that site at that period. Often, the artefact-classes of ‘weaponry’ or
‘jewellery’ are too loosely defined. Nonetheless,
there are certainly some examples which appear to be genuine. How one analyses these within the problematic
of alterity is a difficult issue. On the
one hand the point must be reiterated that the bare fact of inclusion in the
communal cemetery, as well as the evidence that the interment was conducted
with appropriate ritual, care and attention by surviving relatives speak
against seeing the occupant of such a grave as somehow ‘other’. The fact that a difference from the normal is
made clear in the evidence, in the public deposition of artefacts and costume
accessories, also removes the possibility (discussed earlier) that the
deceased’s family were trying to cover up any difference and stress consensual normality. On the other hand, however, it is very
difficult to avoid the conclusion that the deposition of (in biological or
osteological terms) a man or woman with items overwhelmingly associated with
the opposite sex represents an inversion of one of the most important structuring
norms in social organisation, one with which concepts of alterity were very
strongly associated, as noted above.
The first point to be made in confronting this
conundrum is that we should not see the interment of biologically female
subjects with masculine artefacts analytically equivalent to the burial of
biological males with feminine material culture. One of the detectable movements in
Merovingian material culture in the sixth and seventh centuries is the adoption
of some masculine artefacts by women.
This is best seen in the case of plaque-buckles. These started out as strongly masculine items
of apparel but seem gradually to have been adopted by women. This in turn led to a redrawing of this
gender distinction, with decorated and larger examples being buried with
males. The dynamic continued to operate,
however, with women starting to wear decorated plaque-buckles and men investing
more in the size and decoration of their belt-buckles. This dynamic is of course well attested in
many social contexts. The construction
of masculinity and the boundary it erected against the feminine were therefore
always under a certain degree of pressure, with a constant level of ‘background
noise’ where women were adopting masculine items. This movement is in many ways to be expected
in situations where women could be judged positively for the possession of at
least some masculine qualities.
The handful of plausible cases of women interred
with weapons needs particular care. It
has been tempting, especially for non-academic readers, to leap to conclusions
questioning the male dominance of warfare and even to refer to mythic concepts
such as ‘shield-maidens’. This is especially significant for this paper
as societies which contained armies of women (notably the Amazons) constituted
one of the key manifestations of alterity in the Roman ethnographic imaginary. Some caution is required. Heinrich Härke long ago drew attention to the
fact that close study suggests that a strict, functionalist connection between
weapons and an actual warrior role is highly questionable. Most obviously, there are small children
buried with weapons – rarely in Merovingian Gaul; more commonly in Anglo-Saxon
England and the Alamannic regions. We do
not assume that this implies that children habitually went off to fight. That said, I have argued before that the
symbolism of weaponry was more specific than merely a right to fight. The written sources in any case tell us of
women involved in low-level violence. I
have suggested that the level of violence referred to in the deposition of
weaponry was that of the army, of warfare, and the right to take part in
it.
There is no evidence that women had a right to
participate in the activities of the army but there are nevertheless several
ways in which weaponry could still appropriately be employed in the interments
of females. One might be through the
breach of norms to manifest a family’s distinction, as noted earlier; in other
words a family might be suggesting that its right to participation in the
military and political activities of the army inhered in, and could be passed
through, its womenfolk. Similarly, the
family into which such a woman had married might have been staking a claim to
acquire that right, or the military obligations that came with particular
lands, through that marriage. The
written sources do tell us occasionally of women involved in some military
activities. The Liber Historiae Francorum’s admittedly problematic account of Queen
Fredegund accompanying the Neustrian army on campaign against the Austrasians
is perhaps the best instance. Weapons could represent the control of warriors. It is also well-attested that a female role
in leading the defence of settlements was accepted in the early Middle Ages. Weapons in a female burial could represent
recognition of such a role or achievement.
There are therefore many interpretive options available before we appeal
to shamanism, the historical existence of warrior maidens or a mass conspiracy
on the part of male writers to conceal the existence of the latter.
The points made in the preceding paragraph are,
however, only valid where weapons accompany
an otherwise feminine burial assemblage.
Where a subject biologically sexed as female was interred with a
masculine complement of grave-goods different issues arise. If what we might think of as a biological
woman lived her/his life as a man, then there is no necessary transgression of
the usual societal norms. This is where
the more recent revision of the common idea that gender is a social construct
on the basis of biological sex make their point. If such people were interred as men then
clearly the community regarded them as men, not as women acting as men. The only transgression would be when women
who lived their lives as women take part in what were regarded as exclusively
masculine activities.
Females buried with what we might call a mixed
gender-kit – weaponry alongside the usual female assemblage – nevertheless
raise a crucial point, with which I will end.
The female warrior was, as noted, a classic sign of alterity in the late
antique imaginary. And yet, we do seem
to have some actually-existing female subjects whose involvement in warfare was
recognised as apt by the community – hence its recognition in the burial
rite. This same seeming paradox may be
attested in the interment of males with female artefacts. As I intimated earlier, these examples
raise some different issues from those brought up by the females with masculine
goods. First, there is no commensurate
valorisation of the male adopting feminine attributes. Here we actually have a written text to help
us, although it is not one without problems.
Gregory of Tours does refer to a man dressed as a woman, during the
tribunal at the end of the revolt of the nuns of Holy Cross, Poitiers. The man justified his wearing of female garb
in terms of his inability to perform ‘manly work’. Whatever this may have meant,
it was evidently not an unalloyed positive.
As Nancy Partner has pointed out, moreover,
it is significant that this subject was described by Gregory and, evidently, the
other participants in the episode as a man wearing woman’s clothes, not as a
woman. It seems therefore that the
episode shows us costume being employed an outward sign of some kind of falling
away from ideal manliness, rather than a ‘biological male’ living life as a
woman. It is also unlikely that we would
encounter burials of the ‘mixed’ type just discussed with biological
males. Someone recognised as a man, but
buried in feminine costume would be unlikely also to receive the weaponry
customary for someone of his (biological) sex, for the simple reason that a
decision to live life as a woman would undermine the ability to participate in
the masculine activities symbolised by weapons.
It might, however, be the case that we might find men buried with masculine
costume but with female artefacts appended – items evidently symbolic of female
work such as weaving batons, loom-weights and so on, for example. This would require close examination because
methods of determining the gender association of artefacts might simply render
these objects ‘gender-neutral’ and the fact that they are not items of bodily
or costume adornment (jewellery) would make the anomaly less immediately
obvious. Thus the known ‘transgressive’
burials of biological males seem to be those interred in female costume, like
the Poitevin mentioned by Gregory. The inclusion of these people within the
communal cemetery, and the respect and recognition given to their identity in
the public burial ritual, show that even though one might consider their
life-style to have represented the very acme of ‘otherness’, as envisaged in
writings about ideal behaviour, in practice room could be made for them within
the early medieval community. This point
would seem, as intimated earlier, to apply quite commonly within early medieval
society, as it is manifested in the burial record.
This illustrates a vitally important element of
alterity, which has been much discussed in modern philosophy, and returns us to
our starting point. The social and
political value of ‘otherness’ resides precisely in in the fact that it cannot
be actualised; it can be confronted on the basis of the empirical only with
difficulty, as was mentioned earlier. It
is extremely difficult to illustrate the ideology of alterity via actually-existing
communities. As Slavoj Žižek has
repeatedly argued, the ideological function of otherness is to act, so to
speak, as a peripheral ‘blot’ which draws the gaze away from tensions that
might threaten the status quo. When one attempts to view it constantly moves
again. The only way to tackle it, argues
Žižek, is to adopt a perspective different from that assumed by ideology. One might argue that such a move is made
easier by returning to the points made earlier in this paper and remembering
that any identity or categorisation, ascribed or adopted, is never coextensive
with itself but only exists by virtue of a system of relations and differences.
It contains within itself the resources
for its deconstruction. On the other hand, the tragedy of identity and
alterity is that that ideology can be used to rupture communities that have
long lived side-by-side, as in the countless instances of nationalism and
ethnic cleansing in the modern world.
The variability that we can see within the post-imperial cemetery record
may suggest, more happily, moments when such differences could be incorporated
within everyday interaction.
The study of early medieval cemetery archaeology and
its confrontation with the images of society and its ideals given in the
written sources therefore has extremely valuable things to teach us. It instructs us that while we should not
assume that ‘ideology’ was something somehow different from ‘reality’ with no
bearing on how ordinary people lived their everyday lives, statements of
ideology should, as they still must, be closely interrogated. The gap opened up by the burial evidence,
between articulated views of alterity and interactions ‘on the ground’, must be
explored. Then as now, that gap shows us
that ideological visions of alterity are constructs with little or no empirical
grounding. It teaches us above all that
our perspective must always be shifted to expose that discrepancy in the
interests of freedom and humanity.
Härke, H., ‘Early Saxon weapon
burials: frequencies, distributions and weapon combinations’ in Weapons and Warfare in Anglo-Saxon England,
ed. S. Chadwick-Hawkes (Oxford, 1989), pp.49-61; id., ‘“Weapon graves”? The background of the Anglo-Saxon weapon
burial rite.’ Past & Present 126
(1990):22-43.
