Critique of Archaeological ReasonBroken traditionsGiorgio Buccellati, October 2014Foucault's archaeology Memory Competence A fluid competence The breaking of a tradition Intentional breakage Filters Personal dimensions Nature of the carriers The biblical notion of tradition THe concept in the literature See CAR: 2.3; 16.4; 16.5; 16.13; 17.5; 17.6; 18.2. Back to top A tradition and its carriersThe notion of tradition implies awareness and continuity of identity. Something is "handed down" (tradere) by someone to someone else, and this "someone" is in principle a plurality of individuals, a human group. The content of the tradition is thus shared horizontally (within the group) and vertically (through time).We can choose language as a good example. In this case, the "tradition" is a linguistic structure that is shared by speakers synchronically and handed down, diachronically, to other speakers. The content of a tradition is as broad as any context requires. Coherent in its overall impact, it is nevertheless in flux (see below), much like a living organism (including our example of a language). It may be considered to be in a "liquid" state, in a sense similar to that proposed by Bauman, but not with the negative connotation he attributes to it. The carriers of a tradition are as important as its content. They are not a frozen receptacles of the content, but rather enter in a living interrelationship with it, which can therefore be gradually modified in the measure in which it is differently perceived, and hence transmitted. Back to top Foucault's archaeologysee Holly's treatment of Foucault and the Annales as equivalent to iconologyliving carriers: act according to tradition (even if they are unaware of it) non-living carriers (we): do not act ... notion of assent as per Newman Back to top MemoryPertinent to the concept of tradition is that of collective (Halbwach 1992), cultural (Assmann and Assmann, 1983, 1992, 2005, Balza and Mora 2014), public (Casey 2004), or epic memory (Buccellati 2004). Also pertinent is the notion of "taphonomy" applied to a textual tradition (Miller 2005).Memory of past events that affected a given human group is a major factor in defining group identity, because it provides past points of reference with which all members of the group can identify. All the more so if there are memorializing monuments and documents that provide a physical memento of the phenomenon held in memory. There are also less defined elements that have sedimented in communal awareness, and are operative without being specifically remembered. See in particular the notion of archetypes in Jung, and see also the notion of archaeology peculiar to Foucault or the notion of "traditional referentiality" as opposed to "post-traditional" texts (Foley 1991). The question of transmission becomes, in such cases, more difficult to determine. While memory is an important factor of tradition, this is broader than what can be tied to the past, and even when linked to specific past events or institutions, need not retain a specific time-bound awareness of either. Back to top CompetenceCritical to an understanding of the concept of tradition is the notion of competence (Moro 2008). This refers to the instinctive control of the content on the part of its carriers. Referring again to the example of a language, native speakers are competent in their language even if they are not systemically aware of its grammar. They have absorbed the relevant linguistic structure independently of a mediated knowledge of its rules: there is as if a wedding of the structure of the content (the language) with the mental structure of its carriers (the speakers).Competence is shared among members of the group. The very possibility of sharing depends on the reality and validity of the content's structure, and on the aptitude of the carriers to receive it and identify with it. It is on this that rests the notion of a continuous tradition: one the competence of which is handed down along with the substantive content. Competence presupposes sharing, and sharing presupposes communication. It is a communication that does not depend necessarily on articulate and formal channels. The specifics, and the structure to which they belong, are appropriated even without a deliberate educational process, but only through the sharing of the presuppositions that lay behind the structural whole. Certain aspects of the overall competence may be more sharply felt in response to specific situations, especially in response to controversies internal to the group or the emergence of danger from the outside. Thus the religious dimension of a given sense of ethnic identity may be heightened by a contrast during a specifically religious persecution by external elements. This is where the "liquid" dimension of a tradition may become more clearly evident. Back to top A fluid competenceThe "liquid" dimension of a tradition (see above) means that competence is not frozen. It is not like a manual where one can find a fixed definition of mechanical parts. There is a delicate balance between variation and continuity, and conclusions derived from the ways in which self-understanding is expressed must be carefully calibrated.A telling example may be seen in the classic study (Contini 1970) of a sonet by Dante Alighieri, which is very familiar to every Italian with a minimum of education, and yet this level of familiarity does not necessarily reflect the proper import of the original. In other words, the competence of a modern Italian may be well at variance with that of a contemporary of Dante, some eight centuries earlier. Back to top The breaking of a traditionSince a tradition is intimately connected with its carriers, it may be said to break when there are no more carriers. In the case of a language, we speak of a "dead" language, but clearly this applies only to its speakers.Thus the concept of "breakage" implies the loss of a conduit: there are no more living informants who are "competent" in that particular tradition. This is particularly important when one seeks to answer questions about the possible non existence of a given element: it is this kind of question that highlights distributional possibilities, and cases of mutual exclusivity. When a tradition is no longer carried alive, it can be retrieved if it has left a proper record. This means not only a record of the content, but also of the "conduit," i. e., of the carriers through which the tradition flowed. The hermeneutic effort, then, consists in reconstituting this conduit as well as the content to which the carriers responded. In other words, the object of inquiry is not only the data as preserved (say, a temple), but also the broader cultural context that conditioned its perception on the part of the users, who were the carriers while the temple "lived." That is the proper task of an archaeological hermeneutics. We must recognize the "breakage," and mend it. The possibility of such a task rests in the first place on the fact that these are human traditions. The "breakage" does not therefore imply that an inaccessible barrier has come to exist between our experience and theirs. They also lived. As we do. And the hermeneutic task of the archaeologist is to recapture the filaments that held together the tradition with its carriers. The methodological question is: how to reach behind the lack of living and competent informers, or carriers. The answer lies in the establishment of an articulate distributional analysis, carried out on as wide a body of data as possible, for which digital analysis gives us a type of control that was until now unimaginable. Back to top Intentional breakageA converse situation to the one where the carriers are no longer extant is the one where the carriers intentionally intend to erase part of their tradition.The classical case is that of the damnatio memoriae, the formal removal of visible elements that refer to a person or an event. The formal dimension is generally supported by a more widespread rejection of the substance behind the symbol. A case in point is the rejection of Nazism in Germany, which goes well beyond the removal of symbols, and aims at eradicating (in the literal sense of removing the roots, if possible) the spirit of the movement. The opposition, to this day, to a republication of Hitler's book Mein Kampf is an eloquent witness of this trend. For a similar case of breakage at the personal level, see below. Back to top FiltersThe confrontation of a modern observer with the record, i. e., an archaeological hermeneutic effort, must reckon with a number of filters that may have come to be interposed with time between the original situation and us. Some of these phenomena are subsumed under what has come to be known as a collective "imaginarium."The factors that can give rise to such filters are many, of which a few may be cited here. (1) An intentional ideological bias may select given cultural components to bolster a claim of continuity with a past that is deemed to give depth and value to a current political agenda – for example, the pretended descent from prehistoric groups that are rediscovered as emblematic of specific party platform. (2) An unreflected continuity may be assumed because of links that are in and of themselves valid (e.g., the continuity of territorial identification), but are too partial to sustain a critical analysis – for example, the claim of ethnic groups to be the direct descendants of an earlier ethnic group identified with a glorious political past. (3) A fantastic and mythological past is proposed as a window for an equally fantastic projection – for example, games about medieval societies project simplified versions of those life styles. (These are more easily identifiable as filters because of the ludic nature of the context. However, they can influence general perception more than one might expect, as with "historical" films that reproduce settings and customs in a very life-like situation.) Back to top Personal dimensionsIn our own personal lives we regularly witness different types of breakage with our past, which, while more easily mended because of the continuity of the subject, require nevertheless particular attention in order to make it possible to bridge the chasm. They are not directly pertinent to our concern, but they may be helpful in pointing towards a general understanding of the phenomenon.The psychoanalytic effort at regaining a past buried in the unconscious is a case where specific mechanisms have been devised to reach beyond the forgetfulness that may intervene with regard to one's own deeper levels of being and awareness. A divorce may entail the conscious rejection of what had been a shared past between two people. Recovering the memory of this shared past would in this case be easier if more painful. And one may well not want to recover such memory, as with the case of the damnatio memoriae cited above. Accidental amnesia differs because it is unintentional, and in this it differs also from the psychoanalytic sphere: the loss of memory occurs at the full level of consciousness, and mechanisms aimed at recovering it differ from those current in psychoanalysis. Back to top Nature of the carriersThe comments just made about the personal dimension of the phenomenon highlight the role of the carriers: what is handed down (traditum) is intimately connected with the one who hands it down (tradens). Hence it is that the nature of the carriers as active subjects is of major import.A signal example is that of the break between hominins and humans. At the cognitive level, hominins relate to the world around them exclusively through perception, whereas humans (us!) can only do so, through the overlay of language and logical thought (following what I call the "transcendental revolution," Buccellati 2014) and forthc.). In this case, the hermeneutic effort is extremely delicate, since we must deal with subjects whose cognitive nature differs from ours as a matter of substance – even though we presume a deeper continuity. There are two other cases where, rather than of a break in a tradition where we assume continuity, we deal with carriers who are altogether different by nature. The pertinent data are not archaeological in nature, but they can help us by highlighting the problem of a hermeneutic effort across the chasm of non-congruence. At least as a thought experiment, one may consider the possibility of an encounter with aliens. Science fiction has fed our collective imaginarium, but the potential of having to communicate with extraterrestrial beings is taken seriously on many levels (Sagan et al. 1978). Presumably intelligent and conscious, these beings would not, however, be human. They would thus hail from a tradition with which we have no common ground. It would not be a case of a broken tradition, but rather of one that is totally unrelated and without any expected common grounds. It may be said, then, that the procedures of archaeological hermeneutics as I am proposing it would be the safest starting point for establishing the roughest basis of communication (note 1). Autism may be considered a related case . Here the individual consciousness is severed from the stream of tradition, through a physiological condition. The effort, then, is not on the part of the observer who seeks to identify the tradition of the autistic person, but conversely it is the autistic subject who seeks to capture the tradition with which he or she is confronted. When this happens, it is done through procedures that are quite instructive with regard to our own effort at recovering a broken tradition (see Buccellati 2010). Back to top The biblical notion of traditionThe notion of tradition emerges with extraordinary force in the biblical mindset. It is relevant for our purposes inasmuch as it illuminates the impact that the belief in the continuity of tradition may have on a community, in contrast with the notion of a broken tradition. The problem of the intervening filters is of particular relevance here.In the Old Testament, the underlying notion of tradition serves as the motor that creates a canon of a scope and coherence wholly unknown in other ancient cultures, see Buccellati 2012, 12.6, 17.8. The notion of "god of the father" (as in "god of my father," "god of Abraham,' etc.) is also pertinent: it stresses the continuity across generations. In the New Testament, the notion acquires a more explicit formulation, with the words parádosis (traditio) and parathéke (depositum) becoming technical terms to define the phenomenon. Particularly poignant is the expansion of the latter term to depositum fidei, which stretches to the utmost the dimension of continuity: faith is seen as remaining the same, in the form of an element contained in an inheritance clause. Back to top The concept in the literatureIt is obvious that the generic concept of a tradition that is remote in time and in this regard "broken" shuold occur frequently in the literature. But one does not as a rule draw the systemic conclusions that I do from it. I will cite here a few examples.
Note – Back to text For a science fiction narrative that sets the problem and proposes an interesting and rather sophisticated solution (with recourse to expressive structures derived from the epic of Gilgamesh) see the episode of Darmok from the American television series Star Trek. Back to top |