Debate

ETHNICITY AS A FORM OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NEOLITHIC CILICIA AND CENTRAL ANATOLIA

Isabella CANEVA                                                                                
isabella.caneva@uniroma1.it

Nikos Efstratiou: I think that we all can agree that issues such as ethnicity, culture and ethnic groups or identity represent a problematic area in archaeology. And as we have heard from Caneva’s paper, the reasons are not only methodological but theoretical as well. If I can start with a short introductory comment, I would say that, in my opinion, the archaeological discussion about ethnicity is defined by the struggle of archaeologists to organise and interpret aspects and categories of the material culture, into some coherent form: either the ‘culture concept’ of ‘culture-historical archaeology’, or the ‘processual’ analysis of socio-cultural systems, or the ‘post-processual’ exploration of ‘symbolic and ideological’ systems. What lies behind these attempts – despite the criticism expressed and the methodological modifications suggested – are a number of commonly accepted equations such as archaeological cultures and people, and cultures with ethnic groups and ethnic entities.
The second point I would like to raise is that, in my opinion, we must avoid entrenching and limiting our archaeological thinking in the strict dichotomy which creates the acceptance of a primordial and/or instrumental approach to ethnicity (biological basis of ethnicity/what a person is born with versus the socio-culturally acquired characteristics).
To my mind the turning point in the anthropological discussion concerning the definition of ethnic groups was the work of Frederic Barth in the 1960s when he introduced the notion of ‘boundaries’. Consciousness of ethnic identity or ethnicity is embedded in social relations and is the result of the need for creating boundaries; boundaries for manifesting ‘alterity’ and ‘differentiation’ vis-à-vis other groups, the ‘who - I am - not’ notion.
What I can testify to here is my experience from my ethnoarchaeological work among the Slav-speaking Moslem upland community of the Pomaks in Greek Thrace. As happens with all oppressed minorities, Pomaks have on the one hand been marginalised by the dominant Greek culture and on the other, engulfed by the Turkish Moslem community which exerts on them strong influence in religious, ideological and material matters. Moreover, by ‘experiencing’ the negative connotation of being a ‘Pomak’ (the word for centuries meant the untrustworthy person), they have not developed any strong self-identity mechanism. It is characteristic that when asked about their identity they reply: ‘They say we are Pomaks’ (see F. Tsibiridou, Les Pomaks dans la Thrace grecque. Discours ethnique et practiques socioculturelles. Paris, L’Harmattan, 2000).
In terms of material culture what you see in the Pomak villages are different types of architecture such as houses with internal courtyards with high walls which correspond to a Turkish style together with open houses, a typical Pomak arrangement and so on. On the other hand, the same types of objects (ceramics, for instance) can be found in all villages. Differences do appear in social behaviour: some villages are less religious than others, the drinking of alcohol so on and so forth. At the same time, certain ‘practices’ (Bourdieu’s habitus) remain the same (magic festivities etc.).
So, how can someone describe their group identity or ethnicity in view of this material and ideological diversity? As a primordial ethnic group with racial connotations they are in constant crisis, employing consciously or unconsciously different politics for their identity construction. This is a complex process which refers to constantly changing and negotiated power relations and involves power games and power agencies on different levels and scales: personal, inter-community, national etc. In this context, ‘instrumental’ factors such as socio-cultural, personal and behavioural elements, incorporate and express a continuum of different intentions while primordial bonds such as racial elements, commonly shared cultural features continue to exist. One may say that in cases like these when there is a lack of homogenisation and the presence of many different politics, even the notion of ethnic identity as such is hollow, pointless, lacks significance, weak, indistinct. The question, therefore, is how reasonable is it to suggest that we can draw ‘boundaries’ and define ethnicity in this complex manifestation of ethnicity which is constantly under construction and in a state of crisis.
Now, turning to archaeology, my suggestion is that if we can somehow manage to define these ‘boundaries’ on whatever level and scale, in material, ideational or other manifestations, only then can we start tackling the issue of ethnicity. I suggest that we must overcome the dichotomy of the primordial and instrumental approaches since the former will always be present while the latter will have many different forms and expressions along the line. Their correlation will be constantly regulated by social relationships (control, power etc.), which in the end determine ‘alterity’ and ‘differentiation’ and ultimately ethnicity and identity. Functional and typological analyses in the context of a processual approach may not be so irrelevant or formalistic as they might appear in the beginning if they manage to avoid discredited equations such as stylistic variation-normative tradition (decoration-social information, Binford).

Douglas Baird (chairman): How to draw the boundaries, Isabella?

Isabella Caneva: What I wanted to put on the table was this reality. We have to think that this is a reality now, and it was probably also in the past. And as you said, there are different levels. It’s alterity, as you said. And it’s an emic notion. So it is difficult to define, because it is what people think of themselves, not what other people think of them. It is so very difficult to find the boundaries between such intellectual creations, that what we should do is to keep in mind that this exists. So it doesn’t exist as a property, it’s not primordial, it’s not racial of course. But it exists in the behaviour. So we may use it to explain a phenomenon which has no other explanation. But, if we don’t keep in mind the range of possibilities, then we will never find what is related to that possibility.

Nikos Efstratiou: Yes. Yes. But if you look, there are always reasons why they have reached that stage. Why they cannot recognise themselves, why they don’t have an identity. And these reasons are political, they are economic, etc.

Isabella Caneva: This is the problem. There are many different reasons.

Nikos Efstratiou: That’s right. It’s not a construction we have in mind.

Douglas Baird: Does anyone have any comments on how approachable they feel ethnicity might be with the sort of material that Isabella has presented to us?

Oguz Erdur: I am not an archaeologist, I am a cultural anthropologist. I do not see how you get around the fact that ethnicity necessarily implies an ontology. And actually, by saying ‘it exists’, you also imply that. Even though you say, ‘it’s not primordial’ and ‘it’s not related to race’, you still go around and say that ‘it’s related to behaviour’, then you are still essentialising something. I mean, for an anthropologist, the way ethnicity would be approached is as an issue of identity, either self-identity or a matter of identity through otherisation. So it’s either a matter of identity from inside or from outside. I do not see how, when you have no living people around to identify themselves or the people living around them, how you can talk about ethnicity without essentialising it.

Isabella Caneva: In fact, relativity and reciprocity are essential to identity definition, even individual identity definition. You acquire your identification, your identity, looking at what you are not, looking at other people. So there is no sense of identity, no sense of ethnicity in isolation.

Oguz Erdur: I basically do not see the relevance of that concept for prehistory, that’s what I am saying. I mean, ethnicity as a modern concept is about identity, self-identification or –

Isabella Caneva: Why do you say it’s a modern concept? We don’t know. It’s in the texts as soon as we have written documents in the Near East, in the second millennium BC for instance. It’s clear that it is a pervasive concept in the Near East. So why not before? We simply don’t know because we have no written documents.

Oguz Erdur: I just do not see the justification of carrying that backwards in time. I mean, if we are talking about historical periods, and if there is a mention of ethnicity, then that’s to me understandable.

Isabella Caneva: It’s not a mention of ethnicity. It’s understandable that there are many groups that define themselves as different from other people around. So we can imagine that, if we study the mechanism, this notion develops and changes – this is the main point: That it changes according to contingencies. So if we understand the mechanisms, then we can try to make a projection. This is a proposal anyhow. And I am trying to enlarge the possibilities of analysis of this world. Because we have the tendency, when we look at prehistory, to define everything in a global sense. And we always get total explanations.

Douglas Baird: Would anyone else like to argue against the existence of ethnicity in the past?

Eliot Braun: No, I think that people have ethnic identifications. I just wonder how exactly we can identify them in prehistoric periods by using material culture, which is all we have left. Listening to people talking about wall paintings in Çatalhöyük it gets sort of enter into the spirituality of the people. The people whom I deal with mostly in the Early Bronze Age of the southern Levant left us almost no art. They built specific kinds of houses. They made specific types of pottery and they have flint and chipped stone types we know a lot about. That’s all.
I have a problem with the identification of Dark-Faced Burnished Ware (DFBW) as a group in itself. Some years ago I had a chance to be at Tell Kurdu and for two weeks I saw a lot of material that could possibly be called DFBW. And for many years people thought of making that into an ethnic group. And they did the same thing with red-burnished ware and then they got to the lime-paint group ware and they had Proto-Urban A, B and C. And what turns out is that there are regional developments and there seems to be trade, systems of trade, and I don’t think that there is anything in the particular pottery when you find it in small quantities, especially material that looks like luxury ware, that might have special uses by which you can identify ethnic groups. And I just wonder whether that’s what other people think about.

Francesca Balossi Restelli: I do not feel I can talk about ethnicity at the moment, or group homogeneity identifying the DFBW horizon. But it is true that DFBW as pottery with some specific characteristics, that is mineral inclusions, highly burnished, very specific temper and decoration, is very similar in some sites. But there is no DFBW at all in Tell Kurdu that we have been able to see at the moment. In the Rouge Basin and in the Qoueiq, I have been able to see the pottery from these areas. And I can say that, to a certain extent and on a certain percentage, that it is not the same in each site. We can say that it is the same pottery production, the shapes are the same, the decoration is the same, the volume is the same, the technology is the same. But there are some differences. For example, the impressed decoration in Tell Judaidah is on what Braidwood called red-washed ware, which is basically DFBW, but red washed on the inside. In the Rouge Basin the impressed ware is on the DFBW, with no red wash inside. So that might indicate some desire to distinguish or separate the groups. I mean, it’s not the same group but they are sharing something that is stronger than just simple contact or communication.

Eliot Braun: Could it be that these are groups competing for markets? I mean, could you have different centres of production, rather than just make this an ethnic kind of thing? Who made the simple ware? I don’t know what percentages you have, but who made the plain old pottery that most people used for everyday cooking and eating and so on, for utensils? Why do you necessarily have to relate this to ethnic groups making certain pottery?

Francesca Balossi Restelli: I think the same people were making also the simple ware. And DFBW is not only a luxurious ware. It’s not just prestige pottery, but you also have in the same ware, like, everyday pottery. Even cooking pots can go into the DFBW horizon. I definitely think it is the same people, and their material culture, their pottery production is characterised by the simple ware. The other thing is that I am not so sure the dark-faced ware represents ethnicity. I haven’t said that. I just said that these groups are producing the same pottery. And that means they must have some similarity in their organisational or social being.

Damien Bischoff: An anthropologist denied us the use of ethnicity for ancient periods. But at least at the beginning of the industrialisation of ceramics studies by such anthropologists as Meillassoux and Alain Testart spoke about ethnical groups relating them with ceramic evidence. So we can use ethnical marks with ceramics with one reserve: we need industrialisation to be sure to identify those ethnical groups.

Mehmet Özdogan: I will try to be more on archaeological grounds than anthropology, and I’ll say a few words about the DFBW. Looking at such a problem in general, of course there is an identifiable strict group called DFBW. But when we try to define its borders we see it gradually merging into something like a fashion. I think we should not be too strict or too precise with defining ceramics as representing ethnicity or identity. Pottery can be part of an ethnic identity but its distribution can also be due to a functional variety or to a productive centre.
Coming back to the picture which Isabella has drawn. So we have a site in an area of the Mediterranean, Mersin-Yumuktepe, which has an assemblage – architecture, subsistence pattern –the composition of which is different from sites we have in other areas, although it is also evident that Yumuktepe is not radically different from what we know from Central Anatolia. Should we try to see Mersin as a kind of ethnic identity or group identity or local identity? Or as kind of variability within the spectrum? I think that is the thing which we have to think about because each time we find a different type of pottery in a group in an area, should we start thinking that it represents another ethnic group in that area? Even when you look in the Central Anatolian Neolithic there are dark-faced burnished wares, although they might not be chemically the same as the dark faced burnished wares of Cilicia. So it is a matter of deciding whether we see the whole problem as a kind of archaeological variability or as a group identity. Especially in the case of Yumuktepe this is difficult because the site is in a very strategic geographical location, where the Central Anatolian plateau, the mountains, and the Mediterranean coast merge with each other.

Douglas Baird: So, other possibilities, Isabella? Did you consider alternatives to ethnicity?

Isabella Caneva: I think ethnicity was the alternative. The other possibilities are the archaeological variability as Mehmet said, of course. Differences in the environment, of course. Also for pottery, of course. Functions or style or fashion or trade, and ethnicity were intended to be an additional variable for interpreting these things.

Fusun Ertug: I just want to add one more idea. As we all know, some villages are specifically specialised in pottery making in many parts of Anatolia, and especially in Eastern Anatolia. Up to the 70s, about 50 villages were studied by Güngör Güner, a pottery maker. And she did research on these different villages that produced different materials. Some villages produced water jars and some others were specialised in cooking pots. But in the Uslu village there was a huge variety of potteries. And when we were working in Malatya and in the Elazig region we could identify Uslu pottery in every single village. How to explain this? There are no ethnic differences and no ethnic similarities between these villages, but there is a single village that produces the most favourite pots of that area. I even found Uslu pottery in Central Anatolia. So it could be a fashion in one area or a specialisation of one or few villages in one region.

Isabella Caneva: Well, I have no answer, but I think we should take into consideration the specific role that each type of pottery has in a community. In this regard, there is a beautiful article by Hélène Balfet on the pottery from the Maghreb, Northern Africa, where in a wide community she finds a pottery made by each family for its own use and which is made consciously in different ways by each family. And it is made like this because it is the definition of the family. And it is used and kept inside the house. Then there is another pottery, which is there because it comes from gifts and prestige circulation. And then there is the common everyday pottery, the cooking pots with no painting, which is made by men in the shop and sold all around the region. In an archaeological context we would be very confused because we are used to see that everyday pottery is locally made and that prestigious pottery comes from a wider environment. So we first should reconstruct the specific role that each type of pottery has in each community. Who is producing? For who? And why?

Peter Kuniholm: I think one of the first British travellers in Turkey, in Anatolia one day came down near Afyon somewhere and his guide said: ‘Those people over there, they are Yörük’. And the traveller said: ‘Why, is their language different from yours?’ He said: ‘No.’ ‘Is their religion different from yours?’ ‘No.’ ‘Is their clothing different from yours?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are their customs different from yours?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then why do you call him a Yörük?’ And the guide said: ‘Because he is a Yörük and I am a Turk, that’s why.’ So that’s probably one. But secondly, this is the first archaeological meeting I’ve been to in thirty years in Turkey, where I’ve heard people asking what I would call ‘the bigger questions’, instead of tiresome recitations of numbers of pot, of herbs and classes of vessels and things like that. And hooray for it, I would say. These are the questions that should be asked. But I think you need to remember that the chance of success at getting an answer is altogether different. And I leave you with one final anecdote. Some years ago, I was headed for Crete and I heard a man speaking in a horrible form of Turkish next to me. So I went over to see what he was. And he identified himself as a Yörük from the mountains above Eskisehir. And he was headed for Crete with two pick-up trucks, one of them filled with baskets and the other one with reeds. I said: ‘What do you do?’ He said: ‘I sell my baskets all throughout Crete, each one with its little nazar boncuk (A nazar boncugu is a small bead of blue glass to take away the evil eye according to traditional beliefs.) on it.’ And then he said: ‘If the Cretan women have a particular desire, we make our baskets to their specifications.’ And all I could think of was: God help the poor anthropologist years from now, who goes to Crete and tries to figure out the Yörük invasion of Crete, – apparently this man did it every summer. He was driving cars with a Greek licence plate – how he got the permission, I have no idea. But here he was with this Yörük culture, all with the boncuks. I defy the anthropologists – let’s say our descendants – to figure out what in God’s name was going on in Crete.

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