The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture

21. What, Where, and When Is Hybridity

486 21. What, Where, and When Is Hybridity Stephen W. Silliman Abstract: This chapter offers concluding comments on the volume’s contributions with a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it considers the various ways that authors in this volume have defined and used hybridity as a conceptual entry into the topics of ethnogenesis, syncretism, and materiality. A primary objective is to see if hybridity offers helpful new perspectives or analytical tools. On the other hand, this concluding piece extends beyond the chapters to consider more deeply what archaeologists might mean by hybridity and what pitfalls we must avoid to use it successfully. Rather than draw out firm conclusions about such an ambiguous concept, this chapter orients more toward generating discussion and clarification. Introduction Applying and understanding concepts of hybridity in archaeology are not easy chores, but they are certainly welcome ones to the theoretical repertoire of archaeologists. They prove complex enough in individual archaeologists’ applications of conceptual terminology, particularly given the history of the term hybridity in social and biological studies, but they take on a special intractability when one is charged with synthesizing and evaluating those multiple versions. Such is the welcome fate that I accepted for this chapter, tackling papers that span topics and time periods from Neanderthals in Paleolithic Europe to Roman statuary in Britain to ceramics in Mesoamerica to copper artifacts in the seventeenthcentury Midwest to leper colonies in late-nineteenth-century Hawai’i. My hope is The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture, edited by Jeb J. Card. Center for Archaeological Investigations , Occasional Paper No. 39. © 2013 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-8093-3314-1. What, Where, and When Is Hybridity 487 to deliver something worthy of the fate of readers that brought them to this one of a pair of synthesis chapters (Deagan, this volume). In that light, the objectives of this paper are twofold. First, the chapter isolates the various ways that some authors of this volume have defined and used hybridity as a conceptual entry into the topics of ethnogenesis, syncretism, and materiality that already invigorate the work of many contemporary archaeologists . The goal is to see if hybridity offers something new to that repertoire. Second, this concluding piece extends beyond those chapters, whether individually or collectively, to consider more deeply what archaeologists might mean by hybridity and what pitfalls we must avoid to retain it as a useful concept. I may pose more questions than answers, but my hope is to generate discussion and clarification rather than to impose too much order drawn entirely from my own theoretical leanings. This kind of clarification will permit us to both draw on and contribute back to other allied disciplines of history and culture, as Liebmann’s chapter also encourages. Approaches to Hybridity The authors in this volume work with a number of subtle variations of hybridity. Some define it explicitly (Clark et al.; Ehrhardt; Hayes; Klaus; Lieb­ mann), while others only imply their working understandings of hybridity and sometimes even go so far as to hardly even use the word when otherwise talking about cultural reformulation (Flexner and Morgan; Frieman; Griffitts; Hauser; Tolmie). However, they all unite in trying to develop approaches to hybridity that better illuminate aspects of ethnogenesis, syncretism, and materiality. As archaeologists, the chapter authors situate these understandings in the realm of material culture. Quite a few authors talk about the incorporation of foreign materials or objects with mixing and combining taking place in moments of cultural exchange as a kind of hybridity (Brezine; Ehrhardt; Harrison-Buck et al.; Liebmann; Tolmie). Others talk about experimentation and mixture of cultural forms (Card; Chatfield; Flexner and Morgan; Griffitts; Hauser; Hayes; Liebmann), intertwined histories of groups assumed to be distinct (Clark et al.; Hayes), the development of new transcultural forms specifically among indigenous groups (Liebmann; see also Liebmann 2008a), the interplay of material culture and biology (Klaus), and the intersection of identity and skeuomorphism—rendering in a new material a form commonly produced in another (Frieman). Still others consider hybridity as the mixture that results from nondichotomous accommodation rather than cancellation of cultural difference (Baltalı Tırpan), as the transformation of human agency by its extension and perhaps very existence through material agents (Hayes), or as the bridging of differences through the employment of conventional iconographic signals of more than one social situation and set of past experiences relevant to more than one social group (Roberts). Finally, another set of contributors talks more specifically...