Rethinking Anthropological Perspectives on Migration

1. The Problematic Relationship between Migration and Culture Change

1 The Problematic Relationship between Migration and Culture Change Graciela S. Cabana For more than a century, anthropologists have been pursuing “migration” as a topic of inquiry: if people moved from one area to another at some point in prehistory, did that movement precipitate changes in behavior, language, and material culture? The answer to this question has important implications. If the answer is “yes,” then identifying past large-scale migrations potentially allows us to identify significant patterns and processes in human cultural and biological evolution. A study of migration therefore holds the promise of opening large windows into the past, and for this reason migration has reemerged as a hot topic among prehistorians over the past two decades. In the course of exploring migration as a subject of anthropological inquiry , I began to realize that anthropologists (including myself) are invested in a certain migration worldview. That worldview puts a heavy premium on the investigation of “culture change.” Pursuing these interests has led to a dead end. I devote this chapter to an analysis of the historical relationship between prehistoric migration and change within anthropological archaeology, because it is within this realm that migration studies tend to be most heavily pursued. Although biological and linguistic anthropologists also research the topic, archaeological theory provides the basis for many of these studies. My comments are reserved for migration studies within North American anthropology , though anthropologists working in other contexts may find them of interest as well. Migration in Archaeology Traditionally, the archaeological view of “migration” is significant population movement such that “the people of one area expands [sic] into another area replacing the latter’s population” (Rouse 1986:13). “Migration” as a concept refers directly to “migration theory,” a term first coined by Adams et al. (1978) The Problematic Relationship between Migration and Culture Change 17 to embrace the numerous individual cases in which migration has been used as an ad hoc explanation for culture change. Although migration has never been hailed as a grand theory of change for human history and prehistory, archaeologists have invoked migration so frequently that an unspoken set of assumptions remains in archaeological thought about the nature and effects of migration on material. One major assumption has been that “migration”—or significant population movement—accounts for abrupt changes in the material culture patterns that constitute the archaeological record. For a long time, archaeologists treated such abrupt changes as evidence for the arrival of a new “culture” and hence a new “people” (Adams 1968; Adams et al. 1978; Binford 1972 [1965], 1972 [1971]; Trigger 1968). The concepts of migration and culture change have enjoyed an intimate relationship within archaeological thought, to the point that when theoretical approaches to culture change shift, anthropological migration studies are drastically affected. Historically, archaeological approaches have existed in tension with scientific method and theory, ranging from a tentative embrace to a firm rejection. That tension has played itself out quite dramatically in the arena of what historically has constituted acceptable “explanation” in archaeological research (see Fogelin 2007 for a recent analysis). “Explanation” can mean a description or an accounting of events. Additionally, “explanation” can incorporate prediction (Trigger 1989). A predictive explanation accounts not only for past events but also for future events if all the appropriate conditions are met. This latter interpretation derives from the deductive-nomological enterprise Hempel described (the covering-law model of explanation; Hempel 1942) that was adopted by many archaeologists beginning in the 1960s (e.g., Watson et al. 1984), such that “explanation means implicitly or explicitly showing how particular events and processes are covered by general theories and laws” (Trigger 1989:275). As the emphasis on different explanatory modes has shifted in archaeology, so has the approach to culture change. Accordingly, for many archaeologists in the 1960s and 1970s, explanation in terms of culture change involved understanding internal mechanisms leading to cultural evolution. These mechanisms were to be understood by uncovering the regularities and universal laws that shaped human behavior. In turn, the status of migration studies has depended heavily on whether or not the discipline demands specific or universal explanations for culture change. When the discipline’s scale of inquiry has been on the particular and the contingent, or “historical,” explanation, archaeologists initiate migration studies. Conversely, when the discipline has been primarily concerned with 18 Graciela S. Cabana universal explanation, in particular the Hempelian covering-law model of universal explanation, migration studies have suffered. Below, I...