History, Social Evolution, and the Culture Wars

George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 have become analogical touchstones for the excesses of government and the pervasiveness of oppression in everyday life. Yet I think a more apt comparison for Timothy Pauketat’s meditations on complexity and power would have to be “Shooting an Elephant.” In this well-known autobiographical essay, Orwell explores the weight of authority as an agent of British imperialism who, against his better judgment, feels compelled to kill a tame elephant that had escaped its chains and run temporarily amok while in “must.” He does so less because of the danger it posed to the Burmese villagers and more because his refusal to slay the beast would undermine the expectations of his position held by the colonial subjects. This story emphasizes the cultural dimension of subjugation—that no matter the degree of control over the material reins of power, holding command involves a process of eliciting consent that is frequently tenuous, at best partial, and always under negotiation. This, I argue, is the most important lesson in Pauketat’s Delusions: how what we construe as culture is in reality a web of relations that is always in the process of being historically framed and reframed among people, and which constantly tacks between agency and structure.

Pauketat’s critiques of social evolutionism will no doubt wound some Southeastern archaeologists who, in self-defense, will claim ownership of the chiefdom concept solely on a heuristic basis. Here I might suggest Cobb’s Rule: if you claim that you’re not really a social evolutionist but find yourself feeling defensive when the chiefdom concept is criticized, then at heart you’re a social evolutionist.¹ It’s not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with using chiefdom as a descriptive device. As Pauketat argues, the problems arise when we attempt to use it as an explanatory device. Neoevolutionary taxa just do not easily embrace forms of organization that embody significant differences from standard social types. Pauketat may blanche at the notion, but I do see one strong similarity between his corpus of work and Lewis Binford’s lifelong efforts in archaeological theory building. Binford has been consistent and insistent that explanation is about understanding variability. Although coming from a fundamentally different theoretical background, Pauketat is asking us to bear the same goal in mind. Rather than ecological variables, however, he stresses history and the “X factor,” those cultural variables that distinguish one society from another.

Pauketat and Binford have very little patience with the typologizing that passes for addressing variability. This was the basis for Binford’s well-known critique of John Yellen’s attempt to characterize activity areas on !Kung settlements.² Binford argued that Yellen’s study was ultimately based on normative constructs—empirical generalizations—that elided the interesting variation within !Kung communities, as well as between !Kung groups and other hunter-gatherer societies. Likewise, the normative constructs that comprise evolutionary stages bear the brunt of criticism in Delusions. Traditionally, once the evidence begins to show fundamental fissures in an evolutionary type, the typical processual response has been to create subtypes. Thus, as Pauketat points out, we have been treated to simple, complex, and paramount chiefdoms and, more recently, corporate and networking strategies in the attempt to apply the dual-processual model to Mississippian polities.³

Social types do have their uses, but as Pauketat emphasizes, these additional categories have assumed the status of normative constructs that have become the goal of analysis rather than a point of departure. Binford’s earlier rebuke of “inductivists” (in his view, misguided processualists) likewise took them to task for the way in which they treat exceptions to patterned regularities: “[T]hey [the new patterns] are different, justifying the definition of a new category or taxonomic unit for subsuming the observed case and any other similar ones discovered in the future.”⁴ Here we have an intriguing instance of epistemological equifinality, where two scholars with widely disparate philosophies converge on the same criticism.

If the point of departure is not to create more subtypes, then where do we take our analysis to explain variation in...