The Woodland Southeast

24. Domesticating Self and Society in the Woodland Southeast

Chapter 24 Domesticating Self and Society in the Woodland Southeast Charles R. Cobb and Michael S. Nassaney Unraveling the nature of social organization in the Woodland Southeast has traditionally been approached from a number of different directions , notably mortuary practices, exchange networks, and settlement patterns . Earthworks have also constituted an important venue for addressing social complexity. Mound-building traditions such as Poverty Point, Marksville, Coles Creek, and Mississippian have been used by archaeologists to draw inferences about the mobilization of labor, ceremonial behavior , and other correlates of complexity. In this chapter, we suggest that longterm changes in earthwork construction during the Woodland era may have been linked to changes in world view among indigenous groups in the Southeast —changes that involved societies enacting increasingly stronger notions of discipline and domestication of the self. In addition, we consider how these changes may have permeated the everyday world of domestic architecture and subsistence. Researchers elsewhere have observed that the process of plant domestication involved dramatic shifts in human perceptions of self in addition to alterations in plant genomes and food practices (Hodder 1990; P. Wilson 1988). In other words, societies domesticated themselves while they were domesticating plants. This suggests to us that addressing social organization in the Woodland Southeast requires a consideration of both the ceremonial dimensions of earthworks and the more mundane daily practices that reproduce everyday existence. Only by considering the complementarity of ritual and quotidian life—the sacred and the profane—is it possible to comprehend the reproduction of the social body. In making this argument, we adopt a perspective akin to that espoused by Julian Thomas (1993a) in his studies of Neolithic landscapes: that it is possible to develop a historical phenomenology that encompasses transformations in world view and power from the view of the long term. With regard to the Woodland era, we suggest that, similar to the Neolithic, groups may have been experiencing a revolution in subjectivity that set the stage 526 Cobb and Nassaney for dramatic changes in perceptions of the social body, which corresponded in turn to important shifts in social organization. These social transformations were manifested, in part, in the physical landscape of earthworks and the built environment. These perspectives perhaps come closer to interpreting the archaeological record than to explaining it, as is the more common objective among southeastern archaeologists. We do not, however, believe that proposed shifts in Woodland world view constituted purely a revolution of the mind; they were, in fact, strongly articulated with material dimensions of society. As a consequence, we believe that it is possible to argue that recurrent patterning in the landscape (visible and measurable to archaeologists) is the result of habits that transmitted ideas and practices from one generation to another. In particular, we will argue that the increasing instillation of social discipline is evident in changing land-use practices in the Woodland period built environment. Further, this built environment extended beyond architecture to the landscape of subsistence practices. In this chapter we take on two orders of business. First, we consider transformations in human attitudes toward, and perceptions of, the natural and social world that occurred in tandem with plant domestication in the Southeast. Second, we scrutinize how those changes corresponded with increasing conditions of cultural and social domestication, which, in turn, we believe can be viewed as a form of cultural discipline. In particular, we argue that, while there is a long-term trend toward intensification of agriculture , changes in monumentality and houses indicate that the imposition of discipline oscillated between the ritual and domestic worlds. To understand this process, it isfirst important to consider changing notionsof land use between hunters and gatherers on one hand and agricultural groups on the other. Land and Labor Land and Labor Land and Labor Land and Labor Land and Labor In the study of political economy the distinction has been made between land as an object of labor and land as an instrument of labor (Meillassoux 1978:160; Wolf 1982:91–92). As an object of labor, land serves as a reservoir of resources exploited by human groups. This conceptualization is characteristically associated with hunters and gatherers, who are more prone to live off the land, so to speak, rather than attempt to harness the productivity of land by actively modifying the landscape and its flora and fauna. Simply put, hunters and gatherers practice territoriality rather than the tenure associated with cultivators (Ingold1986:134–36ff.).This does not mean that mobile societies make no impact on the...