The Archaeology of Institutional Life

14. The Future of the Archaeology of Institutions

14 The Future of the Archaeology of Institutions Lu Ann De Cunzo In my first college archaeology course, I learned from David Hurst Thomas about the complexities plaguing and energizing our efforts to “predict the past.”As aspiring scientists, we memorized Thomas’s (1974:4) dictum that “systematic examination of alternative explanatory hypotheses”would bolster our predictions. The year 1974 was a long time ago. Today we struggle with the extent to which we live as captives of our own times and places, unable to know a past not of our own making, let alone predict the future. I aspire to a much more circumscribed result in this essay: to propose how the volume’s authors have helped chart an“archaeology of institutions”for the future, both in what they did and what they could not pursue in these chapters. Like Baugher’s historical overview (this volume), my remarks focus on institutions of “communality,” incarceration, and education. In the abstract to the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) session from which this volume grew, April Beisaw and James Gibb noted that institutional studies have foundered on the“lack of a coherent body of theory and supporting methodology.” Archaeological studies, they asserted, have not adequately considered this set of fundamental questions: What is an “institution”? Why are there institutions? How do they“work”? How should we study them? In this volume several authors do explicitly address these foundational questions. They draw on historical models of institutions and theoretical understandings that were crafted beginning in, or in response to, the cultural context of the 1960s—that era of contest in which people questioned, challenged, or rejected the “system” and its pernicious, even Future of the Archaeology of Institutions / 207 evil, institutions, while others struggled to maintain the existing order. Stephen Warfel presents an example of the latter from his 1968 cultural anthropology text, Man and System, to aid his thinking about Ephrata Cloister as an institution. Harry Turney-High (1968:347) emphasizes the ritual nature of institutions, which he describes as our “greatest attempt to build system, to produce expectable behavior” in “paramount” arenas of social life. This understanding of institutions resonates with me in light of my own encounters with the Magdalen Society, a home for “fallen” women in Philadelphia (De Cunzo 1995, 2001). That research led me to works like Michel Foucault’s (1977, 1978) on sexuality, discipline, and punishment; Erving Goffman’s (1961) on total institutions; David Rothman’s (1990) on the asylum; John Alexander’s (1980) and Michael Katz’s (1986) on almshouses and poorhouses; and Estelle Freedman’s (1981) on women’s prisons. With the help of Eleanor Casella, Suzanne Spencer-Wood, and others, I discovered the growing cross-disciplinary, critical, and feminist literature relating to institutions that they have reviewed in this volume. These works shared a view of institutions’ functions and purposes as social control, and framed all relationships within those institutions in terms of power, as relationships of domination and resistance. I found their arguments convincing and yet not enough. Essentially, they seem reductionist, and left me wondering what the point of studying the Magdalen Society would be if only to document one more example of such power relationships. I had already traveled too far down the road of studies of symbol and meaning in anthropology and material culture, and I knew there was more to it. Perhaps ironically, that more came from looking even further back into the traditions of anthropology, to ritual studies. There I rediscovered, among other things, the power of spiritual belief to shape an entire worldview and way of life. Archaeologists would enrich their interpretations by thinking more about that, and I will return briefly to ritual in concluding. The historical archaeologies of institutions presented in this volume share a concern with the culture and economy of capitalism and relationships of power in the modern world. They recount the social, political, and moral acts of establishing institutions and the goals and purposes of these places. They probe acts intended to transform, reform, teach, and punish. They seek to understand conceptions of identity, madness, deviance, and normalcy in different times and places. We have learned about classifying those who enter the institutions’ doors and reclassifying those who stay. 208 / Lu Ann De Cunzo We have witnessed the choreographies of time, space, object, and body that shaped the experiences of confiners and confined in institutions. The“trialectics...