AHOTW Symposium - Dr Moya Smith and Xavier Leenders - Sacred or Secular?

Sacred or secular: the reimagining of ancient objects

Transcript

Moya Smith: One of the wonderful things about working in a multi-disciplinary museum and also in hosting exhibitions like A History of the World in 100 Objects is how it triggers conversation. As archaeologists when we think about objects, when we try and understand the ancient worlds, we ask ourselves a range of questions, teasing out ideas of things, people and the worlds they live in. We might even consider, might I say, what cultural or religious practices were linked with these objects, and you can see me teasing that out there with several. ‘Um’ is probably the best response. Many of the current discussions about the archaeology of religion can trace their theoretical frameworks to anthropology — and Sven was quite right, we borrow from everybody we possibly can — so as early as Durkheim in 1915 and Geertz in the 1960s. For the most part archaeologists considering the idea of the sacred or religion focus on religious beliefs and practices, identifying correlates such as religious architecture, votive objects, ritual deposits, icons and symbols. But many embrace the notion that only religious practice leaves material remains that archaeologists can pursue. The defining difference has been, I think, that if archaeologists couldn’t define a functional value for an object, for a feature or for a structure, then, ipso facto, one has religion. Now I’ve got to say, as an undergrad we were struck with the idea that if you don’t know what it is, it’s ritual. At its most basic this creates a stream of archaeological discourse that envisages the notion of a dichotomy. That objects will be either sacred or secular, and these on the screen before you are some of those triggers that come up when you think about the sacred or when you think about secular. To sacred I’ll add a couple more: the notion of sacred landscapes, the notion of houses of god or houses of gods, and the symbiotic relationship between humans and animals: are they sacrifice, are they companions, are they spirit beings, are they more than food? There are continuing tensions in our interpretation of the past and partly I suspect this may be that as we truly embrace science, as we feel as archaeologists that we can only deal with the tangible, or as my husband keeps saying, ‘bones and stones and other people’s rubbish’. I ask if we do this though, if we embrace this dichotomy as though it’s an absolute given. Do we lose much of the history of the past human societies, do we lose the complexities of the past, and do we also then give away our discipline and let some of those areas be taken over by others? So it was with some curiosity that I wondered how the 100 objects reflecting humans over two million years might be seen in relationship to notions of the sacred. So I did the very evil short text-based word search on the catalogue, with a little bit of a dose of subjective decision making, ‘cause of course there’s a lot of overlap as well, and figured that 58 — this is my first cut on how ‘sacred’ is defined in the gallery, how sacred is glimpsed in the gallery, and I think I’ve probably done a great disservice to the sacred — but 58 at first cut. We have sacred objects, deities, Buddhas, cause Buddha is not a deity per se, religious objects, protective items, burial goods, and those that are not simply functional, so going back to my earlier comment, “hey guys, it must be ritual”. So those objects that weren’t caught in my ‘sacred’ net have a range of other significances and probably, possibly, connotations of the sacred realm. I’ll digress by noting though that inevitably these ideas of sacred and secular give a rich fodder for cartoonists. But, the reason I got really caught up with, I think, the idea of this sacred-secular debate is — and perhaps too because I’m embracing the entanglement and materiality without having fully digested the theoretical frameworks of these — it seems to me that in Australia secularisation may be the go-to position and especially as we embrace science. This is a major change in the nature of Australian archaeology I think. Most recently we’ve moved away from the early UK archaeology as it was, through to the American ethnographic analogy, and now we’re heading in a different trajectory. This was really emphasised for me recently by two younger archaeologists saying, “archaeology should leave the whoo-hoo to others and focus on tangible evidence of issues such as climate change and environmental impact”. And then the other one was, “all objects are first and foremost functional” — I thought ohh! So as I listened to this [laughs] I thought, two examples of an entirely different framework from our own experience in the museum, and the first of these is a truly glorious exhibition stemming from collaboration with the Nyamba Buru Yawuru in Broome. Now this exhibition focused on a really entangled history of pearlshell and pearling, a colonial industry built in the late 1800s and early 1900s, built on the shimmering nacreous shell, also built on the labour of Aboriginal people and divers and crew from Malaysia, China, Timor, the Philippines and Japan. But, weaving through this story of pearling is a strong and long-term Aboriginal tradition of pearlshell associated with religion, cosmology and social relationships. Now the dominant reason for the pearlshell industry was buttons to start off with — and some examples on the back; they’re not all just utilitarian, some of them are exquisite — and souvenirs. By the mid-twentieth century as the pearlshell buttons became less popular, less commercial, pearling then turned to focusing on pearls themselves as items of jewellery, items of adornment, though back-tracking to — and this history so far is entirely secular as you will see — ironically the oldest pearl we so far have in Australia from an Aboriginal site, the Brremangurey Pearl on the left – which is this big [laughs] tiny, blink and you’ll miss it – was found in a midden of shell refuse, or small shell, Pintada albina, about this big, and probably spat out as grit. There are lots of stories I know from friends whose kids had pearls, they were using them as marbles across the floor, they were just a nothing thing, it’s the food that was the source. But despite that, pearlshell as well as bailer and tusk shells, had a long, long history in Australia. Over 26,000 years ago pearlshell was discarded in archaeological context some 200 kilometres from the sea. Now pearl meat isn’t going to be particularly edible after that sort of travel so there has to be an alternate reason for the presence of the shell, and there’s no evidence they were used as tools. What value did they have? Well for the last 200 years pearlshell has been a commodity linked with ritual trade across the top end, linking the west and east coasts of Australia, and with movement of materials down through the centre. Bailer shell has been found at desert sites, Pete for example found some dates of up to 2000. And in a historic context, bailer and pearlshell are objects in ceremony and ritual, and possibly that is a type of significance they’ve had for much longer. Carved shell continues to have a particular value in ceremony and carries the essence of the Dreaming with it. Even for those artists who carve shell for a commercial market, differences in shell shape and design reflected a public/not-public divide but even so the people who carved had the authority to carve that’s bestowed on them socially as men of higher status and religious knowledge and lore. So overall there’s no question that Aboriginal society is deeply embedded in ritual belief. Even the most mundane objects carry with them an underpinning sacredness. I take for example this very simple manguri, a woven head ring placed on the head for carrying wooden bowls. This is an object with a specific function, to all intents and purposes a simple secular thing. They’re womens’ work. Women learn to weave them, they pass the tradition on, and knowledge of their manufacture though is associated with power and status and pride. But when women do this, when they make them, when they use them, and when they subsequently make baskets, the Tjanpi weavers, they’re re-enacting an element of a Dreaming story. There’s an element in the Two Sister Dreaming where an older women collects her younger sister and they’re travelling together. Her younger sister’s been grown up by people who aren’t her family, the older sister is taking her home, and as they travel hundreds of kilometres back to home country the older sister, the key action is to teach her younger sister to make a manguri. You can even see shapes of these or shapes of the coolamon they carried on their heads. So now when modern desert women weave their grasses into bowls and weave their baskets or their manguri for a consumer society, they’re simultaneously activating the energy of these ancestral women. Pearlshell, manguri, even something that might look deceptively simple like water from your home country, which keeps your spirit alive, these strengthen for me the obvious point that for many peoples— if not all — the world isn’t a dichotomy, whether it’s been sacred or secular, or any other oppositional construct. For many societies elements of the sacred underpin the everyday. But now I’ll turn over to Xavier who will take it from a very different perspective.

Xavier Leenders: Hello, hello. So unlike Moya I’m not an archaeologist thankfully. I had to, I had to [laughs]. I’m a cultural anthropologist by trade and therefore come at these issues from a very different position. For myself culture is like a constantly shifting web of symbolic interactions that exist between people and things, and so then the difference between sacred and secular is for myself in terms of objects less pronounced. My specialty lies in the present and so while I cannot definitively comment on cultures past I can take part in a comparative exercise by thinking about how people, ancient or otherwise, constitute their material world. With this in mind one of the things that I’ve realised as a student of culture is that meaning is fundamentally embedded in absolutely everything, the chairs you’re sitting on, the coffee I had this morning, this fabulous shirt [laughs] all embedded with meaning and all decidedly cultural things. Through a shared cultural lexicon we decode the signs, symbols and images confronting us on a daily basis. In turn, we construct symbols and add meaning to materiality in particularly culturally sensitive ways, a prime example being when I tell my partner that I’d rather watch a movie at home than go to a nice date with her, and her response is simply, “whatever”; the symbolic absence of words here obviously far more telling than her singular response implies. In this way one of the awesome things about culture is that it’s found in the mundaneness of everyday life. Culture isn’t just a new concert that you’re going to go to, the Perth Fringe event that you might have been to last night, or a heritage display. Culture is happening all around us in a constantly shifting mess that we often just simply refer to as just another normal day. Now this is not to say that certain special events or significant facets of material culture are not important to the stability of a cultural group, merely that the bulk of cultural happenings within a given society of those that are normalised into routine. Hunting or gathering food at the local supermarket, the ritual commute to and from work... [audience laughter]

Xavier Leenders: I think this is where you can find real cultural depth and this fact is by and large represented by material culture. Take a trip to the local rubbish dump and you can clearly see everyday life played out in the objects that we’ve thrown away. But this brings me to an interesting point: we, as purveyors of culture, tend to focus our attention on explicit instances of cultural significance. Objects of ritual, of cosmological or mythological power, things of explicit cultural significance tend more often than not to be associated with notions of the sacred. Perhaps unsurprisingly many scholars will prefer to investigate great instances of spiritual and social significance, rather than pay attention to the boring hubbub of everyday life. Take this Eharo mask for instance, produced by the Orokolo people of the Papua New Guinea Gulf. Though not as sacred as the associated Ma Hevehe masks the Eharo are things of gladness utilised in the Ma Hevehe dance cycle to placate malevolent water spirits. Famously recounted by the anthropologist Francis Edgar Williams, the Ma Hevehe and the Iharo have become the topic of serious anthropological investigation into notions of cultural performance. However, the construction and performative aspects of this particular mask only occur at particular points in the Ma Hevehe cycle, which is as it happens to be around every seven years. Though certainly not my intention to diminish the social importance of this ceremony, one can hardly make the claim that this Iharo mask is representative of everyday Orokolo culture. Indeed, while some museums tend to place emphasis on objects of significant provenance and beauty, many of our collections are conceived as everyday objects, and importantly by extension to what is commonly referred to as ‘the secular’. A question I’ve then posed to Moya in the past and one that I pose here now is that if culture is made in the everyday then why is it we so often put scholarly emphasis on the meanings found in significant sacred objects, sequestering supposedly functional objects into the background of cultural intimacy. Why, in other words, do we valorise the sacred at the expense of the secular? I think Moya and I have yet to find an answer to that question and to be honest to discuss it in this timeframe would put us over our time limit. But this discussion isn’t just about the sacred and the secular, it’s also about the meanings we attach to forms of material culture. So instead I would like to open up a discussion on the connection between meaning-making on the one hand and notions of the sacred and secular on the other. You see, one of the key things for me as an anthropologist about material culture is the relationships that form implicitly between the world of humans, of sociality, and the world of objects, of materiality. I think that these relationships are really, really important because they help us to understand objects not only as functional things but as embedded with a whole range of meanings. For instance, my mobile phone. It isn’t just a phone to me anymore. It’s also my assistant, my calendar, my bank account, my camera, my portal to an interconnected world. But is my mobile phone a sacred or secular object? Well on the one hand my phone is an everyday thing, it helps me to connect with people around me and make relationships with them. I can read the news on it, keep time, stay in contact with people and of course play Angry Birds, and in that way it’s very secular. On the other hand my phone is in all likelihood the most personal object that I own. It is a portal to my life. I use it to enact important kinship relationships and practice rituals. It contains my credit card information, personal information and photos. If I lost it or worse if someone stole it in order to assume my identity the resulting effect it would have on my life would be incredibly destructive. So here we have this highly functional and arguably secular thing that is embedded with a level of meaning and sociality that parallels many more traditionally sacred things. My objective here is not to query the analytical and semiotic difference between the sacred and secular, but to illustrate that there is a separation between these categories and the inscription of symbolic meaning. Just because an object is of secular or functional nature does not mean that it is devoid of cultural symbolism, just as seemingly sacred objects may not present world-shattering meaning to their associated peoples. Now since this session is titled Ancient Worlds let me bring this discussion back to the archaeological by providing a hypothetical story. So, in 3,000 years time long after I’ve overdosed on six coffees a day this is what archaeologists will find of me. [audience laughter]

Xavier Leenders: I’d imagine that attention will probably be paid to this fine-looking vessel just here. I’d also imagine that the archaeologists of the future would be able to figure out that this is an object capable of containing liquid and in all likelihood a functional and therefore secular object, and you know what, they would be right, It’s my coffee cup yeah? However the mistake that they would make would be in thinking that these vessel has no particular form of meaning inscribed into it. I love this mug, it’s got an X on it. It demarcates my desk, it represents my identity in the office and acts as a medium for my morning tea ritual coffee consumption. I could write papers on the cultural intimacies embedded within this mug. [audience laughter]

Xavier Leenders: The point that I’m attempting to make is that those certainly related meaning-making and then notions of the sacred and secular are perhaps not mutually inclusive things, and perhaps as a result we should play with the idea that secular objects possess their own form of meaning.

Moya Smith: As Head of Department I get last say... [audience laughter]

Moya Smith: You might have got the idea that anthropologists and archaeologists aren’t necessarily communicating from exactly the same framework [laughs] It’s been very instructive for both of us. So this probably will sound like a bit of a homily but, back to my surprise that ‘whoo-hoo’ is unpopular with many Australian archaeologists. I do have to admit that you probably get better grants for science-based archaeology than you do for the explorations of the sacred. But let’s remember, as Xavier’s also said, that human behaviours and relationships of things are complex. The social fabric of any society is pervaded by emotional, ideological practory and sensory elements, and many societies don’t distinguish between the natural, supernatural and social realms. Thus our systems of classification may simply confine us. If we look at cultural objects purely in the light of technology – see this homage on the left to early understandings of human development – how narrow will our vision of the past and present be? So let’s think about those elements that most likely carry different codes of meaning, people, things, place, colours, sounds and smell. Let’s attempt to embrace a more holistic framework for engaging with human past, and hey, let’s explore the ‘whoo-hoo’. Thank you. [audience applause]