Lives

As we saw in chapter 3, the anthropologist Adam Kuper concluded his review of the concept of culture with the view that this can always be broken down, that we have multiple identities, and that culture could be thought of as a public discourse, which can be broken down into limitless constituent parts (Kuper 1999, 246). Likewise the anthropologist Maurice Bloch has referred to the ‘the long conversation that is Balinese society’, in which ‘at some time, one notion of time is used, and others, another’ (Bloch 1977, 284). Archaeologists wrestling with the relationship between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ and the satisfactory definition of these terms may have much to learn from this kind of approach to identity and action in the world. One recent insightful account of the variation in depositional practice in LBK settlements characterised the LBK as emerging ‘between structure and agency’, somewhere between ‘shared principles and individual histories and local solutions’, and suggested that the ‘locus of that dialectic is the house’ (Last 1998b, 19). Another recent account has also examined the scope for agency in the LBK, using Habermas’s concept of Lebenswelt and Bourdieu’s notion of doxa, to examine whether change was simply unimaginable or whether orthodoxy was promoted by the suppression of change (Sommer 2001). There is a welcome attempt to examine issues of uniformity and diversity in different material practices through the history of the LBK, and in terms of controlled, negotiable and neutral ‘sectors’, but the conclusion (e.g. Sommer 2001, fig. 3) remains a generalising contrast between houseplans, lithics, pottery and domesticates.