Style & Identity

“

Identity

these days is a fashionable term. But it is not very meaningful unless one can show how it manifests itself in social interaction and behaviour.” (O. Figes, Natascha’s dance. A cultural history of Russia, 2002, p. xxxiii)

Cultural Ecologies 2 Miguel John Versluys

Definitions

: Culture: what people think and what people do (or: the life-style of a society) Cultural boundaries: do not really exist but are clearly felt/percieved Cultural competence: knowing the rules of the game Identity: consciousness of sharing (with others) = cultural construct Cultures and identities are: *hybrid from the beginning *multi-everything: relational/mixed/negotiated/instable/context-dependent/fluid

How, then, do we define cultures in the past?

Greek? See

Hellenicity

: Rigidly formulated (what Hall does not) the Greeks are in fact a Greek, or rather Athenian, invention, only used in periods of crisis in opposition to the Other.

Roman?

Pollitt: “When we speak of ‘Roman’ art we mean something quite different from what we usually mean when we speak of Greek art. The latter, at least before the Hellenistic period, generally refers to a single ethnic and cultural group created in regions (-) where the Greeks lived. Mature Roman art, by contrast, refers to a tradition of styles, genres and iconography which served the political needs of a vast multi-cultural and polyethnic state and which satisfied the changing tastes of a society that was stratified primarily on the basis of wealth.” Stewart: “When I was about to begin my (-) research, I met a distinguished Oxford professor who told me that a lifetime’s consideration of the field had led him to conclude that there was really no such thing as Roman art. In several respects he was right.”

For archaeologists, who have to make sense of the past on the basis of material culture, style seems to be one of the main instruments to define cultures and identities.

For the concept of identity to become operative “

Identity

these days is a fashionable term. But it is not very meaningful unless one can show how it manifests itself in social interaction and behaviour.” (O. Figes, Natascha’s dance. A cultural history of Russia, 2002, p. xxxiii) a proper understanding of the concept of style, and our reconstructions of the relations between style and identity in the past, is thus fundamental.

An example: *Nederland in de Prehistorie, 258: “Kleine vondstgroepen met Rössen-aardewerk en – vuursteen op de zandgronden (-) wijzen erop dat de Rössner boeren net als hun voorgangers gebruik bleven maken van deze gebieden”, or 269, “Aardewerkstijl en gemijnde Rijckholt-vuursteen bestempelen de samenleving daar tot Michelsberg”.

Structure, please!!

Forms of reception

(in material culture-terminology)

Addition

: imports (that might well have a different meaning in their different context!)

Modification

: formal changes might occur

Transformation

: new types and styles emerge, more local than foreign

Translation

: local products with a different meaning than the original

Creation

: an absorbtion of the old idea

Style

“What we think of as style is pervasive in human society, no matter how we may define it. And style is involved in all archaeological analysis, whether it is covertly or overtly discussed. (-) the study of style and its place in research and interpretation in archaeology is central and determing.” (M. Conkey & C. Hastorf,

The uses of style in archaeology

(New directions in archaeology) (1990) 1) “Die Stildiagnose ist eine Differentialdiagnose” (J. Assmann, Viel Stil am Nil? Altägypten und das Problem des Kulturstils, in: H.U. Gumbrecht & K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (eds.),

Stil. Geschichten und Funktionen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Diskurselementes

(1986) 519-537, 526) “Le style c’est le diable” (Paul Valéry)

A short overview of the development of the concept of style Some examples of what archaeologists nowadays do with the concept of style An application of the subject on our topic of cultural ecologies in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean *Introduction: what is ‘Greek’: Laocoön & more *What, then, is Roman?

*Conclusion: to be Roman, go Greek, Egyptian, and so on?

A short overview of the development of the concept of style Style = a specific way of expression (objective) (subjective) Style = the preferred way of doing so (stylish, he or she has style, etc.) Applied to material culture the concept of style first was mainly used to evaluate art in a rather subjective way: Style = appropriateness, “what is fitting”, often in a teleological perspective, where “likeness to real life” is considered the ideal.

Vasari talking to Michelangelo in Rome in 1546 after having visited Titian: After they had left him, and were discussing Titian’s manner of working, Buonarotto gave him considerable praise, saying how pleasing he found his colouring and his manner {maniera, style}; but it was a pity, he said, that in Venice artisans did not learn to draw well from the beginning and that Venetian painters did not have a better method of study … because whoever has not done enough drawing, and has not made sufficient study of choice things both ancient and modern, cannot do well by himself, nor can he improve those things that are taken from life.

Tension between style as an individual phenomenon and style in a broader sense.

Style as an individual phenomenon can be useful in archaeology as a taxonomic tool but is not directly relevant to archaeological interpretation.

We will therefore focus on style in the broader sense. What is this “broader sense”?

From a ‘classical model’ to ‘les goûts des nations’ Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, 1721,

Entwurf einer historischen Architectur in Abbildung unterschiedener berühmten Gebäude des Altertums und fremder Völker

: Diversity = the tastes of nations, and = not subject to an argument or value judgement In order to study style we thus have to study the various factors that condition it: here social and political context comes in. Style itself now can become historical evidence.

The first one to do so is Winckelmann who, in his

Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums

from 1764, explicitly considers how styles vary in accordance with differences among peoples and times.

: The principal characteristics of the Etruscan style (a tendency to dwell extensively on details, strained, artificial) are also visible in Etruscan literature and can be seen as the characteristics of the Etruscan people, hence the faults made by Daniele da Volterra or Pietro da Cortona!

Note however, in the same period, Hegel on aesthetics: if Chinese or Indian works of art turned away from the representation of reality, this is a matter of deliberate distortion.

The 19th century then shows a decisive victory of diversity over uniformity of style. Gottfried Semper (1803-1879) produced a comparative analysis of styles in which, after dealing with the constraints of material and tools, he looks at: “local and personal infuences, such as the climate and physical constitution of a country, the religious and political institutions of a nation, the person or corporation by whom a work is ordered, the place for which it is destined, and the occasion on which it was produced. Finally also the individual personality of the artist”. (

London letter

, 1853)

Alois Riegl,

Stilfragen

(1893) Decoration and form exercised an, historically contingent, autonomous power, artistic will or

Kunstwollen

.

Spätrömische Kunstindustrie

(1901): late Roman art is a coherent expression of a specific and homogenous Kunstwollen.

The insistence on style as a coherent and cohesive phenomenon acquired a new meaning from the 1920’s onwards: H.F.K. Günther (1926)

Rasse und Stil

Adolf Hitler at the Victory Congress in 1933: “It is a sign of horrible spiritual decadence of the past epoch that one spoke of styles without recognizing their racial determinants.”

Post processual archaeology: Style as communication within or between groups. Stylistic behaviour would have to do with ideologies and strategies of legitimation.

Material culture and its style in now seen,

inter alia

: *as signs of status and identity *as vehicles of meaning and equivalence within and between different cultures *as bearers of aesthetic value *components of ritual *indicators of lifestyle and identity what we could call its social functions Fashion/Mode= gesellschaftlichen Verallgemeinerung (-) zu einer bestimmenden Wirklichkeit (Gadamer)

From the 18th century onwards ‘style’ has thus been related either to a certain people or to a certain period (Volk oder Zeit) Although post-processualism broadened our scope of possible understandings of ‘style’ it largely remained in the ‘Volk oder Zeit’ framework. (but see I. Hodder, Style as historical quality, in: M. Conkey & C. Hastorf,

The uses of style in archaeology

(New directions in archaeology) (1990) 44-51, 44: “I wish to begin my discussion of style by considering what it is NOT”).

Here we encounter the inherent ambiguity of the concept: it has, of course, something to do with groups and/or specific periods, but never in the way we imagine it to be, as a kind of social index.

Another important tension is that by our style types and definitions, we create the past, not always knowing, however, how relevant these definitions were in the past.

My defintion: ‘style’ is Ausdruck von Eigenart.

Materiality studies may help to develop an alternative paradigm: not style IN context (signs, vehicles, bearers, components, indicators, and so on) but style AS context *as knowledge and ideas (Appadurai) *as potentially inalienable (Miller) *as objects of discourse also because the object/subject dichotomy is dissolved (so there would not longer be the tension between our definition of style and the use of style in the past).

More about that …. Next week

Some examples of what archaeologists nowadays do with the concept of style *Boiotia after Antiquity, lecture John Bintliff: “we know from literary sources that Slavic people took over the area but so far we have only found 1 Slavic sherd.

*Lomas on Massalia (K. Lomas, Hellenism, Romanization and cultural identity, in: K. Lomas (ed.),

Greek identity in the western Mediterranean

, 2003, 475-498) uses the words

character

and

style

in discussing the theatre and the city walls (“in Greek rather than Roman style”) and other remains (“the new harbour, and more general material culture, are more Romanised”, both quotes from p. 491) and consequently draws the conclusion that the archaeological evidence is a set of mixed (it is Greek and Roman) signals. She also states that the persistence of Greek games and festivals reinforced a Greek identity for the city. *In the

Blackwell Companion to Archaeology

there is no chapter on style, nor is there appropriate attention for it in other chapters.

An application of the subject on our topic of cultural ecologies in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean “Style (-) is often used as a means of delimiting, demarcating, and cutting out: as a weapon. At the same time, style has also played an important (and too little recognized) role in the acceptance of cultural diversity.” (Carlo Ginsburg,

Wooden eyes. Nine reflections on distance

(2001, original edition

Occhiacci di legno

, 1998) 109)

*Introduction: what is ‘Greek’: the Laocoön.

Greek = the (material) culture of the city state of Athens in the 5th and 4th century BC. This ‘Greek’ was used by the Macedonian king Alexander the Great and, for own purposes, spread around the eastern Mediterranean. On an even larger scale it was spread by the Romans over the whole of the Mediterranean world.

Die Griechische Klassik. Idee oder Wirklichkeit

, 627 on the Roman world: “Ausgangspunt ist die Feststellung, daß es sich um eine Zeit handelt, in der die Stile verschiedener Zeiten (Archaik, Klassik, Hellenismus) zur Verfügung standen. Seit dem Hellenismus erhielt die Wahl eines Stils die Funktion, bei dem betrachter bestimmte Assozationen hervorzurufen”.

In Dio Chrysostomus (also called Dio of Prusa) (

Or

. 37.25-27) has been preserved the so called

Corinthian oration

by the famous 2nd century AD sophist Favorinus of Arelate (Arles). In this oration a person representing Favorinus himself can claim he is: “not a Lucanian, but a Roman; not one of the rabble but a man of equestrian rank who has cultivated not only the language of the Greeks but their thought, life and dress as well, and all this so completely and so manifestly that not a single Roman before me –or even any Greek of my own time- has equalled me”.

Classicism

= a strategically assumed or naturalised identity (set of practices, fantasies, habits and attitudes), the assumption of which is designed to answer a specific problem in specific historical circumstances.

= the emulation of an earlier set of visual styles. Numerous earlier styles and forms serve as a kind of cultural memory bank. It is artisctic appropriation with important socio-political consequences.

A few applications, why is ‘a Greek style’ used?

Hellenistic Alexandria

: The overcome the cultural dislocation of a Greek educated elite

Hellenistic Greek East

: Exploring connections to,

inter alia

, the Athenian past

Roman world

: Expressing proximity to- or distance and autonomy from Greece (and often both of these at once)

Second Sophistic

: Articulating identity towards Rome (possibly)

Late antiquity

: Expressing newly defined paganism

18th century Europe

: Revolting against Christianity and the expression of Enlightenment ideas

*found in Rome in 1506 *it concerns a ‘free copy’ after a Hellenistic original of around 200 BC (“Hellenistic high baroque”).

*this artefact dates to the late 1 st century BC; more often in this period ‘copies’ in the Hellenistic high baroque-style were made *from a mention by Pliny we know that this group was placed in the palace of an emperor (Titus) around 80 AD.

As a cultural biography this is fascinating (style 200 BC, production 20 BC, use (still) 80 AD).

How do we account for the choice of this ‘Greek’ style?

Bestimmte Themen = Bestimmte Darstellungsformen

So called altar of Ahenobarbus, ca. 70 BC

So, the use of a ‘Greek’ style can be explained on what Baudrillard calls the natural stage (use). But what about the commodity stage (exchange) and the structural stage (sign)?

*What, then, is Roman?

*Conclusion: to be Roman, go Greek, Egyptian, and so on?

The use of foreign ‘styles’ in Rome (if our taxonomies are right!) reflects Roman imperialism (they are ‘trophies)’ but also they function as signs of status and identity, as bearers of aesthetic value, as components of ritual, and so on.

At the same time they constitue, they are Rome. This is the fascinating paradox: Roman = Etruscan, Oscan, Greek, Egyptian and so on. But at the same time there is something distinctly and clearly recognisably Roman all over the Mediterranean.

To understand the use of style in the Roman world, our framework should be INCLUDED ALTERITY

REMEMBER Addition

: imports (that might well have a different meaning in their different context!)

Modification

: formal changes might occur

Transformation

: new types and styles emerge, more local than foreign

Translation

: local products with a different meaning than the original

Creation

: an absorbtion of the old idea