Homing instincts: Grounded identities and dividual selves in the British Bronze Age

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, phenomenology has formed a basis for interpretations of a range of prehistoric buildings and monuments. Such approaches have been argued to provide insights into the interpretation and experience of these structures in the past. Yet, in focusing on the grounded and place-centred nature of human experience, we may be in danger of reproducing in the past particular elements of our own cultural context, notably the centrality of place in the construction of ontological security (as the ideology surrounding the "home" in modern English society demonstrates). Phenomenology emphasises the physicality of architecture in the creation of social identity at the expense of the social networks in which humans are embedded. This strikes a chord with high modernity in which communities and families are fragmenting while the home improvement industry booms. In contrast, this paper will explore how the materiality of the "home" belies its essentially cultural character and how even in our own society, the same house can be quite differently understood and experienced according to context. This paper will challenge the widespread assumption (reflected obliquely in recent phenomenological approaches) that self identity, as constructed through contexts such as the "home", is necessarily monolithic, fixed and unchanging. Drawing on anthropological studies of the self, a relational conception of the person provides the theoretical backdrop for an understanding of power relations within the domestic world of the settlement. The implications of this for our understanding of the domestic domain and gender relations in the past will be explored, in particular the challenge it poses to the idea that women's identities are inextricably and universally bound up with the domestic context. Ways of approaching the slippery and contextual nature of selfhood, identity and social power will be discussed using the example of British Bronze Age roundhouses. © 2005 Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York.