This is something that has recently been considered by Normark (2004) with reference to Maya archaeology and contemporary Maya identities, whereby the leaders of the contemporary Maya movement have criticized, rightly or wrongly, non-Maya Mayanist archaeology for the labels it ascribes. The Maya movement’s reaction to identity discourse is locked into a range of variables (the application of contemporary ethnic labels, the aftermath of the long civil war in Guatemala, which is the focus of Normark’s case study), but the main problem between ‘most archaeologists and the Maya movement is whether there is cultural continuity or discontinuity’ (Normark 2004: 130), and in how ‘surviving’ elements of Maya culture are used to strengthen the pan-Maya identity.
Configuring identities in archaeology
11
Although the reasons underpinning this example are obviously complex, and this author is not qualified to comment on Guatemalan politics and identities, the important point to reiterate is that, in general, hermeneutical and empirical ‘apartheid’
which can be generated by vested-interest identity groups is not at all conducive to either the understanding of identities, past and present, or to the development of relevant theory and methodology in approaching past identities. Yet with the currents of relativism swirling around the edges of archaeology, but not to the degree of anthropology (Eriksen 1995; Geertz 2000), reluctance to engage with the archaeology of other identities, perhaps vocal ones, is partly understandable. Nonetheless, archaeology as a discipline and archaeologists as its proponents should be both mature and confident enough to overcome such hurdles in recognizing difference, but also in emphasizing complexity, and where necessary commonality, or what Gosden (1994: 196) has termed (though not in the context of identities), ‘the creation of some common ground without undermining the nature of difference’.
The multicultural society: a new phenomenon?
A core contribution, perhaps, which archaeology can make in considering identities is in assessing the phenomenon of the multicultural society. Which is obviously pred-icated upon, to put it crudely, the interaction of identity groups, and within the context of this author’s life (just short of four decades), multiculturalism has gone from being a term not frequently heard to one at the top of the agenda, at least in Western Europe. This has been an era of massive change, with the decline of colonial-ism, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the growth of globalization with its allied information and people flows (see Schlee 2002a). The opposites of political-economic instability and freedom have meant that people have migrated to an unprecedented extent. New identities are being constructed, but more so the interaction of different
‘identity’ groups is occurring within the new societies which are being constructed, both virtually and physically.
Yet within the overall debates as to what multiculturalism actually means (Cashmore 1994; May 2002; Brochmann 2003a), very little thought appears to have been given to whether contemporary multicultural societies have any precedents. A historical perspective (and included here is archaeology) beyond the context of 40–50
years, i.e. the beginnings of the current multicultural phenomenon, is neglected (see for example Brochmann 2003b). Furthermore archaeologists have been unusually mute about this subject as well. This is surprising for it is obviously of the greatest relevance for us as archaeologists, for through the entirety of the slabs of time with which we deal the absence of suitable ‘multicultural’ comparative examples would be astounding. And we can withhold our astonishment for they do exist, with perhaps the best-known example being Imperial Rome, i.e. the city, where both archaeology and history allow us to assess an earlier experiment in multiculturalism.
The parallels between Rome and modern cities/societies have been noted by others; Brian Hayden (2003: 404–5), for instance, makes the point that ‘today’s Industrial society is much more reminiscent of Imperial Rome, in which all cults were tolerated provided that they abided by the laws of the land and respected the rights of others’.
The status of Rome as a ‘cosmopolis’, a world city, is also discussed by Edwards and Woolf (2004), and they mention how documentary sources describe peoples from the
12
Timothy Insoll
Danube region – Germans, Arabs, and Ethiopians, among others – as all being inhab-itants of Rome.
Yet, unsurprisingly, there were also many differences between Rome and modern multicultural cities represented, say, by London or New York. For example:
•
The latter do not claim, as Rome did, according to Edwards and Woolf (2004: 4), ‘to rule the world’.
•
An active emphasis is not put upon gathering together ‘the world’s greatest books and greatest scholars’, as was also undertaken in Rome (ibid.: 15).
•
Disease, a correlate of Rome’s world city status in drawing together ‘the most noxious germs of the Empire’ (ibid.: 10), is obviously not such a factor of importance today.
But the similarities are also surprising. These include:
•
as already mentioned, the plurality of religious beliefs found in Rome, described by Edwards and Woolf (2004: 9) as ‘a bewildering variety of cults from all over the empire’;
•
in the process whereby smaller ‘colonies’ were established within the larger city
– which today we might translate into different areas inhabited by different ethnic, religious, or other identity groups;
•
or in the angst recorded in Latin historical sources as to the nature of immigra-tion, very resonant in Europe today, and reflected in ‘attempts to police, limit and control the influx of people and traditions on which the physical and demo-graphic survival of the city depended’ (ibid.: 9);
•
or again, in Rome in the immigrant’s portrayal ‘as opportunistic economic migrants’ (Edwards and Woolf 2004: 12).