The Instantiated Identity: Critical Approaches to Studying Gesture and Material Culture

Gesture and bodily comportment are fundamental to the maintenance and transmission of social identities. The degree to which they are employed and convey meaning is often culturally exclusive, rule-driven and context-specific. Gestures are also clearly power relations, structuring particular forms of social distinction, such as gender and age, and thereby replicating certain socially normative patterns of sexuality and role. A significant aspect in the study of gestures and bodily comportment that is often overlooked by other disciplines is the human utilisation of the material environment. Whilst the construction of the social being through movement is integral to both the experience of the lived body and a sense of personal identity, it is also one that is significantly negotiated through relations with things as well as other persons. Through examining ornaments and swords from the from the Northern and Central European Middle and Late Bronze Age this paper will discuss ways in which archaeology presents the opportunity to study from a material perspective the ‘generative field’ that would have structured the appropriate use of gestures as an embodied discourse in the maintenance and transmission of particular social identities and roles. Introduction: Instantiation and ‘techniques of the body’ In this paper I hope to demonstrate how the construction of particular aspects of identity during the Middle and Late Bronze Age in Central and Northern Europe were instantiated processes, that being the importance of the experience of practical bodily dispositions, in relation to material culture, in their temporal immediacy and spatial co-presence, or in other words – gestures. Gestures represent an embodied intentionality: they exist only because they have an intended audience (i.e. they must be witnessed) and performed only because they are intended to communicate1. There are a number of different forms of gestural communication and Argyle (1988: 188) distinguishes between three particular types of bodily movement: