memoria ethnologica nr. 48 - 49 * iulie - decembrie 2013 ( An XIII ) ROLAND BOER1, AUSTRALIA Cuvinte cheie: rudenie, gospodărie, Asia antică de sud-vest (Orientul Apropiat), genealogii, flexibilitate, locul de cult Printre clanuri şi gospodării: despre maleabilitatea gospodăriilor organizate pe bază de rudenie în antichitatea Orientului Apropiat Rezumat Acest studiu oferă o nouă interpretare a structurilor gospodăriilor pe bază de rudenie din antichitatea Asiei de sud-vest (antichitatea Orientului Apropiat, 3000-333 î.Ch.). Pornind de la descoperirile lui Henri Lefebvre referitoare la “analiza ritmică“, încercăm să contracarăm tendinţa de a vedea gospodăriile formate pe bază de rudenie în termeni statici - ca o familie care este organizată în mod auto-suficient. Analiza se concentrează pe natura colectivă a acestor gospodării bazate pe rudenie, pe funcţia şi pe raţiunile maleabilităţii genealogiilor, pe flexibilitatea spaţiului care se reproduce constant. Studiul se încheie prin luarea în considerare a unui exemplu al acestei flexibilităţi, şi anume a povestirilor orale legate de “locul (colţul) de cult”. Importanţa gospodăriilor organizate pe bază de rudenie constă în determinarea socială a realităţii economice a supravieţuirii prin subzistenţă: prin premisele religioase şi culturale, legile tradiţionale, prin diviziunea muncii şi sancţiunea socială, acestea determinau cine ce face şi unde anume, cine primeşte, ce anume şi de la cine. 1 Renmin University of China (Beijing), and the University of Newcastle, Australia. 6 memoria ethnologica nr. 48 - 49 * iulie - decembrie 2013 ( An XIII ) Key words: kinship; household; ancient Southwest Asia (Near East); genealogies; flexibility; cult corner. By Clans and Households: On the Malleability of the Kinship-Household in the Ancient Near East Summary This study offers a new interpretation of the structures of the kinship- household in the ancient Southwest Asia (ancient Near East, 3000-333 BC). Drawing on the insights of Henri Lefebvre’s “rhythmanalysis,” it seeks to counter the tendency to see the kinship-household in static terms – as a family living in a self-contained dwelling. The analysis focuses on the collective nature of the kinship-household, the function of and reasons for the malleability of genealogies, and the flexibility of constantly reproduced space. It closes by considering a tell-tale instance of that flexibility, namely, the “cult corner.” The importance of the kinship- household lies in social determination of the economic reality of subsis- tence survival: through religion and cultural assumptions, customary law, division of labor, and social sanction, it determined who does what where and who receives what from whom. 7 memoria ethnologica nr. 48 - 49 * iulie - decembrie 2013 ( An XIII ) By Clans and Households: On the Malleability of the Kinship-Household in the Ancient Near East So the Israelites departed from there at that time by clans and households (Judges 21:24). The question of households and kinship in the ancient Near East2 is a topic of significant debate and in need of some new thinking. I would like to take some steps towards a new way of considering the material, not least because it has a bearing on our own assumptions concerning such matters. In particular, I seek to challenge the tendency to think of households in static terms (as built structures in fixed locations) and of kinship purely in terms of the living. Thus, I am interested their collective orientation, the malleability of their genealogical reconstructions, and flexibility in their productions of space and rhythms of life. But why link the two terms with a hyphen – kinship-house- hold – as I have done in the title? The reason is that they provide different angles for speaking of the same phenomenon. The two may have different methodological starting points, with the more recent research on households3 basing itself on archaeological work and the older study of kinship relying on extrapolation from ethnographic and textual material. Yet they speak of the same reality. However, even in the statement of the distinct methodological approaches, we can already see the origins of the static tendencies in interpretation, since archaeological artifacts have lain in place for thousands of years. Thereby they give a sense of stability and location, and the methods for analyzing them tend to be spatial and quantitative. So too are texts static cultural artifacts, for they are written at a certain time and place and then preserved through the vagaries of time. The effort to see them in more dynamic terms therefore requires a methodological leap. In the following discussion I begin with a discussion of the collective nature of the kinship-household. In the section that follows, I focus malleable genealogies, turning after that to deal with more recent work on households (albeit with kinship in mind). Collectives The starting point of my investigation is that the kinship-household is an eminently collective form. It may be defined as a particular form of collective life with ideological, social, and economic dimensions. In its ideological dimension, the kinship-household functions as an extra-economic form of compulsion crucial for any economic system to function. It ensures that most of the small population sees itself as part of the social whole and partakes of the necessary functions to ensure survival. And it does so by offering justifying narratives, such as genealogies and mythical stories 2 In the body of the article, I use ancient Southwest Asia for what has traditionally been called the ancient Near East. The former term is more accurate from a global and geographical perspective, and is coming into use among scholars. It covers the period from the fourth to the first millenniums BC. 3 Most of the current work on households takes its theoretical and methodological cue from Richard R. Wilk and William L. Rathje, "Household Archaeology," American Behavioral Scientist 25(1982): 617-39. For useful surveys of the research on households in relation to the Levant, see Assaf Yasur-Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling, and Laura B. Mazow, "Introduction: The Past and Present of Household Archaeology in Israel," in Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, ed. Assaf Yasur- Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling, and Laura B. Mazow, 1-8 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); James W. Hardin, "Understanding Houses, Households, and the Levantine Archaeological Record," ibid., 9-25. 8 memoria ethnologica nr. 48 - 49 * iulie - decembrie 2013 ( An XIII ) of the ancestors, along with fostering customary assumptions such as loyalty, behavior, association, and labor. Socially, kinship provides certain structures for collective organization. The best way to see such organization in operation is to focus on the village communities that were the mainstay of life in ancient Southwest Asia, for these villages were typically organized in terms of kinship.4 The mean village area during the Bronze and Iron ages in the southern Levant was 0.5 hectares, many of which occupied less than that area. This provides a mean human population of 75-150 people for each village. Significantly, this is roughly the same size as the clan, or – to use a term from biblical Hebrew – mišpā-â...5 The overlap is reinforced by the way the texts such as the Samaria Ostraca (eighth century) use the same name to designate a place as the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) uses for a clan.6 Of course, that name was drawn from the mythical founder of the clan village in question. In short, the village and the clan were overlapping realities.7 So we find that the crucial village community, with its herds of sheep and goats and patterns of allocated land shares, was largely coterminous with the clan, which provided the social determination of the economic activities of the village.8 As for the clan itself, it was endogamous, provided protective association (including the basis of the militia), was the primary social horizon within which people understood their place in the world, and was remarkably resilient.9 It was also the prime social determination of basic economic form of the time, subsistence survival. The allocation of field shares, of herding animals, of agricultural tasks, and of myriad other tasks, was determined in large part according to patterns of the kinship-household. Production was only half of the story, for kinship comes into its own in the allocation of the much-needed produce of herd and crop.10 A slaughtered sheep or goat is consumed – from choice portions to apparently useless parts – in terms of kinship lines. So also are the milks, fibers, and bones distributed according to such patterns. In other words, production and consumption appear as one beneath the umbrella of kinship; it was not a question of individuals sharing (post-Rousseau), but the simple assumption that any labor and usufruct belonged to the group. 4 Here is I am indebted to the detailed calculations of Liverani and Schloen, as well as the careful analysis of Jankowska concerning Arrapkha, where the clan and the village overlapped to a significant degree. Ninel B. Jankowska, "Communal Self- Government and the King of the State of Arrapha," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 12(1969): 233- 82, 239-53; J. David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2001), 155-65; Mario Liverani, Israel's History and the History of Israel, trans. Chiara Peri and Philip Davies (London: Equinox, 2005), 21-22. See also the summary in Douglas A. Knight, Law, Power, and Justice in Ancient Israel, Library of Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011). 5 I write “roughly,” since we need to be careful not to fix such a correspondence too tightly, especially in light of my emphasis on fluidity and flexibility. Igor M. Diakonoff, "Socio-Economic Classes in Babylonia and the Babylonian Concept of Social Stratification," in Gesellschaftsklassen im Alten Zweistromland und in den angrenzenden Gebieten, ed. Dietz Otto Edzard, 41-52 (Munich: Beck, 1972), 44.] 6 Yohanan Aharoni, The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979), 357-68; Cornelis. H. J de Geus, The Tribes of Israel (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1979), 138-40; Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East, 156-59. 7 See also Judges 6:24; 8:32; 2 Samuel 14:7, Jeremiah 3:14. 8 On the matter of the clan or gens as the prime social determinant, I agree with Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 3. 9 Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 BCE (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999 [1979]), 257-84. 10 “Kinship relations served as the social relations of production and distribution, regulating access to the means of produc- tion and determining the distribution of the products of labor.” Ronald A. Simkins, "Patronage and the Political Economy of Ancient Israel," Semeia 87(1999): 123-44, 132. 9 memoria ethnologica nr. 48 - 49 * iulie - decembrie 2013 ( An XIII ) Malleable Genealogies Kinship, of course, appears in different shapes across quite distinct social formations. In some formations, it is subordinate to other modes of social and economic organization, but in the societies of ancient Southwest Asia kinship was a prominent and determining feature. A distinct sign of its prominence is the omnipresence of genealogies, such as those we find in the texts of the Hebrew Bible. Two items need to be emphasized in relation to genealogies. The first is that kinship structures were as practically collective as they were ideologically constructed. Not only were the flexible genealogies given mythical ancestors – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for instance – but they had their gods, gods who were fiercely clan-loyal. It is a short step from the mythical narratives of specific clans to the people as a whole clan, with one patriarchal deity. Here may be found the source of the necessary fable, or political myth, of the distinct origins of an ethnic group.11 For instance, as archaeological records now show quite clearly, ancient Israel was a collection of local Canaanite groups. In order to assert a distinct identity over against this common background, a story had to be told of old and long kinship lines. That story was of course an impressive act of creativity.12 Second, there is the well documented artificiality and malleability of genealogies. Such flexibility – which is usually attributed to political and ideological tensions – is better seen as an indicator of the shifting contours of what counts as the socio-economic unit of the kinship group. Should a famine or plague decimate some tribal groups, then their leftovers need to be included within other groups. Should captives from war arrive, or should some tribes themselves find themselves splintered due to war, then other groups expand their own sense of identity to include those needing a collective home.13 Here an apparent tension between conservative assumptions and the realities of life, with its shortage of able-bodied laborers, emerges. The genealogies, and indeed customary law concerning endogamous marriage and kinship associations,14 seem to make it difficult for outsiders to join the group, yet the group in question was highly flexible.15 How to solve this tension? Assert the deep continuity of the genealogies and the restrictions to outsiders, while at the same time constantly remold that “unchangeable” tradition. “We have done so since time immemorial” bears with it the assumption that “time immemorial” is no longer than a few years. Even more, the creative malleability of genealogies indicates a rather different sense of what constitutes a kinship group or “family.” Rather than assuming that such a group is constituted by 11 See further Roland Boer, Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 12 For ongoing debates over these issues, suffused with the continuous struggle between some Israelis and Palestinians in our own day, see Avraham Faust, Israel's Ethnogenesis: Settelment, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance (London: Equinox, 2006); Yuval Gadot, "Houses and Households in Settlements along the Yarkon River, Israel, during the Iron Age I: Society, Economy, and Identity," in Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, ed. Assaf Yasur-Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling, and Laura B. Mazow, 155-81 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); David Ben-Shlomo, "Early Iron Age Domestic Material Culture in Philistia and an Eastern Mediterranean Koiné," ibid., 183-206; P. M. M. Daviau, "Domestic Architecture in Iron Age Ammon: Buildings Materials, Construction Techniques, and Room Arrangement," in Ancient Ammon, ed. Burton MacDonald and Randall W. Younker, 113-36 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 113. 13 L. V. Danilova, "Controversial Problems of the Theory of Precapitalist Societies," Soviet Anthropology and Archeology 9, no. 4 (1971): 269-328, 276; Philippe Guillaume, Land, Credit and Crisis: Agrarian Finance in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Equinox, 2012), 51-52; Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East, 71. 14 The assumed unchangeableness of customary law was predicated on, and indeed justified, constant adaptation. For instance, when the ever-present threat of economic crisis became real (as in the long period towards the close of the second millennium), the collection of assumed patterns of social interaction would be reconstituted to ensure survival. For a comprehensive study of customary law, see Knight, Law, Power, and Justice in Ancient Israel, 115-56. 15 For example, see Genesis 38:2 and Exodus 2:21. 10 memoria ethnologica nr. 48 - 49 * iulie - decembrie 2013 ( An XIII ) living blood relations, it moves well outside such connections. But the question is how far it did extend? Given the ubiquity of sacrifices to and veneration for the ancestors, the dead were included, not least because they often dwelt in a chamber beneath the floor or were represented by the teraphim (anthropomorphic statues).16 Schloen notes astutely: “The ‘living’ household was also, in a sense, the household of the dead, because deceased ancestors continued to participate in the social life of their descendants.”17 Of course, the dead do not engage materially in agricultural production, but even here they are recipients of reallocated produce, particularly in the daily pattern of invoking their names (a task for the eldest son), in breaking some bread for them as part of the meal of the living, and in the presence of the “chair for the ghost.” Every month in Mesopotamia, more lavish items were set aside, culminating in the vigil for the dead at the end of fifth month (summer). However, their prime function was ideological, an extra-economic dimension that was very much part of the kinship-household. Given the inescapable interlacing of the sacred with everyday agricultural life, the dead were very much present, for not only did daily life have its specific rituals for the dead, but they were invoked in all those myriad moments I mentioned earlier.18 Flexible Households All of which brings me to the concern with households, which has become a major focus of archaeological work since it – laudably – provides access, to some extent, to the lives of ordinary people rather than those of the ruling class.19 I assume a definition of household that provides a slight twist to the usual: a household comprises the rhythms of life and flexible constructions of space within and without a distinct structure or collection of structures that may be more or less permanent, which is made possible by the social and economic context in which it is found. Let me say a little more about each of these terms. Household is far preferable to “family,” with its modern assumptions of (constructed) blood ties between individuals. Thus, it is comprised of people, animals, the smells, sounds, tastes, and items of everyday life – tools, cooking pots, jugs, storage containers, clothes, pestles, lamps, and so on. However, these are not static, for they involve constant rhythms, of movement within, of the flow of items, both animate 16 Evidence for such chambers is found across ancient Southwest Asia, whether Syria (Ugarit), the Levant (Bronze Age), or Mesopotamia (Ur). Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East, 342-46; van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life, 218-25; Patrick D. Miller, The Religion of Ancient Israel, Library of Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster- John Knox, 2000), 72. 17 Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East, 346. 18 On ancestor cults and veneration for the dead, see Miller, The Religion of Ancient Israel, 54-55, 71-72; Naomi Steinberg, "Exodus 12 in Light of Ancestral Cult Practices," in The Family in Life and Death: The Family in Ancient Israel: Social and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Dutcher-Walls, 89-105 (London: T & T Clark, 2009); E. Bloch-Smith, "From Womb to Tomb: The Israelite Family in Death as in Life," ibid., 122-31; van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life; Karel Van der Toorn, "Family Religion in Second Millennium West Asia (Mesopotamia, Emar, Nuzi)," in Household and Family Religion in Antiquity: Contextual and Comparative Perspectives, ed. John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan, 20-36 (Malden: Blackwell, 2008). 19 It is worth noting that “household commune” was a common term in Russian scholarship well before its recent fashion. Igor M. Diakonoff, "The Commune in the Ancient East as Treated in the Works of Soviet Researchers," in Introduction to Soviet Ethnography, Volume II, ed. Stephen P. Dunn and Ethel Dunn, 519-48 (Berkeley: Highgate Road Social Science Re- search Station, 1974), 529; Igor M. Diakonoff, "The Structure of Near Eastern Society before the Middle of the Second Mil- lennium B.C.," Oikumene 3(1982): 7-100, 37; Igor M. Diakonoff, "General Outline of the First Period of the History of the Ancient World and the Problem of the Ways of Development," in Early Antiquity, ed. Igor M. Diakonoff and Philip L. Kohl, 27-66 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 34-35; Diakonoff, "Early Despotisms in Mesopotamia," 88. 11 memoria ethnologica nr. 48 - 49 * iulie - decembrie 2013 ( An XIII ) and inanimate, into and out of the place, of the way space itself is produced through such rhythms.20 That is, households are eminently flexible, constantly reusing items for different purposes, and reconfiguring internal and external space in multiple ways depending upon the needs of the moment. While “household” emphasizes structures for dwelling, such dwellings may be more or less permanent. They may be anything from tents or ruins used for a season, or they may be longer-term structures made out of brick, timber, mud, and plaster – such as the “courtyard” cluster or ubiquitous “pillared” dwelling in the southern Levant, with its three or four rooms. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the household is contained within such spaces, for it comprises what is both external and internal to the various structures. Finally, households are not discrete units, but constituted by the social and economic context in which they function – the clan village I discussed earlier.21 This definition is an effort to deal with some of problems associated with research on house- holds. First, it is too often assumed that a household is a dwelling in which a family lives, whether nuclear or extended.22 Although scholarly weight is firmly on the side of extended families, it is usually postulated in terms of different combinations of nuclear and extended families, with the latter spread over a number of households.23 Alternatively and very much within the family fold, a 20 I am indebted here to the insights of Henri Lebebvre, both his proposals concerning the production of space and “rhythm- analysis.” Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. David Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004); Henri Lefebvre, Éléments de rythmanalyse (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 1992). See also Beth Alpert Nakhai, "Varieties of Religious Expression in the Domestic Setting," in Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, ed. Assaf Yasur- Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling, and Laura B. Mazow, 347-60 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 347; Scott Branting, "Agents in Motion," in Agency and Identity in the Ancient Near East: New Paths Forward, ed. Sharon R. Steadman and Jennifer C. Ross, 47-59 (London: Equinox, 2010); Susan Ackerman, "Household Religion, Family Religion, and Women’s Religion in Ancient Israel," in Household and Family Religion in Antiquity: Contextual and Comparative Perspectives, ed. John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan, 127-58 (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), 128. 21 My thanks to Christina Petterson (personal communication) for this definition, which is drawn from her current work on the Moravian household in eighteenth-century Europe. Too often definitions of “household” restrict it to human beings and veer towards the static. This is a legacy of the oft-cited definition of Wilk and Rathje, who specify: a) the social unit constituting the household; b) the material reality of the dwelling and its contents; c) human behavior. Wilk and Rathje, "Household Archaeology," 618; Hardin, "Understanding Houses, Households, and the Levantine Archaeological Record," 14; David Ben- Shlomo, "Early Iron Age Domestic Material Culture in Philistia and an Eastern Mediterranean Koiné," ibid., 183-206, 186. 22 Stager’s oft-cited but problematic article on the “family” in ancient Israel (which he assumes was based in the highlands from 1200 BC onwards) assured that this term would persist in studies of households in the Levant. Lawrence E. Stager, "The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel," BASOR 260(1985): 1-35. As a sample of those who follow his lead, see Nava Panitz-Cohen, "A Tale of Two Houses: The Role of Pottery in Reconstructing Household Wealth and Composition," in Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, ed. Assaf Yasur-Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling, and Laura B. Mazow, 85-105 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 100-3; Aaron J. Brody, "The Archaeology of the Extended Family: A Household Compound from Iron II Tell en-Nasbeh," ibid., 237-54; Avraham Faust, "Household Economies in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah," ibid., 255-73; Saul M. Olyan, "Family Religion in Israel and the Wider Levant of the First Millennium BCE," in Household and Family Religion in Antiquity: Contextual and Comparative Perspectives, ed. John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan, 113-26 (Malden: Blackwell, 2008). 23 As a sample, see Panitz-Cohen, "A Tale of Two Houses: The Role of Pottery in Reconstructing Household Wealth and Composition," 100-3; Aaron J. Brody, "The Archaeology of the Extended Family: A Household Compound from Iron II Tell en-Nasbeh," ibid., 237-54; Avraham Faust, "Household Economies in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah," ibid., 255-73; van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life, 225. Alternatively, the conflict between nuclear and extended families is read as locus of political and economic tension between kinship structures and the monarchy. Simkins, "Patronage and the Political Economy of Ancient Israel," 136-38; Ronald A. Simkins, "Family in the Political Ecomony of Monarchic Israel," Bible and Critical Theory 1, no. 1 (2004): 1-17. If we must use the terminology of extended families, then Diakonoff has to my knowledge the simplest and best solution: an extended family is the norm, but occasionally breakaway groups may for a time function as what we now call nuclear families until they had built themselves up to the status of an extended family. Igor M. Diakonoff, "Extended Families in Old Babylonian Ur," Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäiologie 75(1985): 47-65, 48-49. 12 memoria ethnologica nr. 48 - 49 * iulie - decembrie 2013 ( An XIII ) simplistic and unmediated correlate is at times made between size of dwelling and size of family: smaller structures (especially in towns) are assumed to be the dwellings of nuclear families, while larger structures (sometimes in towns but more often in villages) housed extended families.24 The initial problem here is the looseness of the terminology, for “nuclear” and “extended” operate as a catchall opposition that gathers all manner of different arrangements without specification. Does “extended” include all blood relations or only some of them, or perhaps those also fused by means of legal arrangement? Does it include the dead or recent additions that have been creatively added to the genealogy?25 Only in this light does it make sense to speak of an “extended” family, although I prefer “clan.” As for the “nuclear” family, it is best to put that term to rest and refer to a “mating couple,” biologically necessary for the production of children. In pondering these questions, the oft-unexamined assumptions associated with the term “family” begin to reveal themselves. It comprises the fundamental building block of society and economy, it is argued in an echo of slogans of the religious and political right. It includes one’s immediate or more distant blood and legal relatives, is natural and universal. And a family lives in a house, or at least an identifiable and discrete dwelling, separated from other families who live in similar dwellings.26 The anachronism is becoming obvious, but I would add that the anthropological evidence of the way human beings connect with one another is so varied that it becomes difficult to know what “family” means. In some cases husbands and wives never live together, in others the biological paternity of children is never known and ignored in raising children, in yet others slaves mediate all social relations, and so on.27 A second problem is a carry-over from the focus on the family: the household, it is asserted ad nauseam, is the basic socio-economic unit, upon which larger economic structures are built.28 The trap now, however, is a fragmented approach to the economy. One begins with the smallest identifiable unit and then sees the whole as made up of those units – a distinctive approach characteristic of research undertaken within a capitalist framework. The truth is somewhat different, for those units would not exist at all without the wider framework. A household exists 24 These calculations operate on the rather fixed assumption that one human being requires 10 square meters of roofed area in which to live. Avraham Faust, "Differences in Family Structure between Cities and Villages in the Iron Age II," Tel Aviv 26(1999): 233-52; Avraham Faust, "The Farmstead in the Highlands of Iron Age II Israel," in The Rural Landscape of Ancient Israel, ed. Aren M. Maeir, Shimon Dar, and Ze'ev Safrai, 91-104 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2003); Faust, "Household Economies in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah," 257, 262-63; David Ilan, "Household Gleanings from Iron I Tel Dan," ibid., 133-54, 144. Morris offers a comparably crude example from the study of Greek history, in which house size is taken to be an indication of growth in wealth. Ian Morris, "Archaeology, Standards of Living, and Greek Economic History," in The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models, ed. Joseph Gilbert Manning and Ian Morris, 91-126 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 25 Thereby expanding what Laslett calls a “houseful.” Peter Laslett, "Introduction: The History of the Family," in Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, 1-89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 36. 26 See also the criticisms of the terminology of “family” by Ackerman, "Household Religion, Family Religion, and Women’s Religion in Ancient Israel," 127. 27 See the extensive number of examples in Bonnie J. Fox, ed. Family Patterns, Gender Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Susan McKinnon, Neo-Liberal Genetics: The Limits and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2005). 28 Many studies begin simply by reiterating the claim, by Wilk and Rathje in their programmatic study, that the household is the “most common social component of subsistence, the smallest and most abundant activity group.” Wilk and Rathje, "Household Archaeology," 618. As a sample of this repeated assertion, see Carol Meyers, "Material Remains and Social Relations: Women's Culture in Agrarian Household of the Iron Age," in Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina, ed. William G. Dever and Seymour Gitin, 425-44 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 427; Hardin, "Understanding Houses, Households, and the Levantine Archaeological Record," 10; Aaron J. Brody, "The Archaeology of the Extended Family: A Household Compound from Iron II Tell en-Nasbeh," ibid., 237-54, 239; Avraham Faust, "Household Economies in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah," ibid., 255-73, 255; Lily Singer-Avitz, "Household Activities at Tel Beersheba," ibid., 275-301, 275. 13 memoria ethnologica nr. 48 - 49 * iulie - decembrie 2013 ( An XIII ) not in sheer isolation, as though it would on another planet, but in the context of the determinative social and economic form. Third, researchers are tempted to regard the household as a static entity. The physical reality of traces of foundations, walls, roofs, and rooms often make this temptation irresistible, as do the archaeological items that have lain in situ for millennia.29 Not only static, it is also contained and constrained by the outer walls of a single dwelling or of a cluster of structures (tents typically do not leave much of a trace). My earlier definition explicitly seeks to counter such a static approach, focusing as it does on rhythms and the flexibility of constantly reconstructed space. Precisely how such space was reproduced may actually be beyond our imaginative ability. I think not only of the constant rhythms and flows inside and outside a built structure or collection of structures, not only of the fact that a household is clearly not constrained by walls (that are often difficult to identify), but also of a couple of curious features that emerge from documents of transfer (although there are no central registers of possessors or title deeds). For instance, throughout Mesopotamia, a reasonably large collection of such documents – all from urban contexts, but here we may extrapolate to rural situations on the question of space – specify the built space that is to be transferred in terms of its internal dimensions, not the external dimensions, as so much analysis assumes.30 The difference is often considerable.31 At this point, we may suggest that such a focus reveals a concern with lived space and not on external house size as a determinant of value. But now it becomes even more intriguing: virtually all of the titles that have survived never specify a complete structure, but only part of it – usually a room or part of a room, which was measured out by covering the floor with grain, such as barley or emmer wheat. A number of town or village officials with various titles (such as “master house surveyor,” “street herald,” and “great one of the peg”) were present to ensure that the measurements and payments were accurate. The part of the room so transferred then had an object (peg or cone) hammered into the wall. I have been unable to find anyone who can provide coherent reasons for these practices, particularly the parts of rooms transferred, which suggests that the perceptions and constructions of space are even further from our own than we may expect.32 As a further example, the layout of the remains of built structures and their relationships to one another indicates a very different sense of spatial production. Each is at oblique angles, jutting out here, and bending to the curving streets and lanes there. Often a building has a bend or two on one side, with a rather different bend on the other. Why these varying angles? Why these bent streets? Why the jumbles of houses and buildings? It speaks of a production of space, a notion of lived reality that is far from our own. It is not as though they did not have the wherewithal to construct neat right angles, but rather – and this is only a guess – the sense that 29 Schloen’s quaint but obsessive effort to calculate numbers of persons on the basis of dwelling size is perhaps the most extreme example. Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East, 165-83. See also Panitz-Cohen, "A Tale of Two Houses: The Role of Pottery in Reconstructing Household Wealth and Composition." 30 Yuval Gadot, "Houses and Households in Settlements along the Yarkon River, Israel, during the Iron Age I: Society, Economy, and Identity," ibid., 155-81, 160; Bruce Routledge, "Average Families? House Size Variability in the Southerly Levantine Iron Age," in The Family in Life and Death: The Family in Ancient Israel: Social and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Dutcher-Walls, 42-60 (London: T & T Clark, 2009); Faust, "Differences in Family Structure between Cities and Villages in the Iron Age II." 31 For example, in a tablet from Tello in the Old Akkadian period (third millennium), the entire building measures 164.5 m2 but the inside space is 89 m2, which is 54 percent of the external dimensions. Marc van de Mieroop, "Thoughts on Urban Real Estate in Ancient Mesopotamia," in Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East, ed. Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine, 253-87 (Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1999), 266. 32 For further discussion, see Mieroop, "Thoughts on Urban Real Estate in Ancient Mesopotamia," 356. 14 memoria ethnologica nr. 48 - 49 * iulie - decembrie 2013 ( An XIII ) human existence was a much more complex affair, in contrast to the supposedly clear calculations of life in our own time. Flexible, dynamically rhythmic, perpetually reproduced space – these are the features of the household I seek to emphasize. But what are the implications for kinship? Simply put, the households in question were patriarchal and patrilineal, as well as being the locus of customary law. As should be obvious by now, these patriarchal households were not fixed entities, but malleable in terms of who or what was part of them. They had both ideological functions and economic roles. The rhythms of who went out when to what field-shares, what animals would be taken out to the herds and back again, what equipment was used and to whom it should be given next, who would work the olive presses or cultivate the orchards, what foods, fibers, fuels, liquids, and other products were gathered, brought in and processed, where food is to be cooked and eaten and where it was to be taken,33 which animals would return, how waste was dealt with – these constant flows were determined by the social reality of the patriarchal kinship-household. So too were activities that required collective activity, such as harvesting, oil pressing, baking, beer and wine brewing, storage of surpluses for tough times.34 What are the implications for gender? Here two points are pertinent. First, women found themselves in either a patrilocal or virilocal household.35 By patrilocal I mean the woman lives in the house of her father (or grandfather, in the unlikely chance that he is still alive) while her partner comes to live the same household. It follows that a virilocal household entails the woman living in her husband’s household, who would then be subject to his own father. These distinctions are an obvious and deliberate shift from the tradition categories of matrilocal and patrilocal, which obscure the nature of gender arrangements. In either case, the women in question were formally and socially subject to the economic and social directions of the male head of the household. All of which leads to the second point concerning the division of labor. Here we face a curious twist. Many have assumed that women typically engage in “domestic activities,” such as the processing and preparation of food, spinning and weaving, bearing and raising of young, along with labor- intensive tasks involved in the gathering, threshing, and storage of crops. The problem is that it is actually quite difficult to specify such activities from archaeological data. Some skeletal remains of women indicate deformities from bending, kneeling, and threshing, and it may be the case that cooking and weaving were primarily the tasks of women, but as Singer-Avitz points out, it is impossible to determine what household spaces were used by which sex.36 By now the reason 33 These rhythms and flows of food are implicit in the concept of “foodways,” although the full potential of such foodways is not often realized. Nimrod Marom and Sharon Zuckerman, "Applying On-Site Analysis of Faunal Assemblages from Domestic Contexts: A Case Study from the Lower City of Hazor," in Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, ed. Assaf Yasur-Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling, and Laura B. Mazow, 37-54 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Typically, food tended to be prepared and cooked outside in the hotter months and inside during the cooler part of the year. Aaron J. Brody, "The Archaeology of the Extended Family: A Household Compound from Iron II Tell en-Nasbeh," ibid., 237-54, 249. 34 A sufficient number of installations in village communities that may well have been oil presses, bakeries, breweries, and storage facilities, indicate local collective activity on these matters. Schloen points out that the locations of the oil presses indicate that they were part of the subsistence economy, with approximately 20 percent of dwellings having such presses. Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East, 138-40. 35 Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); David Jobling, "Feminism and 'Mode of Production' in Ancient Israel: Search for a Method," in The Bible and the Politics of Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Norman K. Gottwald on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. David Jobling, Peggy L. Day, and Gerald T. Sheppard, 239-51 (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1991). 36 Singer-Avitz, "Household Activities at Tel Beersheba," 294. Hardin stresses the dynamic and adaptive nature of gender and labor, over against static and absolute distinctions. James W. Hardin, "Understanding Houses, Households, and the Levantine Archaeological Record," ibid., 9-25, 21. 15 memoria ethnologica nr. 48 - 49 * iulie - decembrie 2013 ( An XIII ) should be obvious, for the multifunctional flexibility of space, which was constantly reproduced, also means that men and women overlapped in many areas of the actual work needed for subsistence survival in the framework of the kinship-household. While the whole structure may have been normally under the tutelage of a kinship-household head, the reality of shortage of labor meant less specialization and the utilization of all hands. Finally, we should not forget the impression on the senses of these rhythms and flows. Sounds come and go: humans talking and shouting, calling to animals, whistling to a dog; animals bleating, snorting, lowing, barking, hissing, urinating, and defecating. Smells move almost as fast as light, swirling about and constantly on the move: urine, feces, refuse piles, raw meat, blood, threshed grain, baked bread, brewing beer, cooking stews, unwashed human bodies, wet animal fur, lanolin, the smells of sex, birth, and death … For where it smells, it is not only warm, but it is also busy. Without the myriad agents to remove bacteria and their effect, taste too was strong, on the air, in the food, in the beer and wine, in the intimacy of ripely smelling bodies. And touch: of fur, wool, and hide, of thistle, fruit, and grain, of wood, stone, and metal; of slime, roughness, and moisture. Conclusion: On Cult Corners I have emphasized the malleability and flexibility of the kinship-household in ancient South- west Asia, in an effort to counter the tendency to see it in static terms. There is little need to reiterate the main points of the argument here – concerning collectives, genealogies, and households. So let me close in a slightly different way by drawing on the example of the so-called “cult corners.” These emphasize my argument quite strongly, but now drawing in the question of religion. A cult corner may be defined as a “small area or part of an area in a larger building or courtyard, with or without a bench, and containing ritual objects that could accommodate two to three people.”37 They may take the form of a partition or niche in a wall, a platform, bench, or plastered surface, usually in a corner of a room or in a courtyard. At the same time, these cult corners are profoundly ambivalent, or difficult to identify. Their identification is usually made intuitively by archaeologists, assuming clear distinctions between the sacred and the profane. The problem is that, as I have argued, space was multifunctional, or, rather, it was constantly reproduced through its usage. The fact that some cult corners appear in transitional areas such as passageways and gates enhances this reality. This means that what may be used for cultic purposes may also be used for everyday activities, except that to describe it in such a fashion assumes a sharp separation between the two. Instead, while the corner was the location for a sheaf of grain, worked animal bone, amulet, figurine, incense, jug of beer, or a representation of food left for the sake of a god of harvest, or perhaps for animal wellbeing, safe birth of a child, or for the rains at the right time, it was also the place to put a cooling cooking pot, a loaf of bread before a meal, or some clothes needing repair. Or, if a space was used at times for threshing, oil pressing, wine production, or weaving, then the processes may have required regular libations at different stages, 37 Louise A. Hitchcock, "Cult Corners in the Aegean and the Levant," ibid., 321-45, 321. See also Garth Gilmour, "The Archaeology of Cult in the Southern Levant in the Early Iron Age: An Analytical and Comparative Approach" (University of Oxford, 1995); Miller, The Religion of Ancient Israel, 64; Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (London: Continuum, 2001), 248-54; Van der Toorn, "Family Religion in Second Millennium West Asia (Mesopotamia, Emar, Nuzi)," 26; Nakhai, "Varieties of Religious Expression in the Domestic Setting." Objects found include stands for vessels and offerings, small altars, standing stones, drinking and libation vessels, arrowheads and knives, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines, model furniture and vehicles, amulets, beads, pendants, animal bones, tools for food preparation, and remains of food offerings. Hitchcock observes that the origin of the term is obscure, but it comes from Eastern Orthodoxy, with its devotional corner. 16 memoria ethnologica nr. 48 - 49 * iulie - decembrie 2013 ( An XIII ) or the notching of bone scapulae in a way that was integral to the processes themselves.38 For example, in Bronze Age Ashdod, potters worked with terracotta figurines and kernos rings at their side, to which libations were given, while in many domestic oil presses and weaving sites in Ekron (Iron Age) a large number of four-horned incense altars have been found.39 Relevant here is the condemnation in Jeremiah of the daily rituals associated with what is called the “queen of heaven,” for in the process of caricaturing and decrying this “sin” the text may well leave the spoor of popular practice (Jeremiah 7:18; 44:15–20). The flexible use – by both men and women40 – of these spaces indicates the way the sacred was interwoven with everyday life. 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