International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Vol. I, No. 3, 1997

Expressing Ideology Without a Voice, orObfuscation and the Enlightenment

Barbara J. Little1

The consumer culture produced by the Industrial Revolution obfuscatesdiversity in the archaeological record. Mass-manufactured goods might be readas mass-manufactured culture. It is important for historical archaeologists toattempt to decode the complexities of consumption. Using a feminist approach,I examine one archaeologically visible way in which muted groupssimultaneously embrace and resist the tenets of a dominant ideology. I compareceramic assemblages from four nineteenth/twentieth-century sites in Annapolis,Maryland, two mid-nineteenth-century assemblages from New York City, andsome additional selected examples from North America.

KEY WORDS: feminist archaeology; feminism; ideology; ceramics; muted groups; ambiguity.

INTRODUCTION

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?The books are filled with names of kings.Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?

Bertolt Brecht (1947, p. 109)

Thus begins the poem, "A Worker Reads History." Brecht ends withthese lines:

Each page a victory,At whose expense the victory ball?Every ten years a great man,Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.So many questions.

1National Register of Historic Places, U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service,P.O.Box 37127, Mail Stop 2280, Washington, DC 20013-7127.

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I092-7697/97/090fl-0225$l2.50/n O 1997 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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These particulars about which Bertolt Brecht muses are those that con-cern archaeologists—particulars that are keys to much larger questions. Istart by recalling this poem to bring forward issues of representation andideology, particularly in the writing of history, in order to emphasize theimportance of a feminist archaeology. A feminist archaeology resists certainways of telling history; it resists certain kinds of silences. Confronted by apatriarchal history that serves to legitimate present gender, ethnic, and classrelations, feminist archaeologists seek to recast the stories and to peoplethe past with living players—regardless of the ambiguities and contradic-tions which that recasting might entail. A multivocal past may not soundharmonious, but it is realistic.

Janet Spector and Mary Whelan (1989) identify three areas as centralto a gendered archaeology: exposing biases, defining appropriate conceptsand methods, and creating new interpretations about gender. As archae-ologists rise to these challenges, the literature on gender and feminist ar-chaeology continues to grow (e.g., Claassen and Joyce, 1997; Gero andConkey, 1991; Nelson, 1997; Seifert, 1991; Spector, 1993; Scott, 1994; Waldeand Willows, 1991; Wall, 1994; Wright, 1996).

In this article I hope to contribute to the goal of identifying appro-priate methods by raising questions for an approach that examines ideologyand its expressions. My attempt here has little to do with discovering genderin the archaeological record; it has everything to do with approaching di-versity in the archaeological record from a feminist perspective. I offer noformula for ranking resistance and no statistical description of women'sroles. I examine one archaeologically visible way in which "muted groups"simultaneously embrace and resist the tenets of a dominant ideology. Todo this, I compare ceramic assemblages from four nineteenth- to twenti-eth-century sites in Annapolis, Maryland, limited information from twomidnineteenth-century sites in New York City, and some additional selectedexamples from the archaeological literature.

DICHOTOMIES

Until fairly recently, many historical archaeologists working in theUnited States have accepted a unidimensional model of a developing Geor-gian order. In this model eighteenth-century American society as a wholeadopted individuality, segmentation, separation, and other "Age of Reason"values. I have suggested elsewhere (Little, 1988) that this common modelof culture change is overly simplified because it ignores those segments ofa society that are outside the "mainstream" of the male, white, urban, mid-dle or upper class. The characterization of this overall change is in termsof structuralist oppositions, including changes from nature to culture, com-

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munal to individual, and public to private. These dichotomies have becomewell-known and appreciated by historical archaeologists since they were in-troduced to the field's literature and logic by James Deetz (1977, 1983).We also need to recognize and give serious consideration to the often un-spoken but always implied Female: :Male opposition.

The emergence of the dichotomies themselves rather than simply theswitch between oppositions is a result of Western cultural developmentsince at least the seventeenth century. They became strongly embeddedthrough the eighteenth century as Age of Reason ideals came to form thecore of the dominant ideology of the modern Western world. The culturalpriorities of the Enlightenment form some of the basic assumptions of amodern American culture of capitalism. The developing relations of indus-trial capitalism relied on wage labor, which is built upon segmentation oftime, of work from domestic life, of space, and of social position throughadherence to particular rules of behavior. The separation of people fromeach other and the segmentation of their work support part of the socialrelationship necessary for capitalism to develop and thrive (e.g., Leone,1988). The shift in worldview that entails increasing priority on individualover community can be identified in most domains of material culture in-cluding archaeologically discernible artifacts such as architecture and equip-ment for serving meals. The "Georgian" individual, created by the mid- tolate-eighteenth century, organized life by segmenting it.

MUTED GROUPS

Class as well as gender is important in constructing a more completeunderstanding of Anglo-American culture. Ethnicity, race, religion, occu-pation, and other defining attributes take on importance when addressinga more complete American culture. Historian Joan Kelly-Gadol (1987)posed a now classic question, "Did women have a Renaissance?" whichemphasizes that women's historical experience may be different frommen's—so too black from white, Catholic from Protestant, wealthy frompoor, merchant from shoemaker. In this essay I adopt a feminist approachto consider the material conditions and material culture expressions ofgroups both marginal to and within the dominant cultural power structure.

I find Edwin Ardener's (1975a, b) notion of muted groups to be usefulin thinking about nondominant groups. In his model, dominant groups gen-erate and control the dominant modes of expression, through which othergroups must express themselves if they wish to be understood or, perhaps,accepted by the culturally dominant group. Muted groups remain so be-cause their models of reality and worldview cannot be expressed adequatelythrough the modes and ideologies accepted by dominant groups. Mutedness

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is a result of the relations of dominance that inhibit the realization, for-mulation, and expression of alternative models. For my adoption of Ar-dener's idea I understand a dominant group as consisting of those withtactical power over social settings and structural power over social labor(Wolf, 1990). The muted are those whose power largely is limited to in-terpersonal situations and to actions of resistance.

It must be recognized that double muting takes place. The first iswithin the society under study. The second is by scholars, who tend to lookonly for dominant models or attempt to fit all groups' actions into overdetermined interpretations of preselected categories. Into the latter cate-gory I'd place the interpretation of consumption practices in terms only of"status." This double muting complicates and sometimes confuses analysis.For example, many scholars understandably wish to break out of the ten-dency to impose upon the past a simplified model of dominant culture.They may find so much diversity and so many examples of human perse-verance that they temporarily lose sight of very real economic, political,and cultural oppression of muted groups.

For the archaeologist's purposes, modes of expression include not onlyoral and written language but also material expressions such as architecture,clothing, craft items or manufactured goods, consumer choices, and thelike. One example of a dominant mode of expression is proper etiquetteand use of equipment for meals. Dominant ideology judges what is properor culturally appropriate or successful. Muted groups' ideologies, insofaras their expression is channeled through controlled modes, cannot fully ex-press their ideologies in ways that can be understood by dominant groups.Such a situation presents a challenge to archaeologists, who must learn tointerpret variable artifact assemblages and data that do not "fit" expecta-tions as something meaningful rather than just "noise" in a pattern.

Alternative values may be expressed in material culture. However, innineteenth- and twentieth-century North America, the dominant culture'sEnlightenment values, expressed in the consumer culture produced by theindustrial revolution, obfuscate the diversity in the life of a city by imposinga coherent set of cultural constructs and a consistent material culture.Mass-manufactured goods imply mass-manufactured culture. It is one ofthe challenges of historical archaeology to decode the complexities of con-sumption within consumer culture.

CERAMICS AND EXPRESSION

A study of ceramics is appropriate for studying material culture ex-pressions both because ceramics are ubiquitous on historic archaeologicalsites and because several investigations have made it clear that ceramic

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assemblages indicate far more than functional use; they inform about sym-bolic interaction and group competition (e.g., Burley, 1989; Shackel, 1987,1993; Wall, 1991, 1994; Yentsch, 1991a, b). The recognition of competitionamong groups amplifies the need to consider the composition, strategies,and constraints of these groups.

To identify some possibilities for recognizing alternative expressions, itis worth asking what choices of ceramics have meant historically. Severalresearchers have interpreted the presence of various vessel forms and deco-rative techniques in innovative ways, particularly in relation to ethnic- andgender-based interactions. Kathleen Deagan's work (e.g., 1983, 1987) in-terpreting women's roles as culture brokers in Native American and Span-ish interaction is particularly important. Some other recent studies includethose by Anne Yentsch (1991a, b) on symbolic meanings of ceramic vesselsand on the techniques used to analyze vessels.

I briefly describe below a study correlating ceramics with gender identityand two examples of nineteenth-century competition involving ceramics. Thesethree studies provide data important for insight into expression through ceramicchoices and reveal the centrality of gender ideology in making those choices.

Janet Brashler (1991) interprets the assemblages at late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century logging camps in West Virginia. It is clear fromhistoric photographs that women and children were present at many of thelarger logging sites, while the smaller sites were occupied by men only.Brashler translates the presence of decorative, fragile glass and ceramicsto indicate the presence of women and heterosexually based families inlogging camps. There is a strong cultural metaphor connecting women as"gentle" and "civilized" with the presence of fragile household objects.

David Burley (1989) observes the counterintuitive presence of transfer-printed ceramics among mobile bison hunters. Connecting ethnic identity andstatus marking, Burley argues that ornate ceramics were used as a visual in-dication of gentility and civilized behavior and to mark the status of Metiswomen as legitimate wives for Euro-American men involved in the WesternCanadian fur trade. This legitimation became particularly important in the1830s when white women became competitors for social positions as wivesto Hudson Bay Company men. The several arenas of competition in theseinteractions include ethnic competition between the racially mixed hivemantMetis and the Euro-Canadian traders, gender competition between Metismen and Metis women for status within the Euro-dominated fur trade, andgender specific ethnic competition between Metis and white women.

Diana DiZerega Wall (1991)2 analyzes ceramic assemblages from twomid-nineteenth-century New York households, one lower middle class and

2Data here are from Wall's 1991 article rather than from her 1994 book. The upper middle-class site is 50 Washington Square South, and the lower middle-class site is 25 Barrow Street.

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one upper middle class, to gain insight into how women were constructingtheir domestic worlds. She compares and interprets tablewares andteawares for both households. Tablewares are similar, although the wealth-ier household owned more objects and chose more colors. The teawaresvary more than the tablewares. The wealthier household owned at leasttwo sets: one of porcelain and one of ironstone. The poorer householdowned one set of ironstone teaware.

Wall interprets the tableware as having meaning in the context of fam-ily meals for both households. The wealthier household has two sets ofteawares for use in two different contexts: one for family and one for en-tertaining. Wall uses Bourdieu's work on modern French households forinsight into choices about the use of the home. She (1991, p. 179) arguesthat it is important to understand that the family with the "lesser" teawaresmay not have been attempting to imitate wealthier families but may havebeen encouraging cooperation rather than competition. Of the upper mid-dle-class household, Wall writes (1991, p. 79),

Like the china and crystal that Bourdieu's bourgeois families used for dinner parties,these fancier tea vessels suggest that this home was not simply a haven from thecompetitive world of the capitalist marketplace —Eliza Robson [of the wealthierhousehold] may well have used her dishes in a series of competitive displaysdesigned to impress her friends and acquaintances with the refined gentility of herfamily.

Wall's interpretation raises some interesting and challenging questions.If the wealthier household is competing within the boundary of homespaceand the poorer household is not, then it may be that the wealthier groupis unsuccessful in following its own nineteenth-century ideological rhetoricthat defines home as a refuge separate from work. Since family acquain-tances are likely to include business associates, this observation becomesmore reasonable. One might suggest that for the wealthier household com-petitive aspects take precedence over the supposed sanctity of home spaceas family space. It may also be that the wealthier household espouses out-wardly an ideology that works to keep other classes in their place and ef-fectively out of the competitive arena. The less wealthy household, on theother hand, may be interpreted as adopting the "home as refuge" modelmore completely, more fully separating aspects of life, and therefore adopt-ing more completely one of the central tenets of the dominant ideology(separating work from home). It could also be that the poorer householdis rejecting the competition that defines wealthier lives. The two householdscompared by Wall are both "middle class" and presumably could choosetheir ceramic purchases based on criteria other than simple cost.

To consider the matter further, contrast Bourdieu's interpretation citedby Wall with that of Douglas and Isherwood (1979, pp. 93-94):

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The upshot is that exclusion from the club of the rich may mean that there is noway of ordering a rational experience at a more modest level in the same universe.For the rich who call the tune are continually changing it, too. The price of orderand rationality for those who are neither rich, nor in control, nor in a position tochallenge control, is to withdraw.

While Douglas and Isherwood are contrasting the strategies of the verywealthy and very poor, it is reasonable to expect that tactics of exclusionand withdrawal work similarly for closer class distinctions as well.

Does lack of competitive display indicate rejection of competition infavor of friendly cooperation? Or does it indicate withdrawal from the com-petitive arena in the face of hopelessness? Is withdrawal analogous to re-sistance? Is it a prerequisite for the establishment of muted groups? Aresubcultures' alternative, muted cultural expressions necessary to the domi-nant culture's dominance?

Intrigued by the ambiguity of interpreting consumer choices and thecentrality of gender ideology is those choices, and convinced that reduc-tionist economic models reveal little, I decided to compare Wall's (1991)assemblages from the urban setting of New York to several from the muchsmaller city of Annapolis, Maryland. I analyzed ceramic assemblages at foursites in Annapolis, which were chosen based on differences among the oc-cupants during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The archaeologicalcontexts of the assemblages vary from a privy to yard scatter. I offer theseobservations not as complete descriptions of the ceramic assemblages. In-stead I hope to raise issues concerning the interpretation of status, and,most importantly for the purpose of this article, the meanings of ownershipof certain types of ceramics.

The Green Family Print Shop site (18AP29) has been occupied withbrief interruptions by the same family from the 1730s to the present (Coxand Buckler, 1995; Little, 1987). During the second quarter of the nine-teenth century, the male head of household was a civil servant who investedheavily in city real estate and went bankrupt in the 1840s. From the 1860sthrough 1899 the male head of household was a physician; the female headof household was the daughter of a prominent and wealthy family. In thetwentieth century, the male heads of household were a lawyer and thenNaval officers (Brown, 1989). The occupants of the household, therefore,may be labeled occupationally as middle or upper middle class. The nine-teenth-century ceramic vessels were reconstructed from very fragmentarymaterial from a yard that had been continually gardened, limiting the analy-sis to rather gross temporal control: 1820s to the midtwentieth century.However, virtually all of the ceramic assemblage is of nineteenth-centurymanufacture. There were virtually no ceramic (or other household mate-rial) discards from the twentieth century in the analyzed assemblage.

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The homes at Gott's Court (18AP52) were owned by whites and oc-cupied by African-American renters from 1906 until the 1940s. Residentswere skilled and semiskilled laborers (Leone et al., 1997; Warner, 1992).Limited testing was donein several backyards.3 The unknown occupantsmay be labeled as lower middle or lower class. The ceramic vessels werereconstructed from yard midden contexts.

The Main Street site (18AP44) was occupied by the family of a phy-sician recorded as owning the property (Shackel, 1986). The use of theproperty by the physician is supported by not only privy contents of nu-merous pharmaceutical bottles, but also the presence of amputated humanlimb fragments (Mann et al., 1991). The occupants of the household maybe labeled as middle or upper middle class. The ceramic assemblage isfrom the privy context dating to the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

The St. Mary's site (18AP45) is best known as the home of CharlesCarroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Inde-pendence. It has been owned by a Catholic religious order since the middleof the nineteenth century. As an all-male cloistered group, the Redemp-torists' ceramic use provides an important contrast to other types of house-holds. Assigning class status to such a group is difficult. Because of thespecial religious character of the community, the personal lack of wealthnecessitated by vows of poverty may not translate into lower class standing.I have labeled the occupational class as possibly middle class (MC?) onthe figures to indicate this uncertainty. The ceramic assemblage is recon-structed from relatively fragmented remains in yard scatter dated to thesecond half of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Vir-tually all of the ceramic assemblage is of nineteenth-century manufacture.

Based on her analysis of the documentary record, Elizabeth Kryder-Reid (1994) has suggested that gender roles were implicitly assigned withinthe community, corresponding to a spiritual and authoritative hierarchy.Young men in training for the priesthood were expected to be of "manlycourage," adopting masculine characteristics. Lay brothers, who wouldnever attain the same spiritual authority, were given the domestic choresand supportive, traditionally feminine roles.

Figure 1 compares simple percentages of tablewares and teawares, dis-regarding any other functional type. NYUMC and NYLM refer, respec-tively, to the New York upper middle-class and New York lower middle-class households analyzed by Wall (1991). The number of vessels repre-sented is 77 from the former and 21 from the latter. There are 269 vesselsfrom the Green House (18AP29), 32 from Gott's Court (18AP52), 80 fromMain Street (18AP44), and 35 from St. Mary's (18AP45). Both the

3Further testing was done at Gott's Court later, but the results are not included here (butsee Goodwin et al., 1993).

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Fig. 1. Annapolis and New York City site comparisons: ceramic vessels by function.NYUMC, the upper middle class site from New York, contains 77 vessels. NYLMC,the lower middle-class site from New York, contains 21 vessels. 18AP29, the middle-to upper middle-class Green House, contains 269 vessels. 18AP52, the lower middle-class Gott's Court houses, contains 32 vessels. 18AP45, the possibly middle-classRedemptorist community, contains 35 vessels. 18AP44, the upper middle-class MainStreet site, contains 80 vessels.

(NYUMC) household and the Main Street household (18AP44) have a pre-ponderance of teawares, as might be predicted for relatively well-to-dohouseholds. However, the Green House (18AP29), occupied by a physi-cian's family as was Main Street (18AP44), is very different and, instead,resembles the assemblage at Gott's Court (18AP52) with its preponderanceof tableware. The NYLMC and St. Mary's (18AP45) assemblages are simi-lar to each other, with a percentage of teawares between the other dis-cernible pairs.

If I were to remove the Green House assemblage from this analysis,Fig. 1 would show an unsurprising pattern of ceramic ownership which wecould reasonably attribute to class or status differences. There is remark-able similarity between the urban center of New York and the small cityof Annapolis. The upper middle-class site in each locale is nearly identical.The NYLMC and the Redemptorist households are also quite similar, per-haps indicating a class status for the religious order as a whole. The siteoccupied by African Americans could be interpreted as revealing the lim-ited choices of the poorest families, who purchased relatively little teaware.The Green House assemblage contains far more vessels than any of the

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Fig. 2. Annapolis site comparisons, 19th to 20th century: ceramic vessels identified by func-tion. 18AP29, the Green House, contains 312 vessels. 18AP52, the Gott's Court houses,contains 40 vessels. 18AP45, the Redemptorist community, contains 46 vessels. 18AP44,the Main Street site, contains 111 vessels.

others. While the archaeological context is not ideal, the fragmented yardscatter is not unique or unusual in these or other historical urban sites.

Figure 2 provides more a more complete comparison of functionalcategories for the four Annapolis sites, including food preparation and per-sonal vessels.4 Vessels of unknown function are not included. The GreenHouse (18AP29; n = 312) and Gott's Court (18AP52; n = 40) remainquite similar, although there are more food preparation vessels at Gott'sCourt (18AP52). The proportion of food preparation vessels is similar atGott's Court (18AP52) and at St. Mary's (18AP45; n = 46). The high per-centage of teaware at the Main Street site (18AP44; n = 111) is striking.The St. Mary's case appears ambiguous because the vows of poverty takenby members of the order would suggest that their material possessionsmight look different. I suggest below that adding gender to the analysisadds some viable interpretations.

Again the Green House assemblage is the anomalous case. Withoutthe assemblage, the proportions of functional ceramic vessels present a neatdemonstration of lower, middle(?)-, and upper middle-class choice. I do

4Tablewares include plates, platters, bowls, sauce dishes, butter pats, and mugs. Tea waresinclude cups, saucers, and tea pots. Food preparation items include crock/jars, bowls, andbottles. Personal ceramics include chamber pots, ewers, basins, slop jars, toothbrush holders,soap dishes, and spittoons.

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not know why the Green House assemblage seems not to fit. My ad hocscenario involves the household's unquestioned social position, which maynot have needed explicit display. But that scenario is untested and is notthe purpose of this article. I am most interested in these data that do not"fit" predictable patterns because they have prompted me to ask furtherquestions about households' consumer choices and how these expressionsare related to dominant ideology.

CERAMIC CHOICES AND IDEOLOGY

What does it mean to adopt the equipment of tea and coffee service?What does it mean that all of these ceramic assemblages contain teaware?Given what archaeologists routinely find on nineteenth-century sites, we expectthat these sites should contain such material, but it is not self-evident what theownership means. The idea of vulgar and nonvulgar ideology is useful here.

I have found that correspondences between meanings of goods andvulgar and nonvulgar ideology has been useful in other contexts for un-derstanding people's choices (Little, 1992). While ideologies are not re-stricted to dominant groups (Eagleton, 1991; Little, 1994a, b), in this caseI am concerned with dominant ideologies, both vulgar and nonvulgar. Vul-gar ideology refers to subjective knowledge and explanation that servessome social class [see Meltzer (1981, p. 114) and Handsman (1977) forarchaeological translations of these concepts]. Vulgar ideologies serve topromote, possibly through distortion, the dominant group's interests. Vul-gar ideology is potentially obvious and penetrable by members of a culturewho can recognize, if not effectively resist, the ideological "arguments"used to maintain the status quo. A message of vulgar ideology interpretedfrom a Georgian mansion might be that material wealth is a legitimationof social power. Such an ideological message may be questioned but notnecessarily overturned. Nonvulgar ideologies, or culturally embedded com-mon sense, arise from the material structure of society and constitute ap-parently "objective" knowledge thought to be beyond question. Nonvulgarideology is much more difficult to penetrate because it forms the basisfor accepted truth, such as supernatural and natural prescription. Theabove "wealth equals power" argument also may hold nonvulgar messages,as wealthy individuals embed their power in natural right and reify itthrough material expressions. Muted groups may well see through domi-nant vulgar ideology and accept or reject it, but neither muted nor domi-nant groups are likely to perceive explicitly the structure of nonvulgarideology.

I suggest that the simple presence of teaware and the presumed useof it reflect the basic acceptance of at least part of a dominant, nonvulgar

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ideology.5 It may be that during the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-ries nearly everyone within the European global market owned ceramictableware and teaware because it was nearly always culturally appropriateto do so. One alternative, that of owning no appropriate equipment, wouldresult in being defined as culturally "other": uncivilized, as in the case ofHurley's interpretation of the hivemant Metis (who owned ceramics to markthemselves as civilized); or without "normal" gender relations, as in thecase of Brashler's male loggers but not in the case of Kryder-Reid's malereligious. Muted groups are thus drawn into the underlying expressions ofthe dominant ideology. However, they may very well reject or mock, aswell as accept, other ideological expressions.

The dominant message comes through clearly. It is appropriate and ex-pected for "normal" households to own ceramic tableware and teaware. The"noise" in such pattern varies. A relatively large percentage of teaware ornumerous or costly sets of teaware may indicate competitive social display,as it certainly did among many households in eighteenth-century Annapolis(Shackel, 1993). A relatively small percentage of teaware or less expensivesets may indicate a refusal to participate in such competition based on a re-jection of competition, resignation from the competitive arena, or some otherfactor. It may well be that withdrawal indicates a rejection of the vulgar ide-ology supported by spending inordinate amounts of money on display.

The display of two upper middle-class households—in New York andat the Main Street site—may be explained by competitive display withinthe home. The Green House assemblage, however, does not fit this model.It therefore complicates what we expect from households within the domi-nant culture.

Both Gott's Court and the LMCNY households may be resisting com-petitive display, albeit for different reasons. Gott's Court adds the compli-cation of race. Researchers in Annapolis, Maryland (Leone et al., 1997),interpret the ceramic choices of African Americans at Gott's Court as aconscious rejection of a white capitalist culture and the marking of a self-created, separate identity. Subtle resistance may be disguised as economicnecessity.

Certainly part of the normalcy of households depends on their genderrelations. It is worth asking, for instance, why Brashler's all-male loggingcommunities owned few or no ceramics, while an all-male religious com-munity owned an assemblage that was much like that of middle-class house-

3Elizabeth Scott, in her review comments on this article, rightly points out that there is evi-dence from nineteenth-century cookbooks that teacups and other items were used in meas-uring for cooking and baking. Therefore, the presence of tea wares may not indicate theiruse in a household's display of proper tea ceremony etiquette or even the use of tea at all.For further comment, see Scott (1997).

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holds. One possible answer is that, in contrast to the loggers, the malereligious had successfully engendered their own (nonsexual) relationships(Kryder-Reid, 1994).

The Redemptorists had no need to avoid feminizing artifacts; however,the loggers did, for to adopt women's things at a single-sex and single-gen-der (male) site would be to subvert the "normal" hierarchy and relation-ships and would inappropriately engender a single-sex community. Thereligious community instead supported a hierarchy that was imbued by thegender hierarchy embedded in the broader society.

The Redemptorists' ceramic assemblage indicates that as a largehousehold, they supported the dominant gender archaeology of the largersociety. In spite of vows of individual poverty, at odds with the culturaltrend toward emphasizing the individual, the larger religious householdcould claim a sort of "normalcy." Kryder-Reid (1994, p. 108) writes thatthe "antimaterialist ideology of poverty foils our most critical tool of analy-sis—the ability to associate archaeological context with the social contextthat produced it." She abandons artifacts as an expression of the commu-nity's economic or social position. However, the archaeology can be asso-ciated with the social context if the scale of analysis is enlarged. Insteadof looking for archaeological correlates on gender within the cloister, wecan see the position of the whole religious community within the largercommunity of Annapolis and the dominant culture.

ACCEPTING AMBIGUITY IN A FEMINIST ARCHAEOLOGY

A feminist archaeology can examine ideologies and their pervasiveness.In considering differences in ceramic choices, nonvulgar ideology dictatesthat each group owns the proper equipment for tea or, in the case of theBrashler's loggers, has the proper nonownership of equipment. The accou-terments of the dominant culture as established in the eighteenth cen-tury—the Age of Reason—are adopted and therefore the possessors andusers of such material look a lot like participants and emulators. On theother hand, the tea equipment does not necessarily look the same. Theformality and investment vary. Is this difference due to relative wealth?The desire to withdraw? The desire effectively to separate social competi-tion from the domestic refuge? The necessity to act on a different stage?Initial responses to these questions depend partly upon the social theoriesarchaeologists adopt.

Wall (1991, 1994) refers to Bourdieu's observations about middle- andupper-class French families. The wealthy, who spend more on their equip-ment for public display such as dishes, are forced to compete even withintheir homes. The supposed separation of workspace from homespace is

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false, as socializing and business are intertwined. The less wealthy mayspend less because they have not had to compete with their friends andneighbors. They may use their home as refuge from the "other" world ofwork and competition. Visitors to the home are insiders rather than out-siders. Who is subject to the Enlightenment ideal of separate spheres?Upon whom is the dominant ideology operative?

Douglas and Isherwood (1979) see the distinction somewhat differ-ently. Withdrawal is an option when the means to participate are notavailable. There are no other options. Who has withdrawn? Is there re-sistance in withdrawal? Resignation? How do we interpret the materialculture record to distinguish between motivations for owning particularkinds of ceramics?

Particularly, when we are looking at middle class households ratherthan comparing the very wealthy and the very poor, I believe that we canwork with the idea that households are making conscious choices based ontheir own perception of their social positions. Resistance to the vulgar ide-ology of costly competition may well be present. The nonvulgar ideol-ogy—the use of consumer goods in particular ways and in recognizableproportions—is not resisted. It is adopted as cultural common sense.

A feminist archaeologist seeks to render an archaeology that sees dif-ferently gender relations, class relations, hierarchy and inequality, and di-chotomous models. I want to see a range of real pasts that may be analyzedwith models that are not predetermined. Feminist archaeology can makea difference. History is a powerful determinant of the present, particularlywhere history is homogenized and sanitized to enable the present statusquo to continue without critical self-reflection. A feminist archaeologyseeks contemporary changes in the way history is created and presented.

I do not pretend to have decoded the complexities of nineteenth-cen-tury domestic consumption. I only hope to have raised some questionsabout the ways that muted groups—the less wealthy, African Americans,groups such as the cloistered Redemptorists, who reject specific tenets ofthe dominant ideology—may express their social identities or attitudesthrough the things they choose to buy and use. Although the material cul-ture expressions are muted through the medium of mass-manufacturedhousehold items, we can search for subtle variation. There are questionsraised too about the expressions of those within the dominant cul-ture—wealthier, white, family-based households.

Ceramic assemblages contain elements of competition and social in-teraction involving class, ethnic, and gender relations. Precisely how thoseelements relate, what they meant, and what they now mean are not alto-gether clear. I have resisted the temptation to include here only the datathat seem to "fit," desiring to keep the confusing and sometimes contra-

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dictory observations. My aim is to raise questions about how ideologiesmay work and be expressed. Women and men running households makeparticular choices that may express both unquestioned assumptions and al-ternative views. One of the challenges of a feminist archaeology is to searchfor the range of such expressions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A version of this article was presented at the 1992 meeting of theAmerican Anthropological Association with the title "A Feminist Approachto an Archaeology of Muted Groups." I am indebeted to Robert Paynter,whose invitation to that session, "Lines that Divide," prompted me to startlooking more seriously at the archaeological expressions of muted groups.Thanks to James Delle and Elizabeth Scott for their careful reading andhelpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Special thanks to PaulShackel for discussion, comments, and his constant support.

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