Introduction

Questions relating to social interaction and individual experience are at the heart of all work on ancient societies and material culture, from history and geography to linguistics and religion. In this chapter I offer a specific range of perspectives, but this entire handbook is relevant to the topic. I sketch some of the ‘‘macro-worlds’’ (structures and institutions) and ‘‘micro-worlds’’ (personal lived experience, ‘‘daily life’’) of social life (Berger and Berger 1976: 21), emphasizing their mutual dependence, as well as the potential for tension and conflict. I review sources and approaches, focusing on core questions relating to social structure, social process, and social reality. For such a vast topic discussion and references cannot be comprehensive; it is possible only to present a sample of issues and perhaps to point in some new directions.

Material culture is integral to and constitutive of social relations and practices. It does not simply provide a setting for them or reflect them; ‘‘everything is infused with the social’’ (Hodder 2004: 38). Egyptian material culture offers a rich and diverse range of evidence for social organization and experience. Approaches using it extend from philological treatments oftexts, which have historically been the focus and are themselves material objects, to the study of house structures and settlement patterns (cf. Mumford ch.18; Moeller 2007), categories of artefacts (e. g. Dubiel 2008), and human skeletal remains (e. g. Zakrzewski 2007). The settlements of Middle Kingdom Lahun and New Kingdom Deir el-Medina in particular offer rich opportunities to reconstruct aspects of everyday life and social structure through archaeological and textual sources (e. g. McDowell 1999; Andreu (ed.) 2002; Szpakowska 2008). Thus the potential of studies which integrate different domains of evidence is considerable; examples include Stephan Seidlmayer’s (2007) treatment of textual, iconographic, and archaeological material from Middle Kingdom Beni Hasan, and Janet Richards’ (2005) analysis of necropolis and votive evidence from a range of Middle Kingdom sites.

It is necessary to be aware of limitations and agendas both of the sources and of our approaches, and to draw distinctions between normative projections of ideologies and more complex social realities (Eyre 2000). Most Egyptian material exhibits a centralizing, elite bias. Written sources and monumental, iconographic contexts of tomb and temple are most explicit in this respect, but the analysis of much nondiscursive data such as burial goods and settlement patterns is also often more revealing for elite culture than other social levels. In light of this, studies increasingly explore approaches to lower levels and domains of interaction between elites and others (e. g. Richards and Van Buren 2000; Moreno Garcia 2001; Quirke 2007; Baines in press). However, as Seidlmayer (2001a: 206) observes, although idealizing contexts such as burials may not map directly onto ‘‘true’’ patterns of social organization, ideal or ideological frameworks and representations are culturally ‘‘true’’ and meaningful.

Treatments of social themes tend to be shaped by the character of the data-sets for different periods, in addition to the interpretive frameworks adopted. Studies of social structure have tended to focus on third millennium and, more recently, second millennium material, while discussions of ‘‘daily life’’ have centered on the New Kingdom, especially the workmen’s village at Deir el-Medina. For the Old Kingdom, questions relating to lived experience need to be approached differently, as is true also for the Third Intermediate and Late Periods, which have hardly been approached for social questions; Christopher Eyre’s studies of a range of social topics which integrate material across broad temporal ranges are notable exceptions (e. g. 1984; 2004; 2007). Overviews, such as this chapter, necessarily blur no doubt considerable changes.

Theoretical frameworks developed in disciplines such as anthropology and archaeology additionally open up the material to new questions. Gender, ‘‘the cultural interpretation of sexual difference’’ (Gilchrist 1999, 1), is an explicit example that has been a recent focus. Egyptian society was strongly gendered in terms of position and representation (Robins 1993; 1994) and, although inequality was at the core of this distinction, status and role could vary considerably. Recent studies examine how far such distinctions play out in material culture, both domestic and mortuary (e. g. Meskell 1999; Seidlmayer 2001a: 235-40). Women have been the primary focus of gender study, although masculinities are beginning to be explored (e. g. Parkinson 1995; Robins 2008), as is the idea that gender was a fixed dichotomy of male and female (Depauw 2003). Comparable issues can be investigated for other categories of social identity, notably ethnicity, age, and rank. How far each maps onto the ancient actors’ categories can be questioned (e. g. Baines 1996).

Crucial to all work on social structure and daily life is diversity, from the modeling of local, rural life to high-cultural forms - there can be no single model and no single experience (Trigger 2004: 51). Where possible, I emphasize this diversity and the corresponding value of plural approaches.