Bioarchaeology of Marginalized People

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Madeleine L. Mant¹ and Alyson Jaagumagi Holland²,    ¹Department of Archaeology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL, Canada,    ²Department of Anthropology, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

Abstract

Marginalization is of interest to scholars in many disciplines as it can be a physical, cultural, economic, and political force on individuals who are set apart as something other. The embodiment of marginalization is relevant to bioarchaeologists, who read human remains for markers of stress and inequality. The complex relationship between socioeconomic status and health affects individuals during their lives, while recognizing nonnormative burial patterns, or unequal treatment of the dead, allows for the interpretation of potential marginalization during life and after death. The process of becoming marginalized is not limited to an individual’s lifespan; contemporary understandings or representations of past peoples can contribute to marginalization. There is the potential for past and present human groups to be forgotten or ignored, leading to underrepresentation or erasure of their experiences. This volume seeks to problematize the complex topic of marginalization by studying human bodies through time, highlighting individuals from disparate contexts.

Keywords

Marginalization; health; embodiment; Developmental Origins of Health and Disease hypothesis; Barker hypothesis; socioeconomic status; frailty; stigma; mortuary archaeology; identity

Chapter Outline

Contributions 5

References 8

Scholars in many disciplines have wrestled with topics surrounding the marginalization of individuals in past and contemporary populations. Marginalization can take many forms; while commonly viewed as a social process, whereby members perceived to be part of a specific group are treated differently than others in a society, marginalization can also be physical, cultural, economic, or political. Social theorists and clinicians have engaged with the topic of marginalization largely by examining the processes by which people become peripheralized in society and how these resulting positions of ambiguity (Lynam & Cowley, 2007, p. 141) come to affect health and resilience. The notion of marginalization as being ambiguous recognizes the liminal social space that the marginalized occupy. They are viewed as similar to the rest of their society, but also set apart as something other. This liminality affects access; being part of a dominant social network is a major mechanism by which people gain access to resources, and a lack of belonging (and therefore resources) can manifest as differential changes to health status. While the mechanisms through which marginalization occurs are broad, Hall (2016) identifies a suite of marginalizing dynamics in the clinical sphere, including scapegoating, stigmatization, bullying, exclusion, incarceration, deprivation of basic resources, control, symbolic violence, microaggressions, implicit biases, and toxic environmental exposures. These methods share a common endpoint and emphasize that marginalization is central to the nexus of person-health-environment (Hall, 2016, p. 200). These processes are painfully universal and diachronic, which make marginalization such an important area of study. Through differential access to resources and the resulting emotional, physical, and cognitive stress, the act of being marginalized has potential chronic effects upon individuals’ physical and mental health that may be underreported and underrecognized. In bioarchaeology, marginalization offers a route to explore not just diseased states, but the underlying forces that drive health and disease.

The embodiment of a marginalized state, which is the epidemiological concept of the synthesis of the environment into one’s physical body, is of interest to bioarchaeologists. Social epidemiologists have explored this theme, defining embodiment as the cumulative interplay between exposure, susceptibility and resistance (Krieger, 2001, p. 672). Krieger (2005, p. 350) goes farther to emphasize that embodiment is literal, that bodies tell important stories about spatial, temporal, and multilevel processes, a concept that is central to bioarchaeology where these stories are quite literally read from the bones. Skeletal remains are examined for markers of stress and inequality; biological markers of slowed growth and long-term infections alongside evidence of interpersonal violence are placed within their cultural contexts to provide interpretations of complex topics such as structural violence (e.g., Klaus, 2012; Martin, Harrod, & Fields, 2010) and slavery (e.g., Dent, 2017; Martin & Osterholtz, 2016; Shuler, 2011).

Through embodiment the adult skeleton is a record of lived experience in both its strength and frailty (Agarwal & Beauchesne, 2011, p. 314). Bone is both a lasting record of human lives and a living tissue with incredible plasticity that allows the body to remain contextually dependent (Sofaer, 2006, p. 161) as it changes in response to an individual’s environment. Bioarchaeologists are tasked with the challenge of retrospectively identifying these events using only the final alterations made to bone. Theoretical approaches that borrow from the clinical literature present useful frameworks for attempting to uncover the sequences of events that led to observed skeletal alterations. The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease hypothesis, which views lifetime health changes as the product of exposures during key development periods, provides a useful lens into how the effects of this plasticity can be seen over the life course, and how it can extend beyond the individual to their parents and offspring. In the context of bioarchaeology, it has the potential to help disentangle the intergenerational effects of various health risks, though there is much to be learned about the relationship of epigenetics to skeletal manifestations of disease (Gowland, 2015). Bioarchaeological attention to the Barker hypothesis—stressful events in an individual’s early life history have negative health consequences in adulthood—contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of frailty and the synergistic complications of stresses such as infectious diseases and chronic undernutrition (Armelagos, Goodman, Harper, & Blakey, 2009).

Socioeconomic status (SES) is an important mechanism by which differential health risks emerge. Marginalization and health are intimately tied to SES as it is the complex interplay between social standing and economic worth that determines access to resources. Studies that aim to elicit SES are critical for questions of marginalization since the distinctions between groups in the past, just as today, were not always clear and discrete. People’s fortunes may change throughout their life courses, scrambling the signals that may be read from their bones. Reflecting upon the nexus of factors, including neighborhood conditions, working conditions, education, income, race, and stress, in addition to children’s early experiences, is critical in understanding the mosaic of factors that may affect an individual’s position in society. The relationship of SES and biological frailty has been investigated (DeWitte, Hughes-Morey, Bekvalac, & Karsten, 2016), revealing SES to be a strong predictor of mortality. Frailty is not equal across populations, however, and social theorists engaging with the social determinants of health address questions concerning inequality and health and wellness outcomes. Marmot (2005), working with contemporary living populations, emphasizes the clear connections existing between the SES of households and excess mortality rates. Braveman, Egerter, and Williams (2011, p. 384) explore the stepwise social gradients present today, acknowledging that while the differences between those of high and low SES are extreme, individuals falling in the middle also appear to be less healthy than the richest and/or best educated.

Assessing intangible concepts such as SES require analysis beyond the skeleton, looking at the mortuary practices themselves. Unequal treatment of the dead, seen in differential burial practices and varied grave goods within a population, remind us that the dead do not bury themselves. Mortuary practices that suggest inequalities reflect most strongly how the living viewed the dead and their place within society, which can then be compared to the physical evidence gained from their bones to approach an understanding of an individual’s embodied experience. Murphy’s edited collection (2008, p. xii) explores deviant burials in the archaeological record, noting that some individuals such as criminals, women who died during childbirth, unbaptised infants, people with disabilities, and supposed revenants may appear in different burial contexts in relation to other members of a population. Recognizing nonnormative burial patterns and evidence of necrophobia allows for the interpretation of potential marginalization during life and after death. Quinn and Beck (2016) examine both the lived (osteological evidence) and performed (mortuary context) aspects of identity to explore the contributions of economic, ideological, and political factors to an individual’s position in society. This study demonstrates the power of bioarchaeology to explore embodied inequalities both synchronically and diachronically. Other authors have discussed biocultural models of systemic stress and violence (e.g., Harrod, 2012; Klaus & Tam, 2009; Robbins Schug, Gray, Mushrif-Tripathy, & Sankhyan, 2012) through a combination of bioarchaeological and archaeological evidence, underlining the importance of context in shedding light on past lives. Stigma and blame relating to syphilis, a disease associated with sexual and moral dangers, often led to social exclusion in postmedieval societies; Zuckerman (2017) found in her study of four postmedieval cemeteries in London that there was no evidence of nonnormative burial of individuals with syphilis. This research emphasizes the care that must be taken when dealing with the complex factors and context surrounding marginalization: intense pressures to bury the dead quickly due to high mortality rates and the pressures of poverty may have outweighed the desire to separate the stigmatized. Mortuary communities then cannot be assumed to represent the members of an actual lived, dynamic, and interacting community in the past (Zuckerman, 2017, p. 98). Robbins Schug (2016) explores the archaeological and textual evidence relating to leprosy in South Asia, concluding that stigma has not been constant through time and that individuals with leprosy were not consistently treated as others.

The process of becoming marginalized is not limited to an individual’s lifespan; contemporary understandings or representations of past peoples can contribute to marginalization. There is the potential for past and present human groups to be forgotten or ignored, leading to underrepresentation or erasure of their experiences. In this sense, marginalization may be considered a sense of being overlooked, categorized or misrepresented (Lynam & Cowley, 2007, p. 146). Cultural representation of Indigenous groups in museums is a key example that has come to the fore in museum studies (e.g., Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998; Tuhiwai Smith, 2010; Unruh, 2015), with emphasis that Indigenous peoples should be provided the space to speak for themselves rather than continuing to be potentially misrepresented by other, colonizing powers. Power and influence emerge as important themes in how the marginalized come to be represented, especially with reference to memorialization and collective social remembrance. Fanning writes that institutionalized social memories are created by the privileged (2010, p. 127) in reference to the seemingly forgotten 1918 influenza pandemic, which has only relatively recently received attention by scholars (Phillips, 2014). When the dominant historical narratives are taken at face value, there is a risk of missing groups of stakeholders and of continuing to advance historical misremembering and marginalization. The relative roles of disease victims, the survivors, and the wider society must be considered when examining potential lacunae in collective remembering and memorialization.

Interest in topics relating to identity and marginalization in bioarchaeology has resulted in the recent publication of several excellent volumes. Stodder and Palkovich’s (2012) The Bioarchaeology of Individuals and Knudson and Stojanowski’s (2009) Bioarchaeology and Identity in the Americas use osteobiographies and a focus on the individualized experiences of people in the past to demonstrate the depth of understanding that may be drawn from a contextualized skeleton. These works respond to a need to identify and celebrate the individuals that make up past populations, resisting the top-down approach of previous explorations of the past and focusing on the individual actors within a skeletal cohort. Volumes such as Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability (Eds. Byrnes & Muller, 2017), The Bioarchaeology of Dissection and Autopsy in the United States (Ed. Nystrom, 2017), The Bioarchaeology of Violence (Eds. Martin, Harrod, & Pérez, 2012), and Broken Bones, Broken Bodies: Bioarchaeological and Forensic Approaches for Accumulative Trauma and Violence (Eds. Tegtmeyer & Martin, 2017) demonstrate the profound interest in the interpretation of lives affected by potential marginalizing factors such as nonnormative bodies, postmortem dissection, and various forms of interpersonal