Leskernick Project Forum - 'artificial community' Listed among the project's objectives in the Introduction to this web site is the "ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY of the artificial community carrying out the research" on Leskernick.

From: Amy Hale Here's a quick question for you all: what exactly do you mean by 'artificial community'?

From Barbara Bender: Amy asks why 'artificial' community? I guess we use the phrase because we're not a community bound by kin ties or by living together for a long time but, rather, that we've almost accidentally come together. Rather like being on a boat. And because we work closely together, and live closely together, we do become a sort of community. But, being 'artificial' there's no particular reason why it should go on once the excavation is over.

From: Amy Hale I don't necessarily see an 'artificial' element to it, sounds 'real' enough to me! You are bound by the dynamics of the project, and through your interactions will probably establish expressive behaviour that is a central part, and helps to define the community. Certainly all communities are dynamic, yours is just short lived (relatively). Are you mostly then, looking at the reactions of the researchers to the landscape and processes of the site? What have your interactions with the surrounding Cornish communities been like?

From: Paul Basu Yes I tend to agree with Amy. Perhaps Tony Williams, one of the team members conducting the 'ethnography' of the 'ethnographers' might be enticed to comment. Tony, are you out there? As a researcher of Scottish Highland landscapes, a possible parallel that strikes me is that of sheilings. Where, so I understand, people from different townships who nevertheless shared summer grazing land, would live together for a period each year. One can imagine this to be an amazingly 'social' arrangement - one confirmed by the experience of archaeologists 'stranded' together for the duration of the excavation season? The nature of community, transience and place is, I guess, one of the most central issues in anthropology. I read an interesting chapter in a book on Internet communities recently ('Notes Toward a Definition of Cybercommunity' by Jan Fernback) which explored some of these issues in the age of cyberspace. I am currently working on the next feature to be added to the web site, the site diaries. These may question the artificiality of the community in question. Perhaps we ought to remove the offending word from the introductory section?

From: Amy Hale I didn't think the word was offensive, just possibly unneccessary. Certainly internet communities are today's obvious example for redefining 'community', similar to the ways in which folklorists are redefining 'folk'.

From: Tony Williams I am one of the project sociologists involved with the so called artificial 'community'. I think that the term usefully sums up the participants' co-presence, not least because it has obviously inspired some debate about what defines community etc. The term has been used to reinforce the notion that archaeologists and anthropologists are social beings who not only worked together for a duration of five weeks, but also had to live together in caravans at a local campsite. Of course, there was negotiation, conflict and tension but also times when a sort of 'community bonding' experience seemed apparent. Mike Wilmore (the other sociologist) who has not yet subscribed to onelist will probably agree to me saying that it is also extremely important to think about the participants' wider networks of relationships BEYOND Leskernick. He is particulalry interested in the articulation between those involved in the project, academia, work, leisure and so on. He is building participants' biographies at these different scales which will join up with my own research which is based on peoples' interactions with landscape and material culture. Through survey, questionnaire and participant observation I have attempted to reveal the social dynamics involved both at the level of the trench and survey and beyond Leskernick at the campsite where participants' were accomodated. The upcoming paper will include such aspects as project members' interactions with place, excavation materiality and each other. At their caravans I have looked at the food they eat, their clothes, 'group experience' and the act of appropriating caravan interiors.

From: Henry Broughton As for the 'artificial community' thing.... well I don't think I would use the term but there is something quite unique about the way a project such as Leskernick throws a really quite surprisingly diverse group of people together. Long days spent on the moor followed by long nights in caravans with people you do not know all that well has some intersting results (perhaps This is Tony's area). It is also important to remember that people are away from home and loved ones and this results in both tension and comraderie. There is a liminal quality to the community in that we leave our normal everyday structures of life to enter into a whole new set of relations.....

From: Sam Fleming I spent 6 months living on a tent in a field followed by a further 9 months living in a caravan in the same field while working on a dig in Lincolnshire, the Rectory Farm project. It was simply an archaeological survey for Redlands, who had bought aggregate rights, but there was very much a sense of community. There were about 40 people living in that field at one time, and some of us became very close. We were only about three miles from the nearest village, but that was enough to promote a feeling of separation. This seems to be a common experience with all medium to long term digs, particularly those which involve, shall we say, basic accomodation on-site. We found that groups within the larger community developed as a matter of course, although these did not always bear any relationship to the groupings of people assigned to particular trenches. It was more down to entertainment habits! Obviously our community was not studied the way yours is being studied, but there are parallels to be drawn with many situations. At the moment I am involved in a discussion on another list about the development of virtual pagan communities on the internet, and there are parallels to be drawn there as well.

From: Mike Wilmore I'm somewhat amused to see that the first topic that has provoked everyone to write is one that is very sociological in character, i.e. the artificial community debate. Hopefully some of the other aspects of the project - archaeology, art and exhibitions to name only three of the most obvious topics - will stimulate discussion in the months to come. I hope that the project team will be on-line when they are in Cornwall this year so that those of us who can t be there for a whole season s fieldwork can join in the fun via cyberspace! As Tony said in his contribution the notion of the project team forming an artificial community isn't necessarily a description that we would subscribe to or indeed one that the very people who use this term would themselves evince in their day-to-day work on the project. When one looks at the project it is quite obvious that it is both multivocal and multilocal in character. So different participants have quite distinct opinions about various aspects of the project's work and these opinions are constructed from different positions within the social organisation of the project. One of my concerns about the use of the word community , artificial or otherwise, is that it bears connotations of unity [my Collins dictionary includes groups having shared interests or origins amongst its definitions] that don t really accurately reflect the social relations from which archaeological knowledge (amongst other things) has come into being at the Leskernick Project. It's for this reason that I've tended to think about the project and write of it in terms of it being a landscape , this being an apt metaphor given the character of the archaeological work being carried out on Bodmin Moor by the Leskernick Project. At a quite literal level there is a project landscape that encompasses the hill upon which the excavation and survey worked together, the wider moorland, Cornwall, UCL, various locations where people work on the project material and discuss the project, and so on. This project geography enters into virtual territory when we consider media like this web site or the more traditional formats of published reports in journals or books that are read by people for whom these might be their only contact with the project and its work. But entering into what we might call the phenomenological spirit of the project, I also think of how different people involved in the project view this landscape - do the project directors look at it in the same way as the excavation supervisors, as the student archaeologists, as volunteers who come to help at various times, as the professional archaeologists who visit to monitor the projects work on the moor. The trick, of course, for the project sociologists is to come up with an approach to analysis of this situation that doesn't slip into extreme relativism. There isn't space or time here to go into this question in too much detail - it is a question that will obviously form a key part of my contribution to future publication of the project results, but I will use the artificial community question to illustrate how a landscape approach (influenced by Bourdieu s sociology for those interested in such matters) might help us to understand why certain claims have been made about the project. One of the first important questions is who is making this statement about the Leskernick Project. Obviously we have a problem here as the web site introduction is anonymously authored. This in itself is interesting as it tends to suggest that this introduction is a general statement on behalf of the project, or is intended to be read as such by the author(s). As such it reinforces the connotations of unity and shared opinions that are implicit in the notion of community that were noted above. It is the case, however, that this phrase is one that has been used previously by the project directors when describing the sociological component of this project to its various participants - in particular during an introductory talk to students who were working at the Leskernick Project during the 1997 season of fieldwork prior to their first trip onto the moor. In this respect I think that this is a phrase intended for public consumption - on a publicly accessible web site or to students who are as yet not familiar with the work of the project. [Tony Williams has discussed in his work how the tour of the Leskernick Hill area given to students by the site directors on the day following this introductory meeting served as a sort of rite-of-passage through which they were brought into the fold of the project - I m sure he can post some details of this to this discussion site if anyone is interested to hear more about this.] To put things very crudely, it s a description of the project and its social aspects that those ultimately responsible for the project wish to propagate. Given that a multidisciplinary project of this timespan and with this number of participants can run the risk of generating significant disagreements amongst those involved, we might describe the use of this phrase in these sorts of public context a necessary fiction ; something that doesn't really describe reality, but which comes about because of that reality. In other words, it's a political statement. A white lie! To re-phrase this in terms of the image of the project as a landscape that I described above, the authority of those who lead or direct the project comes precisely from the fact that they are positioned at the interstices between other participants and can, indeed must, move between these positions in order for the project to properly work. So, for example, a student excavator won t have any direct involvement with funding agencies or academic publishers, but the directors will have to communicate and deal with a whole variety of these sorts of different agencies. This necessity is as much as constraint as it is a freedom. How can someone in this position find a means through which these different positions can be successfully integrated or articulated? In particular, given their responsibility to present the public face of the project, how can the directors maintain public approval? And by public I mean here the public who are interested in the project, i.e. other archaeologists, students of Cornish culture and history, funding agencies, local moorland residents, local property owners, etc. (you can add others to the list). So a phrase like artificial community is part of this compromise - we know it to be a fiction, indeed given the adoption of communitarianism as a slogan of the New Labour government we might even describe it as a clichi, but it represents, I believe, an attempt to unite different project participants around a common project identity (very New Labour!). Has that attempt been successful? Probably not given the response on this discussion page to its use and previous comments from project participants! But that s not to say that it isn t an attempt worth making because the Leskernick Project in all its many facets is, from where I stand, endlessly fascinating. Any thoughts on what I ve written here will be very welcome as I m still working through my research material and would be very happy to receive your comments.

From: Chris Tilley I am somewhat surprised that the term 'artifical community' should have stimulated so much interest and such a substantial comment by Mike Wilmore. Since Mike is concerned about the anonymous nature of the statement containing the term I happily admit to having coined it. Perhaps an alternative description might be more apt but I'll just make a few remarks here on what I envisaged. By community I meant a group of people living and cooperating together on the project. Within this group social relationships form or pre-exist between certain individuals. There is (i) structure; (ii) hierarchy; (iii) gender difference (iv) differences in age and experience; (v) division of labour; (vi) people play out different social roles; (viii) people both interact formally and informally on and off site; (ix) degrees of reciprocity in relation to material and non-material resources e.g. equipment, food, drink, knowledges. In this sense Leskernick might be held to have some of the characteristics we would associate with a community in the usual i.e. everyday sense of the term. But, of course, this community is of a very different nature from how we might use the term when referring to an English village or an area such as Camden Town in north London hence the term requires the prefix 'artifical'. The 'community' is obviously artifical in the sense that (i) it only exists for five weeks each year; (ii) from one year to the next membership is radically different. Only four people have been working at Leskernick since the first field season in 1995: the three directors and Henry Broughton. Every year about 80% of the people will be new; (iii) everyone is working towards the project goals and that is why they are there; (iv) members do not usually have spouses, partners, children, neighbours, friends with them; (v) they are all living a long distance away from home; (vi) they are forced to live together whether they like it or not etc. For me the term community does represent a kind of ideal i.e. it suggests people cooperating, sharing, valuing, and caring for each other. In my opinion it was much more like this during the 1995 season when there were only about ten of us and divisions of labour and interests had not become so firmly entrenched. But now, of course, the reality of the project is not like this as Mike Wilmore points out. The more neutral term 'group' would, of course, be a more accurate description. But I have always been more of an idealist than a realist!

If you have something to add, subscribe to the Leskernick discussion list or post a message to leskernick@ucl.ac.uk. We look forward to hearing from you! FORUM HOME