Archaeolog

I have much respect for the impetus behind the 'social movement' in archaeology. Indeed, aside from the pivotal early works of Gordon Childe, Graham Clark and, later, Colin Renfrew, the real push for a 'social understanding' in and of archaeology comes from the Cambridge 'underdogs': Hodder, Shanks and Tilley and their compatriots in social arms. There was indeed a sense in which 'the natural' had ridden roughshod all over the interests and curiosities of archaeologists less naturalistically inclined. They were right to point with Hawkes and Binford that there was more to archaeology than solely the lower rungs of the past culture ladder. What makes us human? the upper realms of intentional behaviour, symbolism and ideology. There was a refreshing honesty in those works, remonstrating archaeologists for dividing-off the work in the discipline from the work of being human, for anesthetizing ourselves to the social and political dimensions of the field. Instead there was a reconceptualization of 'culture' or more operationally, 'society', as an active negotiation of individual agents of their social roles, and the objectification and use of material cutlure in these processes. The formerly staid, stimulus-response model of society as an 'extra-somatic' means of adaptation to the environmental substratum was greatly complexified. And in tandem, the ambitions of archaeological explanation sprung up the ladder of inference. These bold thinkers served as a much needed corrective to the brilliant but ultimately limiting framework of an explicitly scientific ambition.

But things have changed in the intervening 20 years. What was a reaction to the totalizing and 'closed' concept of the natural in the new archaeology has come to be the shibboleth of the inheritors of post-processual archaeology. The idea of social archaeology swallows up all concerns with the past. And the enchantment is persuasive: as it has been stated recently for the discipline, 'everything is social'. But what has 'the social' done for archaeology? Has it better served to understand society past and present? Does 'social explanation' in archaeology still serve us as a corrective, or has it superseded its role as a reminder to not forget the discursive and non-discursive strategies of past individuals in the accretion of the archaeological record? To get at some of those provoking questions at the beginning, I want to look a little more closely at a recent book which may be said to canonize 'the social' in archaeology.

In a comprehensive and well written recent compendium, A Companion to Social Archaeology, Lynn Meskell and Robert Preucel (editors) take a broad view of the discipline of archaeology and divide the field topically into "key constituents of a social archaeology"; namely temporality, spatiality, and materiality (4). While within broad parameters these concepts are undeniably central to archaeological work, the 'ity' modifying each term tips off the intent of the editors in characterizing archaeology. These are not 'objective' matters of existence, 'out there' in reality, but are instead the constituents of the 'social world', or how Kantian a prioris are refracted through the prism of social being. Under the ambit of each category, there is a disciplinarian history of the usage and development of each of these categories. While brief, these are well researched. The thrust of each subsection is to debunk former dichotomies regarding these concepts. For instance, in their focus on materiality they review the well known configurations of materiality, citing Kopytoff's artifact biographies (the social life of things), UCL's pioneering of objectification via consumption, phenomenological (or more recently embodiment) approaches and the more linguistically anchored heuristic of material culture-as-text (14-15). They argue that these constitute the main directions for attending to the materiality of life, and that, in including them under the rubric of 'materiality', they seem to implicitly espouse the notion of materiality as comprehensive and unifying. Their conclusion is that the inherited (modernist) dichotomy of objects and subjects must be overcome in the study of materiality, as, more properly termed, 'people and things' are equally agentic and constitute each other in an indissoluble process (16). "Studies of materiality cannot simply focus upon the characteristics of objects but must engage in the dialectic of people of things" (16). This brings in focus the reasoning behind re-terming their primary categories of archaeology: Objects qua objects are not important to archaeology. Much like Gell's well known account of objects' agency, objects themselves are only important in their relationship to social being, to individuals experiencing and creating their worlds. As they conclude: "we wish to offer a different but related, view of archaeology, one that acknowledges the social construction of time, space, and material culture as constituent of social being(16, my emphasis).

As a corrective movement to earlier anglo-american archaeology, taking into account of the social has been indispensable. But I see this corrective movement, which has an enchanting appeal for its apparent ability to unify the range of archaeological topics (ie. space, time, matter) under one explanatory framework, as running aground on the very dichotomies which it has so explicitly hoped to overcome. Fundamentally, the greatest divides are society-nature, and subject-object. Now, as the editors note, "studies of materiality cannot simply focus upon the characteristics of objects but must engage in the dialectic of people and things (16, my emphasis). With this unique perspective, the editors feel that archaeology "can contribute to the broader project of developing social theory for the twenty-first century" (17). Since the 'upgrading' of social theory in archaeology by the early Cambridge school, dialectics has figured prominently and has been repeatedly espoused as a manner of overcoming outworn, inherited dichotomous thought. The desire was to overcome such inhibitive, 'artificial' thought which splits subject matter into pre-established categories. Now, this is where the 'enchantment of the social' has only deepened the dichotomies mentioned above and in doing so inhibits the discipline from contributing to wider disciplines. Why? First, as the inheritor of Hegel's dialectics, this perspective on understanding depends upon opposition of poles: dialectics cuts the middle in 'synthesis'. So that a dialectics presupposes and operationalizes the very opposing categories (such as subject and object) which it is supposed to overcome by stating the now mundane conclusion: 'its both/and'. For More on Dialectics see Deprivation Through Dialectics. Here is the empty function of the 'social' which I began with. It is spread across this divide of subject-object, or culture-nature like an explanatory bridge. The 'social' encompasses and absolves division in its embrace; and, as this volume purports, it embraces everything. So, to finally get back to my questions at the beginning: if the 'social' unifies everything and all explanations of the both/and variety subscribe to its charm then what is the social? Here 'social archaeology' threatens to collapse under the weight of binary traffic over its fragile suspension. It purports to do so much that it does nothing. Yes, we may say that everything is social and feel satisfied that the enchantment has banished the perfidious dichotomies, but then we're left without an explanation of this mysterious 'social'.

As far as social theory is concerned, there have been others entrenched in the type of science wars which archeology perennially straddles as a humanity-science. Those in science studies have dealt with the desire to rid explanation of worn (modernist) dichotomies while retaining reality. From their perspective, particularly the work of Actor-Network-Theorists, the movement to 'the social' as a unifying solution is fundamentally misguided for several reasons. I will only discuss two of them. One, as they have argued against archaeology's cognate fields of social theory and critical sociology, the 'social' is presupposed both as a 'category' and as distinct from 'nature'. Thus social explanation stacks the cards against any solution to pesky fragmentation, as they assume the modernist divides they wish to overcome in adequate accounts. Then, determined to make the social do all the work in the self-established impossible task of unifying what is distinct, 'the social' bleeds itself dry. What is left is only the unctuous phrase: 'the social construction of ___________" (insert any phenomenon). This lead to the second point: 'the social' becomes a mysterious force behind the scenes which accounts for all and for nothing. The social itself is not explained. What is the social? 'It is everything.' 'It is a dialectic between subject and reality.' Unlike the 'everything is nature' forbears of post-processualism, 'the social' is not investigated. It is simply assumed.

Other 'social theorists' are in fact not concerning themselves with dialectics. Instead, they are investigating the very supposed distinct poles of these troublesome dichotomies and discovering that they are no longer (have never been) apt descriptions of the world. There is no uniform 'Nature' as opposed to 'Culture' which can be 'mixed' by pulling on the elasticity of 'the social' from one pole to the other. Likewise with 'Subjects' and 'Objects'. Instead, events are described which defy any presumption of any ontologically distinct 'compositors'. Just as modern humans are posited to emerge with tool usage, mixtures of humans and nonhumans – Haraway’s proliferating ‘cyborgs’ (1991) – form the starting point of research into society past and present. An autochthonous, purified ‘individual’, capable of Goodman’s (1978) ‘worldmaking’ through conceptual relativity, comes rather late in the game with the modernist ideal of humanism – and then (especially then!) ever more mixed with modernity’s technology (Latour 1993). Now the appeal to liberate and empower the individual, historically and socially particular as it is, has strong roots. As Richard Rorty (1998) tracks (and subscribes to) this obsession in modernity, we are determined to be beholden to no one and nothing: first liberation from an external God, then liberation from external things, so that we are not answerable to anything but each other in our pan-humanism. A look to environmental degradation should immediately rid us of such a human-centered myopism. Even if only as an analytic, heuristic reconfiguration for archaeological explanation, taking such ‘matters of concern’ (Stengers 2006) seriously seems most appropriate for the ‘discipline of things’ (Olsen 2003).

So what is to be done? There are other fields which have struggled with such incommensurable divisions and the derivative feuds. What have they done? Both pragmatic philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century and continuing today and Science Studies took the unpopular course of action to abandon traditional epistemology and its built-in dichotomies. Both focus upon action as the measure of reality. And both affirm the multiplicity of experience (a 'pluriverse') which must be attended to and not subordinated to any singular concepts. Modernist thought with its intractable problems is set aside; not because it is a retreat from urgent dilemmas, but because, like Wittgenstein (1963:109,133) observed at the moment of Analytic Philosophy's almost-coronation, such problems are of our own making. 'The social' is one of the last and most ambitious attempts within modernist thought to solve the problems of its own making.

In particular, I want to list a few relevant quotes from an introduction to ANT and Science Studies in order to bring out in contrast an alternative approach to 'the social'.

From Reassembling the Social:
• "ANT is not, I repeat is not, the establishment of some absurd 'symmetry between humans and nonhumans'. To be symmetric, for us, simply means not to impose a priori some spurious asymmetry among human intentional action and a material world of causal relations. There are divisions one never bypass, to go beyond, to try to overcome dialectically. They should rather be ignored and left to their own devices, like a once formidable castle now in ruins." (Latour 2005:76)
• "This is also the dividing line between postmodernism, which believes that its task is to add multiplicity to a world overly unified by 'master Narratives', and ANT which feels that multiplicity is a property of things, not of humans interpreting things." (ibid:116)
• "There may be thousands of ways to design a bridge and to decorate its surface, but only one way for gravity to exert its forces. The first multiplicity is the domain of social scientists; the second unity is the purview of natural scientists. Cultural relativism is made possible only by the solid absolutism of the natural sciences. Such is the default position of the endless debates going on, for instance, between physical and human geography, physical and cultural anthropology, biological psychiatry and psychoanalysis, material and social archaeology, and so on. There is unity and objectivity on one side, multiplicity and symbolic reality on the other.
This is just the solution that ANT wishes to render untenable." (ibid:117)

The alternative with social explanation is an important contribution to archaeology, but one that stacks the cards against any solution to pesky fragmentation by assuming the modernist divides it ostensibly wishes to overcome. Pace their reminder that ‘we cannot assume a priori that what we consider as natural, no matter how institutionalized, is fundamental’ (Ibid:23), we cannot assume that what we consider as social is fundamental. Society and Nature and any bridges erected to join the two immiscible realms only anchors archaeology to irresolvable disputes inherited from modernity. In contrast, a symmetrical approach does not take us back to a ‘naïve empiricism’, nor to a scientific realism. Neither does it pose some absolute symmetry between humans and nonhumans. It simply ‘means not to impose a priori some spurious asymmetry among human intentional action and a material world of causal relations’ (Latour 2005:76).

With an abeyance on the dichotomies which 'social archaeology' inherits, we can ask what is uniquely archaeological? Is it social, is it matter? As the above quotes indicate, it seems better to work at an archaeology of associations; see Symmetrical Archaeology. Ironically, through an inquiry into the associations which link collectives of humans and nonhumans in action, 'the enchantment of the social' may finally be explained - and dispelled.

References

Goodman, Nelson 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Haraway, Donna (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.
Latour, Bruno 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Meskell, L. and R. Preucel (eds) 2004. A Companion to Social Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Olsen, Bjørnar (2003) 'Material culture after text: re-membering things', Norwegian Archaeological Review 36:87-104.
Rorty, Richard (1998) 'Pragmatism as polytheism', in The Revival of Pragmatism: new essays on social thought, law, and culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Stengers, Isabelle (2006) 'Whitehead's account of the sixth day', Whitehead's Account of the Sixth Day, Conference at Stanford University, April 2006.
Webmoor, T. and C. Witmore 2004 Symmetrical Archaeology. http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/symmetry (acessed July 2006).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1963) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.