Archaeolog

Things are in the limelight. Fresh in the wake of TAG US where the plenary session was focused on the Future of Things, two announcements came through the CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) listserv this past week for thing-oriented conferences/sessions. CHAT 2009 and What's the 'Matter' in Anthropology, both set in Oxford, are taking up the call for things. This is a refreshing state of affairs.

The call to take things seriously has been an important agenda at the heart of what has been called a symmetrical archaeology (González-Ruibal 2007; Olsen 2007; Shanks 2007; Webmoor 2007; Witmore 2007).

Symmetry is an awkward term. It is part of an admittedly poor, but necessary, vocabulary meant to help us move from a very problematic rendering of reality to a hopefully more refreshing and interesting one. The "symmetrical" is simply meant to remind us not to assume the nature of relations between, for example, boundary cairns, arbitration inscriptions, and the governance of Greek poleis by imposing an asymmetric scheme based upon a discord between intentional social players and objective matter.

This is not to say asymmetries don’t exist. There are after all winners and losers throughout history. It is simply to say the asymmetries are not to be oriented along any preformed opposition between humans and nonhumans. This move requires hard work, much of which is yet to be accomplished. Here, it is important to note that significant work is already occurring in many areas across archaeology (see, for example, the contributions to Edgeworth 2006; Jorge and Thomas 2007; Knappett and Malafouris 2008).

As to be expected, many quibbles have been raised with the “symmetrical” agenda. I would like us to address two of these here: 1) the question of disciplinary commitment with respect to theory and; 2) reactions to the rhetorical subtext “the discipline of things”. These cavils were raised at TAG US and in one of the many interesting abstracts from the upcoming Centenary Conference of the Oxford University Anthropological Society, What's the 'Matter' in Anthropology; both criticisms rest upon some basic misunderstandings.

Continue reading "Symmetrical archaeology: Two clarifications" »

Posted by Christopher Witmore at 5:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The disjuncture between ‘what we do’ and ‘what we say we do’ has contributed not only to a great deal of conversation and debate it has also lead to a fair amount of angst and misunderstanding in archaeology (i.e. theory/practice split or the homebase/field bifurcation). Many (myself included) firmly believe that this disjuncture can only be addressed by following up close what ‘we’ (understood to encompass people, institutions, media, materials, things, etc. which comprise an archaeologist) actually do in practice.

Anthropologists and sociologists have long enrolled ethnography and ethnomethodology as set of practices for engaging with what scientific practitioners do (this has been especially successful when they have been bold enough to free themselves from the weight of epistemology!). Hitherto, archaeology, sadly, has been in large part ignored by these practitioners (refer to my entry from October 23, 2005 and Tim Webmoor’s from November 6, 2006), though there are notable exceptions in the related field of the philosophy of science with the important work of Alison Wylie. Thankfully, the tides are changing and this is in large part due to a few archaeologists who have taken the initiative themselves.

A recent book edited by Matt Edgeworth, Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice: Cultural Encounters, Material Transformations is an example of this initiative and will help us along the path to knowing who we are! The volume pulls together a diverse and welcome body of ethnographic work with archaeology (beyond the well-known reflexive strategies operating at Çatalhöyük, Turkey) from projects throughout Europe and the Americas

Continue reading "Id quod facimus sumus! (We are what we do!) A commentary on Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice: Cultural Encounters, Material Transformations" »

Posted by Christopher Witmore at 7:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Johan Normark

Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Göteborg University, Sweden

The following text is a short resume of what I call Polyagentive Archaeology. It shares some similarities with Symmetrical Archaeology. Apart from the ingredients of Latour, other technoscientists and Gell, which all have been used in recent years, polyagentive archaeology mainly includes ideas from Bergson, Deleuze, Grosz, DeLanda, Pearson, Badiou, Sartre, Nietzsche, Darwin and Aijmer. The most recently updated text is my dissertation (Normark 2006) from which the following text is taken and slightly modified.

Polyagentive archaeology proceeds from the idea that the real challenge for archaeology is to construct a theory where the material remains are in focus and not the human beings which are the focus of the humanocentric approaches lumped together such as “culture-history”, “processualism” or “postprocessualism” (“assymetrical archaeologies”). Here I am partly following Fahlander and Oestigaard’s (2004:5) belief that archaeology is entering a third formative phase; the study of the social dimensions of materialities. Like my fellow colleagues Cornell and Fahlander (2002), I do not believe in an absolute symmetry since polyagentive archaeology seeks human patterns but these are initially reduced in order to find what is continuous and persistent in the archaeological record. This continuous and persistent is not the human being. However, neither is it the artefact as a material thing. Even material objects change, they become. Polyagentive archaeology sets the focus on the processes of becoming, the actualizations of the virtual.

In some contemporary social theory there has been an emphasis on the relationship between humans and non-humans, especially in the field of technoscience (Haraway 2003; Ihde 2003; Latour 1987, 1993, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002, 2003a, 2003b; Law 1999; Pickering 1995, 1997, 2003). These researchers are united in a belief in an active material world. However, the only way in which we can represent this active and changing world is through static entities and solids, such as words, pictures, numbers and matter (Bergson 1998, 1999, 2001, 2004). For this reason, some technoscientists wish to abandon the representational idiom (Fris Jørgenssen 2003:213). This is also a central issue in the polyagentive approach.

One way to break away from hyper-representationalism is to loosen up the entities, make them interpenetrate, and not see them as isolated from each other. However, we still need to write and illustrate our ideas, and we can never escape the representationalist chains. Instead, the focus for polyagentive archaeology is on how polyagents interact without any particular entity taking the central role. No entity can have an absolute boundary in space and time. In this endeavour I ally myself with posthumanism, since my aim is to decentralize, in some instances even end, the importance of human beings in archaeology. If the relation between the human and the non-human is just a social construction, then this distinction is useless. However, I do believe that this relation is more than a social construction, particularly since social constructionism sees the becomings of materiality only as the result of human activities and imagination, something Deleuze calls hylomorphism (Pearson 1999:214). Therefore, my approach aims to go beyond constructionism (Hacking 1999), representationalism and hylomorphism (Deleuze and Guattari 1988), in order to find the basis elsewhere.

Continue reading "Polyagentive archaeology. Part I: Evolution Revisited" »

Posted by Johan Normark at 5:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)