The paradox has come to light that we know the least about that which we know the most; the familiar and the close-to home are more estranged from us than the unfamiliar and the culturally distant. In studying the material culture of the distant Other, the role of our own material culture has become objectively hidden to us.
TOOLKIT
The craft skills of excavation are inseparable from the tools through which they are applied; to acquire those skills one has learn how to use the appropriate digging tools. In this sense our material culture is not just the medium or conductor of our intentions in shaping other objects; it is also a medium through which the accumulated material experience of generations of practitioners shapes the actions and perceptions of the tool-using subject.
This is not to deny the creative role of the agent or subject who uses the tool. Many examples are given here of workers improvising conventional strategies from moment to moment to take account of emerging evidence. Nor is it to deny the active role of the object. Many examples are given of the ‘resistance’ of material evidence. It is through the practical dialectic that unfolds between the (cultural) skills of the working subject and the (material) object of labour that the craft skills of excavation are transformed.
(slightly amended extract from 11.1)
Posted at Jul 26/2006 02:42AM:
kuy
Posted at Jul 26/2006 02:43AM:
http://metamedia.stanford.edu:3455/edgeworth/846
