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things-people symmetry------------radical asymmetry of 'absolute ethno-idealism';
or Posthumanism------------Humanism.
Working (briefly) through the major thinkers, I will suggest that such an application of technoscience posthumanism to this contentious archaeological issue, will also serve 'to trial' technoscience where it has received much criticism: in its apparent inability to address normative issues such as ethics. I suggest that an absolute symmetry (Latour, Haraway, A-N-T), while idealistically the most 'democratic' (in its anonymity and absolute inclusion of humans-nonhumans) must be pragmatically tempered by Pickering and Ihde's formulations of 'hybridized symmetry' or 'post-subjective humanism' with the inclusion of both bodily situatedness and conceptual frameworks as a part of the 'mangle of practice'. Drawing these implications out, I suggest that the 'stasis of dialogue' and dialogic approaches in politicized archaeological engagements with indigenous beliefs may be side-stepped by incorporating alternate conceptual frameworks and bodily situatedness as simply one of the myriad of 'actants' which are mobilized in 'the archaeological collective'. Finally, drawing from Ihde's notion of 'instrumental realism' and Haraway's democratizing effort in the sciences (such as with hypertext and situatedness), the crescendo of 'social software' usage in academic, popular and political settings is portrayed as a media for enabling an ethical/democratized archaeology by extending mediational capacity to mobilize articulations to those ordinarily situated Outside (in participatory sense) of 'the Collective'.
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