Second guarantee (of the new 'Constitution'):...a revision process should be maintained, an appeal of some sort, to make sure that new claimants will be able to have their voices heard. And 'voice,' of course, in not limited to humans (Latour 2003:38).

...the possibility of a radical performative incommensurability by suggesting that within different cultures human beings and the material world might exhibit capacities for action quite different from those we customarily attribute to them (Pickering 1995:245).

A focus upon instrumental mediation, of this interface of technology and actors in engaging the world, allows for 'relative degrees' of symmetry between people-things. That is, framing the relationship of people-things from a Pickering and Ihde technoscience perspective where actor intentionality is not absolutely commensurate with actant/thing 'intentionality' in the unfolding of practice, allows for a specified consideration of 'claimants' in the sciences and of particular configurations with technology. A material-semiotic lens (Latour, Haraway) considers goals of practitioners as constrained/enabled by material, socio-political and institutional practicalities (Latour's acts of translation in a process of delegation), but these case studies are contexted in the operation of Western sciences where intentions may be said to be informed by similar conceptual frameworks - such as Latour's (1988, 1999:ch.4-5) Pasteurs and cartographers (1986) seeking optical consistency in their media. Can such 'rational activity' or research goals of 'optical consistency' and 'combinability' of immutable mobiles (plans, maps, and other visual inscriptions) for argumentation in the sciences be universalized to all actors and their instrumental mediations? Latour himself (1987:ch5) addresses such a question of 'rationality' versus 'irrationality' and asserts that there is no 'gulf' between them; only differences subscribable to 'rhetoric'. These differences in 'rhetoric' extend to how media is mobilized to convince. And in the same chapter, he affirms that no knowledge can be separated from its informing context, as all knowledge is embedded in society. This suggests, not only may the 'rhetoric', the mobilization of media, differ depending upon social context, but that the very type of knowledge desired - and so the practical purpose to which media are engaged with - may also be differ considerably. Latour attempts to avoid any notion of 'social constructivism' or hyper-relativism (eg ibid,2003:36,40) by, as previously argued, turning analysis to the inscriptional results of technological interface - to the material-semiotic effects of such mobilizations. As quoted above, Latour (2003) does turn to issues of normativity, of making judgments as to what assemblages of people-things are to be included in the 'pluriverse' of his new 'constitution'. A measure to insure 'democracy' in the new 'parliament' is the sanctioning of 'consultation' (ibid:137-60). But again the emphasis is upon things and their mobilization for normative judgment: "that the question of democracy be extended to things" (ibid:23).

I would not argue for such a hyperrelativism in archaeology by shifting determination to presumably incommensurable social representations of reality (to be, in Hacking's (1999:24-34) portrayal, a 'social realist' insisting upon the flexibility of 'the world' but inflexibility -'realism'- of social formations). But the 'external mandate' to include non-archaeological inclusion in knowledge constitution may be illuminating to address non-Western sciences conceptual frameworks which (as part of Latour's embedding of knowledge in society) do vary according to informing society and do inform differing 'goals of the researchers' prior to any inscriptional activity. This is a shifting of the Latourian lens of analysis along the spectrum to 'pre-conditions' which are not static, a-historical, but are also part of Pickering's inclusive 'mangle of practice'. Sharing a concern with informing 'concepts' of practice, Pickering (1995:216) believes that:

The eclectic recognition of the importance of both the epistemic and the social in science is certainly a step in the right direction, a step toward an appreciation of cultural multiplicity in science, and a fruitful departure from traditional monodisciplinary images of science.

Recent legal developments in the practice of archaeology have forced archaeologists to consider just such a 'cultural multiplicity' in science.

Even in the hearings on the reburial laws, the archaeological community was rumored to have been warned by a senator that if archaeologists couldn’t come to grips with the issue, Congress would solve the problem for them (Zimmerman 2000:293).

The above comes from the hearings in a subcommittee of Congress in considering the Native American Graves Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), or Public Law 101-601 of 1990. While political and institutional pressure to open archaeology to inclusion of stakeholder groups is manifest in other nations, the passage of NAGPRA in the United States has had the most impact upon archaeological practice because of its legally binding statues. Most specifically, sections 7-9 of NAGPRA provide for the altering of one of archaeology's operating assumptions, namely the idea of 'cultural resource', by admitting tribal authorities to define 'resource' under non-archaeological terms. In re-defining what was previously part of the corpus of ‘archaeological resources’ or ‘data’ pertaining to North American prehistory under the category of ‘Cultural Items’ as ‘Human Remains’, ‘Sacred Objects’, ‘Associated Funerary Objects’ ‘Cultural Patrimony’ and ‘Unassociated Funerary Objects, Sacred Objects, and Items of Cultural Property’ (1990 25 U.S.C.A.§2(3)a-d), NAGPRA requires that ‘the federal government and non-Indian institutions must consider what is sacred from an Indian perspective (Trope 2000: 151; and see Mihesuah for detailed explication). Furthermore, ‘the term sacred is not defined explicitly in the legislative definition. Rather the definitions will vary according to the traditions of the tribe of community’ (ibid:144). In addition, the burden of proof (the ‘preponderance of evidence’) in establishing ‘cultural affinity’ with contested material is not restricted to scientific data but may include: ‘kinship…folkloric, and oral traditions’ (25 U.S.C.A.§7(a)4). Finally, the assessment of such material and the implementation of NAGPRA procedures will be conducted by the administrative body which NAGPRA established as the ‘Review Committee’ (ibid:§8) which will have recourse to assessing punitive damages to insure the compliance with the statutes (ibid:§9).

The ramifications for the mandate to include claimants in defining and assessing the very 'data' of archaeology has had wide ramifications, particularly as the law is binding for not solely government funded projects, or projects on federal land (as with the ambit of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA)), but to any project investigating 'resources' identifiable as Native American - such as with the controversy surrounding Kinnewick Man (see External Mandate and Ethics in Archaeology for more discussion). NAGPRA concerns the abutment of ‘legiethics’ (cf. Watkins 2000) with more immutable, fundamental assumptions about what archaeology is - what it does, how it does it, and why. A prodigious amount of literature has been produced concerning the issue of incorporating ‘the local’ in archaeological practice (e.g. Bender 1998; Bray 2001; Carmichael 1994; Gosden 1999; Hodder 2000, 2001,2003; King 2000; Lynnot 1995; Meskell 1998; Nelson 1990; Nicholas 1997; Schmidt 1995; Stoffle 2001; Swidler 1997; Vitelli 1996; Woodall 1990; Zimmerman 2003) – just mentioning the larger compendiums, not including the flurry (sometimes acrimonious) exchanges in scholarly journals (Anyon 1995; Dowdall 2003b; Echo-Hawk 2000; Fotiadis 1993; Goldstein 1991; Green 2003; Hale 2002; Hemming 2000; Hodder 2001; Marshall 2002; Mason 2000; McGuire 1992; Meighan 1992; Meskell 2002; Mulvaney 1991; Oyuela-Caycedo 1997; Patterson 1994; Politis 2001; Powell 1993; Shepherd 2003). Though certain archaeologists (Zimmerman 2000: 301-5; Watkins 2000:170, 2003:277,282) engaged in the issue speak of ‘hybridizing’ archaeological knowledge and non-disciplinarian knowledge in constituting a ‘new and different archaeology’ (Zimmerman 2000), these attempts, I would argue, have largely been co-opted by simply training Native Americans in archaeological methods (and disciplinarian philosophy) and including them in otherwise unaltered archaeological investigations. The problem?: distilled to the most divisive issue, NAGPRA entails an abutment of alternate philosophies, alternate conceptual frameworks for engaging with 'the past' - as even the notion of 'the past' has been contested by traditions of 'living pasts'. Zimmerman (ibid), along with an increasing number of other pro-repatriation archaeologists such as Watkins (2000:176, 2001, 2003), are explicitly stating that the embattlement is over the ‘conflict in philosophical traditions’, or as Smith (2003:185) puts it, acknowledging that the conflict is not over ‘ethics…but between scientific and indigenous philosophy’.

A practical example may help to underline the legislated necessity for archaeologists (in the United States, but analogous legislation has been passed, or is pending, in New Zealand, Australia and Canada, not to mention professional organizations 'binding' ethical proposals for archaeologists in other countries) to account for 'alternate goals' and practices that may not be strictly subsumed under the intentions of the Western sciences which science studies has (understandably) focused upon. A repercussion of NAGPRA for compliance archaeology (constituting the majority of archaeological endeavour in the States) has been the modification of compliance laws (National Historic Preservation Act) to provide protection for Traditional Cultural Properties (TCP's - Parker and King 1990). Derived from section 7 of NAGPRA, the new statute requires identification and mitigation efforts to protect 'sites' which may contain no normatively defined 'artifacts' or 'cultural material', but which are deemed important to local tribes for purely cultural or spiritual reasons. These are generally synonymous with sacred sites (eg Carmichael 1994). So familiar to some will be the designation of Mount Shasta in Northern California as a TCP, despite constituting solely a 'natural resource'. Such sites may be valorized for their situadedness in the landscape, their association with oral history or cosmogony, or with historical events. As such, they provide a cogent example of the breaking down of nature/culture divisions so prominently espoused by the technoscience thinkers I've been considering (eg Latour 2003). The question for archaeologists, entrusted with identifying and protecting such nature-culture locales, is how to document them for bureaucratic purposes (to be placed on the National Register of Historic Sites - see King 1998,2000 for 'section 106 protocol'). Determining and documenting the 'significance' of such a TCP was undertaken in conjunction with the National Forest Service (overseeing government agency) on the Comanche National Grasslands in southern Colorado (see Comanche project).

Under pre-1990 criteria this vision questing site would be deemed 'not eligible' due to a paucity of artifactual significance. Yet post-NAGPRA amendments to include TCP's deem that significance may be afforded due to the qualities inherent to the location in the landscape which 'selected' the site for culturally-significant activities but were 'a-archaeological'. This re-orientation of selection criteria to the ineffable and immaterial qualities of the site arises from an alternate conceptual model within which research goals and related concepts - such as 'significance', 'preservation', 'past/archaeological site', 'management' - differ considerably from normative archaeological science. A mobilization of actants in the form of the documenters, multi-media 'inscriptions', local Forest Service regulations and resources, etc. were articulated under the alternate criteria to make the claims of significance for the site 'more real' and convincing (in Latour's (eg 1986:32) terms). In this very performance of 'tuning' the various media-captures in the project, differing reactions to 'interruption' or thwarting of research goals incur untoward acts of delegation which would not fit any archaeologist's research plan. Instead of fundamentally being oriented to preserve and manage the site (and so shift acts of delegations in reasonable translations), a goal-shifting to not preserve and plot the site with a GPS on heritage maps may be negotiated in order to follow tribal belief to allow the 'living' site to transform/decay without interference. And would the resultant 'inscriptions' - though these constituted audio recordings, video-work, and map-image integration in non-textual form - be included through Latour's (2003:136-61) 'consultation' as material-semiotic products? I would argue that if the underlying re-conceptions of 'significance', 'artifact', 'preservation', 'past' and so forth which led the inscription process were not factored-in, then the site's assemblage would be dismissed according to normative archaeological judgment - as indeed TCP criteria and adjudication process are contested (Echo-Hawk 2000; Mason 2000).

In practice what is required is a 'symmetrical lens' that allows for inclusion of conceptual models which predispose and relate to an additional necessary inclusion of attention to alternate 'technology interfaces', or instrumental mediations. For Ihde's (1991:30-8) 'post-phenomenological' perspective, such alternate instrumental mediations are part of 'macroperceptional'-'microperceptional' factors of bodily situatedness. Inherited from Merleau-Ponty's later writings, cultural context must be considered as it influences 'macro-perception', or general habits and traditions' orientations toward the world (Foucault's potential discontinuity in cultural perception), which then inform personal 'micro-perception' (ibid:88). His extension of this forefronting of bodily praxis as part of scientific practice to Instrumental Mediation, extending and merging with the human perceiving body and so utilized within macro-perceptual orientations, should be included in a technoscientific approach to 'Multivocal archaeology'.

Pickering, as part of stressing the 'flux' and 'multiplicity' of his 'path dependency' in scientific practice, includes 'concepts' among the variables which must be 'tuned' into alignment for knowledge constitution to, however temporarily, 'settle-out' (1995:17,20,182,2003:85-9).

I have argued that the connections between knowledge and the world are, in practice, interactive stabilizations of machinic performances and conceptual strata... (Pickering 1995:182). The social is thus itself part of the delicate and uncertain business of making alignments in practice as the material and conceptual (Pickering 2003:87).

A later distillation reaffirms his position note-1: “The social is thus itself part of the delicate and uncertain business of making alignments in practice as the material and conceptual” (Pickering 2003:87). 'Concepts' informing the intentions and practical goals of scientists must, for Pickering, be included as part of his temporally emergent mangle process. In relation to NAGPRA-archaeology, such a inclusion in the 'collective' for consideration in knowledge judgments of both informing conceptual models and particular/alternate instrumental mediations (which may indeed not 'inscribe' anything at all recognizable to Western sciences 'macroperception') will, I argue, result in a more 'diplomatic collective' (cf Latour 2003:ch4).

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