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All the same, we are not going to wallow in multiculturalism and abstain from making any value judgments; instead, we are going to start talking to one other again, as people should have done at the beginning of the age of great discoveries (Latour 2004:210).


Bruno Latour's extensive development of a program to 'symmetrize' the relations between humans and nonhumans carries particular rhetorical weight appeal for the human sciences. Offering a therepeutic overhaul of the collective, unconscious baggage of an inherited modernist conditioning, Latour's appeal may be in his radical disinvestiture of binarisms which have characterized a Western intellectual tradition composed of radically incomensurate constituents: the 'things' of the world and humans subjects groping in Kant's (1958) schema to know them. And though this tradition may be traced back to Plato's doctrine of Form/Ideas (Copleston 1993), Kant's Theory of Knowledge in his Copernican Revolution serves as a final coup d'etat in entrenching a very 'undemocratic' and repressive manner of relating to the world.

Latour's call for a movement for the democracy of people and things (2004:223), then, seems reasonable if 'revolutionary'. Reasonable, or more perceptively, desired, as the modernist inheritance has effected a particularly widening divergence in academia between socially-oriented and empirically-oriented research disciplines - epitomized in the 'science wars'. A compound fracture band-aided, for example, by 'from-above' academic insistence upon 'multi-disciplinary' projects, yet perspicaciously triaged as the inability to speak-across-the-room syndrome. Departments are split along 'science lines', certain courses are avoided or crowded for the inclusion of certain catch-words, and researchers collaborate like a 'mixed salad' of incommensurable specializations (see non-embedded collaboration).

In Latour's book, The Politics of Nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy (and adumbrated in his introduction to Making Things Public), he presents a program offering re-unification in a monistic (though relational) 'Collectivity'. This is also a book which addresses directly a widespread criticism of Latour (and other technoscience thinkers), or his inability to address normative issues such as ethics and value judgments. It is within this tension of 'absolute inclusion', or his 'Parliament of things and people', and a manifestation of an absolute subjectivity or representation-bound program of including a plurality of voices in science (Haraway 1997; Harding 1998, 1991) as an ethical imperative that I want to discuss the particularly germane example of 'Multivocal Archaeology' (Mihesuah 2000;Swidler 1997;Watkins 2000;White Dear 1997;Zimmerman 1996) and suggest a tweaking or 'tuning' of technoscience ideas with new digital media (particularly Social Software) for my practical goal of attempting an inclusive model of knowledge constitution for archaeology.

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