Material Hermeneutics

Don Ihde

Abstract

A material hermeneutics is a hermeneutics which “gives things voices where there had been silence, and brings to sight that which was invisible.” Such a hermeneutics in natural science can best be illustrated by its imaging practices. The objects of this visual hermeneutics were not texts nor linguistic phenomena, but things which came into vision through instrumental magnifications, allowing perception to go where it had not gone before. One could also say that a visual hermeneutics is a perceptual hermeneutics with a perception which while including texts, goes beyond texts. This local history gives but a small glimpse of the directions I tried to outline in Expanding Hermeneutics. Such material hermeneutics are doubly material—first, in the sense that the objects being investigated are material entities—paramecia, extra-geocentric satellites, and eventually even the chemical make-up of the stars-but also it is material in the sense that the instruments being used to ‘bring close’ such phenomena are also material entities, technologies, by which and through which the natural sciences are embodied. In Expanding Hermeneutics I outlined both a weak program of hermeneutics in natural science, that is, a program of actual and extant practices which can best be understood as hermeneutic practices, and a strong program which was more prescriptive, suggesting ways to radicalize a material hermeneutics. In part the trajectory of expanding hermeneutics comes from much that I have learned from the new versions of interdisciplinary “science studies” which include the strands of the new sociologies of science, feminist critiques of science, and the varieties of philosophy of science which emphasize praxis, instruments, and laboratories over sheer theory production - all under which I now title “technoscience studies”. I have developed a sensitivity to the ways in which our instruments, technologies operate in hermeneutic ways. And that is a story I wish to tell here—with a new twist.

Paper

Introduction:

Vesprey, 1993, it was at that meeting that I first proposed the notion of “expanding hermeneutics.” Today, at our tenth anniversary meeting, I want to illustrate how this expansion takes shape. First, a little local history:

I well remember, from our first meeting, how a certain controversy got underway. Our theme, after all, was hermeneutics and the sciences, including the natural sciences. But amongst the hermeneuts here then, a good number retained what I later called the “Diltheyan Divide,” that is a belief that there is a distinctively different methodology which belongs to the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the social and human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Karl Otto Apel was the most persistent in this distinction, although Dagfinn Follesdal seemed to have a variation upon it as well—he later denied to me that he did. I, and a number of other colleagues, including Bob Crease and Laszlo Ropolyi, argued that this distinction was outdated and that the purpose of an expanded hermeneutics ought to be such that it could operate within the natural sciences as well. We had some fairly warm sessions concerning this conflict between the classical “Diltheyans” and those of us who wanted to develop what I called a “material hermeneutics.”

This issue stuck so much in my mind, that I ended up doing a whole book, Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science (Northwestern University Press, 1999) in response to our first meeting. In that book, I argued that what the Diltheyan Divide did, was to cede the natural sciences to a postivistic interpretation: they go their way on one side; the humanities and social sciences on the other. I argued, instead, that an expanded notion of hermeneutics at least ambiguates, if not obliterates the old Diltheyan Divide, and that the natural sciences, too, are deeply embedded with hermeneutic practices. I shall not here review that book or its movements, (although I have copied a review by Peter Paul Verbeek who nicely summarizes my arguments.) The main point of an expanded hermeneutics is that what the natural sciences teach us is that there are ways, through instruments—techologies—by which things can show themselves.. A material hermeneutics is a hermeneutics which “gives things voices where there had been silence, and brings to sight that which was invisible.”

Such a hermeneutics in natural science can best be illustrated by its imaging practices. Beginning with the very earliest modern science, for example with Galileo and Leeweunhoek, the then new technologies of telescopes and microscopes began to let things become visually present which had not previously been visualizable: Galileo saw the mountains of the Moon, the satellites of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and sunspots; Leewenhoek saw single celled animals, plant cells and even sperm, never before seen. The objects of this visual hermeneutics were not texts nor linguistic phenomena, but things which came into vision through instrumental magnifications, allowing perception to go where it had not gone before. One could also say that a visual hermeneutics is a perceptual hermeneutics with a perception which while including texts, goes beyond texts. The shift to perceptual observation from textuality has often been remarked upon in different ways, for example by Michel Foucault, Catherine Wilson and others.

This local history gives but a small glimpse of the directions I tried to outline in Expanding Hermeneutics. Such material hermeneutics are doubly material—first, in the sense that the objects being investigated are material entities—paramecia, extra-geocentric satellites, and eventually even the chemical make-up of the stars-but also it is material in the sense that the instruments being used to ‘bring close’ such phenomena are also material entities, technologies, by which and through which the natural sciences are embodied. In Expanding Hermeneutics I outlined both a weak program of hermeneutics in natural science, that is, a program of actual and extant practices which can best be understood as hermeneutic practices, and a strong program which was more prescriptive, suggesting ways to radicalize a material hermeneutics.

In part the trajectory of expanding hermeneutics comes from much that I have learned from the new versions of interdisciplinary “science studies” which include the strands of the new sociologies of science, feminist critiques of science, and the varieties of philosophy of science which emphasize praxis, instruments, and laboratories over sheer theory production. Within these conversation groups whose names must include Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Ian Hacking, Peter Galison, Andrew Pickering, Joseph Rouse, Trevor Pinch, and many, many others, and under which I now title “technoscience studies” I have developed a sensitivity to the ways in which our instruments, technologies operate in hermeneutic ways. And that is a story I wish to tell here—with a new twist.

Material Hermeneutics and the Humanities:

I begin with two lessons gleaned from recent years with science studies. The natural sciences have long focused upon dimensions of reality which lie outside or beyond the human as such. Thus one can say that the problem for physics, chemistry, and even biology is to somehow make that which does not speak, speak, and even that which is not seen or is invisible, to be seen, to be visible. My own now three decade long work on instrumentation and more lately imaging technologies tries to understand precisely these processes by which sciences produce knowledge.

There is a second level to this interest, again reflected for nearly the same length of time within science studies, and that is the interest in what most broadly can be called the ‘material culture’ of the sciences. What happens when humans, here the scientists, use, interact with, their material world both as an object field of knowledge and through their instruments by which the knowledge is constituted.

What if we were to take this same approach and apply it to the humanities, broadly construed? That is what I am going to deal with in this paper, a material hermeneutics for the humanities. I begin with an example which parallels some science studies examples in which the role of instruments in the production of knowledge is followed.

Three Trajectories:

In this presentation, I shall follow three trajectories to exemplify and descriptively show what I mean by material hermeneutics. And, to make the issues clearer, I shall develop these three trajectories in variations which will show three different sets of relations with more traditional, text-focused hermeneutics. But, to also make the distinction and interrelation between text-focused and material hermeneutics, I shall deliberately select examples which allow degrees of tension to occur between these two hermeneutic styles.

Trajectory One: material and textual hermeneutics in constrast. Viking Invasions.

Those of you familiar with European history will be aware that from the 8th through the 11th century, Vikings made their influence known from England to Russia and down to Istanbul. This is a complicated and important history and I want to select only a small part of it involving England to highlight my framing of textual and material hermeneutics. The general problem, not framed in my textual/material issue, is well recognized. My favorite landmark 1929 Encyclopedia states: Most of our evidence as t the Vikings of this period is derived from the literature of he lands which they visited, and is therefore essentially hostile. To contemporary chroniclers they were utterly hateful, faithless, cruel and enemies of civilization and he arts of peaceful life. Their own side of the story is untold…. Their character can only be inferred from the scale upon which their raids were planned, the forms of society which arose… and the archeological evidence which yields something of their culture. Judged in this way they cease to appear as a mere blind force of destruction. (Enc. Brit. P. 148,Vol 23)

Implicitly this passage plays off the textually focused discipline of history with the materially focused discipline of archeology. Here, for example, is a text concerning the raid on Lindesfarne in 793, the first recorded Viking raid in England:

The same year the heathens arrived from the north to Brittany with a fleet of ships. They were like stinging wasps, and they spread in all directions like horrible wolves, wrecking, robbing, shattering and killing not only animals but also priests, monks, and nuns. They came to the church of Lindesfarne, slayed everything alive, dug up the alters and took all the treasures of the holy church. (J. Cornish The beginning of the Viking age.)

This narrative, which I do not dispute, remains a partial narrative, one limited to texts which were produced by those who knew how to write. As for raiding churches, it is clear that the Vikings did this for the same reason that Willy Hutton robbed banks—that’s where all the gold was! And the hordes of English coin found in Scandinavia dating from the 9th century is material evidence that the text was correct.

Yet, but now relying more upon archeological sources, the first narrative needs supplement since the Vikings were also traders and even settled, after a few years, in the raided countries. There is textual and linguistic evidence for this as well—there are some 900 words of Danish origin dating back to these times (egg, fellow, sky, skull, window, among these), common surnames ending in ‘son’, and numerous place names to be found in England. Less directly, but clearly datable, one can trace the building of major river and harbor which cities probably arose due to trading practices between the Norsemen and Saxon English, including Dublin in Ireland.

These evidences, partly textual, partly material, however derive from earlier studies. More recent ‘material hermeneutics’ if I may call it that, show a rather more subtle pattern of cultural modification. It appears that the invaders, become traders, become residents, also blended customs in rather quick ways. Only recently have older grave practices which show Viking style shown up. The oldest burials now have shown, in one instance, “an adult male ..with a necklace, with two beads and a silver Thor’s hammer, a copper alloy buckle, an iron sword, two iron knives, and iron key, the tusk of a wild boar and the bone of a jackdaw,” all in Scandinavian burial style. But, equally, the adaptation of the invaders to the dominant Saxon burial practices is also evidenced.`(Archeology, Dawn Hadley, April, 2002.) The rapid adaptation to trade and intercultural practices led one archeologist to conclude that the story given by the material culture, “is a far cry from the traditional image of the brutal Viking warlord concerned with nothing but rape and plunder.” {ibid.}

Please note that I am not trying to re-invent history and archeology which have long supplemented each other. Rather I am telling about a richer narrative which draws from both textual and material hermeneutics to provide for a richer and more multidimensional description of social and human phenomena. The Viking narrative is one in which the tension between textual and material evidences is one of supplement but also of difference. It is precisely imbalanced because in this case there are not conflicting texts compared to conflicting material evidences as might be the case in other instances.

Trajectory Two: Material Hermeneutics without textual hermeneutics. The Case of Otzi the Iceman.

As the world’s glaciers have begun to melt, they have also begun to reveal unknown pasts. In 1991, “Otzi” AKA the iceman, was discovered on the Austrian-Italian border, the freeze-dried remains of a man who lived 5300 years ago. Here is a case which in my framing calls for a ‘pure’ material hermeneutics since he is ‘pre-history’ if by that we mean prior to European textual, recorded history. Otzi’s case is highly interesting from a material hermeneutic perspective, in part because his story has even changed quite dramatically since he was first discovered. And, since he is a contemporary find, the archeology and paleopathology involved is precisely that which shows what may be called the postmodern material hermeneutics at its best.

The initial hikers who found the body, and the authorities investigating, first assumed he was one of many lost avalanche victims which are regularly yielded by the glacier—but it soon became apparent that Otzi was much older than this. So, the first question was about when Otzi lived—and a material process invented only in the 20th century comes to bear, radiocarbon dating. It was applied both to body tissues and to the organic material associated with Otzi and all yield 5300 BP, making Otzi the oldest such preserved body in Europe in this period. And, with this comes a series of other surprises: he had a fully intact copper axe, the oldest such axe ever recovered and with its full technology showing; he was clothed, again with the oldest best preserved garments of that age; he carried in addition to the axe, a flint dagger, bow and arrows, medicine bag, fire making kit and a sharpening tool. In short, Otzi came technologically equipt for his last journey. All these material artifacts “speak” and begin to evidence his lifestory. But, except for the radiocarbon dating, all else remains standard material archeology. And, in rhetorical archeological style the first archeologist, Konrad Spindler, told the following tale:

(Spindler) proposed that the man had fled to safety in the mountains after being injured in a fight at his home village. It was autumn… and the man was a shepherd who sought refuge in the high pastures where he took his herds in the summer. Hurt and in a state of exhaustion, he fell asleep and died on the boulder on which he was found five millennia later. (Sci Am. P. 72)

After some feuding between Austria, which first claimed him, and later Italy which won the claim, newer scientific material processes came into play and we can update Otzi’s story: X-rays later revealed that Otzi bore an arrowhead under his shoulder blade, at first suggesting he had been murdered, but now thought perhaps to have been an earlier wound with the arrowhead grown over. Note the process, X-rays reveal that which was invisible.

His diet and even last meals are revealed through mass spectroscopic processes—his hair, which had been separated by natural processes, showed that he had a mixed plant and animal diet, also confirmed by analyses of intestinal contents which, through DNA identification showed him to have eaten red deer, wild goat, plants and ground grain shortly before his death. The ground grain was einkorn wheat, ground and associated with charcoal and thus probably baked bread. Pollen grains, revealed by microscopy, were those of the hop hornbeam tree and produced only in the spring, thus proving Spindler wrong concerning time of year for his death. Specific plant remains probably show his exact village origin, near today’s Juval Castle. Microanalysis of his fingernails show that he was seriously ill three times in the months before he died. His clothes, layered, were well designed for the climate in which he lived and died.

I shall not go on, but what I am illustrating in my terms, is the instrumental, material processes by which Otzi’s history is constructed. X-rays, microscopes, mass spectrographs, radiocarbon dating, are all instrumental means by which that which was unseen becomes visible and that which could not be heard is given ‘speech.’ And, since all of this requires critical interpretation, I term it material hermeneutics. Otzi’s story thus becomes quite rich without any textual evidence at all.

Trajectory Three: Material versus Textual Hermeneutics. The Case of Contemporary Archeology and the Bible.

In my first trajectory I showed how a textual hermeneutics alone is simply not sufficient to tell the whole tale, a material hermeneutics not only supplements, but often supplements with contrary tension, the partiality of the textual. In my second trajectory, with a material hermeneutics alone, while it is clear that the counter-supplement of a textual trace would have helped and enriched the story, yet much could be told from the material interpretation alone.

In this last trajectory, I want to sharpen the tension between textual and material hermeneutics with what is bound to be a controversial case: contemporary archeology and the Bible. This is a case I find particularly interesting personally, because I was a graduate theological student 1956-1959 in an interesting period. The Dead Sea Scrolls had just been found; the higher criticism, mostly a critical textual, but also archeologically enriched hermeneutics was finely honed; and I had become deeply interested in these movements. But this early hermeneutic education occurred before the rise of the newer archeology which begins, according to the sources I shall be citing, around 1970. Yet, since that time I have followed the controversies about the Scrolls and retained an interest in the theories of the formation of the Bible. Occasionally there would appear in one or another of my science reading sources, articles about new discoveries implicating this phenomenon.

Then, in 2001, two highly acclaimed archeologists, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, published The Bible Unearthed: Archeology’s New Vison of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts. This book performs two interesting large moves: first, it synthesizes a good deal of recent and accumulated archeological research concerning the Holy Lands, including much of the more contemporary processes arising since 1970, and second, they invert the traditional role of biblical studies to archeological discovery. The authors point out that much traditional archeology has pretty much taken for granted claims by the biblical texts and used those texts as indices for archeological work. Cities cited in the Bible are presumed to have existed in biblical times and are searched for and excavated when found. This textual clue for material history is not different in principle from the way in which German, in particular, discoverers and extollers of ancient Greece did their work in the 19th century—Schliemann on Troy, for example. This text-to-archeology model prevailed in many areas even until the ‘90’s.

But, Finkelstein and Silberman propose an inversion of this process: what does archeology show us by way of clues for the formation of the Bible itself? Such an inversion I take to be basically phenomenological, such as one does with figure/ground reversals to reveal different aspects of things. Moreover, one should note at this preliminary juncture, that there is probably no region of the earth so fully archeologically examined as the Holy Lands, and this more fully and with contemporary means more since 1970 than in any other locality.

The Finkelstein and Silberman results are radical and controversial, and I want to quite deliberately outline some of these as starkly as possible: • Abraham and the Patriarchs are, at best, legendary or mythical; • The Exodus, in all likelihood, did not happen and Moses is as legendary as Abraham; • Israel, as a distinguishable group was simply a Canaanite variant subgroup and pre-existed the Exodus; • There never was a glorious Solomonic Empire; • The earliest strands of the Bible go no farther back than the 7th century BCE, but narrate events claimed to occur centuries, even millennia earlier.

These radical conclusions are largely deconstructive in form, but the Finkelstein-Silberman conclusions also have positive, reconstructive claims: • For the most part the Bible was formed after the Assyrian conquests destroyed and captured the North and is largely an invention of the southern Judean kingdom; • The Bible reflects a tension between a more puritanical and religious South and a more assimilationist North; • It displays origins and a golden age in typical rhetorica, justificatory forms; • The Bible ‘invents’ a people, not the other way around. I shall return to these results shortly, but one can see here a case which fits nicely the questions and interests of ‘science studies’ as well. For example the results obvious relate to contemporary interests, politics and cultures. One can immediately see the implications for Israeli politics and claims about the promised lands—but, as we shall see, the results actually cut two ways.

My question, however, remains that of a material and textual hermeneutics and what, in this trajectory, the inversion and effective making primary of archeological or material hermeneutics by Finkelstein and Silberman implies. But, I also do not wish to oversimplify this contrastive tension since, from my own background on the textual side, what at first may appear as radical in The Bible Unearthed, is not quite as radical as it might be. Indeed, one question I had in mind when I first read the book was, what new could I learn from it? Permit, then, a very brief detour into some earlier results of the largely textual hermeneutics of higher criticism whose roots lie in 19th and early 20th century biblical scholarship:

• Earlier textual analysis, some going back as far as the 17th century, had noted curious and often contradictory ‘doublets’ in the Torah. For example, double flood, double creation stories, double genealogies, all with contradictory orders. By the 19th century and what is now known as the higher criticism the notion that the Torah was actually a complex, edited and redacted body of texts was commonplace. The now famous “J” or Yahwist and “E,” Elohist sources identified the contradictory origins accounts; showed tensions between Babylonian-like sequences related to the Gilgamesh epics on the one side, and a desert, patriarchal or nomadic source on the other. Moreover, the Babylonian Genesis sources thus already hint at a laater time for composition. In short, the claim that much of the Torah took its shape in the 7th century BCE could be made on textual and comparative grounds. So, the time of the compilation of biblical texts into the Torah was not new to me.

• Literary forms are also revealing. There are vast stylistic differences between the stories of the Patriarchs with their legendary ages, flood tales, and the like, and the legalistic and historicized accounts of kings and dynasties which presumably occur much later. Given the vast time spans between presumed events and redacted texts, this also was not surprising.

• And the laws of the Deuteronomic text, discovered 622 BCE, were already recognized as probably historically earlier than the later redacted foundational stories of Genesis and Exodus. Thus, again, there is a textual and stylistic difference between significant parts of the Torah already recognized by textual hermeneutics. Thus, if one is a deep higher critic, even though limited to more or less textual and comparative cultural analysis, and the older archeology, many of the conclusions reached by Finkelstein and Silberman do not seem as radical as first sight might seem. So, what then, does the newer archeology add, and how does the material hermeneutics involved play itself out?

The Bible Unearthed is an archeological tour de force with many details, so I will here highlight only a very few salient examples, emphasizing where possible the contributions of newer techniques for material hermeneutics. Finkelstein and Silberman give 1970 as a date for what I am calling the new archeology. That is, this is the date, after the 1967 War which makes the land of ancient Israel open to new work, and after the inventions and practices which widen archeological investigation to the new sciences. These include (a) important new dating techniques, such as re-calibrated radiocarbon dating, (b) regional survey techniques, (c) the addition of data from associated animal bones, seeds, soil analysis and anthropological models drawn form world cultures, all of which expanded and greatly enriched older techniques. (FS 21).

I shall now return to some of the claims I listed from Finkelstein and Silberman, drawing where possible from the contributions of the new material techniques to emphasize what may be newly learned from such material hermeneutics:

• The Patriarchs. According to biblical dates, this is the ……. Year since the Creation, given the long lives of the ancients, including Methusalah, Abraham presumably leaves Mesopotamia for Canaan around 2100 BCE. He is depicted as something like a Bedouin nomad, with camels, goats and family, and begats the first heritage for life in Canaan. But, while until the late 20th century, this picture of nomadic culture was taken for granted and was assumed to have reached back the four millennia implied, the new archeology, now armed with surveys which include animal bones and patterns, today shows that camels were not domesticated until late in the 2nd millennium BCE and did not, in fact, become part of nomad life until about 1000 BCE, a full millennium after Abraham. The Joseph story, only one generation past Abraham, speaks of camels carrying “gum, balm, and Myrrh,” a practice which,.by the 7th-8th century BCE is established but which did not occur in the over a millennium earlier claimed for the Abrahamic story. In short and anticipating another conclusion, the descriptive account of 7th century BCE practices accords well with the newly theorized time of biblical redaction and construction, but not with the presumed events disputed by archeology. The Bible is simply describing what was occurring at the time of its own writing, while retroprojecting these events into an earlier millennium. (FS37)

• The non-occurrence the Exodus argued for by Finkelstein and Silberman is bound to be more controversial, and I shall not dwell longer on this than other less controversial items—but it is interesting to note that a good many American Reform rabbis have publically accepted the Finkelstein-Silberman views. Again, dating using the Hebrew Bible would place the Exodus at about 1440 BCE, but even the place names and Pharaohs mentioned do not fit this date. Rather, the city being build by the Hebrew slaves was named after Ramesses in 1320 BCE. This story becomes very, very complicated and I do not have time to trace its intricacies here—but I will point out that my authors very well document two interesting things: first, during this period Egypt thoroughly controls Canaan and this is also a period with massive record keeping and massive communication between Egypt and the Canaanite territories and there is simply no mention of a mass exodus of semites from Egypt, biblically estimated at nearly half a million people. Finkelstein and Silberman also point out that had this many or even a much smaller number of people wandered the Sinai peninsula for 40 years, there would doubtless be campsites to be discovered, but even in spite of the micro-archeological techniques already well employed, there is no evidence at all for such wanderings.

• I shall not detail greatly the equally large and complex work done in The Bible Unearthed regarding the period of the conquest, equally under doubt, other than to indicate that through contemporary dating methods, it now becomes possible to generalize that many of the cities presumable conquered by Joshua simply did not exist at the presumed time of the conquest, but did exist by the 7th century BCE when the Torah was presumably redacted and written.

• If the exodus and the conquest are to be placed in the legendary category, along with the Patriarchs, what to me is much more interesting—and here I learned something new—is the claim made that there is strong evidence that Israel pre-existed the exodus and that the Israelites were, in fact, a sub-group of Canaanites themselves! The first textual, archeological evidence is the Merneptah stele which cites the name, Israel, within Canaan, 1207 BCE, a reference to indigenous people already long known. Then, in a long chapter on Israel, my authors describe the thorough archeology which showed that as Canaanite culture declined, various sub-groups formed, including some in the highlands of the north. Again, cutting to the quick, these Israelites remained Canaanite in some degree, since bronze bull figurines and other Canaanite deities are found with the sites, but they were also distinctive in that, unlike other groups of the time, no pig bones were found in the Israelite sites so identified. Thus, one cultural distinction was the practice prohibition against pork, perhaps a practice which preceded a much later codification in law. Finally, there is no evidence that this sub-group of Canaanites migrated from anywhere else, thus again evidencing the indigenous relationship with the larger, extant culture. One can add here that the biblical accounts of its kings, constantly returning to the Baals is even more evidence that Canaanite culture continued throughout and may indirectly simply show that these kings are simply local Canaanite variants.

• The most publicized and perhaps the most argued about claim made by my authors regards the non-existence of a glorious Solomonic Empire. David, at least as a regional southern king, was well documented extra-biblically, but the very lack of Solomonic golden age work was archeologically curious. The detractors who have succeeded in getting publicity for presumed Solomonic sites, however, cannot show anything like the extent or gradiosity of those claims even today. There is not any evidence for anything remotely approaching Peresopolis or the Parthenon in ancient Israel.

But, I stray from my point which is to show how a textual hermeneutics relates to an expanded material hermeneutics. In this trajectory I have emphasized contradictory tensions between textual and material evidences. In this case these very contradictions lead to some interesting theories concerning both the relations between textual and material hermeneutics, and to possible reconstructions of the older fashioned textual hermeneutics.

For example, in this case the theory holds that the Torah, now as evidenced by rather massive, but new material evidences from archeology and anthropology, was likely largely constructed in the 7th century BCE and following. And, when this is presumed, then its descriptions much more closely match the ‘history’ of its composition time than previously would have been seen. A southern kingdom, rigorously religious and legalistic, fearful of its larger neighbors, reflecting the various cultures extant including our camel nomads, emerges as the then contemporary scene within which the narratives are spun. This artwork, if I may, is very like the late medieval arts which depict biblical stories with characters cast in medieval garb and wandering amidst gothic architecture while adoring the holy infant whose birth would have, if historically taken, occurred over a millennium earlier.

As I leave this trajectory, I will make one passing comment about a provocation I threw out in the beginning. The Bible Unearthed, I suggested, is bound to be controversial in a contemporary world, one which includes on the part of the diaspora returnees to today’s Israel who claim that the promised land was given them by God when they undertook a conquest which attempted, but did not succeed in throwing out the previous inhabitants, the Canaanites. The new depiction which comes from The Bible Unearthed, very interestingly shows that if the Israelites were, all along, part of Canaan, as but one sub-group, a clan as it were, amongst the Canaanites, then the entire picture changes. This possible claim, I believe, is not weaker than a return promise one, but it is a claim which reflects much better the current realities of today’s conflict perhaps not that different than the ancient ones as well.

Epilogue:

I have now taken you through three trajectories in which an expanded hermeneutics, marked by material practices, takes its place. In the first, Viking, trajectory, the material hermeneutic clearly enriched the narrative by giving balance to the partiality of the text-only account. That enrichment, I would argue, occurs in any expanded hermeneutic account. In the second, Otzi, example, the material hermeneutic could stand on its own, although it, too, would have been enriched had there been a textual supplement. In the third, Biblical account, the entirety of the textual dimension undergoes a radical re-situating and re-framing which implies in certain ways that a material hermeneutic may event take precedence.

And, while my point is simply to exemplify the need to expand our notions of hermeneutics to include scientific processes such as those instanced in my examples under material hermeneutics, there is also an intriguing future possibility. What if one were to apply an expanded hermeneutics to the humanities, or to philosophy itself? While the path I have followed here has been one which incorporates a material hermeneutics into primarily ancient and even pre-historic examples, there is no reason in principle that the same could not be done with more modern and even contemporary phenomena.

I did not specifically indicate to the point that the rise of science studies, or as I prefer, technoscience studies in the 20th and now 21st centuries is, in effect, the opening to material hermeneutics. If one looks at several of the landmark studies which have transformed our views of how the natural sciences are formed—for example, Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Airpump, or Peter Galison’s Image and Logic, or even better his work on how clocks and railway schedules in the patent office played a role in Einstein’s special relativity, or Andrew Pickering’s notion of The Mangle of Practice—one can begin to see how detailed attention to the material realm and to the instrumentation which reveals it has changed our very notions of natural science. It has been this movement which today makes the older, theory-biased positivisitic notions of science seem so antiquated. What would happen if we turn the aim of such sensitivities to humanities and philosophy?

And, if one were to do so, where would one look for such an application? There are two initially obvious places for such research to begin: first, with respect to the history of philosophy, such an examination of philosophy’s material culture has rarely been done. I, myself, have done some work in this area. For example, in recent years I have shown how specific technologies—such as the camera obscura—have played roles in how philosophers came to think of knowledge production itself. This was the case with both Descartes and Locke in the 17th century. And, secondly, one could examine how the tools, the material means by which philosophers work, relate to their own production of knowledge. Is the philosophy produced through word processing, the internet and contemporary technologies different from that produced by typewriters or earlier methods—and if so, how? The role for a material hermeneutic is just beginning. For me, this will become a longer term project, perhaps to be reviewed at the next decade’s ISHS meeting.

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