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Articles and EventsA Symmetrical Archaeology
Organizers
Bjørnar Olsen (University of Tromsø, Norway)
Michael Shanks (Stanford University)
Timothy Webmoor (Stanford University)
Christopher Witmore (Stanford University)
Abstract
Archaeology has long struggled with or even straddled divides as those between the material and the social, the present and the past, and the sciences and humanities. Caught in what can be broadly construed as a cyclical fluctuation between concerns with realism and constructivism, epistemology and ontology, objectivity and subjectivity our history of disciplinary “turns” associated with the negotiation of such divides is familiar to many. In this session we suggest a series of paths that do not lead to the continuation of such cycles of “dialectical war,” which faithfully and persistently repeat the gesture of the Kantian (Copernican) revolution.
Symmetrical archaeology gathers approaches that share the conviction that the world is far better represented and understood if conceived of in terms of mixtures and entanglements rather than dualisms and oppositions. It poses a radical levelling of the way we treat humans and things, both in our articulations of the material past and in our reflexive analyses of our own archaeological practices. However, this is not a claim to an undifferentiated world. We acknowledge the differences between entities but conceive of them as non-oppositional or relative facilitating collaboration, delegation and exchange. Through the application of the principle of symmetry we attend, not to how people get on in the world, but rather to how a collective, the entanglement of humans and nonhumans, negotiates a complex web of interactions with a diversity of other entities.
In accentuating links and crossovers with science studies, pragmatism, semiotics and empirical philosophy, this session reconfigures our understandings of human relationships with the material world in ways that are not necessarily subject to modernist thought. This session gathers together practitioners who wish to demonstrate how archaeology can set alternative agendas in the humanities and sciences by articulating a new “ecology” packed with things, mixed with humans, and which prioritizes the multitemporal and multisensorial presence of the material world.
Papers
A brief manifesto for a symmetrical archaeology. Christopher Witmore
Genealogies of asymmetry: why things were forgotten. Bjørnar Olsen
Asymmetrical Time: Stratigraphy in archaeological practice. Ashish Chadha
Beyond Asymmetry: A View from Historical Archaeology. Dan Hicks
Latourian cesspits. Maartje Hoogsteyns
Material hermeneutics. Don Ihde
Symmetrical archaeology, pragmatism and archaeological hope. Timothy Webmoor
From a postprocessual to a symmetrical archaeology. Michael Shanks
Discussant: Stephanie Koerner (The University of Mancester)
Posted at Jun 21/2005 12:39PM:
tim webmoor: I've placed the session proposal for TAG Chris has drafted with comments up:
SymArchTAG05.doc (submitted to TAG 05); and I will post the SAA session abstract shortly for comments.
Posted at Dec 06/2005 06:18PM:
Timothy Webmoor: Chris, what do you think of getting up a page for the TAG contributions?
Posted at Jan 02/2006 09:21AM:
Timothy Webmoor: Thanks everyone for a great TAG session.
Posted at Jan 04/2006 09:55AM:
Timothy Webmoor:Great commentary - makes up for the lack of time for discussion @TAG. To continue the discussion and give room for others to respond, I'll move your comments to a 'discussion' page linked to our TAG page. Also, send your link and we'll put it up - the rich ability of hypertext.
Posted at Jan 05/2006 07:17AM:
chris witmore: to this end we can, following Tim's lead, post the full text versions of the TAG papers here. I will place mine up in the next few days. Thank you for your wonderful commentary Matt.
Posted at Jan 04/2006 04:51AM:
Matt Edgeworth
Some thoughts and feedback on the Symmetrical Archaeology Session at TAG
This was a great session. The room was packed, with all seats taken and people sitting on the stairs – testifying to the topicality and importance of the topics discussed. The papers were stimulating and thought provoking, and it was only a pity that the time for questions and comments from the audience was so short (though the existence of this website, encouraging feedback, makes up for that). I agree with the general arguments for a more symmetrical archaeology, and accordingly haven’t commented on them here. However, three specific issues raised by various speakers seemed to me to be of particular interest, and I comment on these in some detail below.
1. ON THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF ARCHAEOLOGY. Don Ihde argued in his talk, as indeed he has in his books, that science and scientific disciplines are embodied in their material apparatus. It is through the use of the artifacts/instruments/gear of science that science as a social or cultural phenomenon is reproduced. But the radical implications of this fundamental point did not seem to impact on any of the other papers. Hence the question which I asked in the discussion towards the end of the session. My question was:
Has symmetrical archaeology taken on the implications of what Don was saying with regard to the material equipment of the discipline of archaeology itself? To what extent is archaeology as a social and cultural phenomenon itself embodied in - and reproduced through the use of - its own material culture?
(by material culture I mean not just the trowels and theodolites and computers and other instruments of knowledge production, but also the artefacts which – though originating from other cultures in the distant past – are appropriated into our material culture by virtue of being identified/shaped as culturally significant to us in the practices of ‘discovery’).
I have two points to make here:
The first is that if the discipline of archaeology really is embodied in its material artefacts then many interesting questions could perhaps be asked and possibly answered (for example about the entanglements of subject/object and nature/culture in archaeological practice) by carrying out an ethnoarchaeological study of the artefacts of archaeological knowledge production. It is through the use of such artifacts, after all, that our perception of and contact with material evidence is mediated.
Should we aim therefore for a kind of strict reflexive symmetry in our approach to the study of the past? Should the very perspectives we apply onto the material fragments of the archaeological past in principal be applicable to the material culture of archaeologists in the present? That is certainly an argument of the forthcoming book on ethnographies of archaeological practice which I was telling you about in my previous message.
The second point is that the artifacts and features which archaeologists discover in the ground could perhaps be regarded as part of the material culture of archaeologists as well as the material culture of past societies. Such entities are symmetrical in the sense that they are literally ‘double-artifacts’ – partly the product of archaeological practice in the present AND partly the product of cultural others in the distant past. This is not a constructivist position. It does not negate the active role of the object in the constitution of knowledge. It is just a recognition that at any moment in the archaeological process the object has already been partly constituted by ourselves (as well as ourselves partly constituted by it). This point is of course entirely in keeping with the main thrust of symmetrical archaeology, which as I understand it sees the subject and the object as being entangled together from the start.
2. ON MATERIAL RESISTANCE. The discussion of zoo architecture by Dan Hicks focused on a lime-pit/bear enclosure which seemed to be particularly obdurate in the way it endured through time. Dan described it as ‘awkward’ and conyeyed a sense of the sheer material resistance it offered. It was almost as if the building had its own (stubborn) personality – a material force to be reckoned with by succeeding generations of zoo planners.
I really like this idea of material evidence having the capacity to be stubborn, awkward, resistant, recaltritant or just plain bloody-minded. The notion of material resistance could be a very valuable one to a symmetrical archaeology because it does not pretend to be a solely objective property of material. Material resistance arises out of the interaction of humans and materials. It is both active and passive. To say that something has resistance implies the question: resistance to what? And the answer is that material can be resistant in this sense to human action, and indeed to all the subjective or inter-subjective projects, plans, interpretations, anticipations or intentions that humans might seek to put into action. Neither subject nor object, resistance arises out of the entanglement of both.
This applies as much to archaeological interpretation as any other kind of human practice. In practice, material evidence can ‘resist’ the very archaeological theories that seek to shape it. If it were not for that material resistance contradicting and surprising our applied meanings and ideas, we really would be stuck in the ‘interpretivist’ world that symmetrical archaeology is so critical of.
So we are back in the entanglement of subject and object. It is easy to get labelled a constructivist or interpretivist by saying that archaeologists shape and sculpt material evidence, which of course they do. But the key point is that it is in the very process of ‘shaping the object’ that the resistance of the object is encountered, and it is in that encounter and against that resistance that our practical skills of shaping are honed. Without the shaping there would be no resistance – and vice-versa!
3. ON AN ONTOLOGY OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT. Bjornar Olsen’s paper rightly criticised those interpretive approaches which give precedence to applied meanings over materiality – especially ‘the readerly veil of humanly embodied meanings that envelopes it’. But in going back to the things themselves, as the phenomenologists exort us to, we risk going too far the other way and ending up in a similarly assymetric situation. The crucial point that Bjornar made, it seemed to me, was that in order to arrive at a truly embodied archaeology we would have to have an ontology of the subject and object.
Where better to try and arrive at an understanding of such an ontology than in our own material practices?
In this regard I would like to point out the existence of the following fieldwork report:
Edgeworth, M, 1991. The Act of Discovery: An Ethnography of the Subject-Object Relation in Archaeological Practice. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Durham.
(more recently published as Edgeworth, M, 2003. Acts of Discovery: An Ethnography of Archaeological Practice. BAR International Series 1131. Archaeopress, Oxford).
Very important not to equate this report with the small paper I did for ARC in 1990, which is sometimes cited in post-processualist articles. The ARC paper was written while my fieldwork was still in progress and gave an inherently incomplete account of archaeological practice, favouring the role of the interpreting subject over the active role of the object. But the full fieldwork report, very rarely cited or discussed in the literature, gives a much more considered and balanced account of dialectical interactions between the subject and the object. It describes specific practical examples of the active role of the object and of material resistance as manifested in excavation processes.
OK, so the report was written a long time ago, but it nevertheless seems extraordinarily relevant to symmetrical archaeology concerns. I’ve been thinking of putting the report online. Don’t suppose you would be interested in having a link to it once I get it up and running?
Great to see you at TAG
Best wishes,
Matt mattedgeworth@hotmail.com
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