(Hyper)Pluralism in the discipline, a case of epistemic dispersion

Does relativism still menace archaeology? Is it inherent in the archaeological record, in the underdetermination of claims to know the past by the evidence itself? And so is it in our making or in our finding? Or is objectivity still a discernable and defensible ideal? Might it be we only need give up our ambitions to Hempelian verifiability of claims and instead limit ourselves to Popperian falsification? Or is statistical-probability the best manner of ‘confirming’ explanations? More broadly, does any archaeologist still consider these dilemmas in earnest?, especially in a disciplinarian climate where epistemic issues seem to be passé. In fact, it may seem anachronistic to still spend word processing power on conjuring these specters of archaeological justification of knowledge claims. As reviewed last chapter, the issue was already raised in Anglo-American archaeology as early as the 1940’s with the ‘typology debates’ and was part of the explicit focus on ‘rigorous reasoning’ with the new archaeology of the 1960’s-70’s. Yet these historical debates, especially those of the new archaeology, were not typically framed as diametrically opposed across the chasm of relativism-objectivism, but may be characterized as already siding with the objectivism goal: the issue was how objective might archaeological claims be made to be. Within this shared commitment, the internal debates, best showcased by Binford’s (1989, esp. part I and II) un-repenting style, involved disputes between ‘strict empiricism’, or keeping inference close to the observable record, and a positivism espousing more ambitious inference to go beyond observation to propose generalized (universal) causal factors (ibid:14). Both the ‘strict empiricism’ of behavioral archaeology and traditional archaeology and Binford’s own positivism are committed to generic scientism .

The topic of relativism only became a mutual preoccupation for disciplinary wrangling with the processual versus post-processual discussions beginning in the early 1980’s with the manifesto publications from the ‘Cambridge school’ (esp. Hodder 1982, 1984, 1986, Shanks and Tilley 1987, 1989). As Tilley (1989:185) remarked in 1989, if one accepts Kuhn’s paradigm shift as marking a fundamental reformulation of a discipline’s subject matter (its identified problems worthy of investigation), then “the decisive break occurs not in 1962 with the substitution of one form of empiricism for another, but in 1982 (Binford 1962) with the appearance of Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (Hodder 1982).”

As I argued last chapter, this paradigmatic shift involved an interrelated re-characterization of the concept of culture, especially as related to the signifying processes of material culture, and the appropriate reasoning for understanding the ‘past as text’; namely a hermeneutic based, interpretive approach (for extended treatment see Hodder 1991a, 1999). The practical outcome, however, less than the innovative though reasonable re-characterization of the ‘proper domain’ and strategy of archaeology, is what has vexed opponents and opened the row over relativism. The outcome revolves around how to evaluate claims made for the past, especially as these claims climb Hawkes’ (1954) ‘ladder of inference’ to include for consideration the social and ideational realms of culture; ‘rungs’ which present particular problems as the ideational and social realms assuredly pattern material culture but which are not themselves easily observed in the archaeological record. To continue with the metaphor, ascension is made less secure as the post-processualists (Shanks and Tilley’s 1992 ‘dialectic of past-present’) emphasized the indubitable social and ideological factors of the present context of the archaeologist which may be said to dislodge the very placement of the interpretive ladder. Unlike the previous controversies in archaeology Chapter 2 which opened over how best to infer from the ‘archaeological record’, the ensconcing of archaeological inquiry within the realm of social practice, as well as the reconceptualization of the remains of the past as likewise the material of social practices, lead to a double destabilization: there were shifting contexts both of the interpreting archaeologists in the present as well as of the social agents in the past to be explicitly considered. This ‘linguistic turn’ in archaeology (esp. Hodder 1986) coupled with the updating of social theory (esp. Shanks 1987a,b), one magnifying individual agency, greatly broadened the traditional scope of theory-ladeness and dislodged the debate of epistemology away from natural science formulations to the humanistic fields of history and literature(Hodder 1987) . Yet epistemology, which had become a topic of explicit consideration after the new archaeology, still framed discussion of research and reasoning. The reaction to forgo supposedly foundational consensus to what counts as a claim brings the worry of relativism. How was an interpretive approach going to square with epistemological considerations?

In summarizing over a decade of disciplinarian debate concerning the consequences of post-processual thought on archaeology, the Lampeter Workshop and its commentary (1997) turned upon evaluative reasoning as the single most unresolved and contentious consequence of a post-processual platform. ‘Epistemic relativism’ was the specific variety of relativism discussed, and the workshop identified various criteria by which post-processual archaeology evaluates interpretations. “These criteria include such notions as coherence, comprehensiveness, complexity, relevance, plausibility, style (i.e. aesthetic criteria), moral and political import, and empirical correspondence” (Lampeter Workshop 175, emphasis added). These criteria were enumerated to avail post-processual knowledge claims from the frequent charge of an ‘anything goes’ relativism (Renfrew 1989:36-8). In the commentary and discussion, however, these criteria were identified as too various and vague to provide any measure of consensus for evaluation.

“…the weakness of social archaeology to be more specific on the criteria for judging alternative language games, different interpretations of the past…still our consensus seems to be very vague” (ibid: 177, emphasis added).

“The disagreement between myself and LAW (Lampeter Archeology Workshop) starts with that what Kohl failed to address in their defence of a ‘post-processual’ archaeology is the complex issue of the evaluative criteria by which to judge alternative interpretations and explanations of the past” (ibid185, emphasis added).

In defense of such ‘vague’ criteria for evaluative judgment, other post-processual archaeologists have argued that no explicit and formulaic guidelines may be proffered.

“What constitutes a good or competent interpretation? No satisfactory answer can be given to this question since, as is the case with most things in life, all available guidelines are vague and always involve an appeal to norms such as clarity, coherence, lack of serious contradictions, parsimoniousness, etc., which can scarcely be realistically defined” (Tilley 1993:4).

“It is equally important to break away from any notion that rigid criteria can be established for the evaluation of statements about archaeological data” (Hodder 1997b:194).

These disavowals of explicitly definable criteria for evaluation of claims are consistent with a more general post-processual affirmation of the social nature of archaeology. Much as ideology, society and politics, the historical context of the archaeologist herself, cannot be ‘bracketed-out’ in Husserlian fashion from any consideration of archaeological research, evaluation as the end of the process cannot be distilled from informing, subjective factors. Theory-ladeness permeates both the ‘context of discovery’ as well as the ‘context of justification’, and this was, building from Kuhn’s and Critical Theorists’ discussion of the permeation of values in scientific activity, an integral component of the post-processualists’ argument with Binford who, admitting theory-ladeness in the ‘context of discovery’, wished to maintain objectivity as a possibility in the ‘context of justification’ (Binford and Sabloff 1982, Binford 1989:34-9).

Nevertheless, despite these caveats against rigid criteria, there persists a felt need for some measure of accountability among interpretations, for some principles demarcating degrees of plausibility. Indeed, in a recent compendium Archaeology: the key concepts ‘epistemology’ is showcased, concluding with a section on the whether the skeptical challenge poses a crisis in archaeology (Renfrew 2005: 89-94). Irrespective of this inclusion and the various published ‘position papers’ disavowing the epithet of ‘relativist’, then much of the ‘straw-maning’ characterizing the debates concerning relativism and objectivity attest to the enervation of the ‘raw nerve’ of epistemology for archaeologists. Assessing the theoretical literature on the topic, most often there seems to be little headway between the post-processual characterization of the pursuit of objectivity in archaeology as an ‘illusion’ or at least the total rejection of relativism as “…little more than colonial nostalgia” within the necessarily complex post-colonial world of globalization (Hodder 1997a:194, Workshop 1997); or the labeling of postprocessual approaches by those favoring explicit, objective criteria for adjudicating explanations of the past as an ‘anything goes’ platform embracing ‘anarchic subjectivity’ and ‘rampant relativism’ (cf. Blintiff 1991:18, Renfrew 1989:34, Trigger 2003:124). Irreconcilable (at least in publication), the opposing ‘camps’ rallied around emotionally held convictions of the role of archaeology in contemporary society, and, slotting opponents into a binary structure, viewed adherence to either of the poles as the outcome of ‘fear’ or ‘irresponsibility’.

As Hodder (2004:28) has recently restated the nagging and unresolved problem: “There are various forms of relativism, and most archaeologists would accept that archaeological interpretation is and should be answerable to data. The question is really just a matter of ‘how’” (emphasis added). The difficulty, as given extended consideration in the Lampeter Workshop, is that subsequent to the trenchant critiques of the positivist framework for adjudication of claims (hypotheses) via neutral testing procedures there remains no generally accepted consensus as to how claims are to be judged. Rather, in the post-positivist landscape of archaeology, various accounts of the relation between interpretation and ‘data’ proliferate to answer the ‘how’ in Hodder’s quandary.

Coming in 1995, Trigger’s statements regarding ‘moderate relativism’ are far from isolated. One could compare Alison Wylie’s (1996) analytically informed “mitigated objectivism” or Ian Hodder’s (1991a:10) “guarded objectivity” as rapprochement between hermeneutic interpretation and scientific realism, Shanks and Tilley’s ‘network of resistances’ (1987a:104) or (1989:43) “particular and contingent objectivity” in reply to charges of absolute relativism and Binford’s (1989:34) own revision of ‘relative objectivity’. As termed by Wylie (1989), these epistemological positions were negotiating the ‘interpretive dilemma’, which, while rooted in perennial debates between idealist and empiricist perspectives, took its most recent and provocative form in Kuhn’s historical schema of theory ladeness in the natural sciences. The interpretive dilemma, succinctly put, allowed for two general positions. First, the conclusions of Kuhn could be rejected, leaving intact the operating assumption that scientific reasoning was capable of developing methods and evaluative principles allowing for the impartial adjudication of the facts by the facts themselves of the empirical record. As Wylie (2002:part 2) has elaborated the history of the discipline, this is precisely the attitude of the ‘traditional’ archaeologists before the advent of the ‘typology debates’ Chapter 2. Attending to rigorous methodology in the observation of the record, the empirical facts are allowed to ‘speak for themselves’. While such a view has been disparaged by Binford (1989:42-4) as being a vestige of “archaic science” or “strict empiricism”, he characterizes much of the continuing research of second-generation new archaeologists conducting actualistic studies or formation processes studies to naïvely affirm such unmediated access to reality.

The alternative comprises the other pole of the dilemma. If ‘data’ of the archaeological record are only recognized as relevant given the informing paradigm or theoretical framework, then a subjective element necessarily inheres in the ‘facts’. Given Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis pertaining to the relationship of successive paradigms, then the idea of ‘data’ as objective is doubly undermined as they are constituted or accorded significance only within a given paradigm and this paradigm specific constitution does not necessarily hold across alternate paradigms. There is no independence of either ‘data’ or theory to grant evaluative principles an independent or impartial status. Both our theoretical outlooks and the ‘data’ we investigate are embedded in larger, socio-historical considerations. Far from facts speaking for themselves, the archaeologist “creates facts”(Hodder 1983: 6). Such a position, elaborated and pursued by postprocessualists, implies that evaluation of evidence is locked-in to a particular theoretical outlook, without the possibility of evaluative crosschecks between paradigmatic ‘schools’. Following this ‘solution’ to the interpretive dilemma, subjective considerations are ineliminable from archaeological research and thus the attempts to filter-out subjective bias from practice and reasoning are misguided. Attention should more productively turned to compelling qualitative research in the manner of history or socio-cultural anthropology and to ‘critical theory’ which investigates the social and political contexts which predispose archaeologists to subjectively favor certain lines of inquiry as opposed to others.

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Containments

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