Symmetrical Archaeology, Pragmatism and Archaeological Hope

Timothy Webmoor (Stanford University)

Abstract

This paper suggests the current convergence of classical and (analytic)neo-pragmatism and recent science studies’ concern with overcoming the dilemmas of ‘modernist metaphysics’ provides a lens and practice for dealing with the discipline of archaeology’s current crisis of epistemology-ethics.

First, I briefly sketch the current ‘crisis’ in theoretical archaeology which has resulted from an increasing anthro-apologizing of archaeology in response to the interest of indigenous and stakeholder groups to legally mandate the right to interpret/appropriate the past within non-Western, non-Scientific frameworks of understanding. The divisive crux: how to balance the ethical imperative to incorporate non-archaeological interests in global heritage without compromising an ‘objective’ rendering of the past.

Such a response is dependent, however, on a non-pragmatist view of truth. Consequently, I (second) trace the pragmatist elements in a symmetrical approach to archaeology and argue how such a concern with an ontological collective of people-things naturally fords a way around the epistemological standstill. In bypassing a need for ‘accurate representation’ and instead drawing-out the enmeshed-through-action character of archaeological matter and archaeological stakeholders within specific contexts of engagement, symmetrical archaeology provides a socially useful criterion of ‘truth’ which is more relevant to global heritage and its attendant cultural politics than previous, more narrowly defined and practiced, frameworks for rendering the past.

Utilizing such a pragmatist premise, the convergence of symmetrical archaeology emphasizing an inclusive people-thing ‘Constitution’ with global heritage may offer hope rather than intellectual crisis.

Paper
Hope in Symmetry

Hope? It’s a very non-academic topic. Why should we be concerned with ‘hope’ as archaeologists focus their attention on concepts of: ‘interpretation’, ‘materiality’, ‘origins’, ‘agency’, ‘meaning’ and so forth. Now, lets be honest: every so often a new archaeological generation wants to re-set the terms of discussion, re-direct research agendas, and break with the old incommensurable paradigms. This is surely evidenced by our gathering here at TAG – established to correct an oversight of theory in archaeology in the 1970’s. So to begin I want to ask the intimate question of why we push and rail against ‘old paradigms’ in advancing new platforms. I of course will not assume unanimity in the answers; but I can draw on experience of academia of an ethnographic sort to hedge my bet. The answer is that they no longer serve our purposes; our practical purposes of career advancement which we hope to push by addressing problems that seem relevant. To push ourselves with questions irrelevant to our interests or unable to address problems we identify as significant, then there is a hollowness in our activity. So, rather than digress in Kuhn’s incommensurable paradigm shifts, I wanted to simply provoke with a candid question to ‘feel’ how ‘hope’ is inextricably bound up with practical considerations of whatever variety: methodological, theoretical, private and mundane. I think Peirce was right to suggest that true problems are felt not simply identified abstractly.

I believe this to be the case with Symmetrical archaeology. There are classic binarisms which are felt to be contrary to our thought-experience. Hence the appeal of its Science Studies progenitors to common-sense. A general sense held in common by an increasing number of practitioners that our inherited intellectual concepts are inadequate in their overly tight containments. From phenomenology, deconstruction, sociology of practice in the sciences, and also, there the entire time, Pragmatist thought, we think-feel that the actuality of our engagements in experience exhaust our heuristic conceptual schemes. We are always missing/mis-construing/simplifying. So this is the double-arrow of Hope of a Symmetrical approach: to better relate ourselves to ‘our’ condition – past, present and future.

Now, a symmetrical archaeology is going to complexify all sorts of inherited dichotomies. In this paper, I am going to argue that such re-characterizations, particularly that of the ontology of people-things or humans-nonhumans, is, as I said above, practically motivated. So you can now anticipate my need to discuss Pragmatism, an umbrella term to designate a range of thinkers from (most famously) James to Rorty who in one sentence may be said to focus their energies on Practice versus Representation. And as the majority of the binarisms which symmetry hopes to abjure from have been represented as such, a natural tendency will be to move away from representation and focus on what Latour (2004) calls the ‘constitution of common worlds’. There are two moves I will be taking in the course of this short paper (and unfortunately they will only be adumbrated here).

1) First, following this push to broaden and complexify the inclusion of humans-nonhumans in Latour’s collective, I am going to utilize classic and neo-pragmatic (or post-analytical philosophy) thought to suggest that the relationship between ideas, values, volitions, conceptual schemes – what we now disparage as ‘mental’ or at best in the sciences ‘theoretical realism’ – and practice is much closer and more inter-meshed (or ‘inter-penetrating’ with Putnam) than what has been inherited as the theory-in-observation admission of the neo-Positivists. I will say that ‘ideas’, just as ‘things’, are indissoluble in practical action and therefore are likewise not distinguishable from things and people once we adopt the practical point of view. They must not – now that we have gone through the dis-investiture of Cartesian inheritance - be thought of as a priori givens or 1st-principles, but thought of more in terms of ontology. I draw this out with Pragmatism’s concern to debunk the (to borrow a phrase from Don Ihde) ‘epistemology-engine’ of the fact/value distinction in order to reconceive the standard of ‘truths’ as being utility and success in negotiation with the real world.

2) Secondly, I want to address the ‘hope’ which comes from taking such a practical lens in symmetry to see commonality-in-complexity and sketch the practical outcome for a particularly litigious and politically divisive issue in contemporary archaeology. This is the ‘multivocality’ debate, or, for those it vexes (and there are many), the ‘anthro-apology’ of archaeology. I do this because to emphasize ontology at the expense of epistemology - or evaluation by principles - worries some that a symmetrical approach will not be capable of addressing normative issues, particularly those relating to multiculturalism. It is also a pressing issue that, more than any other, appears to stretch archaeology across the realism-antirealism or hyper-relativism divide. I see it as an exemplar in need of a practical outlook as the debate is stalled over matters of ethics-epistemology. Again I will have recourse to the model of democratic inquiry which Dewey and now Putnam and Rorty espouse so optimistically.

Pragmatism – values/humans/nonhumans as propositions evaluated for collective action

Now my first task seems to present some room for confusion. Thinking through the modernist lens of ideas=subjective and human distinguished from non-humans or things=objective facts - the real - there rises up the cognitive impasse of distinct ontological realms. As considered by the positivists, such subject values, intentions or beliefs are precisely ruled-out from inquiry as lacking ‘cognitive meaning’. And positivists were always good at their delimiting definitions. Now the principle of symmetry, as may be anticipated, has a riposte: if representational epistemology relied upon it’s much sought after direct link, or hooking-on, to things-as-they-are, there is no need anymore. There is no epistemological nervousness posed by an incorrigible gap between the world of things and that of our representation. Symmetry’s re-entanglement evinced in action of things-people performs the erasure of the distinction between real world vs. thinking subject and, critically for my argument, lifts the load from ‘facts’ needing to attempt purification from ‘value’ – to polish the mirror in Rorty’s phrase - in order to provide assurance of knowledge.

Why might this be so? It sounds as if I am succumbing to the allure of an untenable subjective realism, or worse, a personal idealism. Much like Latour in Politics of Nature, I am wanting to shift the lens of evaluation away from assumed distinct categories within the equation of: theory-and-bias+human agency=result (as in a deductive hypothesis test), each of which, as distinct, may be isolated and their respective contributions analyzed; to the idea of on-going ‘courses-of-action’ involving an indissoluble mix which may temporarily stabilize, but which are judged through their usefulness in action. Evaluation, then, comes in from experience over the long term with these courses of action and whether or not their practical effects are successful.

Now ‘successful’ is a catch-word with a Pragmatist account, as is ‘mobilization’ or ‘articulation’ in studies of science. It is critical in appreciating the contrast between a modernist pursuit of truth and a pragmatic approach. A representationalist-driven operation yearns to match-up descriptions or hypotheses to the ‘real world’, the activity of which is presented as an end-in-itself, as the ‘successful application’ of the model or equation. Within this strategy, we may then posit the successful representation as a ‘Fact’, or an inter-relation of facts. As the way it is, the strategy dissimulates as ‘pure inquiry’ or disinterested intellectual activity, with no motivation aside from knowing what’s what. Such a copy-view of truth is an inert static relation. By now, the criticism of such altruistic knowledge derived from the ‘spectator theory of knowledge’ (of Putnam) is familiar. Moreover, as if out of the times, or assuming a naivety in ‘how the world works’, such a justification of inquiry strikes us as over-simplified, overly abstract, and really just a caricature of what we actually do. We have since been exposed to Power-knowledge accounts, to the collapse of fact/value, to students of science following practitioners around and accounting for what really goes on in research institutions and laboratories, and, importantly, to our own common sense of how investigation progresses.

Thinkers such as James and Peirce suggest that a representationalist account just doesn’t go very far: Grant an idea or belief to be true but what concrete difference will it’s being true make in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? . . .What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms? (James 1907:114).

As James continues, …the fact that the possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action…and that our duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command from out of the blue… can account for itself by excellent practical reasons. . . truth passes from cold-storage to do work in the world, and our belief in it grows active (ibid:115). Truths do work in the world; they pay. Analogous to health, strength, happiness and other processes connected with getting-on in life, ‘truth’ from the pragmatist account is simply a collective name for processes which are made in an on-going negotiation with experience. We can think of it as something possessed or inhered, but this abstracts the phenomena under inquiry and cuts the life-ties to in-action that gives it its recognizable functions. Rather than static or essentialist, justification is a process that helps us deal, both practically and intellectually, with our articulations in the world. And because of this active-quality, ‘truth’ is a ’leading-to’, or a becoming, which integrates us better and more fully with experience.

Because it leads us in negotiations with life, a pragmatist account of understanding is future-oriented, as a hypothetical, absolute judgment would be deferred indefinitely towards the ideal of the convergence of all possible evaluations related to the matter-at-hand. Now this is an hypostasized convergence of opinion on the horizon underscoring a thread of a principle of scientific fallibilism as a limiting component of their notion of experience. Despite this always present possibility of refutation by reality - the maxim of ‘never prove an hypothesis’ - pragmatists draw us back, however, to the baseline of operations of getting-on with working truths, reminding us that this is what we do in the practice of inquiry. It should not come as an affront; but as a reflective acknowledgment fostered by the re-description of something we held out to be definitive, absolute and capable of possession.

Science studies folks also have made just such arguments based upon a perspective from on-the-ground. Most strongly Ian Hacking, in Representing and Intervening, makes such a plea to look at inquiry as practical action in upholding a scientific realism. He focuses upon, much like Latour, Pickering and Ihde, instrumentation, or the networks of people-things, which enable successful scientific research agendas. The cash-value, for Hacking at least, is that good, or true (small ‘t’) ideas – ones that are ‘warrantedly assertable’ - enable us to actively intervene in the world (to create or stabilize reactions or phenomena). Now, he would cringe with me characterizing him as such, but Hacking takes a pragmatic approach to understanding with his felicitous phrase:if you can spray it with electrons its rea (1983). For Hacking, a good account of the world is one which leads to the practical benefits of leading-to further successful experiments and instrumentation, to a growing research program. There is no worry whether the sciences have an accurate picture of reality – however partial that representation may be. Rather it comes down to operating according to small ‘truths’ which, even if never falsified can never be proven, and which nonetheless serve in the setting of courses-of-action for further research. In this sense, the ‘Truth’ (with big ‘T’) becomes some hypothetical converging point in the future; but for today, for practical considerations, we are lead to further action based upon the success of our articulations of ideas-humans-instruments. Electrons may be prove, as the case may be, to be false, or at least incorrect ‘representations’ of sub-atomic Nature. But because one intervenes in phenomena with them – such as ‘spraying them’ to magnetize other elements – their action demonstrates viability and ontological certitude, however imprecise our modeling.

So while unfortunately brief, how does such verifi-ability (from James) of belief through practical action relate to my First point. Succinctly, as common-sense guides us, ideas and values are bound together with humans and instruments, with things, in courses-of-action. We shift our evaluation from attempting to reduce-out things from ideas from human action in a falsely static moment prior to the setting-off on an experiment – to distill out all the ‘ingredients’ composing the ‘representation’ - to whether such an articulation of ideas-things-humans are getting-on successfully or not. Are the entanglements working and leading to further articulations. Or have they dead-ended and stultified relations to the world. Again, the burden of proof is not upon demonstrating links between ideas and humans to the real world. This failure to link up what have been argued to be ontologically distinct components has been the failed project of modern epistemology. Instead, a symmetry, following pragmatism, looks to the common sense of practical action and how successful action is composed of networks or conglomerates of ideas-humans-nonhumans. The shift moves questions of: ‘what is it, how do we know it’?, to ‘how well do such composite networks work, are we lead-on to further action’?

Multivocality. Or the democritization of hybrid constitution

Now considering one salient issue I’m involved with in archaeology, I want to argue that just such a re-focusing on successful courses-of-action for verifi-ability rather than static epistemology is needed for the stalled framework of Multivocality. While a larger critical reflexivity in anthropology has lead to some ‘dialogic’ methods in archaeology, where ‘heritage stakeholders’ are included or at least consulted in interpretation, the apotheosis of the trend towards ‘ethical inclusion’ has come in post-NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or Public Law 101-601) United States archaeology. Other code of ethics and legislation could be compared, such as WAC’s 1991 Code of Ethics or the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists Inc. (AACAI) and the Australian Anthropological Association (AAA) mutually established professional ethics. But to the point, with the passage of NAGPRA in 1990, archaeologists have become legally bound on public land – with disciplinary consequences – to consult in interpretation First Nations that are deemed affiliated to the project. (Many of you may be familiar with the current legal wrangle over Kennewick Man). I simply, however, want to cite the most pertinent mandate: section 7, paragraph a-4 which is as follows: establishing ‘cultural affinity’ with contested material is not restricted to scientific data but may include: kinship…folkloric, and oral traditional: (25 U.S.C.A.§7(a)4).

This single sentence has resulted in an on-going acrimonious outcry between archaeologists intent upon retaining the fact/value distinction as a part of empirical practice, and Native Americans calling for the end of scientific imperialism. The two horns of the dilemma as perceived thus far: create an ethical archaeology, but one that includes non-scientific – and so relativistic – ‘data’, and so lose objectivity of representation of the past; or circumscribe participation so that non-verifiable data – such as oral history – is excluded and face punitive action. We seem to be presented with a most pernicious dichotomy that, as legally mandated and ethically condoned, cannot be ignored.

However, drawing upon the insights of symmetry with evaluation placed upon successful courses-of-action involving values-humans-nonhumans, how is the ethics vs. epistemology crisis re-characterized? Without the ontological gap present to force us back onto one or the other attempts at representation, we may instead judge the enmeshment of ideas-people-things in terms of leading-us to successful or non-productive courses-of-action. In Latour’s (2004) terms, which practices lead to better constitutions of a ‘common world’? With knowledge as a doing or making, a practical activity aimed at solving problems in experience through the active intervention of such imbroglios, a solution offered by Dewey is to proliferate the courses-of-actions and deem, much like James, which trajectories are leading us to successful problems solving, and which are not. Importantly, again, this is not in terms of accuracy of representing the past. Now, much of Dewey’s underlying mechanism is Darwinian based: practical activity which is beneficial will continue to lead-on to more problem solving, while those which are not advantageous will be ‘weeded out’ as unhelpful. We may take objection to such entwining of nature and culture, but his intent is to democratize inquiry, to suffuse a practical and critical mode of operation throughout larger society. The more courses-of-actions involving the most complex entanglements of humans-ideas-nonhumans, the better the chances at success in constituting a just ‘Political-ecology’. Now his views are strongly empiricist and neo-liberal; yet that does not limit his estimation of granting opportunity to embark upon a diversity of practical actions.

For Multivocality, the consequence should be apparent. Viewed from representationalism, from a perspective that knowledge is valuable in and of itself as it allows us to hook onto the world, practical activity initiated by NAGPRA legislation would seem to add too many incommensurable elements: mixing, for example, animism, notions of sacredness, unified nature-culture (as listed in Section 7 of NAGPRA), and so forth, with discreet entities, humans above or at least apart from nature, deductive hypothesis testing and radiocarbon dating (these are the very concerns raised before Congressional hearings). Before symmetry, such mixtures would seem counterproductive to archaeological knowledge. But to remind one last time, if knowledge is no longer abstract but practically motivated and evaluated upon criteria of moving us forward to incorporate more and more into a common world, the more energy devoted to such a project, or the more candidates of things-ideas-humans in the mix (as it were), the better our prospects as a collective society. For Rorty (1999) and Putnam (2002) via Latour (2004), particular courses-of-action must be measured-off not in terms of their accuracy of mirroring reality (the failed modernist project), but in relation to other courses-of-action. This is not ‘inter-subjective’ consensus, for we don’t have mutually independent people, ideas and things; it is a goal oriented cooperative inquiry of our collective world (Putnam 1995:70).

Conclusions

My sketch has been too brief to explore any one proposition in detail. But now it is obvious why ‘hope’ figures prominently in my paper. In the face of intractable problems and dichotomies, both in terms of inherited thought and contemporary feuds in archaeology, there seems to be a real need of felt ‘hope’ to overcome a retreat into isolated intellectual communities. My proposal in drawing upon pragmatism in symmetry comes not from the abstract hope of a grand Hegelian synthesis, but one which calls for bypassing problems in a practical course-of-action for archaeology. (This is my own pragmatist bent). Thus, as with a symmetrical archaeology more generally, the evaluation will turn on whether it is successful on addressing a need for balance in the discipline.

My socio-ideotechnical proposition, as the term itself attests, is a mixing of properties which were formally held distinct. Ideas and values, humans and things swap properties as they are worked out in practice and this mixing is materialized in action. To go back to the layer cake model, where each may be rung higher or lower according to a Hawkes’ ladder of inference, is to make abstract – for purposes of purification in representation - inter-penetrating constituents which only collectively make the process of goal achievement viable.

References

Conant, J. and U. Zeglen 2002. Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism. London:Routledge.

NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) 1990: 101st Congress of the Unites States, 04 STAT. 3048 PUBLIC LAW 101-601-NOVEMBER 16, 1990.

James, W. 1907. "Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth" in Pragmatism.

Hacking, I. 1983. Representing and Intervening. Cambridge: CUP.

Ihde, D. 2004. "Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines," in Human Studies 27:361- 376.

Latour, B. 2004. The Politics of Nature. Cambridge: Harvard.

Mounce, H.O. The Two Pragmatisms: from Peirce to Rorty. London: Routledge.

Putnam, H. 1995. Pragmatism. Oxford: Blackwell.

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