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Lessons From the Real: mediating people-things in a symmetrical archaeology
-Timothy Webmoor
Introduction to a ‘Symmetrical Archaeology’
What is a symmetrical archaeology and why is a symmetrical archaeology? In this introduction to the collective work of a heterogeneous group of archaeologists (Hicks 2005, Olsen 2003, 2005, Webmoor 2005, Witmore 2004), I want to quickly address these identifying questions. But as I proceed, hopefully it will become clear that encompassing both of these questions, and in turn giving greatest ballast to such an embarking, is how a symmetrical archaeology. How symmetrical archaeology reconfigures a host of basic dualisms – such as past/present, subject/object, meaning/referent, representation/represented – will serve as the best lineaments of the what and why questions. At the outset, however, it is important to highlight the most fundamental compass point for symmetrical archaeology; and that is how it attends to the relation of people and things. Drawing insight from Actor Network Theory(Callon 1997, Latour 1993, 1999(1992), Law 1999), itself, not unlike contemporary Anglo-American archaeology, emergent from the diatribe of idealists/constructivists versus scientific realists, we undertake a recharacterization of this most primordial ontology. This is our starting point in rethinking some of the other dualisms I’ve just mentioned. If archaeology is etymologically the ‘study of old things’ by contemporary people, then this should be a common enough denominator to unify, not divide, all of our interests in archaeology.
I want to emphasize the relationship of people and things as primordial for the discipline from the outset, however, as apparently not only do such topics comprise the entirety of the domain of archaeological reasoning, but it is precisely with such a presumed common focus that there is such increasing fragmentation of archaeology into a diversity of intellectual camps. With the maturing of the discipline, the once bedrock of the house of archaeology has since multiply fractured into the proverbial sand dilemma. There are a plethora of specialty theories in archaeology today – most evident in sampling the interests of the various theoretical ‘readers’ and programmatic statements grouped variously under processual and postprocessual archaeologies (e.g. Hodder 2001, Meskell 2004, Preucel 1991, Preucel 1996, Tilley 1993, Ucko 1995, VanPool 2003). Now as historians of archaeology, such as Trigger (1989), have pointed out, there has never been a monolithic corpus of interests amongst archaeologists. Yet we may note that the ripples of a post-Kuhnian image of scientific inquiry reached archaeology precisely at the time it was – particularly in the States but in Britain as well – attempting to shore up a unified approach to the past. So that today most meta-commentators and theorists, keeping in step with a disunified vision of science have encouraged, rather than bemoaned, the increasing number of practicing camps in archaeology. Now what disunifies these camps seems to fall along the lines of Ian Hacking’s (1987) idea of ‘styles of reasoning,’ each motivated by different questions and different evaluative procedures for assessing claims as an outgrowth of divergent emphases in methodology and theoretical beliefs. I don’t want to belabor such differences, as an honest assessment of the contemporary archaeological landscape should suffice – with landmarks to note such as varying pedagogical priorities in graduate programs, varying citational practices in publications, the themes of the publication venues themselves, performance evaluation criteria for research and teaching, and so forth. Why I even bring up such a worn fact of the field is this: rooted in the people-things equation, the discipline nonetheless branches far from seed along the spectrum stretched between the presumed ontologically immiscible categories of things or people. Symmetrical archaeology abjures from this division of people and things, and, as the epithet attests, operates instead from the premise that humans and things cannot artificially be separated from the outset but must be treated in equal terms.
Processual Asymmetry
To highlight the manner in which people-things are currently mediated in research traditions, let me give a few (overly) rapid examples to illustrate my point. Approaches that may be aligned most closely with processual archaeology would appear to foreground human-things interactions, particularly as these two constituents are co-constitutive of the depositional processes forming the archaeological record recoverable by archaeologists for study. So that in a recent programmatic assessment of behavioral archaeology, LaMotta and Schiffer (LaMotta 2001:20) state that: “Behavioral archaeologists define the basic unit of analysis precisely as the interaction of one or more living individuals with elements of the material world. As a unit of analysis, behavior includes both people and objects.”
Such an explicit emphasis upon both people and things and their mutual engagement in formation processes should come as no surprise, considering that within such a program was the birth of ‘modern material culture studies’, which, in the reincarnation at the University College London department, places great emphasis on the ‘co-constitution’ of people and things through processes of Hegelian objectification. Behavioral archaeology presents us with a detailed and well thought-out attempt for parity in dealing with humans and things as both are theorized to collectively designate archaeologically recoverable ‘behavior’, in distinction from coeval functionalist accounts which emphasize external, material constraints – i.e. generally environmental conditions – as largely determinant of human behavior. Schiffer and Lamotta emphasize this distinction themselves: “This analytical focus on both material and organismal aspects of behavior distinguishes behavioral archaeology from other theoretical perspectives founded upon purely organismal conceptions of behavior” (ibid).
In publication reports subscribing to behavior archaeology, however, the stress of explanation lies squarely with disentangling humans-in-themselves and things-in-themselves – in, for example, the familiar models of c(culture)-transforms and n(nature)-transforms – in the hope of sieving out extraneous variables in order to reconstruct formation processes responsible for the encountered state of the archaeological record. And while these formation processes hinge upon actions of the human counterpart in this mutual formulation of the record – actions such as ‘abandonment’, ‘re-use’, ‘discard’, etc. – the end result typifying such studies are ‘artifact (or architectural) life histories’ (Schiffer 1976:46). Along the spectrum mentioned above spanning people-to-things, behavioral archaeology admirably embraces both as the proper domain of archaeological investigation, yet in result shifts toward a position lodged with ‘things’. Obviously, it may be countered that this favoring of things is an unavoidable methodological consequence due to the reality of the archaeological record: artifacts are recoverable while their behavioral counterpart, living, acting people, are not. The motivations of past people – their behavioral decisions – must be inferred by reducing-out the more demonstrable n-transforms to posit the c-transforms of things.
This seems commonsensical enough. And despite the diatribe between the two programs, evolutionary archaeology takes a similar tract in respect to the human-things spectrum. At the outset, both people and things are subsumed under the aggregate analytic category of ‘human phenotype’. For purposes of applying Darwinian Natural Selection, Leonard (2001:72) explains that: “the objects of archaeology were part of living organisms. Behavior and technology are components of the human phenotype. “ Merging things and people into a novel 3rd ontologically-posited category of ‘phenotype’, which then is collectively acted upon by the forces of natural selection, Dunnell and Leonard are then able to explain the archaeological visibility and variability of things through their ‘replicative success’(Dunnel 1980, Leonard 2001:73). As their posited ontological category includes both things and people, the observance of artifact variability in the record carries the supposition of past acting people as their phenotype carriers. There is something very culture-historical about such a one-to-one identification of visible with invisible. And like culture-historical accounts, the results of such evolutionary studies consist largely of flow charts and branching ‘pedigree’ diagrams of artifact variability (cf. Leonard 2001:84-92). Again, while brief overviews, there is a favoring of things along the archaeological spectrum Figure 1, reinforcing not only the notion of a distinction between people and things, but the very duality itself. Confined within such a deeply ingrained dualism, archaeology has shifted back-forth and to the middle of this people and things spectrum.
Postprocessual asymmetry – canonizing the social
This is best demonstrated with the subsequent post-processual shift. As one component of the reaction to processual approaches, the post-processual promotion of a recovery of people, even of individuals, who, it was argued, had been de-emphasized or overtly characterized as epiphenomenal to archaeological understanding. I think that this was exaggerated for rhetorical purposes, as the tenements of a behavioral program testify to. Yet the programmatic shift of focus was as dramatic as the diatribe. Essentially, the early advocates inverted the relationship of things-people in theoretical focus and explanatory method, granting priority to the society pole of the spectrum at the expense of things Figure 2. Now while people and things were bound-up in the archaeological record, things were prioritized for their meaning-bearing qualities. Such a move may be seen as the antidote to an oversight of the symbolic and agency bearing dimension of past humanity which were absent in processual accounts. But the move also corresponded (if not somewhat late) with extra-disciplinarian, post-Kuhnian criticisms of scientific practice, especially those which developed in the sociological camps of the ‘strong programme’, which spring-boarded from Kuhn’s paradigmatic schema and the ineliminable influences of socio-political factors in scientific endeavor. The vector of this push accelerated with the general ‘social constructivist’ position. For archaeological studies under such an ambit, things took on a malleable quality, shaped by the vagaries of past actors utilizing things to objectify and negotiate meaning, and by contemporary Kuhnian-type archaeologists themselves in their present day social and political maneuvering. Post-processualists had indeed ushered in the end of innocence for the discipline, and for things-in-themselves. Like the swing of a pendulum, such a move in archaeology was necessary and therapeutic in its self-criticism.
Material culture studies presents us with a field of study which developed out of and in tandem with much of post-processual thought (eg. Buchli 2002, Miller 1987). Yet there remains the recalcitrant ‘social’ as an abiding irony in such a ‘materialist’ focused program. While such a platform foregrounds the concept of the material as constitutive of culture, material culture studies nonetheless lodges explanation within the social realm by utilizing interpretive models of explanation, particularly that of material culture-as-text (Olsen 2003). The practical result of such studies is to ‘clothe’ materiality – the things of both the past and the contemporary - within the social realm as the recipient of meaning ascription by human consciousness. A guiding example for material culture studies is a notion of the social agency of things as espoused by Alfred Gell (esp. Gell 1998). Here things are acknowledged to be active rather than passive by-standers in society. Yet things in Gell’s scheme only have agency when inserted within human interaction. The actions of things only have significance in relation to ‘social agency’. Ultimately such relations of people and things remain asymmetrical, as people again a priori constitute society first and foremost, and things are factored in only ‘after the fact’ as they impinge upon human-to-human engagement.
We might say that together these three broad approaches in archaeology which I’ve just mentioned remain fundamentally humanist in relating things and people. That is, while things are variously discussed as integral to archaeological reconstruction of culture, explanation in all of these accounts privileges either the things pole or the people pole of the spectrum. The problem from a symmetrical perspective is that a humanist assumption corrupts the explanatory focus before research has even begun by separating people from things. The resultant ‘turns’ in archaeology, or at least the multiple research platforms, then variously traverse this spectrum depending upon what component is emphasized in explanation. Symmetrical archaeology views the initial splitting of people and things as unhelpful, and as accounting for the wide divergences, or hyper-pluralism, of approaches characterizing current archaeology.
Diagnostic of the future of such incommensurable platforms may be the rising debate concerning multivocality, or the ethical imperative to incorporate stakeholders into archaeological interpretation. Developing from internal reminders of the contemporary socio-political context of archaeological work, as well as from independent, external legal mandates, multivocal approaches incorporate many important debunkings of inherited dichotomies such as past-present and objectivity-subjectivity. The leverage of neo-liberal conceptions of individual autonomy and legal standing serves to tie such progressive calls to a humanism favoring, once again, a deep divide between the discipline’s fundamental topics of concern.
The Proposition of Symmetry
Symmetrical archaeology does not present itself as a unifying theory for the discipline. Symmetrical archaeology does work at re-characterizing the topics which are fundamentally what archaeology concerns itself with: it excavates beneath the duality of people and things. The guiding proposition is as follows: what if we were to treat things and people symmetrically? Figure 3. Such a ‘one more turn after the social turn’ (Latour 1999:281) literally turns the arrows of explanation 90 degrees so that rather than nature and society poised across from each other on a horizontal axis, nature-society is seen as a complex imbroglio of people-things which cannot be reduced apart and explanation comes vertically from the common pole of nature-society. This posthumanist repositioning de-centers humans as autonomous, independent beings, in need of distinct explanatory concepts, making the non-(a)modernist recognition that things are just as much a part of being.
What is the root justification for treating people-things, or naturescultures symmetrically. With modernist thought, such categories were viewed as separate because of differences due to inherent qualities or essences. The inferred possession of these qualities placed an entity into one category or the other. First and foremost among such qualities was ‘intentionality’ or ‘consciousness’. It may seem overly philosophical, but such presumed essences give rise to a host of resultant concepts key to archaeology and based upon an either/or reasoning. So if humans possess intentionality, nature, as substratum, does not. That way discussions of agency or meaning in archaeology are slotted, with this either/or ticking of attributes, under human-society; while time, environment or objects, lacking intentionality, are slotted into nature-things. The problem, as brought most illustratively to light in the ‘trenches’ of actually studying how such divisions are (or are not) utilized in scientific practice, is that such ‘essences’ prove un-demonstrable and are furthermore often ‘mixed’ in actual research. The best examples come from Technoscience where human research goals and models and the capacities of instruments create grey areas where both are responsible in an indissoluble manner for research outcomes.
As an example in archaeology, the Millon map of Teotihuacan, a touchstone for survey and mapping techniques in archaeology, was intended to be as comprehensive as current technology (early ‘60’s) allowed. Yet hand drafting based upon aerial reconnaissance allowed only so much imaging resolution. The recent construction of a Walmart in the SE portion of the archaeological zone revealed more sub-surface structures than the map was capable of predicting with its coarse resolution. Was it the fault of the then available mapping techniques, the omissions or inaccuracies of the survey teams? Again, none of these is fair – far from it! It’s more reasonable to say that it was the result of the particular instrumentation and research goals bound-together at the time. And similar arguments have been highlighted even for Paleolithic technology where lithic composition merges with the knapper’s desired result to produce particular ‘diagnostic types’ of tools – so that a quartzite folsom point would be rare indeed. Where does the intentionality of the researcher end and the material capacity of the instrument begin? Which is more responsible for the temporary stabilization of the outcome?
Incorporating and building upon the insights from such inter-disciplinarian fields which have likewise endured the polemic of social constructivism versus scientific realism, a symmetrical archaeology advocates the need to suspend metaphysical questioning (assumed or explicit) regarding ‘essences’, ‘intentionality, realism versus idealism, and so forth. Why? Because like the examples concerned with ‘human intentionality’, such questions, characteristic of metaphysical probing, remain open-ended and contentious, supplying the oil for the ‘revolving door’ of theoretical turn-over. Instead, a symmetrical approach retains the insights of previous archaeologies while dismissing the unsolved ‘epistemological dead-ends’ that have lead to acrimonious – and premature – dismissal. As I began, the hope for this paper is to manifest the need to re-center, re-focus and re-tool archaeology as a discipline rooted symmetrically in the study of people and things.
Implications for Symmetrical Practice in Archaeology
Like the simple diagram indicates Figure 3, this analytic move complexifies what was previously categorized as separate entities. This is the trade-off for analytically neat divisions. So that a host of subsidiary notions thought to pertain exclusively to one pole or the other, such as practice, agency, representation, change and time, are likewise re-configured. Practice, rather than framed in terms of Bourdieu’s dialectic of the active individual negotiating with both constraining and enabling structures, becomes a matter of the success or failure of assemblages of people and things (both instruments and objects of investigation) to stabilize. In archaeology, such parlance should be familiar enough: ‘assemblages’ were a taxonomic type characterizing certain time periods. For instance, common orange ware is consistently found at Teotihuacan, Mexico throughout the site’s duration (approx. 100 BCE-600 CE). Rather than distinguish such things from the people who utilized them, a symmetrical archaeology would treat the Teotihuacanos and orange ware of this period as inextricable. For understanding prehistoric practice is it helpful to distinguish the users of the ubiquitous ceramics from the ceramics themselves? With the proliferation of ‘cyborgs’ (cf. Haraway 2003) through history, the contemporary, politically relevant example would be Latour’s discussion of the National Rifle Association (conservative champion of ‘gun rights’) in the Unites States: is it the gun in the hands of a individual which kills people? Or the individual with a gun in the hand? Neither, symmetrically speaking, is quite right: it is the special assemblage, or ‘cyborg’ of gun+individual which is uniquely responsible for killing, and which is sui generis reducible neither to human intention nor mechanical function. It takes the (daunting) assemblage to practice killing. And however unfortunate, such an assemblage, much like the early hominid with her crude hand axe, has proven to be very stable over the long term.
Such a notion of practice, one focused on stabilizing assemblages of technology and people, re-distributes ‘agency’ in a more democratic manner. ‘Democratic’ because it is inclusive irrespective of humanist bias. So the ‘material agency’ (viz. Pickering 1995) of things must be considered equally as part of action. In fact, due to the embeddedness of ‘agency’ with humanist thought, ‘action’ may be preferable to de-center the idea of humans as the locus of action. Like the example above, once the assemblage of hominid+tool stabilized, it would be a partial description to discuss the agency of humans as if they acted without technological prostheses. Things (hand axes, guns, electron microscopes) must be given their credit. While granting action to things may initially strike one as anthropomorphic or even fetishization (in Marx’s sense), it is more accurately the de-fetishization of humans as mysteriously autonomous ‘givens’, divorced from their ‘relations of production’ with things.
Instead, attending to the mixtures of things-people removes the burden of representation inherited from Platonic and Cartesian thought and reified in Anglo-American philosophy of science. Conceived within both idealist and realist philosophies as a gap between word and world, or mind and reality, scientific representation was to bridge this gap by matching-up to the things of the world, thereby justifying truth-claims as correspondence-to-reality (Figure 4). . As an inheritor of such a theory of knowledge, archaeology is no exception. In fact, archaeology relies to an exceptional degree upon its representations – maps, plans, stratigraphic profiles, photography – as the immortal witnesses of a past ‘destroyed’ for representational rebirth (Figure 5). . With the failure of correspondence theories, most notably the logical-positivist’s program for the sciences, archaeology has been increasingly disunified into ‘intellectual camps’ due to the resulting epistemic dispersion: some practice a ‘watered-down’ probabilistic-statistical version of verification, others have moved to justification via coherence theories, still others moved to Popper’s falsificationism, and many, if not all, of the post-processualists have adopted a hermeneutic ‘tacking-back-and-forth’ for justification of epistemic fit – if they grant conscious attention at all anymore to evaluation of claims.
What happens when a split between people and things is not presupposed? If there is no Cartesian brain-in-a-vat questioning reality but instead the recognition of brain-with-vat is the collective world. Popper and Kuhn both recognized the inability of the Hempelian positivists to provide a secure manner of ‘hooking onto the world’ with representation, and so turned attention away form the context of justification of claims to the context of discovery. Springboarding from their advice, science studies, emerging from the ‘science wars’ of the 1980’s and 1990’s, has looked at the practice of scientists and apocryphally announced that there was no ‘gap’ between scientists(archaeologists) and their objects of study. Both are implicated in on-going relations which mobilize people (scientists, politicians, witnesses) and things (instruments, objects) to temporarily stabilize phenomena for purposes of justifying claims. This pragmatic approach to justification emphasizes mediation which is co-active and on-going (Figure 6). . Mediation (re)balances claims to know the world by excavating beneath representation as conventionally understood, and provides both an ontology of the co-creation of people-things and an epistemology not encumbered by the subject-world gap (that irresolvable dead-end).
Finally, change and time are other defining foci of archaeology. But if things and people are mixed, then what are the implications for the ‘container’ of their play, that is time? As archaeologists, we intimately know that things from the past remain today as ruins, as the residues of what came before. However, looked at symmetrically, we are perpetually mixed with things: we are cyborgs with our cell phones, cars and other technological accoutrements. So as the archaeological sensibility makes us aware of, we are equally mixed with things from the past: cars are assemblages of recent and stone age technology (the design of the first wheels), cell phones and computers incorporate the initial discovery and harnessing of silicon, and more mundanely, as burgeoning heritage studies reminds us, ruins and monuments of the past act upon us everyday in directing traffic around obelisks, altering city and suburban growth, shifting our economies to archaeo-tourism, or creating territorial or religious conflicts over Hindu-Islamic sanctuaries. From a symmetrical perspective, the past is with us everyday, acting upon us and questioning our claimed humanist and modernist ‘liberation’ from the uncivilized worlds of things and pasts. Symmetrical archaeology, much akin to a 3rd-party in a bipartisan political system, or the environmental movement, urges radical reform from an unpopular platform in order to recognize the equal role of things in our collective future. Anything less, such as the assuring neo-liberalism which puts humans at the center of concern and action, risks an unsustainable, partial ecology. Archaeology, as the discipline of things and long-term vision par excellence stands to be an important contributor to understanding such a progressive, inclusive future.
References
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