Showing papers in "Archaeological Dialogues in 2010"

Rethinking Emotion and Material Culture

Abstract: In this article, we wish to return to the suggestion made by Sarah Tarlow a decade ago about the importance of understanding emotions in archaeology as a central facet of human being and human actions. We suggest a further expansion of this that focuses exclusively on the relationship between material culture and emotions (as opposed to textually, verbally or iconographically informed approaches), and offer a vocabulary that may better equip archaeologists to incorporate emotions into their interpretations. We attempt to show the implications of such a vocabulary in a specific British Neolithic case study at the henge monument of Mount Pleasant.

Recharting Atlantic encounters. Object trajectories and histories of value in the Siin (Senegal) and Senegambia

Abstract: The Atlantic era marks a turbulent period in the history of Senegambia, defined by dramatic reconfigurations in local socio-economic conditions. These ‘global encounters’ have often been equated with the subjection of African societies to the whims of an expanding capitalist economy. While the long-term effects of the Atlantic economy cannot be denied, conventional histories have often prioritized macro-trends and generalized process, thus glossing the complex mosaic of experiences that constituted the African Atlantic. By contrast, a closer look at how different categories of objects were consumed and circulated over time may provide more nuanced assessments of the impact of global forces on coastal societies. This article examines how these material entanglements took place in the Siin (Senegal), by following the social trajectories of several classes of objects in space and time, and charting their enmeshment in regimes of value, patterns of action, forms of power and historical experience. Combining these empirical insights with a broader theoretical reflection, the paper attempts to draw out the implications of rethinking the historical space of the African Atlantic through a more intimate engagement with the historicities, contingencies and materialities that fashioned African historical experiences. While this shift in conceptual priorities inevitably creates new silences, I suggest that it also re-establishes Africans as cultural and historical subjects, firmly grounded in world history, and that this perspective can provide a point of departure for the production of alternative historical imaginations and subjectivities.

Agency and personhood at the onset of the Mycenaean period

Abstract: This paper offers a critical evaluation of the debate on agency and personhood in archaeology. Despite some very interesting and sharp discussions, the debate has suffered from the projection of anachronistic definitions of the person and an overreliance on specific ethnographic readings. In addition, little attempt is made to integrate abstract theoretical discussions with close analyses of empirical data. I would like to suggest that this should be our priority. In the second part of the paper, I will apply these ideas by examining notions of personhood and agency held by the inhabitants of the southern Greek mainland between ca 1800 and 1600 B.C. The analysis will be based on the mortuary practices and imagery of the period.

Beyond externalism. Exploring new directions in the history of archaeology

Abstract: In recent years archaeologists have celebrated the emergence of a critical history of archaeology which has assumed a central position in disciplinary debates. This new historiography has been characterized by the adoption of an externalist or contextual approach primarily concerned with how social, economic and political conditions have influenced the interpretation of archaeological data. While externalism has played an essential role in the recognition of the history of archaeology as a field, I suggest in this article that it is time for historians to explore new ways of conceptualizing the social dimensions of archaeological knowledge. In particular, I consider how certain debates held by historians and sociologists of science during the last years can encourage historians of archaeology to enquire more critically about the blurry boundaries between ‘archaeology’ and its ‘context’.

The matter with emotions

Abstract: I ‘full-heartedly’ agree with Harris and Sorensen that archaeologists are in need of fuller ‘appreciation of how the encounter with the material world is inherently affective’ in order to more effectively understand ‘how human beings and material things are co-constitutive’ (p. 146). Further, but assuredly not ‘foolhardily’, I would argue that in refining our appreciation and understanding of these matters of matter and emotion and being, we can make an important contribution to contemporary dialogues on emotion beyond ‘archaeological dialogues’; in particular, dialogues with psychological anthropologists.

Emotional aspects of a fen

Abstract: Oliver J.T. Harris and Tim Flohr Sørensen have written an interesting and urgent paper, raising crucial points touching upon a question at the very core of archaeology: what can we learn about the lives of prehistoric people, based solely on the material remains? Or, rephrased, how far can we reach on the Hawkesian ladder? To tackle this question, Harris and Sørensen accept the ten-year-old challenge raised by Sarah Tarlow, and suggest a vocabulary that will enable archaeologists to include emotional aspects in their interpretations. As they point out, several studies in archaeology have focused on emotion during the last decade, using burials as their main material. But as they acknowledge that emotions were a part of mundane social life, and not limited to ritualized events such as burials, they want to broaden the span of their inquiry and include materials from other contexts as well. As they do this, they make an interesting point and take a step forward in the development of archaeological interpretation. However, I would argue that they could have explored the issue even further. It would, for example, have been interesting to see them apply their ideas to some of the more mundane archaeological materials, from, for example, settlements that would be more explicitly connected to everyday life. Instead they use a quite spectacular site, where dramatic events have taken place. Is it perhaps easier to make assumptions about emotions when they are suspected to have been intense and exceptional in some way? The mundane emotions still escape us. Nevertheless, the case study chosen by Harris and Sørensen still illustrates their arguments and serves as an example for how the suggested vocabulary may be used.

Emotion reified. Lessons from the archaeology of ritual

Abstract: Harris and Sorensen's critique of the archaeological inattention to emotion and their recognition of the material mediation of affect bring to the fore perennial epistemological problems defining the broader archaeological enterprise. The immediate citation of the long-discredited Hawkesian ladder of inference challenges the assumption that past emotional states are unrecoverable from archaeological contexts, just as an earlier generation of archaeologists rejected processual theory that meaning, conceptual schemas and symbolism fell beyond the pale of scientific inference. Of course, Hawkes was not a materialist in the strict sense of the term, and he recognized that value systems transcended the epiphenomenal and played a vital role in structuring social practice and shaping historical process. It was his contention, however, that conceptual and symbolic schemes and their role in social reproduction were simply too complex to be read satisfactorily from material remains (Hawkes 1954; see Fogelin 2008, 129–30). He wrote that ‘there is nothing in North American ecology . . . to compel either Iroquois institutions . . . or the constitution of the United States’ (Hawkes 1954, 163). To be sure, Hawkes probably would not have denied that moved to move is intrinsic to the human condition and that affective dispositions were a force in individual experiences and the collective fortunes and self-representations of past communities. At the same time, he probably gave little consideration to the dialectical interdependence of the material world and emotion, a relationship that has captured the imagination of recent scholars. Hawkes would no doubt have scoffed at the notion that emotion as ontological problem, cultural construct or variable of social interaction is amenable to archaeological interpretation.

Those obscure objects of desire

Abstract: ‘Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects’, posits Kathleen Stewart in her challenging experimental ethnography Ordinary affects (2007). Affects – public feelings that put intimate sentiments in broad circulation – are, for Stewart, the sinews of social life, an opaque circuit that simultaneously grounds experience in places and things and publicizes the personal. As such, affects are quintessentially archaeological in that they are both artefactual, embedded in what Bill Brown (2003) calls the ‘object matter’ of human relationships, and rooted in deep histories of material production and transformation. It is not surprising, then, that the intertwined problems of emotion and affect have re-emerged as potentially productive loci of research within archaeology itself. Indeed, as the discipline continues to extend its understanding of the social instrumentality of objects, landscapes and representations, it must, of necessity, come to terms with the affective efficacy of things, with the causes and consequences of our captivation.

Moral theories, Homeric questions – and the shaft graves of Mycenae. A response

Abstract: I would like to thank Silvia Tomaskova, Christoph Ulf and James Wright for their comments, which allow me to clarify and expand my argument. As I cannot address all the points they raise in this response, I have decided to concentrate on three themes: (i) the application of moral theory, (ii) Homeric questions and (iii) the focus on the shaft graves of Mycenae.

‘What did the Greeks owe the Orient?’ The question we can't stop asking (even though we can't answer it)

Abstract: Reviewing five recent books in German classical and oriental studies, this essay argues that the question of archaic Greece's debts to the Orient remains a particularly lively one in German-speaking Europe. Like their predecessors in previous generations, iconoclastic classicists like Walter Burkert, oriental archaeologists like Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) and maverick outsiders like Raoul Schrott have attacked the enraptured view of ‘the Greek miracle’ familiar to those educated in classical Gymnasien. And yet the question of Greek cultural autonomy is still alive, in part because there are too many uncertainties for it to be answered definitively, and in part because it continues to play a role in attempts to define modern European identity.

Different languages. An interview on archaeology in Germany with Friedrich Lüth

Abstract: This is an interview about archaeology in Germany and beyond Friedrich Luth, currently president of the European Association of Archaeologists, among other positions, talks about archaeological practice and thought in Germany and Europe and the relationship between both Is German pre- and protohistoric archaeology still best known for its disciplined approaches to material evidence and the thoroughness with regard to the data (Harke 1989)? Are there still concerns whether it is atheoretical (Klejn 1993)? In this interview Luth reflects on university chairs versus ‘schools’, we hear about how to gain new facts and how to deconstruct interpretations, and we learn about the sixteenfold German heritage management – archaeology is the competence of the sixteen Bundeslander (states) rather than of the Bund, because state archaeological services as well as the universities fall under the laws of the states, not under federal laws Topics range from the Bologna process to Germany's attitude towards ‘world archaeology’, from positivism to plurality, and from budgets to languages We also learn much about the self-perception of archaeology in Germany as a subject between data and theory, between humanities and sciences, and between knowledge production and public relevance

Talk about the passion

Abstract: We would like to thank the five commentators for their thorough and stimulating reflections on, and criticism of, our article. The different comments raise various issues, and we appreciate their diversity of perspectives and their analysis of problems in our attempt at a rethinking of emotion in archaeology. The comments are each in their own way highly rewarding for us, and they certainly bring concerns to the fore that we have left out. Here we identify several issues that the commentators address in different voices and with varying intensities, and would like to examine these in turn. First, we consider the question of ritual at Mount Pleasant and the absence of the quotidian from our account. Second, we engage with the worry expressed over the lack of specificity of emotions in our given scenarios. Third, the phenomenological perspective in our article is given some critical thought. Fourth, we address the important point on which several of the commentators agree: that we leave out how emotions unfold in historically specific and context-dependent situations. Finally we turn back to the issue of our vocabulary to see how it stands the test of both application and critique.

Response and responsibility (before and after the ‘facts’). Postcolonial thoughts on ethical writing

Abstract: Let me begin by expressing my heartfelt thanks to Sarah Croucher, Audrey Horning, Tim Insoll and Peter van Dommelen for their thoughtful comments. It is not uncommon for academic critique to be seduced by the facility of criticism, to draw its impulse from what, with Freud, we might call the ‘narcissism of small differences’, and proceed with the obstinacy of the hatchet headed for the jugular . . . More artful, and far more difficult, is a form of engagement that gives more than it takes, that disputes but in the spirit of generous exchange. I feel that the respondents have accomplished precisely that. They have crafted a space of ‘hospitable’ discussion (cf. Derrida 2000), which rests on a double movement of ‘interruption’ (Westmoreland 2008): of their plane of thoughts, by bringing my article within the ambit of their conversations; and of my ideas, by making them a little less self-evident, a little less ‘at home’. This act of ‘making strange’ – when one's viewpoints acquire a different face as they are presented anew through the minds of others – is the cloth of which constructive dialogue is made.