Big Words

While browsing the History Carnival I came across this entry on Early Modern Notes “Academics and their big words” by Sharon. It’s on the value of language and in particular as response to Robert Fisk’s article Let us rebel against poisonous academics and their preposterous claptrap of exclusion in the Independent on May 14. In particular Anthropology is skewered by Fisk as being gibberish. This, Fisk argues, draws up a social barrier unless you know the socially constructed (and unwritten) meanings of words. I could agree with this. Sharon sympathises with reading theory, but not with Fisk’s argument that the words used being meaningless, noting:

I often struggle with ‘theory’ people’s writing; but, very often, less because of individual words or concepts than the clunking, convoluted manner in which the buggers string them together. (In other words it’s not the language/vocabulary that’s the problem, it’s a lack of writing skills. And it’s quite true that poor writing + heavy theory (tends to) = extreme violence to language.) I’m not defending bad writing here.

She demonstrates this quite well noting the words Fisk abhors as being in no dictionary are ones like matrilineal, emic and etic. So far I’d agree with her. Fisk has chosen poorly. But I would draw the line at ‘meaning system’.

Meaning system would seem to be pretty easy, but Fisk’s article shows the context it’s used in.

“The Abrahamic myth of a loving Patriarch and a loving God who care for a special people has created a home and a meaning system for millions of human beings.”

I think in this case ‘meaning system’ means ‘religion’. In fact I’d argue that the word religion is more informative than the phrase ‘meaning system’ and shorter. I can’t see any reason or benefit in replacing a well-recognised term and going for something longer. Why do we use neologisms?

The reason I use neologisms and jargon is that they’re shorthand. They’re common concepts and it saves time to create a label for them. So when I talk about an altitude of a star I tend to make the point of saying ‘this is the angular height of a star above the horizon’. This means once I’ve done that I can just refer to an altitude rather than repeating ‘this makes an angle of θ° above the horizon.’ It also reduces word counts, which is essential for paper-based journals. I think Sharon is right to say that some difficult language is necessary because some work in the social sciences isn’t totally shallow. So in the case of the ‘meaning system’ above, I’d argue that’s bad writing rather than a case against specialised vocabulary.

So I do wonder if Fisk’s article would have hit harder if he’d chosen his words better. I could draw up a list but that would be tedious. I’ll stick to just one which I keep hitting again and again in archaeology.

Agency.

Agency is about decision making and is derived from Giddens’s Structuration Theory and Bordieu’s work. Or so archaeologists would have you believe.

John Robb in his recent book of Agency and Archaeology counted twelve different forms of Agency used by archaeologists. That is not what I have trouble with. I’m happy for an archaeologist to use any of those twelve concepts or even create a thirteenth one and call it Agency – so long as they make it clear which form they are using.

And this is where it breaks down.

There is no common definition of Agency for people to refer to or disagree against, yet you wouldn’t know it in the average Agency paper at a theory conference. The term is blithely dropped into a talk without explanation. I can only come to two possible conclusions. Either there is a definition that archaeologists have agreed but not written down – it’s a social marker. Or the speaker is using a specific form of agency but not telling people what it is. Neither situation should be tolerated.

There is a third option that the speaker doesn’t have much idea of what Agency is but is bluffing – but it’s done so often you’d have to have a very bleak view of archaeologists to consider that as a sensible possibility.

The truly strange thing is that this is an archaeological problem. I don’t find it in Ancient History. That’s not to say there’s no bad Ancient History. I’ve read some pretty poor stuff, but there’s not the tolerance of meaningless language that you find in archaeology. Tolerance may even be the wrong word. Some archaeologists don’t merely tolerate it. They revel in atrocious writing. The Trireme Veterans for Truth highlight this brilliantly.

I think the problem is due to some archaeologists being taught that theory is the highest form of archaeology. I was told this was the case because theory is inherent in all archaeology. So is performance (usually through literature), yet I can’t recall anyone arguing that performance is the highest form of archaeology. The theory first approach produces people who think that bad and inpenetrable theory is inherently nobler than Golden Marshalltown (Ready Salted) archaeology, no matter how good. I really wish I was making this up for polemical purposes, but I was told in an MPhil theory seminar by a professor, who closed his eyes and waved his hand as though he was caressing the words as he spoke them, “Theory is the highest form of Archaeology”. That could be taken as encouragement to produce theory. So how do you fake theory if you’re no good at it?

Good theory can borrow concepts from other fields, introduce new concepts and so introduce new words. A bad theoretician could conclude that the way to be successful is to take words in from other disciplines. New words are inherently good so you can take them even if you have no understanding of the meaning. Witmore and Webmoor have argued “there is more to understanding than meaning” and seeing them tackle symmetry I believe they’re sincere. I don’t believe they know what symmetry is, but I don’t question their sincerity.

That’s where Fisk went wrong. In the cases of the phrases used Sharon was absolutely right to criticise Fisk. But if he’d chosen words used in ways that have no relationship to their dictionary definitions, then the case would be indefensible. As an ancient historian I completely agree with Sharon. Fisk is 100% wrong. But when I’m an archaeologist I have to concede he does have a very reasonable point. —–