Low Stakes Writing: Bakken Book

Over my winter research leave, I’ve been experimenting with some low stakes writing. In most cases this is just spending a few hours at my laptop putting my thoughts into a Scrivener file. 

This low stakes writing has been focused primarily on producing text for a volume of photographs from one man camp in the Bakken over the course of a five years (2012-2016). I had floated this book which consisted almost entirely of photographs to a few publishers over the years and they generally suggested that it needed more explanation. In the fall, a publisher proposed that I write a long introductory essay that served to offer some “context” for the photographs as well as a kind of final word on our work in the Bakken with the North Dakota Man Camp Project.

I have a loose goal of starting with a survey of work on the Bakken in the 21st century and then situating this within recent discussion of archaeology of the contemporary world. This then provides a foundation of talking about how the history and archaeology of the 20th- and 21st-century world (and modernity more broadly) has deep and (and maybe even fundamental) roots in the history and archaeology of oil (which is, in many ways, a synecdoche for carbon based fuels). The most obvious connection between oil and the archaeology of the contemporary world is the growing concern for climate change.

This is where photography comes in. I’ve been particularly intrigued by Dan Hicks’ and Leslie McFayden’s work on the place of photographs within archaeology. They argue that most recent scholarship on photographs in archaeology stresses their representational character. In other words, photographs represent a material reality from the past. Hicks argues that photographs are not representations of something, but artifacts in their own right which are not dependent on what they represent to produce meaning. Thus these photographs have a “an idorrhythmic coexistence” with their viewers, the objects, events, and situations that they document, and the past. This provides photographs with a kind of instability or even fluidity (or perhaps a kind of viscosity to continue our petrometaphor). It also recognizes in photography a genuine alternative to conventional epistemologies. It echoes recent scholarship that understands how the global character of climate change has accelerated the dissolution of the distinction between plot, argument, and setting. In other words, photographs offer a way to see our world that challenges narrative and rewards new forms of associations outside of the representational practices that support traditional archaeological interpretation.   

The question, of course, is what can photographs provide if we recognize their capacity to produce knowledge outside conventional practices?      

Right now, I have a rough outline:

0. Introduction

1. Archaeology of work force house both in the US and World Archaeology. 2. Industrial archaeology and the archaeology of extractive industries. 3. Archaeology of the contemporary world.

4. Oil and Modernity 5. Mobility and Modernity: Viscosity  6. Fixity in the age mobility: the suburb.

7. Photography and archaeology: permanence in the age of ephemerality. 8. Fixity and fragments. 9. Narrative and fragments.

10. Conclusion