Shopping for Philosophy

A premature obituary.

Occasionally I have communication trouble. I have a naïve tendency to take things at face value. For instance I thought that archaeologists who built their ideas around Foucault’s ideas had actually read Foucault. It turns out they’ve read Foucault in translation. Fair enough, philosophical French is a little dense, there’s nothing wrong with reading it English for archaeological purposes. It turns out that this isn’t quite what some people mean by in translation. They don’t read Foucault at all. They read what other archaeologists said about applying Foucault to archaeology. Ok. Still not a problem per se. There’s never enough time to read everything you want to. There’s nothing odd about archaeologists being inspired by other archaeologists. The reason I bring this up is that once again I’ve been asked if it’s possible to bolt on “critical theory” to an archaeological project that’s well underway. I’m struggling with the puzzle why you would want to do that. Or even add on any theoretical perspective when the project is being written up.

In the case of second generation Foucauldian archaeologists. If Foucault hadn’t lived, would that make any difference at all to their work? I think not. What would happen would be that they would shop around to find another philosopher who matched their preconceptions of what they wanted to say. If a scientist did this, simply picked out the data that fitted their ideas, this would be laughable. Still, it’s not necessarily the same for a social scientist.

I have an interest in evolutionary theory. However, from personal experience, I’ve found it’s next to impossible to use it in an archaeological conference. There’s a sufficiently large number of archaeologists who don’t understand evolutionary theory to make it difficult to use it for examples, unless you work from basic principles. So pulling a suitable philosopher off the shelf makes sense to use as an analogy for what you’d like to say. Except this is where a defence of critical theory in archaeology breaks down, because if it is only read at a distance then you have to question how critical it is. Can it be a useful source of comparison if few people read it?

It would seem that the success of a lot of philosophy in archaeology depends on people not thinking about it. This would be ironic, or at least it would be if people stopped to think about it. Oddly this doesn’t annoy me greatly. Rather it’s an amusing foible. You’ll be able to catch me out as a hypocrite with tomorrow’s entry. —–