Yhposolihp?

Forest Clearing. Photo by J-Hob.

Archaeolog and Traumwerk in general are Good Things in my opinion. It’s a convenient way of keeping up with what’s going on in the archaeological mainstream with having to travel several hours to attend a brief seminar at a distant university. Occasionally something will come up that makes me seriously question whether what I’m doing is remotely archaeological or whether I am solely an ancient historian who uses archaeology. Matt Edgeworth’s piece The Clearing: Heidegger and Excavation is an example of something where it’s not so much that I disagree with it, it’s that I can’t work out where there might be a common frame of reference. As it happens there are elements that I do disagree with. Edgeworth takes Heidegger’s idea of clearing and compares it to a forest clearing which is nothing like the forest clearings of my youth. For Edgeworth clearings are “static” or else “are just ‘there’.” In contrast I find clearings to be dynamic. A common reason for a clearing is that a tree has fallen. This may take down a few more trees, or weaken them so that they fall in the next storm. Saplings spurt up through the undergrowth taking advantage of the light to grow into mighty oak themselves. A clearing is often temporary and transient. Even clearings that are just ‘there’ are not just ‘there’. There may be geological factors, or human patrol of the clearing. I think Edgeworth’s central metaphor is broken, which would cause me great distress if I were hearing it a conference, but my greater discomfort is that – for the purposes of his argument – I’m not sure it matters.

I’m not averse to mixing philosophy with archaeology or ancient history. I’m interested in social atomism, the idea that you have discrete individuals, because I don’t think it’s necessarily true. It’s quite reasonable at this point to mutter to yourself that you’re pretty certain you are an individual. However when we write histories we often write them of places or peoples in the plural. We talk about the Romans or the Greeks and individuals are things which contribute to that greater whole. If we’re using aggregate data it doesn’t automatically follow we can derive individuals from that. Even your sense of self can be defined in relation to others. You’re the daughter of X or the father of Y. I don’t know if there can be a you to call yourself you without letting others in.

I’ve also been thinking about the other end of the scale, at sub-individual units. It’s the thing that Chris Gosden calls the dividual (2004:33-36), a being that is the sum of its parts. Is a person who is a mother entirely defined by her relationship to her children? I don’t think so there’s other things like ethnicity, personal cosmology, physical ability and so on. Yet the concept of ‘motherhood’ is interesting because while it’s a sub-individual unit, it also appears in many people within a population. Now a girl is not born with a ‘how to be a mother’ module inside her somewhere, so how does this get transmitted between generations? What you end up with is a concept of individual where supra-individual and sub-individual pressures meet. Are there any forces which act purely on the individual rather than the supra- or sub- levels?

Philosophy is useful because you often find people have already been thinking about similar problems. In my case I’m finding some discussion of Habermas useful, as he too questions social atomism and also thinks about communication in society. Also his ideas have been criticised. I can read those criticisms and think about whether or not they also apply to my work. Yet I wouldn’t call myself a Habermasian historian. For one reason it would be pretentious. To be honest I’m struggling a lot with his work, he isn’t the most silky writer. Another reason is that Habermas very definitely does not define the parameters which I work in. Habermas’s model of society has been developed as a model of modern society. The societies I look at are pre-modern. No serious historian would suggest that you can take Marxism and drop it wholesale into the ancient past. This is where I feel out of step with the archaeological mainstream.

There is a strong strand of post-processual archaeologists who do allow a specific thinker to define parameters for work. This is not automatically a Bad Thing. You can for instance start by saying “If we assume Foucault is right in saying… and then you set up the assumptions then how can we interpret our data and what would it say about society?” You can following a thinker not just to get answers, but also to get new questions. I would say the key word here is if, and I think it’s getting dropped from a lot of research.

If you follow me so far then you might think that I’m saying that by taking philosophy and dropping it on archaeology they’ve got it the wrong way round. I’m not sure about that. Bearing in mind there’s a lot more of them then there are of me I have to keep open the option that I’m the one who’s got it back to front.

It depends on how you view philosophy. If you cite enough philosophy books do you become a philosopher? I don’t know. If you listen to enough John Lennon records do you become a Beatle?

A lot of post-processual philosophy has clearly delineated boundaries which it works within. Again that doesn’t automatically make it bad. Some post-processualists read extensively to examine the parameters they work within. They take this to archaeology and say things about the discipline. What is rare is for someone to say something about the philosophy. The reason Edgeworth’s piece has prompted this is that it’s a good example. If you want to compare our thoroughness in writing, count the citations. Ok, I could throw in a few like Habermas(1986, 1989) if I was feeling impish. The point is that Edgworth’s article isn’t arbitrary, it’s a product of serious effort. It also makes no claim on the validity of the philosophy, it accepts all claims. The only discipline it challenges is archaeology. This is why I don’t think it matters that his central assumption is broken. It’s not about if Heidegger is right, it’s about working from the idea that Heidegger is right and what that means for excavation.

In contrast I am (I hope) no more uncritical of philosophical sources than I am of archaeological or historical sources. I’m prepared to say that Habermas could be wrong on some issues. For instance I haven’t read anything which tackles the difference between supra- and sub- individual entities satisfactorily. Perhaps I haven’t read enough yet, I’m struggling with the relationship between lifeworld and system, perhaps he doesn’t tackle scale. I certainly wouldn’t subscribe to his views on the evolution of society. I accept there’s a directionality, societies like rivers go downhill, but like someone starting out from a river source, you can’t tell what that directionality is. That puts more pressure on me because it suggests that I should also be touring my work to philosophers because I am saying that philosophers can be wrong. Yet, it would be extremely weird to find that I’m dead right about all things philosophical despite having no real training and no philosophy department in my own university to bounce ideas off.

This is why I haven’t gone to anything theoretical for a while. I can listen to a lot of very intelligent people talk about Theory and feel I’ve got it completely backwards. I may have. I remember Colin Renfrew saying in a seminar that the purpose of Archaeology was to produce Theory. My interest in theory is to have a tool to produce Archaeology or History.

Bibliography

Gosden, C. 2004. Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. CUP.

Habermas, J. 1986. The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society Vol 1. Polity Press.

Habermas, J. 1989. The Theory of Communicative Action: Critique of Functionalist Reason Vol. 2. Polity Press.