Revisiting Actor-Network Theory in Education

Tara Fenwick, Richard Edwards, Tara Fenwick, Richard Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351627955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Actor-network theory (ANT) is enjoying a notable surge of interest in educational research. New directions and questions are emerging along with new empirical approaches, as educators bring unique sensibilities and commitments to the ongoing debates and reconfigurations that characterise ANT-inspired research. Ethics and politics are now figuring more prominently in ANT-related educational publications, as are educational policy and the critical studies of assessment practices. Research on digital technology in education has also attracted critical exploration with ANT approaches.

This book gathers together articles that address important educational issues while showing creative theoretical and methodological possibilities for ANT studies in education. This book aims to locate these contributions within broader trajectories of inquiry in education and sociomaterial approaches considered worthy of attention, given the challenges facing educators today. It also raises critical questions about what appear to be certain oversights or less helpful ideas in what is emerging in the field.

We Have Never Been Latourian: Archaeological Ethics and the Posthuman Condition

TIM FLOHR SØRENSEN

This article is motivated by the recent proposal of a ‘symmetrical’ approach in archaeology. Symmetrical archaeology takes its starting point in Bruno Latour’s contention that we have – paradoxically – always been able to practice a symmetry between humans and non-humans, and that we have, simultaneously, also always been able to distinguish humans from non-humans. It has been argued by its proponents that symmetrical archaeology has ethical ramifications, yet this dimension remains only vaguely described in the current literature. This article seeks to explore what it might mean to extend ethics from humans to non-humans, and it contends that such a relationship is already being practised. Archaeological practice and heritage management are salient examples of how the ability to distinguish and conflate humans and non-humans frequently occurs along the lines of a number of undeclared and un-critiqued political and ethical logics. In effect, some things and some people are embraced by an empathetic embroidery, while others are disenfranchised. The article contends that a symmetrical principle in archaeology and heritage poses central ethical challenges to the ways in which the archaeological Other is defined and identified.

INTRODUCTION

Let me first briefly tell you the story about Lasse. Lasse was a 10-year-old boy from Denmark, who had cancer in one of his feet and had to have it amputated (Skovsbøl 2010). After learning that the cancer meant that he would lose his foot, Lasse became very concerned with the destiny of his foot and was determined that it should not simply be discarded as ordinary tissue waste, which is the norm in Danish hospital practice. Lasse wanted to part formally with his foot, and his parents, the hospital and the local vicar agreed to his wish in order to aid his emotional healing process. Before his foot was amputated, the family held a farewell dinner for Lasse’s foot, where the entire table was decorated in black: black table cloth, black napkins, black candlelight, black balloons. Upon the amputation of the foot, the family held a formal funeral for it, keeping the foot in a small, white coffin in the home until the day of the funeral. Then the family went to the cemetery and buried the foot, and the vicar held a eulogy over the severed body part. The funeral was followed by a wake, where the dining table was dressed in a kaleidoscope of colours and spring flowers to celebrate that the cancer was gone and that Lasse had been equipped with a new – artificial – foot to move on in life.

This story may remind us of Bruno Latour’s observations on the complicated relationship between humans and non-humans, between people and things. Defining ‘modernity’ as the great divide, Latour (1993) argues that there are no ‘premodern’ or ‘postmodern’ as opposed to ‘modern’ humans: human beings have always been able to distinguish humans from non-humans, and they have always had the capacity to confuse humans and non-humans. Here, Latour (1993, pp. 10–11, 47) speaks of ‘translation’ or ‘mediation’ as opposed to ‘purification’. ‘Translation’ and ‘mediation’ define the world as a mixture of nature and society, while ‘purification’ establishes a clinical ontological distinction between humans and non-humans. In this, Latour’s (1993, p. 11) point is that the non-modern gaze considers the world through both lenses simultaneously and that even moderns have always been able to conflate as well as separate humans and non-humans in practice, but have never been explicit about the relationship between the two categories (Latour 1993, p. 51). Accordingly, things are always integral parts of human society and never apart from it (Latour 1992, 2005, pp. 71–72).

Latour (1993, pp. 142–145) goes as far as to propose a ‘parliament of things’ where objects are democratized as a result of their inherently hybridized ontology with people, being essentially enmeshed in human existence. He argues that ‘[b]y defending the rights of the human subject to speak and to be the sole speaker, one does not establish democracy; one makes it increasingly more impracticable every day’ (Latour 2004, p. 69). In Latour’s view, true democracy can emerge only if non-human voices are uttered with the aid of human representatives, thus indicating, effectively, that we have never been (truly) democratic. Latour would have us give democratic voice to non-humans, i.e. to animals, tools, pottery, bronze swords, jewellery, buildings, space ships, etc., because they constitute an imbricated part of the ‘common world’ of humans and non-humans, emerging as a ‘collective’ rather than a ‘society’ (Latour 2004, pp. 47, 53–54, 62, ch. 5, 2005, p. 75).

The question is whether this is a valid proposition. Many archaeologists would probably answer readily and with little hesitation in the negative. Whereas Latour (1993) argues that ‘we have never been modern’, because ‘we’ (i.e. human beings) have never been able to categorically separate humans from non-humans or nature from society, the modernist ground on which archaeologists rest (Thomas 2004) implies that that they have never been Latourian, i.e. they have always been able to discriminate humans from non-humans. As Tim Dant argues, most of the time moderns hardly give any thought to things and, if we do, ‘we regard them as “mere” objects that do not in any way compete with humans for status as beings. Objects are there for us to use and dispose of in whatever way we wish; we may treat them well or badly without any concern for their rights or feelings because they have none’ (2005, p. 62).

In this, Dant cites a pedestrian rejection of the democracy of things and alludes to a potential ethics beyond that of humans (we may of course observe that such a posthuman ethics is already realized in notions of animal rights and animal welfare). This colloquial attitude to things, it may be argued, is merely a stubborn and mind-numbingly automated reproduction of the Cartesian prejudice that things are inanimate, dead matter and hence inferior to humans. Thus, the capacity to distinguish subjects from objects, humans from non-humans, nature from society has simply become part of an un-critiqued modern, Western doxa (Latour 1993, pp. 97–103, 2004, pp. 45–46).

Extending this logic to the ethical dimensions of archaeological remains, we need to challenge the status of the human as a priori privileged over the non-human, which calls for a rethinking of a number of relations; for instance, the relation between that which is integrated into the organic body as opposed to detachable and inorganic, non-bodily artefacts or the animate being in relation to the inanimate object. Or, in other words, how, why and with what legitimacy do archaeologists separate the prosthetic hand from the organic hand, the amputated hand from the whole body, the glove from the hand, the wedding ring from the finger on the hand or the hand from the tattoo on the hand? Do they make arbitrary distinctions based on contemporary ontologies and ethics or is the aim to try to approximate a hypothetical Other in the past and her or his notions of human and non-human, body and non-body?

The symmetrical relationship between humans and non-humans, and the ‘democracy’ that Latour advocates, should not be entirely unfamiliar to archaeologists as it has, arguably, already been effectuated for quite some time in the field of heritage, in the sense that things – or, rather, some things – are protected and treated as if charged with ethical rights similar to those of humans (see also Harrison 2012, ch. 9). This discourse works on two levels. One seeks to protect things from destruction, while the other seeks to give people access to objects and places. In discourses on ‘heritage’ and ‘cultural property’ as unique or irreplaceable the position of things is uncannily similar to that of humans and the rights of humans. On the one hand, institutions such as UNESCO stipulate in the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage that the disappearance of items of cultural heritage ‘ constitutes a harmful impoverishment’ of all nations of the world, which implies that the loss of cultural heritage is a loss for humans and for human society. On the other hand, the widespread discourse on heritage in national heritage agencies, in political agendas and at historical tourist sites rarely specifies that protection of things from the past is decided by humans and in the interest of humans, but simply disseminates ‘heritage’ as a value in its own right with an intrinsic and irreplaceable importance (see Smith 2006, Waterton and Smith 2009). However, only certain things are cherished as indestructible or inviolable, or so important that people should be given access to them: some items become cherished while others are relegated to a shadow existence as anonymous, mass objects or because they are classified as undiagnostic or unrepresentative. The political or moral power of things that Latour (1992) identifies is thus already a reality, but it issues forth more as an oligarchy than a democracy, because the privilege of having a ‘voice’ and being ‘heard’ is granted only to a few lucky things selected by their spokespersons (or lobby) in current heritage practice (see also Meskell 2010).

So, while Latour argues that there is an unproductive asymmetry between humans and non-humans, reproduced through the modernist agenda, we may extend the problem into the (modernist) practice of archaeology and heritage. After introducing symmetrical archaeology and its ethical contours, I explore a number of cases and scenarios from archaeology and the heritage industry that are ethically charged, but which nevertheless tend to fall under the radar of explicit ethical scrutiny, despite being invested with explicit ethical decisions and highly political consequences. This allows for a critical scrutiny of the limits of ethics and the range to which the symmetrical approach has bearing for the field of ethics in archaeology.

FROM HUMAN ETHICS TO MATERIAL ETHICS

The modernist division of humans and non-humans has been challenged within, for instance, technology and culture studies in recent decades. In an influential article Donna Haraway (1985) thus proposed three ‘boundary breakdowns’, disputing the margins of, respectively, humans and animals, organism and machine, and the physical and the non-physical (Haraway 1991, pp. 151–154). The work of Haraway, among others, has been part of an expanding interest in social, technological and philosophical imbrications of humans and non-humans, and in the potential transcending of humanism and the privileged position of the human. An array of studies into posthumanism, new materialism and speculative realism addresses ethical challenges to contemporary and future societies (see, e.g., Barad 1998, Hayles 1999, Badmington 2000, Bryant et al. 2011, van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2010, Pyyhtinen and Tamminen 2011, see also Verbeek 2005, 2006, 2011), while the implications are rarely seen as historical let alone archaeological (but see Dawney et al. in prep.).

Within archaeology, the Latourian and posthumanist notion of a non-discriminatory approach to humans and non-humans has been embraced explicitly by the branch of so-called ‘symmetrical archaeology’ (e.g. Olsen 2003, 2012, Domanska 2006, Witmore 2006, 2007, Shanks 2007, Webmoor 2007, Webmoor and Witmore 2008, Normark 2010). This approach calls attention to the symmetry between humans and non-humans in the archaeological discipline, effectively levelling the modernist opposition of people and things. It thus highlights a number of interesting and potentially necessary redirections in archaeology, yet it also raises a number of challenging issues.

The aim of symmetrical archaeology is, allegedly, not to invoke any ‘simplistic’ equivalence of humans and non-humans, but rather to appreciate their ‘distributed collective’ and the complex entanglement of people and things (Witmore 2007, p. 547). Bjørnar Olsen (2003, 2006) thus takes up Latour’s notion of a democracy of things, and argues that archaeology has overlooked things. Despite its being the very ‘discipline of things’ (Olsen 2003, p. 89, Olsen et al. 2012), the focus is always drawn to meta-theory, politics and society. Instead, he appeals for an archaeology that can embrace how non-humans and humans are created in mutual collaboration (see also Hodder 2012). He asks for an approach that allows us to appreciate ‘how objects construct the subject’ (Olsen 2003, p. 100) and how things are part of political processes (Olsen 2006, p. 17). Olsen wishes not only to include non-humans as social participants at an analytical level, but even more to be ‘pragmatic’ about the accounts of archaeological and historical ‘collectives’ (Olsen 2007, p. 586).

For Michael Shanks, the politics of this agenda is also about ‘who we are’ (2007, p. 591), and the symmetrical ‘attitude’ is thus about opening up to new identities for people and things. In this, it is important to stress that a symmetrical approach allegedly does not collapse humans and non-humans into one uniform identity: things are not the same or equal, just because they are approached as symmetrically constituted (Olsen 2012, pp. 211–213, Olsen et al. 2012, p. 13), but are instead participants in ‘heterogeneous networks’ (Shanks 2007, p. 593, Witmore 2007, p. 550) or ‘mixtures’ (Witmore 2007, p. 559, Webmoor and Witmore 2008, p. 59, Olsen 2010, pp. 132–136). As such, there are no autonomies: all objects and subjects are entangled and dependent (Hodder 2012). These new identities – and their symmetrical ontology – obviously have bearings on the political and ethical aspects of the beings that inhabit the world.

Interestingly, Christopher Witmore announces in his manifesto for symmetrical archaeology that the symmetrical levelling is ‘neither axiological nor ethical’ (2007, p. 547). Soon after he argues that ‘a symmetrical archaeology builds on the strengths of what we do as archaeologists’ (Witmore 2007, p. 549).

For some, however, it may be somewhat difficult to see how the practice of archaeology can be divorced from ethics, and it is particularly curious to see an ethical claim abandoned in the light of symmetrical archaeology’s necessary association with Latour’s democratizing project. So, if anything, symmetrical archaeology is involved in a political project, and it seems to me to be naive to consider practice and politics disconnected from the ethical field.

A number of writings under the moniker of symmetrical archaeology have indeed explicitly highlighted ethics as a direct consequence of the symmetry principle. For instance, Shanks (2007) declares that symmetry is precisely an ethical principle, even though the exact implications remain somewhat unclear. It seems that a postcolonial attitude to the representation of the past is part of this ethical and political principle, revolving around critical judgements of how archaeologists may be ‘speaking’ for the past in its absence (Shanks 2007, p. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: How is actor-network theory contributing to educational research? A critical revisitation
• 1 We Have Never Been Latourian: Archaeological Ethics and the Posthuman Condition
• 2 Critique and Politics: A sociomaterialist intervention
• 3 Resettling notions of social mobility: locating refugees as ‘educable’ and ‘employable’
• 4 Globalising assessment: an ethnography of literacy assessment, camels and fast food in the Mongolian Gobi
• 5 Target-driven reforms: Education for All and the translations of equity and inclusion in India
• 6 Policy matters: de/re/territorialising spaces of learning in Victorian government schools
• 7 Reflexivity and the politics of knowledge: researchers as ‘brokers’ and ‘translators’ of educational development
• 8 Short Cuts and Extended Techniques: Rethinking relations between technology and educational theory
• Index