Relational Archaeologies

Humans, Animals, Things

Christopher Watts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415525312
• eBook ISBN: 9781135903190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Many of us accept as uncontroversial the belief that the world is comprised of detached and disparate products, all of which are reducible to certain substances. Of those things that are alive, we acknowledge that some have agency while others, such as humans, have more advanced qualities such as consciousness, reason and intentionality. So deeply-seated is this metaphysical belief, along with the related distinctions we draw between subject/object, mind/body and nature/culture that many of us tacitly assume past groups approached and apprehended the world in a similar fashion. Relational Archaeologies questions how such a view of human beings, 'other-than-human' creatures and things affects our reconstruction of past beliefs and practices. It proceeds from the position that, in many cases, past societies understood their place in the world as positional rather than categorical, as persons bound up in reticular arrangements with similar and not so similar forms regardless of their substantive qualities. Relational Archaeologies explores this idea by emphasizing how humans, animals and things come to exist by virtue of the dynamic and fluid processes of connection and transaction. In highlighting various counter-Modern notions of what it means 'to be' and how these can be teased apart using archaeological materials, contributors provide a range of approaches from primarily theoretical/historicized treatments of the topic to practical applications or case studies from the Americas, the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia.

1

RELATIONAL ARCHAEOLOGIES: ROOTS AND ROUTES

Christopher Watts

Introduction

What would an understanding of the Andean past look like if stones were understood to disgrace or even destroy their human interlocutors? How might our sense of ancient wayfaring in the Canadian Arctic be altered by a ‘zoocentric’ perspective? Why was it considered necessary for Torres Strait Islanders to curate and construct intricate mounds of marine mammal bones? More broadly, how can we understand such practices and account for them in our research designs, field methods, and artifact analyses? These are just some of the questions posed by the contributors to this volume, all of whom advance a ‘relational’ understanding of past peoples and the animals, plants, and things with which their lives were entangled.

Defined here as a suite of approaches aimed at conflating the abstract and immutable dualities of modernist ontologies (e.g., nature and culture, self and other, subject and object, mind and body), relationality has been increasingly employed both as a conceptual device and heuristic technique by researchers across the social sciences and humanities. Such perspectives often highlight the transactions, translations, and transformations that are carried on between humans and non-humans, as opposed to the analysis of ‘interaction effects’ among pre-existing, self-contained entities. Generally speaking, this results in a concern with the relations themselves – the linkages rather than the nodes, the actions rather than the substances – in considering how various forms emerge and evolve together across space and through time. By tracing the contextual and contingent paths along which such forms come into being, as opposed to populating the categorical spaces of assorted dualist narratives, relational thinking shifts our analytical focus to the ways in which entities, thought of as processes rather than existents, become entwined. This is lucidly illustrated in the work of biologist Donna Haraway, whose cyborg theory (1985) and concepts of ‘natureculture’ and ‘companion species’¹ (e.g., 2003, 2007) subvert traditional accounts of non-human animals and things as externalized entities with which we intermingle and of the ‘social’ contexts within which they are gathered. In their stead, Haraway offers a rich and nuanced recasting of the relationships which ultimately bring about ontic categories (e.g., humans and dogs). We, as humans, develop relationally with our ‘partners’ in the world through a process Haraway (2007:vii) refers to as “lively knotting.”

A comparable metaphor is found in the recent work of Tim Ingold (e.g., 2007, 2011, this volume), where a process-oriented and thoroughly relational emphasis on ‘meshworks’ and entanglements is intended to capture the co-continuous flow of humans and non-humans along paths. This work builds upon Ingold’s much celebrated collection of essays, The Perception of the Environment (2000), which sought to dismantle the “overriding academic division of labour between the disciplines that deal, on the one hand, with the human mind and its manifold linguistic, social and cultural products, and on the other, with the structures and composition of the material world” (Ingold 2000:1). Holding fast to such a dichotomy, Ingold argues, serves to cleave what is in fact a unified phenomenon. We do not simply traverse the world, confronting and abstracting objects of consciousness, but rather ‘dwell’ within it, open up to it, and incorporate it within ourselves as sensuous beings. Moreover, it is as whole bodies, rather than ethereal minds, that we develop perceptions, products, and life histories born of “specific dispositions and sensibilities that lead people to orient themselves in relation to their environment and to attend to its features” in particular ways (Ingold 2000:153). Accordingly, Ingold notes, meanings are never affixed to the world, but instead arise in a continuous and concordant manner alongside the other entities and features of the environment with which we are enfolded.

Ingold’s anti-essentialist critique finds a receptive audience in the contributors to this volume, several of whom (i.e., Borić and Hofmann) explicitly engage with aspects of his work. But as these and the other authors make clear, there is also a burgeoning archaeological literature dealing more specifically with the biographical (e.g., Gosden and Marshall 1999) through agential or affective properties of things (e.g., Gosden 2005; Knappett 2005; Knappett and Malafouris [eds.] 2008; Olsen 2010; Webmoor 2007; Witmore 2007), and the ways in which they are relationally implicated in human designs. Likewise, drawing inspiration from Strathern’s (1988) account of the Melanesian ‘dividual,’ work by Fowler (e.g., 2004) and others (e.g., Brück 2001; Conneller 2004; Jones 2005; Kirk 2006) has advanced the notion of a relational personhood in archaeology involving hybridized, distributed, or permeable bodies brought forth through a recurrent exchange with others and their products. To this we may add a heightened interest among archaeologists in assessing the ontological status of non-human entities such as animals and plants, and the extent to which they were embroiled in various ‘animistic’ ways of being with the world (see e.g., Alberti and Bray 2009; Brown and Walker 2008; cf. Bird-David 1999). That there is extramural appeal in moving past notions of the atomistic, Western self is also attested by contemporary developments in sociology (e.g., Crossley 2011; Pachucki and Breiger 2010) and psychology (e.g., Gergen 2009). And lest we think of these as rarefied pursuits, consider for a moment the transformative effects of relational social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as the open-source movement in computer programming. In a larger sense, we might even see the ascendancy of topical interests in ‘deep ecology’ (e.g., Naess 1989), indigeneity, and animal rights as reflecting a disquiet with increasingly inward-looking ways of life. If that is true, it would not be the first time an archaeological movement has followed what Durkheim called the ‘collective consciousness.’

In eschewing a belief in insular human beings set over against the world, and by instead tracing the material signatures of the manifold linking past entities together, the relational archaeologies described in this volume both incorporate and advance these themes. From the placement, articulation, and juxtaposition of human and non-human remains in various depositional contexts, to the dialogic, conductive, or animistic dimensions of architectural forms and environments, each contributor parses a wealth of archaeological data from a particular region and time period while obviating conventional analytic imperatives. The result is a view of humans, animals, and things as ontologically bound up in reticular arrangements with similar and not so similar forms, as well as new and uniquely archaeological ways of thinking about the world and how past peoples recognized their place within it. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I spell out what I see as essential to such an understanding in archaeology, seeking to clarify points of articulation between a relational approach to the past and particular philosophical works, anthropological or sociological perspectives, and ethnographic accounts, before briefly summarizing the various contributions.

Humans

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.

(Geertz 1984:126)

One of the more noteworthy yet nebulous features of Western modes of being concerns the distinction drawn between humans and non-humans. Intentionality, language, and rational thought, as well as the qualities noted in the above passage by Geertz, figure prominently in narratives of human evolution and the exclusivity with which the human condition is often defined. After all, we are taught that only humans are capable of knowing the world, abstractly and assuredly, through acts of consciousness. Such is the legacy of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought, particularly Cartesian rationalism: it is the privileged, purified mind of the subject that recognizes objects and gives them meaning.

While Descartes’ philosophy has greatly influenced the modern Western approach to knowledge production, various alternative conceptions informed by so-called ‘continental’ philosophy, non-Western ‘indigenous’ ontologies, and posthumanist or ‘new materialist’ thought (e.g., Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost [eds.] 2010; Ingold 2000, 2011), have sought to challenge some of its fundamental tenets. Among continental philosophers, Heidegger (e.g., 1962 [1927]) has argued that humans are not detached analysts of the world but rather concerned users of things. Owing to our familiarity with the places, creatures, and things with which we interact, the world is not ‘out there’ but rather part of our being, so much so in fact that it is impossible to disentangle the two. Moreover, as enmeshed in particular spatio-temporal contexts, our being-in-the-world means we encounter, experience, and understand things in specific, relational ways, within an elaborate field of possibilities. These include, for example, everyday items which are ‘ready-to-hand’ in contrast to objects of detached observation and contemplation (i.e., things which are ‘present-at-hand’; see Heidegger 1962:98–99). His classic example is that of a hammer which is first and fundamentally known to us through our embodied engagement with it, as well as our understandings of its use and position within a web of other items such as lumber and nails. When it is used as intended, the hammer ‘withdraws’ from any explicit concern we might have with it. It is only when the hammer breaks that it becomes something to ponder in its uselessness.

Heidegger’s concern with our practical understandings of the world, which implied that one could not tease apart the conscious and the corporeal in everyday modes of engagement, was recognized by Merleau-Ponty as a facet of post-Enlightenment thought in need of explication. To this end, in the Phenomenology of Perception (1962 [1945]), Merleau-Ponty advanced the theory of the corps-sujet or ‘body subject’ as a unified whole defined by the primacy of a perceptual rather than ‘pure’ consciousness. The world is always already understood as relational and meaningful because situations are experienced, first and foremost, not as atomized and idealized events instilled with meaning by the ‘mind,’ but rather as immediate and suffusive encounters that provide modalities for a bodily relationship with things that cannot be achieved by consciousness alone. This point is taken up by Mary Weismantel in her discussion of architectural features at Chavín de Huantar in Peru. Here, Weismantel’s focus on the ‘body/artifact interface’ provides for a discussion of the kinaesthetic forms of engagement that must take place in order to view stones such as the Obelisk Tello and the Lanzón, processes which at times are frustrating, awkward, and incomplete.

But what is this corporeal form through which our relationships with the world become reified? Is it an inviolable and fixed container, as modern Western conventions would have it, the surfaces of which may be subject to a variety of ‘cultural’ modifications (e.g., through dress, cosmetics, prostheses, ornamentation, tattooing, etc.)? Following Strathern’s (1988) performative account of Melanesian personhood and Csordas’ (1990) call for a ‘paradigm of embodiment,’ (see also e.g., Butler 1993; Grosz 1994), many anthropologists and archaeologists have explicitly eschewed such biological conceptions, and have instead embraced a view of the body as a fabrication of the social relations that take effect among an assortment of human and non-human ‘others.’ Chief among the tenets associated with such a position is that the human body is a processual entity; it is continually made and remade through the exchange of human and non-human substances such as bodily fluids (e.g., Busby 1997; Weismantel 2004), foodstuffs, and medicines, as well as the incorporation of ornaments and the like. This theme is explored in contributions by Losey et al., McNiven, Hofmann, and Harris.

Crucially, it is also within such a view that the physicality of the body, rather than the ethereal properties of consciousness, can be regarded as the locus of difference between humans and animals. Considerable efforts have been devoted to advancing this topic within various strands of Amazonian (e.g., Descola 2005; Santos-Granero [ed.] 2009; Vilaça 2002, 2005; Viveiros de Castro 1998) and circumpolar (e.g., Willerslev 2004, 2007) anthropology, much of which turns on the idea that humans and animals share a consubstantial essence or ‘soul,’ but different corporeal forms. Viveiros de Castro (e.g., 1998, 2004) has discussed this idea according to what he calls ‘perspectivism’ or the ontological principle that “the point of view creates the subject” (1998:476–77; see also Figure 1.1). Among various Amazonian groups, Viveiros de Castro (1998:478) contends, one’s perspective is given by the body one occupies, including its intentionality, dispositions, and capacities. As such, humans and (game) animals will see the world in different ways despite sharing the common essence of humanity (i.e., a spirit or soul), a theme which he refers to as ‘multinaturalism.’ Thus, what jaguars see as manioc beer, humans will see as blood. What tapirs regard as their large ceremonial house, we hold to be nothing more than a salt-lick.

Perspectival notions, which point to the ontological intersections and shared personhood of humans and animals, have long been noted among various indigenous groups by Ingold (e.g., 1988a, 2000:61–76) and are a subject common to the contributions of Borić, Losey et al., and McNiven. Among the Cree of Northeastern Canada, for example, Ingold (2000:48–52, 121–23) has described hunting practices as forming part of an ongoing interpersonal dialogue wherein animals must consent to be taken. Hunting here, as in other parts of the world, is based on principles of trust and regeneration; animals will not return to hunters who have mistreated them, a point which comes through in McNiven’s discussion of dugong hunting rituals and Losey et al.’s interpretation of bear mortuary rites at Shamanka II. But it is also possible to see such notions as a facet of animism, as Descola (2005) does in his comprehensive taxonomy of ontologies. As discussed by both Borić and Shapland, Descola’s classificatory scheme can be rendered as a twoway table (Figure 1.2) where a group’s beliefs in the extent to which humans and non-humans share the same physical form and interior properties (e.g., conceptions of intentionality, subjectivity, reflexivity, etc.) come to define their way of being. These similarities and differences converge in four modalities. Animism sees humans and non-humans as possessing a shared interiority (e.g., spirit or soul) among a variety of outwardly different corporeal forms. Totemism, recast from conceptions put forward by Lévi-Strauss (e.g., 1964), sees groups of humans and non-humans as sharing a suite of essential features that sets them apart from all others. As the inverse of totemism, analogism recognizes distinctions along both axes (of physicality and interiority) which Des...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Relational archaeologies: roots and routes
• 2 Inhuman eyes: looking at Chavín de Huantar
• 3 Theater of predation: beneath the skin of Göbekli Tepe images
• 4 The bear-able likeness of being: ursine remains at the Shamanka II cemetery, Lake Baikal, Siberia
• 5 Between the living and the dead: relational ontologies and the ritual dimensions of dugong hunting across Torres Strait
• 6 Methodological and analytical challenges in relational archaeologies: a view from the hunting ground
• 7 Identity communities and memory practices: relational logics in the US Southwest
• 8 Intimate connection: bodies and substances in flux in the early Neolithic of central Europe
• 9 Relational communities in prehistoric Britain
• 10 Shifting horizons and emerging ontologies in the Bronze Age Aegean
• 11 Classicism and knowing the world in early modern Sweden
• 12 The imbrication of human and animal paths: an Arctic case study
• 13 The maze and the labyrinth: reflections of a fellow-traveller
• Index