Africa in Theory: Theory in Africa
Saturday May 1st
2:30 pm-6:00 pm
Organizers: Stephanie Wynne-Jones, University of Bristol (stephanie.wynne-jones@bristol.ac.uk) and Jeffrey Fleisher, Rice University (jfleisher@rice.edu)
Abstract: Postprocessual theory has taken an increasingly dominant role in global archaeology, with its emphasis on agency and the active nature of material culture. While the original intellectual interlocutors of this theoretical shift were in Western countries, the roots of the tradition are in Africa. Their inspiration was, specifically, with a group of ethnoarchaeological studies of the 1980s, as archaeologists discovered that African societies gave them new heuristic tools to think through their subject matter (Hodder 1982a, 1982b; Moore 1986). This session explores the epistemological implications of theory being based in Africa. We pursue this 'locatedness' in two ways: first, what does it mean for archaeological theory that foundational thinking was grounded in African case material? Second, what does it mean for Africa that it occupies a specific place in archaeological thought, with an apparent emphasis on interpersonal and household relations rather than larger scale or state-level social formations? These two questions, we argue, are not unrelated. They force a reconsideration of the way that theoretical concerns such as the individual and society, interactions with the material world, and understandings of landscape may have an African character, while at the same time suggesting why African archaeological case studies remain peripheral to certain debates within global archaeologies (McIntosh 1999; Stahl 2005).
Structure: Introductory discussion by organizers, followed by papers of 15 – 20 minutes length. Speakers will be asked to keep to the lower limits of that time, to allow for discussion at the end of each paper. A discussant will provide a summary of the themes represented, and there will be a final discussion.
2:30: Stephanie Wynne-Jones (University of Bristol) and Jeffrey Fleisher (Rice University): Introductory remarks
2:45: Henrietta Moore (University of Cambridge): The Place of Africa in Theory
3:10: Scott MacEachern (Bowdoin College): African Models in Global History
3:35: Stephanie Wynne-Jones (University of Bristol): Problems with Practice: Understanding Objects and Spaces in African Archaeology
4:00: Coffee break
4:30: Jeffrey Fleisher (Rice University): Theoretical Relocations: From Postprocessual to Processual and Beyond in the Archaeology of the Swahili
4:55: Kathryn Fewster (Columbia University): Bringing It All Back Home: African Ethnoarchaeology and European Archaeological Theory
5:20: Paul Lane (HEEAL Project, University of York): Discussion
Participants and Abstracts:
1. The Place of Africa in Theory
Henrietta Moore, William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
This paper discusses what archaeology, and social science theories in general, have inherited from Africa. More specifically, it examines how African materials, cultures and communities have influenced the pre-theoretical assumptions undergirding ideas about agency, meaning and interpretation in anthropology and archaeology. Instead of exploring postcolonial theory and politics from the perspective of how Europe and the ‘west’ – both contested terms – have framed Africa, it focuses attention on how the symbolic practices, livelihood strategies and gender relations of African societies have provided particular theoretical and methodological tools for social scientists to work with. It goes on to critically examine the notion of African epistemologies and African subjectivities, and interrogates the limits of the framework of cultural difference for thinking through the analytic linkages between modernities, hybridities, and traditions.
2. African models in global history
Scott MacEachern, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bowdoin College
Sub-Saharan Africa plays a particular role in global archaeology, especially through the informal intellectual divisions of labour that professional archaeologists use to partition their expectations of the ancient world. Research on the continent is central to palaeoanthropological understanding of hominin origins and human evolution, and to ethnoarchaeology and material culture studies, and such research is recognised to be of global significance. At the same time, studies of sociopolitical complexity and state formation in sub-Saharan Africa play only a marginal role in wider debates on these latter topics, as a number of researchers have recently noted. I will argue that this curious intellectual position of Africa in global human histories stems from continuing deep Western assumptions about the passage of time – and its negation, timelessness – in African societies. Palaeoanthropology deals with timescales entirely divorced from quotidian human experience, while ethnoarchaeology inevitably collapses time distinctions between modern and ancient communities to varying degrees. Studies of sociopolitical complexity and state formation deal with the dynamics of cultural change over historical time-scales, difficult to reconcile with assumptions of timelessness and their institutional residues. These assumptions need to be very stringently questioned, especially as they become more salient and intellectually influential in other disciplines that also talk about the African past\
3. Problems with practice: understanding objects and spaces in African archaeology
Stephanie Wynne-Jones, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, University of Bristol
Most contemporary material culture studies proceed from some basic premises. We assume that material culture is meaningful and actively engaged with; further, we study the spatial patterning of material residues for evidence of social priorities and structuring behaviours. The study of material culture has therefore moved away from a simplistic link with identity rendered concrete, towards a fluid sense of identity through practice and a link between those practices and the material world. This sense of structured material practice developed in large part from ethnoarchaeological work based in Africa. Hodder’s (1982a, b) work on material culture in group and individual identities and Moore’s (1986) study of domestic space and daily practice among the Marakwet are often cited in this regard. These studies, and those that have followed, rely on a notion of individual engagement, and of social structure built up through multiple instances of mundane behaviour; objects and persons moving through daily life creating and being created by structures of meaning. In this paper, I consider the limitations of using these dynamic models of practice and engagement in relation to the archaeological record; the broad application of such particular models might have the effect of reducing African societies to a series of ‘innate’ principles, rather than historical practices and ongoing engagements. I suggest that this is inherent in the application of these ideas, rather than the original concepts, and that archaeologists must remain sensitive to the locus of meaning when invoking practice as an explanatory mechanism.
4. Theoretical relocations: From postprocessual to processual and beyond in the archaeology of the Swahili
Jeffrey Fleisher, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Rice University
This paper seeks the epistemological implications of early postprocessual thinking for the archaeology of the Swahili. First, I examine why an early engagement with social theory (Donley Reid 1982, 1984, 1990) in the archaeology of the Swahili was largely abandoned during the last 25 years; what followed was not a more fully developed postprocessual archaeology, but rather studies that emphasized culture history and processual concerns. I suggest that national interests and the drive to cast the ancient Swahili as an African complex society help to explain why this might be so. Next, I examine the way that early postprocessual research on the Swahili—and the Swahili house more specifically—became an important example of how ‘household archaeology’ could be broadened to include social theory, namely the work of Bourdieu and Giddens. This case was applied broadly and transferred to many other archaeological contexts, as a way of thinking through the house. However, without an understanding how this research was committed to a particular view of Swahili society—and, in fact, an ideological vision of its elite—these wholesale transfers were problematic. This paper attempts a source side criticism of the historiographic context of the Swahili, following on similar approaches to the use of ethnographic analogic reasoning (Stahl 1992).
5. Bringing it all back home: African ethnoarchaeology and European archaeological theory
Kathryn Fewster, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
This paper will examine specific ethnoarchaeological studies that have been carried out in Africa since the 1980s, exploring the possible reasons why these became important "carriers" of post-processual research in Britain. I will argue that because of the nature of the discipline of archaeology in Britain, the original ethnoarchaeological studies themselves have largely disappeared into obscurity, while the theory that was generated from them has been widely embraced once made applicable to the European archaeological database.
6. Discussant
Paul Lane, Reader and Director, HEEAL project, University of York
References
Donley-Reid, Linda 1982 House Power: Swahili Space and Symbolic Markers. In Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 63-73. 1987 Life in the Swahili Town House Reveals the Symbolic Meaning of Spaces and Artefact Assemblages. African Archaeological Review 5: 181-192. 1990 A Structuring Structure: The Swahili House. In Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 114-126.
Hodder, Ian 1982a Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1982b (ed.) Symbolic and Structural Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McIntosh, Susan Keech 1999 Pathways to Complexity: An African Perspective. In Susan Keech McIntosh, ed., Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-30.
Moore, Henrietta 1986 Space, text and gender: an anthropological study of the Marakwet of Kenya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stahl, Ann 1993 Concepts of Time and Approaches to Analogical Reasoning in Historical Perspective. American Antiquity 58(2): 235-260. 2005 Introduction: Changing Perspectives on Africa’s Past, in Ann Stahl (ed.) African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1-23.