Location of Theory Subplenary Session I: Locating Theories

Subplenary Session: The Location of Theory
Session I: Locating Theory

Saturday, May 1st
2:30-6:00 pm

Session Organizers: Omur Harmansah (Brown University) and Nick Shepherd (University of Capetown)

Session Abstract: This session intends to follow up on the debate opened at the Plenary Session on “the location of theory” in the world of archaeological practice. Through the investigation of in-depth case studies and perspectives from around the world, we hope to offer new reflections on the political economy of knowledge production in archaeology in the context of rethinking coloniality and modernity. Drawing on the text of the abstract for the plenary session, we invite papers that investigate the various ways in which archaeological theories of the center have “landed”, re-interpreted, hybridized or been generated by locally situated archaeologies. What kinds of debates and theory-making have taken place in response to local priorities, interests, pressures? How do these situate themselves in relation to metropolitan theory: as resistant forms (forms of counter-theory), or as conversations with it? Studies of the involvement of archaeologists in the micro-politics of the various localities they work in can offer valuable insights into situated fieldwork practices, while attempts to see the emergent impact of located archaeologies on central disciplinary discourses are especially encouraged.

2:30: Nick Shepherd (University of Capetown) and Omur Harmansah (Brown University): Introduction: Locating Theory
2:50: Alejandro F. Haber (Universidad Nacional de Catamarca – Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Catamarca, Argentina): Un-disciplining Archaeology
3:15: Uzma Z. Rizvi (Department of Critical and Visual Studies, Social Science and Cultural Studies, SLAS, Pratt Institute): From Ganeshwar to Karbala: Ingesting the Material, Reconstituting the Analytic and Recognizing Centrifugality in Archaeological Theory
3:40: Discussion
4:00: Coffee break
4:30: Alfredo González-Ruibal (Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)): Making the Mud and Crops Speak: On the Speech of the Subaltern
4:55: Rodney Harrison (The Open University, UK): The Symmetry of Heritage: Indigenous Belief Systems, Postcolonial Critiques, and the Establishment of a Theoretically Informed Critical Heritage Studies
5:20: Sarah K. Croucher (Wesleyan University): Excavating Histories: American Exceptionalism to African Isolationism?
5:45: Discussion

1. Introduction: Locating Theory

Nick Shepherd (University of Capetown) and Omur Harmansah (Brown University)

2. Un-disciplining Archaeology

Alejandro F. Haber (Universidad Nacional de Catamarca – Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Catamarca, Argentina)

We can think of a kind of archaeological colonialism either in terms of the exportation of metropolitan theories and/or methodologies to peripheral countries and regions, or in the manner in which metropolitan academic institutions and archaeologists conduct archaeology in peripheral countries and regions. But even if we manage to stop these kinds of colonial bonds and relations, archaeology would remain an imperial weapon. Moreover, it can be said that colonialism is not dependant on the overseas provenance of archaeologies and/or theories. Beyond theoretical and methodological variability, it is archaeology itself which recapitulates colonialist relationships; and this seems to happen even when archaeology is openly and deliberately oriented towards indigenous peoples’ empowerment, social justice, and peace. It seems that theoretical and methodological paradigms and political intentions operate at a surface level, while colonialism is equipped with stronger streams operating below the floor where archaeologists stand. What is there below our feet, making us move in one direction even when we walk in the other? If it is not contained in theories, nor in methods, nor in the political intentions and nationality of the archaeologist, what is that hidden force that governs the sense of archaeology in the contemporary post-colonial world? My argument is that this hidden force, which is not actually hidden, remains unseen because it is too obvious. It exists in the disciplinary framework of archaeology itself; that is, its basic subject matter and method, beyond, or below, the theoretical and methodological paradigms and the political orientation in which we aim to proceed, or our nationality or whatever, recapitulates coloniality. Without implying that theoretical and methodological debate within archaeology is in vain, I would like to dedicate this piece to writing not within, but about the discipline. In short, my paper will include talking about disciplining, its recapitulation in post-disciplinary contexts, and the implied proposal of un-disciplining archaeology.

3. From Ganeshwar to Karbala: Ingesting the Material, Reconstituting the Analytic and Recognizing Centrifugality in Archaeological Theory

Uzma Z. Rizvi, PhD (Department of Critical and Visual Studies, Social Science and Cultural Studies, SLAS, Pratt Institute)

This paper digests notions of the archaeological artifact by reconstituting the site of examination. Shifting the center of investigatory practices to the site of the material, this paper underscores the simple notion that where one studies the object effects how one studies the object. Archaeological anthropology in the US relies heavily on establishing the importance of the ancient context for the understanding and reconstruction of meaning of the archaeological object. In more recent years, archaeologists have also made relevant the contemporary location of the artifact and its effects on understanding the material, particularly in political and heritage based contexts. This paper re-examines the study of contemporary contexts, re-focusing on the use of those materials and how/where one interrogates them in order to expand and contest traditional notions of ancient artifacts used in reconstructed pasts. This paper utilizes the copper materials from Ganeshwar, Rajasthan, and the sands of Karbala, Iraq, as two points of reference in which the materiality and meaning of the artifacts in use context, reconstitute the inert lines of theory of the object within western discourses of materiality studies.

4. Making the Mud and Crops Speak: On the Speech of the Subaltern

Alfredo González-Ruibal (Spanish National Research Council (CSIC))

In recent years, there has been much concern among archaeologists with incorporating other discourses and bringing the multiple voices of the subaltern to the fore (women, the colonized, indigenous peoples, working classes, etc). However, these well-meant attempts have not been sufficiently theorized, and the possibility of the Other’s speech rarely problematized in depth. Gayatri Spivak famously questioned the speech of the subaltern; first asserting that the s/he cannot speak and later that s/he cannot be heard. In this paper, I follow this thread and argue that the experiments on multivocality among postcolonial archaeologists are fraught with political troubles and issues of epistemic violence. Ultimately they cannot avoid ventriloquism and logocentrism, and they tend to reduce liberation to the right to narrate. To bypass those problems, I propose, following Jacques Rancière’s poetics of knowledge, to take an epistemological detour that will bring us beyond discourse and its traps into the realm of things, which is the true place of archaeology. This detour has important ethical and political consequences: I defend an extended ethics that deals not just with present others, but with the Other’s specter as well, and a political stance that puts archaeologists out of the limelight. The theoretical points will be illustrated with my research experience in Ethiopia.

5. The Symmetry of Heritage: Indigenous Belief Systems, Postcolonial Critiques, and the Establishment of a Theoretically Informed Critical Heritage Studies

Rodney Harrison (The Open University, UK)

In this paper I explore the influence of Indigenous belief systems and postcolonial critiques on both the management of heritage and the establishment of a theoretically informed critical heritage studies as an academic discipline. Since the establishment of the World Heritage Committee in 1972, UNESCO has experienced sustained criticism from third world countries and Indigenous people regarding its model of heritage which differentiates between natural and cultural realms and which focuses on the monumental. The official response to this criticism appeared in the form of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, however this could be argued to have had little influence on broader definitions of heritage through its implication that ‘intangible’ heritage is largely the preserve of small scale societies. I want to explore instead the way in which many of these critiques have generated alternate models of heritage which have subsequently informed, and continue to challenge a new field of critical heritage studies. This alternative disciplinary history demonstrates the potential for ‘theory’ to be generated outside of academic contexts and to influence the development of new academic discourses. I draw particularly on the implications of Indigenous Australian belief systems for our understanding of heritage and the challenges they raise for those discursive approaches which have come to dominate the field of critical heritage studies, pointing to their connections with current work in the social sciences which seeks to shift our focus on ‘meaning’ to the connectivities constituted by networks of both human and non-human agency.

6. Excavating Histories: American Exceptionalism to African Isolationism?

Sarah K. Croucher (Wesleyan University)

It is an exciting time to be a historical archaeologist. Suddenly, the field seems to be expanding, with new sites being excavated around the world, including those outside of the traditional centers of European settlement and colonial expansion. The investigation of the recent past through the study of material remains closely intertwined with related historical investigation is no longer simply a handmaiden to history or an expensive route to telling us ‘what we already know.’

Along with this expansion however, has come reflection, particularly as to the theoretical basis and aims of historical archaeology which have been thus far largely developed by US scholars. Africanist scholars have been vocal in this debate, with volumes such as Schmidt’s Historical Archaeology in Africa (2006), and Reid and Lane’s edited African Historical Archaeologies (2004) critiquing the wholesale import of historical archaeological theory to African contexts, including the very way in which the discipline has constructed what history is.

In this paper, I discuss the place of Africa in theoretical debates within historical archaeology. Rather than suggesting wholesale isolationism in continental theories of historical archaeology, I argue that archaeologies which deal with a period in which the world became increasingly globalized may require theory that bridges between particular regions rather than being isolated to any single area. Concomitantly, I will argue that historical archaeologists need to listen to the voices of those in non-Euro American contexts as vital to moving historical archaeological theory beyond debates which sometimes verge on exceptionalism in their narrow privileging of Western histories.