Worlds of Immateriality
Sunday, May 2nd
2:00-5:30 pm
Session Organizers: Dianne Scullin (Department of Anthropology, Columbia University) & Brian Boyd (Department of Anthropology, Columbia University)
Session Abstract: Archaeological investigation routinely begins with material, the material world that past peoples created and dwelled with and within: stones, bones, pots, architectures, and so on. But what of immateriality? A large portion of social life consists of the immaterial: magic, sound, speech, music, dance, noise, gesture, prayer, medicine, sex, sport. Many of these practices do not leave visible tactile remains in the ground. A growing philosophical literature on the immaterial, the intangible, the unknowable, the invisible, the absent, now demands that archaeology engages with these aspects of human life. This session will focus on the relationship of the immaterial to the material, asking ‘does absence have a presence’? Papers will be drawn from archaeology and related humanities.
2:00: Dianne Scullin and Brian Boyd (Columbia University): Introductory remarks
2:10: Dianne Scullin (Columbia University): The (Im)Materiality of Music: How Network Theory Conjures Objects Out of Thin Air
2:25: Richard Sullivan (Southampton University): Landscape and Materiality and Maritime Archaeology
2:40: Dianna L. Doucette (The Public Archaeology Laboratory): A Perception of Time: Expanding the Archaeological Record
2:55: Terence N. D’Altroy (Columbia University): The Necessity of Immateriality
3:10: Jolene Debert (University of Manchester): When Artefacts Can't Speak: Towards a New Understanding of British Early Neolithic Timber Structures
3:30: Coffee break
4:00: Manjree Khajanchi (Bradford University): “That’s Not Mine”: A Working Theory on the Absence of Tangible Objects
4:15: Darryl Wilkinson (Columbia University): Unencompassable Worlds
4:30: Brian Boyd (Columbia University): The Materiality of Sound
4:45: Andre Gonciar (S.U.N.Y. Buffalo): The Materiality of Emotion: Re-Conceptualizing the Archaeological Subject. A Theoretical Perspective
5:00: Discussion
Abstracts and Participants:
1. The (Im)Materiality of Music: How Network Theory Conjures Objects Out of Thin Air
Dianne Scullin (Columbia University)
The conception of the world as an interconnected series of networks of relationships links the physical existence of any object with that object’s ability to enter into relations and make connections with other things and material objects. If it does not, it would not exist in the world. From this point of view, the category of ‘immaterial’ remains ineffectual, for nothing can exist and not enter into a material relationship of some kind. This paper advocates discarding the category ‘immaterial’ as incorrect and obsolete. Instead, it will reorient the concept of immateriality towards its intimate connection with types of temporality. The immaterial are simply objects or things that exist for a short period of time, as opposed to the more durable long-term temporal nature of the material. By utilizing the example of music, presently firmly assigned to the category of the “immaterial”, this paper will situate an immaterial thing firmly within its network of material relations that comprise and define its existence in the world. By exploring the mutually constitutive relationships between durable objects and ephemeral ones, this paper will demonstrate both the inherent temporal nature of objects and the necessary material relationships enacted by ‘immaterial’ things.
2. Landscape and Materiality and Maritime Archaeology
Richard Sullivan (Southampton University)
As archaeologists we struggle to identify the subjective and intangible significance of materials and location. "Why here", "why this", we ask attempting to place ourselves somewhere else as someone else. In maritime archaeology these concepts of materiality and landscape assume a highly intertwined and evolved meaning. The ship becomes both a landscape in transit and an object imbued with deep cultural significance. It exists connecting lands and cultures while simultaneously serving as symbol, tool, and place. The weft of the landscape may span vast distances, while the resolution of the site brings our focus to a single moment. It is the materials of the site that call our attention to the landscape, but a landscape, maritime or otherwise, is not solely composed of mass and texture. The materiality of the objects, arrangement of the landscape, rituals and traditions of the culture, all need to be explored. By doing so we create a framework for which the empirical observations of place and matter can be arranged. These significances are personal and subjective, and the ability to step beyond the perspective of the archaeologist and adopt that of the mariner is vital to this understanding. The items of a shipwreck were not carefully chosen to be discarded, nor the location carefully selected by those who built the vessel. Yet the isolated remains reveal an instant, merging people and land across time and shores. It is the objects that are measured, their positions marked, but it is the people who are being studied.
3. A Perception of Time: Expanding the Archaeological Record
Dianna L. Doucette (The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc., Pawtucket, RI)
In interpreting the pre-contact archaeological record in the Northeast, it is important to keep in mind just what that record represents. For the most part, preservation is limited to stone artifacts, pottery, bits of calcined bone, and charred plant remains. What is missing from the archaeological record on one level are textile materials, artifacts of wood or bark, bone implements, and unburned food remains. At another level, we are also missing the sights, sounds, actions, and interactions of the people(s) whose presence created the archaeological evidence. This paper explores how accurately material culture mirrors the cultural processes and events of the past, and what happens when we attempt to project the present onto the past to fill in the gaps. Archaeological practice compresses variation in time and circumstance into a single period (a component) at a particular location (a site). But what of the cultural landscape and the inherited memory of the people creating that landscape? If archaeologists limit themselves to a view of the past based only on what they can touch, see, and count, then it will be a past dominated by functional interpretation; there will be no discussion of music, dance, or the ceremonies associated with birth, initiation into adult status, marriage, healing, alliance formation, and seasonal rhythms. Although it may not be possible to answer fine-grained questions unambiguously with the data, this paper explores how researchers should not be deterred from envisioning and voicing the questions.
4. The Necessity of Immateriality
Terence N. D’Altroy (Columbia University)
An essential element of the Inka worldview – and thus, by extension, statecraft – was a division of dimensions of knowing and acting in the world into those that were given material representation and those that were not. There are, for example, no known images of Inka rulers from the prehispanic era (save some now-lost paintings kept in Cuzco’s main temple), nor propaganda-laden statuary or reliefs, nor monuments celebrating individual rulers. Materially, power was expressed mostly through infrastructure and practice, and abstract symbols in portable objects. The scarcity of human presence in Inka material culture contrasts starkly with the use of language, in narratives that unabashedly attributed the realm’s genesis and nature to the heroic and ingenious acts of individual rulers. In this paper, I argue that material expression provided a broadly understood order to the world, within which immaterial expression could be flexibly modified to suit the dynamics of power and relations between the past and present.
5. When Artefacts Can't Speak: Towards a New Understanding of British Early Neolithic Timber Structures
Jolene Debert (University of Manchester)
This paper will focus on the rectangular timber framed structures of the early Neolithic from Britain. Recent discoveries through both research and developer funded projects have significantly increased the number and variety of these buildings now known, but they remain the subject of heated and contentious debate. The major reason for this mass disagreement lies in the material culture, or the general lack of finds, associated with these structures. As very few artefacts have been recovered, those seeking the function and meaning of the structures have proposed multiple interpretations. These contradictory hypotheses based on the minimal artefact collections have locked studies of these structures and this pivotal period in a loop or circular arguments. I would suggest that not only is the question 'What was the function of these structures?' flawed but our concentration on what artefacts have been recovered blinds us from the more interesting immaterial. This paper examines these structures not in terms of receptacles for materials, but as a stage for performance. A discussion of these actions cannot only break this theoretical deadlock but also present an alternative understanding of the British early Neolithic, where the actor is placed back on their stage.
6. “That’s Not Mine”: A Working Theory on the Absence of Tangible Objects
Manjree Khajanchi (Bradford University)
The study of archaeology has been erected on the idea that material objects uncovered are of value to the person or people who made and used it, thereby providing useful information on the material culture of a society. But what happens if the material world discovered is not valued by the people who use them? This paper develops on results of ethnographic research conducted in Surat, India on the lack of possessiveness and non-attachment male and female Jain ascetics ascribe to their religious items. These Jain ascetics have formed a minimal functional relationship with their things, which does not include feelings of ‘ownership’ towards these objects. I pursue an argument that this kind of relationship between people and materials is also present in our society today and is not a unique feature to Jainism. Rather, in mass-consumerist cultures, many instances occur when specific materials are not considered to be possessions with individual meaning. Whether objects are use-and-throw (toilet paper), purely functional (toothpicks), or representative of a label (books, cutlery, and doorknobs), all these examples bid archaeologists to question whether all tangible objects necessarily have a presence?
7. Unencompassable Worlds
Darryl Wilkinson (Columbia University)
Using the Nazca geoglyphs as a starting point, this paper considers how sacred worlds might be manifested in forms that are quite deliberately unencompassable. Rather than puzzling over the ‘anomalous’ fact that the lines at Nazca could not have been seen in their entirety from the ground, I suggest that this may in fact have been exactly the point. Taking the lines as a material mediator between humans and some ‘sacred domain’ forces us to contend with a manifestation of the sacred that was not intended to be appreciated within the human sensorium, except in a very limited, piecemeal fashion. Unlike sacred objects which take the form of an ‘absent presence’ or are made to be hidden, the Nazca geoglyphs are neither invisible nor concealed, and yet still could never have been seen in their whole form by their creators. This suggests that we might need to expand our discussions of such phenomena to move beyond the somewhat restrictive binary between the material and the immaterial.
8. The Materiality of Sound
Brian Boyd (Columbia University)
Ways of deliberately producing sound obviously involve engagement of the human body with the material world: musical instruments, the spaces, ambiences, technologies and architectures of producing and recording sound. The preservation of sound, it seems, was once so tangible: plastic/vinyl (78s, 45s, EPs, 33 and a thirds), cassette tapes, 8-track tapes, CDs. Most of these forms of sound capture are possibly receding into archaeological time, although a concern for them remains in (largely male) specialist communities. Digital sound forms - mp3/4, WAV, AIFF - while preservable are, it could be argued, immaterial, and there are many legal issues being brought forth on this. With an archaeological eye, this paper considers the recent media focus over the rumored sale of the Abbey Road studios in London - an architectural/technological space of prime cultural heritage - and asks: how is the memory of sound preserved?
9. The Materiality of Emotion: Re-Conceptualizing the Archaeological Subject. A Theoretical Perspective
Andre Gonciar (S.U.N.Y. Buffalo)
The study of the archaeological record is based on pattern identification (contextualization) and recognition (actualization). The degree of similarities between contexts is the result of repetition and reproduction of practice through space and time. Nevertheless, potentially stable contexts, resulting from a highly regulated socio-cultural behavior, can display certain forms of deviation that escape contextual rationalization. It could be theorize that in specific environments, deviant behavior is the result of an emotional event that overrides rational constructs. Emotion in this context could be approached through the impact it has on the archaeological record in an attempt to understand the motivation of the gesture that modifies an established behavioral pattern. Conceptualizing emotion as an artifact would allow it to be approached from an archaeological perspective. For this purpose, the archaeologist’s own experience - as accumulation of both scientific knowledge and experiential understanding - and empathy become valid and essential tools in the reflexive engagement of archaeological environments. Once a potentially charged environment has been identified, a methodology can be devised to isolate the emotional elements in the taphonomic process and, as a result, socio-cultural structures are made visible through deviant behavior patterns.