Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T19:02:14.486Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Agency (again). A response to Lindstrøm and Ribeiro

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2018

Abstract

In this reaction article I reflect on criticism raised by Torill Christine Lindstrøm and Artur Ribeiro in recent issues of this journal. I attempt to identify the source of our disagreement, and focus on three particular aspects of their previous reactions: (1) their framing of agency in Alfred Gell and symmetrical archaeology, (2) their basis for declaring symmetrical archaeology redundant and (3) their identification of the terminology of symmetrical archaeology as inflated and crammed with ‘buzzwords’ and ‘neologisms’.

Type
Reaction
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barad, K., 2007: Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham, NC.Google Scholar
Barrett, J., 2012: Agency. A revisionist account, in Hodder, I. (ed.), Archaeological theory today, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 146–66.Google Scholar
Bogost, I., 2012: Alien phenomenology, or, what it's like to be a thing, Minneapolis.Google Scholar
Bryant, L.R., 2014: Onto-cartography. An ontology of machines and media, Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Gell, A., 1998: Art and agency. An anthropological theory, Oxford.Google Scholar
Harrison, R., 2015: Beyond ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ heritage. Toward an ontological politics of heritage in the age of Anthropocene, Heritage & society 8 (1), 2442.Google Scholar
Lindstrøm, T.C., 2015: Agency ‘in itself’. A discussion of inanimate, animal and human agency, Archaeological dialogues 22 (2), 207–38.Google Scholar
Lindstrøm, T.C., 2017: Agency. A response to Sørensen and Ribeiro, Archaeological dialogues 24 (1), 109–16.Google Scholar
Malafouris, L., 2008: At the potter's wheel. An argument for material agency, in Knappett, C. and Malafouris, L. (eds), Material agency, New York, 1936.Google Scholar
Olsen, B., 2012: Symmetrical archaeology, in Hodder, I. (ed.), Archaeological theory today, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 208–28.Google Scholar
Olsen, B., Shanks, M., Webmoor, T. and Witmore, C., 2012: Archaeology. The discipline of things, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Olsen, B., and Witmore, C., 2015: Archaeology, symmetry and the ontology of things. A response to critics, Archaeological dialogues 22 (2), 187–97.Google Scholar
Ribeiro, A., 2016a: Against object agency. A counterreaction to Sørensen's ‘Hammers and nails’, Archaeological dialogues 23 (2), 229–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ribeiro, A., 2016b: Archaeology will be just fine, Archaeological dialogues 23 (2), 146–51.Google Scholar
Sørensen, T.F., 2016: Hammers and nails. A response to Lindstrøm and to Olsen and Witmore, Archaeological dialogues 23 (1), 115–27.Google Scholar
Sørensen, T.F., 2017: The two cultures and a world apart. Archaeology and science at a new crossroads, Norwegian archaeological review 50 (2), 101–15.Google Scholar
Webmoor, T., 2012: An archaeological metaphysics of care. On heritage ecologies, epistemography and the isotopy of the past(s), in Fortenberry, B.R. and McAtackney, L. (eds), Modern materials. Proceedings from the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory Conference 2009, Oxford, 1323.Google Scholar