Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T16:51:17.188Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hammers and nails. A response to Lindstrøm and to Olsen and Witmore

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2016

Tim Flohr Sørensen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Two contrasting arguments on the merits of symmetrical archaeology and an associated discussion of object agency appeared in a recent issue of Archaeological dialogues (Lindstrøm 2015; Olsen and Witmore 2015). While Torill Christine Lindstrøm extends a thorough, yet hardly new, criticism of the notion of object agency and of symmetrical archaeology, Bjørnar Olsen and Christopher Witmore provide a clarification in its defence (even though their article is oddly categorized by Archaeological dialogues as a ‘provocation’). In this reaction article, I take issue with a number of arguments by Lindstrøm and by Olsen and Witmore: first of all, I challenge Lindstrøm's representation of object agency, which I believe is in need of corrections. Second, I contend that Lindstrøm fails to identify a number of fundamental contributions within the framework of symmetrical archaeology, thus allowing her to caricature symmetrical archaeology as ‘old wine in new bags’. Third, even though Olsen and Witmore's defence offers helpful clarifications, I believe that their contribution invites us to discuss the vocabulary of symmetrical archaeology, scrutinizing why there is an apparent tendency to misunderstand its arguments and merits. Lastly, I take issue with Lindstrøm's dismissal of ‘different ontologies’ as a result of political correctness.

Keywords

agencysymmetrical archaeologyontologyalterity
Type
Reaction
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , June 2016 , pp. 115 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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

Bille, M., 2013: Dealing with dead saints, in Christensen, D.R. and Willerslev, R. (eds), Taming time, timing death. Social technologies and ritual, Farnham, 137–55.Google Scholar
Bille, M., and Sørensen, T.F., 2007: An anthropology of luminosity. The agency of light, Journal of material culture 12 (3), 263–84.Google Scholar
Byrne, S., Clarke, A., Harrison, R. and Torrence, R. (eds), 2011: Unpacking the collection. Networks of material and social agency in the museum, New York.Google Scholar
Gell, A., 1998: Art and agency. An anthropological theory, Oxford.Google Scholar
Harper, S., 2010: The social agency of dead bodies, Mortality 15 (4), 308–22.Google Scholar
Heidegger, M., 1962 (1927): Being and time. New York.Google Scholar
Jessen, M.D., and Sørensen, T.F., 2015: Environment. Embodiment and senses in eleventh-to thirteenth-century churches in southern Scandinavia, in Jørgensen, H.H.L. (ed.), The saturated sensorium. Principles of perception and mediation in the Middle Ages, Aarhus, 207–25.Google Scholar
Johannsen, N.N., 2012: Archaeology and the inanimate agency proposition. A critique and a suggestion, in Johannsen, N.N., Jessen, M.D. and Jensen, H.J. (eds), Excavating the mind. Cross-sections through culture, cognition and materiality, Aarhus, 305–47.Google Scholar
Latour, B., 1993: We have never been modern, New York.Google Scholar
Latour, B., 2000: The Berlin key, or how to do words with things, in Graves-Brown, P. (ed.), Matter, materiality and modern culture, London, 10–21.Google Scholar
Latour, B., 2004: Politics of nature. How to bring the sciences into democracy, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Latour, B., 2005: Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-network theory, Oxford.Google Scholar
Lindstrøm, T.C., 2015: Agency ‘in itself’. A discussion of inanimate, animal and human agency, Archaeological dialogues 22 (2), 207–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ling, J., and Cornell, P., 2010: Rock art as secondary agent? Society and agency in Bronze Age Bohuslän, Norwegian archaeological review 43 (1), 26–43.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, 19–36.Google Scholar
Morphy, H., 2009: Art as a mode of action. Some problems with Gell's art and agency, Journal of material culture 14 (1), 5–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olsen, B., 2003: Material culture after text. Re-membering things, Norwegian archaeological review 36 (2), 87–104.Google Scholar
Olsen, B., 2010: In defense of things. Archaeology and the ontology of objects, Lanham, MD.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, CA.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
Pollard, J., 2008: Deposition and material agency in the Early Neolithic of southern Britain, in Mills, B.J. and Walker, W.H. (eds), Memory work. Archaeologies of material practices, Santa Fe, 41–59.Google Scholar
Robb, J., 2004: The extended artefact and the monumental economy. A methodology for material agency, in Demarrais, E., Gosden, C. and Renfrew, C. (eds), Rethinking materiality. The engagement of mind with the material world, Cambridge, 131–40.Google Scholar
Shanks, M., 2007: Symmetrical archaeology, World archaeology 39 (4), 589–96.Google Scholar
Solli, B., 2011: Some reflections on heritage and archaeology in the Anthropocene, Norwegian archaeological review 44 (1), 40–54.Google Scholar
Sørensen, T.F., 2009: The presence of the dead. Cemeteries, cremation and the staging of non-place, Journal of social archaeology 9 (1), 110–35.Google Scholar
Sørensen, T.F., 2013: We have never been Latourian. Archaeological ethics and the posthuman condition, Norwegian archaeological review 46 (1), 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Oyen, A., 2015: Actor-network theory's take on archaeological types. Becoming, material agency and historical explanation, Cambridge archaeological journal 25 (1), 63–78.Google Scholar
Verbeek, P.-P., 2005: What things do. Philosophical reflections on technology, agency, and design, University Park, PA.Google Scholar
Verbeek, P.-P., 2006: Materializing morality. Design ethics and technological mediation, Science technology human values 31 (3), 361–80.Google Scholar
Verbeek, P.-P., 2008: Morality in design. Design ethics and the morality of technological artifacts, in Kroes, P., Vermaas, P.E., Light, A., Moore, S.A. and Verbeek, P.-P. (eds), Philosophy and design. From engineering to architecture, Berlin, 91–103.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, E., 1998: Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3), 469–88.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, E., 2004: Exchanging perspectives. The transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies, Common knowledge 10 (3), 463–84.Google Scholar
Webmoor, T., 2007: What about ‘one more turn after the social’ in archaeological reasoning? Taking things seriously, World archaeology 39 (4), 563–78.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, 13–23.Google Scholar
Webmoor, T., and Witmore, C.L., 2008: Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a ‘social archaeology’, Norwegian archaeological review 41 (1), 53–70.Google Scholar
Willerslev, R., 2004: Not animal, not not-animal. Hunting, imitation and empathetic knowledge among the Siberian Yukaghirs, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10 (3), 629–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Willerslev, R., 2009: The optimal sacrifice. A study of voluntary death among the Siberian Chukchi, American ethnologist 36 (4), 693–704.Google Scholar
Williams, H., 2004: Death warmed up. The agency of bodies and bones in early Anglo-Saxon cremation rites, Journal of material culture 9 (3), 263–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Witmore, C.L., 2007: Symmetrical archaeology. Excerpts of a manifesto, World archaeology 39 (4), 546–62.Google Scholar
Witmore, C.L., 2014: Archaeology and the new materialisms, Journal of contemporary archaeology 1 (2), 203–24.Google Scholar