Matthew Greer offers us a powerful, refreshing and thought-provoking critique of posthumanist approaches in archaeology as he sees them through the lens of Black Studies. He asks us to leave aside—temporarily—concerns with anthropocentrism to concentrate instead on the human side of the equation, while nonetheless positioning himself in line with posthumanist efforts to dismantle the human–non-human divide. The crux of Greer's arguments is that posthumanist approaches do not go far enough in distancing themselves from humanism for two reasons. First, humanity remains (tacitly) equated with white, heterosexual, economically well-off men, a single group that forms the scale against which all other people are measured. Second, posthumanist approaches do not acknowledge that racism and related forms of oppression were integral to the emergence of humanism and not a by-product of it.
A central feature of humanism, according to Greer, is that it is grounded in exclusion of those who are defined as not fully human. In an argument reminiscent of Edward Said's definition of Orientalism, Greer contends that this exclusion, this creation of non-human people, is part and parcel of defining who is human; humanism is ‘an intellectual project devoted to colonialism, slavery and racial capitalism’. The solution he proposes is to embrace ‘counter-humanism’, a critical approach developed in Black Studies.
In order to highlight the problems he identifies in both humanist and posthumanist approaches to the human, Greer adopts a terminology in which ‘human’ refers to a culturally constructed, ontological category consisting of those who are considered human in specific cultural-historical contexts, whereas Homo sapiens designates people in general. The distinction is a crucial one for his argument. The vocabulary is, however, a problem. Homo sapiens is fundamentally a biological label, and its use risks leading down the slippery slope of biologism. We may be ‘biological creatures living in material worlds’, but biology has also been used to racialize, discriminate and oppress. And from an archaeological viewpoint, does this mean that other (sub)species of Homo are categorically excluded?
A related point is Greer's contention that counter-humanism incorporates alternative understandings of humanity in which all ways of being human are considered valid. Although this may hold the promise of moving us away from a monolithic and ultimately oppressive categorization, it still begs the question of what it is that constitutes ‘being human’. Is it indeed a ‘purely’ biological category? The issue of categorization more generally would merit some further consideration here. I was also surprised to find no mention of Kimberlé Crenshaw's work on intersectionality. While it does not resolve problems of categorization, it does place a focus on relations among categories, in particular those that produce oppression and discrimination, and relationality is central to much of Greer's discussion.
Greer shows us that Black Studies offers a powerful critique that warrants serious attention and engagement. But it is not the only possible entry point to these issues. Other work originating from critical, non-Western-centric traditions would offer possibilities to further enrich—and perhaps also to challenge—Greer's Black Studies-based approach. I think here especially of the writings of Indigenous scholars such as Zoe Todd (Reference Todd2016) or Max Liboiron (Reference Liboiron2021). Feminist literature is replete with the differing concerns of feminists from non-Western traditions, such as scholars from western Asia and north Africa (e.g. Mir-Hosseini Reference Mir-Hosseini1999; Moghissi Reference Moghissi and Hoffman2019).
In a number of places in the text, I found myself wishing that Greer would address directly the question of who is meant by the referent ‘we’ (see Davis et al. Reference Davis, Moulton, Van Sant and Williams2019). In the hands of some actors and discourses, ‘we’ turns into a power play, a means of appropriation of an Other under the semantic pretence of acting inclusively. The appropriation of ‘we’ is a counterpoint to the notion of moral community as discussed by David Morris (Reference Morris1996) or Judith Butler's (Reference Butler2010) concept of whose life is (not) grievable. Moral communities, too, depend on exclusion: ‘We do not acknowledge the destruction of beings outside our moral community as suffering’ (Morris Reference Morris1996, 40).
In the end, Greer makes a potent argument for a focus on humans, one that may not sit well with all posthumanists. That position is in some respects not so far from that of Díaz de Liaño and Fernandez-Götz (Reference Díaz de Liaño and Fernandez-Götz2021), who contend that the problem is not that archaeology has traditionally been too anthropocentric but that it has not devoted enough attention to humans. Greer insists that we add a crucial element—it is not only a question of a focus on humans, but rather on who is and what it means to be considered human.
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