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The Interplay of Evidential Constraints and Political Interests: Recent Archaeological Research on Gender
Abstract
In the last few years, conference programs and publications have begun to appear that reflect a growing interest, among North American archaeologists, in research initiatives that focus on women and gender as subjects of investigation. One of the central questions raised by these developments has to do with their "objectivity" and that of archaeology as a whole. To the extent that they are inspired by or aligned with explicitly political (feminist) commitments, the question arises of whether they do not themselves represent an inherently partial and interest-specific standpoint, and whether their acceptance does not undermine the commitment to value neutrality and empirical rigor associated with scientific approaches to archaeology. I will argue that, in fact, a feminist perspective, among other critical, explicitly political perspectives, may well enhance the conceptual integrity and empirical adequacy of archaeological knowledge claims, where this is centrally a matter of deploying evidential constraints.
... Empirical research was often based on sexist presuppositions and it largely ignored microscale practices (such as those concerning households), leading to incorrect conclusions about humanity's past. Conkey and Spector, 1984 raised this problem to the attention of the wider archaeological community, which required an effort of this community as a whole to be adequately resolved (see also Conkey, 2003;Wylie, 2002). When other archaeologists learned about these issues-for example by reading Conkey and Spector's work-did they have any moral or epistemic duties to act towards resolving the given problem, and if so, which duties exactly? 1 Abandoned-research. ...
... While both cases also concern moral harms, each crucially involves epistemic harms as well (for a discussion on why Biased is a matter of epistemic concerns, such as empirical adequacy, see the work of Alison Wylie, e.g.Wylie, 1992Wylie, , 2002. ...
... While both cases also concern moral harms, each crucially involves epistemic harms as well (for a discussion on why Biased is a matter of epistemic concerns, such as empirical adequacy, see the work of Alison Wylie, e.g.Wylie, 1992Wylie, , 2002. ...
Discussion of epistemic responsibility typically focuses on belief formation and actions leading to it. Similarly, accounts of collective epistemic responsibility have addressed the issue of collective belief formation and associated actions. However, there has been little discussion of collective responsibility for preventing epistemic harms, particularly those preventable only by the collective action of an unorganized group. We propose an account of collective epistemic responsibility which fills this gap. Building on Hindriks’ (2019) account of collective moral responsibility, we introduce the Epistemic Duty to Join Forces. Our theory provides an account of the responsibilities of scientists to prevent epistemic harms during inquiry.
... Data from our survey of AJA authors (274 responses from authors published in the journal between 2000 3 American Journal of Archaeology 2021. 4 For feminist philosophical discussions of how a thinker's standpoint affects their thought, see, e.g., Hartsock 1983;Haraway 1988;Harding 1991;Collins 1996. For archaeological theory on this subject, see, e.g., Conkey and Spector 1984;Gero 1985;Hodder 1985;Wylie 1992;2012. 5 Harding 19922016. ...
... Data from our survey of AJA authors (274 responses from authors published in the journal between 2000 3 American Journal of Archaeology 2021. 4 For feminist philosophical discussions of how a thinker's standpoint affects their thought, see, e.g., Hartsock 1983;Haraway 1988;Harding 1991;Collins 1996. For archaeological theory on this subject, see, e.g., Conkey and Spector 1984;Gero 1985;Hodder 1985;Wylie 1992;2012. 5 Harding 19922016. 6 Scholars working in North American and historical archaeologies and critiquing racism and colonialism include Franklin 1997a;1997b;2001;Agbe-Davies 1998;Two Bears 2006;Battle-Baptiste 2007;Atalay 2010;Watkins 2010;Franklin et al. 2020;Ike et al. 2020;Flewellen et al. 2021. ...
This article presents the results of a demographic survey of authors who published in the American Journal of Archaeology between 2000 and 2020. We sought to better understand the demographics of knowledge production in one of the major English-language journals for Mediterranean archaeology, and, by extension, in the field in general. The survey, delivered by email in the spring of 2021, asked authors about their gender, race or ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, the educational attainment of up to two of their parents, their current academic position and rank, and the number of times they have published in the AJA. Our results indicate that people of color and the children of parents without advanced degrees are greatly underrepresented among AJA authors over the past two decades when compared to the U.S. population as a whole-a phenomenon that likely confirms many scholars' perceptions of the field but has not yet been empirically demonstrated. We conclude with some reflections on possible causes of underrepresen-tation and suggestions for creating a more inclusive discipline and publication process. 1
... show a tendency to conflate 'gender' with 'women' (Conkey & Spector 1984;Wylie 1992;Knapp 1998;Gilchrist 1999;Sorensen 2000). This builds an exclusionary approach that further perpetuates and reproduces binary divisions, pushing 'transgender archaeology' (Weismantel 2013) further into the shadows. ...
... This feminist focus reflects the social attitudes at the time of publication. Initial wariness towards feminist theory, typically perceived as a radically disruptive 'intellectual 'fad' (Wylie 1992:59), is reflected through the lack of literature demonstrating feminist approaches to archaeological methods, with some arguing that women were considered by chance rather than design (Wylie 1991;. These earlier works do, however, provide a valuable insight into the origins of the gender binary within archaeology, with Gilchrist (1997;1999) in particular highlighting the naturalization of bimodal sex characteristics through the conflation of physiognomy, ethnicity, religion and sexuality, as well as noting that gender dichotomies date back to the Enlightenment period with the abandonment of Galen's Humoral Theory. ...
The archaeological imposition of Western conceptions of gender as a binary system consistently dismisses the potential existence of transgender and nonbinary identities in the past. This thesis examines the construction of this binary system and its naturalisation through medical, psychiatric, and archaeological frameworks, as well as the criminalisation of transgender identities throughout history. The conflation of vitally distinct terms, including sex, gender, and women, is analysed alongside the influence of feminist gender archaeology in limiting publications discussing transgender identities directly.
Building on archaeological case studies researching the presence of nonheteronormative identities in Native North America and Eastern Europe, and ethnographic examples of gender fluidity in the Pacific Islands and Indonesia, this thesis aims to demonstrate the need for consideration of gender as a spectrum in archaeological analysis. The maintenance of heteronormativity in archaeology is also considered, further highlighting the impact of this on public attitudes towards LGBTQ+ communities, and on the wellbeing of transgender and nonbinary identities.
Reluctance to consider spectrum-based systems of gender identity and the continuous erasure of LGBTQ+ burials are analysed as the legacy of institutionalised transphobia. The limited examples of ungendered approaches towards mortuary interpretations are discussed as evidence of the potential benefits for the deconstruction of the gender binary in archaeological frameworks.
Finally, this thesis suggests future research to demonstrate levels of understanding towards transgender and nonbinary identities in professional archaeology, in order to develop archaeological frameworks that accommodate for nonheteronormativity in the past and advocate for queer lives in the present.
... The feminist critique of science has come to dominate North American feminist archaeology and can be seen to constitute the orthodox approach. Work typically draws on feminist philosophers of science such as Helen Longino and Sandra Harding (Wylie 1992(Wylie , 2007. This orthodoxy co-exists with a lesser post-structuralist feminist production inspired largely by the work of feminist philosopher Judith Butler (e.g., Joyce 2008), which is concerned with questions of discourse and the performance of gender. ...
... Although, feminism is more concerned with equity issues, leading to some adversarial exchanges on the grounds that post-processualism simply reproduces androcentric and heterosexist structures in the discipline (Tomášková 2011: 113-115). Conkey and Spector (1984: 21) argued that the greatest limitations on our knowledge of the past are epistemological rather than lack of data (see also Wylie 1992) ...
... The driving goals here are not only negative denigration but positive identification and promotion of better science, in which better is understood not just hypothetically but in reference to actual exemplars from scientific practice: for example, on gendered practices in archeology (cf. Conkey and Gero 1997;Gero 1991;Wylie 1992;Wylie 1993;Wylie 2002). ...
... Post-positivist feminist philosophy of science is generally characterized by a methodological commitment to engage with science in practice and in piecemeal, not just abstractly or broadly. Exemplars like Lloyd's (1993;2005) work on androcentric bias in evolutionary explanations of female sexuality and Wylie's (1992;2002) work on gender bias in archeology derive their force from skilled interactional expertise (Collins 2004;Plaisance and Kennedy 2014). The guiding questions of feminist philosophy of science "cannot be pursued from philosophical armchairs" (Nelson and Wylie 1998, 21). ...
Bruno Latour is not the only scholar to reflect on his earlier contributions to science studies with some regret and resolve over climate skepticism and science denialism. Given the ascendency of merchants of doubt, should those who share Latour’s concerns join the scientists they study in circling the wagons, or is there a productive role still for science studies to question and critique scientists and scientific institutions? I argue for the latter, looking to postpositivist feminist philosophy as exemplified by Alison Wylie and Lynn Nelson, among others, as a guide. Feminist philosophers of science who ground their analysis in a detailed understanding of scientific practice are not science’s champions nor its antagonists, but they do stand in a distinct relationship to science. If not merchants of doubt, are they scientific gadflies or perhaps in scientific loyal opposition? Though these notions can underwrite useful approaches to science studies, neither captures the distinctive interdependency and interestedness of feminist philosophers and science. I suggest that we would be better served by the notion of trustworthy science criticism, building on the analyses of trust and trustworthiness by Annette Baier, among others, attendant to the dynamics of interdependency in trust relationships.
... This does not apply only to archaeometry, so-called ''scientific'' archaeology or processual archaeology, even social archaeologies which are politically committed to social justice in the present (in theory lying at the opposite extreme from positivism) have defended the need for an epistemological perspective to safeguard certain levels of legitimacy and authority for archaeological discourses regarding the past. Only in this way can exclusion or inequality in the past and the present be visibilised and confronted through the academy (see, for example, Wylie 1992Wylie , 2002Vargas and Sanoja 1990;McGuire 2008;González Ruibal 2012;González-Ruibal et al. 2018;Fuenzalida 2017;Prieto et al. 2019; among many others). ...
... In various publications since the mid-1980s (Wylie 1992(Wylie , 2002(Wylie , 2011(Wylie , 2015Chapman and Wylie 2016;etc.), archaeologist and philosopher Alison Wylie has given shape to an epistemological proposal that is at once post-positivist, critical and non-relativist, on the basis of which certain criteria can be defined for justifying claims about the past. ...
The object of the present article is to study the relations between the forms of knowledge production in archaeology and the existing systems of publication in academic journals. We explore the predominant criteria in peer-review processes and the relative importance of their epistemological dimension. The results are discussed in terms of the social, political and institutional implications of contemporary academic archaeology, suggesting a need to strengthen epistemological criteria in the peer-review processes, thus improving the justification of the assertions that archaeology makes about the past. This is important for archaeology as a discipline that claims to generate a contribution to present-day society, but it requires changes in institutional policies at local and regional levels in order to be effective.
... Circumstances changed slowly over time, and archaeologists began to pay considerable attention to research on gender in the human past. A plethora of topics emerged that took gender as their central point, and Western archaeological research changed drastically (Moss 1993;Wylie 1992;Dent 1991;Joyce 1993;Solomon 1992;Gifford-Gonzales 1993;Tringham 1994;McGuire & Hildebrandt 1994;Sassaman 1992). "Exploring Gender through Archaeology" was a collection of papers from the 1991 Boon conference, edited by Cheryl Classen, that illustrates how the meeting on the topic of Gender and Archaeology anywhere in the world was widely appreciated (Classen, 1992). ...
After the infusion of “New Archaeology”, the study of the past has witnessed several considerable alterations that emerged by analysing the remnants of the ancient world through multiple perspectives. This diathesis made revulsion in World Archaeology, and the way toward a more nuanced interpretation of the past laid the mainspring for Gender Archaeology. Ever since, archaeologists from all over the world started making great efforts to refuse androcentrism which prevailed in portraying humanity’s deep past. There is a rich and varied body of work for uncovering the women’s role in that era, where the contribution of men was only taken into account in mainstream research. Hence, in this review, we make an effort to integrate and elucidate much of the existing work which made it possible to recognise and magnifies the true role of women alongside men in prehistoric time.
... De hecho, en décadas posteriores, el tratamiento de estos y otros temas epistemológicos fundamentales fue dejado, mayormente, en manos de filósofos de la ciencia con un interés, ya sea transitorio o permanente, en la construcción del conocimiento arqueológico (v.g. Patrik, 1985;Salmon, 1975Salmon, , 1982Salmon, , 1993Salmon, , 1997Wylie, 1992aWylie, , 1992bWylie, , 2002. Al menos parte de esta claudicación puede considerarse relacionada con el creciente auge que cobraron, a partir de inicios de los años 1980s, aproximaciones relativistas basadas en el constructivismo social, el interpretativismo y la primacía del significado. ...
El objetivo de este trabajo es abordar una revisión conceptual del término 'evidencia arqueológica', de sus variantes y sus diferentes significados. En años recientes se ha verificado un aumento en el interés por el problema de la evidencia y del razonamiento basado en evidencia, tanto en la ciencia en general como en la arqueología en particular, en este último caso incluso entre herederos de diferentes tradiciones de pensamiento. Por ello, es posible considerar al problema de la evidencia como uno de los temas perennes de la arqueología, con profundas implicancias en diferentes dimensiones de su teoría y de su práctica. Para llevar a cabo la revisión conceptual mencionada, en esta contribución nos centraremos en: a) la especificación del significado del término 'evidencia arqueológica', b) el análisis de la relación entre evidencia e inferencia y c) la distinción entre los dos grandes tipos de evidencia en los que se basan nuestras inferencias, a saber la evidencia positiva y la evidencia negativa.
The aim of this paper is to address a conceptual review of the term 'archaeological evidence', its variants and their different meanings. In recent years there has been an increase in interest in the problem of evidence and evidence-based reasoning, both in science in general and in archeology in particular, in the latter case even among heirs of different traditions of thought. For this reason, it is possible to consider the problem of evidence as one of the perennial themes of archaeology, with profound implications in different dimensions of its theory and practice. To carry out the aforementioned conceptual review, in this contribution we will focus on: a) the specification of the meaning of the term 'archaeological evidence', b) the analysis of the relationship between evidence and inference and c) the distinction between the two great types of evidence on which our inferences are based, namely positive and negative.
... con el postprocesualismo, ya que se argumenta la importancia del contexto, el uso político del lenguaje, y la subjetividad de las interpretaciones (Wylie, 1992). ...
... Whether or not the politics of research are made explicit, archaeology is political (Silberman, 1995;Tilley, 1989;Wylie, 1992). The influence of politics on research can occur in different ways and to varying degrees. ...
This article calls for the use of multiple histories to reconstruct the past. More specifically, it argues that Indigenous histories should figure prominently in archaeological discourse. Although the word ‘decolonization’ and its derivatives are never used in the article, it argues for what would today be recognized as a decolonizing approach: foregrounding Indigenous voices, conducting research with benefits for Indigenous communities, changing language that legitimizes Eurocentric views, and ‘braiding’ different ways of knowing about the past. Drawing on ethnohistoric sources, Maya oral histories, archaeological reports, and national histories told by Ladino authorities, this paper examines several historical themes in relation to the Maya site of Iximche’: its origins, conflict and ethnic relations, politics, religion, and identity. This case study shows that combining multiple historical perspectives has the potential to highlight the dynamic, changing, and sometimes contradictory histories of Iximche’s people, and to assert the relevance of Iximche’ and the Maya to Guatemala’s past, present, and future. More generally, bringing together ‘multiple histories’ is a way for archaeologists to build respectful partnerships with Indigenous peoples and act as allies in revitalizing Indigenous identities and cultures.
... La teoría también guía lo que es apropiado o aceptable para el estudio (el tema). La posición de les investigadores, ya sea individual y/o comunitario, y su marco teórico tienen un impacto directo en las preguntas formuladas, en a quién o qué se investiga, en el poder compartido, en el (des) establecimiento de jerarquías y más (e.g., Tuhiwai Smith 2012;Wylie 1992Wylie , 2000. Los puntos de vista epistemológicos y ontológicos de les investigadores influyen directamente en cómo entienden e interpretan sus mundos. ...
El año 2020 fue un despertar para algunes. Para otres, reiteró la persistente injusticia social en los Estados Unidos. Impulsades por estos eventos, 30 personas diversas se reunieron entre enero y mayo de 2021 para un seminario de un semestre de duración que exploraba la inequidad en la práctica arqueológica. Los debates del seminario destacaron la inequidad y las injusticias sociales que están profundamente arraigadas en la disciplina. Sin embargo, la inequidad en la arqueología a menudo se ignora o se trata de manera limitada como problemas discretos, aunque poco vinculados. Un enfoque amplio de la inequidad en la arqueología reveló que la injusticia es interseccional, con efectos compuestos. A través de los temas generales de individue, comunidad, teoría y práctica, nosotres (un subconjunto de les participantes del seminario) exploramos la inequidad y su papel en varias facetas de la arqueología, incluidas las relaciones norte-sur, publicación, distribución de recursos, diferencias de clase, accesibilidad, inclusión teorías, servicio a comunidades no arqueológicas, trabajo de campo, tutorías, y más. Nos enfocamos en la creación de una hoja de ruta para comprender la interseccionalidad de los problemas de inequidad y sugerir vías para la educación continua y la participación directa. Argumentamos que la construcción de comunidad-al proporcionar apoyo mutuo y construir alianzas-ofrece un camino para lograr una mayor equidad en nuestra disciplina. Palabras clave: equidad, interseccionalidad, diferencias de clase, racismo, género, relaciones norte-sur, arqueología comunitaria, sexualidad, discapacidad, tutoría The year 2020 was an awakening for some. For others, it reiterated the persistent social injustice in the United States. Compelled by these events, 30 diverse individuals came together from January to May 2021 for a semester-long seminar exploring inequity in archaeological practice. The seminar's discussions spotlighted the inequity and social injustices that are deeply embedded within the discipline. However, inequity in archaeology is often ignored or treated narrowly as discrete, if loosely bound, problems. A broad approach to inequity in archaeology revealed injustice to be intersectional, with compounding effects. Through the overarching themes of individual, community, theory, and practice, we (a subset of the seminar's participants) explore inequity and its role in various facets of archaeology, including North-South relations, publication, resource distribution, class differences, accessibility, inclusive theories, service to nonarchaeological communities, fieldwork, mentorship, and more.We focus on creating a roadmap for understanding the intersectionality of issues of inequity and suggesting avenues for continued education and direct engagement. We argue that community-building-by providing mutual support and building alliances-provides a pathway for realizing greater equity in our discipline.
... Whether or not the politics of research are made explicit, archaeology is political (Silberman 1995, Tilley 1989, Wylie 1992. The influence of politics on research can occur in different ways and to varying degrees. ...
... Theory also guides what is appropriate or acceptable for study (the subject). The researcher's (or researchers') positionality, whether individualand/or community-based, and their theoretical framework have a direct impact on the questions asked, who or what is researched, power sharing, the (dis)establishment of hierarchies, and more (e.g., Tuhiwai Smith 2012;Wylie 1992Wylie , 2000. Researchers' epistemological and ontological standpoints directly influence how they understand and interpret their worlds. ...
The year 2020 was an awakening for some. For others, it reiterated the persistent social injustice in the United States. Compelled by these events, 30 diverse individuals came together from January to May 2021 for a semester-long seminar exploring inequity in archaeological practice. The seminar's discussions spotlighted the inequity and social injustices that are deeply embedded within the discipline. However, inequity in archaeology is often ignored or treated narrowly as discrete, if loosely bound, problems. A broad approach to inequity in archaeology revealed injustice to be intersectional, with compounding effects. Through the overarching themes of individual, community, theory, and practice, we (a subset of the seminar's participants) explore inequity and its role in various facets of archaeology, including North–South relations, publication, resource distribution, class differences, accessibility, inclusive theories, service to nonarchaeological communities, fieldwork, mentorship, and more. We focus on creating a roadmap for understanding the intersectionality of issues of inequity and suggesting avenues for continued education and direct engagement. We argue that community-building—by providing mutual support and building alliances—provides a pathway for realizing greater equity in our discipline.
... Múltiples ejemplos existen en esta dimensión y provienen de las más variadas ciencias, desde la arqueología a la neurología, pasando por la ginecología. Los trabajos de Wylie (1992) y Conkey y Spector (1984), demostraron el modo en que la arqueología ha tendido a ignorar a las mujeres como sujetos históricos, situándolas inexorablemente en el ámbito reproductivo y doméstico contra toda evidencia arqueológica, interpretando el pasado a partir de estereotipos cuyo principal objetivo es el de naturalizar las relaciones desiguales entre los sexos. Del mismo modo, en el ámbito de la neurología se ha llegado a hablar de "neurosexismo" en la medida en que el androcentrismo sigue mostrando su fuerza contemporánea en la compleja discusión relativa a la conformación de la mente humana. ...
... Múltiples ejemplos existen en esta dimensión y provienen de las más variadas ciencias, desde la arqueología a la neurología, pasando por la ginecología. Los trabajos de Wylie (1992) y Conkey y Spector (1984), demostraron el modo en que la arqueología ha tendido a ignorar a las mujeres como sujetos históricos, situándolas inexorablemente en el ámbito reproductivo y doméstico contra toda evidencia arqueológica, interpretando el pasado a partir de estereotipos cuyo principal objetivo es el de naturalizar las relaciones desiguales entre los sexos. Del mismo modo, en el ámbito de la neurología se ha llegado a hablar de "neurosexismo" en la medida en que el androcentrismo sigue mostrando su fuerza contemporánea en la compleja discusión relativa a la conformación de la mente humana. ...
En tiempos actuales, donde la salud y las políticas sanitarias son objeto de discusión diaria a nivel mediático y personal, en planos nacionales como internacionales, el repensar o remirar el rol que tiene la salud pública resulta crucial. La pandemia por COVID-19 ha dado pie para cuestionarnos sobre el diseñoo y adecuación de ciertas políticas públicas; hoy m.s que nunca los sistemas de salud y la política sanitaria han debido responder a la inmediatez del curso de la pandemia con facilidad de adaptación y versatilidad para hacer frente a este fenómeno que pocos creemos poder vivir. Es en este contexto donde el presente libro y las valiosas contribuciones de sus autores resultan más valorables, por cuanto problematizan el rol de la salud pública frente a una diversidad de temas actuales que invitan a la reflexión y discusión. El documento se encuentra organizado en cuatro secciones. La primera de ellas se orienta a la discusión sobre el quehacer de la salud pública y alberga los primeros tres capítulos del libro.
... A força que esse imaginário moderno/colonial exerce na arqueologia mora nas origens colonialistas da disciplina inicialmente denunciadas por Trigger (2004). A gênese da disciplina como prática colonial gerou uma tradição que tem influência não apenas sobre a forma como contextos arqueológicos coloniais propriamente ditos são entendidos na arqueologia, mas sobre a teoria e prática arqueológica como um todo, o que vem sendo continuamente desafiado sob diferentes perspectivas dentro da disciplina, desde a escola pós-processual clássica (HODDER, 1982;WYLIE, 1985;SHANKS;TILLEY, 1992;LEONE, 1982), até a arqueologia feminista e queer (GERO; CONKEY, 1991;WYLIE, 1992 (GNECCO, 2009;HABER, 2016). O que essas perspectivas têm em comum é a busca por expor como o presente interfere na forma como se percebe o passado arqueológico e como o passado arqueológico pode muitas vezes ser utilizado para sustentar as assimetrias sociais do presente; além da crítica epistemológica da produção do conhecimento, oposição aos essencialismos e foco na formação de identidades e autonomia das comunidades locais sobre suas próprias histórias. ...
O projeto “Arqueologia nas escolas: educação e preservação do patrimônio arqueológico de Florianópolis”, vinculado ao Laboratório de Estudos Interdisciplinares em Arqueologia da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (LEIA-UFSC) e coordenado pelo professor doutor Lucas Bueno, configurou-se em um projeto voltado à extroversão do conhecimento relacionado ao patrimônio arqueológico da cidade de Florianópolis, mais especificamente da Ilha de Santa Catarina. Esse projeto esteve diretamente relacionado ao desenvolvimento de outra ação em curso no laboratório no mesmo período, o projeto “Florianópolis arqueológica”, que visou atualizar as informações sobre pesquisas e sítios arqueológicos da Ilha de Santa Catarina, bem como rediscutir e traçar perspectivas de pesquisas interdisciplinares
... A força que esse imaginário moderno/colonial exerce na arqueologia mora nas origens colonialistas da disciplina inicialmente denunciadas por Trigger (2004). A gênese da disciplina como prática colonial gerou uma tradição que tem influência não apenas sobre a forma como contextos arqueológicos coloniais propriamente ditos são entendidos na arqueologia, mas sobre a teoria e prática arqueológica como um todo, o que vem sendo continuamente desafiado sob diferentes perspectivas dentro da disciplina, desde a escola pós-processual clássica (HODDER, 1982;WYLIE, 1985;SHANKS;TILLEY, 1992;LEONE, 1982), até a arqueologia feminista e queer (GERO; CONKEY, 1991;WYLIE, 1992 (GNECCO, 2009;HABER, 2016). O que essas perspectivas têm em comum é a busca por expor como o presente interfere na forma como se percebe o passado arqueológico e como o passado arqueológico pode muitas vezes ser utilizado para sustentar as assimetrias sociais do presente; além da crítica epistemológica da produção do conhecimento, oposição aos essencialismos e foco na formação de identidades e autonomia das comunidades locais sobre suas próprias histórias. ...
... 8 Libros importantes y artículos incluyen Shanks & Tilley (1987a, 1987b; Barrett (1988);Hodder (1982Hodder ( , 1986; Johnson (1993). 9 Artículos y libros relevantes incluyen Paynter (1983); McGuire (1989McGuire ( , 1992; Wylie (1985Wylie ( , 1989bWylie ( , 1990Wylie ( , 1991Wylie ( , 1992a; Handsman (1980Handsman ( , 1981; McMullins & Handsman (1987); Patterson (1986); Potter (1994); Gero et al. (1983); Gero & Conkey (1991); Orser (1988); Spector (1993); Shackel (1991); Barbara Little (1994); Leone (1978Leone ( , 1981aLeone ( , 1981bLeone ( , 1983. ...
Este artículo se propone discutir el potencial de entender la Arqueología Histórica a la luz de la teoría critica, pensándola como una arqueología del capitalismo. Esta conjunción de ideas permitirá al arqueólogo la construcción de nuevas narrativas criticas sobre las historias oficiales y sus silencios en relación con los grupos subalternos. La neutralidad científica tiene que ser cuestionada para poder pensar la dimensión política de la arqueología y su lugar en la construcción de narrativas. Una arqueología histórica del capitalismo puede desafiar la opresión y contribuir al desarrollo de sociedades más justas.
... Some of the arguments put forward for accepting the ethnographic record as credible and reliable might seem more political than scientific (for instance, the quote from Schmidt and Patterson, above). It is a post-modern truism that science is inevitably politicised, and this is particularly true for archaeology (Wylie 1992;Shanks 2006). It is, however, possible to put forward the simplest test for the usefulness of the ethnographic record in New Zealand archaeology. ...
... En el ámbito anglosajón, luego de los intentos por "recuperar a las mujeres" a partir de la cultura material (Conkey y Spector 1984, Gero y Conkey 1991, vino una revisión de los conceptos que han marcado el androcentrismo de la disciplina (Wylie 1992), la creación de una práctica con enfoque de género (Claasen 1992, Gero y Conkey 1991) y la explicitación de aproximaciones feministas (Engelstad 2007, Wylie 2007. En la actualidad, la crítica se ha diversificado hacia la reflexión postcolonial, feminismos negros, representación de identidades no hegemónicas y culturas del acoso (Alberti 2013, Battle-Baptiste 2011, Casella y Voss 2011, Dowson 2000, Joyce 2008, Schmidt y Voss 2000, Voss 2000. ...
Si bien los estudios de género y pensamiento feminista han tenido un importante impacto en la arqueología mundial y en las ciencias sociales en general, esto no se ha visto reflejado en las investigaciones arqueológicas chilenas ni en la propia historiografía de la disciplina. Basado en lo anterior, en este trabajo presentamos los resultados de seis entrevistas en profundidad realizadas a cinco mujeres y un hombre que fueron estudiantes de arqueología durante la etapa de institucionalización de la carrera en la Universidad de Chile (década de 1960). A partir de las entrevistas buscamos visibilizar la participación de las mujeres en la historia de la disciplina, reflexionar en torno al por qué de la ausencia de estos enfoques y discutirlo desde una perspectiva actual. Los resultados evidencian la ausencia de una idea de violencia de género en las personas entrevistadas, un alto impacto personal e institucional a partir del Golpe de Estado de 1973 y la posterior dictadura y una visión crítica acerca del desarrollo actual de la disciplina.
... In contrast to the above-mentioned approaches, feminist archaeology in general began to subscribe to the opinion that preference cannot be given to any single standpoint. The more feminist archaeology critically considered the dependency of research on contextespecially in the women's studies that arose from second-wave feminism-the more it questioned its own approaches; 'a purely feminist approach can lead us into the same trap as androcentrism' (Moore and Scott 1997: 251-2;see also Müller Clemm 2001;Wylie 1992;Engelstad 2007). ...
The chapter discusses the influence of feminist theories on theory construction, self-conception, and the public perception of archaeology and its various sub-disciplines. The theoretical foundations of gender archaeology are also considered. As there are many feminist theories as well as archaeologies, the chapter also summarizes what can be described as broad sets of overlaps, and to an extent simplifies the variety of different points of view.
Feminist criticism as well as new questions, models, and methods based on it reached archaeology in the 1980s, later than the other humanities. Initial efforts could be classified as women’s studies that mostly aimed to balance a male-biased view of the past by adding a female view to it. Since the 1990s, the term ‘gender’ with its various aspects is the focus of discussion. The number, convertibility, and history of genders are also important topics.
In addition, feminist archaeology focuses on archaeology’s own institutions, their social rules, their language, and their image, which are also linked to the gender expectations of the surrounding society. These aspects are also connected to the way images of the past are presented to the public, and which effects they have on gender discourses.
... How many writers declare that they are writing from and thereby advocating, a "normal/male/heterosexual" perspective, although it is often demanded that queer theorists, feminists etc. should explain and justify their modes of thought (cf. Engelstad 1991;Wylie 1992). Let me present a current example ofpresent-day heterosexuality forced upon an archaeological material. ...
This paper deals with humanoid figures on gold foils from the Late Iron Age in Scandinavia. Interpreted as figures wearing masks, an effort is made to show the complexity, importance and significance of masking practices. The single Bornholm figures from the 6th century are interpreted as shamans performing rituals. Further, it is proposed that a restriction of masked appearances and performances to certain people (shamans) and places in the long run created stricter and more rigid gender roles in everyday life. The later gold-foil couples are seen as signs of divine communication, cosmological movement and seasonality, making up a mythology that legitimised political domination —the sacred lineage of rulers pivoting around an apical, ancestral cross-sex pair.
... However, and thirdly, the focus on material objects in archaeology ensures a constant dialogue, where we can be, and often are, met with solidified counter-arguments to our preconception in every study, or what has been labelled the 'evidential constraint' (Wylie 1992). The lingering quality and materiality of these physical first-hand sources to long-term developments and events in Saami contexts outlive and resist both the longevity of human recollection and our penchant for categorization, arguably providing things with a voice of their own (see Olsen 2010). ...
Introduction to "Currents of Saami pasts. Recent advances in Saami archaeology". Fulltext of book available here: http://www.sarks.fi/masf/masf_9/masf_9.html
... To make this point is not to assert some kind of radical inductivism, or to suggest that data are not theory-laden; rather, it is a generalized prescription for avoiding the fallacy of affirming the consequent characteristic of so much social archaeology. Obviously, archaeological data are always selected with problems in mind, but the theoretical basis for making what we may call "reconstruction inferences" should not depend on our initial assumptions about, for example, the existence of tribes or chiefdoms, but on at least semiautonomous lines of argument (Wylie 1992). ...
... How many writers declare that they are writing from and thereby advocating, a "normal/male/heterosexual" perspective, although it is often demanded that queer theorists, feminists etc. should explain and justify their modes of thought (cf. Engelstad 1991;Wylie 1992). Let me present a current example ofpresent-day heterosexuality forced upon an archaeological material. ...
This paper deals with humanoid figures on gold foils from the Late Iron Age in Scandinavia. Interpreted as figures wearing masks, an effort is made to show the complexity, importance and significance of masking practices. The single Bornholm figures from the 6'" century are interpreted as shamans performing rituals. Further, it is proposed that a restriction of masked appearances and performances to certain people (shamans) and places in the long run created stricter and more rigid gender roles in everyday life. The later gold-foil couples are seen as signs of divine communication, cosmological movement and seasonality, making up a mythology that legitimised political domination-the sacred lineage of rulers pivoting around an apical, ancestral cross-sex pair.
... A s archaeologists have begun to consider social subcultures through the theoretical lens of agency, additional group identities are coming into focus, including class, ethnicity, and gender (Meskell 2001). One of the challenges of an engendered archaeology is the male bias that has too often permeated interpretation, in part as the result of an assumption that material culture is predominantly produced by and for male actors (but see Conkey and Spector 1984;Wylie 1992). Instead, a goal should be to identify and explore how other genders (and other nondominant groups) used objects to communicate their own symbolic messages (Hodder 1982). ...
Material culture studies demonstrate how objects may act to communicate information regarding social identity. In this study we consider ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence for Postclassic spinning and weaving as symbols relating to female ideology in ancient Mexico. We then relate a contextual interpretation of texts and images to contemporary symbolism, particularly associated with members of the female earth/fertility deity complex depicted and described in precolumbian and early colonial pictorial manuscripts. For our case study we analyze decorative imagery found on baked-clay spindle whorls from Postclassic Cholula, Mexico. This collection is representative of an iconographic system relating to female ideology. Whorls, as well as other spinning and weaving tools, paralleled male-oriented weapons to create a symbolic equivalence or, as we argue, a usurpation of the male symbols within a female worldview as a form of resistance to male domination. We conclude that the symbolic system used on spindle whorls and in other aspects of female practice created a communication network understood by Postclassic women.
... Although gender studies in archaeology are rooted in 19th-century classical evolutionism, the idea of the Great Goddess and original matriarchy (Bachofen 1861; see Szymkiewicz 2010), for many decades marginal, they became a popular area of research, with its own methods and questions, with the rise of the postprocessual approach in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Engelstad 1991;Wylie 1992). Initially, bioarchaeological tools were rarely exploited in gender studies, in spite of their potential for direct insight into the differences between the sexes. ...
En este artículo presentamos una introducción al dossier dedicado a la memoria de Victoria Castro Rojas (1944-2022), destacando su legado en el contexto de las discusiones nacionales e internacionales sobre el aporte de las mujeres al desarrollo científico, especialmente de la arqueología y la antropología chilenas y latinoamericanas. Destacamos la figura de Vicky en su inmensa contribución desde una perspectiva biográfica, así como los aportes que examinan su impacto en la promoción de diversos campos de estudio tanto a nivel disciplinar como conceptual.
This chapter outlines how interconnected networks of women have shaped the development of Australian archaeology from 1960 to the present. We have focused on those women who have pioneered particular research areas while simultaneously making outstanding contributions to the empowerment of Indigenous Australians. We introduce their significant achievements and consider the challenges they faced in their personal quests to contribute to the development of archaeology in Australia. We argue that these networks of women in Australian archaeology had two major impacts on the development of Australian archaeology. The first is an insistence on systematic archaeological surveys prior to development and the protection of cultural heritage sites by legislation, policy, and processes. The second is that efforts to decolonize archaeology in Australia were led by women whose work was embedded with deep and lived understandings of socio-politics' on archaeological theory and practice. Our analysis, emphasizes the power of a cohort of like-minded women.KeywordsAustraliaArchaeologyGenderCultural heritage managementIndigenousHistoriography of archaeology
In this Perspective article, I am able to draw the various strands of my intellectual thinking and practice in archaeology and European prehistory into a complex narrative of changing themes. In this narrative, I draw attention to the inspirational triggers of these transformations to be found in works and words of colleagues and events within and outside my immediate discipline. A group of events between 1988 and 1993 disrupted (in a good way) the trajectory of my professional life and provided a convenient anchor around which my themes pivoted and regrouped with very different standpoints. But some trends in my way of working remained constant and contributed, I hope, to a career of cumulative knowledge. Along the way, I show the significance, in terms of my personal intellectual context as well as archaeological practice in general, of my published works as well as more obscure and some unpublished works that are cited here for the first time
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 52 is October 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Children and childhood have emerged as important topics for understanding the history of African slavery in the Americas. In historical archaeology, analyses of subadult skeletal remains have provided valuable information about the biological and social conditions of captivity, yet children are infrequently the primary subjects of study in African diaspora bioarchaeology. Recent bioarchaeological research at Hacienda La Quebrada, a late colonial sugar plantation in central Peru, brings new data to bear on these subjects. Excavations at the cemetery for the plantation's enslaved African and Afro-descendant population recovered 158 subadults ranging from newborns to 20 years old, who represented 64% of the burial sample. Paleodemographic data and skeletal indicators of stress indicate that enslaved children were disproportionately affected by the conditions of life at Hacienda La Quebrada, particularly because of insufficient diets and susceptibility to infection and disease. Although these results are specific to the context of plantation slavery in Peru's coastal sugar economy, they contribute new information about the history of African slavery in Peru and about the study of childhood in conditions of captivity and colonialism in the Spanish Americas more broadly.
A renewed adoption of relational perspectives by archaeologists working in eastern North America has created an opportunity to move beyond categorical approaches, those reliant on the top-down implementation of essentialist models or “types.” Instead, emerging approaches, concerned with highlighting the agential power of relationships between individuals, communities, and institutions, and, more generally, with simply moving beyond categories, are allowing archaeologists to move from the bottom-up, focusing instead on the relationships that underlie, and indeed constitute, social, political, and economic phenomena. In this paper, I synthesize recent archaeological work from across eastern North America in which archaeologists have productively moved beyond a reliance on categorical perspectives. I explicitly focus on the potential for relational perspectives to recalibrate our social and temporal referents in crafting archaeological narratives.
This chapter briefly surveys what (little) archaeologists can say, with accuracy and general agreement, about gender roles, relationships, ideologies, and processes contributing to the forms and transformation of the earliest human societies. It sketches out just a few of the fundamental and vexing issues swirling around the question of how archaeologists can or should go about researching and modeling ancient gender practices. In many ways, the initial concern with finding and giving credit to women in prehistory was an intellectual movement shaped not by discoveries on the ground or in the laboratory, nor by fundamental challenges to the everyday practice or archaeology. It is only since the mid‐1980s that a serious and systematic concern with understanding gender roles, relationships, ideologies, and gender‐related processes has come to the fore in archaeology. The chapter touches upon some of the major epistemological and methodological issues beginning to appear on the receding horizon.
Recent calls across the world for removing monuments to White supremacy have brought widespread attention to the power of images and the role of heritage in society. A more careful examination of heritage’s itineraries and pragmatics—its practical effects—is thus warranted. This paper interrogates the pragmatics of heritage in two ways. First, what are the discourses and rhetorics of heritage—how is heritage invoked and talked about, like a sign of history, in making statements about the world? Second, what does heritage do, as a sign in history, when it is invoked, encountered, and circulated? What does heritage activate, and what are the practical effects of its itineraries? Drawing on the examples of the return of the Euphronios krater to Italy and the removal of Confederate and racist monuments in the US and elsewhere, I argue that while operating in these two modes—as signs of and in history—heritage’s greatest potential for transformational change is when it ceases acting as a rhetorical device and instead becomes itself the center of experiential social action.
This paper explores how feminist and indigenous archaeologies can ally to produce decolonizing heritage practice through intersubjective methods. Intersectional feminisms, particularly Native feminisms, suggest that focusing on local gender contexts in indigenous community research can subvert settler colonial systems, under which sexism and racism conspire to oppress Native people. I apply these insights about the decolonizing potential of localized gender research to a community‐centered project at Nunalleq, a Thule‐era site near the Yup'ik village of Quinhagak, Alaska. Here, stakeholder perspectives on gender suggest that framing site interpretations through concepts of family and teaching/learning would align with community values in potentially powerful ways.
Theory in the Pacific, the Pacific in Theory explores the role of theory in Pacific archaeology and its interplay with archaeological theory worldwide.
The contributors assess how the practice of archaeology in Pacific contexts has led to particular types of theoretical enquiry and interest, and, more broadly, how the Pacific is conceptualised in the archaeological imagination. Long seen as a laboratory environment for the testing and refinement of social theory, the Pacific islands occupy a central place in global theoretical discourse. This volume highlights this role through an exploration of how Pacific models and exemplars have shaped, and continue to shape, approaches to the archaeological past. The authors evaluate key theoretical perspectives and explore current and future directions in Pacific archaeology. In doing so, attention is paid to the influence of Pacific people and environments in motivating and shaping theory-building.
Theory in the Pacific, the Pacific in Theory makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how theory develops attuned to the affordances and needs of specific contexts, and how those contexts promote reformulation and development of theory elsewhere. It will be fascinating to scholars and archaeologists interested in the Pacific region, as well as students of wider archaeological theory.
Using the example of Andean archaeology, this article focuses on subtle forms of inequality that arise when academic communities are conceptualized as friendship‐based and egalitarian, rejecting explicit hierarchy. I describe this as performative informality and argue that it stems from a meritocratic ideology that inadvertently reproduces Euro‐American white‐male privilege. In a discipline that prides itself on its friendliness, openness, and alcohol‐fueled drinking culture, those who find themselves unable to enact or perform informality appropriately are at a distinct disadvantage. Drawing from a multisited ethnography of Andeanist archaeologists, I make the case that it is the ephemerality and plausible deniability of performative informality that makes it hard to recognize and thus mitigate against it. In doing so, I draw on and contribute to the theorization of gender/class intersectionality in anthropology and science studies, US conceptualizations of meritocracy in academia and higher education, and feminist Jo Freeman's concept of “the tyranny of structurelessness.” [ anthropology of science, ethnography of archaeology, class, gender, anthropology of work and education ]
Since the 1980s, activist archaeologists have used quantitative studies of journal authorship to show that the demographics of archaeological knowledge production are homogeneous. This literature, however, focuses almost exclusively on the gender of archaeologists, without deeply engaging with other forms of identity or adequately addressing the methodological limitations of assigning binary gender identifications based on first names. This paper rectifies these limitations through an intersectional study of inequities in academic archaeological publications by presenting the results of a survey of authors who published in 21 archaeology journals over a 10-year period (2007–2016). This survey asked them to provide their self-identifications in terms of gender, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation. The results demonstrate that although there has been an influx of women archaeologists in recent decades, we have not yet reached gender parity. They also show that because many women archaeologists are cisgender, white, and heterosexual, the discipline's knowledge producers remain relatively homogeneous. Furthermore, although there is demographic variation between journals, there is a strong correlation between journal prestige and the percentage of authors who are straight, white, cisgender men. This intersectional study of journal authorship demographics provides a comprehensive perspective on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the discipline of archaeology.
All research is in some ways the outcome of a scholar’s contemporary context. In scientific discussions, misunderstandings, approvals, or disapprovals are sometimes the results of different personal backgrounds. The latter is also the reason why such personal circumstances cannot be ignored in scientific communication, but rather need to be elaborated on. In this self-reflecting article, aspects of contextual approach and hermeneutic theory are discussed in order to argue that every academic study depends on the background of every researcher – his/her personal context (identity). Based on previous discussions, the paper provides examples from the author’s own experience and also from the history of Estonian archaeology to show how the researcher’s context influences the processes of archaeological study and its final results. The aim is to demonstrate that acknowledging the subjectivity of archaeological research helps to understand other archaeological interpretations and evaluate our own research processes more critically. Such critical reflection enables more tolerant and fruitful discussions within archaeological discourse.
The paper is the reaction to the contribution by Marko Porčić in this volume of Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology, presenting his views on the epistemological character and status of excavation in the archaeological process of knowledge acquisition. Here it is argued that the analysis of Porčić is simplified, non-consequential and founded upon the outdated concepts of epistemological analysis of science, which takes into account only the internal disciplinary epistemology and sharply divides theory from practice, thus considerably lowering the potential for research of archaeological epistemology. Discussing a research field, especially a humanistic one such as archaeology, exclusively in the light of its own categories and concepts and ways of thinking inevitably leads to massive reduction in understanding of knowledge production. If the ideal of so-called hard sciences, followed by Porčić, was a severe detachment of objects from subjects, supposedly leading to guaranteed neutrality (objectivity) of knowledge – the first half of the 20th century ideal, today abandoned in many respects even in hard sciences themselves – the constitutive element in humanistic disciplines is (auto)reflexivity and interactivity of researchers in respect to “other people and their work”, and therefore a completely different role of “subject” and their surroundings. Following his internalist approach, Porčić attempts to approach the epistemic structure of archaeology and its modes of knowledge building from the point of view of the so-called (by the author himself) general epistemological model, according to which a research starts by shaping a previous statement (hypothesis), followed by testing and final verification of a new knowledge. Attempting to preserve the “neutrality” of epistemological analysis, Porčić does not take into account the fact that every knowledge, including the scientific one, is historically and culturally conditioned; this fact, which is the foundation of every consideration of knowledge and ways of its production, particularly apparent in humanistic disciplines, is also present in the epistemology of hard sciences, to which Porčić refers. His perseverance to remain strictly in the domain of “theory” and complete neglect of the role of practice in the process of knowledge acquisition is expressed in a string of completely false statements, such as e.g. (theoretical) redundancy of archaeological excavations, or finitude (limitedness) of archaeological inquiry, reached upon by simple syllogistic exercises, often starting by erroneous or tautological premises. Perhaps the most eloquent illustration of the inadequacy of the so-called general epistemological model for archaeology is the neglect of preventive archaeology – today amounting to more than 90% of all archaeological fieldwork in Europe. However, Porčić practically denies all epistemological value to this work, persevering in the extremely reductive view of archaeology, and at the same time neglecting important epistemological perspectives of the discipline.
De l’épistémologie en archéologie: critique du texte « Perspective épistémologique de l’archéologie » de Marko PorčićCe texte est une réaction à l’article de Marko Porčić publié dans ce numéro de Problèmes d’ethnologie et d’anthropologie où il présente son point de vue sur la nature épistémologique et le statut des fouilles dans le processus archéolo-gique d’acquisition des connaissances. Nous argumentons dans notre texte que l’analyse épistémologique de M. Porčić est simplifiée, inconsistante et basée sur les concepts de l’analyse épistémologique de la science dépassés, et surtout sur l’approche internaliste qui, ne prenant en compte que l’épistémologie in-tra-disciplinaire, sépare strictement la théorie de la pratique en minimisant ainsi en grande mesure le potentiel pour une étude de l’épistémologie de l’archéolo-gie. L’observation d’une discipline scientifique, surtout si elle est une discipline scientifique humaine, comme l’est l’archéologie, uniquement par son appareil catégoriel et conceptuel disciplinaire interne et par les manières de réflexion, conduit inévitablement à une grande réduction de compréhension de la construc-tion de la connaissance en archéologie. Si l’idéal des sciences dites exactes, auquel Porčić tient, a été de séparer le plus strictement possible les objets des sujets et de garantir ainsi la neutralité (l’objectivité) de la connaissance – l’idéal de la théorie de la science de la première moitié du XXe siècle, aujourd’hui déjà dépassé à bien des égards même dans les sciences exactes – l’élément constitutif des sciences humaines est la relation (auto)réflexive et l’interactivité des cher-cheurs avec « des autres gens et leurs œuvres » et par là un rôle complètement différent du « sujet » et de son environnement. Conformément à son approche internaliste, Porčić essaie d’observer la structure épistémologique de l’archéo-logie et ses manières de construction de la connaissance à travers le soi-disant modèle épistémologique général, comme il l’appelle lui-même, selon lequel la recherche commence par l’articulation de la proposition antérieure (l’hypo-thèse) et ensuite suivent son contrôle et sa vérification finale qui confirme la nouvelle connaissance. Désireux de conserver « la neutralité » de l’analyse épis-témologique, Porčić ne prend pas en compte le fait que toute connaissance, donc la connaissance scientifique aussi, est conditionnée historiquement et culturel-
Етноантрополошкипроблеми, н. с. год. 14 св. 3 (2019)O EPISTEMOLOGIJIUARHEOLOGIJI787lement; ce fait présente la base de toute réflexion sur la connaissance, sur les manières de son acquisition et elle est surtout évidente dans les sciences hu-maines, et sûrement présente dans l’épistémologie des sciences dites exactes sur lesquelles s’appuie le texte de Porčić. Son insistance stricte sur le champ « théo-rique » et l’ignorance totale de l’activité pratique dans le processus de l’acqui-sition des connaissances est présenté dans une série d’assertions complètement erronées, comme celle, par exemple, sur la redondance (théorique) des fouilles archéologiques, c’est-à-dire, la finalité (la limitation) du questionnement ar-chéologique qu’il atteint en faisant des exercices syllogistiques simples prove-nant souvent des points de départ faux ou tautologiques. L’illustration peut-être la plus évidente d’une grande limitation et de l’insuffisance de l’application du soi-disant modèle épistémologique général pour l’archéologie est la négligence de l’archéologie préventive (conservatrice) à laquelle il nie pratiquement tout poids épistémologique, bien que plus de 90% de toutes les recherches sur le terrain en Europe soit mené dans ce contexte, et il persiste ainsi non seulement sur une image extrêmement réduite de l’archéologie, mais il néglige les points de vue épistémologiques importants de la discipline archéologique.
King offers a necessary synthesis of how archaeology, history, and anthropology have investigated outlaws and disorder. Focusing on Africa, the chapter highlights relevant primary sources (texts, artefacts, environments) in this research, and explores the methodological implications of this evidence. King suggests that disciplinary frameworks condition scholars’ expectations of what disorder looked and felt like in the past, and that exploring outlaws in southern Africa demands breaking out of disciplinary silos. King concludes with an examination of several key inter-disciplinary concepts in this literature—including anxiety, affect, and epistemic objects—that can be used to follow habits of what she calls ‘thinking archaeologically’ through the book. This chapter also offers notes on spelling, orthography, and nomenclature used in the book.
In this paper we examine a set of ethnographic practices from the mid-reaches of the Kikori River, specifically pertaining to women’s crustacean fishing, and in doing so re-examine the archaeological record of nearby rock shelter Epe Amoho. These practices, we argue, are poorly represented in many archaeological sites across the landscape. Such patterned biases of the archaeological record (e.g. of some gendered activities) have major implications for how we understand individual sites and for the utility of ethnography in archaeological interpretation. We conclude that the archaeological record of Epe Amoho underrepresents some elements of women’s dry season activities.
Although epistemic values have become widely accepted as part of scientific reasoning, non-epistemic values have been largely relegated to the "external" parts of science (the selection of hypotheses, restrictions on methodologies, and the use of scientific technologies). I argue that because of inductive risk, or the risk of error, non-epistemic values are required in science wherever non-epistemic consequences of error should be considered. I use examples from dioxin studies to illustrate how non-epistemic consequences of error can and should be considered in the internal stages of science: choice of methodology, characterization of data, and interpretation of results.
raises the question whether social science must remain a partner in domination and hegemony or whether it can forget itself and become something else
describes the move from positivism towards an interpretative, value-constituted and value-constituting social science / dismisses both the modernist reification of the subject and the postmodern 'death-of-the-subject' theories, instead arguing for a decentred subjectivity and multi-sited agency of meaning (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This book starts from the premise that methodology - the procedures for obtaining an 'objective' knowledge of the past - has always dominated archaeology to the detriment of broader social theory. It argues that social theory is archaeological theory, and that past failure to recognise this has resulted in disembodied archaeological theory and weak disciplinary practice. Ideology, Power and Prehistory therefore seeks to reinstate the primacy of social theory and the social nature of the past worlds that archaeologists seek to understand. The contributors to this book argue that past peoples, the creators of the archaeological records, should be understood as actively manipulating their own material world to represent and misrepresent their own and others' interests. Thus the concepts of ideology and power, long discussed in social and political science yet largely ignored by archaeologists, must henceforward play a central role in our understanding of the past as a social creation. Archaeologists must now consider how the material remains they study were used to create images by past societies, which do not simply mirror or reflect but actively orientate the nature of these societies.
This book starts from the premise that methodology - the procedures for obtaining an 'objective' knowledge of the past - has always dominated archaeology to the detriment of broader social theory. It argues that social theory is archaeological theory, and that past failure to recognise this has resulted in disembodied archaeological theory and weak disciplinary practice. Ideology, Power and Prehistory therefore seeks to reinstate the primacy of social theory and the social nature of the past worlds that archaeologists seek to understand. The contributors to this book argue that past peoples, the creators of the archaeological records, should be understood as actively manipulating their own material world to represent and misrepresent their own and others' interests. Thus the concepts of ideology and power, long discussed in social and political science yet largely ignored by archaeologists, must henceforward play a central role in our understanding of the past as a social creation. Archaeologists must now consider how the material remains they study were used to create images by past societies, which do not simply mirror or reflect but actively orientate the nature of these societies.
The question raised by this conference brought me to a surprising conclusion: that the feminist reconstitution of knowledge no longer seems to me so radical a break as it once did. In history, and probably in other fields, as well, our critiques of old scholarship, and our attempts to construct a new scholarship, seem to me rather to follow in paths already opened. That does not, I think, belittle or weaken the feminist contribution. On the contrary, the emphasis on the uniqueness and novelty of what we are doing may reflect the bravado of inadequate confidence.
Standpoint theory is based on the insight that those who are marginalized or oppressed have distinctive epistemic resources with which to understand social structures. Inasmuch as these structures shape our understanding of the natural and life worlds, standpoint theorists extend this principle to a range of biological and physical as well as social sciences. Standpoint theory has been articulated as a social epistemology and as an aligned methodological stance. It provides the rationale for ‘starting research from the margins’ and for expanding the diversity of backgrounds and experience represented in scientific communities.
We have used the abstracts from the Chacmool Archaeology of Gender Conference as one set of examples of what archaeologists actually have done under the rubric of gender studies. The range of topics, time and place, and methodological approach prove to be extremely varied, and there appear to be several research areas that need to be developed. The study of gender roles in the past raises to new levels the need for archaeologists to examine the role of analogy in the creation and evaluation of inferential frameworks. Feminist critiques of science raise issues of making one’s premises explicit and approaching science with a sceptical, questioning attitude. They can also help us to recognize the importance of making connections between archaeology and other disciplines and of learning from feminist approaches to knowledge a more connected way of doing our work.
In the past three decades scholars in virtually every humanistic and social scientific research discipline, and in some natural sciences (especially the life sciences), have drawn attention to quite striking instances of gender bias in the modes of practice and theorizing typical of traditional fields of research. They generally begin by identifying explicit androcentric biases in definitions of the subject domains appropriate to specific scientific fields. Their primary targets, in this connection, have been research that leaves women out altogether (e.g., anthropological research that has arbitrarily and, as it turns out, falsely characterized subsistence systems and political structures exclusively in terms of male activities; [see Slocum 1975]), research that ignores women’s contributions or victimization (e.g., in the definition of literary or artistic canons and historical traditions), and research that conceptualizes its subject, male or female, human or non-human, in explicitly gender biased terms (e.g., models of animal behaviour that project onto it the gender-specific attributes of particular human societies and models of human psychological development that take exclusively male patterns of development as the norm and characterize distinctive female patterns as ‘deviant’; see Harraway 1978 and Gilligan 1982, respectively).
Is archaeology a soft science or an expensive humanity? What is the role of the distant past in modern Western society? Is the past that interests the archaeologist of interest to the general public, many of whom may think archaeology useless and a complete waste of money? Are the pasts which archaeologists create socially neutral? In suggesting answers to some of these questions, the author argues for a post-processual or contextual archaeology in which interpretations of the past should take greater account of meaning, the individual, culture and history. -after Author
Archaeology, like many of the sciences, works to a masculine metaphor, the (male) archaeologist as hero explores and tames the mysteries of his (female) subject. Feminist theory has made important criticism of positivist science on these grounds, drawing on much the same postmodern theory as ‘post-processual’ archaeology. How do the ‘post-processuals’ appear, seen in the feminist light?
Justice is one of the oldest and most central themes of philosophy, but sometimes we would do well to focus instead on injustice. In epistemology, the very idea that there is a first-order ethical dimension to our epistemic practices - the idea that there is such a thing as epistemic justice - remains obscure until we adjust the philosophical lens so that we see through to the negative space that is epistemic injustice. This book argues that there is a distinctively epistemic genus of injustice, in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower, wronged therefore in a capacity essential to human value. The book identifies two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. In doing so, it charts the ethical dimension of two fundamental epistemic practices: gaining knowledge by being told and making sense of our social experiences. As the account unfolds, the book travels through a range of philosophical problems. Thus, the book finds an analysis of social power; an account of prejudicial stereotypes; a characterization of two hybrid intellectual-ethical virtues; a revised account of the State of Nature used in genealogical explanations of the concept of knowledge; a discussion of objectification and 'silencing'; and a framework for a virtue epistemological account of testimony. The book reveals epistemic injustice as a potent yet largely silent dimension of discrimination, analyses the wrong it perpetrates, and constructs two hybrid ethical-intellectual virtues of epistemic justice which aim to forestall it.
Gender is the information that has not been recovered by archaeologists who lack a theoretical and methodological framework to do so, statements on gender have not been absent in archaeological interpretation. The methodological barriers have not kept many archaeologists from inclusion of assumptions about roles and relationships. The organization of gender behavior relates to and is a part of most other aspects of past cultural systems in which archaeologists have always been interested. Archaeologists have to understand gender dynamics at some level to continue to pursue some research objectives set out for: site functions and uses; subsistence systems that are based on task differentiation; inter- and intra-site spatial phenomena; the power and role of material culture; mechanisms of cultural solidarity and integration; extra-domestic trade and exchange system; and the course of culture change. This chapter stimulates critical awareness of the role of archaeologists in employing and perpetuating gender stereotypes and androcentric perspectives. It is also hoped that archaeologists can realize how the roots of the barriers to elucidating past gender arrangements and ideology lie in two related domains.
This chapter describes a series of arguments and counterarguments through which the ambivalence about analogy noted by recent commentators took definite shape. The chapter focuses on an increasingly acute concern that analogy seems to be both indispensible to interpretation and always potentially misleading. At a more fundamental level, these debates can be seen to express a fundamental dilemma that archaeologists confront whenever they seriously undertake to use their data as evidence of the cultural past, namely, that any such broadening of the horizons of inquiry seems to be accomplished only at the cost of compromising actual or potential methodological rigor. Each of the critical reactions against analogy and each of the ameliorating responses represent an attempt to come to grips with this dilemma. Each either endorses one of the methodological options it defines, accepting that research is unavoidably limited or unavoidably speculative, or rejects these options and attempts to show how one or another of the premises yielding the dilemma may be amended and the dilemma itself escaped.
Archaeologists, as explorers and discoverers, have maintained the myth of objective research far longer than have researchers in other social science disciplines. Focused on action, the “cowboys of science” (Alaskan bumper sticker 1981) have dabbled little in self-reflective criticism.
Now at 50, however, the discipline is becoming aware that our notions of the past, our epistemologies, our research emphases, the methods we employ in our research, and the interpretations we bring to and distill from our investigations, are far from value-neutral.
The solar neutrino experiment, designed to test our fundamental theories of the source of energy which sustains the stars and life, is one of the most sophisticated and important experiments of the past two decades. But it leads to some philosophical puzzles. For although the central core of the sun lies buried under 400,000 miles of dense, hot, opaque material, astrophysicists nevertheless universally speak of the experiment as providing “direct observation” of that central core. What can be meant by such talk? Is the puzzled philosopher simply ignorant of the ingenuity of modern science? Or are the astrophysicists using the term loosely or incorrectly or misleadingly, in a kind of sociological aberration that philosophers must gently tolerate while realizing that that usage has nothing to do with “real” observation? Or are the philosopher and astrophysicist perhaps interested in entirely different and unrelated problems, their respective usages being, from their respective points of view, equally legitimate? Or are the usages perhaps related, but in ways more complex than might be supposed from these or other usual alternatives?
This paper seeks further to define the processes of the interpretation of meaning in archaeology and to explore the public role such interpretation might play. In contrast to postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, a hermeneutic debate is described that takes account of a critical perspective. An interpretive postprocessual archaeology needs to incorporate three components: a guarded objectivity of the data, hermeneutic procedures for inferring internal meanings, and reflexivity. The call for an interpretive position is related closely to new, more active roles that the archaeological past is filling in a multicultural world.
In Re-Constructing Archaeology (1987a) and Social Theory and Archaeology (1987b), Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley argue for an antiscience radical archaeology as critique. They use deconstructionist sceptical arguments to conclude that there is no objective past and that our representations of the past are only texts that we produce on the basis of our sociopolitical standpoints. In effect, they contend that there is no objective world, that the world itself is a text that human beings write. This is a form of subjective idealism. Their critique is a nihilistic attack on all objective knowledge.
Against the backdrop of current archaeological debate, this article presents a discussion of the production of data for anthropological research. It is suggested that the particular character of ethnographic research has conditioned the discussion of the role of science in both ethnography and archaeology. It is argued that the 'ethnographic model' of data production is misleading and offers a false model for archaeology. By implication it is also suggested that ethnography is misled as well by its acceptance of personal experience as an ontological guide to the nature of ethnographic data or the enthographic research domain.
Discovery and AMS dating of mid-Holocene Cucurbita pepo fragments from central Maine and north-central Pennsylvania necessitate the reevaluation of the status of the earliest gourds in noncoastal areas of the Eastern Woodlands and the role of women in their cultivation. Gourds may have been spread initially in conjunction with improvements in fishing techniques, with small gourds used primarily as net floats. In this scenario, people passed temperate, Eastern (ovifera-type) gourds northward from the coastal plains of the Southeast into river valleys of the Midwest and Northeast as fishing became more significant in Archaic subsistence systems. The growing of gourds was fully compatible with a fisher-gatherer-hunter lifeway, and it did not necessarily trigger a transition to farming. Women may have grown gourds, but the possible role of women in fishing activities is more ambiguous than is their role in gathering and eventually domesticating the food plants of the Eastern North American agricultural complex.
Gender roles define appropriate behavior for members of society according to sex and age, and appropriate behavior includes appropriate work. The relationship between consumer behavior, household composition, and household function in turn-of-the-century Washington, D.C., is elucidated by understanding women?s work. Archaeological excavations in downtown Washington, D.C.?s, Federal Triangle produced artifact collections from two types of households, working-class households and brothels. For working-class wives, the home was the workplace, and many of these women participated in both paid and unpaid labor without going out to work. Turn-of-the-century brothels were also both workplace and home, but brothels were organized as commercial institutions, not social units. Comparisons of artifact assemblages from a brothel and two working-class households in the neighborhood historically known as Hooker?s Division and assemblages from two other Washington, D.C., neighborhoods indicate different consumer patterns; these patterns reflect differences in household composition and household function.
Reasoning that compares two objects or situations to draw conclusions about previously unknown properties of one of them has traditionally been taken to be ampliative and probabilistic. I propose that it is apodeictic reasoning from a premise about isomorphic structures that is often uncertain, but which we may have good reasons to believe. I characterize the structures and their isomorphism, describe patterns of reasoning appropriate to them, and discuss some complications not immediately obvious.
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Analytical table of contents Preface Introduction: rationality Part I. Representing: 1. What is scientific realism? 2. Building and causing 3. Positivism 4. Pragmatism 5. Incommensurability 6. Reference 7. Internal realism 8. A surrogate for truth Part II. Intervening: 9. Experiment 10. Observation 11. Microscopes 12. Speculation, calculation, models, approximations 13. The creation of phenomena 14. Measurement 15. Baconian topics 16. Experimentation and scientific realism Further reading Index.
Several feminist philosophers of science have tried to open up the possibility that feminist ethical or political commitments could play a positive role in good science by appealing to the Duhem-Quine thesis and underdetermination of theories by observation. I examine several different interpretations of the claim that feminist values could play a legitimate role in theory justification and show that none of them follow from a logical gap between theory and observation. Finally, I sketch an alternative approach for defending the possibility that feminist political commitments could play a legitimate role in science.
▪ Abstract In the past decade, archaeologists have given considerable attention to research on gender in the human past. In this review, we attempt to acknowledge much of this diverse and abundant work from an explicitly feminist perspective. We focus on reviewing a selection of approaches to gender that are anchored to specific theoretical standpoints. In addition, we highlight several approaches that challenge an archaeology of gender that does not explicitly engage with the implications of this topic for research, practice, and interpretation. From our perspective, we suggest the value of situating gender research within an explicitly feminist framework, and we draw attention to some of the important insights for archaeology from the wider field of feminist critiques of science. Last, we draw attention to the crucial implications for the practice of archaeology.