Entangled E-Book

Ian Hodder

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 585

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A powerful and innovative argument that explores the complexity of the human relationship with material things, demonstrating how humans and societies are entrapped into the maintenance and sustaining of material worlds * Argues that the interrelationship of humans and things is a defining characteristic of human history and culture * Offers a nuanced argument that values the physical processes of things without succumbing to materialism * Discusses historical and modern examples, using evolutionary theory to show how long-standing entanglements are irreversible and increase in scale and complexity over time * Integrates aspects of a diverse array of contemporary theories in archaeology and related natural and biological sciences * Provides a critical review of many of the key contemporary perspectives from materiality, material culture studies and phenomenology to evolutionary theory, behavioral archaeology, cognitive archaeology, human behavioral ecology, Actor Network Theory and complexity theory

Leseprobe

Contents

Epigraph

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Thinking About Things Differently

Approaches to Things

Themes About Things

What Is a Thing?

Humans and Things

Knowing Things

Conclusion: The Objectness of Things

Chapter 2: Humans Depend on Things

Dependence: Some Introductory Concepts

Approaches to the Human Dependence On Things

Conclusion: Things R Us

Chapter 3: Things Depend on Other Things

Forms of Connection between Things

Affordances

From Affordance to Dependence

The French School – Operational Chains

Behavioral Chains

Conclusion

Chapter 4: Things Depend on Humans

Things Fall Apart

Behavioral Archaeology and Material Behavior

Behavioral Ecology

Human Behavioral Ecology

The Temporalities of Things

Conclusion: The Unruliness of Things

Chapter 5: Entanglement

Other Approaches

Latour and Actor Network Theory

The Archaeology of Entanglement

Forgetness

The Tautness of Entanglements

Types and Degrees of Entanglement

Conclusion

Chapter 6: Fittingness

Nested Fittingness

Return to Affordance

Coherence: Abstraction, Metaphor, Mimesis and Resonance

Conclusion

Chapter 7: The Evolution and Persistence of Things

Evolutionary Approaches

Evolution and Entanglement

Niche Construction

Evolution at Çatalhöyük

Conclusion

Chapter 8: Things happen …

The Complexity of Entanglements

Is there a Directionality to Entanglements?

Why Do Entanglements Increase the Rate of Change?

Conclusion

Chapter 9: Tracing the Threads

Tanglegrams

Locating Entanglements

Sequencing Entanglements – at Çatalhöyük

Sequencing Entanglements – the Origins of Agriculture in the Middle East

Causality and Directionality

Conclusion

Chapter 10: Conclusions

The Object Nature of Things

Too Much Stuff?

Temporality and Structure

Power and Agency

To and from Formulaic Reduction

Things Again

Some Ethical Considerations

The Last Thing on my Mind

Bibliography

Index

Royalties from the sale of this book will be paid to the Kyle Hodder-Hastorf Memorial Fund

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hodder, Ian.Entangled : an archaeology of the relationships between humans and things / Ian Hodder.p. cm.Includes bibliographical copyrights and index.ISBN 978-0-470-67211-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-470-67212-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Material culture. 2. Social archaeology. I. Title.GN406.H63 2012930.1–dc232011044945

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Epigraph

Fly, Fly, Flywings of hopesoaring out of historyclichéd words from beautiful imagesforced out words sucked from a place of quiet loneliness

Beauty comes in so many formsfreedom, hope, identitysitting in this chair listening to the soundslistening, touching, smelling the images

What would light be if there was no darkness?would we really be falling if there was no ground to hit.what about soaring?If all you can do is fall how do you land in the right placeBroken statues, jumping off ledges–I am a different person when I walk in different directions

(from the writings and poems of Kyle Hodder-Hastorf)

List of Figures

1.1

A piano at the Mesolithic site of Lepenski Vir (Source: Giovanni Caselli).

3.1

Some of the tools and processes involved in making a simple fire (Source: the author).

3.2

Some of the tools and processes involved with plaster at the 9000 year old site of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey (Source: the author and Chris Doherty).

3.3

The introduction of the wheel in European prehistory (Source: Sherratt 1981).

3.4

The parts of a modern car (Source:

http://www.rpmgo.com/tag/car-parts

).

3.5

Interactions occur at all stages along behavioral chains (Source: the author).

3.6

The levels at Çatalhöyük dated by radiocarbon (Source: Cessford

et al.

2006).

3.7

The dating of Çatalhöyük in the context of other sites in Turkey and the Middle East (Source: Cessford

et al.

2006).

4.1

The walls at Çatalhöyük did not stay upright (Source: Çatalhöyük Research Project and Jason Quinlan).

4.2

Sequences of entanglement resulting from brick making at Çatalhöyük (Source: the author, Chris Doherty and Philippa Ryan).

6.1

Some of the factors involved in one stage in the production of pottery: paste preparation (Source: van der Leeuw 2008: 235) With kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

6.2

The organization of Southwest Airlines (Source: Porter 1996).

6.3

Two drawings to which the terms takete and maluma are assigned (Source: the author).

6.4

Decorated face pot from Çatalhöyük. (Source: Çatalhöyük Research Project and Jason Quinlan).

7.1

Mineral tempered cooking pot from Çatalhöyük (Source: Çatalhöyük Research Project and Jason Quinlan).

7.2

Chalcolithic painted pottery from the West Mound at Çatalhöyük (Source: Çatalhöyük Research Project and Jason Quinlan).

9.1

Surface of the marl surrounding Çatalhöyük showing depressions around Neolithic East and Chalcolithic West Mounds (the mounds are shown as white outlines) (Source: Chris Doherty).

9.2

Clay entanglements in the first part of the sequence of occupation at Çatalhöyük (Source: the author and Chris Doherty).

9.3

The spatial distribution of entanglements at Çatalhöyük in Level VIB(Source: the author).

9.4

The roof structure over the excavations in the South Area at Çatalhöyük (Source: Çatalhöyük Research Project and Jason Quinlan).

9.5

The sequence of steps involved in using clay balls to cook sheep meat in a basket at Çatalhöyük (Source: the author).

9.6

Reconstruction of seasonal activities at Çatalhöyük (Source: Fairbairn 2005).

9.7

Sequences of types (clay balls and cooking pottery) set within a decision-making environment at Çatalhöyük (Source: the author).

9.8

Legacy diagram for Çatalhöyük showing differential persistence of things (Source: the author).

9.9

The timing of the introduction of parts of Childe’s Neolithic ‘package’ in the Middle East (Source: Zeder 2009). With kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media.

9.10

The processing of wild and domesticated cereals in the Middle East (Source: Dorian Fuller).

Acknowledgements

This book was largely written while on leave at the following institutions, to which I am extremely grateful: Magdalen College, Oxford; Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris (especially Alain Schnapp and Jean-Paul Demoule); Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Koç University (especially Scott Redford). I would like to thank the following for reading all or various parts of the manuscript of this book and providing helpful commentary and critique: Brian Codding, Ewa Domanska, Matthew Johnson, Louise Martin, Lynn Meskell, Bjørnar Olsen, Bob Preucel, Steve Shennan, James Skibo (and his anonymous students) and several anonymous reviewers. While at Oxford, Eric Clarke and Michael Burden bore the brunt of my questions about music, and I am grateful to Greg Hodder for introducing me to the work of Porter. I owe much to Chris Doherty for help in producing the tanglegram figure used as Figure 9.2 and discussing entanglements at Çatalhöyük. Kelly Nguyen helped with Figure 1.1 and I am grateful to Giovanni Caselli for redrawing this figure for the purposes of this book. Similarly Dorian Fuller was kind enough to redraw Figure 9.9.

Above all, I owe a great debt to Lynn Meskell for the deep friendship and loving support she has given throughout the process of thinking about and writing this book. She has been my constant sounding board, critic and inspiration.

I will always associate this book with Kyle. He was not impressed when I first told him of its theme, but I have labored to make an argument in which he might have seen some merit. He is at rest but deeply, sorely missed.

Chapter 1

Thinking About Things Differently

Approaches to Things

If we look at some of the ways in which things have been approached in the humanities and social sciences we find a bewildering array from the more semiotic to the more material (Candlin and Guins 2009). Recent approaches, in a strand reaching back to Appadurai’s Social Life of Things (1986), have explored the many social dimensions of things. Thus, in ‘materiality’ studies (e.g. Keane 2003b, Meskell 2005a, Miller, 2005b, Pels 1998) the focus is often on the ways things and society co-produce each other (see Chapter 2). Anthropologist Nicholas Thomas (1991) uncovers the role of material objects in the entanglements of colonialism and empire. Bill Brown in his book on A Sense of Things and in his development of ‘thing theory’ examines how things are given new meanings in late 19th century literature (Brown 2001; 2003). Other influential work by Latour (1993) tries to break away from subject-object dualisms and argues for a symmetrical approach to humans and non-humans. Philosophers such as Ihde (1999) explore the ways in which materials and instruments enter into the scientific hermeneutic process (for a different approach in philosophy see Wylie 2002).

As we work through the chapters in this book we will see that a recurrent criticism of these diverse approaches to things is that despite their protestations to the contrary, they could look more closely at things themselves. The approaches, for the most part, explore what things can do for humans in society. So each approach or study takes one aspect of a thing – its symbolism or the labor needed to produce it or its shiny attractiveness or its efficiency in killing an animal or its material links to actor networks – and shows how that particular aspect is made use of, or even constitutes society or what it means to be human. Things are broken up in this way. Each approach or study takes what it wants of things.

Figure 1.1 A piano at the Mesolithic site of Lepenski Vir (Source: Giovanni Caselli).

As social actors we tend to see things in ego-centered ways, in terms of what they can do for us. We hardly look at them. Our interests are in the effects for us, aesthetic, social, scientific, psychological and so on. But every now and then we actually look at the thing itself, as a whole object, a thing in its own right. We explore its grain, feel its weight, note its color in different lights, marvel at its balance and delicate detail. Of course our interest remains self-serving, and often nostalgic, but there is sometimes a moment of realization that in order to understand the thing we have to look harder, anew, deeper, more fully.

In Figure 1.1 a reconstruction of the hunter-gatherer site of Lepenski Vir is shown. This is based on archaeological remains of floor plans and animal bone and stone tool distributions on this 8000 year old Mesolithic site on the Danube excavated by Srejovic (1972). There is an overall scene in which humans go about their business surrounded by appropriate houses and objects. The things in this image and on the archaeological site are used to build a picture of a way of life – of hunters-gatherers-fishers in a settlement or village. In such an image the things are props for a way of life. They allow us a glimpse of a lost society – they do that for us. But our interest in the end is the humans and their society. The things are only there as backdrop. They make a specific form of human society possible.