Response Papers - week 3
Questions, ideas, notes for discussion:
- Hodder: the shift from "cultural" to "social" in archaeological thought. Can we associate the recent rise of body-related theory with such process? We can remind ourselves with Chris Shilling's discussion of the body as "a source for the creation of social life" or as "a multidimensional medium for the constitution of society". What does Hodder mean by "social relations of production"? What are the other kinds of theoretical shifts? The rise of interest in everyday life, material culture studies, micro-processes of daily life in place of macro-processes in the social world.
- Body as an artifact, an artifact of social processes, as a screen upon which society inscribes its structures, representations, significations. As part of the discourse of social constructionism, this line of thought seems to have been influential on archaeologists, theorists of material culture. Should we consider different authors' discussions and critiques of this paradigm? (especially Joyce, Meskell, Sofaer). Any interesting cases that come to mind? (Omur, Posted Sept 21 Thu 12:57).
- Related somehow to the first question is perhaps Ian Hodder's discussion of the pros and cons of regarding/reading material culture as text. What about the human body as text? (Omur, Posted Sept 21 Thu 13:04).
- Seductive artifact paradigm: Meskell argues that archaeological artifacts that offer "visually evocative" representations of the body are only studied in terms of their formal, visally seducing qualities such as posture, gesture, costume, sexuality etc. However these art-historicized account of bodily representations ignore "individual identities, bodily experience," corporeality, agency and materiality, while they "decontextualize and depersonalize" the artifacts by doing so. This I believe is a huge issue in Near Eastern studies, and we'll run into it quite a few times. Prehistoric figurines/statues provide an excellent case study for this and I hope we can address the issue in relation to some concrete examples (Omur, Posted Sept 21 Thu 15:29).
- Sex and gender debate between archaeological theorists and osteoarchaeological scientists: I think it would be helpful to discuss definitions of sex and gender in the different authors we are reading. The heated debate between Meskell and Sofaer seems particularly enticing for that purpose. (Omur, Posted Sept 22 Thu 00:21)
