Questions, ideas, notes for discussion
- This week I am hoping that we will be able to focus on some of the fresh approaches to the problem of technique and technology in archaeology, anthropology and art history. It is quite noticable that there has been some parallel developments among these disciplines recently in developing new and critical discussions of technology. We'll explore these by looking particularly at David Summers's concept of facture, Marcia-Anne Dobres's discussion of chaine operatoire, i.e. the chain of operations in the making of artifacts; and Tim Ingold's social contextualization of techniques and tools. In your readings, try to pay extra attention to these issues in a comparative way. What are the common problems that each of these authors addressing? What are the common threads, intersecting avenues of thought here, and how can we derive a critical understanding of technology by putting these together? How do they relate to Alfred Gell's concept of enchanted technologies?
- How do we compare Ingold's sharp disctinction of technologies (of modernity) and technique (of pre-modern/pre-industrialist) societies, versus Dobres's avoidance of such disticntion, and Summers's complete abandonment of these heavily loaded terms by repolacing them with new concepts such as facture?
- Dobres places an interesting emphasis on the processes of the production of technological knowledge, and how the use of that corpus of practical knowledge can become in the public realm as a political arena for negotiating social power, cultural and individual identities, social hierarchies, gender relations, as well as personhood an subjectivity. This of course relates to the current theoretical insistence on the embeddedness of technical processes in social relations. In what ways does this work, let's discuss with examples. In the Sumerian poem of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, there seems to be a politicized debate going on between the king of Uruk Enmerkar and the ruler of Aratta, over the construction of a luxurious temple in the midst of Uruk. Let's consider this debate in relation to the theories of technological processes.
- One of the important issues being brought up in current discussions of technology is the agency of the craftsman/technician/maker in the processes of production. How does the skilled craftsman assert his/her own agency in the making of things?
Images from Winter and Summers: