Brad's response

Writing a response paper towards the end of the week has its advantages and disadvantages: I get to incorporate the thoughts of others, but am in many ways influenced by them. Additionally, I lose track of everything everyone else has said and run the risk of repetition. Apologies if this is the case. In any event, I hope I still contribute something new while touching upon the contributions of others.

One salient feature of pretty much all of the reading, as I read them, is that even if ideology itself is regarded as a process (thank you Casey, Omur, and even Eagleton), the framework in which it is described in the readings is presented in a static way. I find that this provides a limited notion of ideology, generally.

There are several ways in which I am thinking about this. The first draws on much of the group’s criticism of DeMarrais et al. (1996), wherein the authors present a deliberate, top down, and always conscious notion of how ideology is ‘materialized’ and promoted (i.e. propagated). Althusser also touches on this sense of the controlling of ideology; an ideology is formulated to serve the needs of a (ruling) group or class, which realizes this potential in the ideology, and then agrees (implicitly?) on it, and puts it into action. It is very directed, very static, and way too simple.

If we take the case of the Inca expansion in South America through conquest of people and appropriation of their symbols, we might see what me I mean by static. Put simply, the methods used by the Inca and the symbolic meaning DeMarrais et al. attribute to the materials has a singular meaning, at least in so far as they discuss it. Conquest equals subjugation, and appropriation of symbols gives the materials (religious icons, etc.) new meaning. Most importantly is that they present this new meaning as uniformly understood AND enduring, except in cases of punctuated activity (i.e. the acts of conquest and appropriation). This is essentially an event-based understanding of how meaning is attached to objects.

Linking to Tom’s sense of renegotiation, however, and using it somewhat differently (I think), and drawing from Casey’s and Omur’s desires to move away from the upper echelons only, there likely is a continuous process of actualizing ideology, and this is dependent on all components of any society. Even if we take as a given a sort of solidarity among different classes (which we can challenge in seminar tomorrow), the ruling class (which determines the dominant ideology according to Althusser) is more than likely engaged in constant negotiation and renegotiation over the link between ideology, meaning and material. Furthermore, how the link between meaning and material (i.e. ideology) is received by other people in other societal positions is continuously negotiated and renegotiated by them. We thus have a process more similar to materialization, understanding, performance, materialization, understanding, performance, etc., with outcomes that may vary, or may not. (And here I have certainly oversimplified, even if I have made no sense.) If this is the case, then the static framework for arriving at dominant ideologies is overly simplistic in and of itself.

As this relates to archaeology, we should move away from searches for the singular meaning of the object as a product of an (already material?) ideology, since the materialization of the ideology enters many different frameworks. To be sure, I am not advocating that there is no meaning. Clearly societies function, meanings are associated with materials, and meaning and function are shared to some extent within and across groups of people (can you tell I just read Mann?). Instead, I would advocate a contextual understanding of how this plays out, looking to elucidate particularities rather than relying on the static frameworks. We should allow for flexibility, mutability and organic processes rather than directed and always-agreed-upon-first processes.