Our meetings will be held in the Institute for Archaeology Seminar Room at 70 Waterman St.
This year workshop meetings will all be on Thursdays at noon
The following dates have been reserved and lunch will be provided:
September 18: Planning Meeting
October 23: Nick Shephard
Title: Archaeology at the sharp edge of the trowel: Prestwich Street, ID-ology, and the "necessary entanglements" of practice in the postcolony
These are Nick's remarks for the session:
I thought for the material worlds seminar I could look at a case study which I wrote up recently concerned with the contested exhumation of an early colonial burial site in Cape Town, South Africa, extending this a little by considering an argument that the Comaroffs make about new forms of identity politics in the postcolony, and thinking this through in relation to archaeology specifically (so that it ends with an angle on disciplinary futures in archaeology).
Shepherd3[1].pdfNovember 13: Joint with the JIAAW Brown Bag
Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach (George Mason University) Hydraulic Society and Water Quality: Constraints and Possibilities in the Ancient and Contemporary Maya Worlds Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology, 70 Waterman Street, Seminar Room
December 4: Why Karen Barad matters to archaeology
Benjamin Alberti, Framingham State College
Yvonne Marshall, University of Southampton
Abstract
Karen Barad’s radical revision of ontology collapses the division between matter and meaning, human/non-human, animate/inanimate, arguing that agency is not a property of things and does not originate in human intention and therefore the agency of other beings and of objects is not dependant on and secondary to human agency. Rather agency is understood as an action or doing exercised by all matter, whether human, non-human or inanimate. This assertion cuts to the very core of what archaeologists do – or at least think they do – as the discipline of archaeology is founded on the principle that the nature of human social worlds, and possibly human intention, can be read through the effects human action has on the material world. In other words, matter bears the mark of human agency. Matter itself exercises agency only to the extent that it acts as a secondary agent enabling human intention to be realised. The discipline of archaeology rests on this premise – a premise which Karen Barad argues is untenable. If archaeologists take Barad’s argument on board the implications for the way we think and do archaeology are fundamental. These are outlined using skeletal remains and pots as examples of how the ontological implications of Barad’s agential realism transform archaeological thought and practice.
Readings:
Webmoor and Witmore 2008 Things are Us!: A commentary on Human/Things Relations under the Banner of a 'Social' Archaeology
