TAG 2005

A symmetrical archaeology

Bjørnar Olsen (University of Tromsø, Norway), Michael Shanks (Stanford University), Timothy Webmoor (Stanford University), and Christopher Witmore (Stanford University)

Archaeology has long struggled with or even straddled divides as those between the material and the social, the present and the past, and the sciences and humanities. Caught in what can be broadly construed as a cyclical fluctuation between concerns with realism and constructivism, epistemology and ontology, objectivity and subjectivity our history of disciplinary "turns" associated with the negotiation of such divides is familiar to many. In this session we suggest a series of paths that do not lead to the continuation of such cycles of "dialectical war," which faithfully and persistently repeat the gesture of the Kantian (Copernican) revolution.

Symmetrical archaeology gathers approaches that share the conviction that the world is far better represented and understood if conceived of in terms of mixtures and entanglements rather than dualisms and oppositions. It poses a radical levelling of the way we treat humans and things, both in our articulations of the material past and in our reflexive analyses of our own archaeological practices. However, this is not a claim to an undifferentiated world. We acknowledge the differences between entities but conceive of them as non-oppositional or relative facilitating collaboration, delegation and exchange. Through the application of the principle of symmetry we attend, not to how people get on in the world, but rather to how a collective, the entanglement of humans and nonhumans, negotiates a complex web of interactions with a diversity of other entities.

In accentuating links and crossovers with science studies, pragmatism, semiotics and empirical philosophy, this session reconfigures our understandings of human relationships with the material world in ways that are not necessarily subject to modernist thought. This session gathers together practitioners who wish to demonstrate how archaeology can set alternative agendas in the humanities and sciences by articulating a new "ecology" packed with things, mixed with humans, and which prioritizes the multitemporal and multisensorial presence of the material world.

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