European Journal of Archaeology
DOI: 10.1177/14619571070100020705
European Journal of Archaeology 2007; 10; 231
Marisa Lazzari
Book Review: V. Oliveira Jorge and J. Thomas, eds, Overcoming the
Modern Invention of Material Culture. (Porto: ADECAP, Journal of Iberian
Archaeology 9[10], 2006_2007, Special Issue)
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V. Oliveira Jorge and J. Thomas, eds, Overcoming
the Modern Invention of Material Culture. (Porto:
ADECAP, Journal of Iberian Archaeology 9[10],
2006–2007, Special Issue)
This volume addresses the long overdue question
of the dualism underlying the expression
‘material culture’, a concept that has dominated
much of archaeological research over
the last decades, while coming to designate a
new field of interdisciplinary academic
inquiry. The editors duly introduce the volume
by addressing the fact that words are
never innocent. The words we choose engender
social categories and taxonomies, therefore
discussing and revising conceptual labels are
never self-indulgent intellectual exercises but
a constitutive aspect of any research agenda.
Collected here are the presentations given at
the 2006 TAG meeting in Exeter. An article by
Ingold (2007), who was also the discussant,
was pre-circulated among the participants.
This enabled the authors to engage more thoroughly
with Ingold’s critique of the distinction
between a ‘material’ and a ‘cultural’ order
implied in the term, and the seemingly spurious
attempts to overcome it that are concealed
in the now increasingly popular term ‘materiality’
as a background for their discussions.
Undoubtedly Ingold (2000, 2007) has been
one of the main voices rising against the delusions
of modernity’s dichotomous thinking,
and his ideas are insightful and operative in
pushing the discipline forward. Yet there is
largely a suspicious attitude, as if archaeologists
and other scholars concerned with materials
required a ‘detective’ to highlight the
tracks of taken-for-granted categories. This
suspiciousness is a common thread uniting the
articles, as most of the chapters open by indicating
how previous or current approaches to
things are ‘still modern’ even when claiming
not to be so, before outlining their proposed
ways to move forward. However, one of the
greatest shortcomings of this otherwise worthy
endeavour is the fact that only a few articles
address this question through an engagement
with materials.
Many of the chapters that do engage with
materials seem to use them as excuses for discussing
theoretical positions in ways that
remain more declamatory than interpretive
and, in general, the book does not provide the
reader with an adequate sense of the unavoidable
presence of materials in past worlds.
While authors steadfastly reiterate that things
are ‘gatherings’, ‘bundles of relations’, or ‘convergences’,
they are nevertheless relegated to
the background of these exciting ideas. This
contradiction at the heart of the book reminds
us of earlier projects in archaeology, and
presages a deeper question.
Indeed, this agenda seems in line with early
postprocessual critique, when the ‘archaeological
unconscious’ was the preferred target of
analysis and the tangible order somehow
receded in the background, as an excuse or
entry point to talk about meaningful human
action in both the past and the present. As I
have just said, whilst the critique of categories
is necessary work and thus constitutive of our
craft (and I have engaged in such a tracking
myself), one wonders whether the project is
running counter to its own propositions. For if
our knowledge of the world is embodied, and
thinking does not take place outside our
involvement in the world, one must assume
that binary categories are somehow a part of
our intersubjective, embodied existence. That
is, binaries may not only be a manifestation of
hegemonic thinking, but also a part of how we
experience the world in which we are brought
into being. Therefore, how can we claim to
‘overcome’ them? And isn’t this aspiration to
overcome historically given notions intrinsically
dialectical and modern? This means that
since our resources are polluted, the critical
examination of the conditions and parameters
of knowledge production is necessarily a collective
endeavour. Yet this can only work effectively
if we find ways of not only discussing,
but also of researching and writing that fully
embrace materials and their complexities.
The relevant question is perhaps how to
deconstruct the categories in ways that are
more sensitive to the experience of other
societies (as well as our own), while avoiding
the pitfalls of either reifying difference (both
in the past and the present), or seamlessly
connecting the past and present in genealogies
of endurance.
One of the preferred paths chosen by the
authors has been to use ethnography as suggestive
of potentialities in human societies.
Although offering new understandings that are
helpful in highlighting the richness of human
experience beyond what has been delineated
by Modernity, many times the ideas put forward
by these works are discussed without
fully engaging with their relevance to the contexts
under study. In other words, a lifeworld –
formed by elements of various kinds – may
afford particular material textures that may or
may not be similar to what the particular
archaeological context we study discloses.
Whilst ethnography allows us to think differently
about our materials, we need to go further
and actually trace the assemblages and
gatherings of things, and the relations that create
the very fabric of things. Admittedly, this
task exceeds the limits imposed by the conference
format, but some chapters in the volume
have managed to introduce interesting discussions
weaving practices and materials seamlessly
despite space limitations (e.g. chapters by
Hoffman; Lynch; TroncosoM.).
This might be related to a limited view of
materiality, which seems to be understood as a
discursive mask preventing us from seeing that
things emerge from a field of relations and
incorporate in their formthe processes by which
they come into being. ‘Materials’ (or ‘artefacts’:
Ingold 2000:340–348, 2007) is a good-enough
word to describe such a process. ‘Material culture’
assumes that materiality (as physicality) is
impenetrable, only wrapped around by culture
(as the imposition of meaning), and in this view,
the recent use ofmateriality in social theory continues
this understanding.
This is of course a very valid point that
may never be covered satisfactorily by any
single perspective. Although this could be
accused of spinning the discussion into superficial
semantics, I have argued elsewhere that
materiality is a necessary word to address the
relationality of the world (Lazzari 2005). It
implies a different way of conceiving the tangible,
beyond function and technicality,
but including the capacities of the physical
properties of things to modify human perception
and action. Artefacts help us enter beyond
the physical into the realm of the imaginary in
the sense of Merleau Ponty (1975), that is, as
generated by lived bodies rather than
detached consciousnesses. In this sense, the
tangible is not something to be transcended in
order to create meaning. In line with what
most of the authors of the book argue, the tangible
is itself an emergent property of myriad
lived relations of various orders and kinds. Yet
unlike many of the authors, materiality as a
concept enables our immersion in such orders
and kinds without forgetting the tangible. Our
thick descriptions of past lifestyles should
engage with the full life of artefacts, even
when their various performances as active
bodies may have been apparently contradictory.
This requires overcoming traditional separations
between classes of materials; only in
relation to each other (and to other elements
of the lifeworld) do artefacts reveal their
multiplicity. Thus carefully tracked interrelations
between material classes and past practices
may reveal the multi-layered nature of
artefacts (e.g. as ambiguous performers caught
between representational projects and their
dissolution). Such an angle may be missed
from an analysis that focuses on single material
classes that only have dialogue with contemporary
ethnography (cf. Alberti’s critique
in the volume).
The concern about the relational constitution
of the tangible and the multiplicity of
things has a long and more complex genealogy
than the authors seem to accept. Merleau Ponty
(2000:163) proposed the continuity of bodies
and things in the fabric of the world. Lefebvre
(1991:222) described things as textures, nodes in
fields of relation; a lived fabric of rhythms and
relationships learned and understood through
praxis. Also Mauss (1968 [1939]), often taken as
a ‘suspect’ of Cartesianism, preceded recent
inquiries into the etymology of the word ‘matter’,
highlighting the animated and relational
understandings that had been erased by modern
thinking. Even Marx – another suspect –
disclosed like few others the absurd operations
behind the conceptual separation of mind and
matter (Marx 1977; see Stallybrass 1998).
Deleuze and Guattari (1987:21) called
dualisms ‘the necessary enemy, the furniture
we are forever rearranging’. Overcoming our
entrenched conceptualizations of the world is
an ongoing project that travels back and forth,
therefore all efforts should be welcome. This
volume succeeds at introducing a necessary
discussion and encourages a promising disciplinary
shift toward relational ontology; yet
by keeping materials in the background it may
undermine the broader impact, both in the
discipline and beyond, that it seeks to achieve.
REFERENCES
DELEUZE, G. and F. GUATTARI, 1987. A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.Minneapolis:
University ofMinnesota Press.
INGOLD, T., 2000. The Perception of the
Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and
Skill. London: Routledge.
INGOLD, T., 2007. Materials against materiality.
Archaeological Dialogues14(1):1–16.
LAZZARI, M., 2005. The texture of things:
Objects, people and social spaces in NW
Argentina (first millennium AD). In L. Meskell
(ed.), Archaeologies of Materiality: 126–161.
Oxford: Blackwell.
LEFEBVRE, H., 1991. The Production of Space.
Oxford: Blackwell.
MAUSS, M., 1968. Conceptions qui ont précedé
la notion de matiére (Conference, 1939). In V.
Karady (pres.), OEuvres II: 161–166. Paris:
Editions de Minuit.
MARX, K., 1977. On Mills. In D. McLellan (ed.),
Karl Marx: Selected Writings: 114–123. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
MERLEAU PONTY, M., 1975. The Visible and the
Invisible. Evanston, IL: North Western
University Press.
MERLEAU PONTY, M., 2000. Eye and mind. In J.
Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception: 159–190.
Evanston, IL: NorthWestern University Press.
STALLYBRASS, P., 1998. Marx’s coat. In P. Spyer
(ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in
Unstable Places: 183–207. London: Routledge.
Marisa Lazzari
Department of Archaeology,
University of Exeter, UK
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