Matt Ratto, Michael Shanks and Christopher Witmore organized a session at the Society for Social Studies of Science conference in Pasadena, CA this past weekend (October 20-22). The conference focus was on “The Representation of Controversial Objects: New Methods of Displaying the Unruly and the Anomalous in Science and Technology Studies.”
Here is the abstract from our session “The Past: What an Unruly Thing!” :
Archaeology as a discipline has always had to play a dangerous game, working both to explain and contain the past through scientific means and, at the same time, seeking to explore and manifest history as an interpretive and hermeneutic object. In this sense, Archaeology stretches over the divide (marked even more clearly by the “science wars”,) between science and the humanities, with archaeologists recognizing that they often have to play both sides.
One recent response to this has been the incorporation of new means of representing and engaging with the past; traditional archaeological tools such as the map, the photograph, the scale model, and the material archive have been supplemented by computation simulations, visual models, new forms of performance and other modes of engaging with and articulating history. This work takes many forms and draws upon such diverse fields as economics, physics, and computer science, as well as architecture, literature, cultural and theater studies. As such, much of it sits in a complex relationship to modernist epistemics, and works to balance probablistic theories of the past with possibilistic and interpretive stances.
This panel attempts to describe and explore recent developments in archaeology as a way of reflecting on the issue of representation and the “unruly object.” In the discussion that follows, we will reflect on the relationship between STS and archaeology.
Michael and Chris were able to highlight a number of Metamedia projects oriented toward manifesting qualities of the material world otherwise sieved away by conventional forms of documentation.
Our message: archaeology’s strained position stetched across the divide between the humanities and sciences is of interest to science studies.
Michael pointed to “three agendas or trends emerging in archaeology that lend force to archaeology’s uniqueness:
• an understanding of archaeology as mode of cultural production – a scientific practice working on what is left of the past, archaeology is not a discovery of the past per se;
• archaeology seen as a science of relations between people and things;
• archaeology as mediating practice – translating materiality and mediating past and present in future-oriented projects.”
Michael suggested “that these developments are of significant interest to science studies not least because they invoke:
• radically new ways of understanding cultural materiality;
• a new history and genealogy of humans and (cultural) artifacts (to include a pragmatogony);
• reevaluation of cultural heritage – the intimate relationship between tradition, the remains of history and contemporary cultural values and identities.”
In complementing Michael’s piece, Chris suggested “archaeology, unlike other sciences, actively transforms its fields of study. Archaeology transforms material/event contexts of practice into a combination of displaced things and media (plans, maps, diagrams, text, images, etc.). In this regard, archaeology always returns to a material world permanently transformed.
This transformative aspect of archaeology’s practice means we can only get one shot to manifest the material world sufficiently. Though we may not always be sure how the unruly qualities of the material past can make a difference in our practices now, we have to consider how archaeologists or an interested public will engage with the remnants of the material past 10, 50, 100 or more years from now. In this regard, we can only anticipate for future generations by giving something of our practice over to multiplicities, presences and ambiguities.”
Beyond programs of action science studies has yet to sufficienctly grasp the richness of things. Archaeology has much to contribute in terms of how it attends to issues of material presence, experience and multiplicity. Fortunately researchers and philosophers of science such as Matt Ratto, Laura Watts and Don Ihde are listening.