There are, I think, two types of philosophies that have set the agenda for archaeological theory after the linguistic turn, namely contemporary continental realism and classic American pragmatism. Both traditions are ample in their supply of realist and materialist thinkers (such as Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson or Charles Peirce and William James) that suit the needs of a contemporary archaeologist interested in things after the ‘material turn’.
speculative realism
Object orientations? A commentary on Graham Harman’s intervention in STS and archaeology
Graham Harman diagrams the ‘fourfold’ object for STSers and archaeologists at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, Oxford Graham Harman recently visited Oxford for a week as part of a Mellon funded Sawyer Seminar. The organisers, archaeologist Chris Gosden and geographer Sarah Whatmore, both of the University of Oxford, put together an innovative format…
An Archaeological Metaphysics of Care. On epistemography, heritage ecologies and the isotopy of the past(s)
A discussion yesterday with Bruno Latour, after his presentation “Manifesto for Compositionalism” at Oxford, hinged upon how we go about composing our collective world now that ‘nature’ is no longer an organizing category. The difficulty for analyses is that the modernist notion of nature supplied a related host of distinctions which we routinely call upon…
The realities of the past: archaeology, object-orientations, pragmatology
I have been fascinated by the implications of the speculative turn for archaeology for some time now (Graham Harman’s blog provides a conduit to the world of speculative realism; Harman currently has several books in press on the topic). I have been pulling together several pieces–aspects of which were presented in previous Theoretical Archaeology Group…