Regional Approaches to Society and Complexity - Alex R. Knodell
14. The Way Things Are...
Regional Approaches to Society and Complexity - Alex R. Knodell
A. Bernard Knapp [+]
University of Glasgow
Description
Appadurai’s edited volume The Social Life of Things (1986) first sought to highlight multiple ways in which ‘things’, like people, have active social lives, even biographies. Since then, this train of thought has taken multiple turns, and gone through many diversions and amplifications to, amongst others, agency, materiality and object/material agency, the ‘cognitive life of things’, human-thing ‘entanglements’, ‘symmetrical’ archaeology and the ‘new materialisms’. The end result appears to be a sweeping critique of ‘anthropocentricity’, in which it is argued that the archaeological study of cultures need not have any reference to humans, whether agents, individuals, subjects, or collectivities, but instead must focus on the nexus amongst things. Things, then, are not just tokens or surrogates for human acts or activities, but rather act as material agents in their own right. Taking some materials from archaeometallurgy — specifically that of Bronze Age Cyprus as known from regional archaeological survey and excavation — as my point of discussion, this paper critiques the overall notion of ‘material agency’ and considers the cultural biography of metallurgical ‘things’, seeking to separate the chaff of materiality from the wheat of material culture.