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FOUR. Agency and Ambiguity
- University of Texas Press
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So far I have primarily discussed the plaques as objects that were acted upon and manipulated by individuals and groups, and I return to this approach in the next chapter. Viewing material culture as the medium onto which and through which human agency acts is the traditional approach in archaeology and, when carried out with multiple methodologies, can indeed produce rich and varied insights. But an approach to material culture that views it merely as a passive receptacle of human values, skills, desires, needs, and information is incomplete. Material culture itself has an agency (Gell 1998; Wobst 2000; Dobres and Robb 2000:8), and the plaques are no exception. In a kinesthetic sense the plaques’ materiality—their material, form, and imagery—provoked (and provokes) and constrained (and constrains) the movement of human bodies, eyes, and minds. Their production, display, and disposal contributed to the structuring of social and cultural behavior (Giddens 1986). In this chapter I explore the different dimensions of the agency of the plaques, particularly in their imagery, employing insights from visual psychology, neurobiology, the anthropology of art, and visual culture studies. The physical and material properties of the Iberian plaques play an important role in their agency. The small scale of a plaque encourages the viewer to come close to it and to be still: it provokes intimacy. Its small size also restricts the number of people that can effectively see or read its imagery at any given time: it provokes secrecy. Its delicately incised engravings focus the viewer’s concentration: it commands our attention. Its symmetry is aesthetically pleasing, as symmetry in things—as well as in faces and human relationships—tends to be (Washburn and Crowe 1988:16; Enquist and Arak 1994; Washburn 1999). In general, a plaque creates a mental and physical space for privacy, reflection, and pleasurable concentration . As such, the plaques act in some of the same ways as do Neolithic European figurines in general, as argued recently by Douglass Bailey (2005). There are some important differences, however. The two-dimensionality of the plaques, usually with only one side engraved, channels and fixes the attention of the viewer toward a singular view. In contrast, the three-dimensional figurines of the Neolithic invite the viewer into a tactile and palpable realm, leading to multiple views. Ambiguities in the form and imagery of the plaques also contribute to their four agency and ambiguity agency. These ambiguities are of two varieties, low-level perceptual and high-level semantic ambiguity, and both ambiguities contribute to stilling the mind. In lowlevel perceptual ambiguity, two or more perceptual “readings” or interpretations occur without a change in stimulus (Stadler and Kruse 1995:5). Indeed, these readings seem to “oscillate” back and forth in the mind’s eye. Such multistable images often involve ambiguous fields and grounds, the classic case being the Necker cube (Figure 4.1). In Chapter 2 I discuss this kind of ambiguity in the case of the plaques with ambiguous fields and grounds. To review, for most plaques, the hatched design elements are complete and regular in contrast to the unhatched elements. In these cases it appears that the hatched elements were meant to be the design field, whereas the unhatched dark elements were intended to be the ground. In some plaques, however, some of the engraved elements are regular and complete, while some of their unengraved elements are also complete and regularly shaped. This multistability occurs in a number of the Classic and Transitional triangle plaques, particularly those found in sites of the Lisbon area (Figure 2.16). figur e 4.1. The Necker cube. [44.197.114.92] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:06 GMT) agency and ambiguity In addition to these lower-level ambiguities, the plaques also display higherlevel semantic ambiguities, evoking multiple, sometimes contradictory, meanings through their form and design. For example, they are made of hard stone, yet their designs often evoke the suppleness of textiles. They are axe-shaped, yet they sometimes have eyes. Some plaques have animal features, some appear humanlike, and some appear to be combinations of these different beings. Indeed, the plaques challenge a whole suite of binary oppositions and discrete material classifications: inanimate/animate, human/animal, and stone/textile. We could argue, however, that our entire visual world is ambiguous. Even in an act as low-level as depth perception our mind must deal with ambiguities, since images have only two dimensions when they reach our eyes. Our mind...