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9. Getting on with Things: A Material Metaphysics of Care
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196 Throughout this book we have made the case that we are more than ever merged with our material pasts, and that the things of those pasts push back. As we have often repeated, the reason why—and how—they push back cannot be reduced to this imbrication itself. Things are not merely “enslaved in some wider system of differential meaning” (Harman 2002, 280). They possess their own capacities, inhabit their own compartments; in short, they have at least partial autonomy. As a discipline concerned with things, archaeology helps one realize that objects cannot simply be sorted into the easy categories of “flatland philosophies” (Harman 2005, 231). Neither exhausted by their relations with other objects and people nor islands of unalloyed integrity, things blend both their inherent qualities and their alliances. This is why we have made the analogy to isotopic elements: real and enduring, while nonetheless shifting states of compositional stability.This holds whether we speak of Acrocorinth, Fussell’s Lodge, or a map of Teotihuacan. Archaeology’s intimacy with things and the processes that involve them in human affairs over the long term sheds light on the irreducibility of things in their bewildering differences and ambiguities. The irreducible paradox of things as fields in which we are immersed, while they simultaneously retain individuality and integrity, is not solely an issue of ontological or metaphysical concern. It also has wide-ranging ethical implications, which extend far beyond any disciplinary boundaries , archaeological or otherwise. However, the suggestion that humans chapter 9 Getting on with Things A Material Metaphysics of Care A Material Metaphysics of Care | 197 have neither generalized autonomy nor particular hegemony, that we reside among other entities in a differentiated, but not oppositional, world is countered with the expected, predictable, charge of reification. That is to say, putting humans on the same ontological footing as nonhumans inevitably evokes the modernist and humanist horror scenario of making people into things. Let’s not rush to cast out our Frankenstein’s Monsters, however. The radical ethical implication of our approach is to refit humanism’s tradition of attentiveness and care for people to embrace things and nonhumans as well, and in no small measure (so subtly worked out in Mary Shelley’s original). Also taking into consideration the current debates on environmental issues and the accelerated exhaustion of Earth’s bounty, such an inclusive ethics does not seem untimely, if even belated. In this chapter we conclude the book with an appeal for “collective care,” specifically, symmetrical care for people and things (and all nonhumans ), and the rapports between things, a care that is more responsive to the “wicked problems” characterizing the complexly interdependent circumstances of our contemporaneity. Furthermore, we urge archaeologists to practice their discipline with trust and confidence.What is needed today is an archaeology that looks back at its own past with neither embarrassment nor contempt, but with wonderment combined with the will to revitalize its important legacy. Archaeological Ethics Ethics have become a serious concern in archaeology. Indeed, surveying the literature one can find a number of ethical theories and positions (among many others, for example, see Green 1984; Hamilakis and Duke 2007; Karlsson 2004; Lynott and Wylie 1995; Scarre and Scarre 2006; Zimmerman, Vitelli, and Hollowell-Zimmer 2003). By the 1970s and into the 1980s, questions of how to act and issues of accountability increasingly became an outspoken agenda for archaeologists. During this period, normative issues as to how archaeologists conducted their work were debated and eventually codified into professional codes and ethical protocols. The adoption of its code of ethics by the Society for American Archaeology (SAA),1 the largest professional archaeological 1. See www.saa.org/AbouttheSociety/PrinciplesofArchaeologicalEthics/tabid/203 /Default.aspx (accessed April 13, 2012). 198 | Getting on with Things society in the world, was an indicator of the widespread urgency about taking normative issues seriously. What caused this turn? Alison Wylie, a primary participant in the formulation of the SAA’s Principles of Archaeological Ethics, suggests that the accelerating destruction of archaeological resources in the wake of increased land development and trade in illegal antiquities, coupled with the professionalization of cultural resource management (CRM) made the formalization of archaeology’s conservation ethic a necessary countermeasure (Lynott and Wylie 1995; Wylie 1996; 2006, 15). This move prompted a number of professional bodies to follow suit and establish codes for their members . For instance, the Register of Professional Archaeologists (RPA; formerly the Society of Professional Archaeologists [SOPA]) and the Archaeological Institute of America...