Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology

20. Afterword: Eleven Theses on the Archaeology of the Senses

409 20. Afterword: Eleven Theses on the Archaeology of the Senses Yannis Hamilakis I An archaeology of the senses is an impossible task. By this I mean that it is both unattainable and futile to attempt to produce a new subfield, in the same way that we have an archaeology of food, of death, of texts and documents, of pottery , and so on. This is not only because the senses occupy a different ontological ground in comparison with the kinds of materials and social practices and phenomena that are at the center of customary archaeological endeavor; it is also because to attach the research field of the “senses” to an accepted disciplinary category that we call “archaeology,” in other words to continue practicing “archaeology” as usual following the same norms and the same ontological and epistemological principles, and to expect to derive new, more “truthful” and more valid insights into the past would be a fallacy. It would soon lead to triviality, disappointment, and abandonment of the whole endeavor; the search for novel, trendier, and perhaps seemingly more “feasible” approaches would soon commence. II Archaeologies of the senses are, however, not only possible but also essential and feasible, not as representations of the past but as evocations of its materiality, contingency, and (multi)temporality, not as mimetic exercises or reconstructions but as explorations of the range of sensorial possibilities and affordances . The rich and insightful papers contained in this important volume testify to it. Sensorial experience produces place and materiality (cf. Williams, this volume) but at the same time relies on materiality in order to be set into Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, edited by Jo Day. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 40. © 2013 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois Univer­ sity. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-8093-3287-8. 410 Y. Hamilakis motion. The field of archaeology, having primary access to the materiality of the world through time, is in a privileged position, thus, to explore sensoriality and to contribute to the broader discussion on bodily experience and its social-power effects. The constitution of these archaeologies of the senses, however, requires the reconfiguration of the field of archaeology as a whole. The starting point for an archaeology of the senses should be a dual genealogical inquiry: the interrogation of the researcher’s personal sensory and sensuous stratigraphy, his or her sensorial education and socialization into specific modes of embodied interaction and conduct in the world; and the exploration of ab/senses in our own scholarly heritage, our socialization and incorporation into the apparatus of a (dis)embodied archaeology, an apparatus that was shaped by Western modernity and its dominant (but often diverse) bodily and sensorial regimes. These two genealogical projects should run in tandem, rather than as isolated exercises. Personal (as well as disciplinary) reflexivity is an essential requirement for an archaeology of the senses (cf. Holmberg, this volume). This excavation of one’s sensorial stratigraphy is necessary for many reasons: For a start, in our exploration of the sensoriality of the past, our own bodies are the most important guides and research tools; to unearth and thus expose one’s own sensorial education and conduct would be an important act of intellectual honesty and an opportunity for the reader or the intended audience to judge the validity and plausibility of statements. Furthermore , such an in-depth exploration of one’s sensorial past could become an important process of instruction, a corporeal education on the links between bodies , senses, memories, and materials. The biographical sensorial knowledge thus gained can prove invaluable for any further attempts to evoke past sensorialities. III The Western intellectuals’ inheritedAristotelian heritage, which divides the senses into distinct and finite entities (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste) and imposes a hierarchy on them (high/low, distant/close, primary/secondary, and so on), is an extremely problematic framework for any archaeology of the senses . As several anthropological studies have shown (e.g., Geurts 2002), this is a Western folk taxonomy, intricately linked to social and racial hierarchies, to logocentrism , to patriarchy, and more recently to capitalist modernity and middleclass values and norms of social engagement. Norbert Elias (1994) has eloquently demonstrated, for example, how sensorial bodily conduct, such as appropriate table manners, was a learned code and an index of upper- and middle-class respectability and distinction. Certain archaeological attempts, which implicitly adopt this Western sensorium, place one isolated sense at the center of their inquiry , often for purely...