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48 Chapter Three Becoming, Phenomenal Change, Event Past and Archaeological Re-presentations Dušan Boric´ Abstract First, the paper examines the usefulness of Braudel’s tripartite division of history and subsequent discussions about the approaches of the Annales school of historical analyses within the field of phenomenological philosophy provided by Paul Ricoeur. This critique argues that the event should be seen as the main site of historical analyses since the notion of event, of different qualities and duration, conflates the longue durée levels identified by Braudel: geohistory happens on the human scale and in relation to trends and specific events while economies or empires of the second level equally depend on determining events. Implications for archaeology are examined. Second, the paper discusses the microhistorical “politics of event.” Event is seen as the “principle of individuation” that emerges out of the perpetual process of becoming . Can archaeology tell a story of potentialities, of failed projects of history, of “non-events”? And, are microhistorical, individual narratives and events “slender clues” of much larger phenomena, or are different scales of historical analyses incommensurable ? These questions are illustrated by an example of determining events of structured abandonment of built and mortuary features in a series of collective re-presentations within the context of changing cultural repertoires affecting Mesolithic foragers in the Danube Gorges of the Balkans from 6300 to 5900 cal BC. For when something occurs, it may be said that that which previously remained only a potential or a virtuality now emerges and becomes actual, though only in place of something else that could have arisen here at this time, but did not. This double “difference”— between what is here now but previously was not—and between what emerged and what did not, in all of its complexity and fatality and in all of its pregnant virtuality or potentiality is what I will call “the event.” The event is a principle of individuation. (Kwinter 2001:48–49). Becoming, Phenomenal Change, Event 49 Introduction It has recently been suggested that William Sewell’s work (e.g., 2005) and his concept of the event in historical narratives can be a useful way also for archaeologists to think through their case studies and to come up with a novel perspective on the question of “structural change” in history (Beck et al. 2007). Yet, I feel that the Sewell’s definition of event is very particular. Events are, according to Sewell, “rapid transformations of structure.” I would like to suggest in this paper that it is important to keep the definition of the notion of event open, recognizing that it could be of different durations, to include both brief happenings that are not necessarily seen to have changed structures and changes that occur on longer time scales, including lifecycles of institutions, and even those events on the scale of geohistory. The reasons for these are both methodological and ontological/ethical for the disciplines of archaeology and history. In this paper, I would like to examine the notion of event and theories of phenomenal change from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) discussion on becoming (following Bergson). In the world of seemingly stable phenomena, connecting events to becoming should be seen as a way of breaking out from the confines of “flattened” and spatialized time in an attempt to take temporal duration seriously (cf. Kwinter 2001). In what follows, first I discuss the trajectory with regard to the use of the notion of event in the Annales school and a subsequent critique of certain of its elements provided from the perspective of phenomenological philosophy, with an important guidance offered by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Then, I discuss a possibility to use the notion of representation as a substitute for the use of notion of mentality in our discussions about the past reality and whether the notion of representation better serves the project of representing an eventful past. This then leads one to emphasize the microhistorical level of analyses as well as interdependence of different scales of inquiry. Here the notion of event is also related to the unfolding of individual projects, that is, to agents of social change, by illustrating these theoretical points with two examples that come from the Mesolithic-Neolithic Balkans. Further, I show how the “return of the event” and the individual as singularity has both methodological and ontological consequences in our attempts to represent the past. Finally, resurfacing from strictly methodological and epistemological concerns about the fate of...

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