Thanks to Ruth Tringham, Tim Webmoor and I had the opportunity to have lunch and coffee yesterday with Tim Ingold, a Professor of Anthropology and Head of the Department at the University of Aberdeen. Ingold is well known as a creative thinker across both anthropology and archaeology. Much of his work is on human perception of the environment in the vein of what he regards as an ecological perspective.

Over lunch and coffee we casually discussed common affinities between his work and our own in terms of a symmetrical archaeology. Conversation centered upon the notion of materiality as it is currently utilized in both anthropology and archaeology at large. We have a common frustration.
Paradoxically, the fashionable notion of materiality seems to have moved us further way from reality—the material world (Ingold would say the environment) populated by things, animals, etc. Materiality, it seems, has become the sole dominion of human subjectivity. For Ingold, materiality, in a sense, has been dematerialized.
Here Ingold’s concern echoes Bjørnar Olsen’s call for material cultural studies to move on from ‘the familiar story of how the subject, the social, the episteme, created the object; the story that everything is language, action, mind and human bodies’ (Olsen 2003, 100). Materiality has been over-dramatized to the wrong end, or at least a bit too far to one side of a divide which is of our own making!
Symmetrical archaeology excavates underneath the distanced, detached, and distinct view of the world and articulates the entanglement of humans and things. Indeed, our concern lies with the action and qualities of things in the context of these entangled sets of relations with humans.
But there is more to this. Materiality is too vague, too messy, too ambiguous a term for Ingold. Rather he seeks classification, precision, and order. Ingold is after more exacting categories that will aid anthropologists and archaeologists alike in a “sensible inquiry” into the material world. And, indeed, for this to occur we should not deal with the materiality of objects but with materials and their properties.
The properties of materials provide standards to power observations for overcoming the ambiguity of materiality. Things are gatherings, but not just of different materials. Things also gather together the people/material relations with different materials. With a new set of finer grained, classificatory schema we can build knowledge.
But, wait. Hold on. We need to slow down a bit, because I believe we have witnessed a similar pendulum swing before: from the complex and multiple to the concrete and exact and, after a generation or so, back again.
This is not a swing of the pendulum as if there was a choice between the ambiguity of materiality and the concreteness of material categories; rather this is a series of shifts along a passage between two simultaneous situations (the material world and properties of materials) with multiple intermediaries.
While I share Ingold’s frustration and find common ground with much of his work, my concern is that the powers of multiplicity, which the term ‘materiality’ holds on to, should not be forgotten in this passage. To be sure, multiplicity, raw complexity, ambiguity and materiality hold profound possibility (Serres 1995; also Witmore 2004a). They should neither be regarded as against categories of classification nor always completely subsumed to them. It is worth repeating over and over again—there is more to understanding than meaning.
I believe that we must understand materiality and properties of materials not as antithetical but as two circulating states of relations on either end of a process of acquiring definition. The movement from one state to the other is always a simultaneous process of reduction and amplification (Latour 1999; Witmore 2004b). Some people sample the world for properties of materials, but not everyone engages with things in the same way. As an archaeologist, the documentation of the material past requires various modes of engagement. This documentation requires rich mixtures of media.
Materiality should always be situated outside of the black box. It is never simply reducible to the social. It has never been solely of the material. It is the realm of the chaotic imbroglio. We must seek to understand it symmetrically.
References
Olsen, B., 2003: Material culture after text. Re-membering things, Norwegian archaeological review 36(2), 87-104.
Latour, B., 1999: Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Serres, M., 1995: Genesis, (tr. G. James and J. Nielson), Ann Arbor.
Witmore, C.L., 2004a: ‘Four Archaeological Engagements with Place: Mediating Bodily Experience through Peripatetic Video’, Visual Anthropology Review 20(2), 57-71.
Witmore, C.L., 2004b: ‘On Multiple Fields. Between the Material World and Media: Two Cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece’, Archaeological Dialogues 11(2), 133-164.