This academic year I am on sabbatical leave finishing three long-running projects and planning to focus more on applications of the archaeological imagination to matters of common and pressing contemporary concern, especially through design foresight and futures literacy. This is why I have put to one side my critical commentary on all things archaeological and…
meta-archaeology
A comment on “What comes after Post-processualism???”
On June 3 Cornelius Holtorf initiated an interesting discussion around the question “What comes after Post-processualism???” The discussion is extremely worthwhile and I wish add to a few comments in hopes of keeping it going. Processualism and post-processualism: the powers of the paradigm, manifold as they are, add to the persistence of these terms. What…
“What comes after Post-processualism???”
I recently attended the Nordic-TAG conference in Århus in Denmark. It was a gathering of some 200 Scandinavian archaeologists and archaeology students interested in theory. After one paper I made a comment that I did not find very original at the time, but I received so many reactions even after returning home that I am…
Id quod facimus sumus! (We are what we do!) A commentary on Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice: Cultural Encounters, Material Transformations
The disjuncture between ‘what we do’ and ‘what we say we do’ has contributed not only to a great deal of conversation and debate it has also lead to a fair amount of angst and misunderstanding in archaeology (i.e. theory/practice split or the homebase/field bifurcation). Many (myself included) firmly believe that this disjuncture can only…
Donna Haraway, Richard Rorty, Isabelle Stengers in conversation on Whitehead and Science and Technology @ Stanford
A panel of eminent scholars came together to discuss Alfred Whitehead’s relevance to current issues in science studies, technoscience and pragmatism. Beginning with Isabelle Stengers’ recent work on “Penser avec Whitehead”, the panel discussed the role of Whithead’s ‘propositions’ for facilitating non-reductive modes of understanding ‘common matters of concern’ in the sciences. Stengers and Haraway…