Archaeological Visions

Abstract

It is argued here that the desire to make things visible that underwrites archaeological research is an effect of the Western split between subject and object. This conforms a matrix of 'optic knowledge', or the totalizing gaze of an all-knowing subject, that infuses our language and practices with visual metaphors. The critical consideration of visual metaphors is particularly relevant for gender studies in archaeology and their desire to make women visible. However, this desire also enables the re-signification of vision as a connected experience within a field of social and material forces, thus exposing gender, or any other aspect of social difference, as part of a field of relational practices. KEYWORDSdifference q gender q object q relational field q representations q subject q visuality

An Introduction to Relational Personhood and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology

“…Severin Fowles (2010:25) worries that in our efforts to narrow the subject-object divide, we risk overlooking the "more complicated world of relations in which, packed between the multitudes of self-evident things, are crowds of non-things, negative spaces, lost or forsaken objects, voids or gaps-absences, in other words, that also stand before us as entity-like presences with which we must contend." Similarly, Marisa Lazzari (2003Lazzari ( , 2005 notes that archaeologists' desire to make things visible and our quest to uncover the "real" meaning behind the symbolic or metaphorical thing is linked with the Western tendency to divide subjects and objects. This perspective echoes a broader postmodernist critique of the interpretative (representationalist) approach to personhood that dominated the post-processual movement, where the human body and the individual were given primacy (Skousen and Buchanan 2015:3).…”

“…This perspective echoes a broader postmodernist critique of the interpretative (representationalist) approach to personhood that dominated the post-processual movement, where the human body and the individual were given primacy (Skousen and Buchanan 2015:3). Lazzari (2003) and others advocate an alternative ontology that considers both the seen and the unseen in knowledge building and emphasizes "the relational nature and mutual constituency of both the subject and the object" (Lazzari 2003:200).…”