(Re)assembling Communities

Assemblages and Scale in Archaeology

“…Similarly we can treat individual people as an assemblage -of bones, flesh, cultural dispositions, needs, desires, intentions, and memories and so on -and equally we can treat entire communities as such too. Here the assemblage is made up of people of course, but also plants, houses, animals of various kinds, institutions, rules and so on (Harris 2014a). This means that all assemblages are in themselves made up of other assemblages (DeLanda 2016).…”

“…Fowler 2013;Lucas 2012;Witmore 2014), to give just a few examples. They have also been influential on my own work in a number of areas (Harris 2013;2014a;2014b;2016a;2016b; forthcoming). One of the strengths of assemblages that has so far only been discussed in passing, however, is the way they work at multiple scales, from an atom all the way up to a galaxy; from the act of typing on a keyboard to the development of the internet.…”

Mobility and African archaeology: an introduction

“…For example, Knappett (2011: 100-102) draws on Piercean semeiotics and the triadic sign system of index, icon and symbol to illustrate how things used and made in the immediate can 'transcend the proximate' through evocation of a larger sphere of meaning and significance; symbols are thus consumed in the present and now and yet are also understood and interpreted through a larger set of shared conventions and structured meanings. This meshing of the proximate with the distant resonates with wider ideas around a reconfigured understanding of community that goes beyond co-presence (Harris 2014) to include the 'imagined' community of the non-visible and non-immediate. In a similar vein, 'memory work' researchers have examined how building and shaping memories through practice can maintain larger networks (or imagined communities) while also countering these hegemonic narratives.…”

The potential for Assemblage thinking in population geography: Assembling population, space, and place

“…The impact agenda has raised the profile of population spaces such as localities or the “community” as an appropriate scale at which to govern through. Such an approach, utilising the Assemblage's coding (the motives, desires, and beliefs of a population) can be mobilised to meet the objectives of those seek “impact” (Harris, ; Li, ). Therefore, whilst recognising the contributions of technical knowledges and how the practice of creating it is an important role for population geographers to reflect upon, we also should complement these with the strengths of relational approaches to capture the “people” and the relations that shape population geographies, for example, building on the work of residential mobility and moving desires (Coulter, ; Coulter & Scott, ; Coulter, Van Ham, & Findlay, ).…”