Reflections on Posthuman Ethics. Grievability and the More-than-human Worlds of Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia

Eriksen, Marianne Hem; Kay, Kevin

doi:10.1017/s0959774321000561

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 47 publications

(59 reference statements)

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“…This preoccupation slots body imagery into bounded, familiar categories such as 'housewife', 'Freyr', 'warrior' and 'valkyrie'. I argue this relates to larger, conventional understandings of Scandinavian prehistory -where in many ways emphasis has been, and to some extent still is, placed on élite males as drivers of social change (see Brück & Fontijn 2013;Eriksen & Kay 2022), or else on mythological beings known from much later written sources. A research gaze fixated on the representation of objects is in no way unique to later prehistoric Scandinavia, but has consequences for the questions we explore.…”

Section: Out Of Taxonomic Prisonsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Body-Worldings of Later Scandinavian Prehistory: Making Oddkin with Two Body-Objects

Eriksen

2022

csa

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In the last two decades, the body has emerged as a rich field of theorization and scholarly exploration in archaeology. This paper is an excursion into a consideration of two bodyobjects of prehistoric Denmark: an anthropomorphic bronze figurine from the Fårdal assemblage dating to the late Bronze Age, and a figural gold foil with an anthropomorphic stamp from Sorte Muld, created perhaps as much as 1 500 years later, in the Merovingian period (550–750 CE). The two images are made in very different materials, in distinctly different forms, and belong to different historical situations. Nevertheless, the two artefacts render what are likely women’s bodies with clear differences, but also some uncanny similarities.This article explores these artefacts from a more-than-representational perspective. Moving beyond a taxonomic approach, it focuses on aspects of these images beyond what or who they ‘represent’. What can such an approach tell us about the capacities of bodies, as well as the capacities of the artefacts themselves? This entails, following the work of Donna Haraway, worlding them in two vastly different social, material and political worlds; drawing out their making from two very different technological processes; engaging with the similarities and differences of their biographies; and, crucially, thereby contemplating their kinship.

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Section: Out Of Taxonomic Prisonsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Body-Worldings of Later Scandinavian Prehistory: Making Oddkin with Two Body-Objects

Eriksen

2022

csa

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“…Taking issue with this position, however, we suggest that in the current climate, ethics, responsibility and care (as a form of active and solution-oriented concern) are also designations in need of rethinking (for related critique see e.g. Cobb and Crellin 2022; Crellin 2020; Crellin and Harris 2021; Eriksen and Kay 2022). And by highlighting the relations between ethics and aesthetics – between responsibility and care – we want to suggest hesitation and speculation as dispositions equally ethical and important to urgency and impact.…”

Section: Framing and Positioningmentioning

confidence: 98%

Archaeological encounters: Ethics and aesthetics under the mark of the Anthropocene

Pétursdóttir

Sørensen

2023

Arch. Dial.

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What legitimizes archaeological work in an age of global climate change, socio-political crises and economic recession? On what topics should archaeology focus its research questions, and what forms of archaeological engagement are not merely justifiable but able to make a difference in light of such challenges? Today, there is a tendency, we argue, that archaeological responses to current challenges are expected to align with a specific mode of conduct, political stance and genre, where, for example, a very particular notion of activism, responsibility and ethics is dominating. There is no denial that current challenges call for immediate instrumental reactions, but we contend that valuable reactions can – or even must – vary, and that more fundamental and slow ontological and epistemological change should also be nested within these responses. In this article, we explore what it means to care – what it means to be concerned – in the Anthropocene through archaeological practice and aesthetic engagement. By highlighting the relations between ethics and aesthetics, we explore ways in which we get in touch with the objects of concern, placing undecidability and speculation as dispositions equally important to urgency and impact.

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“…The second example comes from Marianne Eriksen and Kevin Kay's (2022) discussion of the ontological relationships between things, animals and Homo sapiens in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia. They show how things like swords, houses and some animals like horses may have been treated as ontologically equal to humans, being buried in similar ways to Scandinavians who were deemed fully human thereby transforming them into bodies whose deaths could be grieved and mourned.…”

Section: Humanist Missteps In Posthumanist Archaeologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humanist Missteps, A Black Studies Critique of Posthumanist Archaeologies

Greer

2024

CAJ

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Posthumanist archaeologies have attempted to move beyond humanist conceptions of the human for over a decade. But they have done so by primarily focusing on the ontological split between humans and non-human things. This only addresses one part of humanism, as Black studies scholars have long argued that it also equates humanity writ large with white, economically privileged, cis-gendered, heterosexual men, thereby excluding everyone else from the category of the human. They further argue that the violence and oppression inflicted on those excluded from humanism's definition of the human allows this ontological category to come into being. This article introduces Black studies’ critiques of humanism and applies them to posthumanist archaeologies. Ultimately, it argues that by not attending to the critiques raised by Black studies scholars, posthumanist archaeologies have inadvertently made humanist missteps wherein they continue using elements of humanism's definition of the human in their attempts to move beyond humanism.

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Reflections on Posthuman Ethics. Grievability and the More-than-human Worlds of Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia

Cited by 7 publications

References 47 publications

Body-Worldings of Later Scandinavian Prehistory: Making Oddkin with Two Body-Objects

Body-Worldings of Later Scandinavian Prehistory: Making Oddkin with Two Body-Objects

Archaeological encounters: Ethics and aesthetics under the mark of the Anthropocene

Humanist Missteps, A Black Studies Critique of Posthumanist Archaeologies

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