Rethinking emotion and material culture

Abstract

In this article, we wish to return to the suggestion made by Sarah Tarlow a decade ago about the importance of understanding emotions in archaeology as a central facet of human being and human actions. We suggest a further expansion of this that focuses exclusively on the relationship between material culture and emotions (as opposed to textually, verbally or iconographically informed approaches), and offer a vocabulary that may better equip archaeologists to incorporate emotions into their interpretations. We attempt to show the implications of such a vocabulary in a specific British Neolithic case study at the henge monument of Mount Pleasant.

Assemblages and Scale in Archaeology

“…But the process also exceeded the choices they made, it brought together other connections and meanings, it drew on traditions of practice, it would have had affective consequences for others watching that might have been other than those that the choices of the people directly involved intended (cf. Harris & Sørensen 2010). …”

The object of my affection: attachment security and material culture

“…We acknowledge that our lives are inextricably entangled with things (Hodder 2012;Malafouris 2015); however, our understanding of the emotional nature of this entanglement is still in its infancy. Emotions can be seen as woolly, indefinable and difficult to interpret (Harris 2006;Harris and Sørensen 2010) so research tends to focus on the social, technological and political meanings of material culture (Foxhall 2012;Tarlow 2012). Moreover to date most archaeological research which explicitly deals with emotions has tended to focus on attempts to identify the presence of individual emotions, in particular those which are aversive, such as grief (see, for example, Fleisher and Norman 2015;Grguric 2008;McCartney 2006).…”

Ampliar El Marco. Hacia Una Historia Material De Las Emociones Extending the Framework. Towards a Material History of the Emotions

“…En concreto, nos ayuda a ampliar nuestra selección de fuentes, dejando de depender únicamente de los textos para pasar a poder utilizar planos de ciudades 13 (Pernau, 2014: 542), representaciones artísticas (cultas o populares), restos arqueológicos (Harris y Sørensen, 2010), etcétera. Esta abundancia de nuevas fuentes implica también que la población alcanzada es mayor: no debemos reducirnos ya a aquellos que hablaban explícitamente de sus emociones, como defendía Rosenwein, sino que podemos prestar atención a las prácticas y relaciones materiales deducibles de fuentes textuales, por supuesto, pero también gráficas y materiales.…”