Unintended Consequences? Monumentality as a Novel Experience in Formative Mesoamerica

Joyce, Rosemary A.

doi:10.1023/b:jarm.0000014346.87569.4a

Cited by 116 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Such localized know-how also would have been contingent on or motivated by attempts to conform to or avoid someone else's construction practices or the memories and meanings associated with them, adding a political element to the process. To the extent that any given practice involved collective labor or coordinated performances, it probably created communal sensibilitiesor resistance to such sensibilities-memorialized in physical form by the post or post structure (sensu Bradley, 1998;Joyce, 2004;Pauketat, 2000;Paynter and McGuire, 1991).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agency in a Postmold? Physicality and the Archaeology of Culture-Making

Paüketat

Alt

2005

J Archaeol Method Theory

111

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Architecture embodies human agency in all of its dimensions and effective scales.Specifically, the wooden posts of Mississippian peoples in the American midcontinent were simultaneously spatial, material, and corporeal dimensions of the process of cultural construction and contestation. Our reconsideration of the lowly postmold is based on the principle of physicality that, in turn, alters the ways in which we pose research questions and interpret archaeological data. A historicalprocessual methodology involves three procedural fundamentals: identifying practical variability, comparing genealogies of practices, and tacking between lines of evidence at multiple scales of analysis. KEY WORDS: agency; practice; architecture; Mississippian.Recent trends in archaeology bring fundamental anthropological questions back to the drawing board: What causes cultural change? How are we to understand it? Admittedly, some contemporary answers to these questions may seem more complicated than the questions themselves, involving theories-agency, practice, performance, landscape, embodiment, etc.-around which a succession of avant-garde camps have pitched their tents (

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agency in a Postmold? Physicality and the Archaeology of Culture-Making

Paüketat

Alt

2005

J Archaeol Method Theory

111

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“…This specific concern with human agency is present in several studies along the Georgia coast, particularly in the work of Saunders (1998Saunders ( , 2000aSaunders ( , 2002aSaunders ( , 2009 regarding Guale resistance to Spanish hegemony. While we applaud this research as it brings to light the various actions and intentions of actors, recent theoretical scholarship questions traditional applications of agency (Joyce, 2004;Blanton and Fargher, 2008: 5-6). Therefore, these theoretical constructs require some modification, refinement, and exposition in the context of the current study.…”

Section: Agency Historical Archaeology and Colonial Eventsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Applications of agency, practice, praxis, and the like are de rigueur in anthropological historical archaeology; however, many such studies are critiqued for their lack of attention to structure (Joyce, 2004; see also Francis and Kole, 2011). In addition, the use of agency in archaeology often assumes that all social change comes from the action of individuals, usually the self-interested kind, ignoring other sources of social change (Kristiansen, 2004;Carr and Case, 2006: 36-42).…”

Section: Agency Historical Archaeology and Colonial Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life among the tides : recent archaeology on the Georgia Bight : proceedings of the Sixth Caldwell Conference, St. Catherines Island, Georgia, May 20-22, 2011.

Thomas¹,

Thompson²,

Alexander³

et al. 2013

Anthropol. Pap. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist.

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“…Whether the creation of social difference effected is seen as relatively intentional, largely unintentional (Joyce, 2004b), or somewhere in between (Love, 1999), the new architectural projects are seen as stratifying space and creating the potential for differential experience and knowledge. These building projects directly affected the bodily practices of community members, and through their embodied experiences community members incorporated what all these authors argue were largely nondiscursive dispositions.…”

Section: Repetition In Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

PostScript: Doing Agency in Archaeology

Joyce

Lopiparo

2005

J Archaeol Method Theory

Self Cite

110

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We argue that since agency and structure are indivisible parts of a single process through which society is continuously created over time, everything that persists or changes in archaeological sites is evidence of agency. The challenge is to adopt appropriate descriptive levels and language to avoid falsely dividing agency and structure. Successful archaeological studies use networks and chains as models or metaphors for connections in sequences of action over time. We argue that models must also link micro-scale actions to outcomes on the macroscale. Because theories of agency differ in the degree of freedom of action they assume, archaeologists must also clearly identify their own position with respect to constraints on action.We suggest that whenever archaeologists manage to do analyses of agency right, we are simultaneously talking about agency and structure, since these are not alternatives, but inseparable parts of a single process (Giddens, 1979, pp. 53, 69-70). Moore (2000) suggested that archaeologists think about structure and agency dialectically. While forcing us to keep agency and structure linked, in practice this still risks allowing us artificially to separate structure (interpreted as institutions) from agency (interpreted as action). It risks our envisioning the past as an alternation of moments of the exercise of agency in an otherwise continuous flow of structure.Our position is that structure and agency do not alternate. Structured agency is exercised in sequences of practices that recapitulate and transform prior actions, sequences that we can recognize as structures at scales from the individual technical practice to the collective coordinated experience of long-enduring landscapes. Structuration is simultaneously the exercise of agency and the constitution

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Unintended Consequences? Monumentality as a Novel Experience in Formative Mesoamerica

Cited by 116 publications

References 42 publications

Agency in a Postmold? Physicality and the Archaeology of Culture-Making

Agency in a Postmold? Physicality and the Archaeology of Culture-Making

Life among the tides : recent archaeology on the Georgia Bight : proceedings of the Sixth Caldwell Conference, St. Catherines Island, Georgia, May 20-22, 2011.

PostScript: Doing Agency in Archaeology

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