What is Archaeology's "Mitigated Objectivism" Mitigated by? Comments on Wylie Michael Fotiadis American Antiquity, Vol. 59, No. 3. (Jul., 1994), pp. 545-555. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7316%28199407%2959%3A3%3C545%3AWIA%22OM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L American Antiquity is currently published by Society for American Archaeology.
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WHAT IS ARCHAEOLOGY'S "MITIGATED OBJECTIVISM"
MITIGATED BY? COMMENTS O N WYLIE
Michael Fotiadis In her recent work, Alison Wylie has sometimes claimed an important role for present politics in the constitution of archaeological facts, yet she has not fully documented such claims. ['sing the same materials as Wylie, namely the research on gender presented at the conference "Women and Production in Prehistory," held in South Carolina in 1988, I attempt to provide such documentation, arguing that its absence may undermine Wylie's (indeed, archaeology's/ "mitigated objectivism" as well as the facts emerging about prehistoric gender. I dispute neither the scientific integrity ofthose facts nor the rigor of Wyliek analysis. Like many before me, I puzzle about the relationship between truth andpolitics, and I regard the disjunction of the two notions, so obdurate in archaeology, as counterproductive, the source of contradictions and disabling ambivalences. I make at the end two suggestions about overcoming the notional disjunction of truth and politics, one adopted from Brumfiel and from Conkey iarchaeological facts as allegories), the other from Foucault (archaeological evidence as a network of sites of power). E n su trabajo reciente, Alison Wylie ha ajirmado algunas wces la importancia delpapel que la polftica presente juega en la constitucibn de 10s hechos arqueol6gicos, pero ella no ha documentado suficientemente tal afirmacibn. Utilizando 10s mismos materiales que ella ha utilizado, esto es, la investigacibn sobre g6nero presentados en 1988 en la conferencia "La Mujer y la Produccibn en la Prehistoria" en Carolina del Sur, yo intento proveer esta documentacibn, y arguyo que su ausencia perjudica el "objetivismo mitigado" de Wylie (y de hecho de la arqueologiai asf como 10s hechos gue emergen acerca del gknero prehistbrico. Y o no disputo la integridad cient$ca de esos hechos o el rigor del anhlisis de Wylie. Asi como lo han hecho muchos antes que yo, simplemente me pregunto cuhl es la relacibn entre verdad y polftica, y consider0 que la disyuncibn entre estas dos nociones, tan recalcitrantes en la arqueologia, es contraproducente y constituye una fuente de contradicciones y ambivalencias. Y o hago dos sugerencias sobre cbmo sobreponerse a la disyuncibn entre verdad y politica, la primera adoptada de Brumfiel y Conkey (10s hechos arqueolbgicos como alegorfas),y la segunda de Foucault (la evidencia arqueolbgica como una red de puestos de poder). I would like in short to resituate the production of true and false at the heart of historical analysis and political critique.
Foucault 1991:79 Political objection may lead to epistemological critique. It may also lead t o armed resistance, to ill-directed violence, o r to nothing, becoming defused instead as a "politically correct" attitude. O f those alternatives (clearly, not the only imaginable ones), in the archaeological world we privilege the first, disapprove of the last, and maintain complicated, sometimes conflicted attitudes toward the others. As for political objection itself, we reserve for it the most ambivalent status. In this comment I concentrate o n that ambivalence. What are its constitutive elements? Why does it arise a n d persist? How can we overcome it? Let m e identify a little more concretely the attitude to which I address those questions: Objection to a disciplinary account of the past o n political grounds-i.e., o n grounds that the account colludes with a n unjust political order in the present-must be complemented by a n epistemological critique of the objectionable account. Else (or, should I say, even in that case?), the objection is suspect; we are entitled to regard it a s partisan, dispose of it a s irrelevant t o disciplinary pursuits, or even discredit it as the progeny of uncompromising, amoral relativism and cognitive anarchy. O r such seems t o be the ethos of our discipline a t present, a s it emerges from controversies around post-
MICHAEL FOTIADIS
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Department of Anthropology, Indiana University. Bloomington. IN 47405
Amerlcan Antiquity, 59(3), 1994. pp 545-555
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processual archaeologies. Witness, for instance, the claims made by Earle and Preucel (1987:509: emphasis added: for a comparable, but more qualified, statement see Yoffee and Sherratt [1993: I]): Although we must be concerned w ~ t hthe uses and abuses of archaeologq by modem socket). what we discover about the past need not be determ~nedbq modem cultural kalues Relekance must ultkmately rest on our ab111ty to ebaluate the \alid~t)of theones nor 1r1 the present brrt In the past Here Earle and Preucel appear to be thinking of the past as a stable region, well separated from the present, hence also capable of constraining the flights of modem archaeological theory. Others are more skeptical about this separation of "present" from "past," and they would point out the contradictions in which their conceptual relation is embroiled. They would nevertheless wish to preserve something of the formulation of Earle and Preucel, a firm ground, however ephemeral and dispersed, divided perhaps between the archaeological record and other knowledge-a ground, in any case, inviolable by the politics of the present. Alison Wylie in her recent work. especially in her analysis of the research presented at the conference "Women and Production in Prehistory" in South Carolina (Gero and Conkey 199 I), best articulates the latter thesis. Responding to a skepticism by professionals and students toward archaeological research on gender (see especially Wylie [I 990: 171). and to fears that the objectivity of such research might be compromised by feminist policy. Wylie (1992a:22) demonstrates. with rigorous and sustained argument, that "social and political factors are crucial in directing attention to questions about gender but. at least in the case of the South Carolina conference. . . .these d o not account for the successes of the research they inspire or inform." She earlier noted (Wylie 1992a: 21; emphasis in original) that "the alternative models put forward are recommended because they show greater internal coherence, improved descriptive adequacy to the subject domain (the whole subject domain) and broader explanatory power." "Engendered" archaeology-a practice that accords gender the status of an irreducible and pivotal social field, treats "gender as historical process" (Conkey and Gero 1991:5)--is defended by Wylie not for its political effects but for its epistemic ones. The following (Wylie 1992a:29, 30: note her use of quotation marks: cf. Wylie 1990:22) from among her conclusions make this even more clear: [A]t least sometimes, it is plausible to saq that we have quite literally "discovered" a fact about the world. or that we have shown a formerly plausible claim to be "just false." [P]olitically engaged science is often much more rigorous, self-critical. and responsive to the facts than allegedly neutral science. for which nothing much is at stake. Facts of the past can, after all, be disentangled from the politics of the present, Wylie implies. Hers is indeed the converse of the position I identified as characteristic of the disciplinary ethos: An alternative account of the past (alternative, that is, to the one which colludes with the unjust political order in the present. and opposed to it) is acceptable because it is also supported by evidence (cf. Watson and Kennedy 199 1 :268-269). In the case of the South Carolina conference. U'klie demonstrates that evidence is nor predicated upon a feminist viewpoint: it is constituted instead by standard methods. the same ones that have for a long time produced evidence in support of (by now, patently) androcentric accounts of the past. The facts of "engendered" archaeology need not. therefore, be "paradigm relative" (see Wylie 1989) o r "standpoint specific." much less anarchically constituted. Wylie further emphasizes that the researchers engaged in feminist critiques of the disciplines and in "engendered" archaeology d o not simply expose androcentrism in the accounts they criticize; they purport in fact "to expose error, to demonstrate that formerly plausible interpretive options are simply false (empirically) or untenable (conceptually), and to improve on previous accounts" (Wylie 1992a:24: emphasis in original: also 1990:20-21). Wylie articulates those points after detailed analysis of specific pieces of research. Most of her conclusions seem to m e both indisputable and important for our discipline. What I find remarkable at the same time is that "engendered" archaeology and the critique of mainstream/malestream practice must pass a special "epistemological tribunal" before they can be considered legitimate disciplinary pursuits. They have. that is, to be subjected to an unusually rigorous epistemological scrutiny. and to be examined for suspected associations with uncompro-
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mising relativism and cognitive anarchy. The fact that Wylie was compelled to undertake that scrutiny. to defend by epistemological argument a few instances of politically engaged science, points directly to our ambivalent attitude toward political critiques. At the root of that ambivalence lies, I think, the disjunction between the notions of politics and truth (the belief that those are two entirely different things). coupled with the fear that politics can spoil truth (cf. Foucault 1980a:jl; Tilley 1990:302). That disjunction, quietly adhered to in mainstream archaeology, does not seem to me natural or dictated by necessity at all. To put it in a strong way. that disjunction seems to me to be a stumbling block in today's archaeology, the root of endless controversy (much of which Wylie had to summarize in a decade's work), and a principal source of the fear, indeed of the bogey, of amoral (or hyper-) relativism.' I cannot attempt here to trace the history of the disjunction. to identify the circumstances in which it emerged and the purposes for which it has for so long been reproduced within archaeology. What follows are a few comments-preliminary notes-occasioned by Wylie's recent work. Wylie, I think. accepts the disjunction initially, but only so that she can engage the skeptics' supposedly apolitical charges in their oxrw terms. Note. for instance. that she often places quotation marks around words in the field of the disjunction-"politics," "truth," "facts," "getting it right," "just false." "external" (i.e., factors "external" to scientific knowledge), etc. As she develops her argument. she also finds opportunities to challenge the disjunction and to assert that "values cannot be set as sharply apart from facts, or 'politics' from science (or political conviction from scientific knowledge)" (Wylie 1990:22). That argument leaves something to be desired, however, for the disjunction persists. Wylie herself preserves a degree of ambivalence about the relationship between politics and truth. She admits at one time that the former "do not dictate the results of research" (Wylie 1990:2 1). and, at another time. that they "shape not just the direction, but also the content and outcome of archaeological research [although not] seamlessly or irrevocably" (Wylie 1992a:29). When read in the context of Wylie's recent work. those two assertions are not as incompatible as they might appear in my account. But they are not adequately justified either, especially the second. and that is what allows their author to preserve her ambivalence toward the relationship between politics and truth. I will explain below what I expected as justification of those claims. I should add that. in a crucial sense, Wylie's is not an effort to legislate in all of its details the relationship of politics to truth and the role of values in shaping scientific knowledge. Qualifying Sandra Harding (1986, especially pp. 243-250), Wylie in fact recommends some degree of ambivalence as a pragmatic attitude toward such matters (Wylie 1992a:30, 1994; cf. 1987:69-71). She eschews the search for an overarching, "master" epistemology, appropriate for all contexts and all claims. She suggests instead that the issue of epistemic stance-the question of whether neutral grounds for assessing knowledge claims exist or not-"should be settled locally, in light of what we have come to know about specific subject matters and about the resources we have for their investigation" (Wylie 1992a:30). In her defense of "engendered" archaeology, Wylie remains faithful to that principle. and she takes great care to qualify her conclusions and to circumscribe their scope. Her main conclusion. after all, is that evidence, as constituted in today's archaeology, car1 constrain theorizing, that the archaeological data can resist theoretical appropriation, and she shows how this was accomplished in a few, particzilar cases of "engendered" practice.* With that conclusion Wylie not only confers epistemological legitimacy to "engendered" archaeology; she also contests the charge, put forward by the postmodern feminists and postprocessual critics (see Wylie 199 1 :43). that scientific rationality and an archaeology that adheres to its canons are inherent!,: and irremediably laden with androcentric and other hegemonic values. What I think is ironic. however. is that, while defending the local facts of "engendered" archaeology and recommending resistance to "a general epistemic stance appropriate to all knowledge claims." Wylie also articulates such a general epistemic stance. She lays the ground rules for a "mitigated objectivism" (Wylie 1992b:28 1; cf. 1989: 105). as an antidote to uncompromising relativism and cognitive anarchy, on the one hand, and to archaeological empiricism and foundationalism, on the other. In that mitigated objectivism Wylie no longer preserves her ambivalence about the relationship of politics to truth. Truth survives. It is an edifice of evidential claims, themselves constituted with
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the aid of "linking principles," i.e., knowledge derived from diverse sources outside the particular archaeological record under examination and. often, from scientific fields well beyond archaeology; if the edifice is to stand, such linking principles must enjoy some degree of security in themselves and be independent from one another and from the new facts they help to establish (Wylie 1992a: 25-29, 1992b:274-281, 1994; cf. 1989:105-108). As an acknowledgment of the diverse origins of archaeological knowledge (cf. Fotiadis 1992: 145), and as an analysis of the structure of that knowledge, Wylie's work deserves all our attention. Where are politics. however? Politics have completely vanished from Wylie's articulation of mitigated objectivism. D o they not. along with evidence. mitigate facts, local or universal? Ifthey d o not, how can she assert that politics generate the questions we ask about the past and shape to an extent the answers? In spite of those assertions, in Wylie's analyses the politics of gender in today's American life and academia appear in the end to provide only a "historical background," an ancillary condition, as it were, for the archaeological research on gender (Wylie 1990: 17-20, 199 1:3 1-38, 1992a: 16-18, 1994). That is to say, those politics remain loosely articulated with the speclfic reconstructions of the genders in the archaeologists' accounts. One is left with the impression that Wylie reiterates in this case something of the old distinction (which she herself criticizes) between "contexts of discovery" and "contexts of verification." Gender is "discovered" (Wylie 1990: 17, 199 1:33; Harding's phrasing) amidst the struggles of the political present; nevertheless, in our reconstructions of gender in past societies we need no longer pay attention to the historical circumstances of that discovery, to the partial understanding of gender we have acquired in the midst of those circumstances.' As Wylie does not return, in her account of mitigated objectivism, to the specific effects of politics on archaeological knowledge, the old empiricist couple, "discovery" and "verification," may now be reincarnated as politics and truth. Thus Wylie contributes to a process which I shall call redcation of gender: from a network of sites of contestation in a concrete political field not too long ago, gender now is transformed into a docile object of scientific knowledge, one arnong manj3kinds of disciplinarj~production.W ylie's contribution to this process is to test the new knowledge by general disciplinary criteria. and ascertain that it is good inherent!,,, qua decontextualized knowledge. rather than because of the potential it has to transform the political field in which it is strategically situated. While aiming at undermining the disjunction between politics and truth, then, Wylie reaffirms it and the privileged position of truth in disciplinary matters. I remarked earlier that she does not adequately document the role she claims for politics. Let m e put it in a direct way. If the gender politics of the present indeed generate the questions we ask about the archaeological genders and shape to a n extent our answers, the mitigated objectivist has yet to demonstrate precisely how that is accomplished in the particular studies she analyzes. T o d o that, she would have to describe ways in which the new factual claims about archaeological genders are isomorphic not with the political vision of their authors but with the hegemonic constructs to which they are opposed, the errors they replace. She would need, in other words, to identify some concrete marks that politics here and now-the errors, indeed the fallacies, amidst which gender is discovered-have left o n the shape of those new archaeological facts. Otherwise. her claims, that present politics shape questions and answers about genders in the past. will remain unconvincing. Worse, I think, the new facts recuperated about archaeological gender may from some distance appear neither true nor potentially false but strange instead. Let m e elaborate on these points by way of a n example. A salient dimension of the facts emerging from the South Carolina conference is women's affinity with "the techniques of maximizing life" (Foucault 1980b: 123): Women were engaged in productive activities (rather than being crucial merely in biological reproduction), and, moreover, those activities had cosmological significance (rather than being mere quotidian tasks). They were. that is, activities that transformed society, thereby ensuring its reproduction: Mexican women were not passive victims of emerging political power. They participated in the definition of its limits, and they devised strategies to deal with the changing circumstances that it created. Aztec women were flexible, adaptive, and dynamic elements in a dynamic system. While the ethnohistoric record limits us to a narrow. ahistorical stereotype of women's production, archaeology forces us to recognize the realities of women's production, characterized by variability and change [Brumfiel 199 1:246].
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[Plrehistoric women were fully capable not on11 of conscious action. but also of innovation [Watson and Kennedy 1991:269; see also Conkey and Gero 1991:16; Wnght 1991:214]. The quotations above are the concluding lines of the text in both articles. Is it not fully evident that the authors recuperate for women in the past what has been, through practices, denied them in the present? Is it not clear too that what they claim for prehistoric women is that image of human nature so cherished by modernity? Brumfiel once noted the allegorical character of archaeology. "a story we tell ourselves about ourselves" through the sign of the archaeological "Other" (Brumfiel 1987:5 13; also Conkey. with Williams 1991:104). The "story" told about women in the South Carolina conference is a good illustration of Brumfiel's remark. The isomorphies between the facts emerging about women and the errors they replace are, in the passages quoted, unmistakable. The new factual claims are the signs of the old, only inverted. Women in those claims are described in-indeed reduced to-roles habitually reserved for men. Equally remarkable, those roles are built on a conception of human nature as productive and capable of shaping its future. The irony is double: if the coherence and stability of the concept "women" are still made dependent on biology (sex), the concept "men" already appears enfranchised from its biological underpinnings, imposing itself as considerably more gendered than "women" (cf. the keen observations of Williams, quoted in Conkey 199 194-85). We are reminded of the observation of one of the contributors to the conference: "perhaps the greatest harm our sexism [i.e., androcentrism] does to our ability to interpret the past is to limit our imagination" (Claassen 199 1:296). The new facts, then, quite straightforwardly point to their origin in the present. not in the past. Being the very terms of the androcentric hegemony only inverted, they underline their own contingency upon that hegemony and on the will of the researchers to overcome it. It is also that contingency, I think, which could one day save the new facts from harsh judgment. What I am suggesting is that claims like "prehistoric women were capable of conscious action, of innovation. etc." may appear quite strange, even androcentric, from some social distance, if they are seen as constituted from evidential claims alone and one does not take into account what they contest. The fact that they rest on evidence cannot protect them from such a condemnation, for that evidence cannot by itself explain all the details of their shape. That is why the documentation ofthe specific isomorphies between the purposes of the present and the facts of the past, the allegorical and thoroughly political character of the facts contested, should not be overlooked. Because Wylie hesitates to undertake such a documentation, articulating instead an objectivism unmitigated by the political practices of the present, her assertions about the import of present politics on past facts may not be given the attention they deserve. The reader, in that case, may be misled into believing that sometime around 1990 Western archaeology not only discovered the reality of gender and began battling androcentrism, but it also developed a network of methods for capturing truths alive in the past. Oblivious, that is, to Wylie's precautions, to her plea for local truths, the reader might find in her argument confirmation that Western science has reached a stage of perfection where it can set truth free from values. That would be a dangerous engagement with scientism. The faith in the neutrality (hence also superior, lasting essence) of scientific knowledge is the logic of discriminating between authentic and spurious knowledge and, ultimately, between authentic and spurious knowers. A contiguity with practices of discrimination, that is, remains a problem in Wylie's-indeed, archaeology's-mitigated objectivism as much as in any "ism."4 Just as androcentrism is an epistemic system (at least, a set of orienting presuppositions for the production of knowledge) and an ensemble of discriminatory practices, so is scientism. In short, discriminatory practices arise from the very logic of "isms," rather than being their accidental abuse. That is a problem with which Wylie (philosophically) as well as archaeology (strategically) must grapple. As we saw, Wylie considers the old hegemonic views about the roles of men and women in the past as errors-empirically false or conceptually untenable. It does not seem to me, however, that those views can be adequately understood as "errors," at least not as long as "error" and "falsity" are opposed to "truth" in a field saturated with rationality (cf. Harding 1987:82-83; hyper-relativists, if they still exist, might rejoice at what I just wrote, but, then, that could be their last hurrah.) I will explain again by example. In her contribution to the South Carolina conference Conkey (1991,
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especially pp. 72-78) makes it clear that the archaeological evidence with which she revises the facts about women in the Magdalenian has been available since 19 16. Now, if we follow Wylie, we should conclude that for three-quarters of the twentieth century archaeology perpetuated an obvious error. But how could such an error arise? Why would it persist for so long? An objectivism unmitigated by the politics of the present-an analysis that treats disciplinary truth as the practice of reason. defending truth by strictly rational criteria-has no answers to such questions. It cannot explain why, despite evidence, error arises and prevails as self-evident truth in a discipline, except by invoking a lapse of reason, momentary or chronic: it can, that is, attribute the error to "intellectual inattention" -oversight, miscalculation. confusion, logical flaw, etc. While errors from such sources often creep into archaeological knowledge, to suggest that the "errors" about Magdalenian women persisted for 70-odd years because of '-confusion." etc.. would be to cast doubts on rationality itself. on our ability to detect errors and rectify them. (What would guarantee, in that case. that the new archaeological claims about gender are not erroneous as well. refutable by evidence already at our disposal?) Thus the objectivist, by treating an "ism" as an error. undercuts the very position from which sdhe proceeds. The problems I note perhaps arise because Wylie treats the production of truth in archaeology as an essentially intellectual process. Knowledge, as it emerges from her account, is objectified. It is an "edifice," to be evaluated by structural criteria. namely, the security and independence of its supporting elements. Values. politics. and the present do play a role, but that role remains ambiguous; at any rate, values and politics leave no concrete marks on the shape of archaeological knowledge. I think that. with her account, Wylie clarifies for us a particular view of disciplinary practice. knowledge, and truth. a view which is widely (and. most of the time. quietly) held in archaeology and sister disciplines. My comments above have been critical of that view, but they should not be construed as dismissive. I am not suggesting that the production of archaeological truth involves no intellectual effort, or that structural criteria are inappropriate for evaluating archaeological knowledge. much less that the insistence on the descriptive adequacy. intcrnal coherence, and explanatory power of our claims is misplaced. In fact, in my comments I made extensive use of such criteria. I pointed out, for example. some details of the claims about prehistoric women that an objectivist analysis leaves unaccounted. To me, such descriptive inadequacies suggest that the objectivist analysis has its limits. To continue treating the production of truth in archaeology as an essentially intellectual process is to violate those limits. It detracts our attention from alternative conceptions of practice. knowledge and truth-conceptions which will accommodate the unaccounted details, deflate our confidence in the apolitical character of the discipline. and ward off the fallacies which that confidence sustains. In this respect Brumfiel's conception of archaeology as allegory mediated by the archaeological record seems to me immensely helpful, for it foregrounds precisely those elements of our practice that objectivist analyses tend to overlook. The point of the suggestion is not that the archaeologist's account is a kind of literary fiction, an "open" text to be imaginatively interpreted. Brumfiel capitalizes instead on the "second plane of meaning" a story should have in order to qualify as allegory (see Clifford 1986. especially pp. 98-1 03): Archaeological narratives, while expressly about "people, ~ c thc s present. Like Clifford. Brumfiel things and happenings" in the past. also are about o ~ t r s e l ~ in emphasizes the inescapability of that "second plane of meaning" in our claims about Others. Clifford further recommends that we should not think of those "second" meanings as "abstractions or interpretations 'addcd' to the original 'simple' account. Rather. they are conditiotzs for its trzeaningfulness" (Clifford 1986:99; emphasis added). In other words, if our stories about Others are inescapably allegorical, that inescapability is not necessarily a handicap, it is also a potential; claims about the past draw force from their relevance to present concerns. It should follow that such concerns ought to be brought under analysis and be evaluated alongside our claims. Brumfiel's suggestion, then, has important implications for our understanding of archaeological practice, knowledge. and truth. In the first place, it should remind us of the chronocentrisms5 relentlessly embedded in our evidential claims about the past. Archaeological narrative becomes an allegory only as it establishes certain isomorphies between the circumstances in real life (present) and those it narrates (past). The allegon materializes, in other words, as a relationship at a particlrlar
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moment and place. Outside that context-when, for example, the circumstances of real life are transformed- the allegory loses its force. It becomes uninteresting, even completely opaque, a genre, "simply a story" (although one that may be reappropriated for entirely dlferent purposes). The archaeology-as-allegory metaphor, then, at once makes archaeological knowledge relative and accords positivity to knowledge which is situational, contingent on the here and now. It invites us to think of knowledge as timely rather than as timeless, and to examine it and evaluate it with a view to that timeliness. At the same time, by highlighting the local and ephemeral character of our claims, the archaeology-as-allegory metaphor protects them from giving rise to another "ism" and from meeting the fate of all other "isms," from becoming not only instruments of knowledge but also instruments of discrimination. An allegory has no pretensions of being "the whole story." It rather calls attention to its own partiality, to the fact that it has a point to make, and it thereby foregrounds the possibility that another allegory will displace it to make a different point. So with our accounts. To emphasize that they are contingent for meaningfulness on the present. timely rather than timeless, is an equivocation of crucial significance. It suggests that what is thinkable as true or false in the present has limits (cf. Claassen, quoted above), but it also foregrounds the possibility of transgressing those limits. Brumfiel's metaphor should thus remind us that knowledge, even knowledge of the very distant past, is of a strategic nature in the present. Our allegorical accounts of the past can serve as resources to be drawn upon in efforts to transform circumstances here and now; they have a transformative potential (much as they have a conservative one), and they are means to an end in the present. If that also implies that our knowledge cannot be fully evaluated without a view to its objectives and effects, so be it (cf. Shanks and Tilley 1987:204-206). Furthermore. such thoughts should provide a persuasive antidote to the spreading fear of amoral relativism (cf. Note 1). They not only suggest that our accounts, contingent as they are for meaningfulness on the present. are constrained by the "isms" of this present, but that relevance to a project seeking to disengage our imagination from the "isms" can be a decisive criterion for evaluating those accounts (cf. Harding 1991. especially p. 98). In fact. those "isms," and the truths they sustain, provide us with concrete objectives, namely to challenge We have in the the naturalness and inevitability of such truths by exposing their hi~toricity.~ archaeological record a firm ally in that endeavor. If residues from the past can in the end resist theoretical appropriation or anything at all, what they resist best is our attempts to reduce, once and for all, their rich materiality to our chronocentric notions, and to legislate their "Otherness" without committing contradictions. By foregrounding the transformative potential of our knowledge, the archaeology-as-allegory metaphor ultimately suggests "the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth" (Foucault 1980a:133). If we take Brumfiel's metaphor seriously, and the facts emerging about gender, our discipline can then find for itself a political project it will not be ashamed to own-to revise its views of gender in the past at the same time as it reconsiders its view of knowledge, its very epistemology (cf. Harding 199 1 : 12 1-1 33, 150). I do not wish. however, to overextend Brumfiel's (and Conkey's) metaphor. Let us, too, resist the idea that archaeology's accounts are fictions. The allegorical accounts about prehistoric women presented at the South Carolina conference unquestionably rest on pertinent archaeological evidence.' That evidence has been constituted with the aid of linking principles rich and local (context sensitive), and far more political than they may appear in Wylie's analysis. The important point in that analysis is different. The new facts about prehistoric women are established with the aid of linking principles, the politics of which are decidedly nonfeminist. Wylie has demonstrated this to the conviction, I hope, of all. It does not follow that those linking principles are innocent of politics (they have, after all, been wrought in the laboratories of many colluding "isms," including androcentrism), even less that they are independent of the new facts of gender that they reinforce. As I showed earlier, linking principles have left unmistakable marks on the shape of the new factssome uncanny isomorphies with the old facts now found at fault. The mitigated objectivist's insistence on independence-itself a political value-is troublesome. Both of that objectivism's rules of independence (i.e., of the linking principles from one another, and from the new facts) are concisely expressed in the following passage:
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Given the state of knowledge in the relevant fields, explanatory hypotheses about particular past contexts, and the linking principles deployed to interpret the record of these contexts,are rarely integrated into a single, unified, encompassingculture theory: indeed, given the complexity of most archaeological subjects, it is almost unimaginable that a single unified theory (e.g., of cultural systems) would have the resources to provide both the necessary explanatory hypotheses and the grounds for testing them (i.e., the relevant linking principles) in a given archaeological context [Wylie 1992a:26; for "theory" you can also read "politics"]. I find this passage stimulating, but also vexing for its ambivalence. T o what is Wylie appealing here? Is she reaffirming that we are able to keep our gender politics separate from the rest of our politics (an empiricist view)? Is she reflecting on a view of human (or, at least, the archaeologist's) nature as inexorably t o m by conflict and contradictions? Is she thinking that truth and meaning are after all radically, irremediably fragmented, that neither practice nor ideology can ever again achieve unity? Is hers a liberal, pluralist epistemology? There is no political play in the passage, only political ambivalence, and it is not only Wylie's. Perhaps some of the ambivalence I just noted can be shed, if we revise our epistemology in some drastic ways (assuming always that epistemology. not objection. is the place to start). Rather than submit to the disjunction between truth and politics. and be disabled by the fear of contamination, we can instead try to resituate truth in the way suggested by Foucault (quoted in the beginning). That would mean, in the first place, revising explicitly the notion of evidential constraints. Evidence does not only constrain, it also enahles. It is not merely the celebrated "network of resistances," but a network of sites of power. T o paraphrase Foucault (1980a: 119, cf. p. 59), I doubt that anyone would abide by evidence if it said only "no." (I imagine Feyerabend: "Nothing goes.") Evidence instead should be thought of as a "productive network." Because evidence is itself an effect of power, a concrete mark that power leaves in its deployment (Foucault, e.g.. 1980a:52; cf. Tilley 1990:287), it ernpowers truths, both the truths that take hold of (limit) our archaeological imagination, and those with which we try to ease that hold (transgress the limit^).^ And if there is remarkable continuity between the two sorts of truths, between an affirmation and its denial, that may be because resistance (counter-power) is itself one of the prodlrctive effects of that form of power peculiar to the modem liberal state (see Foucault 1980a, especially p. 142). I think it is impossible today, after the substantial effort of Foucault, to give a balanced account of archaeology's truths without focusing intensely on the intimacy oftruth and power, on technologies of power/knowledge. on the fact that archaeological evidence is strategically situated (and, also, subject to market laws), and on the close genealogical relationship of archaeology's new truths with the power they are opposed to. Foucault's would not be a mere assertion that all disciplinary knowledge is constituted in political fields, in regions already created through technologies of power.9 He would indeed enjoin us to go much farther than I have in this comment. Insisting always on the capacity of power to form and regulate objects of knowledge, he would challenge us to delineate, in specific historical detail, the diverse political practices leading up to the new object of knowledge, gender, that "irreducible field" about which it now becomes "possible to articulate true or false propositions" (Foucault 199 1:79). Wylie's accounts very often come close to this, and just as often she changes their course, attempting in the end to reduce archaeology's hegemonic truths to errors, its emerging truths to facts constituted outside history. She has until recently resisted a consideration of power in its relationship to knowledge (but see Wylie [1992c]. where she adopts from feminist researchers the view of "power as a process"). In general, she hesitates to accept the positive, productive dimension of power: "Only the most powerful, the most successful in achieving control over the world, could imagine that the world can be constructed as they choose, either as participants or as observers" (Wylie 1992a:21).I0 That is a striking passage, indced. and not because it defines power in a negative way as "control ovcr" (sec Foucault 1980b:92-96). but for its insight: Thc most powerful apparatus of control in modernity has been the state. and it is precisely thc modcrn state that has cmpowcred archaeology as a discipline. The intimacy of knowledge with power, of truth with politics should be clear. Applying Foucault's (1 99 1:79) epistemology to the truths of Western, disciplined archaeology is far from overextending that epistemology. Last, given our persisting confusion of gender with sex, Foucault's insights about the discovery and construction of sex in modernity, the historicity of its
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"pathologies," allow t h e reader t o m a k e several discoveries which c a n b e useful for t h e study of gender a s historical process.
,4cknowledgments. Alison Wylie provided me not only with the original challenge for the above remarks, but also with many of her papers prior to their publication, and with a generous commentary on the first draft. My intellectual debt to her is very large. For many rewarding comments I am also thankful to the anonymous reviewers and to the editors of American Antiquity, as well as to Tracey Cullen. The abstract was translated into Spanish by Maria Nieves Zedefio.
REFERENCES CITED Brumfiel, E. M. 1987 Comments [on Earle and Preucel 19871. Current Anthropology 28:s 13-5 14. 1991 Weaving and Cooking: Women's Production in Aztec Mexico. In Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, edited by J . M. Gero and M. W. Conkey, pp. 224-25 1. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Claassen, C. P. 1991 Gender, Shellfishing, and the Shell Mound Archaic. In Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, edited by J. M. Gero and M. W. Conkey, pp. 276-300. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Clifford, J. 1986 On Ethnographic Allegory. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by J. Clifford and G . E. Marcus. DD. 98-12 1. Universitv of California Press, Berkeley. Conkey, M. W. 1991 Contexts of Action, Contexts of Power: Material Culture and Gender in the Magdalenian. In EngenderingArchaeology: Women and Prehistory, edited by J . M. Gero and M. W. Conkey, pp. 57-92. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Conkey, M. W., and J. M. Gero 1991 Tensions, Pluralities, and Engendering Archaeology: An Introduction to Women and Prehistory. In Engendering Archaeology. Women and Prehistory, edited by J. M. Gero and M. W. Conkey, pp. 330. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Conkey, M. W., with S. H. Williams 1991 Original Narratives. The Political Economy of Gender in Archaeology. In Gender at the Crossroads ofKnowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, edited by M. Di Leonardo, pp. 102-139. University of California Press, Berkeley. Earle, T., and R. Preucel 1987 Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique. Current Anthropology 28:501-538. Engelstad, E. 199 1 Images of Power and Contradiction: Feminist Theory and Post-.processualArchaeology. Antiquity 65: 502-5 14. Fabian, J. 1983 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. Columbia University Press, New York. Fotiadis, M. 1992 Units of Data as Deployment of Disciplinary Codes. In Representations in Archaeology, edited by J-C. Gardin and C. Peebles, pp. 132-148. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Foucault, M. 1980a Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Pantheon Books, New York. 1980b The History of Sexuality: Volume I , an Introduction. Vintage Books, New York. 199 1 Questions of Method. In The Foltcuult Efect: Studies in Governt~zentulity,edited by G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, pp. 73-86. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Gailey, W. C., and T . C. Patterson 1987 Power Relations and State Formation. In Power Relations andstate Fortnation, edited by W. C. Gailey and T. C. Patterson, pp. 1-26. American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C. Gero, J. M., and M. W. Conkey (editors) 199 1 Engendering A r c h a e o l o ~ ~It.ot?zen : and Prehistory. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Haraway, D. J. 1988 Remodelling the Human Way of Life. Shenvood Washburn and the New Physical Anthropology. In Bones, Bodies, and Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropolog),, edited by G. W. Stocking, Jr., pp. 206-259. History of Anthropology No. 5. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. Harding, S. G. 1986 The Science Question in Fet~zinisrrl.Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y. 1987 Ascetic Intellectual Opportunities: Reply to Alison Wylie. Canadian Joltrnal of Philosophy supplementary volume 13:75-85. 199 1 Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinkingfrot~zWorrlen's Lives. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y.
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Hastorf, C. A. 199 1 Gender, Space, and Food in Prehiston. In Engenderrng .-lrchaeolog)~:ll'otnen and Prehrstory, edited by J . M. Gero and M. W. Conkey. pp. 132-1 59. Basil Blackwell. Oxford. Herzfeld. M. 1987 .4nthropolo,yj~Through thc Loohrng Glass. ('rrflcal Ethnograph!. rn the, .\farglns ofEltropc. Cambndge Uriiversity Press. Cambridge. Hodder. I. 1989 Writing Archaeology: Site Reports in Context. .4ntrqltrt!. 63:268-274. 1990 The Dorr~estrcutionofEurope: Strltcture and Contingenc1,rn .VeollfhicSocieties. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Shanks. M., and C. Tilley 1987 Sociul Theorj, and Archaeology. Polity Press. Cambridge. Tilley, C. 1990 Michel Foucault: Towards an Archaeology of Archaeology. In Readlng .\luterial Culture, edited by C. Tilley, pp. 28 1-347. Basil Blackwell. Oxford. Tringham, R. 199 1 Households with Faces: The Challenge of Gender in Prehistoric Architectural Remains. In Engendering .-lrchueolog).: llhrrlen and Prehrstor?~.edited by J . M. Gero and M. W. Conkey, pp. 93-131. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Watson, P. J., and M. C. Kennedy 199 1 The Development of Horticulture in the Eastern Woodlands of North America: Women's Role. In Engenderlng.Archaeolog).: llhrrlen und Prehistory. edited by J . M. Gero and M. W. Conkey, pp. 255275. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Wright. G. A. 1990 Being There and the Archaeologist as Author. .-lnthropos 85:39-44. Wright, R. P. 1991 Women's Labor and Potten Production in Prehiston. In Engendering Archaeology. Clh~nenand Prehlstorj., edited by J . M. Gero and M. W. Conkey. pp. 194-223. Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Wylie, A. 1987 The Philosophy of Ambivalence: Sandra Harding on The Sclence Qltestron rn Ferrllnrst~z.Canadran Journal o f Phrlosophj. supplementary volume 13:59-73. 1989 Matters of Fact and Matters of Interest. In .4rchaeologlcul.4pproachesto Cultltral Identit!,. edited by S. Shennan, pp. 94-109. One World Archaeology No. 10. Unwin Hyman. London. 1990 Feminist Critiques and Archaeological Challenges. In The .4rchueolog) o f Gender, edited by D. Walde and N . Willows, pp. 17-23. University of Calgan Archaeological Association, Calgary, Alberta. 1991 Gender Theory and the Archaeological Record: Why Is There No Archaeology of Gender? In Engenderlng.-lrchueolog)~:llhtnen und Prehistor~,.edited by J . M. Gero and M. W. Conkey, pp. 3 1-54. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. 1992a The Interplay of Evidential Constraints and Political Interests: Recent Archaeological Research on Gender. At~zerican.4nfiqultj, 57: 15-35. 1992b On "Heavily Decomposing Red Hemngs": Scientific Method in Archaeology and the Ladening of Evidence with T h e o n . In .2fetaarchueologj~:Reflectrons bj. .4rchaeologlsts and Philosophers, edited by L. Embree, pp. 269-288. Boston Studies In the Philosophy of Science Vol. 147. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. 1992c Feminist Theories of Social Power: Some Implications for a Processual Archaeology. .Vorrr.eglan 25:5 1-68. .4rchac~ologicalKc~~~rcvc 1994 The Constitut~onof Archaeological - Evidence: Ciender Polit~csand Science. In The Drsunrtj. ofScience: Roltndarics. Contc,.uts. an(/ Pobrer. edited by P. Gallson and P. Stump. Stanford Universitq Press. Stanford. California, in press. Yoffee. N.. and A. Sherratt 1993 Introduction: The Sources of Archaeological Theory. In .-lrchueological Theor),: IZ.ho Sets the .-lgenda.? edited by N. Yoffee and A. Sherratt, pp. 1-9. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
NOTES
' By "the bogey of amoral relativism" I do not mean the justifiable fear that many, irreconcilable, hostile-toone-another accounts of the past may appear; the proliferation of such accounts is a fact of life today, especially outside academia. The bogey is rather that we, level-headed archaeologists. might appear to have lost all criteria for deciding which account is acceptable, and be now endorsing the attitude "any account of the past is as good as the next." Witness the special effort by archaeologists in recent years-in circumstances that did not always require it-to distance themselves from that att~tude:see. e.g., Gaileq and Patterson (1987:2), suddenly asserting the importance of empirical grounding of archaeology. Once more, Wylie (1992a:18-20. 1992b:270-274) has insightfully summarized most expressions of that fear. I stress that Wylie (1992a:27-29). when discussing security of linking principles, also indicates that even
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those local, newly established factual claims are subject to revision, though not in the direction of the traditional androcentric models. In this respect, Tringham's (199 1:93-94) autobiographical introduction to her paper in the South Carolina conference, her "Aha" experience. should be given serious consideration. See also Hodder's apt comments about the changing role of the archaeological author (Hodder 1989, especially pp. 270-272), and his own autobiographical introduction to The Dotnestication of Europe (Hodder 1 9 9 0 2 4 ) . See also Wright (1990), and Fabian ( 1 983, especially pp. 94-95). Wylie's is the last "ism" to which I should address this comment. I have, indeed, a different target in mind: I have often heard comments about the position of women in other societies today, how poor it is by comparison with women's position in ours. The point of such comments seems to be not the women, however, but the societies, and how much more advanced ours is. Such a comparison, of course, also includes the archaeologies of the respective societies. which we are so capable of diagnosing as senring political, rather than research, interests. "Chronocentrism" is a term that I adopt from Herzfeld (1987:97). Conkey, with Williams (e.g., 199 1:127) often identifies this objective; also Wylie (1992c:64). An outstanding, forceful example of such an inquiry is Donna Haraway's (1988). What is-to my mind, so successfullyquestioned there is the naturalness of biological anthropology's truths of gender. In her appeal for "strong" objectivity, Harding (199 1:138-1 63) identifies v e n good reasons for scientific research that includes in its object the historicity of its own knowledge claims. ' It would be surprising indeed if a number of professional archaeologists came together at a conference and had no data to present, crucial for the theme of the conference. As often is the case (but not always), the archaeologists at the South Carolina conference were also critical of their own data, commenting on their limitations and underscoring the tentativeness of the conclusions. See. e.g., Hastorf (199 1: 149). where she points out the small size of her skeletal sample; Brumfiel (1991:233-234), where she argues the relationship of cloth production. agriculture, and market exchange; and Watson and Kennedy (1991:233-234). where they stressoverstress?-the limitations of both background knowledge and of the archaeological record. The work of Haraway, cited above, is a good example of such an epistemological attitude toward evidence. To my mind, Harding's (1991, e.g., pp. 149, 162) insistence that all, not just "bad," science has political causes that must, in the name of "strong" objectivity, be examined is directly comparable to Foucault's emphasis on power as productive and constitutive of disciplinan knowledge. 'O With that passage Wylie echoes Engelstad (1991:509). The latter attributes Shanks and Tilley's (1987) interest in the Foucauldian concept of power to their "sense of being in a power position." Engelstad (1991: 508) also maintains a completely "anti-Foucauldian" conception of power. "masculine; a domination which is not only far-ranging but also deep within the structure of western society."
Received July 15, 1992; accepted January 15, 1994
