The Politics of Experience: Embodiment and Difference in Our Pasts and Present

In archaeological theory, phenomenology has recently enjoyed currency as a way in which we can think about the different relationships between persons and the material world. It has been applied, in particular, to evidence from the Neolithic and Bronze ages where the categories 'experience' and 'performance' have served to focus research on the effects of landscape and architectures on the movements of the 'human' body and the sensory perceptions of persons. Despite the good intentions of much of this work in emphasising different kinds of social relations and social organisation, this application seems to give rise to the production of depoliticised, neutral narratives. That this is the case is the result of an apparent loss of a sense of the historicity/politics of the discourses which inform the discipline of archaeology. It appears to be part of a continuing refusal to recognise our broader situatedness within a series of political and ethical conditions which are questioning what it is to be 'human', what it is to have a particular kind of body and what this might mean for the multiplicity of differences possible in personhood.

This session examines the possibilities of phenomenology in relation to its limits. One of the ways in which these limits are reached lies in the current theorisation of the bodies of gendered and ethnically engendered difference. This appears to be unable to proceed without reference to a universal category of perception in which we all begin by experiencing the same thing because we all have the same biological foundations. Difference is then said to lie in the cultural interpretations of natural facts. It would seem that there remains a need to work through relations of materiality beyond these binaries.

A less obvious but nonetheless vital limit is found in our reference to this same universal in the theorisation of 'experience' and 'performance' in the past. This common body is a category based upon the perceptions assigned to the disembodied rational subject, whose body is 'mere matter' to its interior consciousness. Its exclusions have been well documented by feminists, post-colonial theorists and theorists of cultural difference.

The papers offered are an attempt to bring together various strands of work in the general areas of embodied knowledges and phenomenology, which do not often occur in the same session, in order to make explicit the connections between our interpretations of the past and our present politics. The topics suggested include: embodying the feminine and the post-colonial in archaeological narratives; technoscience and experience in archaeology; writing multiplicity by imagining embodiment through material evidence for the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages; re-imagining the masculist tendency to (a)void the physicality of bodies by theorising different masculine bodies in the past and the present; acknowledging the differing bodily experiences of nationality as a part of disciplinary identity; the different experiences of embodiment in altered states of consciousness in the past and present; the materiality of excavation and its implications for post-processual theorising.

Prosthetic knowledges: witnessing an archaeological technoscience
 

It seems no coincidence that digital technologies are being used and explored in an archaeology that considers itself to be theoretically informed. Databases, hypertext, image processing, GIS, Virtual Reality, the Internet: these are flexible components of a digital toolkit which is transforming archaeological practice.

Despite this there is very little communication between archaeological theory and computing, with both producing their own publications, journals and conferences. This lack of communication seems strange, because the impact of technologies are often understood in hindsight to have played important roles in shaping archaeological paradigm shifts.

Influenced by the recent work of the feminist philosopher of science, Donna Haraway, I argue for the acknowledgement of an archaeological technoscience: as a discourse prioritising the prosthetic relationships of bodies and technologies. Prosthesis is vital to mechanisms of knowledge production as it encourages us to understand how technologies of disciplinary communication both bring pasts into being, and prioritise certain kinds of pasts over others. Prosthesis also prompts us to ask an important question - via technologies of communication and practice, what kinds of witnesses to the past have archaeologists become?

Filling in the spaces when there's no-body at home

In analysing house plans and the like, it is becoming commonplace for archaeologists to seize upon the notion of the domestic sphere and its organisation as a microcosmic blueprint for the interpretation of social relationships as a whole. Yet we must not forget that whilst we spend ever increasing amounts of time within built environments, there is a wider unenclosed world on our doorsteps from which we draw meaning and out of which we construct understandings of self and others. It is essential that we resist the temptation to view past societies as static in time and space, however complicated and uncertain the interpretations which follow from this might be. Accordingly, we must confront the changing nature of this wider environment and harness its potential for exploring differing interpretations in a contemporary past. The material culture with which we treat may appear to change little over long periods of prehistory. It is when it does change, however, that we can catch glimpses of an assemblage breaking cover and seek to contrast usage and reception, then and now. Only in such changing times can our materials really be said to enter our visual clearing.

Experience as Inbetweeness

Within the discipline of Women's Studies the role and status of "experience" has been a troublesome subject. Arguments rage about the authenticity of the experience of women and indeed about the validity of the term "women". These tensions are not just issues for feminism, they are, or should be central considerations of archaeology. The located nature of the ways we think about the past are vital to the practice of our discipline. As a third wave philosophical feminist my politics are rooted in my embodied experience of sexual difference. It is my belief that the roots of thinking have been lodged in a denial of sexual difference - and that it is this denial that has facilitated the masculinist domination of knowledge. I will engage the concept of experience as a political response to discourses of objectivity - not as a call on the authenticity of self-knowledge. In its variety and multiplicity experience is the imminence of knowledge - the mediation between social and cultural intelligence and the "reality" of our lives. I take "gender" as one of those mediators and "sexual difference" as another. In my consideration of the phenomenology of the Other I would like to employ some of the ideas of Queer Theory in an examination of the ways archaeologists can and must be more self-reflexive about their locations as sexed as well as gendered researchers.

Bodies of the Living, Bodies of the Dead: Towards an archaeology of inhabitation

It is arguable that the recent use of phenomenology in archaeology has produced universal bodies which are devoid of identity and mutuality, who experience landscape features in isolation from each other and seldom seem to engage in the labours of life. In contrast, this paper is an appeal for an archaeology of inhabitation. To inhabit is to experience the world bodily and to act in the world knowledgeably. Habit itself implies routine and thus reproduction; it is a social process carried out by people who are intricately bound in webs of relationships. Inhabitation must therefore be situated not only within the historical materiality of those lives, but it must also deal with social memory and the way in which identities are reproduced and transformed over time. Through the use of a close-grained, landscape approach to the later prehistory of East Yorkshire, it is argued that the presentation of the body - display, orientation and movement - was a fundamental discourse through which social identities were forged. Whereas the magnificence of the funerary archaeology is well known, the square barrow cemeteries are seldom set within their wider 'worked' landscape. It is suggested here that 'different bodies' can be clothed and voiced through directly engaging in the materiality of past lives, and embedded within the wider 'taskscape' (Ingold, 1993) of lived relations.

Imagining Different Experiences: Questioning the Solidity of Materiality

While authors of phenomenology have asserted that subjectivity and experience are always embodied, certain aspects of these embodiments have often been overlooked. Imagination, engendered agency and temporality in particular are seldom discussed in relation to the construction and use of monuments in the past. This paper will explore the attributed fixity of both architectural and social bodies, highlighting the way such bodies are produced through our worldly interactions and performances of agency. The neutral(ised) body of western scientism lies behind the template of many phenomenologies, and this neutral subject is implicitly a 'normative' masculine subject. I would like to propose some readings of Manx Neolithic sites, offered as a reflection on our understanding of "solid facts". These archaeological sites can be interpreted as far from static or solid 'monuments' which create hard boundaries, providing we imagine a number of different embodied subjectivities. Our academic reluctance to accept ditches, banks, screens or stone-walled spaces as membranous or fluid will be explored in direct relation to the hard-edged position of the male body as expressed through the historicity of masculinist authorship.

Back to the Phenomenon of Phenomenology

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationship between the new-born archaeological interest in the phenomenological dimensions of landscape (i.e. Tilley's Archaeological phenomenology) and reasonings in "Geographical phenomenology". It is stressed that both these approaches suffer from a simplified and anthropocentric view of the content of the concept of phenomenology as presented by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Do the geographical and archaeological approaches have something in common with phenomenology at all? Thus, the paper distinguishes between Husserlian phenomenology and the interpretations and adaptions of these projects as they have entered the geographical and archaeological literature. This deconstruction leads to a constructive discussion of how an Husserlian-influenced phenomenology could enrich archaeology.

The medieval guildhall and embodiment: social and political identities in late medieval York

Recent work in medieval studies has placed considerable emphasis on the use of the body to structure social and political relations (Kay and Rubin 1994). This paper will focus on how buildings were used to frame particular medieval bodies through an analysis of three religious guildhalls in the city of York. These were built during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and consisted of halls with attached chapels and hospitals with permanent residents. The paper will consider how the internal spaces of these guildhalls framed the construction of particular levels of social identity. Through their physical and visual participation in masses and prayers said for the souls of the religious guild, the hospital inmates embodied a chantry. Their physical presence therefore not only reproduced and reinforced the dominant eschatological doctrine and practices of the late medieval church, but also the political status of the religious guild in medieval society. The paper will consider how this relationship was transformed after the Reformation, when these buildings were appropriated and transformed by craft and mercantile guilds. It will suggest that this was part of a wider structuration of a new politics of embodiment which focused around the contribution made by the body of the individual to the economic and political stability of the early modern city.

The Doors of Perception - Phenomenological Approaches to Cursus Monuments

In his book, A Phenomenology of Landscape, Chris Tilley set out a new way of considering monumentality in British Prehistory. His work along the Dorset cursus inspired me to undertake similar fieldwork on the cursus monuments of Scotland. More recently, Julian Thomas has set out the applicability of Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology, again looking at British Prehistory and monumentality. Recently, conscious of the failings of my earlier work, I have returned to Scotland's cursus monuments, monumentality and Neolithic people. I will also outline the different phenomenological ideas I have considered in looking at cursus sites, and the limitations they carry.

Forgetting the Subject

"It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience."- Joan Scott. The recent archaeological interest in phenomenology has brought both new opportunities and new problems. Like the so-called 'humanistic geography' before it, a phenomenological archaeology may focus exclusively on the way in which human beings experience the world. In the process, it may neglect the way in which hermeneutic phenomenology throws the human subject into question. A desire to create a humane archaeology can too easily result in an approach which is simply humanist and empathetic, and which takes the 'individual' and its attributes as given. In this contribution I will argue that our analysis of the past can assume no such fixed points. We are not simply investigating different worlds from our own, but different ways of being human on earth.

Relocating Ourselves: Political Archaeologies and Phenomenology

The paper will argue that disciplinary identity needs to be retheorised in order to take account of recent work on embodiment and difference. In turn, I will suggest that this rethink of who we are as archaeologists must give rise to a reworking of our understanding of materiality - in particular, the ëarchaeological recordí itself and how we conceive of it as evidence e.g. evidence for experience in past social worlds. These relocations of our archaeological pasts and presents should take account of the relations of power involved in such operations. Making these explicit was one of the original aims of one post-processual strategy - an objective which seems to have been lost in the purportedly ëpost-feministí, ëpost -classí, ëpost-racistí world of the 1990s. I will argue for the recognition of a contextualised series of archaeological practices which take notice of the historical context of their location within and beyond the discipline.

I will show this in particular by looking at how the bodies which are brought into being by the discipline, both our own and those of past people, are nationalised. That is to say, I wish to look again at nationalism and archaeology in these islands, not in terms of the ëinfluenceí of one upon the other but as lived identities. My contention is that if they are lived through the body rather than seen as abstract codes, then they are not so easy to edit out of our narratives.

Gossiping on people's bodies

I could so easily nag on about how dominant images of bodies are detrimental to the ways in which others imagine their bodies. Each dominant image manifested in an archaeological account is invested with a thousand tiny deaths, the tiny deaths of all those whose lives are relegated to the abject and unliveable through invisibility and repression.

Instead, rather perversely, appropriating some abject notions for myself on the way (for I can just imagine the way I will be feminised now), I'm going to enjoy gossiping about intimate aspects of people's lives. Name dropping: Bill Viola, Clare Whatling, Irit Rogoff.