Humanness as performance

Abstract

If archaeology is the examination of historical conditions with reference to a surviving material residue, then one way in which these conditions might be characterized is as the different ways they had enabled the development of different forms of humanness. The historical construction of this diversity is discussed here as the ways that the relationships between humans and things had been performed. This means that the practice of archaeology must question the recent desire to adopt a flat ontology that defines archaeology as the ‘discipline of things’. It is argued that it was by means of the performances established between humans and their various objects of concern that different forms of human life were able to define themselves. The implications of this argument for the practice of archaeology are explored.

Mapping collaborations: working in the contact zone of posthumanism and gender archaeology

“…Yet it is emphatically not the case that posthuman feminists see studying humans at all as an androcentric activity, or studying plastics at the edge of the world as an inherently feminist one. The posthuman feminist call is to problematise the things that humans do, to look for the contingencies of human action and thus to develop a more richly situated sense of what life entailed in different places, times and practices (Barrett, 2022;Cobb and Crellin, 2022).…”

“…Archaeologists have recently argued for posthumanist thinking as a profound new opening for gender and feminist archaeology (Bickle, 2020;Cobb and Crellin, 2022;Fredengren, 2021;Morris and Bickle, 2022;O'Dell and Harris, 2022;Robb and Harris, 2018). Others have made critical points about what posthumanism cannot, or at least has not, done for the study of past human lives in their gendered, classed, empowered and suffering diversity (Barrett, 2022;Díaz de Liaño and Fernández-Götz, 2021;Eriksen and Kay, 2022;Pollock, 2016;Van Dyke, 2021). The shared idea in many of these contributions is that the new theoretical tool of posthumanism needs to prove its value to gender studies if it is to make a positive contribution to archaeological thought.…”