Archaeology and the Limitations of Actor Network Theory1

Robert W. Preucel

Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) is a radical theory of sociology advocated most

notably by Bruno Latour, John Law, and Michel Callon, among many others.2 It

is radical in the sense that it shifts the grounds of sociology away from the study

of society, its traditional domain, to the description of networks or assemblages

composed of the intersections of people, collectives, and things. It requires

nothing less than a wholesale revision of the methods and theories that underlie

contemporary sociology. Actor-Network-Theory has recently been championed

in archaeology by "symmetrical archaeologists." In my presentation, I evaluate

the origins and rhetoric of symmetrical archaeology from the perspective of the

“new pragmatism,” the renewed commitment to archaeology's relevance in the

modern world.

On Actor-Network-Theory

ANT has its origins in the science and technology studies debates of the mid

1980s. Although there are earlier antecedents (e.g. Callon and Latour 1981),

1
Paper presented to the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, October 10, 2012. Please do not
cite or circulate without the permission of the author.
2
Bruno Latour is Professor and Vice-President for research at Institut d'études politiques de Paris
(Sciences Po Paris) and affiliated with the Centre de sociologie des organisations (CSO). Michel Callon is
Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Mines de Paris and member of the Centre de Sociologie de
l'Innovation. John Law is Professor of sociology currently at the Open University and Co-Director of
ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) and Director of the Social Life of Method
Theme within CRESC.

1
Latour (2005:10) attributes its birth to three key publications, one by Callon

(1986), one by Law (1986), and another by himself (Latour 1988).3 Together, these

contributions pointed towards a new way of thinking about things as diverse as

humans, microbes, rocks, ships, and scallops. Lets look at these studies in a little

more detail.

Callon's article applies what he calls the "sociology of translation" to an

analysis of the introduction of Japanese scallop fishing techniques to Brittany in

the 1970s. He traces out some of the linkages between the fishermen, scallops and

scientists in order to reveal how society and nature are intertwined. In 1972,

scientists and representatives of the fishing industry participated in a conference

at Brest, France to consider the adoption of a scallop cultivation technique used

successfully in Japan. This technique involves gathering the scallop larvae,

growing them in an artificial context, reintroducing them to the bay, and then

harvesting them at maturity. Callon defines obligatory passage points (OPPs)

that determine the success or failure of the practice. An example is whether or

not the larvae attach themselves to the collectors. He is particularly interested in

the progressive development of new social alignments between the various

actors including government funding agencies, the scientists, the scallop

fishermen and the scallops themselves. Initially, all parties give their assent to

the plans of the research scientists. But when a catastrophe occurred, the

fishermen dredged up the experimental scallops and sold them! He concludes

that "the definition and distribution of roles . . . are a result of multilateral

negotiations during which the identity of the actors is determined and tested"

3
John Law maintains a website for Actor Network Theory resources, see,
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/ant/ant.htm

2
(Callon 1986:214).

John Law's (1986) article focuses on the turning point in the balance of power

between Europe and the rest of the world. He suggests that Columbus's

discovery of the New World in 1492 and the arrival of Portuguese vessels in the

Indian Ocean in 1498 marked the shift to European control and domination. He

then makes two arguments. First, he suggests that this power shift was enabled

through long distance control in all its aspects (Law 1986). A small number of

people in Lisbon were able to influence events halfway around the world, and

thereby reap a fabulous reward. To understand this, it is necessary to develop an

analytical method capable of addressing the intersections of the social, the

technological, the natural etc. Second, he suggests that although artifacts, like

astrolabes, constitute an important part of long-distance control systems they

should not be conceptualized as tools directed by social interests. Rather they

should be seen as interwoven with the social, the economic etc. Their form is thus

a function of the way in which they "absorb within themselves aspects their

seemingly non-technological environments." (Law 1986:236).

Latour's book The Pasteurization of France is an attempt to reimagine scientific

advances in public health. He challenges the popular myth that Pasteur

singlehandedly subdued the world of disease through his theory of microbes and

thereby ushered in the Modern Age. He holds that Pasteur's genius lay not only

in his science, but also in his strategy to win over French farmers, industrialists,

and politicians. His success thus depended upon a whole network of forces,

which included the public hygiene movement, the medical profession (military

physicians and private practitioners), and colonial interests. This analysis is

made possible by a new semiotic method. Latour writes, "I use history as a brain

3
scientist uses a rat, cutting through it in order to follow the mechanisms that may

allow me to understand at once the content of a science and its context” (Latour

1988:12, his emphasis). His goal is to build up a network of associations that

make up the Pasteurian world by replacing each argument about context or

content with a new linkage between society and its sciences (Latour 1988:12).

One of ANT’s most controversial moves is its extension of agency to non-

human entities. This is accomplished though the “symmetrical” treatment of

human and non-human actants. Here symmetry means avoiding ascribing

properties to categories a priori and viewing the power of humans and non-

humans as equally uncertain, ambiguous and disputable (Callon 1986). There is,

therefore, no necessary agential priority accorded to the social, institutional,

conceptual, and material (Callon and Latour 1992). In this way, ANT purports to

overcome the seemingly irreconcilable dichotomies of human/non-human,

agency/structure, subject/object, nature/culture. Particular configurations are

viewed not as a property of any one element, but rather as the effects of

networking activity of interpretations that “link in one continuous chain”

representations, politics and the world of the scientific discovery" (Latour

1993:10-11). Power thus lies not within the individual actants themselves, but

through their relations, associations, and alliances (Law 1991).

Latour explains how he came to this new understanding. He writes that “the

Rubicon was crossed, for me at least, when successive connections were accepted

of the three former non-social objects (microbes, scallops, and reefs) that insisted

on occupying the strange position of being associated with the former social

entities we were trying to describe” (2005:106, his emphasis). He goes on to

explain that “scallops make humans do things just as nets placed in the ocean lure

4
scallops into attaching themselves to the nets.” He concludes that the “social is

nowhere in particular as a thing among other things, but may circulate everywhere

as a movement connecting non-social things” (2005:107, his emphasis). For him,

there is no social or society, only “translations between mediators that may

generate traceable associations” (2005:108).

ANT has generated a series of important critiques. Some of these have to do

with ontology, in particular, the nature/society distinction. David Bloor writes,

"Because Latour has picked up the wrong end of the stick it isn’t surprising that

his subsequent account of the symmetry postulate is confused. That postulate is

not expressive of, or dependent on, an underlying asymmetry of attitude

towards nature and society of the kind he alleges. A correct, naturalistic reading

of the symmetry principle implies that both ‘nature’ (that is, non-social nature)

and society will be implicated in the formation of belief. The ‘symmetry’ to be

insisted upon is that both types of cause, both our experience of the world of

things and the world of people, will be implicated in all bodies of collective

belief" (Bloor 1999:88).4 That is to say the natural and social must play a role in

explanations, but they are not necessarily equivalent in their effects.

Other critiques have to do with the mischaracterization of power relations.

Harry Collins and Steven Yearley (1992), for example, critique Latour for

reserving authority for the scientists.5 “The consequences of the semiotic method

amount to a backward step, leading us to embrace once more the very priority of

technological, rule-bound description, adopted from scientists and technologists,

4
Bloor also states that Latour's ANT is "obscurantism raised to the level of a general methodological
principle" (Bloor 1999:97).
5
Harry Collins and Steven Yearley's (1992) article entitled "epistemological chicken" touched off a debate
that has come to be known as the "chicken" debate (Pickering1995:10).

5
that we once learned to ignore. This backward step has happened as a

consequence of the misconceived extension of symmetry that takes humans out

of their pivotal role. If nonhumans are actants, then we need a way of

determining their power. This is the business of scientists and technologists; it

takes us directly back to the scientists’ conventional and prosaic accounts of the

world from which we escaped in the early 1970’s” (Collins and Yearley

1992:322). Collins and Yearley take this position because "the big job of sorting

out the relationship between cultural enterprises has to be done from the level of

social realism. The work can be done from no other level" (Collins and Yearley

1992:309). They conclude "actor network model is philosophically radical, but

when we ask for its use, it turns out to be essentially conservative - a poverty of

method making it subservient to a prosaic view of science and technology"

(Collins and Yearley 1992:323).

Latour has responded to these critiques in a variety of ways. First, he has

engaged in quasi self-critique. In an article entitled "On recalling ANT," he states

"there are four things that do not work with actor-network theory; the word

actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen! Four nails in the

coffin" (Latour 1999:15). He explains that ANT is better understood as an

attempt to pay attention to two dissatisfactions in the social sciences related to

scale, namely the problems of addressing the micro and the macro levels

simultaneously (Latour 1999:17). This leads him to speculate on the possibility

that the social may not be composed of agency and structure at all, but rather a

circulating entity composed of interactions. He goes on to profess hope for life

beyond ANT and that "some other creature might emerge, light and beautiful:

our future collective achievement (Latour 1999:24). However, this self-critique is

6
more apparent than real since Latour has since published extensively on ANT

and continues to defend it from its various critics.

Second, he makes a political argument. He suggests that the definition of

what it means for a social science to have political relevance needs to be

thoroughly revised (Latour 2005:253). He goes on to say that we must

distinguish questions that address the nature of the assemblages in the world

from those that ask whether the aggregates form a livable world. For him, this

shift means “replacing ‘the politics of nature’ with the progressive composition of

one common world” (Latour 2005:254, his emphasis). He sees this move as a way to

"redefine science and politics and to carry out the task of political epistemology

forced on us by the various ecological crises" (Latour 2005:254). This framing,

however, seems to imply that politics is subsidiary to the goals of ANT. In the

end, it is people, albeit entangled in complex social, material, and technological

webs, who must decide what this one common world should look like.

Third, he makes a moral argument. He states, "if you really think that the

future common world can be better composed by using nature and society as the

ultimate meta-language, then ANT is useless. It might become interesting only if

what was called in the recent past ‘the West’ decides to rethink how it should

present itself to the rest of the world that is soon to become more powerful. After

having registered the sudden new weakness of the former West and trying to

imagine how it could survive a bit longer in the future to maintain its place in the

sun, we have to establish connections with the others that cannot possibly be

held in the nature/society collectors. Or, to use another ambiguous term, we just

might have to engage in cosmopolitics (Latour 2005:262). This view of

cosmopolitics is remarkably one sided since it insists upon a Western (Latourian)

7
metalanguage, rather than acknowledging how the Western and non-Western

might transform each other.6

Symmetrical Archaeology

A number of archaeologists, dissatisfied with social archaeology, have now

begun to work with different aspects of ANT. These individuals include most

notably Bjørnar Olsen, Michael Shanks, Christopher Witmore, and Timothy

Webmoor. This intervention has come to be called “symmetrical archaeology” to

signal an alliance with Latour's symmetrical principle (Olsen 2003, Shanks 2007,

Witmore 2007).7 It is partly based at Stanford University and has strong links to

Michael Shanks’s MetaMedialab.8

The leader of this new movement is perhaps Bjørnar Olsen.9 Olsen played an

important role in the early days of postprocessual archaeology and contributed

essays on the language of archaeology (Olsen 1991) and nature of hermeneutics

(Olsen 1990, Johnsen and Olsen 1992). In 2003, he published the first

archeological engagement with ANT in essay entitled “Material culture after text:

re-membering things” (Olsen 2003). He explains that his central research

question is "how do things, objects - the material world in general - relate to

human beings and what generally is thought of as 'social life'" (Olsen 2003:87).

6
For an alternative approach to cosmopolitics see Stengers (2010, 2011).
7
For other archaeological uses of, or comments on Actor-Network-Theory, see Dolwick (2009), Hicks
(2004, 2005, 2007), Hicks and Beaudry (2010), Knappett (2008), Martin (2005), Watts (2007), and
Whitridge (2005). Not all of these examples are necessarily congruent with symmetrical archaeology.
There are as yet very few critiques of this new approach (but see Ingold 2008, Johnson 2010).
8
See the Stanford websites, http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/23/9/ and
http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/actornetworktheory/
9
Bjørnar Olsen is Professor of archaeology at the University of Tromsø.

8
He observes that the philosophical discourse has marginalized the materiality of

social life and material culture studies have moved away from the thing’s

materiality to emphasize social constructivist theories. As a corrective, he

proposed a “symmetrical archaeology” based upon the idea that "all those

physical entities we call material culture, are beings in the world alongside other

beings, such as humans, plants and animals” (Olsen 2003:88). Their difference is

not given by ontological dualities, like culture/nature, but rather by way of

mediation and translation involving heterogeneous networks linking a variety of

entities.

Olsen explicitly identifies ANT as an important source of inspiration. For

him, reality is not to be found in essences, but rather in imbroglios and mixtures

that characterize people/thing relationships (Olsen 2003:98). For Olsen, social

theory is impoverished because it has failed to develop an adequate view of the

world. He explains that "the main reason why the materiality of things still is

being kept firmly at arm's length is that a thing-hostile ontology continues to

inform dominant approaches in material culture studies: an ontology that since

Kant, at least, denied any direct access to things, and which has since surfaced as

a skeptical attitude in which the material is always treated with suspicion and

never allowed more than a provisional and derivative existence" (Olsen

2007:580).

Several scholars have now contributed to the elaboration of symmetrical

archaeology. Chris Witmore (2007) has offered "excerpts of a manifesto" in

support of this new approach.10 He starts with the proposition that humans and

10
I should mention here that Webmoor and Whitmore (2008) have critiqued Lynn Meskell's and my call
(Meskell and Preucel 2004) for a social archaeology.

9
non-humans are not ontologically distinct, but rather ontologically mixed

(Witmore 2007:546). Following Latour (1993), he suggests that our pervasive

subject/object dichotomy is the purified product of our particular relations to the

world. He considers symmetrical archaeology to be a "new 'ecology' packed

with things, mixed with human and companion species and which prioritizes the

multi-temporal and multi-sensoral qualities, the multiplicity, of the material

world (Witmore 2007:546). He identifies its intellectual geneaology as linking

Leibnizian, Whiteheadian, and Pragmatist traditions in philosophy with the

science and technology studies of Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, Michel Callon,

John Law, and Donna Haraway.

He identifies six key slogans and concepts for a symmetrical archaeology.

These are: 1) PRACTICE- archaeology begins with admixtures, not bifurcations,

2) AGENCY- there is always a variety of human and non human agencies, 3)

TRANSLATION/MEDIATION- there is more to understanding than ‘meaning,’

4) CHANGE- change arises from fluctuating relations between entities, 5) TIME-

the past is not exclusively past, and 6) THINGS- humanity begins with things

(Witmore 2007:549).

By practice, Witmore means that we need to attend to what archaeologists do

in the field rather than what we say we do. He emphasizes that the field is not

"out there," rather it is everywhere because the things that we excavate circulate

through a variety of contexts of engagements. The things of archaeology exist

both as things on shelves in museums and in their various substitutes, for

example notebooks, catalogue numbers, illustrations, and photographs etc. The

field is better understood from an ANT perspective as multiple fields,

10
constituting the "heterogenous network, which situates practice throughout

various stages of iteration" (Witmore 2007:550).

Whitmore is critical of the standard use of agency to refer to humans and its

extension to things as an example of secondary agency. He regards this use as a

modernist myth where initiative always comes from humans. He wants us to

consider how things "push back and have a stake" in the world (Witmore

2007:552). Following Latour (1991:181), he suggests that humans are not the

prime movers of the excavation process, rather the excavation is the outcome of a

distributed and nested set of practices. It is here where agency properly resides.

"Our excavator, now understood as a distributed collective called an

archaeologist, is constantly shifting her goals depending on the allies she

mobilizes to attain a particular end. To be sure, this end differs depending on the

properties of that ally or, in this case, tool. Wall collapse excavated by an

archaeologist-with-a pick is very different from wall collapse excavated by an

archaeologist-with-a-trowel" (Witmore 2007:553).

Whitmore next introduces the notion of transformation and suggests that

archaeology, unlike other sciences, actively transforms its field of study. Once an

excavation is completed, the site cannot be recreated in its original form. Rather

it is translated through a variety of media that produce stand-ins. He then

asserts that we have a responsibility (ethical?) to go beyond the search for

meaning and address "the multiplicities, ambiguities and presences of the

material world within the archaeological process" (Witmore 2007:554). He favors

the use of multimedia that enables collaborative authorship and public feedback

to translate some of the sensory, physical presence of the past.

11
 For Whitmore, the notion of change also requires recuperation. As an

example, he argues that the story of agricultural origins during

Mesolithic/Neolithic transition in Greece is based upon a modernist notion of

historicity that specifies what it means to be human and live in the world. He

suggests that the transformations that occurred around 7,000 B.C. are "not solely

about how new things, new understandings, new members are enrolled within a

community, within a collective, rather they are about how the roles of already

present members or the relations of the already present members change"

(Witmore 2007:555).

Whitmore then critiques the notion of time's arrow, the idea that the past is

closed off and inaccesible. He offers the analogy that time is like the weather. "It

is full of calms, whirlwinds and chaotic fluctuations" (Witmore 2007:556). For

symmetrical archaeology, the past is not exclusively past. This is because

something of the past exists in the here and now by virtue of its material

existence. Because it is accorded action it mediates peoples lives in multiple

ways. In the context of landscape archaeology, he suggests that archaeologists

can treat time as a sorter and locate various time periods and components.

However, one can also treat the sorting as a marker of time and record the

multiple material pasts of landscapes as the gathering of disparate times

(Witmore 2007:556).

Finally, Whitmore turns to things. His main example is the origins of digital

media. He identifies the daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre and the calculating

engine of Charles Babbage as providing two trajectories necessary for the

modern digital computer. The former was immediately successful but the latter

was delayed. He suggests that "these achievements were made durable through

12
their translation and in this way transactions between various entities are folded

into such things. As things these accomplishments may circulate at a distance in

space and time; they may be instantly successful, forgotten, or later unforgotten;

when recirculated, they may enter into new interplays and theory contribute to

new achievements" (Witmore 2007:558).

Most recently, Olsen has published his book entitled In Defense of Things

(Olsen 2010). His main goal is to reconceptualize how we think about society and

culture. The central element of his agenda is the ANT assertion that things are

beings in the world alongside other beings such as humans, plants and animals.

He further argues that things are not passive, waiting to be activated by humans.

Rather they have their own unique qualities and capacities that they bring to our

cohabitation with them. Things share certain material properties and have the

potential for effecting the world. He suggests that the one historical trajectory

running from Olduvai Gorge to Postmodernia is that of the increasing delegation

of tasks to nonhuman actors and the increasing mediation of actions by things

(Olsen 2010:9).11 It is these mediations that underlie the advent of farming,

urbanization, state formation, industrialization, and postindustrialiation.

From Inupiat whaling boat crews to Teotihuacan dancers

While there are a number of theoretical engagements with ANT in

archaeology, there are, at present, very few examples of actual case studies. This

11
Compare this statement to John Pickering’s (1997:46) view that “from the earliest artifacts to
nanotechnology there has been a progressive increase in the importance of artifacts to human practices an
the posit human condition is beginning to be discussed as a technological project.” Pickering shows that it
is possible to consider the agency of things without going the route of ANT.

13
emphasis on theory is typical for the early phases in the introduction of a new

theory into a field.12 In what follows, I consider Peter Whitridge's study of Thule

whaling and Tim Webmoor's study of heritage at Teotihuacan.

Whitridge (2004) has offered an application of ANT to the study of whaling

among Thule hunter-gatherers in the North American Arctic. He notes that

whaling emerged as an important economic focus in the Bering-Chukchi Sea

region with the growing interregional interactions among the Punuk, Birnirk and

other cultures during the late first millenium A.D. (Whitridge 2004:458). He

proposes that the Birnirk-Thule transition can be understood as the introduction

a new form of whaling practice from Alaska at about A. D. 1000. This whaling

practice was a quasi-entrepreneurial endeavor led by a successful boat captain

(umialik) who recruited kin and other followers to form a whaling group as crew

for a whaling boat (umiak). The crew cooperated in using toggle-head harpoons,

attaching drags, lancing the whale, towing it ashore and flensing it for food. For

their efforts, they were rewarded with shares of whale products as well as other

social benefits. The boat captain also maintained a communal building to serve

as a club house for the crew and a site for community feasting and ritual.

Whitridge then uses an ANT perspective to come up with new avenues of

inquiry. For example, he considers the changing configuration of sea-mammal

hunting technology not as cultural borrowing or as ecological adaptation, but as

a social imbroglio simultaneously social, technological, ecological and discursive.

12
Olsen (2010) actively resists providing an archaeological example. He writes, “Writing a book about
thing theory easily leads to expectations of something that can be immediately used to inform
archaeological inquiries about the past and even of being provided with instructions for proper usage. In
this book, however, theories are not played out in a ‘case study,’ the compartmentalized applied field that
constitutes such a dominant trope in most archaeological and anthropology books of this kind. Those who

14
He suggests that harpoon heads can be seen as part of a complex technical

assemblage and changes in its function would have had ripple effects throughout

associated fields. He then notes that there is a homology between the

captains/umiak/whaling groups on the water and hunters/qargi/households on

land. "It is as if each technical link in the network that comprises umiak-float

whaling had to be forged through the production of an equivalent social link,

which in turn requires the enlistment of the material idioms of architecture and

community layout" (Whitridge 2004:463). He concludes that "in producing an

account that treats all of these players symmetrically, as equally integral

participants in the whaling enterprise, we are not making a fantastic descent into

a Wonderland of acting whales and harpoons, but we are simply attending to the

accounts of whaling that the Inupiat whalers themselves produced" (Whitridge

2004:466). This is an intriguing study because of its use of ANT principles does

not overwhelm Inupiat practice. But what is absent here of course, is the agency

of the Inupiat whalers themselves, a consideration of the narratives about their

past that the whalers themselves want produced.

Tim Webmoor (2007) has offered a consideration of heritage from an ANT

perspective. He suggests that the modern focus on multivocality and world

heritage might seem to be a context where the symmetry principle would have

limited analytic value (Webmoor 2007:573). He then challenges this view in his

study of heritage at Teotihuacan, a World Heritage site.13 He traces the

associations formed by modern, "Aztec" dancers in order to reveal the active

qualities of things. For example, he draws attention to the stepped causeways

search for a methodology or an interpretive strategy will therefore most likely be disappointed (Olsen
2010:17). Without such a clarification, it seems hard to see this approach gaining a wide following.

15
surrounding the plaza of the Pyramid of the Sun noting that they determine now,

just as they did in the past, where the performances are located. He also notes

that the movement of tourists is also controlled by fences and gates established

by INAH as part of a program to celebrate nationalist identity. Thus things, both

past and present, equally contribute to the performance creating inter-connected

networks that extend well beyond the standard notion of heritage.

Webmoor notes that people come to Teotihuacan for a variety of reasons,

including employment (the market vendors), to perform rituals (the new age

advocates), for entertainment (all tourists), to learn about the past and

archaeology (all tourists), and to take pride in national identities (Mexican

tourists). He then abstracts these goals into four primary associations. These are

the archaeological, the economic, the diversionary, and the spiritual, which

together, through their intersections, constitute what we call heritage. He is

particularly interested in how personal variables relate to the relationships that

individuals form with archaeological sites. For some people, simple ‘exposure’,

to the material of the site and artifacts themselves, to archaeological information

and experts, and to popular media plays the key determining role (Witmore

2007:574). For others, factors such as gender and education are important.

Webmoor suggests that tracing out these associations from a single site draws

attention to local and national politics, stakeholder beliefs, and the general

archaeological shape of local and communities. For him, ANT provides a "voice"

to a greater assembly consisting of both humans and things (Webmoor 2007:575).

This analysis is deeply problematic because it reduces concrete political interests

13
This work is based upon his dissertation at Stanford University.

16
with economic and legal implications to amorphous and fluid associations of

only theoretical import. It is an example of how disciplinary purification (to use

Latour's word) accomplished through frequent ontological/epistemological

churning is complicit with a neoliberal agenda.

Pragmatic Critique

Parallel with the emergence of ANT in science studies, there has been a

growing emphasis on the social and an interest more generally in establishing

the relevance of social sciences to the modern world. In philosophy, this has

meant the re-examination of pragmatism and the importance it places on self-

referential knowledge and its practical application to contemporary social issues

(Baert 2005a, 2005b, Eggington and Sandbothe 2004). In archaeology, this is

perhaps exemplified by the rise of postprocessual archaeologies and the gradual

incorporation of questions of identity, meaning, agency and practice alongside

those of system, process and structure (Baert 2005a, 2005b, Meskell and Preucel

2004). It is no longer possible to justify archaeology on internal grounds. Rather,

the ethics of archaeology now require that we join diverse interest groups in the

common project of understanding the multiple meanings of the past for the

present (Preucel and Mrozowski 2010).

It is therefore profoundly ironic that just at the moment that archaeology is

poised to make contributions to the modern world, there are calls to do away

with the social. The manifesto for a symmetrical archaeology downplays human

agency in preference for a method where humans and things are given

ontological “equality.” It can be argued, however, that hidden under ANT’s

17
radical cloak lies a conservative neo-liberal political stance. Latour (2005:259)

writes that "ANT embraces the intuition that associations are not enough, that

they should be composed in order to design one common world.” He continues to

say that “sociology, unlike anthropology, can never be content with a plurality of

metaphysics. Rather, it is committed to tackling the ontological question of the

unity of the common world” (2005:259). But we need to ask, whose unity and for

what purposes?

In their zeal to reconfigure the material, symmetrical archaeologists have

followed Latour too closely and stumbled against the curb of power relations.

Witmore (2007:559) suggests that “a symmetrical archaeology understands how

human beings live with (to be distinguished from in) the world of mixtures and

entanglements” and that this “opens up new realms of possibility and new

potentials for invention, which free us from the conceptual burdens associated

with such a modernist predicament.” But surely what it means to be human

involves negotiating one’s place within different kinds of networks, be they

familial or corporate, pure or mixed, human or nonhuman. This neglect of power

is not a problem unique to the application of ANT to archaeology. As we have

seen, Latour, himself, offers no clear guidance as to how to address longstanding

human issues such as social justice.

Concluding Thoughts

In the end, a pragmatist must ask what exactly is symmetrical archaeology

for? As Jürgen Habermas (1972) taught us long ago, there is no such thing as

disinterested knowledge. So what interests do a symmetrical archaeology serve?

18
If the social is to be deconstructed and then reassembled, as this approach

apparently requires, what are its implications for what Richard Rorty (1982),

following John Dewey, calls “the problems of men.”

In my view, symmetrical archaeology does offer some valuable contributions.

One of these is acknowledging the artificial separation of past and present. The

past is present. This insight was recognized by scholars as diverse as Binford and

Hodder. Binford (1983) argued that the archaeological record was a present

phenomenon and the task of the archaeologist was to bridge statics and

dynamics. Similarly, Hodder (1983:9) has argued that the past is present in the

sense that our reconstructions of the past are produced in the present. And, from

the point of view of many indigenous peoples, this insight is entirely appropriate

and long overdue. Another is the idea of mediation. Witmore (2007:552) suggests

that this refers to the multiple ways human and non-human actors exchange

properties in the process of moving towards a goal in which a variety of entities

hold a stake. This is similar to, but not identical with, the view of mediation in

pragmatic archaeology (Preucel 2006).

However, there is a serious problem with symmetrical archaeology and it is a

problem shared with ANT. In the reconfiguration of the social, symmetrical

archaeologists have disregarded the specificity of power relations. Their

approach undervalues the transformative nature of power, seeing it as emerging

from the processes that occur within a network, rather than seeing power as

being constitutive of the network. It is thus a flat view of the world with no

acknowledgement of pre-existing social hierarchies. All that apparently exist are

assemblages of human/things constantly engineering and reengineering

themselves in networks of association. This is a profoundly anti-anthropological

19
perspective.14 There is more at stake in the world than epistemology and

ontology. There is also life.

14
Latour (1993:116), in fact, critiques anthropology as being preoccupied with territories and unable to
address networks. Strathern (1996) has provided a valuable rebuttal. For a more recent engagement, see
Strathern (1999).

20
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