Agency and Landscape: abandoning the nature/culture dichotomy in interpretations of the Natufian and the transition to the Neolithic. (original) (raw)

Two cultures in the times of interdisciplinary archaeology. A response to commentators

Archaeological Dialogues, 2019

5 We would like to begin by thanking the journal and the commentators AQ2 below for their time and 6 attention. 7 For us, the comments to our paper illustrate a certain diversity pertaining to how the scientific 8 field positions itself regarding environmental determinism and connected issues. A discussion of 9 this diversity will lead us to revisit some of the key themes of our paper in the context of the 10 comments.

Crossing Divides: Archaeology as Long-Term History

Crossing Divides: Archaeology as Long-Term History. In Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400-1900, 2010

Mitchell, Mark D. and Laura L. Scheiber (2010) Crossing Divides: Archaeology as Long-Term History. In Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400-1900, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, pp. 1-22. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Few cultural and political events have stimulated as much debate among social scientists as the Columbian Quincentennial. For archaeologists especially, the 1992 commemoration of Columbus’s landfall in the New World provoked a wide-ranging and critical debate. At first, the discussion was largely reflexive and focused on the political context of archaeological practice, on the responsibilities of archaeologists to descendant communities, and on the disciplinary divide separating history from anthropology. More recently, attention has turned to the development of new theoretical approaches for studying colonial interaction, inspired especially by political economy and poststructural social theory. The result has been a surge of interest in post-1500 indigenous communities and a rapidly growing body of archaeological knowledge about the ways in which the processes of European colonialism were integrated, accommodated, resisted, and transformed by native peoples. But even as research on colonial interaction has become more prominent and methodologically sophisticated, many scholars have continued to rely on untested conceptual frameworks for understanding how and why native societies changed after the advent of European. Despite evidence of their inadequacy, the same conventional explanations for the course of post-1500 culture change continue to be given. American Indians and First Nations peoples continue to be portrayed as primitive environmentalists, living lightly on the land in a homeostatic state of nature, even as evidence mounts that they were responsible for shaping the ecosystems encountered by the first European settlers. Archaeologists continue to assume that European technologies rapidly and decisively replaced indigenous technologies, despite evidence for the persistent use of stone and bone tools. Historians acknowledge the impact of native actions on colonial society, but the dominance of the colonists, with their more powerful weapons, their superior disease resistance, and their outsized avarice, is seldom questioned. And although the triumphal story of European progress has lost some of its luster, the teleology at its heart can still be found in the assumption of inevitable cultural collapse that infuses research on recent native peoples. In part, the ongoing reliance on conventional narratives of change reflects the asymmetrical outcome of colonial interaction. In the end, the result was decisive: millions of native people dead, the survivors driven from their homes, forced to assimilate, forced to deny their heritage and their identity. Many of their descendants now live in crushing poverty. The consequences for native peoples have been so overwhelming that many scholars have believed they also were inevitable, and this has discouraged critical In part, the ongoing reliance on conventional narratives of change reflects the asymmetrical outcome of colonial interaction. In the end, the result was decisive: millions of native people dead, the survivors driven from their homes, forced to assimilate, forced to deny their heritage and their identity. Many of their descendants now live in crushing poverty. The consequences for native peoples have been so overwhelming that many scholars have believed they also were inevitable, and this has discouraged critical research on the course of colonial interaction. But the assumption of inevitability merely poses questions: On what evidence are conventional narratives based? Who produced them and when? In this chapter, we explore the origins of these narratives, consider why they have endured, and introduce approaches to challenge them.

A sustainable practice: Rethinking nature in cultural research

Continuum-journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22.2, 2008

I start this paper with a question that is also a provocation: how sustainable is a cultural studies that does not take account of nature? What I propose is that before we speculate on how this field can engage with the environmental concerns that face us this question must first be asked. For what cultural studies can offer in the face of ecological stress, I will argue, is circumscribed by its own traditions. If the logics or conceptual parameters of the discipline resist an accommodation of the conditions of sustainability then we have little to offer. Yet if this is the case, what is the future of cultural studies given not only the current import of environmental issues but also the challenge that these material circumstances raise to our dominant traditions of research? Through a discussion of the limits of social constructivism and the prevalence of deconstructive critique in cultural studies, this paper thinks through what an alternative practice might be. It looks to the theoretical and practical application of assemblage, or gathering, as a generative tool for cultural research, and speculates that what we need at this time is a double agenda: to make our own discipline sustainable as we mobilize the particular capacities, methods and knowledges of cultural research in response to ecological distress.

Nature and Culture Dualism: Genesis of an Obsolete Dichotomy

This paper will discuss the relation between the concepts of nature and culture and their intricate interdependency, focusing on Modernity. Moreover, it will analyze the dichotomy that has historically emerged and its implications. Human beings have had different conceptions about what is natural and what is non-natural throughout their history. Before Modernity we did not conceive nature as being a different ontological reality, we did not perceive it as being separated from us. After Modernity everything changed, and we began to see nature as a mere object. Nature became, then, a representation, like a painting on a wall. Our contemporary world vision, our Weltanschauung, was formed mainly during the XVI and XVII centuries. There was, at that time, a considerable change in the way we perceived and described the world. This new mentality and this new form of representing the cosmos provided the basis for our new way of thinking. They were the substrate upon which our modern paradigm was erected. The world’s conversion in an image only became a reality thanks to technology. But this change happened only because of the paradigm shift originated in the XVII century. Technique always has been a way to articulate how (and what) we think. With the Greeks, technique (techné) was, at first, an extension of the physis. Thus, the technique was a way of being instead of a way of thinking. After the paradigm shift in the XVII century (a metaphysical change, in the very way we connected to the world), the human being left his former place. Perhaps would be even better if we talked about nature and culture as being as a hybrid. What, at the source, was natural, through the flows of production and consumption, undergoes transformations and becomes something that is not natural anymore but, at the same time, not completely artificial either. Our world, once divided between the social and the natural, becomes a space where a constant process, a continuous flow, is constantly happening. From that dichotomy between something good and something bad arises a dialectic, in which we no longer can see any division whatsoever. Keywords: Nature, Culture, Dichotomy, World Vision, Hybrid