To browse Academia. For a long time in archaeology, agency has been synonymous with human action. While it might well be argued that most archaeologists still tend to understand agency that way, a fundamental dissatisfaction with this notion of agency has been growing on the theoretical scene of the discipline during the last ten years or so. Some archaeologists have begun to worry that the equation of agency with human action stands or falls with an untenable anthropocentric premise that blocks the way for any full acknowledgement of non-human materiality as a causal constituent in the cultural lives of human beings.
For all the attention given to the social, ideological and communicative importance of human 'material culture', it is argued, non-human materiality has remained causally deprived and stigmatized within the dominant analytical frameworks centred on the human agent e. Harrison-Buck and J. Hendon, pp. Tra le coste del Levante e le terre del tramonto. Studi in ricordo di Paolo Bernardini, Log in with Facebook Log in with Google.
Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Published in: Johannsen, N. Jensen eds. Excavating the Mind: Cross-sections through culture, cognition and materiality, pp. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Archaeology and the Inanimate Agency Proposition: a critique and a suggestion Niels Johannsen For a long time in archaeology, agency has been synonymous with human action.
In other words, we should broaden our concept of agency to include what is perhaps most cogently termed inanimate agency. At surface level the idea of inanimate agency seems quite clear. However, much of the recent literature promoting this revision of agency in archaeology has remained relatively vague on its more specific ontological commitments.
It has often been difficult to identify what exactly revisionist proposals are meant to imply in terms of the practical operation of causal factors e. Martin , Perhaps this lack of clarity or explicitness is what has led some commentators to suspect that propositions on the agency of inanimate things have been adopted primarily because of their suitability as rhetorical levers in the academic game of persuasion and self-promotion Johnson , But, as we shall see below and as stressed by Olsen a, in reply to Johnson, closer examination reveals that the commitments of the IAP, in archaeology and elsewhere, go far beyond the rhetorical.
