Death of the passive subject

Abstract

In recent years some archaeological commentators have suggested moving away from an exclusively anthropocentric view of social reality. These ideas endorse elevating objects to the same ontological level as humans – thus creating a symmetrical view of reality. However, this symmetry threatens to force us to abandon the human subject and theories of meaning. This article defends a different idea. It is argued here that an archaeology of the social, based on human intentionality, is possible, while maintaining an ontology that does not involve dualistic conceptions of reality. Building upon the philosophical work of Vincent Descombes, it is contended that humans are intentional actors and society is predicated on triadic relations that involve humans, objects and meanings. These relations can only be understood holistically, given that these relations are merely parts of a meta-narrative. These meta-narratives contain specific historical and social settings, and it is only within these settings that social relations are intelligible.

Keywords

action intentionality narrative sociality triadic

Introduction

Archaeology is continually changing. The archaeological status quo is constantly challenged and every time there is a relative agreement as to where the discipline should be headed, alternative suggestions appear. Even though there were periods of agreement – for instance the processual period where many archaeologists subscribed to the systems model of societal growth (Salmon, 1978), the use of the hypothetico-deductive method (Watson, LeBlanc and Redman, 1971), and the use of cross-cultural generalizations (Binford, 1978), or even the postprocessual period which promoted the idea of the archaeological record as a text to be decoded (Hodder, 1985; Hodder and Hutson, 2003) and a critical re-assessment of knowledge claims in archaeology (Wylie, 1989, 1992) – archaeology, in general, tends to be more of a ground where ideas are constantly exchanged and rejected. Right now, archaeology cannot be said to have any one enduring theoretical framework, though many ideas from neighbouring disciplines have recently been put forward, such as actor–network theory (Webmoor, 2007; Witmore, 2007), cognitive archaeology (Abramiuk, 2012) and critical realism (Wallace, 2011). As the distinguished archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen states, there is a widening theoretical gap, a crisis in archaeology where apparently incompatible views try to establish themselves as the dominant voice (2004). This dialectic is particularly evident among the more theoretically inclined members of the discipline.

It is in archaeological theory where we have witnessed some of the most contentious ideas. Among these ideas, the ones that have gained most ground are the ones that argue for a complete abandonment of everything that is ‘modernistic’ in archaeology, especially segmentations of the world into divides such as nature–culture, human–material and subject–object (Olsen, 2012; Shanks, 2007; Thomas, 2004; Webmoor, 2007; Witmore, 2007). While I partially agree with most of the arguments made by those that reject what we have inherited from the inordinately modern type of thinking (sensu Latour, 1993), I also believe that some of these alternatives, namely symmetrical archaeology, are premised on some dissonant ideas. A short introduction to these alternatives can be seen elsewhere in this section (Harris, 2018). I will not be addressing these alternatives directly, but I would like to point out that it is not necessary to reject the human subject, and consequently, theories of meaning, as symmetrical archaeology insists. My proposal is not a radical replacement to our ‘enlightened’ ways of thinking, but rather aims to provide clarifications and some ideas as to how we can better understand the human past. Thus, I would like to start by addressing the contentious theses of metaphysical dualism, theses that are central to the current debates in archaeology.

Cartesian dualism has been an issue that has occupied the minds of philosophers since it was first laid out. It is one of the hallmarks of modern philosophy and it has been tackled in many different ways. While it is true that Cartesian dualism has acquired a quasi-legendary status throughout the years to those that support it and to those that reject it (Baker and Morris, 1996), the truth is that the dualism is not a static monolithic idea. Moreover, while the enlightenment was a period when several dualisms became doxa, many of the ideas regarding dualism that are now being supported or criticized are actually of earlier or later origin. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge the fact that not all dualisms have been fully abolished – and there are two that I would like to address that I believe are hindering philosophical and scientific progress.

The first one is the well-known Cartesian mind–body dualism, and the second can be referred to as ontological dualism. The difference between these two dualisms is quite simple: the mind–body dualism pertains primarily to a division of the human being, while the ontological dualism pertains primarily to the division of the whole universe. Both these dualisms are intricately related in that both institute a separation of the physical world from the transcendental non-physical world. However, overcoming the mind–body dualism does not necessarily mean that the ontological dualism will also be overcome. Gilbert Ryle (1949) tried to abolish mind–body dualism, but the division of the universe into a physical and a transcendental realm was left unchallenged. This ontological dualism might not be immediately obvious because this separation is not usually interpreted as a dualism. However, this issue can and should be interpreted as dualistic because if we accept monism in its most radical form, meaning that if we accept that the universe is the only object in existence, then we must forcefully accept that anything outside of this universe pertains to a different realm of existence. With regards to the mind–body dualism, this seems intuitively acceptable: if thoughts, beliefs, desires, etc. cannot be placed within our physical world, then they must necessarily be somewhere else. Accordingly, ontological dualism mirrors this problem: we have a physical world and explanations that rely on a dogmatic entity (Idea, pure act, infinite substance, entelechy, world-soul, perfect God, etc.) that cannot pertain to the physical world (Meillassoux, 2008: 32).

It is quite difficult to establish to what extent Descartes actually contributed to the ontological separation of the world. It is undeniable that Descartes played an important role in establishing the mind–body dualism, and this dualism is the one that most scholars readily recognize. But it is worth remembering that for Descartes mind and matter supervene on a primary substance: God. What this means is that Descartes was not an ontological dualist in the strict sense of the word, given that there are three distinct substances that compose the world (1982[1644]).¹ Therefore, if the mind–body separation is abolished, dualism is perpetuated in a different manner: through the distinction between God and physical matter. At this point it cannot be asserted that we are exclusively challenging the enlightenment heritage any more, given that ideas pertaining to the primacy of the divine can be found in the proto-philosophy of ancient Egypt and ancient Greece and can be seen enduring through such recent times as the 18th-century, albeit more subtly (Becker, 1932).

But what about the 21st-century? In more recent times, the highly influential modern philosopher John Searle has stated ‘we no longer take the mysteries of the world as expressions of supernatural meaning (…) if it should turn out that God exists, that would have to be a fact of nature like any other’ (Searle, 1998: 34–5). While Searle does make a good point in relation to how science seems to have established a strong foothold in our Western conception of the world, there is still the issue as to why that world is. So for instance, when lightning strikes a tall building, the 21st-century secular institutions would explain this phenomenon by appealing to the explanations provided by the natural sciences rather than by appealing to divine intervention. However, if the question purports to why something like electricity is inherently electrical, the explanation cannot be found in the natural sciences per se. Actual empirical phenomena can be adequately explained by natural sciences but the inherent metaphysical nature of empirical phenomena cannot.

It is this metaphysical issue that seems to force us to accept that there is something outside of reality that makes reality what it is, a ‘God’ if you will. For instance, Tim Maudlin gives primacy to laws of nature which he believes to be ‘irreducible primitives’ (2007: 172), and Alfred Gell views agency as a global characteristic of the world of people and things in which we live (1998: 20). Granted, agency and/or laws of nature are not always interpreted as metaphysical entities; however, if they are assumed to be not only denotative but also causal, as in the case of Gell and Maudlin, then it logically follows that they must be ontologically substantial (Armstrong, 1978: 5; Field, 1989: 68).

This idea of an external essence is quite pervasive – and while the idea that everything supervenes on God can be found in a variety of forms in most of human history, the enlightenment heritage contributed in exacerbating this idea further through several theses like Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, a principle that states that everything, every occurrence, and every fact requires a reason for why it is so and not otherwise (Meillassoux, 2008: 33). If we followed this principle strictly, explanations predicated on science would eventually run dry and we would forcefully have to infer some transcendental existence to justify why things are in a certain way.

Overcoming dualities is an objective most archaeologists would currently support, but I fear many ideas I will be defending in this article will come off as ‘modernistic’ in conception. Modernity is something that some archaeologists are intent on overcoming, but I do not believe that the large inheritance from modernity requires a radical substitution. What it does need is some clarification in some cases, and in others it merely needs some additions. The wholesale rejection of modernist worldviews² is throwing away the baby with the bathwater, which would leave us in the uncomfortable position of having to establish a new basis for archaeology, something that at this point is clearly untenable and unwarranted. Moreover, a look into how archaeology is practised across the world shows that the practices are mostly eclectic in origin, that is, that most archaeological practitioners combine methods and theories taken from traditional and current trends (Bintliff and Pearce, 2011). So it seems sensible to not force anything too radical onto practitioners that use methods and theories that evidently work quite well.

So I reiterate: the relationship between archaeology and the inheritance from modernity requires a better or more critical assessment. With this prospect ahead of us, I want to demonstrate how some slight changes in our perception of what the subject–object dualism actually is can create an archaeology that can be eminently social and historical without incurring in some of the problems that previous attempts towards social archaeology have had in the past.

The intentional subject

A subject–object relation relies not on the a priori identification of entities that qualify as subjects and/or objects; rather, a subject–object relation is one that establishes a relation of intentional action. In this view, the subject and object are interchangeable and need not necessarily be human. Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism, loosely based on Alain Badiou’s interpretation of Hegelian dialectics, is a good example of this principle at work (Brassier, 2014: 415; Meillassoux, 2008). This ultimately means that the subject–object dualism is not a metaphysical issue, in that there is nothing that cannot be either a subject or an object – what matters is the relationship of action between different types of objects. So for example, in elementary grammar, the sentence ‘Romeo loves Juliet’ establishes Romeo as the subject of the verb ‘to love’ and Juliet as the object of the verb (Descombes, 1988: 125). From an ontological point of view, we simply see two objects that have a relation with each other, but from a grammatical point of view we notice that Romeo is a subject for having initiated a teleological action. In this sentence, Romeo is a subject because of the intentional act of loving, so the relationship between him and Juliet is asymmetrical in that we cannot state that Juliet loves Romeo back from reading that sentence alone.

The idea of intentional action was central in abolishing the philosophy of representation inherited from Descartes. The philosophy of representation recognized representations as a mediator between the human subject and the external world, meaning that all conscious human action was preceded by a mental image of what was to be achieved. For instance, in order for Romeo to love Juliet, Romeo had to have a mental image of Juliet. Franz Brentano rejected this idea claiming that all mental action is automatically intentional, that is, directed to the object in question (Brentano, 2015[1874]; Descombes, 2001: 21). This was the birth of modern phenomenology as it established a direct connection between the subject of action to an object (Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015). Central to the notion of intentionality was the idea that mental acts are external, that is, that fear, hate, love, etc. had to be directed to an external object and not to their internal representation; for example, we fear wolves, not the idea of a wolf, and the Eiffel Tower is visible in the Champs-de-Mars, not its representation (Descombes, 1986: 4–5).

How does this affect Descartes’ cogito argument? We can envisage two ways in which Descartes defined himself through his method of doubt: as a thinking subject expressed through the pronoun ‘I’, and as René Descartes, the physical body that lived in the 17th-century (Descombes, 1988). In and of itself, Descartes, the physical body is nothing more than an inert body unless we attribute to him intentional actions. So for instance, if we say that Descartes was a person that was born to a family from Poitiers in 1596, we have established him as a particular person with an identity but not as a subject, whereas if we say that Descartes wrote to Van Shooten, we have effectively established him as a subject of an intentional relation. In Descartes, the act of thinking is the crucial element that defines his existence, but from a logical point of view Descartes could also have proven his own existence with other actions. This did not go unnoticed to some of Descartes’ contemporaries like Pierre Gassendi. Commenting on Descartes’ second meditation, Gassendi objected the privileging of the act of thinking over other actions like walking or kicking. Logically, stating ‘I walk, therefore I am’ is as good an inference as ‘I think, therefore I am’ because both these actions presuppose an agent (Descombes, 2001: 15).

If we think then, in terms of these intentional actions, the subject is nothing more than the thing that acts intentionally towards another thing. The distinct advantage of thinking in these terms is that we can have two levels of analysis that do not contradict each other. On one hand, we have the metaphysical world composed exclusively of objects that interact with each other, and on the other hand we have a world of discourse and logic where we see the establishment of intentional relations among subjects and objects. Making a statement like ‘Romeo loves Juliet’ does not imply that we are committed to an ontology that sees all humans as subjects. All this sentence denotes is that Romeo has intentionally acted. By following this perspective, we have shaken loose from the idea that subjects are exclusively passive humans.

Furthermore, intentionality sets itself apart from agency quite clearly. Unlike agency, which is seen by many scholars as an inherent capacity to act³ (Latour, 2005: 53), in the perspective of the present article, intentionality is a way of describing relations between objects. Therefore, saying that humans and/or animals have intentionality is not entirely accurate in that it supports two incorrect assumptions: the assumption that acting intentionally means that the subject is endowed with intentionality, and the assumption that intentionality is the cause of intentional actions.

Agency is commonly conceived as the capacity to cause an event or alter the course of an event (Chisholm, 1976; Gell, 1998: 20), which means that agency is causal. Intentionality on the other hand rejects causality in favour of teleology. What does this mean? Agency, as it is traditionally conceived, is a capacity without which an entity cannot act. Thus, agency causes or initiates actions, whereas intentionality concerns the descriptions of purposive actions. In and of itself intentionality does not cause anything, nor is it something an entity can have. If intentionality is not causal, then it cannot be subsumed under causal forms of explanation, it must have a form of its own: teleological explanation. This type of explanation has been studied quite thoroughly by many philosophers like G E M Anscombe (1957), Peter Geach (1957), Charles Taylor (1964) and George von Wright (1971). Let us look at a brief definition of teleological explanation

[it is the] type of explanation in which the ‘why?’ question about a particular event or activity is answered by specifying a goal or end towards the attainment of which the activity is a means (…). If I am asked why I am staying in Cambridge all through August, I should reply ‘in order to finish writing my book’. (Braithwaite, 1955: 322)

The intention itself is not what sets apart teleological explanations from causal explanations; there is also the context which provides the understanding of the intention. This is why, unlike causal relations which recognize conjunctions between causes and effects (Hume, 1975[1748]) a teleological explanation requires a functional system where the intention must be intelligible. To clarify this idea, Descombes (2014) has associated causal explanations with dyadic relations and teleological explanations with triadic relations. An example of a triadic relation is one between a cat owner and a cat. In this relation, being an owner stems not from some physical relation to the cat, but from what it means to be an owner of a cat. Therefore, to be an owner one must be within a system that recognizes the juridical notion of ownership, that is, of what is mine and what is thine (Descombes, 2014: 117). Without this background of understanding, the notion of ownership is unintelligible. It is in this sense that intentionality extricates itself from the metaphysical problems that afflict agency, given that intentionality is neither the property of entities (humans, animals, objects) nor a capacity to causally influence the world. As Descombes states

In reality, practical intentionality is not an activity at all; in order to have a goal, one need not have given oneself over to some sort of separate mental activity of ‘intending’ or ‘aiming at’ something. To have an intention in doing something is rather to do what one does and to do it with an aim such that there is an intentional relation between one’s present activity and the anticipated result. (Descombes, 2014: 13)

Generally, intentionality is reserved to humans given that it is assumed that intentional actions require the articulation of reasons (Anscombe, 1957: 11). However, as Taylor has remarked, a tiger might be dangerous to a farmer but it is also dangerous to a cow (2004: 209). In this case, even though a cow cannot articulate a reason why it fears a tiger, we expect cows to ‘know’ that it needs to run away in the presence of danger and thus, in a way, the cow can also be the subject of an intentional relation.

It is easy to mistake the relationship between the cow and the tiger as a causal relation, but logically the relation is actually an intentional one. If we describe the cow running away due to the danger the tiger poses, danger cannot be the cause behind the cow’s reaction. A tiger can have several objective properties (it has a certain weight, it makes certain noises and its hide has certain colours) but none of those objective properties is ‘danger’. A tiger is not inherently dangerous; it is only dangerous for someone or something. That is why stating that a tiger is heavy and stating that it is dangerous are two very different ways of describing the tiger. Moreover, talking about both danger and fear are ways of externalizing an intentional relation, in that what determines a tiger being dangerous are the people and/or animal that consider it dangerous. Similarly, what determines fear is not the entity that feels fear, but the entity that one is fearful of. Therefore, all intentional actions like fear, hate, love, etc. must be actions towards an external object, and not the product of the subject itself.

Anthropological and ontological holism

It can be claimed that mental philosophy during the 20th and 21st centuries developed through two distinct theories – the internalist and the externalist theories of mind. In short, internalist theories of mind ‘treat belief/knowledge as the wellspring of action and, accordingly, it requires that cognitive operations be understood to underpin, or even determine, sequences of action’ (Button and Sharrock, 1993: 3). The internalist side of mental philosophy sees the mind as something causal, given that it asserts that internal representations are the point of departure of action and these mental representations can be inferred based on certain patterns of action. The externalist side makes a different claim – that the brain can be studied by the natural sciences but not necessarily the mind, given that the mind is not a physical organ that operates in a mechanical fashion (Rorty, 2004). In externalism, the phenomena we attribute to minds, like having a belief, are always thought of as essentially bound up with phenomena external to the belief and the believer, in the sense in which a belief about water is not just, or not at all, a brain-state but something in the environment (H₂O) of the person with the belief, to use philosopher Hilary Putnam’s classic example (Putnam, 1975). In conjunction with what was said previously, when I provide a reason as to why I acted in certain way, the answer cannot be an explanation that refers to the mechanisms of the brain because the brain’s functions are internal but not intentional. What does this mean? It means that it is impossible for a human to have an internal state of causation (which requires no external context) while simultaneously having an intentional state (a state that can only be identified by an external context in which the intention is intelligible) (Descombes, 2014: xvii–xviii).

Let us imagine the following situation: a Cro-Magnon man is walking across a plain and is suddenly struck by lightning. Rather than leaving him dead, the electrical discharge alters his brain in a way that it mirrors a person who has the thought ‘I need to go to the bank’ (Descombes, 2001: 228). What happens when he has this thought? Is it even possible to have this thought? According to the internalists, who believe that the brain is also the mind and thus subject to a naturalistic type of causation, it is indeed possible, given that feeling the need to go to the ‘bank’ is nothing more than a neurophysiological state. This is why, as Descombes points out, the naturalist theory of the mind is not tenable – it perpetuates Cartesian dualism of mind and body, albeit it has replaced the Cartesian version of the mind with the mechanical brain. If we accept the internalist theory of mind which sees the brain as causing action, then the criticisms made by the continental materialists, regarding human-centred agency, are justified because the internalist theories, besides perpetuating the mind–body dualism, also perpetuate the traditional philosophy of the subject which is based on the Cartesian cogito.

From a metaphysical perspective, an internalist theory of mind forces a gap between a physical object and a capacity to act (human + mind). But, arguably, this is what recent theories concerning agency also do. Unlike internalist mental theories, theories of action which rely on agency usually give the mind less importance. Nevertheless, in both these types of theory, there is the underlying principle that mind/agency are the ‘wellspring of action’. In this perspective, a physical entity is always an agent regardless of whether the agent acts or not, because agency is seen as the property of the agent.

Latour, and the symmetrical archaeologists who agree with him, in their ambition to rid themselves of the subject–object dualism, rejected the view that agency is exclusive to humans – a view which perpetuates an asymmetry where things are seen as mere passive recipients of human action (Webmoor, 2007; Witmore, 2007). For the symmetrical archaeologists, social relations cannot depend solely on humans since these relations are a mixture of humans and things (Webmoor and Witmore, 2008), which is why agency has to be associated to both humans and things. While extending agency to objects does eliminate the subject–object dualism (Latour, 1999), it nonetheless perpetuates the idea that action starts from agency: that you can want, love, or hate, even when there is nothing to want, nothing to love, or nothing to hate. Intentionality, on the other hand, removes the action from the agent/mind and transfers it to a historical and social context. Granted, symmetrical archaeology concerns itself with much more than just agency, yet I find this dependence on agency quite problematic. For instance, the sight of average Joe in a bank in London might not raise any suspicions since going to the bank is a common activity in the Western world. However, some curiosity is raised if for some reason we see a Tanzanian hunter-gatherer, holding a bow and arrow, wearing nothing but a loincloth, in a bank in central London. This event is not out of the realm of possibility, just an unlikely one. Naturally, coming up with a realistic interpretation for why average Joe is at a bank in central London would be simpler in that average Joe’s history might not differ too much from our own, whereas coming up with an interpretation for why a Tanzanian is in the same bank would require knowing more information.

Like Descombes thought-experiment that imagines a Cro-Magnon man wanting to go to the ‘bank’, understanding why a Tanzanian is in the same situation requires placing both these people in situations where it is possible and probable to want to go the bank. In both scenarios, the Tanzanian hunter-gatherer and the Cro-Magnon could legitimately want to go to the bank. From the point of view of agency, they both have the capacity act in accordance with their intentions. What makes these scenarios seem out of place is that we do not expect the Tanzanian hunter-gatherer nor the Cro-Magnon to be familiar with ‘banks’, or in other words, with particular institutions of meaning (Descombes, 2014).

As stated in the previous section, the relation between a subject and object must necessarily be a triadic relation, in that the intention to act towards an intentional object requires a context of intelligibility. Mandelbaum describes a situation in which he enters a bank, fills in a withdrawal slip and hands it to a teller, for which he receives a certain amount of money (1959: 479). In this situation, the action is unintelligible unless, of course, we know the terms of the status and roles of the people involved in the banking transaction. Moreover, these statuses and roles are devoid of meaning unless interpreted within the context of how the roles are socially organized (ibid.), that is, the roles are articulated through institutions of meaning. These institutions of meaning are the external mind – they are what make social action understandable. Accordingly, an archaeology of sociality would necessarily require understanding and reconstructing the material conditions in which these institutions of meaning were created (like the advent of private property, division of labour, feasting, etc.) and this effort can already be seen, albeit tacitly, in archaeology (Barrett, 2014; Watts, 2008).

This is in short what Descombes has dubbed anthropological holism. What defines sociality in past societies is not the agential character of entities in the past, but as Hodder correctly argued some decades ago, a presence of meaning among social members (1982, 1985). These meanings, however, are not ‘conscious and subconscious meanings in people’s minds’ as Hodder and Hutson suggest (2003: 5), but are actual social practices.

Narrative intelligibility

To a large extent, the natural sciences are predicated on causal explanations which see constant conjunctions between two separate objects (Braithwaite, 1955: 293; Hume, 1975[1748]) whereas teleological explanations are not commonly employed in either the natural or the social sciences. Part of the reason why this is so lies on the fact that teleological explanations do not actually provide an explanation of why an actor intended to act in a certain way. As Hodder and Hutson observe, claiming that someone wanted to build a wall because he intended to is not really an adequate explanation (Hodder and Hutson, 2003: 155), therefore, one cannot rely merely on intentions.

An archaeology of social relations should not focus on the intention per se. It should focus on the context in which the intention is intelligible. Regarding this idea Descombes states

These conditions can be brought together under a principle that might be called ‘the principle of narrative intelligibility’. From the perspective of a poetics of narrative composition, every comprehensible episode of a story determines, precisely in virtue of the tale told, different possible chains of events, in the direction of both the past and the future. First, the episode brings forward a determinate past. If the hero remembers having gone swimming in the ocean, he must have gone swimming in the ocean, or it must at least be conceivable that he has. (Descombes, 2001: 182)

Returning to the Cro-Magnon man, one cannot imagine him as simply wanting to go to the ‘bank’ because the intention of going to bank requires an object that has to physically exist outside the mind. From a phenomenological perspective, this intention is a direct relation in that one does not create a mental image of a bank first, and only after such a mental image is constructed, have an intention towards it. Unlike mental images that can be static and timeless representations of real things, a bank and all the social practices related to banking belong in a specific space and time.

So there is a temporal necessity to our explanations of past societies because one cannot imagine intentional action taking place unless that action is understood in a historical context. For instance, understanding the process in which I typed this article on a computer requires a historical understanding of how computers developed, of how people came to use computers for everyday purposes, of how academic publications came to require electronic submission, and my own personal history, which in turn must contain the history of how I learned to use a computer. From an archaeological perspective, it is clear why this is important: it transfers the locus of action from a timeless causal sphere and puts it in a diachronic context of development. Thus, social action needs not to be ‘explained’ in the causal sense; what it needs is a narratological context. More importantly, narrative intelligibility overcomes the ontological issue of having to appeal to some ‘force’ that breathes life into humans and objects.

I find this important because archaeology has become in recent years too focused on identifying these ‘forces’. For instance, a recent review article titled Explaining the Past in 2010 starts with the following sentence: ‘[i]n 2010, archaeologists investigated diverse, multilinear human histories and disagreed about what forces shaped these histories most powerfully’ (Arkush, 2011: 200, emphasis mine). As stated in the beginning of this article, even though some effort has been put forward to eliminate the nature–culture, mind–body and subject–object dualism, we are stuck in a paradigm that sees a ‘force’ as the defining element of societal change and thus perpetuating an ontology that separates the realm of the physical, empirical and social world from the realm which contains these ‘forces’.

Subscribing to the principle of narrative intelligibility means abandoning the idea that there is some transcendental or immanent force that can change societies, and that includes agency. Figure 1 represents the difference between seeing the development of a society from an external point of view and from an internal point of view. In the upper image, change in societies is enacted from forces that are external to the society itself. I qualify these forces as external because they depend not on a society itself for their existence – they transcend it and act upon all and every society. In the second image, understanding why societies change depends on the internal history of the society.

Figure 1.

Two ways of representing how societal change occurs.

Some clarifications are due: when I state that change is external or internal to the society, I am not claiming that environmental events (traditionally conceived as ‘external’ in archaeology) cannot alter the development of society. However, if a society alters its agricultural practices due to some climatic event, the event needs to be seen as a historical event that changed that specific society and the new agricultural practice needs to be seen as the intentional action in response to the event.

Narrative social archaeology

Anthropological holism and narrative intelligibility affect archaeology on two levels. Anthropological holism puts human sociality on steadier footing by highlighting the intentionality of human action, whereas narrative intelligibility sees these social relationships as part of a diachronic development in the actual world of state of affairs.

When faced with archaeological evidence of past societies, it is important to recall that those societies somehow reached a point where they left evidence of social activity. A small hunter-gatherer group and the Roman Empire both left indelible marks, and the only way they could have left such marks was by creating a set of institutions of meaning (Descombes, 2014). For instance, the hunter-gatherer cave art that is currently evident in Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira and Foz Côa would have only been possible if the members of the hunter-gatherer group(s) in question institutionalized the meanings of the practices involved in the creation of rock art. In fact, even hunting and gathering activities would themselves require a set of agreements such as the age when a human could start hunting, which animals to follow during hunting season, which fruits to gather, etc. The Roman Empire, which is socially very distinct from hunter-gatherer groups, has left marks of a very different nature. The Roman ruins that are spread out in most of Europe were structures in their original state and they were built according to a good number of principles, like Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture.

Narrative is present in most human sciences in varying degrees, with its strongest present felt in history (Ankersmit, 1983; Danto, 1985; Gallie, 1964; Stone, 1979; White, 1965). In archaeology, there are few proponents of narrative forms of reasoning and discourse (Joyce, et al., 2002; Pluciennik, 1999, 2010) but, overall, narrative remains underappreciated. There are, of course, several reasons why this is so, one of which is the belief that the use of narrative is exclusively a methodological choice (Sherratt, 1995). But this begs the question, when an archaeologist places her data in a specific chronological order, does she not have to recognize that the order follow a narrative sequence of development? Following this perspective, a historical narrative cannot admit generalization (Oakeshott, 2015[1933]: 123). This can be seen when Carl Hempel tried to demonstrate that use of laws in scientific research had an analogous function in history (1942). The example he provided was that of the Dust Bowl farmers who migrated to California in search of better conditions, and the underlying law being that humans will migrate when better conditions are offered elsewhere (1942: 40–1). What Hempel failed to realize is that this form of explanation, besides being too general (Dray, 1957: 28–9), does not take into account what California meant to the Dust Bowl farmers. Knowing that California offers better conditions is culturally specific, and thus irreducible to a general premise (Apel, 1984: ix–x). In Hempel’s defence, at times, general explanations can offer a quick, intuitive and commonsensical justification for an event or a process, but these general explanations leave out a deeper understanding of how and why people makes the informed choices that motivate their actions.

A determinate present is only coherent if certain facts about the past are accepted. This seems intuitively acceptable and it would be hard to find archaeologists who would challenge this idea. This, however, is merely the basis. Archaeology cannot rely solely on recognizing institutions of meaning, for example finding coins and recognizing monetary transaction. Archaeology also needs to understand how these institutions developed. For instance, how did trade and or systems based on credit (sensu Graeber, 2011) contribute to the rise of the acceptance of coins as a legitimate means of transaction? Furthermore, how did centralized politics effectively manage the process of exchange of goods and where does money fit in this process?

Narratives can be present on two different scales of analysis: a meta-level where something is seen from a long-term and holistic perspective, and a micro-level where the small actions of intentional subjects can be relayed. This is, for instance, the difference between a microhistory like Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1980) and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity (2010). In both of these works, Christianity figures prominently and they demonstrate the interaction between a long-term institution like Christianity (MacCulloch) and the trials of a miller in the 16th-century who defended a creationist myth that differed vastly from the Christian view as espoused through the Roman Catholic Church (Ginzburg). Figure 2 represents a two-scale analysis of narratives, with a meta-narrative posing as a necessary element that provides the context for shorter-term narratives to be intelligible. For instance, Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms is a short-term narrative which involves the Roman Catholic Church, among many other institutions, but in and of itself, The Cheese and the Worms does not provide an understanding of the Church but nevertheless it presupposes that the reader knows, in general outline, what the Church stood for in the 16th-century.

Figure 2.

The meta-narrative and narrative discourse.

Archaeology can work according to the idea certain institutions must exist, like private property and exchange, in order that specific practices, like that of gift-giving, are intelligible (Descombes, 2014). This two-scale analysis requires a constant back-and-forth in time and understanding how, when and where, these institutions came to existence.

The objection that narratives do not provide explanations of a scientific sort (Roth, 1988) seems empty when faced with the incontrovertible fact that we need to accept a meta-narrative for the present to be coherent. For instance, a modern businessman does not leave his house to go to work because that is what statistically people usually do, and he also does not leave the house because there is some sort of ‘force’ that compels him to. Anthropological holism defends that there is no cause for a businessman to leave his house, only a context where going to work is something that makes sense to do. History and narratives provide us with the understanding of specific situations, even if we do not necessarily know what caused that situation. We can understand, for example, why a taxi would stop at a red light even though we might not know the mechanical processes involved when a car stops (Descombes, 2001: 38).

Looking at the world of state of affairs might make the idea of narratives and history rather trivial. Thinking about banks, cars and businessmen, is thinking about institutions of meaning we are already familiar with. But when we look into the past, many institutions that we take for granted might not have been in effect.

The key difference between anthropological holism and a priori theories of human sociality (sensu Bintliff, 2011) lies in the role the past has in relation to a given present – with anthropological holism, a discrete group of people behave in a certain manner because their history led them to that behaviour, while a priori theories establish the behaviour of discrete groups of people regardless of their past. What this means is that a priori theories ignore particularities – they are merely the results of other social forces and not considered as social forces themselves. A social archaeology that does not analyse particular history and the events that might have changed the course of history of a given group of people will inevitably equalize economic and social-cultural individuals across the board (Ginzburg, 1989: 21).

I am not here advocating that archaeology should be exclusively narratological. I am merely pointing out that past and present societies are a result of historical events – ones that are completely hidden to the general theories that are sometimes presented as explanations of societal change and development. Good quality archaeological data and solid inferential methods would clearly allow for the reconstruction of the histories of our objects of study. Narratives can be constructed, narratives that place the human subject as an actor that actually performs deliberate and meaningful action and that engages in societal relations, a subject that is not merely a puppet of ‘social forces’ or ‘natural forces’.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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