A relational marxist critique of posthumanism in archaeology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35305/aa.v13i13.74Keywords:
Marxism, Posthumanism, OntologyAbstract
In archaeology, a Posthumanism has arisen from the ashes of post-modernism and declared that Marxism is dead in archaeology. Archaeological advocates of the posthumanist theory of Symmetrical Archaeology cherry-pick ideas to dismiss Marxism out of hand without considering the depth and nuances of different Marxist theories. They misrepresent the relational dialectic as oppositional thinking and ignore the fundamental dualism of their own polemic. They equate humans and things by arguing that they share a common ontology. A relational Marxism resolves the dualistic nature of their polemic and shows that things, animals and people may be studied relationally while still recognizing ontological differences. Marxism lives.
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References
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Bate, F. (1998). El Proceso de Investigación en Arqueología. Barcelona: Crítica.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bernbeck, R. (2018). Intrusions – on the relations of materiality and suffering. En K. Kaniuth, D. Lau & D. Wicke (Eds.), Übergangszeiten. Altorientalische Studien für Reinhard Dittmann anlässlich
seines 65. Geburtstags (pp. 1-24). Münster: Zaphon.
Brown, B. (2003). A sense of things: the object matter of American literature. Chicago (IL): University of Chicago Press.
Childe, V.G. (1989). Retrospect. En G. Daniel & C. Chippindale (Eds.), The pastmasters: eleven modern pioneers of archaeology (pp. 10-19). London: Thames & Hudson.
DeLanda, M. (2016). Assemblage theory. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
De León, J. (2015). The land of open graves: living and dying on the migrant trail. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Engels, F. (1927). The dialectics of nature. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishers.
Fowles, S. (2016). The perfect subject (postcolonial object studies). Journal of Material Culture, 21(1), 9–27.
Gilman, A. (1998). The communist manifesto 150 years later. Antiquity, 72, 910–13.
Harris, O.J.T. & Cipolla, C.N. (2017). Archaeological theory in the new millennium: introducing current perspectives. London: Routledge.
Ingold, T. (2011). The perception of the environment. New York: Routledge.
Kaufmann, W. (1966). Hegel: a reinterpretation. New York: Anchor Books.
Klejn, L.S. (1991). A Russian lesson for theoretical archaeology: a reply. Fennoscandia Archaeologica 8, 67–71.
Klejn, L.S. (1993). La arqueología soviética: historia y teoría de una escuela desconocida. Barcelona: Crítica.
Kurdi, T. (2018). The boy on the beach: my family’s escape from Syria and our hope for a new home. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leone, M.B. (2005). The archaeology of liberty in an American capital: excavations in Annapolis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lull, V. & Micó, R. (2011). Archaeology of the origin of the state: the theories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lull, V., Micó, R., Montón, S. & Picazo, Y.M. (1990). La arqueología entre la insoportable levedad y la voluntad de poder. Archivo de Prehistoria Levantina, 20, 461–74.
Lumbreras, L.G. (1974). La arqueología como ciencia social. Lima: Ediciones Histar.
Marx, K. (1906). Capital: A critique of political economy. New York: The Modern Library.
McAtackney, L. & McGuire, R.H. (Eds) (2020). Walling in and walling out: why are we building new barriers to divide us?. Santa Fe: SAR Press.
McFarland, T. (2002). Prolegomena. En S. Taylor (Ed.), Opus maximum. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
McGuire, R.H. (1992). A Marxist archaeology. Orlando: Academic Press.
McGuire, R.H., (2008). Archaeology as Political Action. Berkeley: University of California Press.
McGuire, R.H. (2013). Steel walls and picket fences: rematerializing the U.S.–Mexican border in Ambos Nogales. American Anthropologist, 115(3), 466–81.
Miller, D. (2012). Consumption and its consequences. Cambridge: Polity.
Morton, T. (2017). Humankind: solidarity with non-human people. London: Verso.
Mueller, G. (1958). The Hegel legend of ‘thesis-antithesis synthesis’. Journal of the History of Ideas, 19(4), 411–14.
Ollman, B. (2003). Dance of the dialectic: steps in Marx’s method. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Olsen, B. (2003). Material culture after text: re-membering things. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 36(3), 87–104.
Olsen, B. (2010). In defense of things: archaeology and the ontology of objects. Plymouth: AltaMira.
Olsen, B., Shanks, M., Webmore,T. & Witmore, C. (2012). Archaeology: The discipline of things. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Olsen, B. & Witmore, C. (2015). Archaeology, symmetry and the ontology of things. A response to critics. Archaeological Dialogues, 22(2), 187–97.
Patterson, T. (2003). Marx’s ghost: conversations with archaeologists. Oxford: Berg.
Pétursdóttir, Þ. (2017). Climate change? Archaeology and anthropocene. Archaeological Dialogues, 24(2), 175–205.
Shackel, P.A. (2000). Archaeology and created memory: public history in a national park. New York: Kluwer
Tantaleán, H. (2016). Peruvian archaeology: a critical history. London: Routledge.
Trigger, B. (1995). Archaeology and the integrated circus. Critique of Anthropology, 15(4), 319–35.
Trigger, B. (2003). Understanding early civilizations: a comparative study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Dyke, R. (2015a). Materiality in practice: an introduction. En R. Van Dyke (Ed.), Practicing materiality (pp. 3-32). Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Van Dyke, R.M. (2015b). La intencionalidad importa: una crítica a la agencia de los objetos en la arqueología. En F. Acuto & V. Franco Salvi (Eds.), Personas, cosas, relaciones: reflexiones arqueológicas
sobre las materialidades pasadas y presentes (151-174). Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala.
Van Dyke, R.M. (2021). Ethics, not objects. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1-7. doi: 10.1017/ S0959774321000172.
Vargas Arenas, I. & Sanoja, M. (1999). Archaeology as a social science: its expression in Latin America. En G. Politis & B. Alberti (Eds.), Archaeology in Latin America (pp. 59-75). London: Routledge.
Webmoor, T. & Witmore, C. (2008). Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a ‘social’ archaeology. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 41(1), 53–70.
Witmore, C. (2014). Archaeology and the new materialisms. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 1(2), 203–46.
Woods, A. & Grant, T. (2015). Reason in revolt: marxist philosophy and modern science. London: Wellred Publications.
Wurst, L. (2002). ‘For the means of your subsistence . . . Look under God to your own industry and frugality’: life and labor in Gerrit Smith’s Peterboro. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 6(3), 159–172.
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Published
2021-11-11
How to Cite
McGuire, R. H. (2021). A relational marxist critique of posthumanism in archaeology. Anuario De Arqueología, 13(13), 9–15. https://doi.org/10.35305/aa.v13i13.74
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