Gavin Lucas questions whether Ian Hodder's analysis of the ‘entanglements’ between humans and many other things necessarily assumes an inherent asymmetry. The quick answer is that it is more than likely, and we might wonder why Lucas thinks that this is a problem. The recent ‘ontological turn’ in archaeology has sought to treat the differences between all things ‘symmetrically’ and ‘without a priori subsuming them into an asymmetrical regime of radical divides’ (Olsen and Witmore Reference Olsen and Witmore2015, 188). One such radical divide would be between living things (such as humans) and non-living things (such as hammers): it is the potential asymmetry across this divide that Lucas seems to want to avoid.
Symmetrical analysis was introduced by David Bloor (Reference Bloor1991), who showed that all forms of knowledge must be understood ‘symmetrically’ in as much that they are all structured by the social contexts within which they are formulated. What we might regard as truth about the world does not emerge out of a socially disengaged empiricism, any more than errors of judgement need be forms of knowledge tainted by social demands.
Archaeology, which I take to be the study of human history from hominin evolution to the ‘contemporary past’, might have been expected to follow anthropology in treating all human diversity ‘symmetrically’; that is, as diverse ways of becoming part of the same world. Thus Azande witchcraft is not the wrong way to think about reality, while Western rationality is the right way to think about it. Instead both trace different paths towards becoming human (Ingold Reference Ingold2016). This does not deny us the possibility of ethical judgements (an asymmetry): xenophobia is, for example, a path towards becoming that must be rejected because it denies the principle of symmetrical tolerance that I have just outlined.
Unfortunately, some archaeologists have taken a rather different path, one whose products verge on scholastic irrelevance. They note that existence is a matter of relationships where various entities emerge, and have effects, in their relations with other entities, such that each entity might be treated as an ‘actant’ (Latour Reference Latour2005, 54). Consequently, ‘until the requisite work has been accomplished’ (whatever that involves) we are advised that it is best to hold symmetry in place ‘to help us get to those differences without decreeing what they are in advance’ (Olsen and Witmore Reference Olsen and Witmore2015, 188). Symmetrical archaeology does not describe an analytically balanced approach towards diverse ways of becoming, but rather an analytically balanced approach towards things: it does not deny that things have their differences, but it precludes prior judgement as to the status of those differences. Is this useful?
The historical conditions that interest archaeologists are the complex processes by which each living thing made itself as a body of biological order over its lifetime. Life necessarily exists across an energy gradient and it does this by metabolizing food sources from its environments. It is within these environments that it also seeks security. The processes of becoming necessarily operate within the context of the second law of thermodynamics, and they have the effect of dissipating energy (Schrödinger Reference Schrödinger1944; Schneider and Sagan Reference Schneider and Sagan2005). The implication, as far as I can see, is that life in the context of its relationships is embedded in an asymmetry. All forms of life orient themselves towards their world (and as such they display purpose and direction), and different forms of life can be distinguished by the ways that they read the available information to navigate themselves into their world. Humanity is but one particularly diverse form of life.
There is no archaeology of the Jurassic as far as I am aware (although I am sure I will be told that such an archaeology exists in virtue of the field collections, laboratory archives and discursive practices by which that pre-hominin geological period has been defined). I therefore assume that we do archaeology because there is a human history that interests us. Our investigations are made possible by means of contemporary material conditions and the various strands of theoretical archaeology should enable us to clarify and evaluate how we go about that investigation. For me, at least, the Hodder–Lucas discussion fails in this respect.
