‘Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects’, posits Kathleen Stewart in her challenging experimental ethnography Ordinary affects (2007). Affects – public feelings that put intimate sentiments in broad circulation – are, for Stewart, the sinews of social life, an opaque circuit that simultaneously grounds experience in places and things and publicizes the personal. As such, affects are quintessentially archaeological in that they are both artefactual, embedded in what Bill Brown (2003) calls the ‘object matter’ of human relationships, and rooted in deep histories of material production and transformation. It is not surprising, then, that the intertwined problems of emotion and affect have re-emerged as potentially productive loci of research within archaeology itself. Indeed, as the discipline continues to extend its understanding of the social instrumentality of objects, landscapes and representations, it must, of necessity, come to terms with the affective efficacy of things, with the causes and consequences of our captivation.
Yet to come to terms with feeling, whether in the public form of affect or the traditionally more intimate terrain of emotion, demands a conceptual repertoire largely absent in contemporary archaeology. Harris and Sørensen are thus to be commended for clearly identifying a critical lacuna in archaeological thought and pushing the discipline to formalize concepts that might allow us to develop a better sense of the commitments of people to their things. Their basic contention, that emotion was and is a critical element of human social existence and thus must be opened to archaeological research, is indisputably correct. Archaeology's sense of past actors has often been so invested in unimpeachable rationality as to diminish subjectivity to an unrecognizably icy state of cold calculation. Indeed, the field spent much of the later 20th century struggling to evacuate the past of emotion in a quixotic effort to purge the last vestiges of antiquarianism. As a result, we find ourselves today poorly equipped to make sense of sentiments, of the dispositions that order and mould sensation. Harris and Sørensen's observation that we lack even a basic vocabulary for conceptualizing the emotional lives of the past is on target and hence any effort to develop our conceptual terminology is very welcome.
While Harris and Sørensen are certainly correct that emotion is underinvestigated in archaeology, a concern with affect, in contrast, is neither new nor, I suggest, so absent from contemporary theoretical reflection. In one sense, a concern with public sentiment is a kind of intellectual return for the discipline. As Leonard Barkan (1999) has demonstrated, a primordial form of archaeological reflection originated in the vibrant realist sublime forged in the encounter between Renaissance artists and classical statuary unearthed by construction projects in 15th- and 16th-century Rome. The subsequent impact of Kantian aesthetics on the humanist antiquarians of the 19th century, from Winckelmann to Schliemann, explicitly centred archaeological interpretation in the frisson of the encounter between subjects and objects. While the 20th-century drive to establish archaeology as an avowedly scientific enterprise elevated dispassionate encounters with things, and thus cast sentiment into disrepute, there is little evidence to suggest that this project succeeded in rewriting the central axioms of archaeological interpretation embedded in the very kind of ordinary affects described by Stewart. Indeed, as recent studies of archaeology's deployment in service of political nationalism make clear (e.g. Abdi 2001; Dietler 1994; Khatchadourian 2008; Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Meskell 1998), much of the field's analytical apparatus remains lashed to distinctly affective commitments to king, country and kin.
Hence an effort to re-engage archaeology with the domains of feeling circumscribed by the terms ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ strikes me as less a matter of raw invention than of recuperation and extension. Nevertheless, Harris and Sørensen are quite right that formalized investigations exclusively centred on the recovery of emotions are few and far between. But it is worth asking whether that is really such a deplorable state of affairs. Indeed, each of the varied dimensions of social life that have recently (say, over the last decade) come into archaeological theory has entailed at least an implicit understanding of feeling. What are studies of personhood, identity, memory or religion (to use Harris and Sørensen's list, p. 145) if not investigations of the social ordering of emotional dispositions; which is to say, affects? In eschewing a formal engagement with emotion, these approaches maintain a rigorous focus on the social even if at the expense of letting feeling languish. So what are the costs of reorienting the balance, as Harris and Sørensen strive to do, by placing the emphasis most forcefully on emotion?
One concern is certainly that the pursuit of a theoretically discrete archaeology of emotion must necessarily cede an epistemological privilege to a generic sense of human experience over accounts of the social constitution of affect. The authors, to their credit, recognize this danger and work to mitigate it by collapsing interior feeling and exterior expression. Yet the model for the interaction of feeling and the world at hand remains one of evocation – ‘the emotions that arise when [an object] attracts our focused attention’ (p. 150). Thus knowledge of emotion, even emotion defined in the more visible public sense of being moved, remains dependent on generic universal pairs of sentiment and expression: sad/crying, happy/laughing, angry/yelling and so on. This collapsing of emotion and expression has some philosophical rewards in suggesting the simultaneity of mind and body, if not their wholesale unification. Lost, however, are the complicated layers of sublimation and dissimulation critical not only to emotional life – for what would neurosis be without sublimation – but also to the sociopolitics of affect. If emotion has traditionally captured the domain of feeling, affect has done considerable analytical work by describing the public expression of sentiment. By effectively equating the two, Harris and Sørensen's subjects are in considerable danger of becoming emotional naïfs, bereft of hidden feeling or the capacity to dissemble. The political consequences of reducing affect to emotion are perhaps the most concerning since in any kind of public, bodily accommodation to structures of authority (movement, in Harris and Sørensen's terms, p. 149) should not be taken as evidence of an emotional commitment to the ruling order.
Nevertheless, Harris and Sørensen are clearly aware of the sociality of emotion, noting how individual disposition can be scaled up to groups and crowds. However, this move is purely methodological, opening terrain for forms of mass public outpourings of sentiment. It does nothing to combat the problem that the now-collapsed concepts of emotion/affect remain solidly located in highly individuated dispositions. Harris and Sørensen are quite right that archaeology must account for the public mustering of sentiment, but to do so, it would seem advisable to work to make explicit the affective understandings at the heart of the varied dimensions of social life – the desires and fears mustered in service of politics, economy, social solidarity and distinction, just for example – rather than carve out a cross-cutting, too-easily-universalized archaeology of emotion. What seems to be missing, I suggest, is a sense of how emotions are mediated by affective regimes that are powerfully constituted by social institutions and practices. The conceptual vocabulary that Harris and Sørensen provide is a step in the right direction. Affective field (which is quite different from affect itself), attunement and atmosphere provide a potentially useful set of terms for describing the framing of emotion. But their social construction remains underspecified and thus the concepts float free as relations simply between bodies, rather than bodies always positioned within a sociopolitical field. Who claims the power to shape the affective field and through what forms of mediation? How are key locations critical to cultivating attunement – presumably pedagogical settings and ritual performances loom large in this regard – set within wider relationships of power and privilege? And what are the historical processes that shape atmospherics such that the properties of certain materials take on an almost onomatopoetic sense of their own capacity to signify? The utility of the concepts Harris and Sørensen offer will ultimately hinge on the answers to these questions.
Moreover, despite the titular centrality of material culture to the theoretical project of the article, there is surprisingly little effort to move beyond Gosden's (2004, 39) concise claim that ‘emotions are materially constituted and material culture is emotionally constituted’. Such a powerful slogan certainly warrants unpacking through close scrutiny of exactly how things and feelings come to be co-constitutive. This necessarily entails both a historical project tracking the intertwining of objects and sentiments and a synchronic examination of the ordering of affects through the ordering of things, places and representations. Instead, Harris and Sørensen provide us only with the claim that our commitment to things is the result of ‘an inherent human capacity to identify with and through material culture’ (p. 148). Where, it must be asked, is the social construction of desire?
The core problem, I suggest, is that emotion for Harris and Sørensen seems to be counterposed to, rather than embedded within, instrumental social practices staked in a field of power relationships. This is particularly evident in the case study of Late Neolithic Mount Pleasant, where the settlement's sociology emerges from an account of the emotional capacities of the site rather than vice versa. In the discussion of Site IV, for example, the authors describe how by ‘creating an architecture that created the possibility for particular forms of movement and foreclosed others, particular kinds of emotion could also be called forth’ (p. 156). What is missing from the study is a sense of specifically who (in sociological terms) assembled these places and what was at stake in the shaping of the particular affective field. As a result, the emotional force of places seems to precede, rather than follow from, their constitution as locations of social or political significance.
This priority ceded to emotion does create a particularly odd line of argument regarding the transformation of the henge during its final phase. The authors suggest that the three different practices (or ‘attitudes’, to use their more passive terminology) that unmade the palisade – burning, razing and abandoning – ‘suggest that a contestation was taking place at this time, building on conflicting emotional understandings of Mount Pleasant’ (p. 161). That is, varied emotional dispositions toward the monument indicate ‘the presence of separate social groups’. Yet this effort to back into the sociology of Mount Pleasant via emotion reverses the proper order of analysis. That is to say, it would be more persuasive to first establish the presence of distinct social groups (and their lines of distinction), understand what might be at stake in Mount Pleasant's palisade for each, and thus define the emotional resonance that the site's transformation practices might have had. For example, if the lines of social distinction were predicated on status, then one group's burning of the palisade takes on the character of an act of revolutionary defiance while dismantling – and perhaps curating? – the remaining timbers would appear to be driven by a reactionary sensibility of tragedy and loss. This is not to argue with the authors’ contention that the site was powerfully structured by an affective field; rather that a sense of affect in the past follows from an account of the array of institutions and interests at stake in places and things.
Ultimately, although Harris and Sørensen provide us with a new vocabulary to argue over and work with, it is revealing that their analysis leaves us with little understanding of the sentiments shaping the site; there is no love or bitterness, fear or affection at play in the built landscapes of Late Neolithic Mount Pleasant, only a vague ‘tincturing’ (throughout but especially p. 161). People were bound to places, certainly, but the authors stop short of giving us a sense of the actual sentiments at play. The communities engaged with Mount Pleasant were clearly moved by their built world, but for emotion to be analytically productive, we need to be able to understand better what passions things and places inflamed or dampened. In the absence of that kind of specificity, emotions risk becoming simple proxies for underspecified social rivalries. Indeed, in the conclusion to the Mount Pleasant case study, we would seem to have simply rediscovered social negotiation through the lexicon of emotion in the absence of a clear account of the sentiments shaping commitments to the site. Contestation at the site may well ‘be about issues other than power relations, social differentiation and claims of right’ (p. 162), but the authors do not tell us what those issues are. Nor do they provide a convincing case that emotion should be understood as independent of social struggle.
The latter point is one perhaps best made by Luis Buñel in his 1977 film Cet obscur Objet du désir. The action of the film centres on Mathieu, a wealthy middle-aged Frenchman, and his tempestuous, yet unconsummated, affair with Conchita, a poor flamenco dancer from Seville. But the film is punctuated by muggings, bombings, hijackings and murders that force the geopolitical into the traditionally hermetic world of the cinematic love story. When a bomb explodes at the end of the film, killing Mathieu and Conchita after a climactic moment of reconciliation, the negotiations, promises and postponements of lovers are inextricably bound to the wider sociopolitical field of contestation and struggle. Harris and Sørensen are certainly correct that emotions remain obscure to archaeology's theoretical imagination due to an overly psychological understanding of sentiment and the lack of an analytical apparatus for describing the practical constitution of affect. These are both important contributions that warrant elaboration and further consideration. What is left unexplored, I suggest, is how emotional lives are constantly being shaped and reshaped by wider sociopolitical currents such that the objects of desire, like Conchita, remain tantalizingly beyond our grasp.
