The opportunity to review this ground-breaking book, published more than twenty years ago, and still frequently cited, is stimulating. Archaeology has changed and expanded and is today a complex field of situated approaches. One is critical feminist post-humanism, the standpoint from which this review is written.
In reviewing this book, I have found inspiration in Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway (Reference Barad2007), a work to which I will return when I close this text. Reviewing Dobres’ work is a challenge, among others because it is a decidedly substantial piece of analysis with references and connections to a wide range of disciplines. Thus, focus will be put on a few selected topics that gained special prominence throughout the years following the publication of the book. Many works published after the turn of the millennium, would not have been conceivable without the inspiration and backing of Dobres’ framework. Of interest is how some of Dobres’ central issues and tools taken up and developed by her, have changed, and grown over time like, for example, those of materiality and the chaîne opératoire; a thought-provoking question also discussed in this review is whether this book gave the issue of gender and technology a push forward.
The monograph Technology and Social Agency is composed of a List of Figures, a Preface, Acknowledgements, an Introduction, seven chapters, a Notes section, References, and an Index. The chapters analyse and discuss the following questions and themes. In the Introduction, Dobres states that the book is, first and foremost, about people, more precisely about people-artefact relations. Chapter 1, ‘Of Black Boxes and Matters Material: The State of Things’, presents a general view of technology studies in archaeology. Chapter 2, ‘Deconstructing the Black Box: Some Philosophical and Historical Reflections on the Logos and Tékhnē’, takes an historical overview of aspects Dobres finds to be lacking in technological discourses. Mainly, these are aspects aiming to connect materialities and practices.Chapter 3, ‘Prying Open the Black Box: Philosophical Insights on Technology and Being’, starts introducing the tools needed for a technological framework focused on the body. Chapter 4, ‘A Synoptic Approach to Technology: The Social Contours of a Practice Framework’, is focused on aspects of social practice, and the being-in-the -world concept. Chapter 5, ‘Social Agency and Practice: The Heart and Soul of Technology’, introduces the conceptual framework of the essential chaîne opératoire. Chapter 6, ‘Engendering the Chaîne opératoire: Methodological Considerations’, offers concrete examples of the value of this vital research tool. This is illustrated by e.g., a diagrammatic model of a chain of practices (Fig. 6.2a); and by a peopled drawing (Fig. 6.3). To conclude, Chapter 7, A Future for Technology's Past’, takes up an evaluation together with further arguments in support of the framework suggested.
While the two opening chapters lay the theoretical background for a new outline, the following four chapters explain further aspects needed to sketch the contours of a social framework for technology studies in archaeology. This is a framework that aims to include social aspects, and explicitly gender. Although rather generally articulated, Chapter 7 discusses aspects of how technology can be approached in future studies. Emphasis is on how to reclaim the subject through agency and the everyday world, by suggesting a relational- and practice-centred perspective. To achieve this, Dobres composes a methodology weaving together Heidegger's idea of involvement with the world, and Mauss’ concept of embodiment of social aspects through the chaîne opératoire, a constellation within which the social agent has centrality.
A few words follow on general discussions of the time of Dobres’ book, especially on materiality, chaîne opératoire, and gender. In the book, materiality is systematically scrutinised in pp. 88–93. At the turn of the millennium, various and innovative discussions on materiality had gone on for some time already. One example is Microarchaeology, a concept dismissing the immaterial and ephemeral, and powerfully advocating for a focus on materialities and practices (Cornell & Fahlander, 2002, with references). A wide-ranging turning point came, however, with anthropologist Daniel Miller's edited volume Materiality (Reference Miller2005). Interesting enough, the volume was reviewed by Dobres (Reference Dobres2006), if rather summarily. She considered materiality a buzz word in technology studies at the time, but found the book both challenging and rewarding. Her attitude might reflect differing theoretical influeances as Miller's edited volume took a methodological step away from phenomenology, while Dobres's approach was deeply rooted in phenomenological thinking and practice. Gender is discussed in many facets in different parts of the book (e.g., pp. 22–24, 114–15). On approaches to gender, technology, and practice, a few—now classic— works had already appeared, such as Conkey's Context of Action (Reference Conkey, Gero and Conkey1991), which is among the most frequently cited, well suited to bring the discourse further on.
One interesting topic is how the chaîne opératoire has developed and how its definitions and uses have changed since Dobres’ version. The chaîne opératoire is seen by Dobres as situated practice that is, intersections between phenomena. Leroi-Gourhan (Reference Leroi-Gourhan1964–65) was a significant thinker whose work was core to general scientific discussions on technology and practice, especially among Palaeolithic specialist and francophone technological studies, and Dobres gives him plenty of space. This drew attention among anglophone scholars to his contributions to technology studies in archaeology, however often only sketchily cited. His research about humans, technology, materialities, organisms, environment, gestures, and language, was developed within a broad international, as well as Parisian, intellectual milieu (Conkey, Reference Conkey2022). His is one of a very few intellectual oeuvres disseminated from archaeology to other disciplines, including sociology and philosophy. Some years after Dobres, Chantal Conneller presented another and more socially informed and embodied version of the operational sequence (Conneller, Reference Conneller2011: 16ff). She does not, however, build much on Dobres’ work, even if the latter was necessary for the development of the model to the stage where Conneller engaged with it.
Among archaeology's constituent topics are those of materiality, processes, and production, all of them approached from a multitude of perspectives in time and space. Marcia-Anne Dobres’ was one of the key voices in the long and conflicting discussion on those topics. Her work provided fresh perspectives and new twists. Her discourse was supported by an in-depth philosophical background shedding new light on relations of technology, body, and gender. The book offers an example of how eclecticism can work as a fruitful approach underpinning a project.
Dobres’ book became a classic. This was not only due to its thorough evaluation of terms and their background, but also because it came close to a model of how to approach the vital relations between agent, act, and thing in archaeology. It led a dynamic discussion and outlined a useful framework for the further development of technology studies in archaeology. It was a necessary step towards the development of operative tactics to embody (and untangle) relationships between materialities, practices, agents, and social aspects in archaeologists’ analyses of prehistoric technologies.
Despite this, and seen from today's viewpoint, Dobres’ discussion was rather abstract; that is, it hardly reached the embodiment of the crucial connections studied. We need to consider that the book was published in a time, the 1990s and early 2000s, when technology studies inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and Bruno Latour bloomed in every social and humanistic discipline. Additionally, this was a time when extensive discussions on identities and identity politics took place, while in archaeology phenomenological and cosmological approaches were explored and developed. This was, in other words, before the ‘material turn’ had started to have any noticeable impact in archaeology. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Heidegger had some influence in archaeology, as his philosophy was found to offer tools for problematizing and overcoming dualisms in actor-material constellations, as well as relations between humans and the world. Heidegger was at the time widely debated, not only because of his philosophy but also because of his problematic political position, concerning Nazi ideology (explicitly debated in Archaeological Dialogues, 1996, Vol. 1). Dobres’ attitude was that one should not easily dismiss a scholar due to their political ideas, because all of us are influenced by external ideas (p. 80). This is of course a well-trod path in academia.
In the early twenty-first century, the impact of the material turn on archaeology became more evident, while Heidegger's philosophy became less fundamental. Also, relevant to the development of gender-informed chains of practices is that, despite the engagement with ‘being in the world’, the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and feminist approaches is surely ambivalent (discussed in Holland & Huntington, Reference Holland and Huntington2010).
To conclude, was Dobres’ book first and foremost about people-artefact relations? The answer is yes, and no. Technology and Social Agency gives an informative and valued overview of technology discourses in archaeology and is therefore still unavoidable for any student within these fields. It is rich in information, and it offers valuable instruction in approaches to technology. But it is also evident that it was written in a time when it was still difficult to make prehistoric people visible and active. A hindrance to that was surely the emphasis on phenomenology, and not on practices, an approach followed during the linguistic turn. Technology and Social Agency offers useful tools for exploring the themes sketched and discussed by Dobres. Nowadays, particularly the issues related to the intersection of gender, practices, and technology still have great potential. Nonetheless, discussions succeeding Dobres have been informed primarily by approaches connecting practice, materiality, and corporeality more effectively (e.g. Conneller, Reference Conneller2011).
A work of general importance here is Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway (Reference Barad2007). Barad argues that language has been given too much space. As an alternative she develops a model that includes actants of different identities and puts an emphasis on materiality to draw connections in the world. As a contrast to Dobres’ model, which was built on phenomenological premises, Barad's is a model approaching intersections between materialities and actants, between living and non-living matter, between humans and animals, nature, and culture.
Re-reading Technology and Social Agency, makes me conclude that due to the rather abstract nature of her project, analyses of such intersections were vague in Dobres’ book. Analyses and explanations with a focus on intersections are still much wanted and have a potential in archaeology. Finally, it is encouraging to find several recent contributions built on different outlines of materiality and practice studies. This is also the reason why they are fruitful and, not least, more operative in further analyses of intersections (e.g., Conneller, Reference Conneller2011; Fowler, Reference Fowler2013; Conkey, Reference Conkey, Sayre and Bruno2017; Fredengren, Reference Fredengren2021).
