Kerstin Hofmann and Philipp Stockhammer's essay on theory in ‘Beyond antiquarianism’ displays a mood that lacks self-confidence, despite a more optimistic outlook on theoretical reflections in their field than an earlier paper by Ulrike Sommer (2000b). The citations, amounting to 60 per cent of the text, are just an outward sign of that mood. A more revealing element is the essay's framing. Hofmann and Stockhammer do not discuss theory in German-speaking archaeology, as their abbreviation ‘GSA’ seems to imply, but rather restrict themselves to its prehistoric subdivision: the essay is actually only about ‘GSPA’. What are the preconditions for and the consequences of this self-imposed disciplinary (and disciplining) restriction?
Traditionally, disciplinary boundaries in German academia are as insurmountable as the Berlin Wall. This has led to the establishment of disciplinary and subdisciplinary canons accompanied by a considerable lack of intellectual curiosity, something that persists up to today. One can have serious discussions about whether periods without written texts in ancient Western Asia are part of a subdiscipline called ‘prehistory’ or of ‘Near Eastern archaeology’. The entry point to many discussions consists of situating one's research with respect to categorizations of pre-existing knowledge. Academic practice is imagined as firmly imprisoned in predefined cells. As a consequence, the most basic questions concerning paradigmatic choices and their ideological implications tend not to be asked.
This is where Hofmann and Stockhammer go only halfway toward assessing current questions in German-speaking archaeology. They stick to a framework that is traditionally German in its narrowness instead of discussing theory in archaeology tout court. Do they feel that they cannot speak for other small fields such as classical archaeology? By remaining within the traditional boundaries, the article does not consider archaeologists who have become influential intellectuals well beyond the Altertumswissenschaften, foremost among them Jan Assmann, an Egyptologist who is internationally known for his theory of collective memory (Assmann Reference Assmann1992). His work is also occupied with the history and political dimensions of monotheism, including elements of Freud's psychology (Assmann Reference Assmann1998), and with classical music: he interprets The Magic Flute from Mozart's contemporaries’ perceptions of ancient Egypt (Assmann Reference Assmann2005). A classical archaeologist, Stefan Altekamp has done highly interesting work on media and archaeology as well as on Archäologisierung, which he sees as a kind of secretion of matter (‘Absonderung von Materie’, Altekamp Reference Altekamp2004, 213) from social life that substantially differs from the quality of archives.
But let us look at this problem of boundary drawing more systematically. What does it mean to limit reflections on a discourse by submitting oneself to boundaries that are institutional rather than content-oriented? As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Reference Laclau and Mouffe1985) have shown, discourses cannot easily be caged – except when there is a language boundary. But even language's imposition of discursive limits is complex. The use of the German language constitutes for most people in the world an unassailable boundary to understanding, while English is less restrictive by far. Anyone who posts papers in two languages on academia.edu and uses English in one of them can attest to this. English-language discourse ‘sets the agenda’ (see Yoffee und Sherratt Reference Yoffee and Sherratt1993). A main – and justified – reason for Hofmann and Stockhammer's question whether there is a specific theoretical discourse in German-speaking archaeology lies exactly here. Theoretical or other discourses conducted in any language other than English include the potential for ‘creative niches’, for emerging new themes and directions that may at a later point become internationally relevant via translations into English. To take cases from the fields of epistemology and ancient history, Foucault's impact on social and cultural sciences, including archaeology, was predicated on translations into English; the same may be said of Giorgio Agamben's (Reference Agamben and Heller-Roazen1998) work. The ‘ontological turn’ is based on original texts written in French and Portuguese by Descola (Reference Descola2005), Latour (Reference Latour1991; Reference Latour1999) and Viveiros de Castro (Reference Viveiros de Castro2002). It is noteworthy as well as difficult to explain that the intrusion of theoretical work into archaeology usually takes place once this work has been translated into English. It is not French, Italian or Portuguese archaeologists who immediately captured the wide-ranging implications of these writers. There are two reasons for this. I already mentioned disciplinary walling-in, something that is typical for continental European Kulturwissenschaften in general. A second reason is that archaeologists interested in the theoretical foundations of their field search for inspiration in English-language archaeological literature, rather than in writings in their own language, or in other non-English literatures outside their academic discipline. A self-imposed intellectual dependency emerges.
Practices and Verbundforschung
Is there anything special about German-speaking archaeologies at this point in time? I would agree with Hofmann and Stockhammer that the question is to be answered in the affirmative. But the main reason is not a product of theoretical inquiry but an organizational one that they mention, the Verbundforschung. This consists of large-scale, well-funded groups of researchers who pursue a common goal using different methodological approaches. For example, Stockhammer himself is involved in a project that provides massive quantities of new data on aDNA, isotope analysis, chronology based on Bayesian statistics and other laboratory analyses, all of which are focused on the transitional period to the Early Bronze Age in a small region in southern Germany (Stockhammer et al. Reference Stockhammer, Massy, Knipper, Friedrich, Kromer, Lindauer, Radosavljević, Wittenborn and Krause2015). Such massive state-funded projects, but particularly the multi-year excellence clusters, are unlikely to be launched in the English-speaking world. They do not just provide new data; they can also lead to surprising new insights, but include as well a danger of throwing money at research that is not well coordinated. It is too early for a final verdict on the efficacy of large-scale Verbundforschung. The experience with the Topoi excellence cluster suggests that at least a partial melting of the above-mentioned disciplinary walls may be one very positive result.
Prominent themes?
When reading Hofmann and Stockhammer's contribution, I asked myself which topics I would have listed as ‘prominent themes’ in theoretical discussions in Germany. I would agree with their assessment of ‘identity’ as a major issue that is discussed in various fora. Perhaps I would have included the other four as well, since they are elements of cross-disciplinary ‘excellence clusters’. However, ‘reflexivity’ would certainly not have been my choice – if anything, it would rather have been the lack of reflexivity that reveals itself through an absence of serious theoretical debates. Theory is understood too much as a tool to work with or as an element to be described historically, rather than as a standpoint from which to argue and by which to critically judge. Hofmann and Stockhammer's text reveals this tendency in its own basic structure: it is an enumeration of topics and accompanying bibliographic entries, more than an account of differing opinions. For example, they name ‘glocalization’, ‘globalization’ and ‘translation’ as well as ‘hybridity’, ‘appropriation’, ‘copying’ and ‘entanglement’ as useful concepts for the analysis of cultural encounters. But what is it that leads authors to emphasize one term rather than another? Their use in anglophone literature? That some are more fashionable than others? The potential to insert them into larger theoretical frameworks such as Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, post-structuralist thought? We do not know. My guess is that if the latter frameworks played a significant role, theoretical limits would become sharper, while disciplinary ones would be loosened further.
There is also the question whether the five themes that Hofmann and Stockhammer chose for their review can or should be defined as proposed. Two of them, ‘space’ and ‘identity’, constitute an interesting pair, and I will limit further comments to them. I find the fascination of German-speaking archaeology with identity and space puzzling. The proverbial theoretical ‘abstinence’ caused by the aberrations of Nazi archaeologists would be most understandable in exactly these two fields. After all, they were the main elements of the revanchist theoretical apparatus developed by Kossinna and his acolytes. While there is no reason to suspect parallels in content, I wonder what the recent return to such interests means. Do these theoretical issues run so deep that they constitute an almost subconscious fascination in German intellectual circles, and, if so, why? Is this an attempt to rectify past misconceptualizations?
Hofmann and Stockhammer's list of projects and approaches rightly points out the methodological focus of current interests in space as a measured and measurable phenomenon. GIS, the reconstruction of palaeo-landscapes, statistical approaches to distributional patterns of sites and resources give me the feeling of being in a 1980s University of Michigan seminar, but with more advanced technological apparatus. However, present-day German archaeology is closer to geography than to the ecological concerns of a Michigan-style archaeology – strangely enough, given current existential environmental crises.
Identity is a topic of interest far beyond the realm of archaeology, both internationally and in Germany. I suspect that with the political populism of our times, this term and its problematic undertones are not going to leave us soon. The claim by right-wing politicians to speak for a fictitious entity they call ‘the people’ – in many cases a minority compared to the mostly apathetic non-voters – is partly the product of a troubling academic tendency since the 1990s: a turn away from political-economic analyses, from class and material inequality as facts of social life, to purely identitarian issues enshrined in notions such as religion, ethnicity, gender or age. But these dimensions of identity are themselves in need of some elaboration. There are several important differences between English-speaking and German-speaking discourses in this field. First, and on a purely formal level, I wonder why the strongly androcentric structure of German as a language remains silenced in Hofmann and Stockhammer's paper. In university teaching, I constantly fight with the issue, trying to convince students to use gender-neutral language. Second, the discussion by Hofmann and Stockhammer remains strangely unidimensional. They discuss gender, age or ethnicity sequentially, leaving out a lively and wide-ranging discussion in German on Intersektionalität, whose roots lie admittedly in US American feminist thought (Winker and Degeler Reference Winker and Degeler2010). Third, identity is linked to the brutal modern history of Germany and the attempted extermination of a whole group among its population because of their (not even in every case self-ascribed) Jewish identities. The Holocaust has left deep traces in academic disciplines such as history or medicine, physical anthropology or political science, but also in many other fields that investigate collectivities. The theoretical background to ideas of ‘common consciousness’ and identities has been treated critically in the opus magnum of Lutz Niethammer (Reference Niethammer2000), who tackles the issue from a historical perspective and delivers a devastating verdict for the whole idea. An archaeological engagement with this work would be highly desirable.
Hofmann and Stockhammer mention an alternative to the term ‘identity’ proposed by Susan Pollock and myself (e.g. Pollock Reference Pollock, Heinz and Feldman2007; Bernbeck Reference Bernbeck2009a; see also Smith Reference Smith2004): instead of theorizing a pre-existing collective memory and consciousness, we contended that an Althusserian concept of subjectivity would lead us to new and fundamentally different questions than that of unidimensional identity differences (Charim Reference Charim2009). Empirical investigations of subjectification processes, of material traces that contributed to the shaping of particular subjectivities, can free us from the assumption of a collective identity with temporal stability. I maintain that, despite an emphasis by Hofmann and Stockhammer on ‘processes rather than . . . states’ and on ‘dynamics of identities’ (p. 10), the unitary and essentializing associations connected to this term do not vanish.
In summary, GSA (including ‘non-prehistoric’ fields) still has major problems when it comes to theoretical discourse. Instead of a free-ranging curiosity about its own intellectual environment, German-speaking archaeology continues to watch timidly the anglophone archaeological discourse in the mistaken belief that it provides a hint of legitimation for those who are theoretically inclined. The reasoning is that if archaeologists abroad have found useful reflections in the works of Heidegger, Bourdieu, Foucault or Descola, the same could then perhaps be the case for us. I wish for a different theoretical inclination in German-speaking archaeology: much greater curiosity towards its own quotidian discursive environment. Issues discussed in the fields of kritische Psychologie (e.g. Holzkamp Reference Holzkamp1972), in the recognition-theoretical work of Axel Honneth (Reference Honneth2003; Reference Honneth2014), in Koselleck's (Reference Koselleck2000) concepts of temporality or themes such as Beiläufigkeit der Dinge (the ‘casualness’ of things: Hahn Reference Hahn and Hahn2015; Ludwig Reference Ludwig2015) could all be creatively incorporated into archaeological discourse. Some of that happens here and there, but an energetic and controversial, but also respectful, theoretical discourse has yet to develop in GSA. Rather than asking for the fresh fruit in our neighbours’ gardens, we wait until the truck from the ‘Anglo’ supermarket drives by and order the somewhat stale product that has already travelled over long distances.
