Alison Wylie

The Reaction against Analogy

Publisher Summary This chapter describes a series of arguments and counterarguments through which the ambivalence about analogy noted by recent commentators took definite shape. The chapter focuses on an increasingly acute concern that analogy seems to be both indispensible to interpretation and always potentially misleading. At a more fundamental level, these debates can be seen to express a fundamental dilemma that archaeologists confront whenever they seriously undertake to use their data as evidence of the cultural past, namely, that any such broadening of the horizons of inquiry seems to be accomplished only at the cost of compromising actual or potential methodological rigor. Each of the critical reactions against analogy and each of the ameliorating responses represent an attempt to come to grips with this dilemma. Each either endorses one of the methodological options it defines, accepting that research is unavoidably limited or unavoidably speculative, or rejects these options and attempts to show how one or another of the premises yielding the dilemma may be amended and the dilemma itself escaped.

Archaeological Cables and Tacking: The Implications of Practice for Bernstein's ‘Options Beyond Objectivism and Relativism’:

Despite a reputation for stolidly earth-bound pragmatism, indeed, for a certain anti-intellectualism, archaeology has long been profoundly selfconscious about the philosophical issues raised by its practice. This is particularly true of American archaeology since the advent of the ‘New Archaeology’ in the early nineteen-sixties, although archaeologists have debated a remarkably consistent core of issues since the turn of the century. These concern, centrally, the status and security of archaeological claims about the cultural past; archaeologists wrestle with what Dray describes as ‘a certain metaphysical anxiety. . . and about the task of coming to know what literally does not exist’ (1980, p. 29), which is exacerbated by the special difficulties of coming to know a hiinion, citltiirnl subject that ‘literally does not exist’. As often as they have championed particular methodological strategies for meeting this anxiety-many of which have proven unexpectedly effective-they have expressed deep pessimism, even wholesale skepticism, about their enterprise. Given their dependence on analogical inference it seems, more specifically, that any reconstruction of the past reduces it to an image of the present or to what we in the present require it to be. Two considerations combine in the archaeological debates to produce this skepticism: theoretical (ontological) consideratipns on one hand, and epistemological considerations on the other. The first, the theoretical, arise when the cultural subject is conceived, first and foremost, as a system of intentional, conventional action informed by shared cultural ‘norms’ or ideals. Where the ‘normative’ dimension is emphasized the worry arises that past cultural forms may be entirely idiosyncratic and may diverge radically from any we know or could recognize. If this is the case, no uniformity can be assumed as the basis for interpretive recon-

Questions of evidence, legitimacy, and the (dis)unity of science

Abstract The recent Science Wars have brought into sharp focus, in a public forum, contentious questions about the authority of science and what counts as properly scientific practice that have long structured archaeological debate. As in the larger debate, localized disputes in archaeology often presuppose a conception of science as a unified enterprise defined by common goals, standards, and research programs; specific forms of inquiry are advocated (or condemned) by claiming affiliation with science so conceived. This pattern of argument obscures much that is most creative in archaeological practice. Archaeologists routinely exploit both integrating and fragmenting relations among the sciences, especially in establishing evidential claims. I will argue that the credibility of these claims is a function, not of scientific status acquired by corporate affiliation, but of the substantive trade in tools and techniques, empirical insights, models, and theories that is made possible by local interactions between archaeology and a wide range of other disciplines. There is much more to be gained by developing a rich critical understanding of the interfield relations that make this trade possible than by appealing to generic ideals of science.

Rethinking Unity as a "Working Hypothesis" for Philosophy: How Archaeologists Exploit the Disunities of Science

As a working hypothesis for philosophy of science, the unity of science thesis has been decisively challenged in all its standard formulations; it cannot be assumed that the sciences presuppose an orderly world, that they are united by the goal of systematically describing and explaining this order, or that they rely on distinctively scientific methodologies which, properly applied, produce domain-specific results that converge on a single coherent and comprehensive system of knowledge. I first delineate the scope of arguments against global unity theses. However implausible old-style global unity theses may now seem, I argue that unifying strategies of a more local and contingent nature do play an important role in scientific inquiry. This is particularly clear in archaeology where, to establish evidential claims of any kind, practitioners must exploit a range of inter-field and inter-theory connections. At the same time, the robustness of these evidential claims depends on significant disunity between the sciences from which archaeologists draw background assumptions

Putting shakertown back together: Critical theory in archaeology

“Contemporary archaeology,” says Kohl in his recent state-of-the-art review, “is nothing if not tortuously self-conscious” (1981:108), yet, as he observes, this self-consciousness has been curiously limited. While, in an archaeology context, self-consciousness led to a “vehement advocacy” of positivist methods for realizing objective, validated knowledge of other (past) cultures, other social sciences were led, by similar selfcriticism, to “question[ing] the possibility of impartial, value-free social science research” (Kohl 1981:93). The reason for this discrepancy has to do, I suggest, with the fact that archaeologists were motivated to reassess and overhaul their discipline by a deep concern to make it more “relevant.” It was recognized that, so long as research remained descriptive, it would yield only curiosities and relics while, if a method could be devised for reliably interpreting the data as evidence of the cultural past, it might be in a position to provide information of quite broad and even pragmatic value. Thus, the New Archaeologists promoted positivism as a methodology capable of progressively eliminating error and, in this, of assuring approximation to an ideal of objective and possibly useful truth in knowledge claims about the past. By contrast to this, the self-consciousness of sociology and social anthropology referred to by Kohl did not arise so much from a perceived need to make research relevant as from a concern to take stock of the social and political interests that it was already serving, deliberately or inadvertently. Kohl notes with a touch of irony that, while archaeologists were refining their methodology so that it would yield information relevant to “explaining the past and possibly directing future social change” (1981:92), social anthropologists were “acknowledging their discipline’s unsavory relationship to colonialism” (1981:92) and its role in transforming formerly isolated, noncapitalist and nonindustrial societies. They were also beginning to acknowledge what Handsman (1981a) has

Critical traditions in contemporary archaeology : essays in the philosophy, history, and socio-politics of archaeology

Part 1 Philosophical analysis: introduction - philosophical analysis, Alison Wylie philosophy of science and archaeology, Robert C.Dunnell efficient explanations and efficient behaviour, Merrilee H.Salmon inference to the best explanation in archaeology, Marsha Hanan and Jane Kelley the interpretive dilemma, Alison Wylie the structure of American theoretical archaeology - a preliminary report, Lester Embree dialectics, critical inquiry, and archaeology, Dean J.Saitta commentary - common knowledge and archaeology, Ezra Zubrow. Part 2 Historical foundations: introduction - historical foundations, Valerie Pinsky the history, philosophy and sociology of archaeology - the case of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act (1882), Tim Murray philosophical lessons from the history of Stonehenge studies, Christopher Chippindale Childes early marxism, Peter Gathercole commentary - a critical role for the history of archaeology, Valerie Pinsky. Part 3 Socio-political context: introduction - socio-political context, Alison Wylie producing prehistory, controlling the past - the case of New England beehives, Joan M.Gero archaeology as socio-political action in the present, Christopher Tilley living history and critical archaeology in the reconstruction of the past, Russell G.Handsman and Mark P.Leone commentary - a socio-politics of socio-politics in archaeology, H.Martin Wobst.

Feminist theories of social power: Some implications for a processual archaeology

Recent feminist analyses of power constitute a resource for theorizing power that archaeologists cannot afford to ignore given the importance of ‘post‐processual’ arguments that social relations, in which power is a central dimension, are as constitutive of system level dynamics as is the environment in which cultural systems are situated. I argue that they are important on two fronts: they articulate a dynamic, situational conception of power that resists reification, and they suggest a strategy for circumventing the polarized debates over objectivism: relativism which arise when a concern with power turns reflexive.

On “Heavily Decomposing Red Herrings”: Scientific Method in Archaeology and the Ladening of Evidence with Theory

Internal debates over the status and aims of archaeology—between processualists and post or anti-processualists—have been so sharply adversarial, and have generated such sharply polarized positions, that they obscure much common ground. Despite strong rhetorical opposition, in practice, all employ a range of strategies for building and assessing the empirical credibility of their claims that reveals a common commitment to some form of mitigated objectivism. To articulate what this comes to, an account is given of how archaeological data may be ‘laden with theory’ constructed as evidence—and yet still function as an independent constraint on interpretation.

Why Should Historical Archaeologists Study Capitalism

Since the early 1970s, advocates of the emerging field of historical archaeology have defended its worth and autonomy by appealing to the democratizing power of archaeological evidence over the alleged conservatism, the “inevitable elitism,” of text-bound history. Historical archaeology is the key, many have argued, to making visible “the inarticulate” (Ascher 1974:11), the “endless silent majority who did not leave us written projections of their minds” (Glassie 1977: 29), or were not of interest to those who did construct an articulate record of their activities and interests. While this sells short the radical potential of history, it does foreground the important contribution that archaeology can make to the investigation of periods for which we have documentary records. It captures what I take to be the central challenge facing historical archaeologists in the 1990s: that of realizing, of exploiting more fully, the potential of archaeological evidence to counter what Glassie describes as “superficial and elitist… tale[s] of viciousness” … “myth[s] for the contemporary power structure” (Glassie 1977:29), which are by no means unique to history. Because these are tales specific to capitalist ideology, at once mediating and obscuring its contradictions, this is the challenge that defines a historical archaeology of capitalism.

Feminist critiques of science: The epistemological and methodological literature*

Synopsis Feminist critiques of science are widely dispersed and often quite inaccessible as a body of literature. We describe briefly some of the influences evident in this literature and identify several key themes which are central to current debates. This is the introduction to a bibliography of general critiques of science, described as the “core literature,” and a selection of feminist critiques of biology. Our objective has been to identify those analyses which raise reflexive (epistemological and methodological) questions about the status of scientific knowledge and practice, both in general terms and in relation to biological research. We have abstracted these listings from a body of material compiled by members of the research project, “Philosophical Feminism: The Critiques of Science,” which covers a range of discipline-specific critiques beyond biology, as well as the more general philosophical critiques which constitute the core of the present bibliography.