Archaeology sometimes seems to exist in
its own little scholarly world. Compared to other disciplines, we have strange
kinds of data—sites and artifacts. These weird data
require odd specialized methods, from lithic refitting to grave-lot seriation
to dog-lease surface collecting. Scholars in other disciplines don’t do these
things, and they don’t need labels for them. Quite naturally, archaeology
requires its own specialized vocabulary. Does it matter whether our terms match
up with those in other disciplines? After all, we are doing our own thing, and
we rightly assert our ability to define our own terminology.
This is fine, up to a point. But there
is a tendency for archaeologists to take this disciplinary autonomy—and its
associated terminology—too far. We have a habit of adopting terms that have a
standard definition in other fields, and giving them an entirely new meaning within
archaeology. I am not referring to adopting a standard term (say, stratigraphy
from geology) to the peculiarities of the archaeological record and maintaining
a very similar meaning. I am referring to the practice of giving established
terms an entirely new, unrelated definition for archaeology. Then the terms
come into archaeological use, aided by the fact that too few archaeologists
keep up on other disciplines. The result is confusion. When I run into the term
“normative,” I have to stop and think. Does the writer mean normative in its
standard definition in urban planning? Or are we talking about normative in
Lewis Binford’s idiosyncratic vocabulary?
To me, this confusion is a serious problem. It helps isolate archaeology
from other disciplines. It promotes conceptual sloppiness. And it helps keep archaeology down on the farm, and away
from the scholarly centers where the intellectual action is.
I just found a new example is an
article I read on the airplane returning from Aarhus. Norman Yoffee
redefines two terms: infrastructure, and infrastructural power (Yoffee 2015), giving them definitions very
different than understood in other disciplines (and in archaeology as well). So
here are a few examples of this process that come to mind. I’ll start with
Binford. At one point I had a list of four or five such terms that Binford
blindly adopted, but right now only these two come to mind.
Middle
range theory.
The term middle-range theory was
invented by sociologist Robert Merton in the 1950s for a kind of empirical
theory that applied to people and societies and their operation. It was devised
as a contrast to “grand theory” or high-level theory, an abstract,
philosophical brand of social theory. Then Binford came along and used the very
same term for something completely unrelated: formation process. This had nothing
at all to do with Merton’s concept, so the reason for the re-invention of the
concept must have been ignorance on Binford’s part. Raab and Goodyear (1984) sorted this out decades ago, but because
few archaeologists bothered to look at sociological epistemology, we kept on
using Binford’s term. This created a real mess, and it had a seriously negative
affect on archaeological theory and epistemology, since we very badly needed
Merton’s insights decades ago. I discuss the situation elsewhere (Smith 2011). I sometimes wonder if the crisis
in archaeological argumentation (Smith 2015)
might have been avoided had we paid attention to Merton and other
methodological works in the social sciences back in the days when Binford and
Hodder were shouting at one another and filling the need for stock exam essays for
archaeology students.
Normative.
I remember back in grad school days
when Binford’s concept of normative was a pejorative label for models he didn’t
like. Normative meant a theory that relied on any kind of ideas in people’s
heads to explain something in the past. Binford and the materialistic new
archaeologists would say disgustedly that Hodder and the post-processualists
used normative theories. When I started reading in the urban planning
literature, I was surprised to find that the term was a basic concept with a
very different meaning. Normative theory refers to theories about good or
positive values in urban design, “a theory of the kinds of urban environments
town planning should seek to create” (Taylor
1998:22). Kevin Lynch’s excellent book Good City Form (Lynch 1981) is built around a single question:
“What makes a good city?” (p.1). Normative theory in planning is usually
contrasted with “descriptive theory,” which is theory without value judgments.
I must admit that initially I had a strong negative reaction to normative
theory in planning, since the cultural relativism of anthropology was strongly
imprinted on my decades ago. How can one claim that some cultural feature or practice
is “better” than another? But think about buildings and cities that you know.
It should be obvious that some are better designed than others, and normative
theory deals with how to achieve superior outcomes in buildings, cities, and
built landscapes. I discuss normative theory relevant to archaeology here: (Smith 2011).
Top-down
and bottom-up.
These terms are widely used in the
social sciences to distinguish different types of dynamics and causality in
complex systems. For example, in discussing governance, a top-down process is
one where policies are made and implemented by a high-level authority with
little input from the grass roots, whereas a bottom-up process is one carried
out by the actions of people organizing on their own, typically outside of
formal institutions. Laws are often created, and always implemented, by
top-down actions of governments, whereas the Occupy Wall Street movement was a
bottom-up process. Top-down and bottom-up are rarely considered analytical
terms, but they are used informally (and frequently) as labels for things that
have clear analytical definitions. The term “generative process” is often used
for bottom-up social processes. As archaeologists become more sophisticated
about things like governance, economic systems, and other manifestations of complex
adaptive systems, we will turn increasingly to the analytical concepts behind
the terms top-down and bottom-up. In fact I predict that an increasing
understanding of generative processes in the next decade will revolutionize our
understanding of ancient states and ancient cities.
So, how have archaeologists used these phrases
differently? I have seen an increasing number of archaeologists use "top-down"
to describe research that looks at kings and elites, while bottom-up refers to research
that focuses on households. This is a very different concept. Both top-down and
bottom-up processes (in the standard terminology) can implicate both elites and
households. The new archaeological usage is a static descriptive concept, whereas the standard social-science usages describes dynamic processes. I have seen many cases of the new uses, particularly in research on the
Classic Maya, but I haven’t been keeping track. My resources here in Dulles
Airport are limited (with a delay; I’ll arrive in PHX at 6:AM Aarhus time, close to 24 hours traveling.....). I just
saw an Andean example in a recent Latin American Antiquity. Again, this usage
serves to isolate archaeology from other disciplines, and it causes confusion
by the concurrent use of different definitions for the same words. If you are
analyzing households, then say households; don’t use an irrelevant term badly.
Infrastructure
and infrastructural power.
I find Yoffee’s reinvention of these
terms the most puzzling case. Most or all of the above cases arose form
ignorance. The archaeologists in question had no clue about developments in
other disciplines, and were probably not aware they were sowing confusion. But
Yoffee is clearly aware that his definitions diverge from accepted definitions,
both in archaeology and outside. His article takes off from sociologist Michael
Mann’s concept of “infrastructural power” (Mann
1984, 2008), and he cites Mann’s definition as the ability of the state
to penetrate civil society. But then he redefines infrastructure. In normal
scholarly discourse, infrastructure refers to the “sinews” of a city or a
society, the physical features that bind different places together (Boone and Modarres 2006:95). Mann’s usage
extends this concept to include facilities and practices that bring the state
down to the level of neighborhoods and communities to interface with people.
Mann contrasts this with “despotic power,” which means the power of the ruler
to carry out his wishes unencumbered by other forces.
Yoffee defines infrastructure in an odd
way: “By infrastructures, I mean groups of people and their leaders who stand
apart from or are not a part of the institutions of the state” (unpaginated).
Most scholars would call such groups “civic associations” or “institutions”
(guilds, councils, religious institutions, neighborhood watch groups and the
like). I can’t find an explicit definition of infrastructural power in the
paper, but the usage suggests that Yoffee is referring to the power of such
civic associations. He discusses cases where such associations have the power
to resist the rulers of early states. This is an insightful discussion, and I
like many parts of Yoffee’s argument. But why change the meanings of
established terms? “Civic associations” works fine for these phenomena, and that term is common in fields outside of archaeology such as
social history and urban studies (Friedrichs
2010; Prak 2011; Read 2008). Also puzzling is his avoidance of Blanton
and Fargher (2008), the one source by
archaeologists that deals most closely with Mann’s concept of infrastructural
power!
I hope we can cut down on such terminological
sloppiness in archaeology. It breeds confusion and it isolates our discipline
from other fields. With increasing scholarly resources, it is easier now to follow,
or at least check up on other disciplines now and then.
We all need to be more careful about
this, and journal editors and reviewers should not give a pass to these
confusions.
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Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States. Springer, New York.
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and Environment. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
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Owens, and Greg T. Smith, pp. 29-63. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal.
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seminar, London. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/39751/.
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2008 The State's Evolving Relationship with Urban
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2015 The Power of Infrastructures: a
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(published online).
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