33 research outputs found

    Colonization, disability, and the intranet: the ethnic cleansing of space?

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    The article analyzes teacher’s emplacement of the image of disability within school’s intranet sites in England. The image unearthed within such sites was problematic as it did not display a positive or realistic image of disability or disabled people. Within the article historical archaeology and colonialism are employed as theoretic framework to interpret this artifact of disability. The article also provides an ethnographic subscript to the creation of a space of possibilities and how this became striated by missionary teachers who colonized this brave new intranet world. Deciphering of the organization and representation of the disabled indigene, through this theoretical framework, unearthed a cartography inscribed by the scalpel of old world geometry

    Historicising Material Agency: from Relations to Relational Constellations

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    Relational approaches have gradually been changing the face of archaeology over the last decade: analytically, through formal network analysis; and interpretively, with various frameworks of human-thing relations. Their popularity has been such, however, that it threatens to undermine their relevance. If everyone agrees that we should understand past worlds by tracing relations, then ‘finding relations’ in the past becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Focusing primarily on the interpretive approaches of material culture studies, this article proposes to counter the threat of irrelevance by not just tracing human-thing relations, but characterising how sets of relations were ordered. Such ordered sets are termed ‘relational constellations’. The article describes three relational constellations and their consequences based on practices of fine ware production in the Western Roman provinces (first century BC – third century AD): the fluid, the categorical, and the rooted constellation. Specifying relational constellations allows reconnecting material culture to specific historical trajectories, and offers scope for meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. As such a small theoretical addition based on the existing toolbox of practice-based approaches and relational thought can impact on historical narratives, and can save relational frameworks from the danger of triviality.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9244-

    The Temporality of the Landscape Revisited

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    This is an essay about the connections between the passage of time and the condition of archaeological knowledge. It revisits Tim Ingold’s 1993 paper The Temporality of the Landscape, considering its relationship with the phenomenological and interpretive archaeologies of the 1990s and what we learn from it today. Engaged not so much in an ‘ontological turn’ as in a kind of archival return, the essay compares Ingold’s discussion of Breugel’s painting The Harvesters (1565) with an archaeological photograph from 1993. A discussion of the after-effects of performance follows, and four theses about temporality, landscape, modernity and revisiting are put forward: i) The passage of time transforms archaeological knowledge; ii) Archaeological knowledge transforms the passage of time; iii) An archaeological landscape is an object that is known through remapping; iv) Archaeological knowledge is what we leave behind. The essay concludes that that archaeology is not the study of the temporality of the landscape, as Ingold had argued, but the study of the temporality of the landscape revisite
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