Invalid YAMLTitle: @hamilakisArchaeologyAssemblage2017 date: 2023-01-17 type: reference project:
Hamilakis, Y., & Jones, A. M. (2017). Archaeology and Assemblage. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 27(1), 77–84. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774316000688
Hamilakis and Jones are surveying the way 'assemblage' has been used in other fields, in order to introduce a useage for archaeology that builds on the 'conventional' understanding of assemblage with these more rigorous uses in other fields. They survey the themes that emerge from this special issue to provide contextual background for the other papers, while providing a theoretical overview.
Its omnipresent use in archaeology seems to have taken on two distinct but related meanings: the aggregation of objects made of the same material (e.g. an assemblage of pottery or lithics) or held together by shared typological or stylistic similarities; and an aggregation of diverse objects united by a distinctive and clearly defned context of variable scale, e.g. the archaeological assemblage of a cave or the archaeological assemblage of a chronological phase (cf. Lucas 2012). Th
Surrealists including Joan Miró, André Masson and Yves Tanguy, were concerned with juxtaposition as a process of revelation: to reveal the irrational, the unconscious, the surreal in the everyday (Gale 1997, 334)
For example, the cut-up methods of Dada poetry were adopted by the Beat novelist William Burroughs in the 1950s and ’60s, while collage, found objects and readymades continue to have an impact.
Makes me think of gpt2 and 3 as being in this tradition
It is for these reasons that Deleuze and Guattari (2009) emphasize the critical role of artists as exemplars of assemblage making. Assemblage is vital to art practice and offers two important lessons regarding assemblages: frstly, the making of assemblages is a dynamic but also deliberate rather than random process. Second, the juxtaposition of distinct elements can be transformative, generating new entities, new possibilities and new ways of understanding.
Perhaps the clearest articulation of the new scholarship on assemblage comes from the work of political theorist Jane Bennett (2010) who discusses the agency of assemblage, drawing on the philosophies of Baruch Spinoza and of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Spinoza’s anti-Cartesian, monistic thinking set the foundations for a philosophy of affectivity, the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected, connecting at the same time agency with a generalized rather than an individuated emotion, with passion. T
the vitality of the materialities that constitute it’. Given the relational properties of the assemblage, the confguration of the assemblage will depend on the particular capacities and agencies of the bodies out of which it is composed. Morphologically, typologically or taxonomically similar components will have a different agentic impact in different assemblage confgurations.
in the conventional understanding of assemblages in archaeology, the main emphasis is either on formal and material similarity, or on spatial and chronological co
as Ian Buchanan notes (2015, 383), D&G had in mind and perhaps modifed the German term Komplex, a word with clear (and deliberate on D&G’s part) psychoanalytical connotations
Plateaus
the original term in French foregrounds, amongst other things, the deliberate act of bringing things, beings and entities in association, of coming together, stressing thus the agency involved in this process, something which is less immediately obvious with its translation as assemblage
Translation of assemblage wouldve been better done as arrangement. D&g use term agencement.
another reason that may explain the current archaeological popularity of the term: especially in DeLanda’s work, the emphasis is on aggregation, on networks and on scale (cf. DeLanda 2006b), and on the relationship between parts and wholes (cf. Buchanan 2015). These have been, of course, important matters for archaeological theory for some time now (Chapman 2000; see also below), linked as they are to debates on typology, on hoarding, on accumulation and dispersal, on sets and nets, on deliberate fragmentation and enchainment through fragments, and so on. Furthermore, the discussion on assemblages arrived in archaeology at a moment when two other sets of ideas enjoyed significant popularity in archaeological thinking. The frst is Actor Network Theory, and the work of Bruno Latour in general
The second is non-human agency, and the vitality and vibrancy of matter, embodied by the popularity of Alfred Gell’s ideas for the former (1998) and Jane Bennett’s (2010) for the latter. The fact that assemblage is also a key concept in Bennett’s work facilitated further such fusion. Finally, it is admittedly much easier for Anglo-Saxon literature to connect with works such as DeLanda’s and Bennett’s (even Latour’s), than it is with the works of Deleuze and Guattari, produced in (and often responding to) a different intellectual, social and political milieu.
DeLanda’s assemblage theory undervalues the key role of affect and of sensoriality (cf. Hamilakis, this issue), harbouring thus the danger of constructing mechanistic, systemic networks and wholes
Gavin
In The Emergent Past, Fowler (2013) argues for understanding archaeological practice (in his case the reinterpretation of a series of Early Bronze Age graves from northeast England) as an assemblage confgured of materials, things, places, humans, plants, animals, techniques, technologies and ideas. The archaeologist is a component of this assemblage, and archaeological research helps to reconfgure or reshape the assemblage in new ways. The Emergent Past, Fowler (2013) Fowler
It would be helpful to think of bone trade in this way maybe?
Each translation has ‘changed the extent and effects of the key properties of the necklace by drawing it into new assemblages’ (Fowler 2013, 55). The action of successive generations of archaeologists changed the composition and extent of the assemblage.
What would this employ for bone trade?
Lucas. In Understanding the Archaeological Record, Lucas (2012) argues that, in order to overcome problematic distinctions between the social and the material, archaeological practice should switch its focus to ‘entities and their relations’; this allows us to see that ‘materiality is a fundamentally a relational process, not a substance, and what really matters is the relations between entities’ (Lucas 2012, 167–8).
What becomes clear from Lucas’ analysis—like that of Fowler—is that archaeologists shape and compose the assemblages that they excavate. J
John Chapman (2000) was one of the frst to realize the signifcance of assemblage in his Fragmentation in Archaeology (Chapman 2000; see also Chapman & Gaydarska 2007).
His theoretical framework is based upon the principle of enchainment: material relations—typically taking the form of processes of fragmentation or accumulation—link people. Just as objects can be broken between people to establish a material relationship, so objects can be accumulated, or assembled, and these relations will be expressed anew.
This, Chapman, would be very useful for bone trade. In the book maybe a section that says how do we understand these as objects? Square that with black feminist archaeology
Yannis Hamilakis (2013) has proposed that a fruitful way to conceptualize and deploy assemblage thinking will be to consider assemblags within a framework of sensoriality and affectivity, hence his term of sensorial assemblages.
This ontology suggests that the primary role of the senses is not to allow the organic body to operate but to engender affectivity, meant in the Spinozean sense, as agency as well as collective and trans-corporeal feeling and emotion. In other words, the senses enable us to be ‘touched’.
The feld of sensoriality becomes an important element of assemblage thinking, a feld that is expanded to include not only bodies, things and landscapes, but also thoughts and memories, all energized by affectivity.
The commingling of different times in an assemblage, held together by sensorial and affective relations, allows new understandings of temporality and historicity to emerge, and often results in unexpected political effects. T
Mnemonic power of human remains? Also traditional symbol of memento Mori
In another context, in studying the ontology of the photographic feld, Carabott, Hamilakis and Papargyriou (2015, 11) have proposed that the photographic event can be seen as a sensorial assemblage composed of a range of diverse entities: ‘the camera, the photographer, the person, thing or landscape to be photographed, the light and the atmosphere, the surrounding props, the onlookers, the photographic memories that are activated prior to taking a photograph’, an assemblage which may or may not lead to a photographic afterimage. In so doing, they foreground the materiality of the photographic process and the generative nature of the sensorial assemblage of photography. er
Ok Ive read this right? Double check, clear connection w bone trade