I don't agree totally with other points made in this thread -- in
particular, if Anglos are so self-obsessed, why the obsession with Foucault,
Derrida and all the others? Again, Ian Hodder has taken care to place his
thinking within the context of contiental European traditions in his edited
book Archaeological Theory in Europe, which I comment on in the last chapter
of Theory. I would further suggest that a strong undertone never made
explicit in 1980s English academic writing on the politics of archaeology
has been a strong distaste and desire to speak out against the nationalist
agenda of the culture we live in, from its politicians to its football
'supporters'.
However, I freely admit that there is a lot of truth in the suggestion that
the Anglo world tends to define non-Anglo traditions as beyond its purview
or of marginal relevance, at least within archaeology. I've been talking to
Cornelius off the board about these issues, and he felt that others would be
interested in what I was saying. If you don't like navel-gazing hit the
'delete' button now.
I started writing Archaeological Theory quite explicitly for Brits
only, and was encouraged particularly by the publishers to expand it to
include
North American themes. This was the right thing to do, I think, but I found
it very difficult even to 'stretch' the agenda of the book that far --
perceptions of what is or is not important in theory, let alone what to do
about it, seem to me to be quite divergent either side of the Atlantic. This
gave the book a dynamic -- two intellectual traditions, two
cultural/political contexts, compare and contrast -- that I was pleased
with. To add any kind of consideration of non-Anglo traditions would have
meant, I think, that
the book sank under the weight of the divergent agendas it was trying to
address.
Additionally, as I sat at the computer I had a clear mental image of who I
was writing for (Roger Beefy), and that student was a very real individual
who was English-speaking. In a sense I wrote it for students here at
Durham, some of whom read through and commented on draft versions of the
text -- so maybe the book
was unconsciously following/perpetuating/conspiring in the biases of English
undergraduates.
>
At the risk of sounding disingenuous I never thought there would be much
interest in what I was saying beyond Britain and North America. Perhaps
this does indeed reveal my own prejudices! (Cornelius thinks this is indeed
disingenuous, but I think it's true. An Italian archaeologist said he would
like to translate Theory into Italian, but that he didn't see a market for
more than 2-300 copies and the project would not appeal to a publisher. I
don't have sales figures to hand but if people are really interested, which
I doubt, I'll find out how many copies have sold outside the Anglo world.)
>
I do wish now that in the Preface I had made the above reasoning clearer and
more explicit. I suspect that other contributors to this thread will find
the reasoning unsatisfactory, but it was the judgment I made at the time.
I do believe strongly that you either treat of other
traditions eg. Latin American social archaeology properly or not at all,
otherwise you just end up with tokenism. I took the latter course but
didn't make it clear why I was doing so.
What is the lesson of all this? There wasn't any conscious intention to
pass the book off as a complete survey of theory -- indeed, the Preface is
quite explicit about this. Other things I left out included a detailed
account of phenomenology, Schiffer and site formation processes, a number of
traditions in Classical archaeology, childhood, masculinity, sexuality...
Indeed the most frequent comment I've had is 'I liked the book, but you left
my favourite bit of theory out'...
Perhaps the lesson is that the author is dead, and what this thread has
shown is that quite other meanings can legitimately be read into a text than
those consciously intended. Multivocality in a sense.
Matthew Johnson
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