Betwixt and Between: Ethnoarchaeology, Women, Susan Kent
The gilded Marshalltown traditionally went to the guy dressed in faded khakis, eyes squinting in a weather-beaten face, pipe in hand, trowel in the belt (Flannery 1982:267). He dug square holes to get data. Frequently, there were a few young women in his crew, women who mostly worked steadily, eyes lowered as the guy in charge ogled down their halter-tops. Summer over, some of these women worked in the lab. Photographs of field crews named young men, but less often, women (e.g., Jennings 1994:145). Linguists distinguish between unmarked, or basic, categories and marked words, with qualifiers affixed to the basic morpheme. For example, ‘man’ is the unmarked, and ‘woman’ (derived from ‘wif-man,’ that is, wife-man) is the marked word. Similarly, ‘archaeology’ functions as the basic term and ‘ethnoarchaeology’ is the marked category. It follows that a woman doing ethnoarchaeology is special, outside the basic cognitive frame ‘archaeology.’ No woman pursuing ethnoarchaeology has been recognized in standard histories of the profession. This essay will center on Susan Kent, a person who was an indefatigable fieldworker, had an enviable list of significant articles and edited volumes at her early death at 50, served the profession in national organization offices, sparked many discussions with her cogent analyses and stimulating observations, and nurtured a number of younger scholars. Her operational method of doing ethnoarchaeology focused the subfield (David and Kramer 2001:11). To no avail when it came to appointment to larger research-supporting anthropology programs to which she applied, her accomplishments seemingly could not balance what hiring committees saw as a short, plump woman whose lectures at interviews failed to dispel the negative impression. Kent’s career illuminates how fundamental to Western societies is the unmarked ‘man’ standing for ‘human being.’ Our professional community had difficulty fitting the anomalous ‘woman’ ‘ethnoarchaeologist’ into its model of the discipline, exhibiting the androcentrism that can obfuscate substantial, illuminating contributions. The hallmark of Kent’s archaeological practice was her deep, empathetic engagement with non-Western communities. Her model of ethnoarchaeology contrasts with that of the New Archaeology ‘processual’ archaeologists avowedly pursuing ‘lawlike’ generalizations (O’Brien et al. 2005:101–103). Empathy with the people with whom she sat as a participant observer drove her to active concern with her communities’ complicated political issues, particularly about health. ethnoarchaeology, Vol. 5 No. 2, October, 2013, 112–118
Science and the Social Order
THE object of the pamphlets in the Series “Looking Forward”, issued by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is to present problems rather than to solve them; and Dr. C. H. Desch has carried out this purpose in his “Science and the Social Order” (pp. 49. Is. net). For the man of science, the pamphlet is indeed too elementary to be of much interest: its value lies rather as a means of educating the general public on the importance of the scientific habit of mind, as distinct from the knowledge acquired by scientific methods, and the dependence of government and administration on information supplied by scientific experts. Dr. Desch presents lucidly but persuasively the case for the use of scientific methods in planning- for substituting factual knowledge for guess-work- and emphasizes that only planned direction on an international scale making use of all the resources of science, physical, chemical, biological and sociological, is capable of undertaking the immense task of reconstruction that confronts us. He steers clear of political issues while stressing the need for further development of the social sciences, and he does not fail to challenge scientific men themselves to recognize their exceptional position and to determine that, so far as in them lies, their work will be directed to social uses. Dr. Desch suggests that as sociology becomes more generally accepted as one of the sciences, and as the history of scientific discovery is more and more studied in relation to political and economic history, appreciation will grow of the fundamental importance of science in the modern community. Within limits the physicist, chemist or biologist will become something of a sociologist, and the linking of his efforts in his special science with the service of society may resolve the ethical dilemma. Dr. Desch insists further on the need for clear exposition and the avoidance of jargon, and also on the impossibility of limiting scientific research and particularly fundamental research.
The politics of becoming bodies: Sex, gender and intersubjectivity in motion
Abstract This paper presents readers with one (research) story about (sexed and gendered) bodies not as objects with inherent boundaries and properties but as material-discursive phenomena. In telling such a story I examine the role that the screendance, Becoming Bodies , has played in knowledge production and argue for a less ontologically ‘old fashioned’ view of what counts as ‘evidence’. Throughout the paper I draw from a range of feminisms: biological, phenomenological, poststructural, psychoanalytical, and post humanist and performative scholarship of sex and gender. These discourses contest nature/nurture, male/female, body/mind dualisms, and take the political and ethical view that bodies are not neutral; that sex and gender, being a woman or a man are both socially and biologically constructed forms of identity (similar to class and race) that are acquired and learned through socio-cultural regimes of discipline and intersubjective bodily practices. Building on this dynamic and developmental bio-psycho-social view I discuss selected aspects of interview data: (1) the material-discursive tensions and contradictions of sexing and gendering bodies and (2) troubling the intersubjective implications of this for clinical practices.