Agency and Archaeology: Past, Present, and Future Directions

In light of the growing social scientific interest in agency theory, this paper sets out to examine and critically evaluate recent approaches to agency within archaeology. To this end, the paper briefly outlines the foundational theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens before turning to discuss the central themes and issues that emerge from some of the more influential contemporary approaches to agency within archaeology. Drawing from these differing approaches, this paper seeks to establish conceptual clarity in archaeological thinking about agency through a discussion of the importance of distinguishing between intentions, consequences, meanings, and motives when seeking to understand the situated subjectivities of historical actors.     

Linking Theory and Evidence in an Archaeology of Human Agency: Iconography,Style, and Theories of Embodiment

Many of the theories that inspire agency approaches in archaeology identify deep philosophical problems with other lines of thought. This creates challenges for identifying methods: do radical theories require radical methods? Choosing as a case study one of agency’s interpretive frameworks (embodiment) and, further, a single class of evidence (anthropomorphic imagery), I argue that the answer is “no.” In this case, familiar art historical methods, deliberately played off one against the other, provide a middle range framework for linking theory and evidence.     

Doing Archaeology as a Feminist: Introduction

Gender research archaeology has made significant contributions, but its dissociation from the resources of feminist scholarship and feminist activism is a significantly limiting factor in its development. The essays that make up this special issue illustrate what is to be gained by making systematic use of these resources. Their distinctively feminist contributions are characterized in terms of the recommendations for “doing science as a feminist” that have taken shape in the context of the long running “feminist method debate” in the social sciences.     

Doing Archaeology in a Turbulent Time

African Archaeological Review -     

Agents in Inter-Action: Bruno Latour and Agency

This paper aims to describe Bruno Latour's contributions to the theory and methodology of agency in the Philosophy of Science and to apply them to the study of agency in archaeology. These contributions include an understanding of how artifacts or representations of the world emerge, what the best conditions to study them under are and how to understand the process of change they undergo. A case study using the Hopewell burial mounds of the Lower Illinois Valley will serve to demonstrate the application of this methodology.     

Reconsidering path creation in economic geography: aspects of agency,temporality and methods

The emergence of new industrial development paths is an important topic in economic geography. However, current perspectives emphasizing the constraining forces of historical trajectories on innovation and change have shortcomings in accounting for how and where new industries arise. This article argues that more attention needs to be paid to agency, and that agency must be seen as inter-temporal in the sense that actors’ activities and strategies are framed by combinations of experiences and expectations. As such, the article combines insights from economic geography, transitions studies and the sociology of expectations (SoE) literature to expand extant theory on path creation. A brief analysis of the emerging Norwegian offshore wind power (OWP) sector serves to illustrate how experience (the past) and different types of expectations (the future) have tangible effects on agency, and in effect on path creation processes. These insights have methodological implications, essentially favouring qualitative approaches over quantitative ones to understand formative phases in industrial development.     

Imagining Political Possibility in an Age of Late Liberalism and Cynical Reason

Inspired by innovative social projects and new political movements, anthropologists have turned to the study of political possibility. In looking at how people imagine and struggle for temporalities and conditions that will afford them the opportunity to exist in ways different from those they are experiencing now, cultural analysts draw on ethnography and critical political philosophy to chart new analytical trajectories and themes. By foregrounding a language of potentiality and becoming, scholars also envision new ways for looking at democracy and justice. In drawing on three contemporary ethnographies, this review traces how anthropologists examine possibilities in diverse cultural and political contexts, including some of its tenets and conjectures.     

Constructing a Culture of Solidarity: London and the British Coalfields in the Long 1970s

This article explores relationships of solidarity constructed between London and the British coalfields from 1968 until the 1984–1985 miners’ strike. Foregrounding the development of a culture of solidarity over this period resituates the support movement during the 1984–1985 strike as embedded in longer‐term relationships, which suggests a more equal relationship between coalfield and metropolitan activists than is given by focusing narrowly on the year itself. I argue that a spatially and temporally dynamic sense of the development of these relationships allows us to better grasp the potentially mutual nature of solidarity. Thinking about the construction of this culture of solidarity can contribute significantly to understanding the nature of labour agency. I emphasise the generative nature of solidarity, particularly the ways in which the spatial and social boundaries of the labour movement were challenged through solidarity relationships, allowing in some instances a more diverse conception of working‐class politics.     

Power and Agency in Antebellum Slavery

This essay synthesizes conclusions about the agency of enslaved people drawn from three books by William Dusinberre: Them Dark Days; Slavemaster President; and Strategies for Survival.     

Self,Consciousness and Agency in The Egoist

This article re-reads representations of the self and agency in George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879) by drawing new connections between the novel and Victorian psychological theory. Critical discussions of The Egoist and psychological themes have rightly stressed the many ways in which, in Meredith’s novel, impersonal forces, biological, physiological and ideological, threaten to obliterate any notion of the self as discrete and autonomous. Yet Meredith maintains a strong ethical investment in individual agency. Comparing metaphors of fluidity, used to describe the self and consciousness in Meredith’s text, with similar images taken from the work of G. H. Lewes and James Sully, I argue that Meredith presents the self’s plasticity as crucial to its individuation and potential autonomy, even while that same plasticity also underlines the self’s vulnerability to social and ideological forces which threaten its independence. Clara’s individuality and agency take on distinctive political significance by challenging oppressive gender norms. Yet the vulnerabilities and bewildering complexities of individual subjective life, expressed in Meredith’s extravagant extensions of psychological metaphors, mean that any one self’s moves towards greater freedom must be fraught with uncertainty. The final part of the essay draws new connections between the psychological imagery that I have been exploring and Meredith’s engagement with human evolution. Clara’s individuation and capacity for autonomous action give the lie to Willoughby’s pseudo-Darwinian schematisation of her identity, yet the relationship between self and evolution remains a serious and complex issue in the novel.     

Painting as Agency,Style as Structure: Innovations in Mimbres Pottery Designs From Southwest New Mexico

The act of painting a design is a form of agency, and the overall style of that design in part can be conceptualized as a kind of structure. This perspective is used as a basis for analyzing chronological changes in designs on Mimbres Black-on-white pottery (ca. AD 750–1150) from Southwest New Mexico. Specific focus is on a methodology that can be used to detect innovations, that is, the introduction of novel designs that are incorporated into the design corpus and thus transform the structure. The conceptualization of a particular tradition (in this instance, pottery painting) as a form of structure analogous to general structure in Giddens' sense thus provides important insights into the recursive relationship between agency and structure.     

Writing the History of Archaeology in the Pacific: Voices and Perspectives

ABSTRACT

In histories of world archaeology to date the Pacific is all but missing. There has been some investigation into the history of archaeology in Australia and New Zealand, and other piecemeal work focusing on single countries or biographies of individuals, but much remains to be done. We offer a critical overview of general literature on the history of archaeology in the Pacific and stress the potential for a deeper knowledge of archaeology's histories in the region to transform current archaeological theory and practice. We then suggest important avenues for further investigation, including the historiography of Pacific archaeology, diverse national and linguistic traditions, international linkages between scholars and practitioners, pre-World War II excavations, theories about trans-Pacific contacts, and the often-hidden importance of women and Indigenous scholars and interlocutors in the field. Each of these themes is addressed by one or more of the papers in this special issue.     

The Old Kinchega Homestead: Doing Household Archaeology in Outback New South Wales, Australia

The Kinchega Pastoral Station in western New South Wales, Australia, was one of the earliest and largest in the area. A study of one of the station's homestead is demonstrating how the integration and negotiation of material and documentary evidence produces information on domestic behavior in rural Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and highlights the activities of women and children in an environment whose history has been dominated by the exploits of men.     

大型旅行社空间扩张的区位选择--"上海春秋"案例

旅行社是介于旅游吸引物与旅游者之间的组织者,它对地理区位的选择是本文的探讨重点。本文以上海春秋国际旅行社为例,归纳它在国内宏、微观选址的经验,得到其以省会城市、著名旅游城市、新兴经济发达城市为节点的宏观网络和以中心门市及社区门市为节点的微观网络;根据区位因素理论,初步分析了与旅行社空间区位选择有关的一些因素,包括对市场、成本等一般性因素的分析和对行为等特殊性因素的分析;最后,提出旅行社的区位扩张不仅要重视物理空间,也要重视网络信息空间。     

Sorcery and Negotiating Economic Agency: A Critical Observation from Solomon Islands

In this paper, my aim is to add to the discussions of sorcery in Melanesia by focussing on its relation to economic agency in the context of a case example from Malaita, Solomon Islands. Using Taylor's (2015) categories of ‘distributive’ and ‘possessive’ agency as a critical point of departure, I illustrate how sorcery can be considered as an outcome when people are perceived not to be balancing these forms of economic agency. By drawing on the example of an entrepreneur from Malaita, I highlight the complexity of the negotiations between possessive and distributive agencies and show how critically investigating these negotiations is important for understanding why sorcery may happen but also how to limit the chances of it happening. Furthermore, I also illustrate how critical investigations of accounts of sorcery can reveal complexities of socio‐economic and political life in changing economic and social circumstances.     

Ohitorisama,Singlehood and Agency in Japan

Abstract:

Postwar Japanese society has experienced significant demographic shifts. Of particular note are trends in marriage delay, increased divorce, increased rates of lifelong singlehood and an increased proportion of life spent unmarried. In this context, singlehood is increasingly experienced by women, for at least some period in their adult lives. Nonetheless, while greater numbers of Japanese are living as singles for a greater portion of their lives, marriage and childbearing remain key markers of contemporary Japanese womanhood. Living outside marriage – as a single, divorced or widowed person – suggests divergence from the ideal, even if it is just an unavoidable temporary state. This paper explores singlehood as a contested space of ideals and practices, and presents the notion of ohitorisama as one model of contemporary female singlehood.     

Agency and resilience in the time of regional economic crisis

Using a comparative case study on the closure of the research and development facilities of a pharmaceutical company in two regions in Sweden, this paper investigates the emergence of regional economic resilience from an agency perspective. Findings include a networked region engendering agency from non-state actors whilst substantial state intervention is needed to facilitate agency from a less networked region. The paper finds broad confirmation that interactions of actors are due to how a region is organized and the contingencies of its institutional context. Collective agency depends on the ability of actors to align interests and coalesce agendas which, as shown by the two cases, can be based on shared regional affinity as in the case of Södertälje or innovation strategies as in the case of Lund. Regional economic crises bring forth conditions and impetus for temporary modes of cooperation that mobilize resources to launch adaptive resilience strategies. Conflicts in resource distributions or operational complexity make developing agency-based resilience challenging. Emergent regional outcomes from agency-based resilience from these two cases exhibit adaptation with the potential for adaptability in Lund, and adaptability with degrees of adaptation in Södertälje.     

旅行社产品需求个性化和网络采购

本从旅行社产品原材料的特点和旅游需求个性化趋势对旅游产品的影响的角度,分析了利用网络技术进行旅行社产品生产的必要性,并探讨了旅行社网上采购的B2B模式。     

A Very Remote Storage Box Indeed: The Importance of Doing Archaeology with Old Museum Collections

Although our practice has come to be defined by a focus on excavation as the trademark of archaeological research, research on archaeological collections lies at the scientific heart of the discipline. We demonstrate through two very different case studies how a return to primary sources (in this case, boxes of artifacts) can upend our understanding of the objects themselves and create new narratives of social and technological change. At the same time, access to museum collections is becoming increasingly difficult as institutions struggle with the growing pressure to enhance public outreach and modernize data management, while simultaneously contending with persistent budget cuts. As archaeologists who work closely with museum curators and museum collections, we offer suggestions for how researchers can work with museums to ensure that future generations of researchers and the general public can learn from the ancient materials preserved within their collections.     

旅行社产品的双重属性及最优广告策略

旅行社产品具有搜寻品与经验品的双重属性,其旅游线路属于搜寻品,其服务属于经验品。信息性广告适用于搜寻品,劝说性广告适用于经验品。由于旅行社产品中的服务是不确定和不可观测的,用劝说性广告来显示其质量是不可置信的。再加上旅行社广告在旅游产业链上的纵向外部性,旅行社的最优广告策略是对旅游线路提供基本信息的信息性广告。