Heitz, Caroline (7 September 2018). On the Edge of Metamodernity? Third Way-Epistemologies in Archaeology. 24th Conference of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA), 06-09 September, Barcelona, Spain (Unpublished). In: Session 703: Modelling the past: Crisis of ideas in modern archaeology? 24th Conference of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA), 06-09 September, Barcelona, Spain. Barcelona. 6.9.-9.9.2018.
Has archaeology drifted into a crisis of ideas? Or is the current mood rather a symptom of metamodernity in the making? While processual archaeology drew basically on modernity’s realism, it was postmodernity’s constructivism and relativism that informed postprocessual archaeology. However, recent epistemological developments like the so called material, science and digital turn seem to challenge the postmodern thought:
There is certainly a danger of turning (back) to naive realism and (new) processualism. Furthermore, the combining of qualitative and quantitative methods from science and humanities can lead to mixing contradicting stances, if epistemological approaches are not carefully chosen.
In my view, these developments should be reflected in a broader societal context of global phenomena summarized in keywords like resource scarcity, pollution, climate change, big data, AI, the internet of things. With reference to art and culture, it was proposed that such real-world problems led to the dawn of yet another condition of society or even epoch: post-post- or metamodernity (e.g. Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010; Gibson 2017), characterised by stances between and beyond modernism and postmodernism, idealism and materialism, realism and relativism etc. Although such a provocative view might be contentious, its synthetic tendency is intriguing. In
archaeology as well, ‘third way’-epistemologies – as I call them – are being increasingly discussed: by drawing on e.g. the praxeology of P. Bourdieu, critical realism of R. Bhaskar or the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce. I would like to probe into some of them regarding their potential for the current inter-/transdisciplinary tendencies in archaeology.
Item Type: |
Conference or Workshop Item (Speech) |
|---|---|
Division/Institute: |
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of History and Archaeology > Institute of Archaeological Sciences > Pre- and Early History |
UniBE Contributor: |
Heitz, Caroline Franziska |
Subjects: |
900 History > 930 History of ancient world (to ca. 499) |
Language: |
English |
Submitter: |
Caroline Franziska Heitz |
Date Deposited: |
10 Sep 2018 13:17 |
Last Modified: |
05 Dec 2022 15:17 |
URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/119771 |
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