Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology 2018

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Relational Matters of Being

Personhood and Agency in Archaeology

Eleanor Harrison-Buck

This volume presents a diverse set of case studies that highlight the context-based, regional variability of personhood and agency worldwide. Yet a number of shared themes also emerge. One theme I explore here is agency and personhood as generative and mutually constituted processes; and the chapters in this volume, alongside other examples from both archaeological and ethnographic contexts, provide some insightful case studies. The volume as a whole offers important contributions to key areas of contemporary theory in studies of agency and personhood, some of which are reviewed below. These studies provide a critical examination of the so-called material turn, analytically engaging with relational perspectives grounded in ontological archaeology (see Alberti 2016).

I conclude this chapter with a critical look at the so-called new ontological realism (Alberti 2016; Gabriel 2015; Thomas 2015), discussing some of the current trends and shortcomings of the radical theory of ontological alterity. In its strictest sense, this approach privileges non-discursive materiality and a wholesale rejection of discursive cognitivism, suggesting that they are necessarily at odds and mutually exclusive. Despite attempts to eradicate Cartesian dualisms, I argue that this “all-or-nothing” approach has only furthered the mind/body gap in some current post-humanist studies of ontological archaeology. Instead of an “all-or-nothing” paradigm that opposes discursive and non-discursive knowledge, I suggest that scholars consider embodied cognition as “conversively co-creative” (sensu Brill de Ramírez 2007:22). This alternative, conversive form of embodied cognition suggests that epistemologies and ontologies exist among all societies across the globe but vary significantly because people interact with their physical world in markedly different ways.

Agentive (Non-)Persons and Some False Divides

For some scholars, relational perspectives offer a replacement for traditional practice and agency-based theories for understanding personhood. For instance, John Robb (2010:494) notes that “agency is not a characteristic of individuals but of relationships; it is the socially reproductive quality of action within social relationships.” This definition of agency implies that all agents are inherently social beings or persons (human or otherwise). Yet the case studies in this volume suggest that agents and persons are not necessarily synonymous. Erica Hill makes the important distinction that while many things have agency (the ability to act), not all of them possess the capacity for reciprocity—an ability to engage in social relationships with mutual respect—a defining trait for personhood in most animistic societies. These agents are considered non-persons or what Morten Pedersen (2001:415–16) might refer to as “asocial entities.” To constitute personhood in some societies, an agent must have “the ability to elicit a response and to be a social other” (Eberl 2013:3). Therefore, agency is perhaps better defined more broadly as having the “capacity for action” (Robb 2010:493), whereas a social agent engages similarly to a relational person with a capacity to interact and intra-act.

Among the proto- and early historic Eskimo living along the Bering Sea coast examined by Hill in chapter 2, agential non-persons are identified based on their unpredictable and uncontrolled behavior, which includes acts of cannibalism. On the surface, these non-persons resemble relations among Amazonian groups that Philippe Descola (1996:94) describes as animic predation, which he characterizes as the inverse of reciprocity. Yet the comparison ends there. Carlos Fausto (2007:500) further describes such “predatory relations” among Amazonian groups, whereby an animal or human body or aspects of its vitality are captured and in some cases eaten by certain cannibalistic/carnivorous groups. Fausto (2007) clarifies distinctions between agents and persons in Amazonia, indicating first that not everything has agency (it is unequally distributed and hierarchical) and second that humans and animals hold a mutual predatory relationship and that their state of personhood is defined by “two modes of consumption: one, cooked, whose objective is strictly alimentary, and another, raw, whose goal is the appropriation of the victim’s animistic capacities” (Fausto 2007:504). In other words, in this context both humans and (hunted) animals are treated as persons; it is in the act of consuming that their role(s) as subject may (or may not) shift to that of object, effectively blurring the body/soul opposition. The Amazonian and Eskimo case studies show that agency and personhood are not fixed or universal categories and highlight the regional and contextual variability that exists in this case between two different “animistic” societies (see Sahlins 2014 for a recent critique of the fourfold differentiation of animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism outlined in Descola’s [2013] ontological scheme).

Traditionally, scholars present models that emphasize human dominance over the natural world, but these reconstructions tend to obscure the ontological proximity of humans and animals and their mutually constituted relationship (Ingold 1996, 2000). For instance, indigenous hunters often view the hunt as a direct expression of their relationship with their prey, crediting their success to the animal’s willing self-sacrifice rather than to their own (human) superiority or technological mastery over the animal (McNiven 2013:99). In many cases hunting practices blur not only the divide between body and soul but also human-animal distinctions. Some post-humanists argue that “ultimately, the power to alter webs of relationships derives not from people (or even from other organisms, places, things, or other relational ‘nodes’) but from the relations themselves” (Pauketat and Alt, chapter 4, original emphasis). Yet Pauketat and Alt conclude that these two perspectives on human history are not mutually exclusive but in a relational world are mutually co-creative and arise through a generative process (see further below).

Some see relational perspectives of personhood as an extension of post-processual thought, specifically in its rejection of the universal scientific truths espoused by the ecological functionalism of the processual movement (see Thomas 2015:1288). Yet the interpretive theory of post-processualism (first challenged by phenomenology in the 1990s) stands in stark contrast to contemporary ontological theory (Alberti 2016:164; Thomas 2015:1288). The former decodes (representational) meaning, while the latter codes (relational) performance or decorum—that is, both conscious and unconscious ways of being and doing. This distinction is highlighted by Brück and Jones in their study of British Early Bronze Age burials and grave goods, traditionally interpreted as social status indicators of the interred. Brück and Jones argue that such grave goods may constitute alternative ontological forms of Bronze Age personhood, which emphasize a human-landscape relationship rather than strictly the human individual “set apart from (and . . . superior to) the natural world” (Brück and Jones, chapter 10). The nature-culture divide—looking at nature as something “acted upon” by culture as a civilizing or progressive move—represents a pervasive “master narrative” grounded in Western epistemology (Borić 2013:49).

Another false divide in Western thought that has been maintained in economic anthropology is the alienable-inalienable divide (see Graeber 2001; Kopytoff 1986). Maria Nieves Zedeño, Wendi Field Murray, and Kaitlyn Chandler (chapter 5) revisit and further unpack this sharp dichotomy, examining materials including native feathers and European dyes, which would normally be characterized as inalienable and alienable, respectively. Yet in the context of painting and bundling, their object “itineraries” (sensu Joyce and Gillespie 2015) converge as a “relational node” (sensu Ingold 2007) and exemplify what Zedeño and colleagues describe as the inalienable-commodity-inalienable continuum (see also Kopytoff 1986). The same fluid continuum could also be applied to Howey’s discussion in chapter 3 of European-derived copper kettles interred by the Mi’kmaq as grave goods in burials from northeastern North America. Throughout their route of circulation, objects can transition from alienable to inalienable and in some cases back again. This continuum is reminiscent of Bill Brown’s (2001:4) discussion of an object’s “flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition.” This circulation has no beginning or end, only temporary stoppages, knots, or nodes (Joyce and Gillespie 2015:3). In such instances, the “experiential qualities and other flows or movements of substances, materials, and phenomena . . . become attached, entangled, or associated with others and, in the process, define not only people but other organisms, things, places, and the like” (Pauketat and Alt, chapter 4).

Agency as Generative Action in Relational Societies: Crafting Persons

Agency as generative action is what brings things to life. John Barrett (2014:69) makes the important point that if we define agency as simply a causal reaction between two relational objects, “this claim only renders agency as a force or quality identified as a ‘product of material engagement,’ which neither is specific enough for our purposes nor clarifies what, if anything, instigates such an engagement (another agency?).” A causal reaction can be considered agency (a seed pod that falls on the ground), but this action alone is insufficient to (re)generate another life force until it forms a relation or mutual interdependency (breaks apart and reseeds in the ground). A mutual constitution of being is a necessary component of relational personhood. Mutually constitutive relations are the generative acts (the social agency) that produce things in the world, whether those things are human offspring or crafted objects (see Hendon, chapter 7).

If we are to say that some thing has animate agency or a life force, it seems logical to conclude that it must have been created/generated/born similar to any other biological thing. While agency is characterized as a “product of material engagement” (Malafouris 2008a:34), in many instances to qualify as a relational person a social agent must also demonstrate the capacity to carry forth its own generative acts involving one or more other relations to co-produce new life into being. How one defines this continuum or “life cycle” (in a thing or a human) will vary based on ontological perspective. Likewise, how one defines personhood also varies. While a baby is brought into being as an animate or sentient agent through a generative act, for some societies, such as the Aztec, the child is not considered a person until he or she undergoes a series of birthing and bathing rituals that imbue the child with vital life forces (Eberl 2013; Joyce 2000). In these instances, the child is seen as a precious raw material whose personhood is shaped through these and other rituals of socialization.

Often, the production of personhood goes hand in hand with the marking of gender roles and sexual divisions. To be a person requires the capacity to regenerate life; therefore, social agents (persons) are necessarily gendered beings. Extending this capacity that exists for all biological things (humans, plants, animals, and other living organisms) to inanimate things helps explain why some societies view crafting as a sexual act between humans and gendered object-beings. For example, in some African societies iron-smelting furnaces are gendered female and these “technological artifacts” are given bodily features, including clay breasts and vaginal openings, penetrated by male smelters with penis-like blow pipes (Schmidt 2009). Together, the smelter-furnace (person-object) relation is a reciprocal engagement seen as a male-female sexual act that is reproductive, together generating iron object-beings. The generative fluxes of these sexual mates are mutually constituted—the smelter needs the furnace as much as the furnace needs the smelter to produce.

Rather than a one-way process of engagement, it is the mutual work or co-production between relational beings that defines their personhood, and through their generative act of production an animacy or life force is spawned. The sharp divide between subject and object dissolves. Christopher Witmore (2007) calls this a symmetrical process. Julia Hendon (2010) emphasizes intersubjectivity in this process. Following this logic, the vitality accorded to African iron bangles and rings examined by Ann Stahl (chapter 9) might be transferred to these objects during the (re)productive process. According to Peter Schmidt (2009:263), those with the power to transform metal vis-à-vis the iron-smelting furnace not only held procreative power but also served as protectors and curative agents and could induce “medicinal curing, magical protections, and ancestral appeasement.” Stahl’s findings suggest that iron adornments were also capable of extending a form of protective power to the wearer as well as to the shrines they adorned as offerings. Rather than an inherent agency, the efficacious power of the iron jewelry may be the result of its reciprocal engagement and ability to act back on another relational being, effectively “restoring [it] to the generative fluxes of the world of materials in which [it] came into being and [continues] to subsist” (Ingold 2011:29, emphasis added).

The construction and decoration of marine transport canoes among the Torres Strait Islanders described by Ian McNiven (chapter 8) highlights another example of production as a generative act. Two types of gendered wood are smeared with bodily fluids, including blood, female discharge, and seminal fluid; their mixing is suggestive of sexual intercourse (Munn 1986:140; see also Tambiah 1983). The production process includes a suite of ritual actions, including the decoration of the prowboard with anthropomorphic features, effectively transforming the canoe into an animate (social) agent. Yet it is their capacity to interact with the water—as seaworthy object-beings—that sustains their status as relational persons. This example highlights “the ontological concept of assemblage, concerned with examining the changing character and affect of materials as they shift from one grouping and set of relationships to another” (Jones and Alberti 2013:31).

Julia Hendon in chapter 7 describes how crafting in ancient Mesoamerica was not merely a means to an end but a social interaction that formed a relationship between crafter and the raw materials being formed. She argues that it was through this engagement that crafted objects (and tools) became agents with the potential for personhood. Hendon notes that the “crafter’s sense of self develops in part through enskillment” (emphasis added), a process in which the craftperson becomes increasingly proficient in the manipulation of raw materials and the tools of the trade. In a more radical post-humanist approach, Benjamin Alberti (2014:119) suggests that for some societies in which natural and cultural processes are not distinguished, skill cannot be attributed exclusively to the human body and must be more broadly conceived. This might explain why fossils could have been seen as crafted objects rather than simply as natural specimens curated by humans during the British Early Bronze Age (Brück and Jones, chapter 10). Alberti (2014:120) inverts the normative logic of enskillment, arguing that the technical action applied to raw material (with or without tools) is not the only gauge of skill “in a context in which skilled action was considered natural and all natural acts [were] considered potentially skilled.” Hendon would not characterize skilled action as “natural” but does emphasize its supernatural elements, noting that in ancient Mesoamerica an animate life force was housed within both craftspersons and their tools; as such, both were sources of potent agency.

Despite their differences in approach, both Hendon and Alberti come to a similar conclusion that what was efficacious and communicative was the practice of production; the finished product itself is not what lends an object its potency and meaning but rather, it is the relations that form through the creative process. Viewed in this way, skilled action is a co-creative and generative act, bringing forth qualities and properties within both crafters and their tools in the transformation of raw material. Similarly, Looper (chapter 6) argues that for the ancient Maya, qualities and properties of both human and other-than-human agency and personhood were brought forth through numerous types of material transformations. He describes how for the Maya, physical and sensuous properties of objects were conjoined with performative acts, which included speaking or incantation. “By cutting and inscribing shells (and other media) with hieroglyphic texts, the ancient Maya allowed these materials to ‘speak,’ which was understood to be a manifestation of agency and liveliness” (Looper, chapter 6). In this case, the crafting of a shell trumpet and the production of scribal art did not merely produce a finely crafted object but served as a generative act that transformed an inanimate object into a breathing and speaking social agent with qualities of personhood.

Personhood as Nature or Nurture? Ontological Difference and Essentialist Claims

Recent trends in anthropology advocate a theory of ontological difference, with some considering the possibility of multiple worlds rather than multiple worldviews (Alberti et al. 2011; Alberti and Marshall 2009; Henare et al. 2007; Holbraad 2009). The consideration of ontological difference, whether multiple worlds or multiple worldviews, has prompted a reconsideration of the constitution of personhood, which has had a profound impact on our archaeological reconstructions. Oliver Harris and John Robb (2012:668–69) suggest that by envisioning multiple, mutually exclusive ontologies, this creates a “closed” ontology whereby different groups would never be able to communicate and understand one another in circumstances of contact, which historically we know is not the case (see also Robb and Harris 2013). Rather than multiple ontologies, Mario Blaser (2013:552) prefers the term ontological multiplicity because it recasts ontology as a performance or enactment, as opposed to a foundational claim or essentialist fact about how the world operates.

In current postmodern theory, it would seem that anti-essentialist epistemology has been taken to an extreme, wherein any universal truths about the world cannot be reasoned (Fahlander 2012:111). Even reason itself is not universal (Latour 2013). This radical postmodernist critique emerged as a result of the deep-seated bias in anthropology born out of European colonization, where reason and rational thought were considered to be exclusive to Western societies and irrationality was associated with the (uncivilized) people of non-Western societies (Fowles 2013:9, citing Brück 1999). This perspective is perhaps seen as a progressive move on the part of postmodern theory, but this radical position appears to ignore the fact that some essentialist claims can be made—namely, that reason is universal in the sense that all humans share this capacity (Ingold 1996:26). Cognitive science indicates that reason “arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience” and that its structure is controlled by the same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive our surroundings and move about the landscape (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:4). Reason does not comprise some disembodied philosophy developed exclusively by Europeans during the Enlightenment, but neither is it some transcendental component of the universe (see Lakoff and Johnson 1999:4–7). It is both embodied mind and bodily experience that directly shapes the structure of reason and makes sense of the world in which one lives. This explains the lack of a singular, shared rational trajectory among all societies across the globe (Latour 2013:66) and why “everyone’s actions are performed for reasons that are, from the actor’s perspective, entirely reasonable” (Fowles 2013:9).

Much of the current postmodern scholarship in archaeology applies a practice-based phenomenological approach to the construction of relational personhood that is grounded in non-discursive, bodily performed experience. In many studies, personhood as a relational constitution of being is seen as a learned condition, somewhat like acquiring hunting skills generation after generation (cf. Ingold 1996). The aim is to avoid any essentialist claims, but in doing so postmodern scholars also tend to ignore any innate ontogenetic contribution in the shaping of personhood. Notably, child psychology and psychobiology studies suggest that relational personhood is ontologically prior to social learning. Referencing work of Colwyn Trevarthen (1980), João Pina-Cabral (2016:249) concludes that we are all relational beings; beginning as babies, we are in the company of others and are always plurally co-habiting the world. In this so-called basic mind (cf. Hutto and Myin 2013), “each human being starts his or her personal ontogeny—his or her path of being—inside human contagion” (Pina-Cabral 2016:248). Neurodevelopment studies of both children and young nonhuman mammals living outside such contagion in non-relational environments—where physical and emotional connections with caregivers are severely lacking—have shown that such situations have lasting damage on cognitive capacities, suggesting that non-relational conditions are simply not conducive for the survival of humans or nonhumans (Perry 2002).

Thus, aside from the unfortunate cases of severe neglect and isolation, the vast majority of humans and nonhumans are relationally constituted at birth and therefore are inherently social beings whose personhood is shaped by intersubjective bodily experience, making the debate between Western individual versus non-Western dividual a moot point. Starting with relational intersubjectivity as a fundamental and indispensable condition of all personhood, it is from here that people discover their individual selves and learn through embodied reasoning appropriate ways of being—what I call ontological decorum—in the world in which they live and move about. In his discussion of human personhood, Chris Fowler’s (2004) keen observation still resonates, that every human being has some degree of self-awareness or individuality as well as relational-awareness or dividuality, but how these aspects define the self varies (see also Fowler 2016). We cannot say someone is strictly a relational dividual with attentional animacy or a bounded individual with intentional agency (sensu Ingold 2013) without creating a “closed” and universalized ontology that often leads to falsely dichotomizing Western and non-Western cultures (see recent discussions by Fowles 2013; Harris and Robb 2012; Wilkinson 2013).

Many scholars focused on relational or ontological archaeology are “[engaging] with indigenous ideas as theories to reconfigure archaeological concepts and practice” (Alberti 2016:163). Alberti (2016) observes that while approaches to ontological archaeology vary—from Latourian perspectives to the “perspectivisms” of Viveiros de Castro—what these scholars share in common is their focus on alterity. Yet as I argue below, not all of these scholars seem to share the same radical approach to alterity as the new ontological realists (e.g., Fowles 2013). According to Alberti (2016:172), “If ontology is what ‘is,’ then alterity is the part of what others say what ‘is’ that does not make sense to us.” In other words, ontology is “doing” and alterity is the “saying” or “thinking.” The latter is typically characterized as discursive knowledge that resides in the cognitive or conceptual realm of the mind. Yet Alberti (2016:173) makes it clear that ontological alterity in archaeology strictly entails the “nondiscursitivy of things,” suggesting that we are dealing with just the “doings” of the past (sensu Fowles 2013). This is part of the archaeological realist’s concerted move away from discursive knowledge—the abstract, conceptual, and cognitive mind—as an interpretative or representational approach of a “knowing subject” (Jones and Alberti 2013). Instead, the realist’s focus of attention is strictly on the non-discursive—the “performed body knowledge” (Budden and Sofaer 2009:203). The implication here is that the interpreting act of a knowing subject is the stuff of modernist objectivist science (à la Latour 1993). This “school” of ontological alterity, according to Alberti (2016:166), “[is] united in [its] questioning of the ability of modern Cartesian substance ontology—the view that the world is divided into two types of substance, extended matter and thought—to explain the material world fully.”

Alberti (2016) and others gloss the term alterity as difference or otherness, but the term derives from the Latin word alter, meaning “other (of two).” Therefore, among realists, ontological alterity in its strictest sense is an “all-or-nothing” paradigm; it implies that you are not simply dealing with a slightly different version but with something else altogether. This is what Alberti and others (2011) mean when they refer to multiple worlds rather than multiple worldviews (see also Henare et al. 2007). However, by its very nature, ontological alterity can only be revealingly discussed from the perspective of the other world, that is, from the position of a “knowing subject” who has a preconceived conscious awareness of the other reality. Therefore, despite their concerted efforts, realists will never be able to shake the position of a “knowing subject” because knowing what is different is apparently a necessary precursor for identifying alterity in the other world.

Another problem I see with the “all-or-nothing” approach to ontological alterity (when understood in its strictest sense) is that this reality appears to be formed through emotional attentiveness devoid of any rational mind or intentional way of being. This is what Timothy Ingold (2013) is suggesting when he privileges attentional vitality or animacy over intentional agency. If the latter is a “structuring force of the modern constitution on our habits of thought” (Ingold 2013:247), then when did this structuring force change? And how do we reconcile descendent communities who are seeking to reconnect with their ancestral past and who straddle these two “worlds”? This is the paradox set in motion by the new ontological realism, which offers insightful critical thinking but whose “all-or-nothing” perspective becomes deeply problematic and unacceptable if followed to its logical conclusion.

The Thinking Body and the Doing Mind

Despite attempts to eradicate Cartesian dualisms, the movement of new ontological realism radicalizes the “great divides” (sensu Fowles 2010) and perpetuates the mind-body split with their wholesale rejection of the so-called modern substance ontology and their “all-or-nothing” approach to alterity. Their notion of reason and rational thought as (mis-)appropriated by the Modern Objectivists has been inspired by Bruno Latour (1993), whose work has been hugely influential on this group of scholars, especially his actor-network theory (ANT). In my estimation, Latour’s general emphasis on matter has served to sideline thought among his post-humanist followers. For instance, Latour (2013:66) concludes that rational verediction does not stem from a universal truth (Reason with a capital R) but must be defined “within a network that is proper to that network”; “once it has been deprived of its conditions of exercise” it loses meaning and, by extension, its rationality. When considering this perspective, it is perhaps not surprising why those who follow Latour might be inclined to privilege matter over mind and the conditions of bodily experience. Yet in this same context Latour (2013:66) himself states unequivocally: “To understand rationally any situation whatsoever is at once to unfold its network and define its preposition, the interpretive key in which it has to be grasped ([NET-PRE]).” In essence, Latour is echoing what scientists studying embodied cognition have been saying for some time (see Lakoff and Johnson 1999): that our reality or ontology is recursively shaped by both the material conditions or networks in which the body moves about [NET] and our embodied minds [PRE]. Latour (2013:58) concludes that if you take the latter away, “you will understand nothing” of the networks you are traversing. In other words, “Any adequate account of meaning and rationality must give a central place to [the] embodied and imaginative structure of understanding by which we grasp our world” (Johnson 2013:xiii; see also Pina-Cabral 2016:249).

Archaeologists engaged in ontological realism seem to embrace a form of “radical embodied cognition” (sensu Pina-Cabral 2016) in that they reject any representationalist formulations—materialization of abstract beliefs and ideas as mental constructs or symbolic language standing as an intermediary between the observing subject and the objects of the physical world. Archaeological realists would argue that instead of intermediaries standing for or representing to the mind the objects of the physical world as discursive knowledge, materialization of matter itself arrives as non-discursive knowledge and is strictly a bodily performed experience always in a process of becoming (e.g., Alberti 2012; Lucas 2012; Jones and Alberti 2013). A primary aim of ontological realism has been to dissolve the “Cartesian separation between the thinking body and doing mind” (Budden and Sofaer 2009:203–4, citing Knappett 2005:5). While ontological realists often cite philosophers of embodied cognition, like Martin Heidegger or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, they rarely critically engage with the neuroscience evidence that supports embodied cognition (for some exceptions, see Malafouris 2008b, 2013). Yet this work has also contributed a great deal to turning on its head much of the twentieth-century philosophy espousing Cartesian dualisms.

According to Mark Johnson (2013), the mind-body gap can be understood as one that exists “between our cognitive, conceptual, formal, or rational side in contrast with our bodily, perceptual, material, and emotional side” (Johnson 2013: xxv). Post-humanists of the new ontological realism tend to privilege the latter assemblage, reflecting their roots in phenomenology. Yet the rejection of the former assemblage may also be a vestige of post-processualism and its concerted efforts to reject Western rationalist objectivism. As Sandy Budden and Joanna Sofaer (2009:204) suggest: “One way forward in this dilemma is to explore the role of non-discursive knowledge in relation to discursive knowledge, rather than treat them as opposite and incompatible notions. Discursive and non-discursive knowledge are complementary as both are needed in order to understand ‘the making up of people’ (Hacking 2004). The ‘making up of people’ is articulated through the interactions between abstract classifications and concrete actions.”

Neuroscience studies of embodied cognition lend support to this notion of complementarity, demonstrating that the nature of all abstract conceptual constructs and metaphorical cognition is not separate from bodily experience but is fundamentally linked to aspects of our sensory-motor experience (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Meteyard et al. 2012). This is what Johnson (2013) means by the embodied mind; the mind is not only connected to the body but bodily experience directly influences the mind in a mutually constitutive manner.

The neuroscience evidence suggests that the figurative language of metaphorical thinking is not merely abstract conceptual content separate from the body but is based on a physiology of emotions that forms in the mind through numerous sensory and motor systems grounded in bodily action (Johnson 2013; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). This suggests that all humans use non-discursive body knowledge in combination with discursive thinking to make sense of the world in which they live. Instead of an “all-or-nothing” paradigm that opposes discursive and non-discursive knowledge, we might consider embodied cognition as “conversively co-creative” (sensu Brill de Ramírez 2007:22). This alternative, conversive form of embodied cognition suggests that epistemologies and ontologies exist among all societies across the globe but vary significantly because people interact with their physical world in markedly different ways. For instance, the annual solar cycle is something many past and present societies have relied on to track time, but through the use of the clock this embodied cognition has become increasingly more abstract and is now primarily discursive knowledge compared to prehistoric times when the path of the sun was tracked through observations in the landscape, which relied more heavily on non-discursive bodily experience. The physical world in terms of the earth’s rotation around the sun has remained the same, but our interaction with the physical world has changed and become less “attentional” (sensu Ingold 2013). Just as every person has different degrees of individual and relational awareness (Fowler 2004, 2016), so, too, does every person have the capacity and, indeed, varying degrees of intentional and attentional awareness; how these aspects vary depends on the person’s interactions with the physical world. Lambros Malafouris (2013) takes this form of embodied cognition one step further in his Material Engagement Theory (MET), arguing that, like figurative language, the materials derived from the physical world are extensions of these cognitive processes (see also Malafouris 2008b).

Traditionally, anthropologists tend to couch reasoning in terms of conscious decision-making (rational choices) based on lifelong acquired learning, but this is a product of our training as observers who reconstruct past realities (ontological multiplicities) based on material evidence (Jones and Sibbesson 2013:155–56). While a relational ontology largely draws on the shared experiences and environments in which a body directly engages, much of this learning and reasoning according to cognitive scientists is “not completely conscious and almost unconscious” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:4). This is what practice theorists who follow Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and his concept of “habitus” would argue: that the habitual practices and material representations that “create an intelligible, common-sense world imbued with meaning” are generated by both bodily practice and an embodied mind that is largely unconscious (Knapp and van Dommelen 2008:22).

“The mind is not merely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual systems draw largely upon commonalities of our bodies and of the environments we live in” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:5–6). In this vein, post-humanists like Fowler and Harris (2015:138) conclude that materials in the Neolithic West Kennett chambered tomb “had the capacity to engage with people and evoke meaning and emotional resonance—they were potent.” The embodied minds and bodies of the Neolithic inhabitants who shared the West Kennett chambered tomb were no doubt key contributors to this enduring place in the landscape through their ongoing and expanding relations. Yet in this particular case study, the agency of other-than-humans—from grave goods to dirt to dead bodies—seemingly overshadows the role of human agency and leaves us wondering (like the post-processualists before us) whether human intentionality and innovation had anything to do with the construction of the tomb. These scholars conclude, “The technologies of the time, such as pottery, allowed people to draw a connection between bodies, pots and the monument itself” (Fowler and Harris 2015:138, emphasis added).

Some now will only consider the process of materialization of matter itself for understanding truth and will not consider the materialization of abstract beliefs and ideas for fear of being interpretative (representationalist) and essentialist (e.g., Lucas 2012; see Alberti 2016 for further discussion of ontological realism and relativism). This prompts the question, have we taken post-humanism and such neo-materialist approaches too far? Characterizing relational persons (whether human or nonhuman) as “particles” or “waves” (e.g., Fowler and Harris 2015, à la Barad 2003, 2007) highlights their physical matter of being but seems to ignore their mental properties—as if an object-body is capable of operating outside of an embodied mind. The challenge we face goes beyond simply bridging the gap between mind and body; it requires us to invert our logic by considering the relationship of the body in the mind (sensu Johnson 2013; see also Malafouris 2013), as intra-related entities akin to Latour’s NET-PRE model. One is a roadmap for the other to follow using both intention and attention (sensu Ingold 2013), depending on how one’s relational sense of being and thinking is attuned as one moves through the world around him or her.

The “social skin” (Turner 1980) of both human and other-than-human beings is more than an inscribed body or “point of articulation between an interior self and an exterior society” (Joyce 2005:144) but is a performative, ongoing transition (sensu Butler 1990, 1993) of intra-related and mutually informing physical and mental properties of matter and thought (sensu Barad 2007). To truly reject Cartesian or “substance dualism,” we must consider bodily experience—the perceptual, material, and emotional—operating inside the embodied cognitive, conceptual, formal, and rational mind (sensu Johnson 2013:xxv). From this perspective, we are more inclined to approach the physical and mental properties of matter and thought as symmetrical and mutually dependent constitutive relations, balancing human and nonhuman agency as relational persons in our archaeological theory and practice. The contributions in this volume demonstrate the strength of this “conversive” approach in studies of ontological archaeology, where both thinking and doing are co-creative conditions in the formation of agency, materiality, and personhood.

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