Warfare in Cultural Context: Practice, Agency, and the Archaeology of Violence

AXEL E. NIELSEN; WILLIAM WALKER

University of Arizona Press

Lugar: Tucson; Año: 2009 p. 328

978-0-8165-2707-6

This book approches the archaeology of warfare putting emphasis on the way it was practiced and on understanding the embodied cultural logics by which people lived it. Focusing on the various implications of this idea, the articles collected in this volume share the premise that in order to understand why and how people engaged in armed conflicts or the social and archaeological consequences of these actions, it is necessary to consider the interpretive frameworks and inherited dispositions through which specific people constued their interests and life projects, their problems and possibilities, and consequently chose among alterantive courses of action. Without loosing sight of the material conditions that has prevailed in the literature on the subject (e.g., resource scarcity, competition over wealth and power), this approach strives for situating these “objective” factors in the context of the historically produced subjectivities of those who were involved. Only reference to the experience of knowledgable agents turns environmental or social constraints and posibilities into practice, drought or potential material gains into fear, ambition, and strategy. “Practice” has become a key word referencing multiple bodies of post-structuralist social theory, so appeals to practice in archaeology are associated with many different things and draw on various bodies of literature. Not surprisingly, this diversity is also reflected in this collection of papers. Drawing mainly on Bourdieu, practice means to most contributors the consideration of embodied “cultural logics,” while for others, it implies a focus on history, context, and the contingencies of particular trajectories as central to explanation. Some of the authors follow a phenomenolgical approach, taking the materiality of practice (bodies, places, objects) as a window into the realm of experience and the process through which subjectivity is constituted. For most, it also implies a shift from structural to agency-based explanations. Certainly these various theoretical approaches are not necessarily contradictory or incompatible; indeed, the so called “social archaeology” research programme integrates elements from several of these lines of thought. Taking advantage of archaeological and ethnohistoric data from various parts of the world, the contributors to this volume (which originates in an advanced seminar held in 2004 at the Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, Arizona), explore the multiple avenues for the archaeological study of warfare that these ideas open before us. Following an introductory chapter in which the editors elaborate on the characteristics of a practice-oriented framework for the archaeology of armed conflict, Part I comprises four papers that focus on how armed conflicts are embedded in cultural frameworks, discussing the role of war in cosmology and religion, the formation of warriors´ identity and their rules of conduct, and the meaningful intervention of non-human agents, such as ghosts, deities, wapons, buildings, or places.