04 Lazzari 2003 Archaeological Visions Gender Landscape & Opt

JSA 3-2 04 Lazzari (dm/d)
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Journal of Social Archaeology
ARTICLE
Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)

Vol 3(2): 194222 [1469-6053(200306)3:2;194222;032576]
Archaeological visions
Gender, landscape and optic knowledge
MARISA LAZZARI
Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, USA
ABSTRACT
It is argued here that the desire to make things visible that underwrites archaeological research is an effect of the Western split
between subject and object. This conforms a matrix of optic knowledge, or the totalizing gaze of an all-knowing subject, that infuses
our language and practices with visual metaphors. The critical consideration of visual metaphors is particularly relevant for gender
studies in archaeology and their desire to make women visible.
However, this desire also enables the re-signification of vision as a
connected experience within a field of social and material forces, thus
exposing gender, or any other aspect of social difference, as part of a
field of relational practices.
KEYWORDS
difference gender object
subject visuality
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relational field
representations
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WHATS IN A NAME?
Among all the words we can use to write about difference, gender is used
most pervasively to designate foundation of all difference. Despite the
performative aspects that make gender as a process or verb easier to
understand (see Butler, 1990), it has more often been considered as the
name of a category that creates clear-cut social divisions. Naming, classifying, categorizing all constitute ways of making things visible, a task that
feminist archaeologists have pursued in order to counteract womens invisibility as active social agents in the past. But this search has not escaped the
basic problem that underwrites all processes of designation, that is, the lack
of engagement with what resides outside names and categories, things that
remain unsaid or invisible. Seeking to subvert womens invisibility,
gender studies tend to keep the same traits that characterize totalizing
Western knowledge, which is based in the assumption of the autonomous
capacities of an all-seeing, knowing subject (Foucault, 1972). The need for
political empowerment has often precluded feminist theorists from reviewing the conditions of possibility of this field (and for the existence of
gender as a category), and the grounds for their ability to represent all
female agents regardless of historical and social circumstances (Butler,
1990, 1993). Where this has been most evident is in the failure to understand gender as part of a relational field of practices, or as it has been
discussed, the intersection of gender with other axes of difference whose
combinations should be explored, rather than assumed, in different social
contexts (e.g. Meskell, 1999; Ortner, 1996).
The connections between power, vision and gender have been extensively analyzed in philosophy and social studies since the early twentieth
century. Metaphors of vision are common in these writings, where a
dominant gaze is confronted by an alternative, subjected one. Gender
studies in archaeology have been particularly fond of vision-related
metaphors, such as bringing into the light or making visible when
addressing the representation of women in both past and present. However,
little attention has been paid to the underpinnings of this to the contemporary structure of feeling of visuality. As a social experience beyond
ideology, world-view or knowledge, the structure of feeling is a form of
practical consciousness, thought as felt and feeling as thought, which is
identifiable in the forms, conventions and other semantic figures in cultural
works (Williams, 1973: 1323). In this matrix, the visual field is the boundless domain of the eye that uncovers what is hidden. Taken as a manifestation of the detached, autonomous knowing subject rather than as part of
an embodied and relational experience, the visual becomes the ultimate
source of both epistemological and political validation.
Despite constituting a counter-hegemonic field, gender studies cannot be
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Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2)
separated from the matrices of power that they submit to criticism (Butler,
1993). But beyond this there lies the general issue of the primacy of the
represented and the visible in archaeological research. This theoretical
point goes further than the analysis of how discourses and practices are
created and reproduced in academia. The critical exploration of a way of
knowing opens the door for alternative ways of considering archaeological
materials. Departing from the interest of processual archaeology in
everyday artifacts as traces of functional, rational choices (Binford, 1983),
and from feminist interest in informal technologies as indexes of female
activity (Gero, 1991), the argument here stresses the importance of
everyday artifacts which were not made to be seen (non-representational
material forms) to the creation of different forms of social experience.
This article reconsiders our involvement in contemporary processes that
enable certain representations of the past in terms of their genealogical as
well as inter-ocular1 linkages with wider forms of representing and
knowing in the West. This should also enable us to write about past social
life in ways more sensitive to its complexities. The following sections
explore critical perspectives on the visual field in social theory in general,
and contribute an alternative notion of visuality as a relational field.
THE CONTEMPORARY MATRIX OF VISUALIT Y: CRITICAL

PERSPECTIVES
The pervasiveness of the visible in the present world is evidenced by the
visual metaphors that infuse our language (Jay, 1993: 587). Indeed, the
industrial proliferation of visual technologies has created new ways of
experiencing the world, triggering intense emotional experiences and
enhancing the sense of detachment traditionally associated with the eye
(Virilio, 1994). Vision is entangled in wider concerns with the problems of
the authority and power of Western culture, a hegemonic field that is
constantly negotiated and redefined (Heywood and Sandywell, 1999;
Mirzoeff, 1999). The visual field is a key aspect of the contemporary structure of feeling, as evidenced by the tropes and semantic figures used in
theoretical and practical discourse.
Vision and knowledge have been linked in Western thought since
antiquity, but it is with the Enlightenment that vision rose as the noblest
of senses (Clasen et al., 1994). The disembodied gaze of a distant observer,
the I that sees everything, became a powerful metaphor for objective
knowledge (Foucault, 1972: 152; Jay, 1993: 590). French theorists and
feminist writers were among those who attacked the primacy of vision and
the illusion of transparency and objective knowledge (see Jay, 1994). Both
drawing on and departing from Foucaults notion of the creation of subjects
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through subjection, feminist theorists have considered the gaze as a form

of patriarchal power (Haraway, 1991; Irigaray, 1985; Mulvey, 1989; Pollock,
1999).2 The need for alternative ways of seeing has also been explored by
anthropologists, who have raised the critique of vision in connection to how
the discipline constructs its object (Fabian, 1983: 123; Grimshaw, 2001).
However, in certain cases the critical consideration of the gaze has found
the Cartesian split to be instrumental. Although feminist writers have effectively criticized this binary (Grosz, 1994; Hekman, 1990: 93; Irigaray, 1985),
those concentrating on the gaze have often assumed this binary as foundational. This has crystallized in the assumption of a trans-historical female
subject whose gaze is empowering rather than a vehicle of domination
(Pollock, 1988: 88, but see de Lauretis, 1984: 68). In this way, the need for
political effectiveness has presented an innocent female agent, eventually
avoiding the discussion on the constitution of political discourses (Burgin,
1996: 17; Butler, 1993; Hirschmann and Di Stefano, 1996).
In archaeology, gender studies have particularly trusted visual metaphors of power as a way of claiming a better view of both past and present.
However, they have rarely engaged with the gaze in all its complexities as
in other fields (e.g. Barthes, 1981: 31; Berger, 1980; Bryson, 1983). The
struggle to make women visible in archaeology has been based on the
subject/object model, with an essential female subject in permanent opposition, either as the subject of domination or as empowered knowing agent.
This indicates the evident lack of dialogue between gender archaeologists
and those colleagues who have criticized the use of Cartesian dichotomies
and their role in reproducing essentialisms (Bapty and Yates, 1990; Lucas,
1995; Meskell, 1996, 1998; Shanks and Hodder, 1995; Thomas, 1996).
The next section explores the conceptualization of vision when used as
a metaphor for domination. The intention is to explore how we create
concepts and representations that tend to flatten out the diversity of human
actions and practices. Given that different forms of representing (or
genres) enable different ways of seeing and conceptualizing reality
(Bakhtin, 1994: 179), this analysis will hopefully lead to a different understanding of the visual field and the related issue of representation.
OPTICISM: POWER, KNOWLEDGE AND VISIBILIT Y

Privileging gender at the expense of other social vectors of difference may
be considered another manifestation of modernitys optic knowledge, the
all-seeing powers of an essential, trans-historical subjectivity. Related to
de Certeaus opticisms of power (1984: 93), this rhetorical figure conveys
the totalizing gaze and its pretense of a disembodied that suppresses
diversity, contingency and contradiction.
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Geographers and archaeologists have lately appealed to de Certeaus

ideas on spatial practices. More specifically, feminist writers have used his
idea of the totalizing gaze from above the rising skyscrapers of the city that
opposes the daily tactics of the city dwellers to describe phallocentric forms
of power that underwrite current visual and spatial ideologies (see
discussion in Soja, 1996). It would be worth going further into the core of
this authors writings by addressing the city space and the concept-city
as metaphors for the production of knowledge.3
Optic power, or the totalizing gaze that produces knowledge, has always
attempted to transcend the contradictions arising from daily life, just as the
formal buildings of a city rise from and look down towards the myriad of
individual and group projects (de Certeau, 1984: 93). Conceptual spaces (in
the sense of areas of studies, disciplines, etc.) can be considered like urban
spaces. These spaces, like massive buildings, have high visibility and cast
their eye over the complexities, the silences, the paths and tracks, the
tactics from which they rise. Academic discourse is trapped in this structure of knowledge creation that constantly reproduces its asymmetrical
conditions of production in both local and global levels4 (Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 1999; Friedman, 2000).
Gender studies as a totalizing strategy of knowledge building show that
optic power performs its gender. Just as Butler (1990, 1993) argued for
gender, we could say that optic power constitutes itself through its disguises,
in a multiplicity of domains and situations.5 This optic power that homogenizes through naming and designation the diversities of everyday life works
alongside panopticisms, or the microphysical ways of reaching the individual in every minute action. However, the tactics of individual and
collective agents can re-signify the practices shaped by domination (de
Certeau, 1984: 945). The small practices of consuming, walking, talking
and writing; all the alternative ways of representing or even of escaping
representation can undermine the regulations and strategies of the spaces
of power, either material (as the city itself) or discursive (as concepts).
Foucaults panopticisms are in this way always incomplete, something
always escapes the eye.6
This leads us to consider how the strategies that create spaces of inquiry
often elide their conditions of existence, thus erasing the complexities of
social experience (Bourdieu, 1997). Gender designates a specific conceptual building that gazes at the ambiguities of social life. By neatly segregating a field of study, it eventually becomes a form of optic power in trying
to generate knowledge from a better view that attempts to domesticate
what is in itself non-essential and diverse. Like other strategies, it conceals
its connection with the power that enables its existence, the pre-conditional
power of owning a separated and ultimately exclusive discursive space that
makes this knowledge possible (de Certeau, 1984: xx, 194, 360, emphasis
added). Gender becomes a female stronghold that often enforces its very
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culturally specific research agenda into social contexts in which gender

difference per se is not a main concern. As an example, Latin American
female scholars have expressed their concern regarding the suggestions to
re-direct their research towards gender issues in order to receive foreign
funding (Korstanje, pers. comm.).7
Through the categorization of spaces for discursive practices, gender
undermines its very reason of existence: the experience of subjects as the
actors of their histories and the resulting multiplicity that characterizes
social experience (see Meskell, 1999, 2001, 2002; Mohanty et al., 1991). By
claiming to have the illuminating power of a more comprehensive vision
while refusing to examine the conditions of representability of the uncovered social subjects, gender studies erase the ability of the other that
lies outside to illuminate back. It thus refuses to be part of a relationally
constituted social world. In this scenario, nothing is left to men, transgendered individuals, present and past women from different classes, ethnic
identities, or cultural backgrounds with different projects and needs. How
is it possible to understand the workings of patriarchy without acknowledging the immense diversity of experiences through which it is constructed?
In order to understand gender or any other aspect of social experience
as part of a relational field of practices, it might be worth exploring an
alternative ontology of vision, one in which the seen and the un-seen, or
the represented and the non-represented, are mutually constitutive: we
look and the world looks back at us. Opposing the kind of thinking that
seeks to erase the union of subject and object by portraying the subject as
pure consciousness and the object as in itself, Merleau-Ponty (1962: 320)
argued that the phenomenon of human perception demonstrates the inseparability of both terms. The action of seeing always involves perceiving the
invisible (or the non-represented). The invisible is then what is ahead,
before, behind and beyond the things we see, the mesh that constitutes the
tangible, the continuity of the visible in the invisible, the screen that allows
us to see, not as a blank background but as an entanglement of possibilities
(Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 115). Memories, previous experiences, alternative
states or qualities of things, people and places; they all participate in the
action of seeing and make us see what we see. Invisible are the layers of
memory awakened by the experience of the objects that surround us, which
is not recalling images from some dark storage place. In Merleau-Pontys
famous example, he outlines that when we perceive the color red we
perceive all the reds we know and also those we have never seen and they
immediately relate by subtle difference to the one that we see. It follows
that the red we perceive is not a property of an object that stands in front
of us. Rather, perceiving the red is finding oneself at the crossroads of a
thousand strands of the world that are invisible but allow us to see. The red
perceived is therefore a node (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 132). Consequently,
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the invisible is not just what is concealed, the hidden element that will
provide when uncovered the real meaning of the visible thing. The
invisible is an intrinsic part of that particular arrangement that makes us
see (the visual field) by directing our gaze within a field of existence of
bodies as systems of perceptual powers (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 318).
In this different approach to vision, what is stressed is the relational
nature and mutual constituency of both the subject and the object
perceived; the object lies at the other end of our gaze, and in this way seeing
is always a communication, almost a communion. Just as neither of these
two terms has primary status over the other, neither does the visible over
the invisible. Although always embodied, seeing is never a subject-centered
action but a field of relations in which the seeing subject is one among many
nodes; it constitutes others while it is being constituted. The seeing subject
is embodied, but this body is neither an autonomous, absolutely conscious
self, nor a universal experience. While the experience of our own bodies
guides our perceptions, a changed relation to the body creates a new understanding of the world (Jensen, 2000: 59). This capability is shared only in
as much as it is situated in a relational field of existence.
It follows that making a subject visible is always part of a mesh of
relations that allows us to see something in particular, while covering
another area. This is what defines thinking and acting in social space:
subjectivity is not an isolated phenomenon that gains certainty of its
existence when facing a world, an object, which is conceived as separated
and isolated from the subject. Contrary to this, human perception is one of
the many experiences that point at the inadequacy of this model, which
eventually leads to the primacy of the visible in epistemological and
ontological terms. Rather than engaging in visibility as proof of the existence of hidden agents in history, we might explore how to build objects of
study more sensitive to past social experience. By giving the same ontological status to both the visible and the invisible (the represented and the
non-represented), one could explore how these two domains were constituted.
A non-dichotomous approach to visuality as a relational field alters how
we conceive knowledge building. It shows that what we see always refers
to the things we do not see, and what is represented is always metonymically related to the non-represented. Beyond the issue of who did what in
the past, artifacts are above all indexes of agency in a relational field. They
are part of a network (in the sense of a craft) of people, other objects,
animals, plants, memories and places; a series of related visible and invisible
presences, variants of the world. It is the failure to explore this that has
converted gender into a screen in the sense of a veil (see Hodder, 1997),
rather than as a screen that is the site where other vectors of difference
become seeable.8 The next section surveys the relationship of archaeology
with both contemporary and past visual fields, particularly in gender
studies.
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VISUAL STRUGGLES IN ARCHAEOLOGY

The struggle over visibility pervades most inter-paradigmatic debates in
archaeology, often rich in semantic indicators of the current structure of
feeling of visuality. For instance, the debate between processual and postprocessual archaeologies has typically revolved around the issue of what
can be seen in the archaeological record (e.g. Brumfiel, 1992; Shanks and
Tilley, 1987; Wylie, 1992), which for some depends on the looking glass
(Hamilakis, 1996; Yates, 1990; Shanks and Hodder, 1995). Indeed, this
shows how much our knowledge building is structured around the visual
field as ultimate source of truth.
Postprocessual archaeology has criticized the objectivity of vision,
acknowledging both archaeologists and people in the past as embodied
subjects (Barrett, 1994; Bender, 1993; Edmonds, 2000; Gosden, 1994;
Shanks and Hodder, 1995; Thomas, 1993; Yates, 1993). These attempts to
transcend the vision-directed duality of subject-object were also accompanied by a critique of visual media and representations of the past
(Bender, 1999; Molyneaux, 1997; Moser, 1998; Shanks, 1997). These
attempts were mainly concerned with the interaction of people, as embodying inscribed social norms, and the landscape, understanding both its
physical and cultural dimensions.
However insightful this has been, these studies often assumed culturally
homogeneous minds (Meskell, 1996). Some archaeologists have pointed at
the possibility of diverse interpretations and experiences in the past
(Bradley, 2000; Edmonds, 2000; Hodder, 1992, 1999; Thomas, 1993). Nevertheless, the subject is often seen as having homogeneous perceptions
related to a cultural body that, nevertheless, is approached through the
lens of the universality (see Thomas, 2001: 181). This universal body
usually reads the landscape through systems of material signs (monuments),
performing a cultural script that follows the guidelines (the text) of representational forms. A few, however, have explored past landscapes as multilayered fields of practices, by combining artifacts made to be seen with
those with no apparent representational intent such as lithics (Edmonds,
2000). However, the capacities of non-representationl material forms to
create social meanings and to channel the experience of social difference
have been generally overlooked. The insistence on seeing landscape as a
text shows that, despite the early emphasis on the symbolic capacities of
everyday objects (Miller, 1985), social meaning in archaeological studies
has been mainly associated to representational features and things that
have clearly been made to be seen, thus rendering people in the past mainly
as enactors of a script of cultural rules in material form. The point is not to
deny the potential existence of material discourses (Hodder, 1989; Ricoeur,
1979), but to understand them as part of a web of visible and invisible
aspects of social life or, rather, said and unsaid things.
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Gender archaeology has not gone much further than the previous
examples. Until a few recent works on masculinist theory (Knapp, 1998),
this area has been, thus far, a womens world. Driven by the need to let the
voices of women be heard, both in the past and in the present context,
gender archaeologists set off to pursue a diversity of objectives. These
objectives range from re-assessing the participation of women in productive process, either to value their domestic work or to prove that women
were not limited to the domestic sphere, gathering and raising children, to
the exploration of gender symbolic orders, ideologies and hierarchies. The
spirit of this research was always a critique of androcentrism both in the
interpretation of the past and in archaeological practice, that offered a
critical analysis of the construction of scientific knowledge and objectivity.
This major struggle that often took place over the meaning of archaeological data and how to see women in the archaeological record, usually
turned into womanist studies or the search for women in the past separated from feminist political action (Joyce and Claassen, 1997: 1). A series
of recipes were developed, which often were tightly attached to commonsense assumptions of womens tasks, obligations, sufferings and desires (e.g.
Conkey and Gero, 1997; Conkey and Spector, 1984; Gero and Conkey,
1991). However, there has been an increasing interest in going beyond
showing how womens roles, activities, rights and duties in the past differed
from ours. Research has been more focused lately upon how the construction of female selves in specific social trajectories and systems of difference
might have been both a process of inscription and performance (Gilchrist,
1994, 1997; Gillespie and Joyce, 1997; Joyce, 1996b, 2000a, 2000b; Sweeley,
1999). Overall, these studies tend to be oriented towards proving that
women were powerful social agents in the past. However, in some cases
this has crystallized as a need to prove the existence of a womens agenda
in the past (McCafferty and McCafferty, 1999), assuming a homogeneous
subject, woman as a unifying category grounded in the almost transhistorical experience of the female body (Bynum, 1995 for a critique of this
assumption).
Within the literature on gender in archaeology, the issue of visibility and
making women visible is directly addressed in titles and subtitles: women
in the past, women in archaeology, the issue of gender and other figures
connoting lack of representation, such as muted voices (Claassen and
Joyce, 1997; Moore and Scott, 1997; Nelson, 1997; Scott, 1994, 1997). One
of the founding volumes, Engendering Archaeology (Gero and Conkey,
1991), specifically addressed the problem of re-writing archaeology by
trying to find women and their traces in the past. While it is true that most
of the available archaeological record precludes the identification of either
women or men as its producers, almost all archaeology done until the late
1980s and early 1990s assumed male was the default sex when interpreting
the empirical data. Archaeologists concerned about this dedicated
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themselves to criticizing the fact that women appeared only where issues
of sexual division of labor were considered relevant. Together with this
critique of androcentrism (Conkey and Spector, 1984; Conkey and
Williams, 1991; Gero, 1993, 1994, 1996; Hurcombe, 1995; Moser, 1998),
gender archaeology also critiqued the assumption of universality of human
motivations along the lines of the feminist critique of science (Conkey and
Gero, 1997: 426; Wylie, 1991). Gender archaeology has shown how these
interpretations were biased and that data could be interpreted as reflecting the actions of the non-default sex. In many cases, they have been
engaged in the dilemma of how to assess the concrete actions of women
in the material record (e.g. Conkey and Spector, 1984; Gero, 1991;
Hendon, 1997). Sometimes, grave goods were used to solve ambiguities in
bio-archaeological data (Marcus, 1993) or to discuss the social status and
roles of women in the past (Lucy, 1997). Quite often, these attempts ended
up obscuring the possibility of nuances in the conceptualizations of gender
(but see Gilchrist, 1997; Hollimon, 1996). Most frequently, the identification of tasks was considered the main way to tackle this problem, thus
resorting to ethnographic and historical analogies with womens work in
historical or contemporary societies was a widely spread methodological
tool (Shaffer et al., 1999). This longue duree approach to the constitution
of subjectivities in the past has been most successful when paying attention to the changing historical context of social and political complexity
(Joyce, 1996a; 2000b; Gillespie and Joyce, 1997). Still, as Meskell (1996,
1999) has already commented, it is interesting how some works such as
Nordbladh and Yates (1990) and Yates (1990, 1993) have been the exception, by showing among other things how the heterosexual matrix
(Butler, 1990: 35) is extremely pervasive when interpreting past representations. More recently, sexuality rather than gender has been addressed in
a series of papers that attempt to overcome this bias (Schmidt and Voss,
2000).
Gender archaeology has opened invaluable research avenues by
addressing the invisibility of the female subject both historically and theoretically. Despite the outpouring work produced in this field since the 1980s,
gender remains the issue of special books written by women. Moreover, the
commitment of some works to understand how gender interacts with other
layers of cultural difference in archaeological contexts (e.g. Costin, 1993;
Hastorf, 1991; Joyce, 1996a) has not been followed through in the analysis
of contemporary archaeological practice, even when endorsing the general
project (e.g. Gero, 1996: 275). It is clear that in spite of its productivity, the
separation of gender as a domain has resulted in the building of a fortress,
a safe domain where theoretical analysis and cultural critique can be
performed on the base of the essential fact and the related authority of
being a woman. Needless to say, it has been a very necessary tactic to face
patriarchal forms of authority still so pervasive in academia. However, the
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effectiveness of this critical project is undermined by a reluctance to

examine the cultural categories and frameworks that allow its existence. We
should ask how this project of a less hierarchical archaeology is undermined
by the unproblematic use of categories that are in fact the product of the
same matrices they try to subvert. In this regard, the different positions in
the recent debate around the applicability of the word gender in other
languages shows that the revision of concepts is a fruitful avenue for
cultural critique and social action (compare Conkey and Gero, 1997: 414;
del Valle, 1993; Joyce and Claassen, 1997: 2; Knapp and Meskell, 1997; Scattolin, forthcoming).9
Archaeology can certainly contribute to current critical thinking through
its involvement with materiality and long-term social analysis. But archaeologys contribution will be undermined unless it is ready to review its own
assumptions. The valuable endeavor of making women visible may hide the
reproduction of concepts and categories that perpetuate a westernized
understanding of social realities (Biddick, 1993: 390), here in particular the
primacy of what is seen over the unseen, and in a related manner, of the
represented over the non-represented. Trapped in its own performance that
seeks to create empowered new social agents, the value of the political
endeavor often prevents gender archaeology from asking these questions.
The next section attempts to show how asking these questions can enable
a different space of inquiry.
GENDER IS LIKE LANDSCAPE: RELATIONAL VISIONS IN

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF NW ARGENTINA
Gender, like landscape, is one of those concepts that unite multiple dimensions and in connection to which dichotomies such as subject/object or
culture/nature become most unhelpful. These concepts work as gates,
rather than as looking glasses, to trace past social meanings and forms of
experience. As Bakhtin (1981) argued, the landscape is a chronotope, a
gate for the appreciation of timespace changes in forms of representations
(Harvey, 1996; Thrift, 1996). Gender can be a gate to understand the relational aspects of representations and the mutual constituency of the visible
and the invisible. It could be said that the dynamics of the seen and the
unseen are played out on the gender screen. It is in connection to both
concepts that the deconstruction of our language and related practices of
detached vision seem more poignant.
The idea of embodied vision in a relational field is linked to certain
feminist writings that have stressed positionality, a partial objectivity
grounded on the diverse experiences of embodied subjects (Haraway,
1991). My argument seeks to also highlight that the issue of visibility should
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be approached in connection to the structure of representations in both past

and present. Representational forms have particular histories in themselves
(e.g. the genre of monuments, Olick and Robbins, 1998) and at certain
moments become instrumental to specific projects. Thus certain forms
enable only particular contents (Bakhtin, 1994; Taussig, 1993). While they
constitute formalized systems of material and/or discursive signs, they are
more than reflections of the real world. What is perceived and what is lived
is inseparable from, but also not reducible to, what is being represented
(Lefebvre, 1964). This is the basic tension that constitutes social life as
experienced by embodied subjects; it is the interstice, the tension between
practice, perception and representation that is of interest.
In archaeological terms this implies a shift of emphasis in regional
traditions of research. For instance, it was not until the mid 1990s that
gender started to be considered as a relevant issue in Argentinean archaeology (Bellelli et al., 1993; Gero and Scattolin, 1995; Medina, 1999). As it
has been pointed out for the case of north-west Argentina in particular
(Scattolin, forthcoming) (Figure 1), the invisibility of women within the
range of legitimate research issues is the effect of a complex web of
historical developments, academic asymmetry, and deeply engrained structures of meaning. Drawing on Scattolins work (2000, forthcoming), it is
striking to note that studies of the first millennium AD (part of what is
known as the Formative period in the area) have overlooked female
representations in favor of the male-oriented Aguada iconography, usually
related to chiefdoms and shamanic practices. In this research tradition, a
ceramic style that emphasizes female features (Candelaria style, Figure 2)
was originally defined as part of the material culture of mountain rainforest
populations, although these materials (according to stylistic analysis) have
been found in archaeological contexts across the Argentinean north-west.
Moreover, while these materials seem to have an earlier and longer
chronology than Aguada, this style is usually interpreted as spatially
confined, earlier in time, and related to societies that never developed into
greater complexity as represented by Aguada. Furthermore, by having
more explicit representation of female attributes the style has been
assumed as signifying nature, even when most styles in the period combine
anthropomorphic and animal features. It has been argued that this visual
display of female images in everyday artifacts was probably related to social
processes that constituted habitual bodies into socialized patterns. Mute but
active, artifacts constitute a world of signs that are read with the body in
the daily engagement with tasks. This period is usually seen as the basis for
later political difference and inequality. In this regard, the study of sexual
difference as represented in this context goes beyond the issue of gender
in the past and seeks to understand the role of material culture in shaping
the actions of people in the context of wider social processes. The question
remains whether gender was the basic difference on top of which other
205
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206
Figure 1
Map of north-west Argentina
forms built up, or whether there were genealogical links between earlier
and later practices and forms of representation that were used as resources
for competing social and political strategies, regardless of gender difference.
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Figure 2
1999: 23
Candelaria style. Reproduced with permission from Garca Uriburu,
In this period, things of very different qualities such as ceramics, obsidians, seashells and organic materials traveled great distances. Things
moved between people and places, and people moved between things and
places. Lithics and ceramics circulated across long distances, creating
complex patterns of use and deposition in different locales. For instance,
the settlements that had access to the same obsidian source sometimes
did not participate in the same stylistic universe, as expressed in other
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208
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materials such as ceramics. The apparent borderlines defined by the distribution of ceramic styles were sometimes blurred, sometimes confirmed, by
the circulation of different types of obsidian. This shows that the landscape
was a multi-layered social space, whose fluidity confirms what ethnoarchaeological studies have shown about the multiple, overlapping and even
competing networks people often sustain in connection to different materials and forms of social relations (Hodder, 1982). In this light the usual difficulties in assigning ceramic finds to stylistic types show the fluidity of social
relations and techniques of representation, rather than being an impediment for their classification (Scattolin and Lazzari, 1997).
How gender difference worked in this context has yet to be assessed, but
there are patterns to be discerned in what was represented and what was
not, and the social webs these things sustained. In this way, the fact that
gender attributes were represented is a meaningful point. But beyond this,
both representational and non-representational objects circulated in a
social space beyond face-to-face interaction while also being part of a daily
triad of bodies-places-objects that included invisible yet intelligible
aspects of social and material relations (other people, beings, places,
objects). In this way, they constituted relations in themselves more than
detached things; they were effects, nodes in a field of social experience (see
Lefebvre, 1991; Munn, 1996). In this context some of these objects may
have acted as representations; that is as signs of an aspect of the world
that lies beyond them while others could have been active agents in themselves (Gell, 1998). Moreover, these alternatives could in fact have been
different stages in the biography of the circulating objects. This can only be
assessed by understanding the visual field of the time as constituted by
both the represented and the non-represented through the gate of the
landscape.
Avoiding gender as a relevant research avenue has created an immense
gap in the archaeological knowledge of the area. But beyond arguing for
redesigned research strategies, the traditional invisibility of gender in
archaeological research points at wider issues that have to be addressed.
We might explore whether objects with female representations actually
acted as such, that is, as part of a system of signs. Whether artifacts were
or were not intended to represent, they actually grow in a specific field
crisscrossed by multiple forces that are at once cultural, natural, virtual and
material (Ingold, 2000: 3468). It follows that the reason why certain objects
seem to represent, and if they are representations at all, can only be understood by studying the non-representational side of materiality.10 In this
case, the seemingly functional and rather formless lithic materials of the
period (Figure 3) offer a fruitful complementary avenue (Lazzari, 1999;
Scattolin and Lazzari, 1997). As part of different practices, artifacts with
different qualities constitute different interpersonal spacetime dimensions. The point is to distinguish the variations in the combinations and
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Figure 3 Lithic artifacts from Formative site Loma Alta (Catamarca,

Argentina)
intensities of the forces (the qualities of things and the practices they are
part of) that result in representational and non-representational forms
(Gow, 1995). By understanding the practices different types of artifacts
were engaged in, and their relative capacities to create social meanings
(Munn, 1986), we may understand their relative value and their role in the
social field.
It is crucial to understand how different forms of materiality interacted,
those artifacts made to be seen and those that apparently were not made
with that purpose. This impinges upon the relevance of the nonrepresented, possibly accessible through formless material items, things
without apparent representational attributes. In this case, a string of
formless objects (flakes, debris, nodules, poorly shaped lithic tools)
circulated and were used together with female representations in ceramic
objects. This emphasis in non-representational material forms transcends
the traditional divide between symbolic and utilitarian materials in
archaeology. Contrary to this, the symbolic is a dimension of all social
experiences, always present at the joints of an action and its potential
variants and outcomes (Munn, 1986, 1990). The specific role of longdistance circulating material culture shows that through circulation these
objects constructed particular dimensions of this given world. These objects
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brought into play their biographies: their pathways, changing categorizations and previous transactions were meaningful, even if they were only
used in daily activities. They enabled the indirect experience of distant
places in everyday life, by means of their active, albeit silent, presence. This
was a nervous network that only became apparently sedimented or instantiated in places, monuments, burials, ritual arenas, houses, artifacts, and/or
graphic forms. The fluidity of this network became more evident in the
poorly formalized lithic materials of the period, always in process of
becoming something else (another tool, a flake, waste), and in the spatially
scattered nature of tasks in which they participated from raw material
acquisition to consumption.
A basic question here is how the material representations that circulated
between people and places without suffering alterations (other than repair
in certain cases) had the capacity to create specific social experiences within
this given world, while other materials such as lithics, in constant process
of change, enabled other experiences. These things carried with them a
different set of invisible yet present relations (to other people, places,
things) and in this way, they must have altered the symbolic nexus of space
and time in particular ways (Munn, 1996). The visual field in north-west
Argentina during the first millennium AD, bursting with palpable yet
invisible relations, offers a unique opportunity to appreciate the workings
of difference and materiality.
We may never know what things meant, but we can access the different
capacities of artifacts to create social meanings and to channel, convey or
disrupt social difference. And this is the basic level of understanding of a
past life-world as such: what forms of materiality ready at hand worked in
connection to which forms of difference. If a life-world is the world at hand,
the unquestioned and non-discursively assumed as shared (Schutz and
Luckman, 1973: 45), then no representation can give total account of it.
Thus the classification of social actors in terms of gender (or rank, as it has
been more traditionally assumed for the period) cannot pretend to exhaust
social experience in this context. Taking gender as the primary order of
difference leaves outside other forms of collective experience, such as
associations in terms of skills, age, exchange partnerships, or even the long
explored issue in anthropology of alternative forms of classification such as
orders or classes of beings (compare Gell, 1998; Lvi-Strauss, 1963).
The contextual associations of different types of raw materials and
ceramic styles point at the complex social categories and connections that
were created, supported and enacted through the circulation of material
culture. Given the patterning of material culture in local and regional levels,
it is possible to think that a person in this period participated in different
networks that placed competing demands on her/his resources, skills and
time, thus making social categories fluid and contingent more than clearcut.
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Gender, as one of the many social experiences of difference, is better

understood as part of a field, a configuration of representations, practices
and perceptions that is crisscrossed by other axes of difference in particular
ways. The landscape, as gate, provides access to these multiple levels of
social difference in the past. But this goes beyond making the previously
discussed issue of the importance of wider spatial scales of analysis. Arguing
for the landscape means stressing its status of ultimate craft, an artifact
woven, carved, lived through representations and practices connected to
social difference (Ingold, 2000; Kchler, 1993). A landscape is never a text
but a spatial texture, a relational field of networks anchored in strong
points such as places. Landscapes partake of those properties of all social
spaces: it is neither a sign nor an ensemble of signs; it has an actuality other
than that of the abstract signs and the real things that it includes (Lefebvre,
1964: 222, 402). The particular history of a landscape as a social space where
differences were played out (sexual or any other) is better understood
by addressing the contradictions of complex past spatialities (Soja, 1989);
that is, the messy intertwining of the lived, the perceived and the
represented.
Studying contrasting material patterns through the gate of the landscape
may show that people were schooled into social categories while also
crossing over categories, spaces and practices. This could potentially enable
the recognition that other vectors of difference were equally or even more
relevant than sexual difference understood in contemporary western terms.
The actions of people in the past, making a place while making and
unmaking themselves and others, may give us insight about how we, as
archaeologists, construct places, concepts and objects of study.
A FICTIVE CONCLUSION
Seeing and naming are basic operations of social life, but these actions are
never innocent. The naming of a conceptual space, the designation of a
project of inquiry and political struggle: all these actions fail to notice at
least part of the conditions for their existence, as by attempting to define
an area of empowerment, they operate by excluding substantial aspects of
what constitutes a relational social world.
It is certainly not just a problem of which words we use (sex, gender,
sexed order, etc., see Meskell, 1996: 23; Scattolin, forthcoming). The
point is to acknowledge the multi-layered, overlapping nature of concepts,
and their potential to flatten out social diversity. In its insistence in claiming
a better vision, gender does not escape the totalizing discourse that is built
upon the basic opposition of subject/object that underlies Western ocular
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centrism; an approach that precludes the understanding of social life as a

relational field.
Counter-hegemonic practices are always part of the processes that reproduce the hegemonic (Williams, 1973). In this way, the isolation of arenas
of knowledge and struggle can only disrupt the interconnectedness, the
relational flow of meanings and practices that may give empowerment its
strongest resources. Exploring visibility and invisibility as a mutually constitutive process, both in the past and the present, we may contact other
realities, other ways of being in the world, other explicit and hidden technologies of crafting the everyday.
This is particularly relevant to the study of social contexts in the past, in
which gender is usually assumed as the primary and natural vector of
difference and/or alliance at the expense of other vectors (Meskell, 2001a).
But beyond this observation, it is the problem of the primacy of the visible,
the represented, and in material terms, of those things made to be seen.
To what extent the images of women represented visions of the feminine,
social roles, ideologies, etc., can only be understood in connection to the
non-represented but still present in everyday life.
What I propose for gender is certainly also applicable to landscape or
any other concept we use. It is a truly difficult paradox to solve: how to
work within our conceptual spaces while being aware of how they came
into existence and how they reproduce the workings of a specific cultural
matrix of knowing. The diversity provided by archaeologys theoretical and
empirical long-term perspective should be used to constantly challenge
these spaces. The very nature of our objects of study, those truly hybrid
conceptual spaces (Fausto Sterling, 2000), gives us a hint of what is existence in a relational world: they exist in the middle space between now and
then, crisscrossed by the individual realm of experience in social space, the
social and historical conditions of possibility of a field of cultural production, its internal rules and forces, its connections to other fields (Bourdieu,
1997).
Consequently, the suggestion to scrutinize theoretical categories does
not imply a lack of confidence in political action, nor the hope for completely revealing the hidden reality of power underneath the categories
we use (Butler, 1992). As archaeologists, we use powerful representational
tools to deal with the world around us that usually manage to subvert our
conceptual orders. We are certainly trapped in the contemporary webs of
meaning and materiality, and our resources for political action are indeed
polluted. But avoiding critical analysis of the conditions of possibility of the
knowledge we produce can only undermine the project of knowledge
building as creative political action. This is a never-ending task, almost an
everyday reflexive technique that is better understood as a collective
project (Bourdieu, 1997). Archaeology can place contemporary issues in
perspective by engaging with both the similarities and the differences
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between social life in the present and the past. This can be considered as
part of an archaeology that has the ability to render familiar things strange,
and reveal timeless things as transient (Johnson, 1999: 34). New experiences in the present open windows into previously ignored or seemingly
irrelevant issues, and in this way re-signify the past by re-directing projects
of inquiry into different realms. Maintaining that archaeology is a critical
project does not mean shaping the past to our image. It is because of this
mutuality that, rather than trying to secure our conceptual spaces, we
should constantly redefine our objects of study in ways that address the
similarities and differences between present and long-gone social worlds.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Lynn Meskell, Dusan Boric and Hernn Muscio for their
thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article, as well as for encouraging this
project. I would also like to thank Alejandra Korstanje and Rodrigo Navarrete for
our lively discussions on this and other subjects, Juan Obarrio for the online chat
that initiated the article, and Cristina Scattolin, for her ongoing generosity with her
ideas, time and invaluable perspective. Sebastin Muoz and Mariana Mondini
rescued me with their technical support in the final stages. Finally, I am grateful to
the anonymous reviewers who helped me to clarify the ideas presented here. Any
mistakes or misinterpretations in this piece are my full responsibility.
Notes
1 The interocular field is what Appadurai and Breckenridge (1995: 12) define as
being structured so that each site or setting for the socializing and regulating of
the public gaze is to some degree affected by the experiences of the other sites.
This entails the constant and even surprising flow of meanings, scripts and
symbols between sites.
2 It is worth noting that the critical analysis of the gaze both owes a great deal to
and departs from Lacanian psychoanalysis and its consideration of both gaze
and voice as central objects for the constitution of subjectivity that enable the
access to reality. The crucial image created in Lacans mirror stage of selfrecognition of the child before language constituted vision as a powerful
analytical tool to understand how difference is perceived in Western
contemporary culture (Mulvey, 1989: 18; Zizek, 1996).
3 De Lauretis (1984: 1718) also used the city as metaphor for knowledge
building, albeit not following de Certeau, to speak of how cinematic theory is
built in historically specific discourses and practices that have assigned to
woman a position of non-subject.
4 An example of this is the long process of impoverishment of academic
institutions in Latin America that underwrites the unequal flow of ideas and
information between them and metropolitan institutions (see McGuire and
Navarrete, 1999).
5 Butlers (1990, 1993) notion of performance captures the in-betweenness that
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214
7
8
9
10
characterizes social agency, particularly in the case of gender. Conceptualizing

gender as performative means that subjects constitute identities that are
culturally expected, without implying that gender is a series of free-floating
attributes created and manipulated at the subjects will. Gender is sometimes
the appropriation and sometimes the subversion, and sometimes both at the
same time, of what is considered natural (Butler, 1993: 128). More
importantly, gender is the vehicle for the phantasmic transformation of that
nexus of race and class, the site of its articulation (Butler, 1990: 130). In this
way, agency is not the same as voluntarism, and though implicated in the very
relations of power it seeks to undermine, it is not reducible to those dominant
forms (Butler, 1990: 13847, 1993: 241), and political action is a difficult labor
of forging strategies from resources inevitably impure (Butler, 1993: 241). This
has been recently taken up by archaeologists, who have also argued over the
dangers of conflating agency with voluntarism (Joyce, 1996b; Meskell, 1999;
Thomas, 1998).
Feminist writers have taken a similar road, as they have been inspired by this
author while strongly criticizing the complete adoption of his interpretive
framework (Bordo, 1990; Harstock, 1990; Hekman, 1990; McNay, 1992;
Richlin, 1998; Sawicki, 1991).
Alejandra Korstanje is Professor and researcher at the Instituto de
Arqueologa y Museo, Universidad Nacional de Tucumn, Argentina.
This idea is based on Merleau-Pontys (1968) example of the invisible as the
screen for the visible.
Although Franco (1999: 1239) makes an insightful analysis of the opposition
of the church to the use of gender in Latin America, regional scholars favor
sexual difference instead of gender, not for religious reasons, but for the
potential of the former to register processes of difference rather than
crystallized segments of social organization (Scattolin, 2001).
As Gell noticed (1998), there are cases in which seemingly representational
art did not have such a role in its original cultural context. A graphic form
that to westerners may appear as made for depicting a trait of the world
outside the object (e.g. mask, zoomorphic vessel, tattoo), can in fact be considered by the objects maker as an act of constitution of a material being that
has the power to modify peoples actions. This can only be understood if we
adhere to models of the self and the world that see personhood as relational
and dispersed rather than unitary and autonomous (Strathern, 1988, 1996).
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MARISA LAZZARI is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University, New York, thanks to a YPF-Fulbright fellowship and Columbia University support. She graduated in 1995 as
Licenciada in Anthropological Sciences, specialty Archaeology, at Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1997 she completed a Masters
degree in Archaeological Theory at Southampton University, UK, with a
Fundacion Antorchas fellowship. She has conducted research in northwest Argentina as part of the CONICET (Argentinean national council of
scientific and technical research) and her main interests are landscapes,
technology and social theory.

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THE CONTEMPORARY MATRIX OF VISUALIT Y: CRITICAL

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through subjection, feminist theorists have considered the gaze as a form

OPTICISM: POWER, KNOWLEDGE AND VISIBILIT Y

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Geographers and archaeologists have lately appealed to de Certeaus

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culturally specific research agenda into social contexts in which gender

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VISUAL STRUGGLES IN ARCHAEOLOGY

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effectiveness of this critical project is undermined by a reluctance to

GENDER IS LIKE LANDSCAPE: RELATIONAL VISIONS IN

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be approached in connection to the structure of representations in both past

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Map of north-west Argentina

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Candelaria style. Reproduced with permission from Garca Uriburu,

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Figure 3 Lithic artifacts from Formative site Loma Alta (Catamarca,

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Gender, as one of the many social experiences of difference, is better

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centrism; an approach that precludes the understanding of social life as a

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characterizes social agency, particularly in the case of gender. Conceptualizing

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Specialization: Where do we go from here? Society for American Archaeologys

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Representation in a Melansian Society, in D. Bender (ed.) Landscapes. Politics

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04 Lazzari 2003 Archaeological Visions Gender Landscape & Opt

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