14
Let Archaeology Be
P ronouncements like "archaeology is anthropology
or it is nothing" worry me.1 This one piggybacks
on the much older pronouncement (by Frederic Mait-
land) that "anthropology will be history or it will be
nothing." No doubt historians, too, have been admon-
ished to be something different, otherwise history is
no more. With sufficient regresseach discipline being
threatened with desuetude unless it becomes something
elsewe might eventually arrive back at the silly con-
clusion that "archaeology will be archaeology or it
will be nothing." The current vogue that this last pro-
nouncement enjoys among some scholars worries me
just as much as the others. It also worries the editors
of this volume, although perhaps for somewhat dif-
ferent reasons.
Prophetic warnings like "or it is nothing" are what
worry me. They aim to extract a pledge of allegiance
from us, rather than an intellectual commitment. Alle-
giances are commonly heartfelt, and they are dangerous
just for that reason. By contrast, we are "mindful" of in-
tellectual commitments, and we can take them or leave
them as proves practical.
I think the first point that American archaeologists
and anthropologists (by "American" I mean scholars
trained in the United States) must admit is that we are
too much given to such pronouncements. Our unfortu-
nate penchant may result from the American religiosity
that Geoffrey Clark (this volume) regrets, but it is much
more likely to be an outcome of allegiance to American
anthropology's so-called four-field approach (enumer-
ated as five in some quarters). "Allegiance," I think, best
describes our relationship with the four fields today, long
since the demise of the museum-based and object-driven
anthropology that once gave it reality. Today we see it
observed in the breach: by tokenism in our curricula, by
separated departments, by tit-for-tat hiring strategies, and,
most troubling, by the four-field approach being put be-
fore us as an object of required obeisance. Such claims
invariably foster equally powerful counterallegiances,
Richard G. Fox
Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research, Inc.
and there are currently many apostates and never-believ-
ers who deny the four-field approach, even though they
still denominate themselves as anthropologists.
So what should we do with this derelict four-field
approach besides demand still more allegiance to it? How
can we enthusiastically support an archaeology that is
truly part of anthropology without falling into worrisome
pronouncements? Counterintuitively, we might come
closer to an intellectually sound and pedagogically
real four-field approach if we gave up all allegiance to
it. Then we would be liberated from pronouncements,
and we could get down to actual practice. Many recent
scholarly developments anticipate just such an outcome,
as 1 shall detail later. But these battles over our proper
faith get in the way of letting archaeology and anthro-
pology be.
I hope this proposition does not qualify as a pro-
nouncement, and to avoid that accusation, let me argue
my case by example. Although American anthropologists
argue its holism and catholicity in favor of the four-field
approach, exclusion has also shadowed it throughout its
history. Folklore was banished from American anthro-
pology departments almost from the beginning, and
ethnomusicology was soon rusticated to music depart-
ments (much to its harm). Anthropology's "people with-
out history" were also without art, as best one could tell
from what we taught. Material culture became the al-
most exclusive property of museums, much as Untouch-
ables alone deal in leather goods in village India.
Material culture has recently come out of the mu-
seum and back into anthropology, as Jane Hill (this
volume) notes, but not where we might have expected
it, that is, in the land pledged to the four-field approach.
Material culture studies have burgeoned within British
anthropology, the least likely scholarly locale, given that
it has never taken the four-field pledge or even given
much allegiance to a concept of culture. Yet material
culture studies in the United Kingdom today bond cul-
tural anthropologists, archaeologists, museum scholars,
152
and other students of objects produced and consumed
by humankind in a common, broad intellectual prac-
tice.2 Let this be a lesson to American anthropology
and archaeology.
T. J. Ferguson (this volume) chronicles another his-
tory in which the development of a very broad anthro-
pology occurred. In their pursuit of cultural repatriation
and heritage, Native American groups had to marshal
evidence from the four fields and far beyond them. No
pronouncements or allegiances but only a very practical
question directed them toward "realizing" an all-inclu-
sive anthropology.
Could American anthropology, once freed from al-
legiances and counterallegiances, get on with the many
research questions that require archaeology and cultural
anthropology, for example, to league together? Could we
truly revise our graduate curricula around linking topics
like race, disability, nationalism, identity, and everyday
life and thereby get beyond the sorry tokenism of re-
quiring our students to take one course in each subfield?
Could we give up the snide dismissals of postmodern-
ism3 and not be so self-protective (and appear so terribly
vulnerable)?
Many of the essays in this collection indicate that
such integrative work has been around a long time and is
still very much ongoing. Teresita Majewski illuminates
the codependency between historical archaeology and
cultural anthropology. David Anderson adroitly links the
Garbage Project in archaeology to ecological issues in
the world today. An older cultural ecology from Julian
Steward motivated settlement-pattern studies in archae-
ology, according to Timothy Earle. George Armelagos
speaks of the complex merger of skeletal biology and
archaeology that underlies the growth of the new field
of bioarchaeology. The evolutionary approach that
Geoffrey Clark advocates necessarily links socio-
cultural anthropologists with archaeologists and bio-
logical anthropologists. William Doelle shows that an
analytic concept like "community"nothing so grand
as Clark's evolutionary theorycan still accomplish the
work of integration.
In accord with these scholars, I believe the research
questions beckoning to anthropologists today make
more salient than ever before an integrated approach to
anthropology (by which 1 mean one that is even more
inclusive than the four-field approach). The material cul-
ture studies I mentioned earlier link up with research on
consumption, on the one hand, and with work on the
character of museum collections, on the other. Analyses
of "landscape" and "urban space" clearly define a com-
mon ground between archaeology and cultural anthro-
Richard G. Fox
pology, whereas the new "biocultural" area compounds
medical anthropology, epidemiology, social construc-
tionism, and science studies. The burgeoning interest in
the anthropology of animals and the cultures of chim-
panzees tramples many conventional or even essential-
ist scholarly boundaries. Public issues such as race and
racism, ecological degradation, genetically modified
crops, immigration, and cultural property claims also
demand that we embrace a broad scholarship. Debates
within anthropology, such as the face-off over Hawaiian
responses to first European contact or the friendlier dis-
agreement over the character of the Precolumbian Mayan
state, cannot be resolved by subdisciplinary loyalties that
fetter scholarship.
I find it strange that some archaeologists pronounce
the need for alarums and excursions against external en-
emies when the "outside world," at least as I know it,
seems so ready to profit from their knowledge. To me, it
is not obvious why archaeologists would want to fortify
themselves against a so-called hostile, or, anyway, for-
eign, outside world by retreating to separate departments
and programs. Instead of a martial posture, it would
not do harm, I respectfully suggest, were American ar-
chaeologists to adopt a more reflexive positionthe kind
of self-inspection that Susan Gillespie and Rosemary
Joyce suggest.
To start, let us recognize that pledges of allegiance
bind the faithful, or, better put, define the faithful, often
precisely to fend off internal challenges to beliefs. Ameri-
can archaeology has undergone fundamental chal-
lengesby that I mean developments that affect the
field's very characterin recent years, and perhaps these
internal challenges, rather than external enemies, pro-
voke the calls for separate allegiance and subdisciplin-
ary loyalty. One challenge comes from cultural resource
management, which offers many important opportuni-
ties to American archaeology but also insinuates funda-
mental changes in pedagogy and professional identity.
Another challenge comes from the claims indigenous
groups have made for control over their cultural proper-
ties and heritageclaims that native populations and
government, too, have judged superior to those of ar-
chaeological science. Still another challenge to Ameri-
can archaeology comes from postprocessual archaeology,
especially when it arrives with a British accent. This chal-
lenge may be the most threatening, because postprocessual
archaeology often has taken over the ready acceptance
within current sociocultural anthropology that American
(processual) archaeology once enjoyed.
Nothing good will come to American archaeology
from trying to ignore these challenges by displacing its
Let Archaeology Be
dismay, displeasure, or dread onto ostensible enemies
outside. If my last statement qualifies as a pronounce-
ment, the only allegiance it demands is a pledge to
pursue significant research questions and to integrate
scholarship across fields and subdisciplines as those re-
search questions require.
Notes
1. Nothing I write here should be taken as necessar-
ily representing the official policy of the Wenner-Gren
Foundation or its board of trustees. 1 write as an Ameri-
can anthropologist, and when 1 use the word "our," the Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont
reference is to anthropology and anthropologists in the
United States.
153
2. University College, London, is one center for
this recent development of material culture studies in
Britain. More than other British anthropology programs,
University College has instituted an American-style an-
thropology, but notand this is the pointwithin an en-
vironment of pronouncements and pledges of allegiance.
3. Principled criticism of postmodernism can be
pointed and amusing, without being snide and dismiss-
ive (see Sokal and Bricmont 1999).
Reference
1999 Fashionable Nonsense, Postmodern Intellectuals'
Abuse of Science. New York: Picador USA.