Archaeology (archaeological method) key idea is that systems of thought and knowledge

of grammar and logic, that operates beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and
define a systems of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a
given domain or period.
Archaeological analysis primarily concerns on the attribution of innovation, the analysis
of contradictions, comparative descriptions, and the mapping of transformations. Wherein, it
lays down the following principles:

1. Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes,

preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in the discourses; but those discourses
themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules.It does not treat discourses as a
document, but a manner of which to an archaeologists’ as monuments; and it refuses to be
allegorical.
2. Archaeology does not seek to rediscover the continuous, insensible transitions that relates
discourses, on a gentle slope, to what precedes them, surrounds them, or follows them. On the
contrary, its problem is to define discourses in their specifity; to show in what way the set of
rules that they put into operation is irreducible to any other. It is not a doxology; but a
differential analysis of the modalities of discourses.
3. Archaeology is not ordered in accordance with the sovereign figures of the aeuvre; it does
not try to grasp the moment in which the aeuvre emerges on the anonymous horizons. It does
not wish to rediscover the enigmatic point at which the individual and the social are inverted
into one another.
4. Lastly, archaeology does not try to restore what gas been thought, wished, aimed at,
experienced, desired by men n the very moment at which they expressed it in discourse. In
other words, it does try to repeat what has been said by reaching it in its very identity.

However, Foucault’s archaeological analysis could say nothing about the causes of the
transition from one way of thinking to another. Foucault’s archaeology is not sufficient o
explain the historical transitions and lacks capacities for explaining why the rules and
regularities

Archaeology works to understand how artifacts fit together in a historical monument,

genealogy works to figure out what kind of people would fit into that set of artifacts.
Ultimately, Foucault’s archaeology acts as a precondition for a transition into genealogy. It is
not much of genealogy replaced archaeology, but rather archaeology was re-inscribed into
genealogy.
 Foucault’s genealogy seeks to deconstruct what was previously regarded as unified
(history as a chronological pattern of events); while it also seeks in attempting to identify the
underlying continuity which is a result of discontinuous systimaticities. Foucauldian
genealogy is a history of tracing origins, which puts into question the idea of origins or deeper
meaning. It unearths the force relation operating in particular events or historical
developments. Foucauldian genealogy debunks the assumption of underlying conventional
historiography that there are facts to be interpreted; rather, facts are themselves constructed
out of the researcher’s “will to truth”.
Foucault describes genealogy using one of Nietzsche’s metaphors. Genealogy is “gray”,
its task is to decipher the hieroglyphic script of humans’ past, a past that is neither black
(totally unknown) nor white (transparent), but something in between (gray), that is,
ambiguous and uncertain. For Foucault, the genealogist us an interpreter but nit a
hermeneutician. The genealogist as interpreter recognizes that the meaning he/she gives to
history is doubtful (hence “gray”), it acknowledges its system on injustice, and in fact his/her
interpretation is subject to revision. He/she has a sense on where he/she stands in history and
does not ignore the fact that he/she is the product of historical circumstances; however he/she
us able ti distance him/herself from his/her situation in order to examine things from a far.
The point of Foucault’s genealogical analysis is to show that the given system of thought was
the result of ruptures and contingent turns of history not the outcomes of nationally inevitable
trends.
Foucault’s genealogical method can be observed in his works such as: Discipline and
Punish and History of Sexuality.
Foucault’s genealogy follows Nietzsche as well as existential phenomenology in that it
aims to bring the body onto he focus if history. Rather than history of mentalities or ideas,
genealogies are “histories if the bodies”. They examine the historical practices through which
the body becomes an object of techniques and deployments of power. In Discipline and
Punish, Foucault shows how disciplinary techniques produce “docile bodies”: bodies of
prisoners, soldiers, workers, and schoolchildren were subjected to disciplinary power in order
to make them more useful and at the same time easier to control. The human body became a
machine the functioning of which could be optimized, calculated, and improved. Its function,
movements and capabilities were broken into narrow segments, analyzed in detail and
recomposed in a maximally effective way.