Having followed the scholarship related to new materialisms, the call for a symmetrical archaeology, its critiques and subsequent responses, I believe that this dialogue is one of the more interesting ones as it illustrates the problematic and reiterative nature of debate within a symmetrical/asymmetrical framework. There is some clarity achieved through the utterly collegial challenges posited in emails between Ian Hodder and Gavin Lucas; enjoyable as it is at once intimate, rigorous and immediate. This is a useful discussion of something I have come to find to be an unnecessary theoretical insistence (i.e. symmetrical archaeology).

We may repeat a hundred times, as per Olsen and Witmore (Reference Olsen and Witmore2015), as reiterated in Hodder and Lucas's introduction, that symmetry should be considered a starting position, akin to a standpoint in which, for that moment, we disregard inherited divisions, such as that between humans and things. That we must reiterate such a foundational point that is made in virtually all other arguments of new materialisms makes me question the utility of such theory. The insistence on a vocabulary of symmetrical relationships belies an aestheticization of theory and discourse in the service of the sublime. I am not interested in launching a critique of symmetrical archaeology because it has already been covered adequately in the literature and re-presented through this discussion by Hodder and Lucas. But I will say that I do not find a productive tension in all dialectical relationships, particularly that between symmetry and asymmetry. In setting the conversation up in relation to the asymmetry of power versus the asymmetry of entanglement, the discussion falls back into older conversations of equality and inequality within the dependent ‘tanglescapes’. Such a framework does little for advancing archaeological theory, as both Hodder and Lucas acknowledge within the text.

However, I appreciated this dialogue because in teasing apart and making apparent the different standpoints that exist within the discourses of new materialisms, and within those establishing the significance of dependencies and the perianthropic, the discussion and examples produced more questions that were murky, slippery, uncertain and paradoxical – that is to say, an interrogation of the best sort. Somewhere in that brilliant mess are concepts that I think are worth pursuing and giving deep consideration. The one I am most intrigued by is the question of being and care that is the crux of the final section of the dialogue, although arguably it is a subtext throughout.

I desperately want to believe that being is not distinct from care (as the dialogue leads us to assume), but I do not believe that the double bind that both Hodder and Lucas discuss in relation to care exists. Hodder has written repeatedly about the dependency of humans on things and things on humans – but I find that even though examples are used, these metaphors work in a vacuum of the normative. I would argue that in the ‘tanglescape’ that is the ontic sociopolitical, both things and humans have proven to be disposable, and thus care is not an inherent property or constitutive of being. I cannot help but wonder what sort of relation this might have to Giorgio Agamben's homer sacer (Reference Agamben1995). I bring Agamben up because the question of the bareness of life and sovereignty links itself to Martin Heidegger's notion of being, while asymmetrical entanglements and entrapments sound remarkably like the ways in which sovereignty could be framed, where the relation with care as patronage or sovereign power becomes paramount. If being and care are constitutive of one another, then where does the bareness of life stand? And as we consider all things as being, then can there be a bareness to things?

Being is brought up in relation to Heidegger's notion of Dasein from Being and Time (Reference Heidegger1973) – that ‘being’ is a spatial consideration (an ontic distinction) much like his notion of dwelling; it is not really embodied or biological. How can one understand disembodied care? It seems that it is when care becomes constitutive of being that the notion of being as Dasein shifts to one of biopower. I would argue that care is an epistemic issue, not one ontologically constitutive of being. We learn how to care, care is recognized differently, and as such I find care to be related to knowledge. And so then the double bind is not necessarily one of being and caring for, but rather is an epistemic one – it has to do with the ways in which epistemic injustice plays out, and where epistemic resistance becomes a necessity when contending with normative frameworks (Fricker Reference Fricker2007; Medina Reference Medina2013). In the space of dependency, can care be understood through obligation, responsibility or fulfilling its ontological and ontic mission? Can the hammer show care by simply being a hammer when you need it to be one?

Why do we not understand the care of the hammer (just to stay with their example), or any archaeological artefact that we collect as data? What role do these artefacts play when, in the act of collection, in the act of producing them as data, we have been rendered mute in order to ask them to convey to us some past ontic. I consider and call this an epistemic injustice double bind – one that simultaneously and systemically blocks us from understanding or decoding ourselves (and our normative values as given) and one that intentionally clouds past meanings of things through a silencing so that even our contemporary entanglement with them is effectively orchestrated (Rizvi Reference Rizvi and Kholeif2015b). I say this because in non-Western epistemic spaces, it is not so difficult to understand or see care in beings that within the Western episteme we may not consider sentient, because, very simply, care is understood and known differently (Rizvi Reference Rizvi2012; Reference Rizvi2015a). If, indeed, being and care become ontologically constitutive of one another, then being itself might be what needs to be re-examined in relation to sentient care.

What is lovely about conversations is that they are ongoing; they are not meant to provide answers, nor aim to be definitive in their stance. The best conversations are those in which one wants to continue the discussion – and I certainly am keen to see how discussions of being and care find themselves within contemporary archaeological discourse.