The premise of this volume is that objects, animals, and other nonhumans can exhibit agency, personhood, and intentionality heretofore seemingly monopolized by humans. Furthermore, the animate potencies and properties of human and other-than-human actors are not a priori or static but emerge out of active relationships linking humans and others in social fields. As explained in the introduction, these axioms are embedded within the “new ontologies” now impacting many disciplines, including archaeology. In this metaphysical paradigm shift, the old Cartesian dualisms that mark modern Western thought are renounced: subject-object, mind-body, culture-nature, form-matter, and so forth. However, these stubborn dichotomies are difficult to eliminate.
The volume's 11 chapters include an introduction by the coeditors, a concluding summary by Harrison-Buck, and nine case studies intended to exemplify the great diversity of cultural practices regarding nonhuman agency, personhood, animacy, and object-beings, both in terms of singular objects or materials and as assembled composites. Most chapters deal with North America and Middle America: Alaskan Inuit (Hill), colonial-era Canadian Maritime provinces (Howey), the Mississippian mid-continent (Pauketat and Alt), historic Plains Indians (Zedeño, Murray, and Chandler), and the Classic Maya (one chapter by Looper and one by Hendon). The Old World is represented by chapters on colonial West Africa (Stahl), twentieth-century Melanesia (McNiven), and Bronze Age Britain (Brück and Jones).
The introductory and concluding chapters provide a general background on agency, personhood, and relationism, going over some now well-trodden ground. However, it was not their intent to promote and apply a uniform set of overarching concepts or a simple dichotomy of Western and non-Western ontologies. On the contrary, the volume's strength lies in the contributors’ attention to specific historical and cultural contexts for the emergence and expression of object personhood or agency. Definitions of key terms and concepts are therefore varied, derived from diverse theoretical approaches and local knowledges. Readers may then choose those ideas that seem most appropriate to their own research interests. Well-developed bibliographies for each chapter invite further investigation, although I was surprised by the scarce mention of Marcel Mauss.
The title refers to archaeology, and the chapters were written by and for archaeologists. Nevertheless, many archaeologists may be underwhelmed by the archaeological analyses. Little information on the personhood or agency of nonhumans in the past was determined from physical vestiges or by hypothesizing such properties and then warranting their manifestation from material traces alone. Virtually all authors rely to some extent, and even primarily, on ethnographic, historical, iconographic, and epigraphic evidence for the likelihood that certain objects, animals, and other nonhumans or semihumans acted in ways that indicated their attainment of personhood or agency. Some contributors merely gathered such evidence, and only a few authors focus on interpreting specific archaeological materials. Even so, those authors accept the capacity for agency or personhood based on other evidence and then conjecture how it may have played out in the past.
In fairness, the stated objective for the case studies was to alert archaeologists to the strong likelihood that the peoples whose lives they scrutinize inhabited landscapes shared with nonhuman agents and persons, assuming a wide variety of forms and situations. The diversity illustrated in these few short examples makes clear that instances of nonhuman actors, agents, and persons cannot be expected to look the same from one context to another.
Still, pesky dualisms have continued to intrude. They include a renewed mind-body dichotomy implicit in an ontological turn that separates out and rejects “discursive cognitivism” in favor of “nondiscursive materiality,” as elaborated by Harrison-Buck. But there is also the title itself. The “other-than-human” descriptor, coined by A. Irving Hallowell in an Ojibwa ethnography in 1960, was admittedly equivalent to the more common “nonhuman.” It indicates a resilient ontological divide in which human is the marked term against which all other identities are measured. Significantly, a few authors examine this dichotomy and find it wanting, suggesting instead a continuum of existences and interpolations between idealized poles of human and nonhuman. Indeed, in a fully relational ontology founded in dynamic and transformative assemblages, neither humans nor nonhumans should constitute monolithic phenomena. Just as objects and animals can range from more to less humanlike, so too might humans exhibit a continuum of statuses, including subhumans and suprahumans, which should have some archaeological visibility. But with their exploration of the great diversity of contexts and statuses of object personhood, agency, and animacy, the contributors raise a number of new questions that amplify the volume's role in ongoing theoretical dialogues.
