Ethics and flesh:being touched by the otherness of things

Abstract

Introduction If there is one discipline that can claim a close affinity with things then it has to be archaeology—in archaeology, one might suggest, there is a “particular kind of care, obligation, and loyalty to things” (Olsen et al. 2012, 1). The image of the archaeologist is one of unearthing and engaging, primarily, with material artefacts. The skilled archaeologist is one who, with an object in hand, does not merely see a material object but rather immediately sees a being-in-the-world, a manner of being already inscribed into the very materiality of the object—hence the seemingly paradoxical phrase of ‘material culture’. The material world, for the archaeologist, is not simply ‘lumps of stuff’. For them materiality is primarily the surface of human culture—the place where human culture emerges from, and settles, as the surface and sediment of on-going situated human practices. As such the objects become hermeneutic surface from which one can read and imagine a world that is no longer available for direct immersion. However, in this affinity for ‘material culture’ objects are taken as material (human) culture. In engaging with objects it is the search for the human implicated or ‘behind’ the object that is fundamental. The material world is taken mostly as “a means to reach something else, something more important—cultures and societies: the lives of past people, the Indian behind the artefact” (Olsen 2010, 24).

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