Ian Hodder - Huxley Memorial Lecture.

A couple of little things before I crack on with this post, firstly thank you very much to John for his post about Claude Levi-Strauss, he was a truly great anthropologist. Secondly I want to apologise for my absence from the site over the past couple of weeks, I have had computer troubles and have been offline for some horrible amount of time.

Right then, last Monday I was at the Huxley Memorial Lecture at the British Museum, which this year was given by Ian Hodder. Yes I know an archaeologist but a lot of his work crosses over with social anthropology and he is a very influential writer. I've heard Hodder lecture before at the EASA conference last Easter and he was a really interesting speaker so I was looking forwards to this. The lecture was entitled 'Human-Thing Entanglement: Towards an Integrated Perspective'.

The lecture was in 3 main parts:
1. Humans depend on Things.
2. Things depend on Things.
3. Things depend on Humans.

1. Humans depend on things. Hodder began here by clarifying that things was a term to encompass everything - any object natural or man-made, any sound or even another person. He also recognised the strength that this idea has gained in recent years and in fact many people now agree that human thought could not have evolved without us having something to think about. He then went on to discuss his experience of this at Catalhoyuk where clay was the most important thing; everything was made of clay from the largest house to the smallest utensil, people lived in a world of clay. Archaeologists have even found clay dust lining the insides of peoples' lungs. Without clay, the people of Catalhoyuk could not have lived as they did - they depended on it.

2. Things depend on things. In this case things meant on man-made or man-changed objects (I think it is a bit of a cop out though to be changing your definitions half way through an argument). Still, this idea was originally set out by M. B. Schiffer in what he termed 'Behavioural Chains'. They state that the life of an object is as follows: Procurement -- Manufacture -- Use -- Maintenance -- Repair -- Discarding. Along this chain things interact with other things so that objects can progress. For example, fire depends on may other things to exist, such as tools and wood etc. At Catalhoyuk, clay was dependant on other things for extraction, transportation, molding and firing.

3. Things depend on humans. Hodder argued that it is often thought that things are static and only the meanings we give to them change over time, however, this is not true. People are constantly altering things either to repair them or to convert them for another use. The walls of the houses at Catalhoyuk were constantly being repaired and done up (largely because if they weren't they would have fallen down). So if in this case the thing (walls) depended on people to keep them up.

Hodder then moved on to discuss the actual entanglement between humans and things, this mostly just repeated everything he had already said but with more emphasis on the complete entanglement and behavioural chains. Over time, through chains of entanglement and interaction, he argued, people and things become completely co-dependant. For example; domesticated wheat is completely dependant on humans for growth and reproduction or it would revert back to being wild and people are also completely dependant on it for food. Our dependence on wheat for food has trapped us in to certain patterns of care and behaviour. Our sense of sweetness (taste) is another trapped behaviour set within a global triangle of history, trade and production. A blind man and his stick are dependant on each other, the man cannot see without the stick and the stick would cease to exist without the blind man to use it.

Basically humans and things are all completely dependant on each other for existence, we could not live without things and things would not exist without us to create them.