Ethnographies Of Scientific Work

Cet article réfléchit aux pratiques soigneuses d’effilage et raccommodage comme parties intimement constitutives de processus de raisonnement incorporé. Mon point de départ est une ethnographie de dialogues entre la broderie calado et la conception technique. D’où, tout en décrivant l’effilage partiel des tissus destinés au calado et leur raccommodage postérieur par le tissage, j’interroge la double action de ces pratiques : d’abord sur l’ethnographie qui les aborde ; ensuite au sujet des effets de l’ethnographie – elle-même influencée par les pratiques du calado – sur les imaginaires et les attentes des ingénieurs à propos de la conception et du contexte de cet art manuel. Tout au long de cet article, je mets l’accent sur le fait que ce genre de processus d’effilage et raccommodage est constitué par le soin (care) en relation aux corps et aux matérialités. Je prête donc une attention particulière à la manière dont ces processus, traversés par la question du genre selon des manières bien spécifiques, entrelacent histoires d’apprentissage incarné et domestique et formes d’invisibilité ambiguë.

This is the only full length report of an ethnography of an archaeological dig to have been published. It describes the everyday events that take place on the excavation of a Bronze Age ring-ditch cemetery, situated in the east of England, from the viewpoint of an ethnographer. The author asks the question: what are the conditions - social, material, cognitive, practical - which make archaeological interpretation possible? His ethnography focuses on the acts of discovery through which archaeologists encounter and interpret material evidence of the past. An ‘act of discovery’ is defined as 'the (temporal) relation between (embodied) subjects and (emerging) objects, mediated through the use of tools'. This is where the cultural agency of archaeologists, in giving form to material patterns, comes into contact with the sheer ‘resistance’ of unfolding material evidence. It is in these practical encounters, the author argues, that knowledge of the past is ultimately produced and reproduced.

(Original and unabridged) 1991 thesis on ethnography of archaeological practice.

Themes covered include:

material resistance
fluidity of emerging materials
rhythms of work and tool-use
archaeological inference-in-action
acquisition and transmission of craft skills
embodied perception of artefacts
phenomenology of archaeological practices

The thesis gives detailed accounts of processes taking place "under the moving blade of the trowel", long before the well-known phrase ‘at the trowel’s edge’ was coined.

Introductory chapters are somewhat out of date, but the main ethnographic section is arguably as relevant as ever. This early work is rarely cited in the post-processual literature. In a recently published book, however, Gavin Lucas describes the thesis as:

“almost unrivalled, even today...a superb analysis of the archaeological operation from a material perspective ...quite ahead of its time... still offers one of the best and sustained analyses of how archaeological facts are produced in the field, from a participant-observer on an excavation of a Bronze Age site in Britain” (Lucas 2012, 'Understanding the archaeological record', p203).