Which Pole Are You?: Review of a “Reviews in Anthropology” Article

I found many intriguing article possibilities for this week’s mission, and this fact alone seems to unmask me as someone with extremely varied archaeological interests. Indeed, my paper Beauty in these Broken Stones is vastly different than my thesis topic. After careful consideration, the Annual Review of Anthropology article that had the most relevance to something I am doing is this one by ST.

I first read it in 2019 in my Introduction to Archaeology course. The article opened my eyes to the exciting area of emotion in archaeology, an area which looms large in my research interests. However, given that I had read this article years ago and that I have learned a lot about archaeology since then, I decided to give it another go. And yes, I got much more out of it this time around and picked up on a lot that had previously eluded my attention.

The article begins by setting the scene of what it is to study emotion in archaeology: it’s new and hasn’t been done very much, and when archaeology does engage in the “emotional turn” it borrows heavily from other disciplines that study emotion. Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear, consistent idea in any discipline that studies emotion as to what an emotion actually is. This leads to oodles of miscommunication and also to an exciting array of research.

ST then introduces us to the two main clusters of approaches for emotion scholars, both within and outside of archaeology. We have the psychological pole which stipulates that emotions are situated in the body and in biology, thus being universal. The constructivist pole argues that emotions are learned and context-dependent, therefore cultural.

ST then takes the “emotional turn” into archaeology specifically by elaborating on the discipline’s theoretical developments that led to archaeologists seeing emotion as a valid line of inquiry, and then embarks on a whirlwind tour of how emotion has been explored archaeologically. Each specific theme (such as archaeologically exploring emotion in “prehistory,” archaeologically exploring more “positive” emotions like love, hope, and happiness, and what to do about the emotions of the archaeologist) is a short section effectively and helpfully demarcated with headings, and she compares and contrasts various case studies in each one.

ST concludes that the archaeology of emotion is too young and too small for a cohesive tradition, and therefore there still is the space to shape the archaeology of emotion. She suggests one way of moving the archaeology of emotion into the future is the contextual path, claiming archaeology needs to consider history and its textual sources to access it. The concrete ways of how to do this are left up to the imagination.

The structure of the article itself is stellar and ST does an excellent job of introducing the reader to the significant developments and issues in the archaeology of emotion, complete with case studies. It reads like a collection of smaller literature reviews bundled together and divided into nice, neat sections. Using a “funnel-like” approach of going from the general to the specific was very clear, beginning with emotion and emotion studies in general, then becoming more specific with emotion in archaeology including comparing and contrasting case studies in thematic sections, and ending with the way emotion should be studied in archaeology.

I’m going to stop right there. Yes, ST concludes with how emotion should be studied in archaeology. While there still is room for the archaeology of emotion to define a cohesive tradition, ST clearly demonstrates where she stands on this. To borrow from our Archaeology as History course, she tells us a story. The narrative goes something like this: we have two poles when it comes to studying emotion and the psychological pole dominates. However, we really should be using the constructivist one because it’s demonstrably so much better. Context is key, so being historical and contextual is the way forward for an archaeology of emotion.

ST makes some interesting narrative choices to ensure the moral of the story comes across. Some of these choices are related to article structure. There’s an entire paragraph devoted to just how dominant psychological approaches are in society and in public policy, a short section singing the praises of constructivist approaches because they’re more “anthropological”, an entire section that (while not explicitly doing so) addresses the shortcomings of psychological approaches as such approaches argue context doesn’t really matter because emotion is what it means to be human, and the final two sections celebrating and recommending that archaeology buddy up with history to access the historical context that apparently is always necessary for studying emotion in archaeology.

Other adroit narrative choices appear in how ST frames certain ideas, such as highlighting archaeology’s “linguistic turn” encouraging the reading of material culture like a text and discouraging archaeologists from using too heavy a psychological approach after exploring how emotions are located in relationships and not within people themselves.

Which pole am I? Where do I stand? Short answer: I’m not exclusive to either one, and my thesis bridges the two poles together. I’m tapping into my psychological background through my use of psychological approaches. I’m also doing lots of historical reading to build a contextual understanding. As for ST encouraging archaeology to embrace history, I agree. I have never been an archaeological purist and believe archaeology and history have a lot to learn from each other. Still, I diverge from ST in that while I believe material culture doesn’t need to rely on textual sources, it is enhanced by them.

While ST reviews what exists in the archaeology of emotion, she exhibits a clear preference of one pole of approaches over another. I have no problem with that. Authors should assert their points of view and ST does so in a way that is compelling without being confrontational. What is important is that the reader recognizes every researcher thinks differently, and that no article ever is truly unbiased.