We Have Never Been Latourian:
Archaeological Ethics and the Posthuman
Condition

T

IM

F

LOHR

S

ØRENSEN

This article is motivated by the recent proposal of a

‘symmetrical’ approach in

archaeology. Symmetrical archaeology takes its starting point in Bruno Latour

’s

contention that we have

– paradoxically – always been able to practice a

symmetry

between

humans

and

non-humans,

and

that

we

have,

simultaneously, also always been able to distinguish humans from non-
humans. It has been argued by its proponents that symmetrical archaeology
has ethical ramifications, yet this dimension remains only vaguely described in
the current literature. This article seeks to explore what it might mean to extend
ethics from humans to non-humans, and it contends that such a relationship is
already being practised. Archaeological practice and heritage management are
salient examples of how the ability to distinguish and conflate humans and
non-humans frequently occurs along the lines of a number of undeclared and
un-critiqued political and ethical logics. In effect, some things and some people
are embraced by an empathetic embroidery, while others are disenfranchised.
The article contends that a symmetrical principle in archaeology and heritage
poses central ethical challenges to the ways in which the archaeological Other is
defined and identified.

Keywords: symmetrical archaeology; humans; non-humans; ethics; body;
heritage

INTRODUCTION

Let me first briefly tell you the story about
Lasse. Lasse was a 10-year-old boy from
Denmark, who had cancer in one of his feet
and had to have it amputated (Skovsbøl 2010).
After learning that the cancer meant that he
would lose his foot, Lasse became very con-
cerned with the destiny of his foot and was
determined that it should not simply be dis-
carded as ordinary tissue waste, which is the
norm in Danish hospital practice. Lasse wanted

to part formally with his foot, and his parents,
the hospital and the local vicar agreed to his
wish in order to aid his emotional healing pro-
cess. Before his foot was amputated, the family
held a farewell dinner for Lasse

’s foot, where the

entire table was decorated in black: black table
cloth, black napkins, black candlelight, black
balloons. Upon the amputation of the foot, the
family held a formal funeral for it, keeping the
foot in a small, white coffin in the home until the
day of the funeral. Then the family went to the
cemetery and buried the foot, and the vicar held

ARTICLE

Norwegian Archaeological Review, 2013
Vol. 46, No. 1, 1

–18, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2013.779317

Tim Flohr Sørensen, Aarhus University, Department of Culture and Society, Section for Archaeology Moesgård, 8270
Højbjerg, Denmark. E-mail: [e-mail]

© 2013 Norwegian Archaeological Review

a eulogy over the severed body part. The funeral
was followed by a wake, where the dining table
was dressed in a kaleidoscope of colours and
spring flowers to celebrate that the cancer was
gone and that Lasse had been equipped with a
new

– artificial – foot to move on in life.

This story may remind us of Bruno Latour

’s

observations on the complicated relationship
between humans and non-humans, between
people and things. Defining

‘modernity’ as

the great divide, Latour (1993) argues that
there are no

‘premodern’ or ‘postmodern’ as

opposed to

‘modern’ humans: human beings

have always been able to distinguish humans
from non-humans, and they have always had
the capacity to confuse humans and non-
humans. Here, Latour (1993, pp. 10

–11, 47)

speaks of

‘translation’ or ‘mediation’ as

opposed to

‘purification’. ‘Translation’ and

‘mediation’ define the world as a mixture of
nature and society, while

‘purification’ estab-

lishes

a

clinical

ontological

distinction

between humans and non-humans. In this,
Latour

’s (1993, p. 11) point is that the non-

modern gaze considers the world through
both lenses simultaneously and that even
moderns have always been able to conflate as
well as separate humans and non-humans in
practice, but have never been explicit about
the relationship between the two categories
(Latour 1993, p. 51). Accordingly, things are
always integral parts of human society and
never apart from it (Latour 1992, 2005,
pp. 71

–72).

Latour (1993, pp. 142

–145) goes as far as to

propose a

‘parliament of things’ where objects

are democratized as a result of their inherently
hybridized ontology with people, being essen-
tially enmeshed in human existence. He argues
that

‘[b]y defending the rights of the human

subject to speak and to be the sole speaker, one
does not establish democracy; one makes it
increasingly more impracticable every day

’

(Latour 2004, p. 69). In Latour

’s view, true

democracy can emerge only if non-human
voices are uttered with the aid of human repre-
sentatives, thus indicating, effectively, that we
have never been (truly) democratic. Latour

would have us give democratic voice to non-
humans, i.e. to animals, tools, pottery, bronze
swords, jewellery, buildings, space ships, etc.,
because they constitute an imbricated part of
the

‘common world’ of humans and non-

humans, emerging as a

‘collective’ rather

than a

‘society’ (Latour 2004, pp. 47, 53–54,

62, ch. 5, 2005, p. 75).

The question is whether this is a valid

proposition. Many archaeologists would
probably answer readily and with little hes-
itation in the negative. Whereas Latour
(1993) argues that

‘we have never been mod-

ern

’, because ‘we’ (i.e. human beings) have

never been able to categorically separate
humans from non-humans or nature from
society, the modernist ground on which
archaeologists rest (Thomas 2004) implies
that that they have never been Latourian,
i.e. they have always been able to discrimi-
nate humans from non-humans. As Tim
Dant argues, most of the time moderns
hardly give any thought to things and, if we
do,

‘we regard them as “mere” objects that

do not in any way compete with humans for
status as beings. Objects are there for us to
use and dispose of in whatever way we wish;
we may treat them well or badly without any
concern for their rights or feelings because
they have none

’ (2005, p. 62).

In this, Dant cites a pedestrian rejection of

the democracy of things and alludes to a
potential ethics beyond that of humans
(we may of course observe that such a posthu-
man ethics is already realized in notions of
animal rights and animal welfare). This collo-
quial attitude to things, it may be argued, is
merely a stubborn and mind-numbingly auto-
mated reproduction of the Cartesian prejudice
that things are inanimate, dead matter and
hence inferior to humans. Thus, the capacity
to distinguish subjects from objects, humans
from non-humans, nature from society has
simply become part of an un-critiqued mod-
ern, Western doxa (Latour 1993, pp. 97

–103,

2004, pp. 45

–46).

Extending this logic to the ethical dimen-

sions of archaeological remains, we need to

2

Tim Flohr Sørensen

challenge the status of the human as a priori
privileged over the non-human, which calls for
a rethinking of a number of relations; for
instance, the relation between that which is
integrated into the organic body as opposed
to detachable and inorganic, non-bodily arte-
facts or the animate being in relation to the
inanimate object. Or, in other words, how,
why and with what legitimacy do archaeolo-
gists separate the prosthetic hand from the
organic hand, the amputated hand from the
whole body, the glove from the hand, the
wedding ring from the finger on the hand or
the hand from the tattoo on the hand? Do they
make arbitrary distinctions based on contem-
porary ontologies and ethics or is the aim to
try to approximate a hypothetical Other in
the past and her or his notions of human and
non-human, body and non-body?

The symmetrical relationship between hu-

mans and non-humans, and the

‘democracy’

that Latour advocates, should not be entirely
unfamiliar to archaeologists as it has, argu-
ably, already been effectuated for quite some
time in the field of heritage, in the sense that
things

– or, rather, some things – are protected

and treated as if charged with ethical rights
similar to those of humans (see also Harrison
2012, ch. 9). This discourse works on two
levels. One seeks to protect things from
destruction, while the other seeks to give peo-
ple access to objects and places. In discourses
on

‘heritage’ and ‘cultural property’ as unique

or irreplaceable the position of things is
uncannily similar to that of humans and the
rights of humans. On the one hand, institu-
tions such as UNESCO stipulate in the
Convention Concerning the Protection of the
World Cultural and Natural Heritage that the
disappearance of items of cultural heritage
‘constitutes a harmful impoverishment’ of all
nations of the world, which implies that the
loss of cultural heritage is a loss for humans
and for human society. On the other hand, the
widespread discourse on heritage in national
heritage agencies, in political agendas and at
historical tourist sites rarely specifies that pro-
tection of things from the past is decided by

humans and in the interest of humans, but
simply disseminates

‘heritage’ as a value in

its own right with an intrinsic and irreplace-
able importance (see Smith 2006, Waterton
and Smith 2009). However, only certain things
are cherished as indestructible or inviolable, or
so important that people should be given
access to them: some items become cherished
while others are relegated to a shadow exis-
tence as anonymous, mass objects or because
they are classified as undiagnostic or unrepre-
sentative. The political or moral power of
things that Latour (1992) identifies is thus
already a reality, but it issues forth more as
an oligarchy than a democracy, because the
privilege of having a

‘voice’ and being ‘heard’

is granted only to a few lucky things selected
by their spokespersons (or lobby) in current
heritage practice (see also Meskell 2010).

So, while Latour argues that there is an

unproductive asymmetry between humans and
non-humans, reproduced through the modernist
agenda, we may extend the problem into the
(modernist) practice of archaeology and heri-
tage. After introducing symmetrical archaeol-
ogy and its ethical contours, I explore a
number of cases and scenarios from archaeol-
ogy and the heritage industry that are ethically
charged, but which nevertheless tend to fall
under the radar of explicit ethical scrutiny,
despite being invested with explicit ethical deci-
sions and highly political consequences. This
allows for a critical scrutiny of the limits of ethics
and the range to which the symmetrical
approach has bearing for the field of ethics in
archaeology.

FROM HUMAN ETHICS TO MATERIAL
ETHICS

The modernist division of humans and
non-humans has been challenged within, for
instance, technology and culture studies in
recent decades. In an influential article Donna
Haraway (1985) thus proposed three

‘bound-

ary breakdowns

’, disputing the margins of,

respectively, humans and animals, organism
and machine, and the physical and the

We Have Never Been Latourian

3

non-physical (Haraway 1991, pp. 151

–154).

The work of Haraway, among others, has
been part of an expanding interest in social,
technological and philosophical imbrications
of humans and non-humans, and in the poten-
tial transcending of humanism and the privi-
leged position of the human. An array of
studies into posthumanism, new materialism
and speculative realism addresses ethical chal-
lenges to contemporary and future societies
(see,

e.g.,

Barad

1998,

Hayles

1999,

Badmington 2000, Bryant et al. 2011, van der
Tuin and Dolphijn 2010, Pyyhtinen and
Tamminen 2011, see also Verbeek 2005, 2006,
2011), while the implications are rarely seen as
historical let alone archaeological (but see
Dawney et al. in prep.).

Within archaeology, the Latourian and

posthumanist notion of a non-discriminatory
approach to humans and non-humans has
been embraced explicitly by the branch of
so-called

‘symmetrical archaeology’ (e.g.

Olsen 2003, 2012, Domanska 2006, Witmore
2006, 2007, Shanks 2007, Webmoor 2007,
Webmoor and Witmore 2008, Normark 2010).
This approach calls attention to the symmetry
between humans and non-humans in the
archaeological discipline, effectively levelling
the modernist opposition of people and things.
It thus highlights a number of interesting and
potentially necessary redirections in archaeol-
ogy, yet it also raises a number of challenging
issues.

The aim of symmetrical archaeology is,

allegedly, not to invoke any

‘simplistic’

equivalence of humans and non-humans, but
rather to appreciate their

‘distributed collec-

tive

’ and the complex entanglement of people

and things (Witmore 2007, p. 547). Bjørnar
Olsen (2003, 2006) thus takes up Latour

’s

notion of a democracy of things, and argues
that archaeology has overlooked things.
Despite its being the very

‘discipline of things’

(Olsen 2003, p. 89, Olsen et al. 2012), the focus
is always drawn to meta-theory, politics and
society. Instead, he appeals for an archaeol-
ogy that can embrace how non-humans and
humans are created in mutual collaboration

(see also Hodder 2012). He asks for an
approach that allows us to appreciate

‘how

objects construct the subject

’ (Olsen 2003,

p. 100) and how things are part of political
processes (Olsen 2006, p. 17). Olsen wishes not
only to include non-humans as social partici-
pants at an analytical level, but even more to
be

‘pragmatic’ about the accounts of archae-

ological and historical

‘collectives’ (Olsen

2007, p. 586).

For Michael Shanks, the politics of this

agenda is also about

‘who we are’ (2007,

p. 591), and the symmetrical

‘attitude’ is thus

about opening up to new identities for people
and things. In this, it is important to stress that a
symmetrical approach allegedly does not col-
lapse humans and non-humans into one uni-
form identity: things are not the same or equal,
just because they are approached as symmetri-
cally constituted (Olsen 2012, pp. 211

–213,

Olsen et al. 2012, p. 13), but are instead partici-
pants in

‘heterogeneous networks’ (Shanks

2007, p. 593, Witmore 2007, p. 550) or

‘mix-

tures

’ (Witmore 2007, p. 559, Webmoor and

Witmore 2008, p. 59, Olsen 2010, pp. 132

–

136). As such, there are no autonomies: all
objects and subjects are entangled and depen-
dent (Hodder 2012). These new identities

– and

their symmetrical ontology

– obviously have

bearings on the political and ethical aspects of
the beings that inhabit the world.

Interestingly, Christopher Witmore anno-

unces in his manifesto for symmetrical archae-
ology that the symmetrical levelling is

‘neither

axiological nor ethical

’ (2007, p. 547). Soon

after he argues that

‘a symmetrical archaeol-

ogy builds on the strengths of what we do as
archaeologists

’ (Witmore 2007, p. 549).

For some, however, it may be somewhat dif-

ficult to see how the practice of archaeology can
be divorced from ethics, and it is particularly
curious to see an ethical claim abandoned in
the light of symmetrical archaeology

’s necessary

association with Latour

’s democratizing project.

So, if anything, symmetrical archaeology is
involved in a political project, and it seems to
me to be naive to consider practice and politics
disconnected from the ethical field.

4

Tim Flohr Sørensen

A number of writings under the moniker of

symmetrical archaeology have indeed expli-
citly highlighted ethics as a direct consequence
of the symmetry principle. For instance,
Shanks (2007) declares that symmetry is pre-
cisely an ethical principle, even though the
exact implications remain somewhat unclear.
It seems that a postcolonial attitude to the
representation of the past is part of this ethical
and political principle, revolving around criti-
cal judgements of how archaeologists may be
‘speaking’ for the past in its absence (Shanks
2007, p. 592). Ewa Domanska (2006, p. 172)
makes the ethical stakes slightly more explicit,
arguing that a material ethics implies, in part,
that things are not simply seen as commodities
or tools for human use, and she cites Silvia
Benso

’s critique of the objectification of

things, i.e. that things are reduced to objects
(Domanska 2006, p. 183). While this line of
thinking is not elaborated much further and
stops short of making specific claims as to
pragmatic ethics, Timothy Webmoor suggests
that

‘care’ for things through archaeological

practice, representation and heritage

‘eco-

logy

’ is in essence a care for ‘our collective

selves

’ (Webmoor 2012, p. 21). Olsen (2012,

pp. 219

–220) adopts a similar approach in

moving towards an ethical

‘care’ for things,

emphasizing that such an embrace is not
achieved by anthropomorphizing non-humans,
but can instead be exemplified in the prac-
tical curation of things in museum collections
and archaeological conservation. Here, Olsen
argues, things are not cherished for the ways in
which humans may see them as valuable, beau-
tiful, meaningful or as commodities, but simply
for what they are

‘in their own thingness’ (Olsen

2012, p. 220, but see also Morphy 2010).

HIERARCHIES OF HERITAGE

While proponents of the symmetrical principle
in archaeology have claimed to identify a lack
of specific ethical consideration of things in
the contemporary world, it may, nevertheless,
be argued that certain archaeological objects
are in fact treated as if endowed with an

unquestionable value, similar to that which is
otherwise ascribed to humans within the mod-
ernist paradigm. These non-human objects do
not simply remain classified under the generic
token of

‘archaeological evidence’ or ‘prehis-

toric remains

’. They become canonized as

‘cultural heritage’, and are certainly attributed
with power not unlike the one normally
referred to under the heading of

‘fetishism’.

Objects of heritage are thus indestructible,
secularly sacred, due to their uniqueness or
their perceived cultural value, conforming
very well to Latour

’s notion of the ever-

present conflation and exchange of human
and non-human

‘competences’ (Latour 1999,

p. 182).

In a sense, some non-humans thus achieve a

status of having

‘thing rights’, being protected

by international as well as national conven-
tions in what has been characterized as a

‘heri-

tage cult

’ (Raj Isar 2011, p. 39), framing an

unquestionable imperative to protect, con-
serve and disseminate whatever is raised to
the category of

‘cultural heritage’ (see also

Domanska 2006, pp. 177

–178). Interestingly,

these rules and regulations serve to protect
selected non-humans against humans (for an
illustrative case, see Bille 2012). And when
these fetishized non-humans are from time to
time endangered, destroyed or

‘executed’ as if

they were humans, as in the case of the
Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, the reac-
tion from certain members of the international
community sometimes seems to indicate that
precisely these non-humans are at least as pre-
cious as humans (Holtorf 2005b, Harrison
2012, pp. 186

–188, see also Francioni and

Lenzerini 2003).

But we are still left with the question: why

should some things be preserved? Surely, we
cannot proceed along the lines of the wide-
spread happy-go-lucky attitude in the heritage
industry that simply prescribes that

‘heritage

is good for you

’ (as coined by Furtado 2006,

but see also Harrison 2009, Smith 2006), based
on the often unqualified dogma that

‘heritage’

is circumscribed by an unquestionable time-
less and eternal value, that it is something that

We Have Never Been Latourian

5

we can all learn from, something whose
absence would deprive us of cultural identity
and humanity. In this perspective,

‘heritage’ is

meant to outlive the temporal scale of indivi-
dual human life and become a shared resource
for all humanity at all times, e.g. in
UNESCO

’s concept of ‘outstanding universal

value

’ (Cleere 1996, Jokilehto 2006). Hence,

objects and places of cultural heritage are
canonized as particularly valuable for humans
and not as things in their own right (Olsen
2012, pp. 218

–219), which is not surprising as

long as the term cultural heritage is main-
tained (Webmoor 2012, p. 15).

The World Heritage Declaration is, never-

theless, one thing, while the more mundane
and local canonization of ancient and histor-
ical artefacts and places remains less explicitly
conceived (see also Omland 2006). In these
cases the reason why only some non-human
remains are protected against destruction
remains largely unstated, which means that
numerous non-humans are readily given over
to oblivion once the archaeologists have
counted the postholes and the contractor is
ready to build the superhighway. In this
light, it appears that we happily accept that
only some non-humans enjoy rights of protec-
tion (see also Webmoor 2012, p. 14).

Another set of issues emerges when we turn

from heritage as protection to heritage as the
right to access. The latter can readily be con-
sidered an extension of the Latourian demo-
cratization of things, because giving access to
things is a way of letting them be

‘heard’.

However, the majority of archaeological arte-
facts are never made available to public scru-
tiny, but stored in museum facilities beyond
public access. In addition, items that are
deemed unimportant and unworthy of preser-
vation are subjected to experiments and
destruction in the name of science, where
objective knowledge of their composition,
date and provenance is achieved. Frequently,
samples are extracted from logs of wood, pot-
tery, bone fragments and metals, but not
necessarily to shed light on the sampled arte-
fact itself. Oftentimes, the sampled artefacts

serve as statistical material that helps to illu-
minate more important finds.

The politics of ostracisation stand in sharp

contrast to the common archaeological atti-
tude to the mundane and the trivial as offering
the most informative access to the reality of
the past (Lucas 2012, p. 125). Whereas the
dramatic and unique are often mistrusted in
archaeology as extraordinary and unrepresen-
tative of past societies, the repetitive produc-
tion of flint artefacts, mud bricks, pottery, pins
and pendants is argued to offer access to a
more complete picture of past realities. This
seems to suggest that there is a tension
between the widespread canonization of
objects

such as the

Ur Standard,

the

Trundholm Chariot, the Terracotta Army,
Stonehenge,

Great

Zimbabwe

and

the

Acropolis (Fig. 1) and archaeological knowl-
edge production based on the myriads of
undiagnostic potsherds, flint flakes and bone
fragments that are excavated throughout the
world, but which readily fall into popular
oblivion,

because

they

are

not

made

accessible.

Metaphorically speaking, and expanding

on Latour

’s laconic terminology, we may

observe how some non-humans

– the ‘faceless

minions

’ (Witmore 2007, p. 552) – are forced

to do the filthy slave labour for an imperialist
archaeology and a heritage industry on a mis-
sion to colonize the past, providing for an
enlightened present. These anonymous, disen-
franchised artefacts are excavated simply to
do the hard work of manufacturing raw data
for the sake of the celebrity non-humans on
the canonized heritage lists, contextualizing,
illuminating and framing the celebrity non-
humans. Within this scheme of things, these
non-humans function as the wretched masses
that continuously build nations, narratives
and knowledge, but at the same time are trea-
ted as replaceable and disposable second-class
heritage citizens; they can be exploited at our
convenience and then relegated to the shadow-
life of statistical material (Fig. 2). As such,
many non-humans are treated in the same
way as colonial rulers treated the colonized,

6

Tim Flohr Sørensen

‘with little or no concern for their welfare’
(Dant 2005, p. 62). They are, after all,

‘just

things

’. While some non-humans find a place

in the limelight, others are stowed away in
storage facilities where the sun never shines.

Hence, if there is any legitimacy in inscrib-

ing non-humans into a democracy, it also
means that mundane, trivial and non-
diagnostic artefacts should be incorporated
more conspicuously into the heritage agenda,
as they traditionally have been in archaeology
(Lucas 2012, ch. 2), so that

‘heritage celebri-

ties

’ are not privileged over the masses. This is

a challenge that highlights how ethically and
politically charged a symmetrical principle in
archaeology and heritage practice needs to be,
if we are to buy into its agenda (see also Solli
2011,

Harrison

2012).

A

symmetrical

relationship

between

humans

and

non-

humans can never be merely analytical
(Witmore 2007, p. 547), and cannot exclu-
sively

concern

the

relationship

between

humans and non-humans, because it essen-
tially hinges on a

‘flat ontology’ (Harman

2009, pp. 207

–208), and hence advocates a

levelling not just of people and things, but
also of non-humans among other non-
humans. Rodney Harrison thus argues that
the

‘flat notion of the social’ necessitates an

‘inclusive sense of ethics that acknowledges
not only the universal rights of humans, but
also those of non-humans

’ (2012, p. 218).

Recognizing the difficulties in defining what
constitutes

the

rights

of

non-humans,

Harrison stipulates that part of the problem
may be that we are not accustomed to

Fig 1. The Acropolis, Greece: a renowned and respected heritage celebrity. Photograph by Troels Myrup
Kristensen. Used by kind permission.

We Have Never Been Latourian

7

communicating with non-humans, and that
the exchange between humans and non-
humans is temporally contingent, or emer-
gent. The latter in particular implies that ethi-
cal relations are not necessarily stable or
eternal, but that they can change and dissolve
(Harrison 2012, pp. 218

–219).

ETHICS AND THE (POST)HUMAN
BODY

In effect, this implies that the ethical issues
addressed by Latour and the posthuman para-
digm are not entirely irrelevant for archaeology,
no matter how modernist its foundation may be,
and are not just of theoretical or conceptual
import. In an archaeological perspective, the
question emerges as to whether modernity

’s

immediate readiness to ascribe ethical rights
solely to humans (and animals) does justice to
the communities that archaeologists excavate;
communities that may precisely have seen a
piece of jewellery as inseparable from the buried
individual or who would have experienced an
artefact that archaeologists consider to be a
‘mere thing’ as deeply animated by a soul or
constituting a full, independent ontological
form of existence in its own right. In this light,
the modern, archaeological relegation of such

‘things’ to the status of dead, inanimate matter is
hardly justifiable.

Latour

’s (1999, p. 182) call for incorporat-

ing things and people into a flat ontology,
where humans and non-humans overlap and
are capable of swapping competences and
properties could, accordingly, be seen in the
light of much older anthropological insights
into the relationship between humans, things
and the animated world. Under the headings
of fetishism, animism and perspectivism, we
know from ethnography that objects are
sometimes experienced and conceptualized as
embodied parts of people or as having imma-
nent power (e.g. Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988, Spyer
1998, Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004, Pels
1998, 2010, Pedersen 2001, Hornborg 2006,
Holbraad

2007,

Willerslev

2007).

Such

enchantments of non-humans may be more
difficult to detect in an archaeological or his-
torical context, but in light of ethnographic
observations it seems naive to automatically
exclude the possibility that certain finds could
have played an active role in past societies as
enchanted objects with embedded power or
personality, or even with their own indepen-
dent subjective perspective on the world. In
this light, the question is whether archaeologi-
cal artefacts were sometimes circumscribed in

Fig. 2. Undiagnostic potsherds, or

‘faceless minions’. Photograph by Tim Flohr Sørensen.

8

Tim Flohr Sørensen

the past by a similar animism and what the
ethical implications of such cases might be.

Likewise, the complex entanglement of peo-

ple and things may assume concrete form in
corporeal integrations of humans and non-
humans, where things can become integral to
personhood or extensions of a human. We
may refer to the rather trivial example of the
wedding ring that is oftentimes considered so
important a part of a person that s/he is buried
with it or it assumes the role of an heirloom
with an immanent power. However, the point
is not simply that things can have power or
constitute parts of people. In the light of the
issues raised with Harrison above, the crucial
challenge for archaeology is to be able to cope
with the fact that human

–non-human rela-

tions may oscillate and change character
over time. This is not only a question of deter-
mining what archaeologists should regard as
human and non-human, but also of recogniz-
ing the changing identities of the human body
in history (e.g. Butler 1993, Gil 1998, van
Dijck 2005, Robb and Harris forthcoming).

Moving on from the wedding ring, we may

consider whether personalized items, such as
adornment in the form of piercings, tattoos,
scars and implants, form part of the human
body, and whether they should, as a conse-
quence, be granted the same ethical status as
the rest of the human body. We may hypothe-
tically distinguish between attributes that have
been inscribed, engraved or implanted on the
body as opposed to those that may be
detached and re-attached as separate objects.
Consider, for example, the tattoos on the skin
of the so-called Ice Man from the Alps
(e.g. Sjøvold et al. 1995). The tattoos are inte-
grated into the skin of the person, and, despite
having been applied artificially, they do not
seem to be regarded as an alienable part of the
Ice Man. Unlike his tools and clothes, the
tattoos are not separable from his body, but
can he be understood without either of them?
On display in the South Tyrol Museum of
Archaeology in Bolzano, museum curators
have not carved the tattoos from his skin,
and probably would never consider doing so,

but his axe, bow and other equipment are not
displayed as equally integral to his bodiness.

In many archaeological cases it is, indeed,

extremely difficult to recognize when a non-
congenital or inorganic application is to be
understood as something the person consid-
ered to be an essential part of her- or himself.
Marie Louise Stig Sørensen (1995, p. 102)
observes how female dress in the North
German Bronze Age is characterized by
being fixed to certain positions on the body,
by often being attached permanently to the
body and by being highly visible. While all
kinds of attire can be seen as extensions of
the body, inseparable objects

– objects that

are forged onto the body

– draw the attention

to a special construction of bodiness and iden-
tity. The status of these irremovable artefacts
as part of the person

’s ontology or identity is a

matter of cultural definitions, but we may at
least stipulate that a bracelet that cannot be
removed from the arm and which is highly
visible

– and thereby socially pronounced –

does not simply represent a personal construc-
tion of identity for the wearer. The bracelet
can be integrated into the social perception of
the individual

’s body or may even have been

imposed on the body by social norms, creating
and presencing (as opposed to merely repre-
senting) her identity or sense of self (Sørensen
1995, p. 108).

This problem about the limits of bodiness

also finds exemplification in the story about
Lasse and the foot that was amputated.
Ethically speaking, Lasse

’s foot was consid-

ered and treated as a legitimate part of Lasse
– by himself, his family and his community –
regardless of whether it was attached to the
rest of his body or not; it had historically been
part of him, which is why it still constituted a
part of Lasse even when it had been severed.
So, if Lasse

’s severed foot cannot simply be

seen as ontologically alien or

‘other’ from the

whole, integrated body, what about his new
artificial limb? This insistence on an ontologi-
cal persistence in the relationship between the
part and the whole of a person breaks down
the barrier ordinarily maintained between

We Have Never Been Latourian

9

what is to be granted the status of body
proper, of body part or of

‘artificial’ extension

of the body.

A recent study comparing the experience

of

osseointegrated

prostheses

(prostheses

implanted into the users

’ bone) and prostheses

suspended with sockets showed that the
integration of the prosthesis into the bone
facilitated the experience of the prosthesis

’

incorporation into the body proper (Lundberg
et al. 2011). It should be mentioning, however,
that an anthropological dissertation on people
with socketed prostheses has testified that
people can likewise experience the detach-
able prosthesis as a part of the body, stating
that the prosthesis

‘is also me’ (Østergaard

2006).

Taking this line of thinking a step further,

Vivian Sobchack (2005, 2010) has accounted
for the sequence of events between losing her
leg to cancer and getting an artificial leg. She
describes the process of changes from being
used to walking on two legs, to having her leg
amputated and having to walk on crutches

–

which she describes as having three legs

– and

occasionally hobbling around on her one
remaining healthy leg. This is what she terms
a

‘choreography for one, two and three legs’,

having to learn and identify with an altered
bodiness and sensation of self. She explains
how the number of legs she was equipped
with at any given time had to be the basis for
how she defined herself and her bodily being.
The presence of two legs, the absence of a leg
or the temporary equipment with three

‘legs’

or even a trolley in the supermarket framed
her understanding of herself, regardless of
what was human tissue and what was techni-
cally

‘artificial’ or a ‘tool’. The supermarket

trolley or the crutches thus approximate
humanness in the same way as an artificial
limb, and Sobchack maintains that they are
‘literally – if incompletely – incorporated’
(2005, p. 57) into the ensemble constituting
the lived body, being

‘the ground of our inten-

tional movement acts, not the figure

’ (ibid).

Sobchack points to the fact that the integra-

tion of a tool or prosthesis into the perceptual

continuity of the whole body depends on
motor skills and the capacity to exercise the
‘one, two and three legged choreography’; the
integration works best the more the prosthesis
disappears into the perceptual background,
where one becomes less aware of its presence,
echoing Drew Leder

’s (1990) notion of the

‘absent body’. This illustrates that the rela-
tionship between human and non-human
does not need to be seen as a clear-cut dichot-
omy or as a stable or permanent continuity,
but can also unfold as sliding positions in a
spectrum of changeable possibilities. In all of
these cases, the margins of body and non-body
are compromised. It may be argued from a
modernist point of view, however, that this is
merely a perceptual, phenomenological or
subjective experience of bodiness and being,
whereas ethical concerns apply only to those
aspects of the body that can be recognized as
distinctly human and can be shared more
objectively as such.

However, the boundaries of the human

organism and the entire notion of the

‘body’

are in many instances breached, which has
consequences for how we relate to and situate
being human (Haraway 1991, Hayles 1999).
In an immediate and practical context, dispo-
sal practices highlight precisely the temporary
and unfixed character of body and bodiness
(see, e.g., papers in Rebay-Salisbury et al.
2010, Kuijt et al. forthcoming). Cremation is
one aspect of such bodily transience, where the
notion of and attitude to the human body in
contemporary Western societies as well as his-
torically can be seen as suspended between
integrity and fragmentation (Sørensen and
Rebay 2008, Sørensen

and Bille 2008,

Sørensen 2009). In the current West, crema-
tion transforms the body to

‘ashes’, perceived

as a new integrity of the body, yet this sub-
stance is most often composed of a fusion of
the human body, its dress and a casket. This is
not merely a condition of cremation in mod-
ern times, where technology and humanity
melt together; archaeological examples of cre-
mation also display a similar production of a
blended human-thing relationship. It may be

10

Tim Flohr Sørensen

illustrated at the Early Bronze Age locale of
Damsgård in north-western Denmark (Olsen
and Bech 1994), where a cremation site was
found beneath a burial mound. A woman had
been burnt in a shallow pyre-pit and the
remains of the cremation were then deposited
in an adjacent stone cist. The stone cist con-
tained a fragment of an arm bone, which had
merged partially with a bronze arm ring dur-
ing the cremation (Fig. 3), suggesting that the
people responsible for the disposal of the dead
person chose not to distinguish between
human and non-human matter after the

cremation, and that they were not primarily
concerned with the coherence of the body as a
purely

human

body

upon

being burnt

(Sørensen forthcoming).

There are, in other words, no purely human

remains upon cremation, and, after being
burnt, the human and non-human elements
are in many cases indistinguishable.

‘Ashes’

are a conglomerate of the partially or entirely
burnt human body, its organic and inorganic
dress, and the container in which (or the pyre
on which) the body was cremated. The ashes
are

– in all aspects of the term – posthuman.

Fig. 3. Bronze arm ring and fragment of human bone, Damsgård, northwestern Jutland, Denmark. After
Aner and Kersten (2001). Printed with permission from Nationalmuseet Copenhagen.

We Have Never Been Latourian

11

DISIDENTIFICATION

Altogether, these examples offer a spectacle
for thinking critically through the limits of
the human and the associated range of ethical
implications. A number of the issues described
above already have consequences for how
archaeology diagnoses and represents past
remains, while their ethical dimensions rarely
breach the confines of the human

–non-human

divide that Latour identifies in modernity, and
ethics hence sits comfortably within the mar-
gins of what is considered human. The over-
laps of people and things outlined above,
however, involve imbrications that make a
separation impossible, such as in the case of
tattoos or cremation. Taking these examples
seriously as modes of thinking about a poten-
tial posthuman ethics triggers a number of
challenges to archaeology with consequences
for cases that are less immediately recogniz-
able as ethically charged.

So, how should archaeologists relate ethi-

cally to a prehistoric scenario, encountering
bodies with things or even the absence of
bodies but the presence of things? If the
human body is to be considered with refer-
ence to ethical claims, what about its non-
congenital or non-human traits? If body
parts and prostheses, adornments and perso-
nal belongings can be members of the
human body, what about other objects that
have less intimate, integrated or personal
character

– where is the dividing line and

how do we make the judgement? If these
questions have any import it implies that
we can assume no straightforward justifica-
tion in identifying more immediately with
people than things. Within the flat ontology
of posthumanism, people and things operate
at the same ontological level, and for
archaeology this should of course also
include taking past conceptions of the char-
acter of the human or non-human Other
into account.

But such as critique also exposes a series of

contradictory practices in current archaeology
and heritage practice: while the archaeological

modernist attitude seems content to reject a
symmetrical principle, heritage management
happily elevates (some) non-humans to the
state of proper

‘beings’. Based on archaeol-

ogy

’s modernist disposition, it is not difficult

to understand why the discipline has trouble
embracing the relationship between humans
and non-humans as a mess, but why are non-
humans sometimes fetishized as entities of
timeless and universal value? And why are
only some non-humans treated in this way?
Heritage practice in effect suggests that the
ethical imperative to protect and conserve is
not only a matter of intellectual attitudes to
objects and places of cultural and educational
value, but equally shrouded in less explicit
mechanisms.

In a radical argument, Brit Solli (2011) con-

tends that certain objects of heritage can
‘defend themselves’ and constitute ‘an essen-
tial heritage

’ by way of their age, anomaly and

beauty (2011, pp. 46

–47). This is an argument

for a

‘mitigated essentialism’ (2011, p. 47): the

universal recognition of certain material qua-
lities that are claimed to be so pervasive and
make it

‘self-evident for everyone that this is a

treasure to be cherished

’. When Solli identifies

heritage items that can defend themselves and
make themselves heard, it indicates that the
thing speaks to us, that it touches us. This
seems to suggest that the past can be not only
so close, affectively, that we can almost touch
it, but also so impressive or pressing that we
are automatically touched by it (see also
Wingfield 2010). It is precisely this affective
quality that situates some objects of heritage
very close to the fetish, and, while there is
nothing wrong with the fetish, it does result
in inherently inconsistent ethical obligations
towards non-humans. For something to be
understood as fetish, it hinges on a human
‘believer’ acknowledging the object as
endowed with a spirit or an agency, being
animated and animating. Heritage objects, in
other words, depend on a human subject
situated in cultural or perceptual proximity
in order to identify with and respond to
its agent-like qualities.

‘Age’, ‘anomaly’,

12

Tim Flohr Sørensen

‘beauty’, ‘treasure’: terms whose essence and
meaning, and not least political use and
fetishisation, relentlessly shift and remain con-
tingent on their historical and cultural con-
text. So if things are not identified as old,
special, pretty or precious, where are they
situated in the heritage hierarchy? Can we
hear them at all?

Two points of critique furthermore emerge

as a consequence of heritage fetishism: if the
thing can

‘defend itself’, does it really need

human representation? And is the immediate
identification

with

affectively

powerful

objects not a call to attend even more care-
fully to the

‘missing masses’ and the ‘faceless

minions

’ at the expense of ‘heritage celebri-

ties

’? These questions suggest the need for

moving closer to and, at the same time,
further away from the archaeological Other
and the heritage object, depending on one

’s

given subjective position. Through an analy-
tical exercise of disidentification it thus
becomes possible to share without erasing
differences (Medina 2003), which allows the
archaeological practice and heritage work to
appreciate situations and contexts where
human

and

immediately

recognizable

human qualities are decentred. Sharing, in
this connection, is about diagnosing continu-
ities between humans and non-humans, while
at the same time being susceptible to histori-
cally and culturally contingent contexts and
their heterogeneity. This means that the con-
ventional archaeological practice of interpre-
tation needs to be placed at the foreground of
this ethical task, because it seeks to under-
stand how people, things, subjects, objects,
abjects, nature, society and what have you,
might have been situated in the past. Hence,
a symmetrical principle or flat ontology
should not be claimed as a universal condi-
tion or constitute an a priori directive for our
understanding of past Others, as it forecloses
the archaeological importance of trying to
understand how human-thing relationships
and ontologies might have looked in the
past. Accordingly, we may need to become
more familiar with the alien Other, and more

distant from the familiar, which compels us
to be able to address, approach and
empathize with the Other without being
able to identify with her or him (see also
Graves-Brown 2011).

CONCLUSIONS AND CONSEQUENCES

While the title of this article speaks in the voice
of the deniers of a confusion of humans and
non-humans, it also seeks to situate a
Latourian approach to things and people
(and parts of people) within an ethical discus-
sion of the practice of archaeology

– whether

conventional or

‘symmetrical’ – and the field

of cultural heritage. The article has argued
that archaeological ethics are located on
dynamic

and

sliding

scales,

oscillating

between the deeply reflective and the casually
intuitive, and that any discussion of ethics is
not (and should not be) characterized by con-
sensus (Tarlow 2006, p. 199). The aim has
been to move beyond the prevailing discussion
of ethical practice that dominates the archae-
ological debate, centred on the handling of
human remains (e.g. Scarre 2006, Kaufmann
and Rühli 2010), looting and the trading of
cultural property (e.g. Hamilakis 2003) or the
potential conflict between archaeologists and
indigenous people and their descendants
(e.g. Watkins 2003). The objective of the arti-
cle has instead been to address the ethical
implications of the de facto sliding scales of
humans and non-humans in the light of the
recent onset of Latour-inspired symmetrical
agendas in archaeology. The aim has been, in
other words, not to evaluate the legitimacy of
a Latourian anthropology or a symmetrical
archaeology, but to explore their conse-
quences for the ethical dimensions of archae-
ology and heritage practice.

Without disarming my argument entirely,

I do want to flag a disclaimer, underlining
that certain aspects of this article have been
more polemic than others. I personally do not
think that the conflation of subject and object
in a Latourian sense is unproblematic and I do
believe that there are very good reasons to give

We Have Never Been Latourian

13

humans primacy over non-humans in terms of
ethics

– also when it compromises so-called

‘cultural heritage’. I would like to suggest,
nevertheless, that any polemic offers the
potential to question ready-made normativity,
and in this case I believe that the common-
sense, unqualified rejection of the ethical
claims of non-humans should be challenged.

It should be made clear that I am not trying

to argue that all artefacts and occurrences
from the past, or the present, should be treated
with the same ethical claim as living or
recently deceased human beings. I am, rather,
trying to question where we draw the line
between those phenomena that are treated as
if they can be subject to ethical claims and
those that cannot. The issue has been
addressed at several levels: whether non-
bodily non-humans should be included in
ethical scrutiny and if they should be given
rights similar to those of human beings,
whether there is any justification for singling
out

spectacular

monuments

as

more

important than fragments of anonymous,
mass-produced,

mundane

objects,

and

whether there is any ethical legitimacy in
defining human remains as empathically clo-
ser to the researcher than non-human objects.

If Harrison (2012, pp. 217

–220) is correct in

characterizing the ethics of heritage as contin-
gent, this also indicates that we have a respon-
sibility for being susceptible to the possibility
of decay and disappearance as positive quali-
ties of an object, place or practice. Some qua-
lities of human

–non-human relations are

precisely temporal and may not be captured
best by sustainability (in the sense of durabil-
ity). If heritage is not simply a set of tangible
relics or intangible expressions and practices,
but something constituted as relational and
emergent (Harrison 2012, p. 226), then one
of its primary qualities may be its capacity
for deterioration. In the end, we may, hence,
raise the question if of whether a Latourian
attitude to archaeology and heritage should
pay more attention not only to the symmetry

Fig. 4. Lille Bamse. Animated for some; an alienable thing for others; himself seemingly untroubled by the
posthuman condition. Photograph by Tim Flohr Sørensen.

14

Tim Flohr Sørensen

of humans and non-humans, nature and
society, but also to the emergence and dissolu-
tion of relations, in effect allowing things of
the past not to be conserved (see also Holtorf
2005a, 2005b).

If we are to take the symmetrical proposi-

tion seriously or at least some of the agenda

’s

posthuman element, it involves at least two
propositions: first, we need to re-evaluate not
only notions of human and non-human, but
also the capability to identify varieties of inter-
mediary and fluctuating beings in the archae-
ological record, and, second, there is a need to
recognize the symmetry between non-humans
in various forms of being and their temporal
properties. In the end, the question emerges: is
there any legitimacy in maintaining the non-
human object simply as an

‘object’, denied of

its right to be treated under the banner of
ethical standards, if it was treated and concep-
tualized in prehistory as

‘alive’, having had

‘personhood’ or was an inseparable part of a
prehistoric human being? Such an object is, of
course, part of the pre-modern (or a-modern)
mindset that Latour identifies, which in his
view has never fully been replaced or revolu-
tionized by modernity. So, we have always
been fetishizing, animating and conflating
the perspectives of humans and non-humans,
even though many (or most?) archaeologists
and curators today might argue that at least
they have never been Latourian.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The main body of this article was written when
I enjoyed a Marie Curie research fellowship at
the University of Cambridge on the Forging
Identities project, funded by EC Framework
7. Basic ideas in the article were presented at a
Forging Identities workshop on ethics and
politics in 2010, and discussion with the parti-
cipating PhD students stimulated me to move
on with the manuscript. A number of indivi-
duals have contributed significantly in the
advanced

work

with

this

article:

Ben

Davenport, Marie Louise Stig Sørensen,
Juliane Wammen, and in particular Dacia

Viejo-Rose and Mikkel Bille. Moreover, I
am very grateful for highly valuable com-
ments and critique provided by two peer
reviewers, Rodney Harrison and an anon-
ymous referee. All mistakes remain my own.

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18

Tim Flohr Sørensen

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