Author: Adam Smith

I am a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Archaeology Program. My research and writing are focused on issues of power, authority, and sovereignty in early complex societies and my fieldwork is located in the the South Caucasus. I've been conducting archaeological investigations in Armenia since 1992 and am particularly interested in how the material world of landscapes and objects shaped--and continue to shape--our political lives.

The epitome of unexpected use: The Water-Cooler Canon

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This from Mike Bobick with many thanks.

This amazing video that is but one of many examples of everyday items (beanbags, water coolers, abstract minimalist techno that has now been successfully co-opted for military uses. I thus present the watercooler as modern weapon. If you are ever in need of an assemblage that now runs the gamut from object of workplace gossip to new military weapon, there’s always the water cooler.

One can only wonder how long it will take for this device to be deployed in ways that transform the ridiculous into the repugnant.  The pepper spraying of seated UC Davis Occupy protesters is an appropriate case to juxtapose with the water cooler canon.  An assemblage (pepper spray) initially designed as a non-lethal alternative for situations where citizens might pose a threat to others or themselves was misused to inflict harm upon citizens who posed no threat whatsoever.  The incident exposed the limits of what we might call an assemblage’s “toleration”.  Ill used by the police, the pepper spray incited the citizenry and shifted the political terrain away from weapons of enforcement and back to the “weapons of the weak”.

When is an umbrella not an umbrella, a cautionary tale for archaeology

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Erroll Morris’s short film on the “Umbrella Man” in Abraham Zapruder’s film of JFK’s assassination provides a wonderful example of the difficulties in interpreting things.  What seems at first glance to be a sinister clue to a wider plot to kill the president may in fact be something quite different.  Take a look here.

Archaeologies of Sovereignty

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The new issue of Annual Review of Anthropology contains an article of mine examining the emerging archaeological investigations of sovereignty.  From the abstract:

Archaeology has long sublimated an account of the political into a series of proxy concepts such as cities, civilizations, chiefdoms, and states. Recently, however, the archaeology of political association has been revitalized by efforts to forward a systematic account of the political, attentive to the creation and maintenance of sovereignty in practical negotiations between variously formalized authorities and a publically specified community of subjects. This new, and largely inchoate, archaeology of sovereignty has pushed the field to attend to the practical production of political regimes and the material mediations that articulate authorities and subjects. This review is intended to highlight the latent principles that draw this dispersed literature into a shared archaeological concern with sovereignty by sketching the intellectual crises that created the space for its emergence and the key concepts that orient current research. Taken together, the works discussed here point to a new concern with the dynamics of authorization and subjection across a wide range of political practices.

“I am pleased to provide you complimentary one-time access to my Annual Reviews article as a PDF file (http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/eprint/Gtc6VXqVGmW5Ns6uhBqb/full/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145754), for your own personal use. Any further/multiple distribution, publication, or commercial usage of this copyrighted material requires submission of a permission request addressed to the Copyright Clearance Center (http://www.copyright.com/).”

Podcasts – A History of the World in 100 Objects

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As a followup to a prior post, here are the collected podcasts to the BBC series: A History of the World in 100 Objects.

BBC – Podcasts – A History of the World in 100 Objects.

The presumptive definitive nature of the list has my contrarian side wondering what would constitute a counter-list?  Well, my first nominee is the skeleton of Piltdown Man.  Presumably this is still somewhere in the British museum too?

Speculative Realism

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As part of a reading/writing group that I’m participating in, I’ve been catching up with the impact of the wider material turn in philosophy. In particular, I’ve been trying to get a handle on speculative realism and Grant Harman’s call for an “Object Oriented Philosophy”. On the one hand, the project seems (reading selfishly) to provide a robust argument for the centrality of an archaeological engagement with the world, one attentive to particular things rather than a homogeneous class defined as “the object”. On the other hand, the work leads to a peculiar imputation of psychic faculties to things modeled on a generic human psyche. So although things become critical to the world at large, it is not a specifically social world where things work differently than we do but rather a generic world where things act in human terms. Does ending anthropocentrism in our theoretical engagement with things necessarily end in anthropomorphism? Is that a significant improvement in our analytical stance? For sources and discussion, here is a link to Harman’s blog.

ARISC Graduate Fellowships CFP

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The American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC) announces the availability of US graduate fellowships in support of research in the South Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, and/or Azerbaijan). Awards will be made for a maximum of $1500 each. Projects in all fields in the social sciences and humanities are eligible. Proposals will be judged on their quality and on the potential of the research to strengthen scholarship on the Southern Caucasus. The purpose of the fellowship is to help cover travel to and/or living expenses in the Southern Caucasus. During his/her stay in the Southern Caucasus, the fellow is expected to give an ARISC sponsored presentation on a subject related to his/her research. The fellow will acknowledge ARISC in any publication that emerges from the research carried during the fellowship.

Application requirements: Please send a complete application including the application form, a project statement of not more than 3 pages, work schedule, budget, and curriculum vitae, by December 30, 2011 to info@arisc.org. Two letters of recommendation must also be submitted. All information must be received by December 30, 2011 in order for the applicant to be considered for the fellowship.

Please see http://arisc.org/RESOURCES/Funding-Opportunities/ARISC-Fellowships for the full description of the fellowship as well as the application form.

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