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Posthumanism in Archaeology: An Introduction

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posted on 2021-06-09, 10:14 authored by Manuel Fernández-Götz, Andrew Gardner, Guillermo Díaz de Liaño, Oliver JT Harris
Posthumanism is a growing field of interdisciplinary study that has emerged, principally in the last 20 years, as a broad church which seeks to reconceptualize human beings’ relationships with the world. At its heart, Posthumanism seeks to destabilize and question the category of ‘human’, which it sees as having previously been treated as transcendent and ahistorical. In its place, the figure of the posthuman aims to capture the complex and situated nature of our species’ existence, outside traditional dichotomies like culture and nature, mind and body, person and environment, and so on. From animal studies (e.g. Despret 2016; Wolfe 2009), via a rekindled attention to the material world (Coole & Frost 2010) to the cutting edge of quantum physics (Barad 2007), Posthumanism draws on a diverse range of inspiration (Ferrando 2019). This diversity also covers a significant internal dissonance and difference, with some posthumanists taking relational approaches, others arguing for the essential qualities of things, some focusing primarily on material things without humans and others calling for explicitly feminist investigations.

History

Author affiliation

School of Archaeology and Ancient History

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

Cambridge Archaeological Journal

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

issn

0959-7743

eissn

1474-0540

Copyright date

2021

Available date

2021-06-09

Language

en

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