Tobias L. Kienlin

# Social life and the material world: a reappraisal of practice theory in Archaeology*

## ABSTRACT

This paper revisits the role of practice theory in shaping archaeological understandings of sociality and materiality. It argues that theories of practice, as developed by Giddens, Bourdieu and subsequent scholars, remain indispensable for analysing the interplay between society and the material world. Against the background of recent post-humanist and symmetrical approaches that decentre human agency and promote distributed or material agencies, this study maintains a critical stance towards such 'turns' that risk de-humanising archaeology. Instead, it emphasises the enduring relevance of practice-based perspectives that view social life as constituted through human activities intertwined with material arrangements, without dissolving the distinctive richness of human intentionality and agency. By engaging with both classical and contemporary debates, the paper highlights archaeology's long-standing yet often overlooked contribution to theorising material culture and critiques the recurrent reinvention of these concerns within the broader 'material turn'. Ultimately, it calls for reaffirming the critical and interpretive potential of practice theory as a humanist framework for understanding the social and material conditions of past life.

## KEYWORDS

materiality, social theory, practice theory, material turn, post-humanism

* I am indebted to my friend and colleague Paweł Valde-Nowak for the invitation to attend the Kraków conference 'Present and Future of Archaeology' celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Archaeology of the Jagiellonian University and to contribute to this volume of the Acta Archaeologica Carpathica. For their comments and discussion of related topics in the context of the Cologne lecture series 'Sociality – Materiality – Practice' in 2020, on which this paper is drawing, I am grateful to Richard Bußmann, Artur Ribeiro, Theodore Schatzki, Andrew Gardner, John Barrett and Stefan Schreiber – none of whom, of course, would share all the views expressed here, and all faults are entirely my own.

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# I. SOCIALITY, MATERIALITY AND THE ‘POST-HUMAN’ CHALLENGE

Prehistoric archaeology has a long tradition of theorising the materiality of social life, and recent decades have seen a proliferation of exciting, although often conflicting, approaches in our understanding of the interplay of society and the material world. We see, thus, a welcome interest in the social *and* materiality, with archaeology and other disciplines studying the ancient world engaging with a range of pertinent ideas originally developed in philosophy, sociology and anthropology. There are also, however, at times profound differences in theoretical outlook, with a broadly speaking processual interest in the identification of past social structure still lingering in certain quarters, alongside agency or practice based accounts in a post-processual vein, and most recently the alleged ‘symmetry’ of human and the variously defined non-human, material agencies of the so-called ‘post-humanism’ or ‘new materialism’.

From the perspective advocated here, theories of practice that emerged across a broad spectrum of the social and cultural sciences during the 1970s and ‘80s and continue to thrive in recent debates were a major step forward in our understanding of the social and its interrelation with materiality. Scholars standing in this tradition, working on the interface of sociality, materiality and practices, share an anti-essentialising view of society. They reject the idea that ‘society’ or ‘social structure’ exists independently or *a priori*. They take an explicit interest in the importance of *materiality* in social life, and some argue for a ‘flat’ ontology of the social where bundles of human activities or practices *and* material arrangements all occupy the same level of reality.

Beyond this tradition of thought, in the meantime some archaeologists argue for a range of competing, post-humanist or symmetrical approaches derived from science and technology studies and anthropology. Like some current practice accounts, such approaches posit a flat ontology of human and non-human material entities and their interactions. But they do so explicitly in order to decentre humanity, *human* agency and intentionality. Instead, it is argued for distributed and *material* agencies, in an attempt to emphasise the role of objects and to avoid what are thought specifically modern, western subject-object dichotomies.

Alongside current attempts to assert a so-called ‘third science revolution’, this clearly has the potential to dehumanise archaeology, that some still think of as a humanist endeavour. For this reason, it is argued here that we should not succumb to the temptation of yet another fashionable ‘turn’ – material,
ontological, or whatever else – that sets the future of the humanities at risk. On the contrary, recent developments in practice theory clearly demonstrate the persistent potential of this body of theories for interpretation in specific social, material and historical contexts. We should, therefore, maintain a critical stance towards the problematic implications of current post-humanism and continue to explore what we still think is a viable and important approach to human sociality and the material world.

## II. APPROACHES TO ‘SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY’

In terms of the diversity of partly contradictory approaches mentioned, there are clearly still many adherents of ‘social archaeology’ (e.g. Renfrew 1984) in broadly speaking processual terms. Updated by current statistical or scientific methods, it is here that we still find the conviction lingering that the archaeological remains more or less directly reflect past social ‘structure’, and that there are distinct, static ‘types’ of society out there – both past and present – waiting to be deduced from the material remains at our disposal by means of methodological sophistication. This modelling of ancient societies often involves considerable extrapolation from the archaeological record, and it is still heavily leaning on the structural side with reified social ‘types’ such as the notorious Hawaiian chiefdoms (Earle 2002) or, more recently, Bronze Age ‘Vikings’ (Ling et al. 2018) still holding sway. There is also often a strange misfit between the prehistoric situation being studied and the anthropological model applied. Such is the case, for example, when widely different (pre-)historic groups that are often characterised by their long-term stability instead of by rapid change are conceptualised in terms of the same abstracted, ethnographically derived ‘prestige goods economies’, some of which, such as the *potlatch*, are quite uniquely competitive and the direct result of early modern colonial encounters between indigenous groups and the industrialised West. We are still thinking and analysing, then, in terms of the same supposedly universal categories that have – for the past decades – been applied to so many and entirely different (pre-)historic societies (cf. Barrett 2012a; Brück/Fontijn 2013).

Since most of the social ‘types’ applied, rather than established, one should add, in this context, carry with them the legacy of their origins in anthropological (neo-)evolutionism, it is here too, that we see a predominant interest taken in the evolution of stratified society and the development from simple to more complex and politically differentiated. There is a ‘centralization
bias' in such approaches (cf. Blanton et al. 1996, 2) and 'complexity' is wrong-
ly equated with hierarchy and executive power (cf. Wynne-Jones/Kohring
2007). Undue emphasis is placed on vertical political differentiation and the
emergence of hierarchical systems (cf. Kienlin, Zimmermann 2012; Thurston/
Fernández-Götz 2021; Lund et al. 2022).

Although anthropologically informed and an advance over traditional
archaeological notions of the social back in the 1970s when processual ‘social
archaeology’ arose, in its teleological, neo-evolutionist outlook this model-
ling nicely blends into more traditional approaches and expectations held by
many archaeologists, in particular in relation to the European Metal Ages.<fnref n="1" />
Just think of the current relapse into talk of Bronze Age ‘castles’, playing on
the Medieval analogy (Hansen/Krause 2018), Bronze Age proto-states, ‘stand-
ing armies’ and large-scale ‘warfare’ in central Europe instead of mere con-
flict (e.g. Meller 2017; Horn/Kristiansen 2018). This kind of thinking results in
a distinctly ‘political’ Bronze Age, conceptualised in different terms than the
preceding Neolithic (cf. Fokkens/Harding 2013; Kienlin 2015). It perpetuates
notions of an historically unique European Bronze Age that ultimately go
back to the influential work of V. G. Childe (e.g. 1950), to his ‘Urban Revolu-
tion’ in the Near East and the supposed effects of metalworking, mobility and
exchange on European societies of the Bronze Age. Childe’s vision of a pro-
gressive Bronze Age Europe opposite a magic-ridden Orient, of the specifi-
cally European freedom and creativity of Bronze Age craftsmen leading right
up to modern Western civilisation involved a strong worldview (cf. Rowlands
1994). And much like in Childe’s case this worldview helped him organise
his profound knowledge into popular syntheses of European prehistory, what
we see now is the return of grand narratives of ‘The Rise of Bronze Age Soci-
ety’ (Kristiansen/Larsson 2005; cf. Nordquist, Whittaker 2007) and various
brands of ‘neo-diffusionism’ – irradiating from a strong school of Scandi-
navian Bronze Age archaeology across central and south-eastern Europe.<fnref n="2" />
Drawing on evidence of personal mobility (e.g. Frei et al. 2015), the exchange
of amber and metal (e.g. Earle et al. 2015) and an optimistic reconstruction of
political hierarchies in likeness of Mediterranean palaces (e.g. Kristiansen/

<footnote n="1">1 For a corresponding Iron Age example to go along with the subsequent Bronze Age ones, see, for example, the debate on the notorious Hallstatt period *Fürstensitze* in central Europe (e.g. Eggert 2007; Krausse 2008; 2010; Schumann 2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 See, for example, papers in Meller/Bertemes (2010), Bergerbrant/Sabatini (2013), Kristiansen/Suchowska-Ducke (2015), Vandkilde (2016) or Bergerbrant/Wessman (2017).</footnote>
Larsson 2005), it is argued for the dependency of European societies of the Bronze Age on the Mediterranean. Ultimately, a convergence is postulated of what an unbiased observer may perceive as socially and culturally distinct societies, widely set apart in space and historical circumstance (cf. Harding 2013; Kienlin 2017). The ‘Bronze Age’ that emerges is one qualitatively different from the preceding Neolithic and historically unique on a pan-European scale (e.g. Kristiansen/Earle 2015).

### III. THE POST-PROCESSUAL CRITIQUE: FROM ‘AGENCY’ TO PRACTICE-ORIENTED ACCOUNTS

We have been there before, of course, and a trenchant critique of this kind of ‘social archaeology’ and its dealings with the material remains of past social life has already been undertaken in the context of the post-processual archaeology of the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Shanks/Tilley 1987; 1992). It was first argued, back then, that in the past we encounter differences in human experience and dispositions as well as in the logic of social and cultural configurations, which do not lend themselves to study in terms of socio-political ‘types’ and the overarching logic of social evolution towards the ‘better’, the more complex or hierarchically structured. It is certainly important to know, who (or what group of persons) was in charge of, say, some fortified tell settlement in the Bronze Age Carpathian Basin or Mycenae in Argolid respectively; which kind of authority and/or power he, she or they were in command of; and if it was derived from control over agricultural surplus, craft production and/or control of prestige goods etc. Yet, the application in this context of such supposedly timeless or universal concepts such as ‘chiefs’, ‘redistribution’, ‘wealth finance’ or ‘prestige goods exchange’ falls short of an appropriate understanding of the historically specific quality of each situation being studied. Instead, an understanding should be sought of this *specific* way of living and its material remains as a medium of social action by past human beings, and the social and cultural reality they created in this way (e.g. Barrett 1994).

For an understanding of the social along these lines, it was suggested that we turn to the field of practice theory,<fnref n="3" /> as exemplified back then by the classic

<footnote n="3">3 E.g. Shanks/Tilley 1987, 57–60, 71–72; 1992, 122–129; Dobres/Robb 2000; Dornan 2002; Hodder 2004, 29, 31–36.</footnote>
studies by Anthony Giddens – his 1979 *Central Problems in Social Theory and The Constitution of Society* from 1984 – and the work of Pierre Bourdieu (e.g. 1977; 1990), both widely acknowledged as paradigmatic for a first generation of practice theorists. Among the commonalities of this body of approaches is the anti-essentialising stance of its adherents, who, one way or the other, argue that the social is in permanent flux, and ‘society’ or social ‘structure’ do not have independent or prior existence. In fact, however, the argument of practice theory is two-sided and takes aim at both the notion of social totalities being more than their parts, as well as at the ‘individualist’ attempt to build up the social directly from individual human actions (e.g. Schatzki 2001, 1–4; Reckwitz 2008, 106–112; Schäfer 2016b, 10–14). In opposition to both these notions, it is argued, that sociality crucially depends on practices, that is on arrays or bundles of *organised* human activities linked by shared practical understandings. Apart from this anti-essentialising conception of the social as a field of practices as such, practice theory as it stands today is attractive, because of its emphasis that practices and understandings are *embodied*, and because of the explicit interest taken in the importance of *materiality* in social life.<fnref n="4" /> Thus, some second generation practice theorists argue for a flat ontology of social life and for an understanding of social phenomena as ‘slices or aspects of nexuses of practices and material arrangements’ (Schatzki 2010, 123; italics added) that all occupy the same level of reality.<fnref n="5" />

In broad outline, then, the notion that ‘the social is a field of embodied, materially interwoven practices centrally organized around shared practical understandings’ (Schatzki 2001, 3) is around since the early post-processual critique of previous ‘checklist’-type social archaeology. However, it was often combined with quite diverse and partly contradictory theoretical approaches (e.g. Shanks/Tilley 1987, 57–78; 1992, 103–134), and it came along with a specific focus on one side of the coin only, namely the notorious ‘buzzword’ of *agency*. In fact, in the meantime ‘agency’ by some is seen as ‘the Trojan horse of archaeology’, for as K. Damilati and G. Vavouranakis (2021, 123) aptly put it:

<footnote n="4">4 See, for example, papers in Schatzki *et al.* (2001), Reckwitz (2016a), Schäfer (2016a), Hui *et al.* (2017) and Buch/Schatzki (2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 In this sense both Giddens and Bourdieu are not adherents of a flat ontology as outlined by second generation practice theories (e.g. Schatzki 2016); see Nicolini (2017, 100): ‘Not all practice theorists embrace a flat ontology. Two examples are Bourdieu and Giddens. Both authors believe that such things as structure, power and fields exist in their own right, although they need to be reproduced in and through practices.’</footnote>
‘Retrospectively, agency is perhaps one of the greatest paradoxes in our discipline’s history. A concept initially introduced to archaeology as a way to restore the importance of the human condition as a force of history, is currently used in order to overshadow and even marginalise the human role as an object of archaeological inquiry.’

From this perspective, it was the narrow focus of much of this work on the human capacity or power for action to the detriment of the ongoing dialectic or recursive relation between (human) agency and ‘structure’ (in the Giddens’ 1979 version; cf. Joyce/Lopiparo 2005; Gardner 2011) that may have paved the way for current discussions on distributed or non-human agencies. This narrowing of archaeological debates on what has been called the ‘freedom/constraint problem’ (Johannsen 2012, 308–309),<fnref n="6" /> is rightly seen to fall short of a full understanding of the social field,<fnref n="7" /> where human agency never operates in a void, but variously understood in the dialectic of structure and agency (Giddens 1979), or in the context of bundles of organised activities or practices extending through time and space in a material world (Schatzki 2002): ‘[...] archaeological interests are best served by language that avoids reifying agency or structure as something that can ever be separated from the continuous flow of conduct’ (Joyce/Lopiparo 2005, 372).

In the above introduction it has been argued that the full potential of such approaches has not yet been realised. And it is only more recently, that among the advocates of second generation practice approaches the *compre-hensive* study of bundles of overlapping practices, their emergence and de-cline, and their specific materiality (e.g. Veling 2019; Gardner 2021; Kienlin, Bußmann 2022), has gained momentum again, instead of merely proclaiming the ‘agency’ of those involved (read: their respective discursive penetration of the social field, their relative ‘freedom’ and their capacity to act). At the same

<footnote n="6">6 See also Kristiansen (2004, 83–85), Robb (2004, 105–106), Ribeiro (2022a, 17–21) and Lund *et al.* (2022, 37–38).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 ‘However, in archaeology – as perhaps more widely – the idea of *agency* turned out to be powerful enough to gradually smother the conceptual twin that it was brought up with. [...] it was no coincidence that it was agency, and not agency *and* structure, which defined the title of an influential edited volume at the turn of the millennium [...]. Agency had become “the buzzword of contemporary archaeological theory” [...] and was increasingly treated as a concept that could stand on its own, something that could be picked up and taken in all sorts of directions whilst not necessarily being restricted by the theoretical context of its initial growth [...]’ (Johannsen 2012, 309).</footnote>
time, however, we see criticism and a reaction to basic tenets of social thought
in post-processual archaeology come from both current post-humanism al-
ready referred to (e.g. Witmore 2007; 2014; Olsen 2012; Harris/Cipolla 2017;
cf. Ribeiro 2016a; 2016b; 2019a; 2019b; Fowles 2016) and from the advocates
of a so-called ‘third science revolution’ (Kristiansen 2014; cf. Sørensen 2017).
This development is most unfortunate. It detracts from the lasting importance
of practice theory for our understanding of the social (see also Gardner 2021).

We see, arguably, the baby thrown out with the bathwater. Important
insights from social theory and anthropology that already had found more
or less broad acceptance, such as the fundamentally social and constructed
nature of categories such as kinship, are replaced by problematic, essential-
ising approaches such as the reconstruction of prehistoric ‘peoples’ by aDNA
analyses, and the attempt to trace their ‘migrations’, strangely analogue to the
current waves of immigration that Europe is facing. We see the pendulum
swing from the realisation that kinship is a cultural resource to genetics. And
we succumb to the temptation of scientific provenance studies as if knowledge
of the ore vein it was produced from told us anything about the recontextu-
alisation, the use and meaning of this dagger or sword in local ‘indigenous’
social practices anywhere in prehistoric Europe (cf. Piccolini/Kienlin 2018;
Kienlin 2018).

Against this background, the position taken here is that there is no way
back behind the essential tenets first outlined by Giddens and Bourdieu etc.,
and, moreover, that this strand of theorising is essential for our understanding
of the interplay of society and the material world. For apart from our notion
of the social as such, ultimately the subsequent interest in ‘embodiment’, ‘per-
sonhood’, ‘social space’ and ‘materiality’ also draws on a tradition of thought
that extends back to Giddens and Bourdieu – expanded, of course, by a sec-
ond generation of (practice and related) theorists’ attempts at breaking down
yet another dichotomy (Kalthoff et al. 2016b, 20–21; Reckwitz 2016b, 164–166),
namely that of the social and the material world, or society and materiality
(e.g. Schatzki 2002; 2010; Shove 2017).

This broader shift of interest towards materiality is remarkable from
the perspective of the archaeologies and anthropology with their somewhat
longer tradition of theorising material culture. It is enriching and potentially
brings both disciplines, and archaeology in particular, into closer contact and
intellectual exchange with sociology and other cultural studies (e.g. Samida
et al. 2014; Kalthoff et al. 2016a). However, we also see different strands of
theorising ‘materiality’, sometimes ignorant of similar concerns elsewhere
and drawing on different intellectual traditions to derive sometimes similar, sometimes quite incommensurate notions of the material (and spatial) context of the human condition and human action. From an archaeological point of view, then, it is sometimes striking to see the wheel reinvented in part of the current broader ‘material turn’ and even among archaeologists who seem to be rediscovering under outside influence what their discipline has been concerned with all along. This, obviously, is down to the rapid succession of ‘turn’ upon ‘turn’ (‘spatial’, ‘material’, ‘corporeal’, ‘ontological’ etc., etc.) and the perceived necessity of stressing the originality of one’s approach.

Furthermore, as already stated above some current approaches are thought problematic here, such as an interest in materiality in the guise of symmetry or distributed agencies of actor-network-theory or the like. In this latter aspect, of course, the flat ontology of human and non-human material entities and their interactions that are argued for, current practice accounts are part of a broader ‘material turn’, and they share certain aspects, but – crucially – not others, with vaguely related so-called post-humanism (cf. Schatzki 2001, 10–11; Reckwitz 2008, 128–129; Hirschauer 2016, 51–53). In particular, from the perspective advocated here, it is of the outmost importance to avoid the latter’s blurring of human and material ‘agencies’,<fnref n="8" /> as well as a deficient account of the social as mere networks.<fnref n="9" /> Instead, alongside central figures of current practice and wider social theory we should retain the ‘unique richness’ and integrity of *human* agency (Schatzki 2002, 201). Consequently, the approach advocated, after Schatzki and others, relies on an understanding of social phenomena as practices tied to material arrangements, *and* the integrity of human agency; that is the constitutional and prefigurational importance

<footnote n="8">8 See, in particular, Johannsen’s (2012) and Lindström’s (2015) thorough critiques of the ‘inanimate agency proposition’ and the various kinds of ‘new materialisms’ – in archaeology and beyond – and their stance on ‘symmetry’ and object etc. ‘agencies’; see also Ribeiro (2016a; 2016b; 2019a; 2019b; 2021) and Barrett (2016b).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Drawn from a different theoretical background, much the same is true for ‘assemblage theory’ (e.g. DeLanda 2006; 2016), and the attempt to construe a notion of ‘society’ as a ‘nested set of assemblages’, where assemblages ‘emerge from the interactions between their parts’ (DeLanda 2016, 20–21; see also 2006, 32–40). Without a mediating notion of practice, this stands in contrast to the conception posited by practice theory (e.g. Schatzki 2002, 18–25, 38): ‘In sum, social orders are largely established in practices. The relations among, meanings of, and, hence, positions of, the components of social orders are beholden, above all, to the doings and sayings that compose practices, in conjunction with practice organizations’ (Schatzki 2002, 101).</footnote>
of human activity for social life, and human doings depending on specifically *human* intentionality, understandings and ends:

‘[...] we should confront the materialism of some sections of post-humanism by being bold enough to differentiate between *effects* and *acts*, *effectants* and *actants*. If a rock (an inanimate material thing) falls down and crushes a house, it is not the rock’s “agency” that “did” it.’ (Lindstrøm 2015, 221).

## IV. A REVISIONIST LOOK AHEAD: PRACTICE THEORY AND THE ESSENTIAL MATERIALITY OF SOCIAL LIFE

In doing so, the approach outlined to sociality and materiality informed by practice theory is *not* new, but stands in a tradition of archaeological readings of the first generation practice theorists Giddens and Bourdieu that extends back well into the late 1980s and 1990s.<fnref n="10" /> However, unlike phenomenology, the detour at that time to hermeneutics or the late effects of the linguistic turn with material culture perceived as ‘text’, these readings attracted much less attention than one should have wished for. It is for this reason, it seems, that, for example, second generation practice theorist Theodore Schatzki’s reformulation of practice theory to fully acknowledge materiality – referred to below – between his 1996 *Social Practices* and *The Site of the Social* from 2002, stands strangely unrelated besides the late John Barrett’s *Fragments from Antiquity* (1994) and the broadly comparable archaeological interest initiated therein in past human actions organised into practices and invariably bound to practical understandings and manipulations of a material world.

It is unfortunate, from the perspective advocated here, that this particular brand of post-processual archaeology did not receive similar attention like Ian Hodder’s (1990) fascinating but problematic mixture of structuralist and hermeneutic approaches (*cf*. Gibbon 1993), or attract numerous followers and (only at a later stage: critical) reception as did the phenomenologically inspired landscape archaeology heralded by Christopher Tilley (1994).<fnref n="11" /> The recent ‘Festschrift’ for John Barrett, *Far from Equilibrium* (Boyd/Doonan 2021a),

<footnote n="10">10 See, for example, Barrett (1987; 1994); see also Ribeiro (2016a, 233; 2021, 537), Boyd/Doonan (2021b) and Damilati/Vavouranakis (2021).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 For critical discussion see, for example, Brück (2005), Barrett/Ko (2009) or Johnson (2012).</footnote>
marks kind of a renaissance among those discontented with current attempts to 'orient archaeology away from humanity' (Boyd/Doonan 2021b, 3), a move by the various post-humanisms or new materialisms vocally resisted by Barrett (e.g. 2014; 2016a; 2016b) throughout his work. Another notable exception is a loose school of thought in Aegean Bronze Age archaeology more or less directly influenced by him and drawing on the same sources that emphasises careful contextual study, and that allows for regional variability, historicity and the specific characteristics of the (material) worlds under study (e.g. Pepperaki 2004; Wolpert 2004; Farmer/Lane 2016; see also Kienlin 2020b).

In this tradition, key concepts continue to thrive from a debate that began with A. Giddens (1979; 1984) and others, and that are indispensable for future theorising. Among them there are the essential recursiveness of social life, its permanent reproduction in social practice by actors more or less competent or knowledgeable, and – as such – its fundamental situatedness in time and space. We must not, therefore, try to identify timeless structures or types of society governed by abstract norms, but rather trace social reproduction and specific practices through time and space as human agents reflexively draw upon rules and resources ('structure') accessible to them as they perpetuate the social world they live in. This process of social reproduction is grounded in time and space, as Giddens realised, but this grounding in space, in particular, has much more to it than the abstract framing of situations of face-to-face interaction that he allowed for (cf. Kienlin 2020a, 15–19).

For a comprehensive reformulation of central tenets of practice theory with an explicit focus on the essential materiality of all social life we are indebted to the philosopher Theodore Schatzki. In his two consecutive major works *Social Practices* (1996) and *The Site of the Social* from 2002, drawing on insights of the later L. Wittgenstein and M. Heidegger, Schatzki outlines a 'flat' ontology of social life,<fnref n="12" /> where the social, first, is understood as a dynamic field, as '[...] a nexus of practices and the sociality opened in this nexus as the basis, or “substance”, of all sociality in human life' (Schatzki 1996, 169) – a notion that is subsequently refined and expanded to an understanding of social

<footnote n="12">12 See, for example, Schatzki (2016, 31): 'Practice ontologies are flat because (1) they treat practices as the central element in the constitution of social phenomena; and (2) practices are laid out on one level. [...] One mark of the flatness of these ontologies is that they analyse social phenomena as arrays of the components of fields, systems, bundles/complexes, or plenum and as lacking any substantive or distinct existence beyond this.'</footnote>
phenomena as '[...] slices or aspects of nexuses of practices *and* material arrangements' (Schatzki 2010, 123; italics added; see also Schatzki 2002, 123, 138–157).

This clearly leaves behind traditional sociology which had it that social facts are explained by social facts (E. Durkheim), where social facts are norms and interaction *etc.* of human individuals. Instead, Schatzki moves towards a conception in which an adequate understanding of the social crucially depends on an understanding of the material side of the world in which practices transpire and human coexistence is constituted:

> ‘Human coexistence is inherently tied, not just to practices, but also to material arrangements. Indeed, social life [...] always transpires as part of a *mesh* of practices and arrangements: practices are carried on amid and determinative of, while also dependent on and altered by, material arrangements. I call the practice-arrangement nexuses, as inherently part of which human coexistence transpires, sites of the social.’ (Schatzki 2010, 130)

In a down-to-earth sense, ‘material arrangements’ are conceived here as ‘interconnected material entities’ that comprise humans, artefacts, organisms and things of nature (Schatzki 2010, 129). However, from the perspective of broadly Heideggerian and Wittgensteinian ‘site approaches’ or ontology that Schatzki (2002, XI–XVI, 57–58, 98–101, 139–150) is referring to in this context, there is much more to such an arrangement than mere physical coexistence in time and space, since it is only in and through their arrangement that the meaning and the identity of what is arranged come into being:

> ‘Social things organized in configurations, where they hang together, determine one another via their connections, as combined both exert effects on other configurations of things and are transformed through the action of other configurations, and therewith constitute the setting and medium of human action, interaction, and coexistence.’ (Schatzki 2002, XIII)

It is as such that arrangements of humans, artefacts, organisms and things are conceived as social orders '[...] through and amid which social life transpires, in which these entities relate, occupy positions, and possess meanings' (Schatzki 2002, 22). We should not, therefore, be expecting fixed uses and meanings of things, including objects, artefacts *etc.*, in such relational configurations. We are looking instead into the social process as unfolding in the interplay of human doings and sayings and the material world.

If materiality – alongside practice(s) – is thus conceived as (co-)constitutive of human coexistence and sociality, the nature of the interrelationship of practices and material arrangements awaits closer scrutiny, and Schatzki (2010, 139–141; see also 2002, 41–47, 148–150, 210–233) offers a discussion of this
matter centred on the possible relations of causality, prefiguration, constitu-
tion and intelligibility. Causality, in a straightforward sense, occurs, whenever
human actions – doings (and sayings) – and practices intervene with the ma-
terial world, '[...] altering, creating, or rearranging material entities' (Schatzki
2010, 139). Such intervention involves specific forms of practical knowledge re-
ferring to the skilful and expedient manipulation of matter or objects (Schatz-
ki 2010, 136). It is a feature of many practices, and, more fundamentally, such
doings or interventions are (co-)constitutive of human practice and sociality
as such. If this already seems trivial, one has to recall alternative ‘tradition-
al’ understandings of the social that get along largely without reference to
a material world beyond human norms and interaction etc. More importantly,
however, causality as it is here understood is a distinctly recursive relation,
because non-human material entities ‘act’ back – in the structured context
of practices – on humans, as well as on other material entities: '[...] both the
properties of material entities and the events that occur to them lead people
to perform actions and practices to take certain courses' (Schatzki 2010, 139;
on matters of human and object agencies see below). This point is of utter
importance, since it brings into clear focus what was still largely missing in
the previous conception of A. Giddens, namely that the *material* world is both
fundamentally the outcome of action, and *vice versa* that it structures that
action in the context of organised practices. Thus, for example, the specific
longevity of material arrangements, '[...] the decades that a house stands, the
centuries that a rock fence perdures' (Schatzki 2010, 137), or the lack thereof
and the relative transience of other arrangements, clearly make a difference
for subsequent opportunities for action and social practices.

Material arrangements, therefore, prefigure future practices, where ‘pre-
figuration’, Schatzki’s second relation between practices and material ar-
rangements, is ‘[...] the social present shaping/influencing/affecting the social
future [...]’ (Schatzki 2010, 140). Prefiguration here is distinctly understood
not to involve the background operation of some abstract virtual entities or
‘structure’, but it is conceived as ‘[...] a product of the actual concrete state of
the social site’ (Schatzki 2002, 222–223). This cautions us against any over-
simplified and deterministic reconstruction of the social process based on an
insufficient understanding of the current state of the social and teleological
assumptions about where we are going to. Instead, we – the observer or the
actual participant in social life – are confronted with or enmeshed in a com-
plex nexus of practices *and* material arrangements that together constitute
the current condition of the social site. We are consequently facing a complex
array or field of possibilities for future action and how to proceed from where we stand, depending on ongoing practices *and* existing material arrangements (see also Schatzki 2019, 42–44). This cannot be reduced – for the scholarly observer or the participant – to simple ends, rational choices or obvious options; and Schatzki makes it quite clear that we have to allow for:

‘[...] the multitudinous ways that the mesh of practices and orders makes courses of action easier, harder, simpler, more complicated, shorter, longer, ill-advised, promising of ruin, promising of gain, disruptive, facilitating, obligatory or proscribed, acceptable or unacceptable, more or less relevant [...]’ etc. (Schatzki 2002, 225)

This, obviously, refers back, on the one hand, to the field of understandings, rules and teleoaffective structures that organise and guide the doings and sayings in social practices, while on the other hand pointing on towards ‘constitution’ and ‘intelligibility’, the last two sorts of relation that exist among practices and material arrangements: Constitution may be understood as an extreme form of causation and prefiguration in the down-to-earth sense that certain courses of action may be physically impossible or unfeasible, and that certain practices depend on the presence or availability of specific material arrangements (Schatzki 2002, 226; 2010, 140).<fnref n="13" /> Intelligibility, on the other hand, in this context recalls that the meaning and the identity of all things arranged depend on their being arranged as such, and the specific modalities of their arrangements. Consequently, the perception of material entities, their meaning, the way they are drawn upon and their potential to guide future action crucially depend not only on their physical properties, but on their situationness in specific material arrangements and corresponding social practices (Schatzki 2010, 141).

## V. SOCIAL LIFE VERSUS POST-HUMANISM

If the ‘site of the social’ is a mesh of practices and orders or arrangements (Schatzki 2002, XII–XIII, 123), where human activity is not ‘[...] a self-contained

<footnote n="13">¹³ Where constitution, too, like causality above, is understood recursively: ‘The reverse also holds: most arrangements through which human practices proceed would not exist or would assume different shapes were it not for the particular practices that are responsible for them and/or carried on amid them’ (Schatzki 2010, 140).</footnote>
and self-sufficient impulse that moves through the world [...]', but rather is
a '[...] dealing with the orders of entities that are always already there for a per-
son [...]' (Schatzki 2002, 106), and where these entities comprise other humans,
organisms as well as artefacts and things of nature to which action is causal-
ly and constitutively bound (Schatzki 2002, 22-23, 107-108), at first sight this
bears some family resemblance with certain post-humanist approaches which
have it that the social field be analysed in terms of networks where neither hu-
man agency nor non-human, material agency can claim priority.<fnref n="14" /> This, howev-
er, is a misconception that Schatzki (2002, 105-122, 189-210; 2019, 36-40) goes
to some length to discourage, calling for resistance against the post-humanist
'blackmail' in certain quarters of the 'ontological turn' that '[...] one is either
a head-in-the-sand humanist or an up-to-date posthumanist' (Schatzki 2002,
193-194). Since the position taken here is broadly the same, namely that any-
thing along the lines of ANT or the like is a poor guide to past social life and
materiality, and impoverishes our understanding of a more complex ancient
reality, Schatzki's critique of post-humanism deserves explicit mention here.<fnref n="15" />

His argument takes two slightly different lines of approach, where the
first one refers to the obvious fact, one should think, that everything we ana-
lyse as social or cultural phenomena – past or present – in fact bears witness

<footnote n="14">14 This in itself from the perspective of Schatzki, and others, of course, is a shortcom-
ing since it makes up for an incomplete account of the social only: ‘The networks of
actor-network theory closely resemble what I call “arrangements”. Both are com-
posed of interrelated material entities. Arrangements, however, are only one of the
two principle sorts of phenomena that make up social phenomena. The second is
practices, which have no pendent in actor-network theory. [...] Actor-network the-
ory thereby fails to capture a key feature of human social life, namely, the practices
that are tied to arrangements and help constitute social phenomena’ (Schatzki 2010,
134–135).</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 With an historical perspective on the rise of post-humanist approaches in the hu-
manities and cultural studies as a reaction to the crisis of (ethnographic) representa-
tion since the 1980s, including the use of post-colonial vocabulary in the so-called
‘new materialism’, see also Fowles (2016, 25): ‘When the West lost its ability to write
about non-Western people however it liked, non-humans surfaced as surrogate
objects of study. Non-humans were socialized; they were empowered; they were
dis-empowered; they were fought over, cared for, and defended; for many, they be-
came full-fledged Others with an analytical value equal to that of humans. With one
important exception: non-humans remained silent, a “perpetual Orient”, outside the
true politics of representation. Objects emerged, in other words, as anthropology’s
perfect subjects because, as subjects, they can so easily be objectified.’</footnote>
to the '[...] special constitutional, causal, and prefigurational significance of human activity in both human life in general and social existence in particular' (Schatzki 2002, 116). This point is nicely made by reference to the example of post-humanist case studies from science and technology studies (Schatzki 2002, 108-116, 119-122), in which, clearly, objects and arrangements have an enabling and constraining effect and as such 'deserve' to be analysed in terms of networks - or Schatzki's own nexuses of practices and orders -, but where objects have no capacity to institute ends and meanings, and '[...] things contribute to what happens in and through them because humans have set matters up that way' (Schatzki 2002, 117).<fnref n="16" /> We are analysing, that is to say, nexuses of practices and (material) arrangements, where the setup of the arrangement side of the argument in the first instance depends on specifically human intentionality, and the ends and the meanings of actions and objects were constituted in practice – *human* doings and sayings linked and oriented through *human* understandings, rules and teleoaffective structures:

‘What artifacts, organisms, things, and people qua components of arrangements do is enabled and constrained by other components and features of the arrangements into which human activity inserts them [...]. Conversely, these entities enable and constrain the activities humans perform, including what humans do with them. Even amid, however, such apparent symmetry, activities hold the edge. For [...] the enabling and constraining effects of objects and arrangements on activities are relative to actors’ ends, projects, hopes, fears, and so on.’ (Schatzki 2002, 117)<fnref n="17" />

Schatzki's second line of argument is centred on a related point, namely the 'unique richness' of human agency opposite 'material' agency, and the general necessity to allow for the existence of different 'types' of agency, instead of collapsing them into one, in a vain attempt to accord intentionality to things (Schatzki 2002, XXII, 192-193, 199-201). With agency simply understood as 'doing' (Schatzki 2002, 191), and objects and orders thought to exert

<footnote n="16">16 Much the same point, the compression of time and ahistoricity, is made by Johannsen (2012, 328) with regard to ANT: ‘The *provenance* of the gun is conspicuously absent in Latour’s causal zoom-in on the virtually synchronic point of “material semiosis” when the killing is done. But if we relax our temporal zoom [...] this causal setting is invaded by a host of human agents without whom Latour’s hypothetical but depressingly topical man would never have had a gun in his hands.’ – ‘In short, ANT wants materiality but not the constraints of material history’ (Johannsen 2012, 331).</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 In the context of this argument, see also Lindstrøm (2015, 216–217, 221–222).</footnote>
a causal and prefigurational influence on activities and practices (e.g. Schatzki 2002, 107–108; 2010, 130, 132–135), for Schatzki, clearly, objects (material entities, artefacts, things of nature etc.) do have agency. They do so, however, expressly in a different way than humans do, whose doings and sayings are organised into practices by understandings, rules and teleoaffective structures, that is by specifically human ‘[...] ends, projects, tasks, purposes, beliefs, emotions, and moods’ (Schatzki 1996, 89).<fnref n="18" /> Thus, geomagnetic storms, the example referred to by Schatzki (2002, 198) in this context, do have agency in the sense that they do bring about the breakdown or closure of electronic communication, but this amounts to hardly more than physical causality (see also Lindstrøm 2015, 221–222; Ribeiro 2016a, 230–231). They cannot be said to have done so on purpose, intentionally and in consequence of deliberate planning:

‘Actor-network theory’s proliferation of agency does not subvert the unique richness of the intentional, deliberate, planning, and self-conscious agency humans enjoy. Attributing agency to animals, machines, storms, and social phenomena such as day trading firms only, at best, corrects a misguided humanism that proclaims people the sole agents.’ (Schatzki 2002, 201)

Of course, other critics of post-humanism have also pointed out the problematic reduction of agency to causality or the property of being able to cause consequences in the physical world (e.g. Johannsen 2012; Lindstrøm 2015), whereby ethical aspects also play an important role. Human action in the world is not exhausted in cause-effect relationships, but includes intentionality and the freedom to decide differently, the knowledge of the consequences of one's own actions and thus also the responsibility for our actions.<fnref n="19" /> We are facing here the problematic ethical implications of post-humanism's decentering and its dispersal of agency throughout networks or the like. Polemic, but surely right, see also Lindstrøm (2015, 222): 'It is absurd to say that the gas was responsible or co-responsible for killing people in Nazi concentration camps. Only people were.'<fnref n="20" />

<footnote n="18">18 ‘In short, it is one thing to say on linguistic or other grounds that scallops, bonobos, humans, geomagnetic storms, and computer networks are all agents, that is to say, doers. It is quite another to attribute intentionality to them’ (Schatzki 2002, 200).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 ‘The fact that agents are free to choose otherwise implies *knowing* what action is being performed and what consequences can be expected. Accordingly, freedom to choose or act means that actions are more than just mechanical causes – actions are *responsibilities*’ (Ribeiro 2016a, 231; see also 2021, 536–537; 2022a, 12–21, 122–156; 2022b).</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 In a similar vein, see also Pollock *et al.* (2014, 156–157), Gerber (2015, 461–465), Meier</footnote>
VI. MORE THAN MERE ‘FRAGMENTS’: PRACTICE THEORY
IN ARCHAEOLOGY

Remarkably, a comparable approach in archaeology has already been out-
lined in John Barrett’s congenial *Fragments from Antiquity* (1994), drawing
his inspiration mainly from Giddens ‘theory of structuration’ and to a lesser
extent from Bourdieu. Underlying Barrett’s approach was the endeavour to
steer clear from both I. Hodder’s (and others) attempt at that time to read back
*meaning* into the minds and material culture of prehistoric people – a radical
example being his *Domestication of Europe* (Hodder 1990) –, as well as from
the ‘personal empathy’ with places as perceived and experienced through
a universal human body in phenomenological approaches, a prominent ex-
ample then being Ch. Tilley’s *Phenomenology of Landscape* (1994).

What Barrett proposes, instead, is an archaeology that does not oper-
ate on a generalising level anymore, seeking to identify this or that social
structure or ‘type’ of social organisation, and in doing so is treating the
material remains of past social life as externalised traces or record of some
preexisting, higher level of social reality (e.g. Barrett 1994, 1–6, 35–37). His-
torical, or for that matter archaeological knowledge, it is argued, does not
involve the uncovering, by acts of methodological sophistication, of some
‘transcendental truth’ or fixed meanings laid out in material culture, sub-
sequently distorted by formation processes and loss, but in principle still
available to reconstruct an ancient, static reality (Barrett 1994, 32–33, 71–72;
2006, 201–207). Instead, we are always looking at a dynamic record of past
human actions, organised into and oriented by practices,<fnref n="21" /> and invariably
bound to practical understandings and manipulations of a material world
that was permanently constituted *and* drawn upon in the unfolding of so-
cial life and practices:

‘The argument [...] moves us away from dealing with the material evidence

(2016, 261–262), Fowles (2016, 12–13, 22–23), McGuire (2021a, 23–31; 2021b, 498–500) and Van Dyke (2021, 488–491).

<footnote n="21">21 See, for example, Barrett (1994, 3): ‘This requires that we recognize, in the fleeting and the momentary occurrences of human action, the expectation that those actions were appropriate and would be effective, that they made sense according to some recognizable order and logic in the world which they addressed and to which they also contributed. Structures are both the means by which socially recognizable actions are achieved, and their consequences.’</footnote>
as if it were some externalized and objective record of a past process, and
leads to the recognition that the material was implicated in the creation of
past human subjectivities. The object of archaeological analysis should be to
understand how those subjectivities could have been constituted out of a hu-
man agency which worked upon the material conditions it inhabited. People
know the world they inhabit, and they rework that knowledge through their
active engagement with that world [...] This situates our analysis of the past
in a frame of reference which is more local and particular than is normally
employed, simply because we are now concerned with the day-to-day main-
tenance of traditional practice by people rather than with the long-term ex-
istence of some abstract "social system"." (Barrett 1994, 35-36; see also 2006,
203-205; 2016a, 134, 137)

This is, of course, the central message of all approaches inspired by prac-
tice theory as outlined above, with the important caveat that the interest in
'past human subjectivities' should not be mistaken as some kind of particular-
istic individualism (cf. Schatzki 1996, 6-9, 13; Schäfer 2016b, 12-13), but as the
expression of the underlying anthropology that – now and in the past – allows
for knowledgeable actors, or humans '[...] who had memories and expecta-
tions about themselves, others and the world which they inhabited [...]' (Bar-
rett 1994, 66, see also 4-6). As such, however, their lives, their understandings
and agencies, were historically, that is socially, situated. They were contex-
tualised in practices and implicated in a preexisting material world struc-
tured – in part – by those same practices. What archaeologists should aspire
to, from this perspective, is an understanding, referring to *specific* settings
and materialities, '[...] of what the possibilities were of being human within
those material and historical conditions' (Barrett 1994, 5). This is the call for
a fine-grained reconstruction of the particular engagements with historically
specific material conditions in social practices; the study of how knowledges
and understandings were produced and reworked in discourse and the ma-
terial world; and how material culture as a structuring medium enabled and
constrained the doings and sayings of those involved:

'[...] archaeologists should seek to understand how people may once have
lived out their lives, and not limit themselves to the more restricted quest of
interpreting the archaeological record. These are not one and the same thing.
Those lives were lived as routines which were built as people engaged with the
empirical realities which they recognized as being available to them. Such
engagements could only have arisen from positions of informed pre-under-
standing. This is an archaeology of memory and of practice [...]. Traditions
are thus enabling and they are carried forward in the action and discourse of human agency.’ (Barrett 1994, 95; see also 2006, 204–205)<fnref n="22" />

People in the past were confronted, then, with ‘empirical realities’, and it is this common materiality, which is not entirely malleable, that we draw upon in our ‘readings’ of the past as well (Barrett 1994, 6, 170). But we should not expect, on the other hand, any single and consistent meaning and understanding to emerge in the social process – neither in the past, nor in the archaeological endeavour:

‘We have not uncovered what those monuments meant, and this does not matter for they were never the expression of a single truth. Instead, we have understood how the logic of the known world could have been revealed and sustained, thought and acted through afresh, as various traditions of knowing were reworked upon the available physical resources.’ (Barrett 1994, 71–72)<fnref n="23" />

Material culture, artefacts and their arrangements, architecture and space etc., that is to say, do not have an intrinsic meaning, but only obtain meaning in specific social practices and interpretative frameworks. Such meanings are permanently reworked as the things of life are drawn upon in new contexts and social practices, while at the same time contributing to the knowledges and understandings characteristically held in specific contexts and practices (e.g. Barrett 1994, 75–76, 95, 168–169).

This assertion, of course, is an imposition on the traditional perception of archaeologists that we are unearthing some kind of static truth or historical reality, even though this may be delimited by the material remains which are at our disposal only. In fact, however, the situation is not that much different from any other attempt to understand the ‘other’, since this will always involve an act of interpretation. We can never lay claim to have exposed fixed meanings or understandings existing out there in human collectivities or held by individuals, even if we were able to talk to them as ethnographers may.<fnref n="24" />

<footnote n="22">22 See also Joyce/Lopiparo (2005, 368) on the ‘deep histories of repeated practices’ and regional traditions.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 See also Barrett (2006, 204): ‘My plea is that we build an understanding of action that turns away from focusing upon a specific motivation and looks instead towards the context in which people worked, made choices and engaged with the materials to hand. Nothing is gained by asking what a certain action “meant”.’</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 ‘Archaeology currently labours under the misapprehension that an understanding of other people is gained only through a close proximity which allows either for talk or for an available translation of the spoken and written word. However, as all knowl-</footnote>
However, even if it is always possible to create meaning, and in fact different meanings, from the archaeological remains (Barrett 1994, 169–170), Barrett’s approach distinctly is not relativistic, but takes aim at a contextualised understanding of social practices and their material conditions that is clearly delimited by the ‘empirical realities’ and the specific materialities studied – by the particular settings of social practices, and the unique possibilities of perceptions and actions provided and reworked, and not others etc. His is an interest, that is to say, in how practices became orientated, how *dominant* or joint – not individual – understandings of the social world arose, were given material expression, *i.e.* stability, and how these were reproduced in social practices (e.g. Barrett 1994, 14, 18–19, 53–54, 76–77; 2016a, 137); an interest in those ‘other interpretive regimes’, past interpretations and the ‘prejudices which are other than our own’ (Barrett 1994, 170) that once operated upon the same material that is still available for archaeologists to study:

> ‘This is a contextual archaeology which attempts to preserve the context of social reproduction over time and space but does not depend on discovering “ideas in people’s heads” [...] Instead of attempting to read back from modern archaeological remains to meanings in the past, a better proposal is to explore the implications of particular material conditions for the structuring of specified social relations.’ (Barrett 1987, 471)

In sum, therefore, it is argued here, we should not be essentialising from a rich and diverse range of evidence however indirectly linked to past knowledge, action and intentionality. We should also not be equating cultural manifestations that are historically unique and the material possibilities they provided, when instead we should be trying to develop an understanding of what is specific about the groups or phenomena studied. Rather than subsuming the evidence at hand to some preconceived idea of the type of society encountered, it is suggested we allow for what is unique and seek to develop an understanding of the actual material remains of a historically specific social and cultural configuration that has come on us as the archaeological record. The result may be less captivating than the grand narratives still told much too often, but for exactly this reason it may also be more consonant with the lives we want to study as once lived in the more or less contingent course of events that unfolded as people carried forward their programmes of understandings

<footnote>edges of others involve interpretation, there can be no moment when anyone else is immediately revealed to us' (Barrett 1994, 71).</footnote>
and intentions in the organised field of practices and reworked the materiali-
ties at their disposal. Or, to give Schatzki the final say here:

‘I believe that one noteworthy outcome of writing histories and analyz-
ing contemporary phenomena with these experientially resonant concepts is
that history and the contemporary world seem less systematic or ordered and
more labyrinthine and contingent than they do when described and analyzed
through the conceptual armature of many other theories.’ (Schatzki 2010, 146)

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ADDRESS OF THE AUTHOR

Tobias L. Kienlin

Department of Prehistoric Archaeology
University of Cologne
Weyertal 125, 50931 Cologne, Germany
tkienlin@uni-koeln.de
ORCID 0009-0008-1248-9452