Grievability, households, and violence in the Iron and Viking Ages
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 17/01/2021

A recurrent critique of the turn to ontology, posthumanism, and particularly symmetrical approaches in archaeology has been that they gloss over and minimize power asymmetry by viewing agency as distributed in collectives and assemblages. How can we situate violence and exploitation in the ontological turn? In 2009, Judith Butler called for a new bodily ontology, one that rethinks issues such as precariousness, vulnerability, and exposure. Bodies are crafted and given form through their situation historically and socially, she argues, in systems of power that makes some bodies more vulnerable, and less grievable, than others.

This paper works from an eclectic dataset relating to household dynamics in the Viking Age, to consider how houses — as particular and powerful kinds of objects -- worked to craft differentiated bodies among their inhabitants. The paper makes two moves: First, I survey eclectic strands of evidence for domestic and structural violence within the Iron and Viking Age house, and how this may relate to multi-modal personhood. Second, I explore how architectural spaces and domestic practices helped to enact social and political realities of grievability in the Viking Age — and the consequences this has for the ontological turn as well as our understanding of Iron and Viking Age society.


Marianne Hem Eriksen, Department of Archaeology, University of Oslo