Theorizing Bioarchaeology (Bioarchaeology and Social Theory)

✍ Scribed by Pamela L. Geller

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 160
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Bioarchaeology has relied on Darwinian perspectives and biocultural models to communicate information about the lives of past peoples. This book demonstrates how further theoretical expansion―a thoughtful engagement with critical social theorizing―can contribute insightful and more ethical outcomes. To do so, it focuses on social theoretical concepts of pertinence to bioarchaeological studies: habitus, the normal, intersectionality, necropolitics, and bioethos. These concepts can deepen study of plasticity, disease, gender, violence, and race and ethnicity, as well as advance the field’s decolonization efforts.

This book alsoworks to overcome the challenges presented by dense social theorizing, which has paid little attention to real bodies. It historicizes, explains, and adapts concepts, as well as discusses archaeological, historic, and contemporary case studies from around the world.

Theorizing Bioarchaeology is intended for individuals who may have initially dismissed social theorizing as postmodern but now acknowledge this characterization as oversimplified. It is for readers who foster curiosity about bioarchaeology’s contradictions and common sense. The ideas contained in these pages may also be of use to students who know that it is naive at best and myopic at worst to presume data derived from bodies speak for themselves.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: What Is Theorizing?
1.1 Theory vs. Theorizing
1.2 The Biocultural Model
1.3 Darwin’s Body
1.4 The Distracting Body
1.5 Querying the Body
References
Chapter 2: What Is Habitus?
2.1 Trend or Tradition?
2.2 Marcel Mauss
2.2.1 Uncle Émile
2.2.2 Body Techniques
2.2.3 Walking: An Example
2.3 Pierre Bourdieu and Practice
2.3.1 From Habitus to Hexis
2.3.2 The Hexis of Heels
2.4 A Bioarchaeology of Body Habits
2.4.1 Plasticity
2.4.2 Entheseal Changes
2.5 Moving Forward
2.5.1 A Warrior’s Life in Late Medieval England
2.5.2 Gender Habitus in Medieval Ensay
2.6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: What Is Normal?
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Georges Canguilhem
3.2.1 “...an affinity of habitus”
3.2.2 In Practice, There Is Theory
3.3 The Normal and the Pathological
3.4 Paleopathology
3.4.1 The Osteological Paradox
3.4.2 The French Disease
3.4.3 Treponemal Diseases
3.5 Embodied Experience
3.5.1 The Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
3.5.2 The Bioarchaeology of Care
3.6 Heteronormativity
3.6.1 Compulsory Reproduction
3.6.2 Atlatl Elbow
3.7 Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: What Is Intersectionality?
4.1 Introduction to the Intersections
4.2 The Concept Intersectionality
4.3 Materiality and Intersectionality
4.4 An Accidental Case Study
4.5 Cuba in the Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries
4.5.1 Enslavement to Emancipation
4.5.2 Racial Differences
4.6 Racism and Racial Equality
4.7 Postmortem Practices
4.7.1 Havana’s Cemeteries
4.7.2 Disinterment and Relocation
4.8 Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: What Is Necropolitics?
5.1 Black and Blue
5.2 The Importance of Neologisms
5.2.1 “...a crime without a name”
5.2.2 “Nazis. I hate these guys.”
5.3 Biopower and Biopolitics
5.4 Making Die
5.4.1 The Agentive Corpse
5.4.2 Bioarchaeology’s Contribution
5.5 Becoming-Object
5.5.1 Teaching Skulls
5.5.2 Textbook Specimens
5.6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: What Is Bioethos?
6.1 Prelude
6.2 Bioarchaeology and Epistemology
6.3 Bioarchaeological Ethics
6.3.1 Cataloguing Concerns
6.3.2 Codes of Ethics
6.4 Bioethics
6.5 Bioethos
6.6 Ontology
6.6.1 Postmortem Interactions
6.6.2 Ontological Insecurity
6.6.3 The Case of Cannibalism
6.7 Ethico-onto-epistemology
6.8 Bioethos in Action
6.9 Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Coda: What Is Future Tripping?
Index