Aocialisation in the archaeological record - Neil Erskine

"Relational ontologies beyond the momentary: socialisation in the archaeological record”
Dr Neil Erskine
Friday, 3rd of May 2024
16.00 CEST (Rome, Paris, Berlin / GMT+2)
15:00 BST (London, GMT+1)
17.00 (İstanbul, Athens / GMT+3)
10.00 (New York / GMT-4)
Recent archaeological theory has expressed enthusiasm for the assemblage thinking of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, albeit usually filtered through other theorists such as Manuel DeLanda and Jane Bennett. Such approaches frequently place a heavy stress on the transformative qualities of assemblages, which represent constantly changing emergent entities that spring forth from the relations between material and immaterial components. Less focus is normally given to experiences of assemblages’ repercussions for socialisation processes, which are similarly transformative. By returning directly to Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, however, we are furnished with other concepts that help us go beyond the meaningful experience of assemblages to their contributions to individuals’ developing perceptions of the world and their place in it. Most important are Deleuze’s folds, the process through which social entities internalise their experiences of assemblages; and Deleuze and Guattari’s plateaus, momentarily coalescing groups of those internalised experiences that represent the social conditions that inform other experiences. Together, these concepts allow the interpreter to reconstruct the conditions of experience that framed individuals’ interactions with places, objects, or practices, and the consequences this had for their ongoing understanding of their world. This paper seeks to demonstrate the usefulness of the wider Deleuzo-Guattarian corpus in exploring ancient socialisation by considering experiences of cult and landscape in ancient West Asia.