Medieval Archaeology and the History of Material Culture: Forty Years Later (2017)
Abstract
The notion of material culture used in various historical and anthropological disciplines was principally introduced into France in several articles written by Jean-Marie Pesez in the late 1970s, to be applied in the field of medieval archaeology. These works reviewed the origins and the circumstances surrounding the emergence of this field of reflection and research, and established an initial framework for putting into practice, in archaeology, the use of material data as a source in the historical approach. A re-examination of these propositions and of the context of their application can be useful in order to investigate the current meaning of the concept, its heuristic potential (which still appears to be too limited), and the role it can play in the convergence of several social sciences.
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Assembling Subjects: World Building and Cosmopolitics in Late Medieval Armenia
Kathryn J. Franklin
This chapter will explore the role of assembling in mediating political subjectivity, or the situation of social actors within regimes of value and power, in late medieval Armenia and western Eurasia. The chapter will explore exemplars of the assembling subject: the early modern collector-prince and the contemporary artistas-assemblage. From the space opened between these modes of conceptualizing the subject-assemblage relationship, the paper will turn to late medieval Armenia and the world assembling undertaken by the merchant prince Tigran Honents. The aim of this chapter is to explore the inherent politics of assembling by examining the links between arguments for power and performed relationships to valuative and imaginative totalities – whether of nature, the known world, or multiple worlds of material coherence and commensurability. By moving from the assemblings of 16th
century Italian collector Ulisse Aldrovandi to a 13th-century Armenian merchant prince situated along highland branches of what is now called the Silk Road, I will develop the argument that the politics of assembling are not dependent on historical subject categories (modern science, pre-modern superstition) but rather manifest in historically specific, contingent ways through the assembling and mobilization of materials, spaces and discourses to projects of distinction and difference – the foundation of politics.
Book: Incomplete Archaeologies: Assembling Knowledge in the Past and Present
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