Conference: Anthropological and archaeological imaginations: past, present and future

Social anthropology has always had an uneasy relationship with archaeology, and it might be argued that the founding of the Association was at least in part an attempt to define the discipline in contradistinction to many of the pre-occupations of archaeology at that time. Rather than an open discussion, however, the two disciplines by and large quietly separated. This eventually gave rise to the paradoxical situation that, even though four-field anthropology still survived in some respects (for instance in the Royal Anthropological Institute’s intellectual charter, in the British Association for the Advancement of Science Section H, or in the occasional combined course or loose institutional link), the relationship between social anthropology and archaeology was never quite discussed in a public forum, and it has never been the subject of one of the ASA’s official conferences.

We believe that the time has come to reconsider this reticence. Archaeology has transformed itself repeatedly throughout the twentieth century, drawing extensively on the ideas of social anthropology as it does so. Today, there is a growing number of practising archaeologists who regard themselves as fluent, or at least learned, in both disciplines. Ian Hodder, who is to give the E. H. Young lecture on 'Archaeology and Anthropology: the state of the relationship' at the conference is one of these. Social Anthropologists have been slow to repay the compliment twice over: even though there are certainly individual exceptions, social anthropologists have not routinely studied contemporary archaeology, nor worked as a matter of course with archaeologists, resulting in a marked asymmetry in the flow of intellectual knowledge and arguably stuttering communication between the two groups at the national level. Why this may be the case is difficult to pin-point exactly: it may be to do with the levels of analysis that social anthropologists usually choose for their ethnographic description; or perhaps to theoretical differences (particular with regard to questions of history and causality) or it may be simply practical, to do with different methodologies, resources and institutional arrangements, or even a form of self-censorship.