Anthmplogy News&ttedMprch.~994 15

Phoenix, Too Susan Coutin is organizing a panel

for the next Law & Society meetings called “Representations of Law in US Culture.” She notes that “many Ameri- cans’ understanding of law is based not on written legal codes, but rather on the representations of these codes that appear in the media, schools, fic- tion.” Susan wants the panel to be able to make use of slides showing the way law is represented in magazine pho- tographs, signs. statues, graffiti, car- toons, advertising. and so on. If you are interested in participating in this panel, or can help Susan by lending her visua\ materials, please contact her at Dept of Sociology, Anthropology. and Social Work, North Adams State C, North Adams. MA 01247; 4131664- 45 11, The L&S meetings will be in Phoenix next June (thank you, Sally).

Commentary: Institutional Logic and Moral Politics

Academics spend enough time sew- ing on committees. A s Fred Bailey showed us in Moraliry and Expediency (Aldine, 1977), there is much about human political and moral life to be learned from the operation of academic committees, and we might as well make good use of the experiences pro- vided by serving on them. I recently served on a college committee to which I, along with representatives from several other academic depart- ments, was my department’s delegate. The committee’s mission was a deli- cate one, having been formulated largely in response to earlier student protests, and was encased in a rhetoric that had been established by the protests and the administration’s response to them. Nonetheless, the stu- dent and faculty members of the com- mittee worked smoothly together and were able to reach a decision with apparent unanimity. I assented to this decision, even helped frame it to be as persuasive as it could be. But even at the time, I realized that the decision was at odds with my own appreciation of the college’s curricular needs and that it was probably also prejudicial to my own department’s future interests.

Was I a hypocrite? A traitor to my own department? On my way to becoming a loathsome apararchik? I don’t think so. Having become a mem- ber of the committee I had taken on its

mission, and though part of my institu- tional persona was at odds with the out- come, the logic of that mission demanded the decision that was made. I had to swallow hard, but it was the only logical thing to do.

Sometimes I think we tend too easily to look on political identities as unidi- mensional and on political decisions as reflecting the equally unidimensional “interests” of those identities. Our anal- yses tend to see race or class or gender as having an overpowering impact in forming interests and decisions. But as a modestly complex person I am capa- ble of recognizing and acting in a vari- cty of identities and in a multiplicity of interests. That the multiple epistemolo- gies these identities and interests demand are sometimes i n conflict makes me neither a hypocrite nor a schizophrenic (though I am less cer- tainly free of the taint of apararchik). Institutions do create their own logics. even little, embedded institutions of short duration like my committee and they can exert a pervasivedare I say hegemonic?-power over their mem- bers. But such hegemonies are also limited to particular frames and actoss are capable of juggling multiple logics, multiple identities, multiple interests, multiple hegemonies. We live not under the baleful gaze of a Cyclops- like panopticon, but in the shifting glance of an Argus-like beast%of many eyes. Now 1’11 gladly admit that this may not be an earth-shattering insight (.as i t were), but I was surprised and gratified to find it in so ordinary a place.

Well, enough of these winter mus- ings. Let me remind everyone of this column’s editorial policy: I will be very happy to accept responses, short or long, to any of the commentaries printed here. Indeed, anyone, APLA member or no, is welcome to con- tribute to this column (I don’t know how long I can keep this up on my own). I will undertake to print pertinent commentary, announcements of new research projects, open letters to one’s colleagues, diatribes, kvetches, bur- lesques, parodies or anything else you feel like submitting and I feel like printing. Here is an opportunity to address your peers. You need only address me first at Dept of Anth and Sdc. Williams C, Williamstown, MA 01 267; 41 31597-2552; fax 41 31597- 4088; internet: peter.just@williams. edu.

There seems to be a certain groundswell of sentiment among our membership in favor of establishing a journal. There was a great deal of dis- cussion of the idea at the AAA meeting in Washington, and Jim Downs writes from Japan that as a result of his letter (September 1993 AN) he has received several letters, all of them addressed to a Maryland address. Jim feels that there may have been some which didn’t get forwarded and, if some people wrote and haven’t received an answer that may be the reason he apologizes. Your editor also must apologize but, since

there are two addresses on his sta- tionery, I selected the Maryland address as easier. Write him again in Japan.

Jim says: Some colleagues have kind of supported the idea of an “old folks” journal and asked if we can’t get a grant. I wonder, however, if there isn’t enough energy and talent and skill in our ranks to at least start a journal on our own. Some of us must know some- thing about desktop publishing so we could get something out at minimum cost. Perhaps each of us could chip in a few dollars to cover mailing, paper. I

am a bit too far off the beaten track to be useful on a day-to-day basis but cer- tainly am available to review articles and do whatever editing that needs to be done by air mail. Happy New Year to all! Jim Downs, Marland 301; 5-4-3 Nukai, Nerima-ku, Tokyo, Japan 176.

Editor’s Note

Keep those bits and bytes coming folks! Internet: Louana Lackey 71 334.3624@Compuserve.com, or send those cards and letters to 17 West 29th St, Baltimore, MD 21218; 410/ 243-6948.

New Ways to Look at Old Societies?

Randy McGuire and colleagues are trying to organize, a discussion group that will explore nontraditional-or at least nonecological-alternatives to view Southwestern prehistory. Both Southwestern and non-Southwestern archaeologists might find this of inter- est.

A n Open Letter to Southwestern Archaeologists

For the past quarter-century, the US Southwest has been dominated by a school of thought known as “processu- al archaeology.” We are Southwestern archaeologists who question many aspects of current thinking in our field and who, despite broad differences in approach, share ideas about how we may best understand the past. We wish to hold an open meeting within the next 18 months, to develop the theoretical approaches outlined below: we ask those who are thinking along similar lines, and who might wish to take part in the meeting, to contact us.

The theories of processual archaeol- ogy are many and varied, but current practice in the Southwest often involves an approach we term “ecolog- ical functionalism.” Under that approach, societies are assumed to be systems, in the sense that groups within a society are functionally bound to each other and do not vary with any degree of independence. As a conse- quence, interaction within a society is not viewed as a meaningful source of historical change. Instead, change is explained by appeal to the interaction between the entire “system” and exter- nal factors such as environmental change or independent demographic growth.

In extending the work of the past 25 years, we assume that prehistoric Southwestern societies consisted of groups that acted with varying degrees of independence and at scales ranging from that of the individual and house- hold to that of the community and region. From this perspective, histori- cal change springs not only from rela- tions between societies and the envi- ronment or demographic growth, but also from relations between and within social groups. Because the checks and balances that maintain a given social order are imperfect, social relations are inherently dynamic. In acting out the relations between them, social groups change those relations-and them- selves. Thus the internal dynamics of a society, far from being a passive aspect of systemic change, are a vital source

of change and a point of departure for archaeological study.

In seeking to explain change, we fur- ther believe that we need to begin and end with the actual history of specific societies. Concepts like “chiefdom” or “Anasazi” may help guide our think- ing, but they are not real i n and of themselves. The discovery of similar patterns of behavior within different societies may lead us to postulate social models at various levels of abstraction, but such generalizations are a means, not an end. Our task is not complete unt i l we demonstrate how those models improve our understand- ing of the actual societies we study. Explanation is embedded in the history that inspires it; reducing social behav- ior to abstract dimensions-then order- ing societies along those dimensions- does not constitute explanation.

Although we no longer emphasize a search for universal patterns abstracted from the archaeological record or for universal laws to explain them, we con- tinue to believe in a scientific archaeol- ogy-one that moves beyond descnp- tion to explanation by verifying propo- sitions about prehistoric social behav- ior. Ancient societies had an existence independent of our inquiries, even if we understand their material traces only imperfectly. The objective exis- tence of those societies-and those traces-means that our propositions about the past are testable. The deci- sion to accept or reject explanations for specific archaeological patterns can and must be grounded in those same archaeological patterns. This implies, in turn, a continued commitment to the utmost methodological and interpretive rigor, including the further develop- ment of middle range theory.

We do not wish to establish a new “dominant paradigm” or belittle the accomplishments of Southwest archae- ology over the last 25 years. Instead, we wish to define an approach by which we can add to those accomplish- ments. We are a small group, but we suspect that among Southwestern archaeologists, others have begun to take-or are willing to consider-a broadly similar approach. At this point we wish to stress our shared concerns: dissatisfaction with tracing all histori- cal change to environmental or demo- graphic roots; willingness to seek social or political mechanisms for change; and the sense that explanation means analyzing and comparing actual instances of change, not examining dif- ferences between abstractions. We also seek new ways to bring people together and begin defining an approach that is