Paper short abstract:

This paper employs a Heideggerian analysis of the phenomenology of ‘being’ to explore the impact of the ‘being’ of the anthropological and archaeological researcher on their engagement with the material and cultural practices of others.

Paper long abstract:

All anthropological and archaeological knowledges or 'facts' are mediated by at least one researcher before their dissemination to an audience, and the impact of this mediation on the resultant texts must be understood if the potentially solipsistic cultural relativism of the "postmodern condition" is to be addressed. This, in and of itself, is not a particularly radical notion - the gender, sexuality, religion, etc, of the researcher having been problematised in a variety of critical discourses for at least several decades - but what is proposed here, rather, is an analysis of a somewhat more fundamental nature; one that explores the concept of the researcher as a 'Being' and, at least initially, strips away such cultural inflections of the researcher's 'self' to concentrate upon what it means to be an inquiring Being. Only once the researcher's experience of being a 'Being' in the world has been examined, and 'this must be done explicitly, even at the risk of discussing the 'obvious'' (Heidegger, Being and Time 1997: 81), can an attempt be made to qualify its impact on their reaction to the physical world and the artefacts and beings therein.

This paper builds upon current discourses that endeavour to reintroduce the 'agency' of studied individuals into the anthropological and archaeological records, but argues that before the agency of others manifested by their material and cultural practices can be understood, the researcher must necessarily understand their own being and subsequent relationship with others and external 'things'.