Paper short abstract:

My doctoral research at is centred on a philosophically challenging and historically motivated surview of the potential epistemological benefits for archaeology that I believe are bound up in Wittgenstein's complex (and often misunderstood) notion of 'language games'.

Paper long abstract:

My research has begun with what one might term as a 'foucauldian' emphasis on a 'history of the present' that attempts to reconcile our current attitudinal disposition to Wittgenstein's thought in the archaeological archive. This has necessitated an attempt to contextualise our 'disposition' historically and critically, and includes a surview of several post-processual papers written in the early to mid 1990s in archaeological theory. For my part, this culminated in a thoughtful article and effort at a 'rapprochement' entitled 'Archaeology and Wittgenstein' written by the processual archaeologist John Bintliff (2000) and responses to this, from writers such as Julian Thomas (2000). It is pertinent that while both writers acknowledge the potential of Wittgenstein, it is left to Bintliff (2000) to outline Wittgenstein's philosophical ideas and to bemoan his relative neglect in the discipline. However little has advanced since this discussion. Why should this be? In part the answer 'going forward' must rest on an exegetical shortfall in Bintliff's position that consists in his over emphasising of one particular reading of Wittgenstein's notion of 'language games' (Monk 1990). This leaves Bintliff's proffered solution to all our difficulties in archaeology vulnerable to charges of relativism. A position long critiqued and anticipated some years earlier in Social Anthropology by for example Ernest Gellner. In aiming to contextualise these criticisms and my drawing on Social Anthropology as an analogue to examine the efficacy of Wittgenstein's later thinking, there exits the potential to explore the potential synergies and inter-disciplinary interchanges between the two academic traditions.