Slow thinking: beyond the entangled list

Summary

Several theorists under the broad umbrella of a new materialism have argued that our accounts of the social-natural world proceed too quickly, skating over rich complexities and contradictions in favor of simple ontological impressions. In response, they suggest, we need to slow down our analytical movements in order to track the complex articulations of a world that becomes difficult to resolve at higher speeds. Here I argue that this issue is particularly relevant for archaeologists for whom issues like temporal compression and interpretive gaps are often highly explicit. I seek to use archaeological materials to both slow down historical accounts of the silver economy in the colonial Andes and to move beyond the descriptive list stage of analysis often encountered in . Faced with a list that might include llamas, mules, alfalfa, altitude, hemoglobin, capital, and adobe walls, I deploy this heterogeneous assemblage to trace specific questions of animal labor, bioplasticity, and precarity in the colonial Andes.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Archaeology and the New Materialism

Keywords

Spatial Coverage