Sight Formation Processes: Archaeology of Cultural and Sociohistorical Extromission and “Seeing Together”

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Despite insights from recent archaeologies of the senses, notions persist in the human and social sciences of vision as the invariant individual’s passive reception of a phenomenally “given” world, while cognitivists posit a universal “visual grammar.” In contrast, this paper asks how archaeology might draw on and contribute to the understanding that visual experience is a social and historical phenomenon, taught and learned through particular sociocultural processes wherein visual perception is necessarily complemented by “extromissive” expressions that resonate within shared visual traditions and shape ongoing visual experience. While many such expressions (spoken language, gesture/ostension) are ephemeral, others, like material culture, iconography, and architecture/spatial organization are the special purview of archaeology, which is likewise positioned to track these circuits of sight formation and change on both long-term and event-based scales. A modern-day vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s image allows an ethnoarchaeological exploration of the sociohistorical, iconographic tradition shared by witnesses, and the spontaneous, decentralized creation of a shrine that indexically affirmed the abductive visual experience while also amplifying it temporally and socially. I conclude with the argument that intentionally eschewing metaphysics opens possibilities for applying these same insights to other pre/historic American archaeological sites and traditions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37339.0