Three Rooms

It began, for me, at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Denver CO, 2002. I was opening a session of papers on archaeology and performance (I have spent some ten years working with a performance company in the UK, exploring areas of common interest - see my book, written with performance artist Mike Pearson, Theatre/Archaeology). There was another session on performance and archaeology, but open only to those who had been invited by the organizers. I wasn't invited. I should have thought about why academics might want to keep their ideas behind closed doors.

I had a business breakfast with one of this other session's organizers - he is/was the doctoral student of an old friend and colleague. He was preparing a book on archaeology and performance, to be based on the papers from this closed session. I asked whether he had read my book. He said yes, but found it difficult because he couldn't find a way of citing it. I should have thought this a little strange. Anyway, we did agree that I would write a piece for his book. The topic was to be performance, power and community. I was to prepare something for the section on performativity.

A few weeks before the submission deadline, I contacted the editors and said that I wanted to do something a little different. I would deal with power and community, but also take up the question of how we might write about performance, how material remains relate to performance. Were they OK with this? Yes, I should go ahead.

(The background is a fascinating issue in performance - recording, media, documentation - see the Presence Project - [link])

A few weeks after I delivered Three Rooms, I got a phone call from the other editor saying they were not going to include my piece, for three reasons. It was different to the other chapters; he didn't think it had anything to do with power and community; and anyway he didn't understand it and couldn't, as an editor, write an introduction to it.

I was furious. Surely the academy is about debating difference. Surely an intelligent and open response to something that puzzles you is to attempt to understand, rather than dismiss it out of hand? Surely he wasn't defining performance as simply about the spectacles of ceremony and power? (He was!) Surely he could see that the three rooms are stages for different ways people have found (or not) of asserting their sense of self and agency, in the face of wider forces and institutional powers? Surely, as editor of a book, and therefore an implied expert on the anthropology and archaeology of performance, he realized that it is not a simple matter to write transparently of performance, which is all about embodiment (and potentially escapes language)? Surely they realized that I saw my role as one who asks difficult questions (I have something of a reputation for this)? Since I am a Classical archaeologist of Greece, maybe they just wanted something about the Olympic games. (They did.) I had to conclude that at best they were innocently incompetent in their editorial role, at worst they were attempting, in their editing of a book about archaeology and performance, to claim leadership of a new agenda they wished to define on their terms. The academy if often about this kind of intellectual property and claims to ownership.

On this - all power to Creative Commons

That is why I sent the piece to the Journal of Social Archaeology.