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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
ANT and that in my research the balance between humans and nonhumans
are unequal. But influences from ANT have still made their way
into my research and at times with a quite strong presence.
The first influence that ANT has had on my research is an opening of my
eyes to the role of things. Instead of just seeing objects as props on the stage of
history or as a means of reaching beyond it, ANT has helped me see how
objects in themselves are important actors who can stop a tank from crossing
a border, facilitate everyday life for soldiers or allow for easy crossing through
a border crossing. But it is not necessarily just the material objects that should
be seen as actors but all parts of the past that we encounter today have to be
seen as important influences of the past in the present, whether fences,
newspaper articles, films, photos or accounts. In the creation of the Iron
Curtain I encounter today they have all had a role to play.
The second point of influence that I have taken with me from ANT is to
‘go with the flow’ and to follow the material. ANT can be seen as a kind of
methodology for tracing the associations between the different actors within
a so called network. The term Actor Network Theory is not unproblematic
and has been used, buried and resurrected by its users, for example Latour
who claims that “‘actor-network-theory’, a name that is so awkward, so
confusing, so meaningless that it deserves to be kept” (Latour 2005:9). The
word network should be seen more as associations and not structured or set
networks and as Law (2009) points out ANT is not a theory as theories
generally tries to explain why something happens and ANT can be seen
more as a descriptive methodology (Law 2009:141).
Latour suggests that instead of ordering the social beforehand into
convenient categories we should try to understand how the actors (human
and non-human) themselves act and interact by tracing the connections
between them (Latour 2005:23). Archaeologist Jonathan Westin brings
Latour’s thoughts into archaeology when he writes: “…a single letter of [an]
inscription is not accountable for the meaning of those words or sentences
it helps form, political or religious as they may be. […] It is not a process
where the primary movement is that of cultural values trickling down and
affecting the parts, but a process where the greater movement is that of
parts soaring upwards” (Westin 2012:39). Within post-processual archaeology
the aim has been to reach beyond the objects to the people behind
them, to translate the objects into the cultural and social symbolism that
they are presumed to represent. By doing this, making the objects symbolise
the trends and the cultural values that we are researching, we take in
advance that which we are researching and place it in an already established
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