Fernando López Aguilar1

Theories can be excellent stimuli (let us remember Whitman), but they can create monsters or mere museum pieces as well.

                                                                  Jorge Luis Borges

A little bit of history

Thirty years ago, during the seventies, an attempt to apply Marxism called Latin American social archaeology: was developed

…our attempt to find an analysis method of the Andean process that explains things coherently and that can be used to link the past to the present in a scientific and significant way. We call this ‘Social Archaeology’ and, at least in our case, it is a discipline in construction, with all the flaws and weaknesses of what is new and experimental. This discipline was founded by archaeologist Gordon Childe, and we believe that Emilio Choy introduced it to Peru in the 50’s.2

The same Luis Guillermo Lumbreras affirmed: “The concern of the social archaeologist consisting in whereas he/she should go ‘beyond’, as a start, in his/her arrangement of materials must lead to establish the level of development of the productive forces, so that he/she can, as a whole, present this to the comparison with homotaxic groups”.3 Since the Teotihuacan Meeting (1975) the creation of a Social Archaeology journal in each of the participant countries was proposed.4 Then the adjective “Latin American” was added and nowadays Manuel Gándara has proposed that it should be called “Iberoamerican”, because he knew by intuition “that the coincidences are larger than the differences”.5

One of the particularities of this Marxism is that it inherits the orthodox views, of the Leninist and even Stalinist tradition of the already disappeared Soviet branch, which integrated dialectical materialism to historical materialism and neopositivism in order to explain social phenomena: “And most of them must recognize in historical materialism the only congruous possibility of a solution for the discipline”.6 In spite of the ideas shaped in its own texts, social archaeology has not had a progressive growth, but it has developed erratically, to the extent of including researchers with antagonistic positions in the theoretical and political field. It is also about a marginal practice in Latin American and Mexican archaeology, both official and academic,7 because there are no researchers who are clearly attached to it, and their academic action is reduced to the ENAH, where there are other research perspectives. It is not necessary to say that not all Marxist archaeologists are seen as social archaeologists. In fact, it might seem that

…Latin American archaeology is pretty strongly oriented towards social archaeology. However, […] it had a restricted influence as to time (the seventies and the early eighties) and place (Mexico, Peru, Venezuela and Cuba). Social archaeology was only developed in a temporal context where the political model of the State sympathized with a Marxist ideology.8

People who have called themselves social archaeologists tend to mystify characters, situations and conditions, building apologetic mythology and texts in order to show their origin in Gordon Childe: “the current we have called ‘archaeology as a social science’ begins when some researchers such as P. Armillas and J. L. Lorenzo in Mexico and L. G. Lumbreras in Peru, discover and worry about the diffusion of Vere Gordon Childe’s works”.9 This is an unsolved debate topic in the history of the Mexican and Peruvian archaeology;10 what is true is that this Australian researcher becomes a founding myth, regardless of the fact that before his death, he wrote: “now at last I have divested my mind of the transcendental laws that determine history and of mechanical causes, economic or environmental, which automatically shape its course”.11

The widest contributions come from Venezuela, Peru, Dominican Republic and Mexico, from which the current has gotten adepts in the rest of Latin America, especially in the places where archaeologists look for a theory that offers support to a more political than academic position:

…Archaeology, in return, is a liberation means when it discovers the historic roots of the peoples, teaching the origin and character of their oppressed condition; it is a liberation means when it shows and discovers the transitoriness of ranks and social classes, the transitoriness of the institutions and the patterns of conduct. It is a liberation means when it is articulated with the other social sciences, which work with nowadays problems, and when it shows the procedural unity of history in its general terms and in its regional and local particularities.12

This way of thinking was already insinuated since the first edition in 1974, in the text of the meeting in Teotihuacan13 and was constantly handled until the fall of real Socialism. In the moments of higher over-excitement it was thought that with this theory one could predict the future; “starting from a theory in which the explanation of history is one of the preconditions for the modification of the present and a prediction of the future”.14

However, social archaeology is not a time and space monolithic block, because there have been at least three generations of archaeologists who come from various countries and this is shown, as we will see along this text, in different forms of conceiving the integration of Marxism to the practice of archaeology. Veloz Maggiolo15 affirmed that social Latin American archaeology had as its main promoters Luis G. Lumbreras, Mario Sanoja, Iraida Vargas: “Fortunately, we are talking about the most prestigious researchers in their respective countries, renowned for their scientific standards and the quantitatively and qualitatively important level of their production”.16

This group organized various academic events,17 but as a result of internal discords, they only wrote isolated works until 1983, date of the first meeting in Oaxtepec. Apart from the articles published in the Boletín de Antropología Americana,18 the books of Bate, Sanoja and Vargas y Montané can be emphasized.19 In them it is still evident the radical difference around concepts such as the one of economic and social formation and means of production, but they coincided in proposing a Marxist “interpretation” of the history of Pre-Hispanic societies. We can also stress an antagonism towards “traditional and classic archaeology”, which they never explicitly criticized: social archaeology, due to its theory and its method, would surpass the merely descriptive exercise of the discipline to become a scientific activity, with an explanatory character. In this period, Bate introduced the “category” of culture as a way to solve the methodological problem of the “inference of social contents to which correspond such cultural forms”.20

With the precedent of Teotihuacan, the Primer encuentro de Antropología Americana (First Meeting of American Anthropology) was held in 1980 with the main topic: “Theory and method in anthropology”,21 sponsored by the Panamerican Institute of History and Geography.22 Here reemerged the need for unification and, in this way, the meetings of Oaxtepec (1983) and Cuzco (1984) were organized. In these opportunities, there was an attempt to precise the definition of the categories of historical analysis and to propose the thesis of Latin American sociohistorical development.23

We can point out that this is the moment that marked the constitution of the group, because they did not only assume a set of common goals and proposals within a theoretical and methodological program related to the definition of “categories” and to the articulation of the theory with archaeological information-an old problem approached since Lumbreras’ work-, but besides they shaped an organization policy of local groups inside each country, almost a cell structure, and they transformed the Boletín de Antropología Americana into the official organ of said current.24 The intention was to have a defined position, basic agreements on the theoretical meaning of notions and categories, workgroups such as the Oaxtepec group (Mexico), the SOVAR (Venezuela) and the INDEA (Peru).25

Around that time, the group Evenflo,^™26 was getting consolidated in Mexico with archaeologists of different branches of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, with the eventual participation of sociologists from the UNAM and anthropologists of the CIESAS and, shortly afterwards, the creation of a cell in Guatemala called 4-Ahau was attempted. Bate said that the different authors had made contributions that were “uneven in quality”, although they were in constant development and change.27 And even if he did not precisely marked out the works of less or higher quality, nor he distinguished the fundamental authors from the marginal ones, he did insinuate a generational distance.28

Several texts stress the importance of the Oaxtepec and Cuzco meetings for the constitution of the “theoretical position” called “coherent”.29 The documents that derived from these two meetings -peculiarly unpublished- are widely quoted as the triumph of reason over the difference between their ways to understand the world:

In a meeting held in Oaxtepec, Mexico, in 1983, many of the archaeologists we have already mentioned discussed the problem. What we call Means of Production, based on the already interpreted archaeological information, was in fact an operational part of the same, a praxis of the means of production.30

The modification of the points of view was so important that they decided to review old postures,31 as well as to create and redefine categories under the lights of historical materialism.32

Manuel Gándara entered the group since the beginning and this was an important fact to try to build a “marxitivist posture”,33 because he deeply influenced the declaration of principles and goals, as well as the terminology to be used, taken from a complex and contradictory influence of Hempel, Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, all this emptied in a rigidly orthodox scheme. Gándara argued in favor of the existence, in Kuhnian terms, of an “academic community” that has generated a “tradition” and an “academic trajectory”: “Sometimes, as it is the case for Iberoamerican social archaeology, this tradition can be of an international scale, with different headquarters that although may involve regional variants, share the basic elements of the position”.34 The book Elements for a theoretical construction in archaeology, together with the article that summarizes it,35 were the reflect of that Marxitivist view and this resulted in the addition of new concerns to solve the history of archaeological contexts and to “produce information”: “Understanding the genesis of the archaeological data implies to theorize about the three kinds of particular real processes and to establish the link between said theories. These are: a) historical materialism, b) the history of contexts and c) the history of data production”.36

For the second meeting in Oaxtepec (1986), they already had a set of agreements. The most important were on the concepts of means of production and economic-social formation, to which the way of life, work style and culture “categories” were added for the definition of a concrete society.37 In a certain way, the culmination of the “category unification” process appeared in the domain of these meetings and, thanks to them, several articles were written.38 In this moment, the elements for a “historical periodization” were also explicitly formulated, based on the contents of the social formations39 which were called “primitive community” -with their variants, the gatherer-hunter and the tribal- and the “initial class”. It was precisely Bate who “pointed out the difference between the qualities of the fundamental production relations”40 of the gatherer-hunter social formation41 and of the initial class,42 while Iraida Vargas did the same with the tribal.43 Other researchers were devoted to characterize the different ways of life of some social formations. For the tribal one, it was again Iraida Vargas44 who affirmed that, at least for the Caribbean region, it was manifested through four ways of life: the egalitarian tubercle cultivator, the egalitarian seed cultivator, the egalitarian mixed cultivator (both tubercles and seeds) and the cacical hierarchical. From a more empirical perspective, some years before Veloz Maggiolo and Bernardo Vega45 proposed the same number for the preceramic Caribbean and were then taken by Veloz Maggiolo and Gus Pantel46 for the gatherers of the same zone; Felipe Bate47 numbered them from I to VI for the case of the South American gatherer-hunters and, as far as I know, there is no essay on the ways of life for the Andean region and Guatemala, this is, on the so-called initial class societies or those that preceded in those countries.48

After the propositional phase in which one of its main achievements was to call the attention towards the theoretical and methodological problems of archaeology that appeared together with the crisis and collapse of the so-called real socialism and with the fall of the Soviet Union, recent social archaeology has shown few novelties, at least from the point of view of the literature that is available; and it is a little abandoned such as the Marxist interpretation that supported it, although this abandonment has been justified alleging whims of fashion and bureaucratic obstacles.49 Due to various reasons, many researchers of the original group moved towards different theoretical perspectives,50 and the original group was confronted to the possibility of the theory’s “refutation”. However, they saw hope, not in the Spanish-speaking countries, but in the Anglo-Saxon ones, their former imperialistic enemies. However, in spite of the friendliness with which these expressions of adhesion were seen, their eclecticism was doubted, since it led to inconsistent theoretical positions.51

The surprise was that they had been read by the American: social archaeology had crossed the “Rio Grande” barrier.52 Patterson talked about the culture from the Marxist perspective and highlighted the aspects proposed by social archaeology.53 When making a recount of the theoretical tendencies of American archaeology, he wrote, as to give place to social archaeology and to Bate’s definition of culture:

…those who defend a Marxist archaeology will have to develop a concept of culture that is not simply reduced to material production or to symbolic systems. Culture is something more than political economy or ideology, on the one hand, or than society on the other.54

Randall McGuire spoke about the history and perspectives of the group almost in the same way Bate had spoken about his version of social archaeology, which we had already mentioned.55

When speaking about the impact on Spanish speakers beyond Ibero-America, he noted:

They find the theory of the Grupo Oaxtepec much more firmly grounded in meaningful political practice in Latin America and in the scientific practice of archaeology. The research of this group has largely been ignored by English- speaking archaeologists, with a few notable exceptions, such as Bruce Trigger and Thomas Patterson.56

In 1995, social archaeology abandoned, in the teaching field, two of its first places, Mexico and Peru, to move to Spain, where Bate and Lumbreras taught the Ibero-American Social Archaeology at the University of Andalucia. In the meantime, the last writings started to be characterized by containing a certain defensive tone, supported more on acts of faith than on praxis from the “specificity” of archaeology: “Personally, I prefer to hold on to what survives from a critical and rational spirit: the light of a candle might be not very intense, fragile, hesitant and local, and it might have failed sometimes: but it is better than darkness”.57

Felipe Bate is the one who seems to summarize the feeling of the group: “Among those who have tried to survive with decorum, maintaining consequence, there are still many unfinished dialogues, many questions to be solved and, we hope, many others to be posed”.58 We might wonder which these questions are, if the only light of rationality is the little flame of social archaeology, if it is the one that lights up the critical spirit within irrational darkness. Maybe the answer is insinuated here:

From our point of view, the archaeological study of material expressions of concrete societies in their historical development with a materialistic perspective is still valid [sic]. […] Anyway, given that under the postmodern perspective everything is valid, we prefer to stick to Latin American social archaeology, which is based on historical materialism, and to complement it in its conceptual equipment, so that we broaden its applicative potentialities to concrete archaeological problems.59

And he concludes: “It is better to be old-fashioned, as long as being in vogue implies adopting deconstructionist poses rather than theoretical positions”.60

Motives

Some time ago, Ignacio Rodríguez published an article in which, among other reflections, he pointed out that

…only at the ENAH there is an academic current that rises as an alternative to the historical particularism that dominates in Mexican archaeology, and it is called social archaeology. Even though a colleague affirms that social archaeology is also a form of historical particularism, the pretension of alterability of its members is endorsed by a diffusion and a militancy that spreads through Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, which makes it important, even when in Mexico there is not a single significant project.61

For many, the failure of the praxis of social archaeology is evident: there has never been a single project, significant or not;62 its authors, the “theoretical” ones, refuse the confrontation with field experience and have caused this adjective to be considered unworthy within the empiricist tradition of archaeology, and that many researchers reject, disqualify and show contempt for the theory and the philosophical reflection. They themselves recognize the lack of praxis.63 There are no projects, only two studies (in Mexico) after more than twenty years of theorizing. Strange situation since the research projects, from those of “low intensity” to the “mega-projects”, are the smallest units of knowledge reproduction in archaeology, especially in the Mexican one.64

The intuition that social archaeology is a variant of historical particularism is shared by other researchers. The suspicion is old65 and it emerged from the comparison of the consequences of its theoretical and methodological proposition, from the reading of its field experiences and from the results that have been generated in other countries with the statements of cultural history, as defined in its American sense.66 The idea that it “reproduced the diffusionist tradition with Marxist supplementary grafts”,67 was one of the starting points of this test. Another one was “The old New Archaeology”68 that preceded this work. The knowing of social archaeology and the reading of alternative philosophical points of view during the eighties led the reflection I present today, which reveals a set of key questions for which I have not found an answer by reading the available texts. Perhaps they are found in a publication I do not know, or in the doctoral thesis recently presented by Felipe Bate, which was granted the INAH research award in 1997.69

The doubts I express emerge from the claim of internal consistency demanded by other theories, which seems to be a substantive characteristic of social archaeology: Is it the example of consistency and coherence, and the prototype of a conception of the theory? Is it possible to find in its works the path of scientificity, the correct answers of objectivism, realism and the demarcation criteria? The reading I have made of its texts seems to demonstrate they do not comply with the requirements they demand from the other archaeological theories.

This text does not seek the debate proposed by Ignacio Rodríguez around what he considers the crucial points for the understanding of this current.70 Those are only some keys of its history that are more related to the motivations to gain identification as a group, to its internal sociology. Neither is it an answer to certain criticisms to the complexity theories.71 As in other cases, the style and tone with which they are presented seems to look for the disqualification by means of adjectives to hide the ignorance about the other theories, which are criticized without profound knowledge of the statements. What is behind all this? I hold that there are other aspects, properly extra-theoretical, extra-philosophical (beyond the rationality they so proclaim), extra-academic and foreign to the political praxis which make them appear as a united and integrated group, which make them associate, identify themselves, create their links and reveal themselves as a theoretical position. Only a detailed reading allows the finding of the distances there are among the main authors, as we will see later on.

This work is not a criticism to Marxism, one of the most important philosophies that have conformed a Weltanschauung in the past one hundred and fifty years: that task, or its exegesis corresponds to others.72 This is only an attempt to understand its differences, its proximities and its distances, that can add something to the understanding of the place held by the contributions of this position to the archaeological thinking. My challenge is that of starting the debate, to overcome the academic stagnation, “on the structural characteristics and the possible theoretical contributions of said current” and with it, “we integrate ourselves to an archaeological practice to which we are not familiar”.73 To this respect, Oscar Fonseca was convinced

…of the need to start-within the discipline- the debate about the guidelines of our professional practice and of the need to have this alternative consolidated as such. In fact, it is this debate and the very nature of our professional practice that have conformed our discipline.74

Its windmills

Social archaeology was built by putting up its enemies:

Certainly, researchers who have assumed a Marxist position are not the largest part, and their propositions are heterogeneous in quality and size. But the same could be said about the ‘new archaeologists’ in America. They have not escaped the opportunism around fashion and Marxism and the ‘new archaeology.75

From their point of view, in the years prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, an important number of archaeologists and social researchers had affiliated to the Marxist position because of a trend; conviction was a privilege of the minority. The seriousness of the researcher means to be immutable, constant as to the way to see the world, in which theoretical change can only take place within certain limits, which are barely clear but very narrow. Every divergent thought is pejoratively considered to be part of a fickle trend that attracts those researchers who are not prepared to resist it.

The thing is that, together with freedom of expression of all sorts of progressist ideas, there has also been an easier and more direct access to the archaeological literature that new archaeology was producing in America, and to English spatial archaeology and others. And there were always young professors who, like Manuel Gándara or Linda Manzanilla, were not dragged by the trend and who spread said statements, without necessarily having to share them, always meeting the requirement of academic seriousness.76

They acknowledge that Marxism made part of the intellectual trend of the seventies and the early eighties, although frivolity creates monsters:

As a great trend, Marxism did not escape the proliferation, among its very abundant adepts, of all kinds of opportunisms. The pamphletary gibberish of a Marxism that was fossilized in distant State ideologies or the stereotyped formulas through efficient vulgarization texts were common currency at all the levels of the academy. “Dialectic”, as a general theory and as a method that generated “scientific, critical and revolutionary” knowledge, was the implicit endorsement of any statement. Thanks to the overwhelming assent of the trend, this mysterious omnipresent dialectic was out of doubt and out of discussion. This, together with its ritualized trivialization, kept everyone safe from the awkwardness or the embarrassment of revealing the unwonted abyss of generalized ignorance hidden behind that magical term. This was so even among the most deservedly renowned scholars.77

Unfortunately, they never said who made up the fickle academy that produced intellectual trends that were “more strident than consistent”. Anonymous were those designated with rhetoric full of qualifiers:

It would seem that we are talking about dead people, but it is not so, they are our contemporaries and they are still around. Most of them prefer to hide their faces in the various openings of ashcolored everydayness. Others, who had felt the call of the golden trumpets of history, cannot yet recover from their confusion, bewilderment, disappointment. […] The true opportunistic, possessed by their own mission and interest, are not driven back by the shame or the scruples, and will always sail with the favorable winds of the new trends, selling at each port what sells best, to the highest bidder.78

On the other hand, their self-reflection reminds us of Salvador Allende’s last speech:: “We suppose that they are not few, those who endure with silent dignity, ruminating the ill-feeling of humiliated truths, keeping the seeds, waiting for the hour or the generation of revenge, of new springs”.79 Gándara also spoke of trends when he recognized that he did not have a model (perhaps explanatory and under the deterministic laws of the means of production) to explain the change from “one theoretical position” to another: “Although my heart is with Lakatos, at least in Mexican archaeology things sometimes are more like Kuhn’s model, called by Popper the ‘law of the mob’, in which one jumps from a theoretical position to another one sometimes due to trends, social pressures or institutional opportunities more than due to a procedure of rational critic”.((Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 11.)) The irrationality of trend was in vogue in Mexican archaeology, although Gándara did not have a rational model for the progress of science. Less known authors also came to dialectically separate themselves from the capitalistic fickleness.80

In fact, for a long time they disqualified the divergence through arguments that emerged from what they later called the appraisal area, becoming a moral, academic and political authority, and pejoratively denying the other.81 How could we label this position? In 1981 (1982) Bate, without quoting the author (who was probably Juan Yadeun), talked about the way in which operated towards the anonymous archaeologist his/her own thesis, since he/she started with idealistic arguments, and concluded with the need to end up with the “absurd worries about dialectical materialism” and by “‘disconnecting the tautological machine’ [sic]”,82 in order to sell a Marxism at low cost, as was claimed by the trend, to conclude: “Quite sui generis ideological resource in the foundation of the premises for a method that satisfactorily responds to the ‘class’ interests of a certain group of archaeologists”.83

Class interests and the search for power were added to the perversions of the other. Foreign to this, they could judge … and so did Bate with those who proposed the uselessness of the term culture in anthropology and rejected its integration as a Marxist category, since they considered it had little to do with “popular causes”.84 That other is anonymous but it is well configured, it is ignorant, wretched, reactionary, frivolous. The arguments of the social archaeologists remind us of the paradox of the wise: who says who is wiser? A super-wise… And in this way, they decide that eclecticism is another one of the intellectual perversions:

…any attempt to conciliate materialism (even mechanicist or vulgar materialism) and logical positivism (in this case, Hempelian), could only reduce to another eclectic incongruity, lacking authority to claim explicit consistency from archaeological science. And this is because the idea that the ‘new archaeology’ would assume a materialistic position has been spread.85

Social archaeologists agreed on two basic points, one was the difference towards Althusser’s Marxism, and the other one was that

…the easy way of eclecticism is not a solution to our deficiencies. Monsters such as Marx-Weber-Wittfogel, Marx-Kant, Marx-Freud, Marx- Lévi-Strauss and others, might result in good tobacco mixtures for pipes, but not for social sciences. Scissors and paste are not part of our methodological instrument.86

Then, how can we read Gándara’s ideas? It seems they forgot Collingwood, who noted that the “scissors and paste” method is characterized because it builds history “[…] by picking out and combining the testimonies of different authorities”,87 and that Marx and Hegel took it upon themselves to pigeonhole and cut parts of very different authors, inventing a pigeonhole system (which has now changed into a periodization chart, means of production, ways of life) in which they made their knowledge fit. The result consisted in arranging the whole of history into an only scheme, “in which ‘periods’-each one of which has its peculiar character- follow one another according to a pattern that can be needed a priori, on the basis of a logic […]”.88

Social archaeology never quoted nor refuted the author that placed the “scissors and the paste” at the center of the Marxist historical method, considered to be central among the American. Social archaeologists, due to the very exigencies of their professional formation, as well as to the university interests, appeared ignorant of the knowledge foreign to archaeology. In Mexican archaeology, affirmed Gándara, prevailed “acritical eclecticism”, which mixed many ideas from many sources “without worrying whereas the result has any rational sense or not”.89

All the criticisms outwards and the highest considerations inwards. The justifications of its own eclecticism, whereas theoretical and philosophical or of the acritical choice of theories and methods, were made as deaf and blind before Bate’s words: the sting of tobacco travels in “the frame of Iberoamerican social archaeology” from the type-variety system to the ethnoarchaeology considered as “technical or heuristic” [sic] and a good amount of terms from the American processual archaeology and from symbolic anthropology. The justification was simple and it was placed in footnotes:

In the low rank theories we see some techniques congregate [sic] that can derive from other disciplines, anthropological or not; it is from this archaeological theory -of medium rank- that the use of procedures and heuristics of different kinds, which are located in an inferior level, is justified. Therefore, the decision making regarding the application of particular tools is based on the very archaeological theory (Manuel Gándara, personal communication 1994). In this way, the fact of using or not taxonomic and analytic systems formulated outside the field of social archaeology (as in the case of the type-variety system that appears in the frame of historical particularism), for instance, in no way means to fall into eclecticism.90

With these words, the perfect hinge is highlighted: philosophical eclecticism entwines with empirical eclecticism based on an authority falsehood (Gandara’s personal communication); the numerous consequences and the infinite polemics behind this idea are omitted, and the choice of an analytic procedure or of one technique over the others is not argued, to avoid suspiciousness.

The fall of real socialism introduced problems to social archaeology, specially because it was the decade in which postmodern thought arrived to Latin American countries and the end of history and of ideologies was discussed. Marxism traveled, as Iraida Vargas acknowledges, from France, Spain and Latin America, towards the Anglo-Saxon countries, since “it has lost grounds in favor of the old thesis of functional relativism that nowadays presents to us, rejuvenated under the protective veil of postmodernism, the usefulness and novel thesis of market economy”.91 Gándara also acknowledges in the postmodern his rivals.92

Our work also tries to give a critical answer to the proposals inspired in Marxism that are held by various Anglo-Saxon archaeologists or by those who work in the Anglo-American world. Based on the thesis of postprocessualism and postmodernism, they propose the need to cast aside the causal relations and the determinations on which Marxist analysis is based, orienting themselves towards explicative models of a relativistic and transhistorical character. We really think that they simply constitute another social theory in which the neopositivistic knowledge is sweetened with quotations and phrases taken from Marx: the “Everything is permitted” of postmodernism.93

Gándara’s preoccupation about the “falsification” of Marxism emerged from there and, of course, from the crisis of neopositivism and the emergence of new philosophical perspectives. However, the disqualification of other “theoretical positions” has been made with arguments that are foreign to the “scientific rationality” they proclaim: “The issue subsists: in order to have a comparison between theoretical positions, there must be theoretical positions”.94 If there are none, it is impossible. If they are not acknowledged as such or if the alternative views do not try to define themselves as such, it is also impossible. Can we compare “theoretical positions” to trends?, equations to miniskirts?, pears to dinosaurs? Perhaps we can, but from other conceptions of the world and other logics. The same Gándara answers to the contrary: “for now, I maintain my Lakatosianism: in order to have a refutation there must be an alternative, and not only promises of alternative”.95 I maintain the questions: how can we compare a theoretical position to a theoretical non-position?, how can we acknowledge, from its game rules, an alternative? The strategy of disqualification stands out, to show us that the only, true and all-powerful theory is its own. Gándara’s Popperian falsificationism in its Marxist-Lakatosian variant overlooked Popper’s and Lakatos’ anti-Marxism. The latter affirmed that his requirement of continuous development of science

…shows the weakness of programs that, such as Marxism and Freudism, we have no doubt are ‘united’, and that they give a wide outline of the type of auxiliary theories that are going to be used to absorb anomalies, but that indefectibly invent their auxiliary theories behind the facts without, at the same time, anticipating others. (What new fact has predicted Marxism since, let us say, 1917?).96

Gándara noted that “there is never an innocent reading” and that risks are presented in the fact that there are theories that reflect initial moments, and also those of peak and senility.97 Afterwards he added that “the principle of charity establishes that the best theories from the best authors in their best times should be taken”.98 However, in later works he affirmed that, from his Lakatosian perspective, there must not only be “offerings that very powerful theoretical positions will be built later, but theoretical positions or, in the absence of these, a program by means of which this construction will take place, to at least clarify the general guidelines”.99 That flickering light of Gándara’s, at this point, is a lighthouse that illuminates the irrational darkness and shows the path of scientific progress: the only one that qualifies as a theoretical position, the best according to his parameters, his own game rules, is social archaeology. As judges and parties, they only criticize a single aspect of the whole of the rival theoretical positions, a small subset of what is called “substantive theories”100 and they do not perform exhaustive analysis of the achievements and deficiencies of other Weltanschauungs. Then, why worry?, who examines the examinants? A meta-examinant, that does not exist. The arguments they wield in their own self-examination and in the disqualification of the other theories distance them from the rationality they claim, to mark out their archaeological science from the promises of theoretical construction of the non-sciences and approach them to their postmodern adversaries:101

Paradoxically, the contemporary philosophers of science (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Shapere, Hesse, Laudan, etc.), in their effort to explain in an objective way the distinctive character of scientific rationality, have discovered that under the presupposed criteria and the methods of analysis held by logic positivists, science does not appear to be as rational an enterprise as they thought.102

In the game there are other values different from those exclusively objective. Gándara’s explicit acknowledgement of lacking a model for the switch of “theoretical positions” (although he also explicitly assumes Lakatos’) may imply not only that social archaeologists are not preoccupied about reasons different from their own criteria of scientific rationality, but that the problem of falsifying and not being falsified may reside elsewhere, that some answers come from Duhem’s anti-positivism:

…since logic does not determine with strict precision when an inadequate hypothesis should give place to another one more fruitful and since the recognition of the adequate moment for change depends on good sense, physicists must weigh up their judgments and increase the speed of the scientific process trying to develop in a conscious way inside them the good sense, in a more lucid and watchful way. Now, passions and interests are the elements that contribute the most to obstruct good sense and disturb its vision, thereforenothing will delay more the decision that will determine a fortunate reformation of the physics theory than the vanity that makes a physicist be too indulgent towards his own system and too severe towards the system of the other.103

This might seem a minor sin in the analysis of the theoretical positions that Gándara makes from his Lakatosianism. But the argument of good sense, as notes Velasco, traveled from Duhem to Lakatos, but most of all, it has been developed by Gadamerian hermeneutic from Aristotle’s phronesis.104

A theoretical position?

The notion of “theoretical position” was proposed by Manuel Gándara, inspired in the Kuhnian idea of “paradigm” and in Lakatos’ idea of “research program”, in order to make a critical analysis of the new American archaeology.105 Among the areas that he originally included, there were the ontological, the epistemological, the methodological, the technical, and another one that corresponded to the “particular substantive theories”.106 Later (1992) he added the appraisal area. From an ambiguous definition that is very far from the rational tradition he seeks to defend, he affirmed that it deals with the ethical, political and aesthetical “commitments” of a theory, since “the theories we propose answer to factors that are not only internal to the development of science, but to the wide social context (and even to the biographical vicissitudes of their authors)”.107

However, in his idea of theoretical analysis, which allows him to compare social archaeology to other authors, he proposed that in order to observe the coherence within a theory, the areas that must be examined are the ontological, the pragmatic-methodological, the formal-syntactic, the aesthetical, appraisal and, finally, the empirical.108 In the first one, the units postulated by the theory are detected, in order to “determine if the theory is not in reality only a reduction to other fields”, the aspects related to the way in which operate the principles of “causality” or “identity” must be solved, and we must answer the questions of whereas the processes are causal or accidental, if causality is deterministic or probabilistic, and the degree of differences and similarities between units that allows to define if we are dealing with one unit or the other.109 The second area has a priority, because in normal conditions, theories are proposed to solve problems, this means that the process starts with the formulation of a question to which the theory tries to provide an answer, whereas in an explicative way, why is it that something, or in the descriptive way, how is it that something. Here he included the refutability and the capacity to allow the growth of knowledge: “it is amazing that some ‘theories’ on the origin of the state turn to be irrefutable, and therefore, does not qualify as authentic theories”.110

The formal-syntactic has to do with the logic of refutation of theories, which establishes the relationship between sentences and between these and “states of the world”, which makes it “essential to know to which sentences we are referring when we refute. In this area, the questions are: which are the hypothesis or nomological principles of the theory?, what type are they-and as a consequence, which are the sentences that refute them? Without having these parameters clear, or the data, other theories are really relevant to examination, given that, in the beginning, we do not know what we are examining”.111 The aesthetical evaluates the sentences with criteria such as “simplicity”, “elegance” and “moderation”: simplicity is preferred over complexity in theories.112 In this text, we have the appraisal area at the end, which includes the ethical, political and aesthetical commitments, stood out in a footnote with a “Gandarian aphorism”: “if for every social theory that really turns to be nothing but disguised ideology we were paid a dollar, everybody would be rich [!]”.113 finally, we have the empirical area, which deals with the analysis, from relevant data to examination … perhaps it is there due to the lack of outstanding data in social archaeology. In a very Kantian assertion,114 Gándara said: “theory can be blind without data, and data can be dumb without theory, but the truth is that without having the first one clear, data always risk being irrelevant”.115 He clarifies very Popperianly that data are not neutral, but they “respond to the theories of observation and technical procedures with which they are obtained, which opens the door to Duhem’s famous problem: when a theory fails: do we blame the theory or the data? [sic]”.116

Gándara stated that refutation from logic (classic and bivalent) goes far beyond than demonstrating the facts contradict the sentences. For instance, he affirms that Earle has not refuted Service’s theory on cacicazgo because

…it is not at all clear that what we refer to when we say that we have refuted/corroborated a theory is intuitive or self-evident, if we do not determine first what it is that the theory says; even if we want to go away from the traditional analysis of refutation, then we have to specify how the theory is analyzed and what constitutes the evidence for or against it. Precisely, this requires performing the formal-syntactic analysis of the theory.117

This formality does not solve the problem of the empirical subdetermination of theories. The formal, semantic and syntactic analysis only place themselves at the threshold, because it is not only a problematic of the internal structure of theories, the problem is also how we chose between two of them and how the evidence is built, and it is here where good sense finds its place. For social archaeology, this is irrational because the evidence has a “hard” construction.

He argued that the overgenerality of the sentences in Flannery’s theory on the “origin of civilizations” makes them irrefutable and makes us think they are corroborated “by any observation in concrete cases”. Such a model resembles psychic predictions in California: “a natural phenomenon will hit a country in the East”, or “a dear Hollywood star will die”, equivalent to Flannery’s sentences “if a low level control repeatedly failed at maintaining the values of certain variables within a certain rank, a control of superior level would operate”.118 The enunciations of social archaeology are equally irrefutable, such as the one of the relationship between socioeconomic formation and culture which is

…the singular set of phenomenic forms any real society displays, as an effect that is multidetermined by the concrete conditions of existence of a social formation. Reciprocally, the category of social formation refers to the general system of essential contents that constitute the causality and structure of the historical processes, manifested in its culture. In this context, the category of way of life is best understood as the particular system of intermediate links, that mediate among the fundamental and general irregularities of the socioeconomic formation and the apparent singularities of the culture.119

To understand this, they say, it is necessary to read Hegel and manage the dialectic relationship of the form-content category:

The form category refers to the time and space organization of the elements that constitute the content. Among the distinctions we can make, it is interesting to consider: a) the fundamental and secondary aspects of the form and, b) the relationship between the general form and the particular forms which constitute it. The form maintains a necessary correspondence regarding its content, this correspondence is established through the fundamental aspects of the form. Nevertheless, there is a wide range of possible variability in the secondary aspects of the form, at different levels, but which multiply at the level of the particular forms. This is why different form configurations may correspond, with a necessary character, to a same content.120

In an enlightening footnote, we read: “Given the fact that a form can correspond, simultaneously or sequentially, to various contents, the aspects of the form that fundamentally correspond to various contents can be different”.121 Briefly, everything can occur between the form and the content, and only a clever “dialectic” mind can transform this into an heuristic122 and into assertive relationships that approach real reality. The confusing and erratic character of dialectic led Marvin Harris to say that “the dialectic relations are never falsifiable”.123

In the same token, we have the definition of way of life that “designates the relatively more limited rank of variations of the general form of society (of the social formation), given in the particularities of certain fundamental fields. On the other hand, it is the wide field of possible variability of the secondary aspects of the multiple particular forms where it is displayed and performs the unrepeatable phenomenic singularity of culture”.((Luis F. Bate, “Teoría de la cultura…”, in op. cit., 1996, pp. 81-82.)) Is this a statement that proves the rationality they proclaim?, is this the little flame of knowledge and reason that penetrates the irrational postmodernist darkness?, what explanation of the past can derive from this category and how would it allow the prediction of the future? It is surprising that this is the ontology they have defended to prove that their theoretical position is the best, lakatosianly speaking, although it is not evident which the sufficient and necessary conditions are for the definitions of social formation, way of life and culture, from the Hempelian model, which they also defend. In the same way, they have not proposed the refutation logic and not even a program that leads to its construction. In 1993, the conception was identical to that of 1977.124

Is culture everything? I do not know if there is in dialectic logic a different procedure from that of formal logic for the refutation of sentences of this kind. One might wonder if with these theoretical tools, the capacity and the need to predict the future by the part of social archaeology is comparable to that of the psychics in California; if these words support the requirements of congruity, coherence, precision, or those of simplicity and elegance. Gándara’s analysis on the position of social archaeology evades and avoids this three-category relation and simplifies it.

At the end of his examples, Gándara performed a superficial analysis of the “appraisal area” of Service’s thesis: “Service’s general position of course stops him from recurring to ‘accidents’ or ‘miracles’, or to intellectual superiorities of certain races, or to geographical determinisms, so that these clearly unacceptable solutions cannot rescue him. There is no theory deep down, but only a social comment or an ideological statement in favor of the function the State performs for the benefit of the social set […] the point is, precisely, that it is basically ideology”.125 Is the argument equivalent to that of political superiorities and of the transforming action of reality by the part of certain classes? One might expect it is not, but its affirmation that it is far from conceiving Marxism as a simple ideological statement contradicts itself with the importance given to the appraisal area and the ethical one, without ever having a refutation. Nevertheless, they oppose to Service’s ideas the non-ideological but scientific notions (according to a “strict” criterion of delimitation), of the form-content relationship in the way of life and culture.

Gándara established the game rules for the analysis of the “theoretical positions”. In his 1993 article, he tried to achieve a “definition of ‘Iberoamerican social archaeology with the processual and the post-processual, which he described as the “two contemporary positions with the most weight”,126 although about the second one he restricted his analysis to only two texts, of “slippery nature”, which according to him, are the key: Hodder (1991 Interpretative archaeology) and Shanks and Tilley (Social theory in archaeology de 1988). Strangely, he mainly offered to the reader the appraisal area, and he in fact started the comparison towards the postmodernist and the processual from this point, from the quotation of a work he had jointly prepared with Bate: “In general terms, the appraisal area of our position derives from a political and ethical motivation, which was superbly summarized by Marx in his observations on Feuerbach: it is about transforming reality and not only about knowing or understanding it”.127

In the same volume of the publication, Bate wrote that “among the hypothesis of the appraisal area, it is necessary to consider the objectives pursued by the research process. We understand that archaeology tries to explain the different aspects of the concrete historical existence of the structures and developments of the social processes”.128 Gándara added that “the ethical and political motivations [of social archaeology] clearly derive from those inherited from Marxism. In the case of our position, these motivations are explicit and highlight the content of class as a central one”,((Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 13.)) to conclude that processual archaeology has not made explicit the “motivation behind its works” and that the post-processual “is similar to an illustrated liberalism more than to a left-winged position”.129 In contrast, social archaeology is interested in “recovering real history, and from it the elements that allow the planning of a better world, but a real better world, and not only one imagined by sects or factions when it so helps tactical objectives of struggle”.130 Does it need to be left-winged in order to gain acceptance? Which left-wing? Here, it is necessary to acknowledge that these motivations are not exclusive and do not imply a left-winged position, because they can be shared by other currents of thought. With this argumentation, Gándara forgot to search for the authors in their best moment and with their best arguments, to propose an unequal comparison: the whole of the Marxist philosophy, especially Marx, Engels and Lenin’s, confronted against only two texts of archaeology. For instance, he did not track the philosophical basis of the authors they criticize, where there have been profound ethical and political debates about the essence and the future; authors that gave foundation to postmodernity and to other philosophies of recent years.131

At least he recognized that although social archaeologists intend the causal “explanation”, sometimes they adopt narrational styles that are close to descriptions and that do not establish the causal link between the central variables and the interrelations;132 he called it “chat” and it is a “more narrational style, much closer to description or to gloss than to an explanation. In a mocking tone, I have called this style ‘chat’ to make the difference between it and real explanation. It is the very ‘chatted’ narration of processes that ‘little by little’ produces effects, without much preoccupation to explain the causal links, the central variables or their specific ways of interrelation”.133 In a tacit way he accepted an appreciation difference on the appraisal and ontological area in social archaeologists, because it is evident there is a disparity among them if only the causal explanation allows the construction of political programs “always oriented, essentially, to take the power precisely to modify the rules of property and, from them, create a new society”.134 With a charitable reading towards his theory, he recognized this issue as a subject of central debate, because it manifests strong divergences and inconsistencies. Bate recognizes the explicative goal and so does Iraida Vargas in Arqueología, ciencia y sociedad (Archaeology, science and society), where she constantly highlights explanation (obviously opposed to interpretation) as the goal of science in general and she notes that every process is regulated by scientific laws.135

The “chat” made it equivalent to the one used by post-processual archaeologists. However, in order to separate it from what might seem “comprehension-and from current forms of hermeneutic that are somehow archaic-“, she emphasized: “This does not mean that said ‘chats’ are deep down false or lacking interest. On the contrary, my sarcasm hopes to be the stinger that makes these chats bloom enough to be explicated, precisely because they are, in a general way, on the right track”.136 What is the foundation of her belief? Maybe that the other one, hermeneutic comprehension-she never clarifies which one- is indeed false deep down, or indeed lacks interest, because it makes “each person write the history that better suits them [sic]”.137 Strange opposition that tries to prove that the chat of social archaeology is pure objectivity, as long as it is narrated, for instance, with the clarity and transparence of the form-content relationships (its ‘what for’); it is not invented history, it is not idealism or constructivism that responds to irrational interests and conveniences since the hypothesis social archaeologists are correct and, therefore, the best: its historical narration is the good one because it has dodged refutations, contrasts and all sorts of theoretical and empirical tests to become the real truth, without dogmas!

Iraida Vargas notes that a set of works from the seventies “were oriented, on the one hand, to conceptual discussion (Lumbreras and Bartra) and, on the other, to the interpretation of empirical data under the light of historical materialism (Sanoja and Vargas)”.138 In another work, Felipe Bate repeats that they tried to “interpret historical processes”139 and, of course, they never realized the implications of the concept, and that it was not a term that could be used at one’s discretion.

Mario Sanoja said: “In order to adequately interpret the relationship between society and its object of work, it is necessary to consider it as ‘a historical process where what is relevant is the mechanical unity of living men with their inorganic natural conditions'”.140 Do they explain? Do they interpret? Do they explain the interpretations or do they interpret the explanations? Is the use of the word interpretation another legacy of cultural history? Will this be one of the “less internal differences”? Do they intend the construction of a different, tacit methodology, where the previous passage of explanation is interpretation and, therefore, explanation is the purged application of interpretation? Is reality interpreted to build the information? Is the information interpreted and from this, is the explanation built? Which will be their philosophical sources in order to take this position? In their texts, there is no reflection to orientate the reader regarding a possible reformulation of the concept and regarding the role it would play to achieve the explicational goal.

Perhaps logical compatibility, eclecticism and congruity have two modes for being measured, towards the others and towards themselves. The reading they make of their own works allows them to say they search to “maintain the coherence -this is, logical compatibility- with historical materialism, which necessarily implies also a dialectical materialistic position”.141 And although he never spoke of logical consistency, he added:

…it is possible to locate the very different propositions or research results -whose links are not always evident- in the global context of a consistent theoretical-methodological conception. Besides, this allows the evaluation of the so-called scientificity of our proposition, as well as its comparison to others.142

There is no doubt that in social archaeology there are agreements. One, derived from the first Meeting of Oaxtepec, had to do with the notion of economic and social formation, as well as with what related to the idea that the main function of knowledge is “to conform the subjective consciousness for the treatment of reality through praxis”,143 that archaeology is a social science and what Gándara summarized in few lines: “a materialistic, dialectical and realistic ontology-the world exists, it is material and independent from the cognitive abilities of the subjects. Particularly, we already think of what is social as a whole, but a hierarchized whole with a causal efficiency that, in general, must be placed on the material foundations of life and, specifically, in the way in which social relations of production are organized from the ownership forms”.144 Causal efficiency? Strange adjective for causality in the social plane and in the plane of positivism. I do not know if everybody agrees with this; in other aspects they have divergences and, to save the problem, he used the classic resource of elevating the level of inclusion: “Perhaps we can talk about a ‘Marxist archaeology’ as a theoretical macro-position or a conglomerate of academic communities that operate within one same conception”.145 Once again, resounds the idea of “type-variety”. Is French Marxism now compatible to them, when they offered resistance to it in the beginning? If social archaeology turns to be a Latin American variant of Marxist archaeology, then the old differences they had with the other Marxisms were not so many, and this trivializes the importance of categorial unification and the creation of the way of life concept.

If this is the case, the following explanation only establishes the minimal distances and not the maximal differences: “The concept of means of production of the material life refers to the unity of the economic processes and does not include superstructures. As to this point, such as in the precedent one, we differ from the Althusserian-Balibarian conception. It should have also been seen that the category of economic social formation does not mean, to us, an ‘articulated combination ‘ of means of production”.146 In this way, the notion of means of production of the first Sanoja, close to the Balibarian-Althusserian, results in a theoretical equivalent of the notion of “concrete whole”, assumed after the first meeting of Oaxtepec, which takes relevance from the change performed to its theoretical conception.147 Perhaps this is why not all the authors assume the relation among the general laws of social formation, the mediations of the way of life, and the cultural singularities. At least Gándara does not mention it, in the same way Lumbreras and Sarmiento did not use the last two categories. It seems also trivial that the category of way of life is used ad hoc, because we are talking about “the objective mediations among the formalized regularities through the categories of economic-social formation and culture. Therefore, it refers to the particularities of the social formation, as ‘intermediate links’ between the essential character of the social formation and its phenomenic manifestation in the culture”.148

And appealing to the authority, Bate noted that “Lenin coined the term, metaphorical but adequate [sic], of intermediate links’ to refer to the mediations between the phenomenic and the essential”.149 From metaphor to category without mentioning in the manuals of dialectical logic and formal logic how to take this step, because the former has traditionally been attributed to metaphysics and is, therefore, outside scientific rationality.150 The role of these “intermediate links” had already been advanced by Bate in 1978 when he noted that

…this analysis of any aspect of the whole must allow, through more or less mediations or “intermediate links”, the discovery or at least the proposition of hypothesis, about the most essential relationships.151

We must ask ourselves why the metaphor of the “intermediate links”, from which logic can we affirm that there are “more or less mediations” and why have these been constant resources in the context of the justification and definition of a central category in their theory, the one of the way of life. Veloz Maggiolo noted that the concept had already been used by various authors, especially by Marx in the Formen and by Childe. He concludes by saying, again making appeal to the authority, that “The Mexican Master Eli de Gortari, in a friendly discussion in the house of Master José Luis Lorenzo, expressed the possibility consisting in that, if said discovery was proved as a historical category, it would serve for a more accurate interpretation of the means of production in all kinds of societies, possibly being a link, a hinge between the means of production and culture”.152 He also said that the category of way of life is a “social expression of the organization of the productive forces related to a specific means, which undoubtedly generates an approach or a cultural answer that is also specific”.153 Undoubtedly? Is the way of life cultural and, at the same time, determined by the productive forces? Is this all that can happen between the singular phenomenic forms and the essential and general contents of society? Is the way of life all, in the same way culture is?

Once again, the answer is ambiguous; in previous paragraphs, Veloz Maggiolo had noted that “only at the level of certain same relations of production could we talk of ways of life and cultures, within a means of production. There is no contradiction if we say that the organization of the productive process within certain similar relations of production, gives place to a way of life”.154 Are we talking about variants of structural stability? Although Iraida Vargas declared that they are “conscious of the fact that […] the quotations of the authority on the tacit use of these categories by the part of the classics of Marxism are certainly not enough”,155 she made an extensive journey through Veloz Maggiolo, Sanoja, Marx and Engels’ works, and through her own, to argument in favor of the relevance of defining this category as the system of particularities associated to the specific environment in which social formation develops, in what seemed to be “a retake of old ideas”.156 The problem is how to integrate these chains of “particularities”:

…An interesting problem presented to us, and on which we must elaborate further, is the one regarding the particularity levels to which the category extends. Certainly, if the category of way of life allows the explanation of the particular processes, intermediate between the general and the specific explained by the categories of economic social formation and culture, a wide range of particularities is presented to us. Evidently, the issue resides in establishing clearly to which level of particularity we refer, and which the criteria we use to access the manifestation of particular processes are.157

In a previous work, this same author had already recognized that the category was considerably ambiguous,158 then the question is, how can we achieve the This is a question without an answer, except for the exclusion: it seems that some social archaeologists prefer to disregard the categories of way of life and culture, to look for their own explanations; their use is limited to Sanoja, Vargas, Veloz Maggiolo and Bate. The reasons are obvious because we are dealing with a slippery notion, poorly defined, which is in opposition towards, for instance, Gándara’s aesthetical criteria. Perhaps these are more of the minor differences; however, they acquire relevance because they are located in the ontological area, in the theory about the object of study and this, according to his own statements, has a direct impact on the methodology.

If not everybody shares the same theorization then, do they share the hypothesis of the epistemological-methodological area? It should be that way, given the methodological monism of Marxism, which privileges dialectical materialism as a philosophy, logic and method: “historical materialism is the interpretation made by dialectical materialism of the social phenomena in their historical development”;159 so that “a direct analysis of social reality, using the method of dialectical materialism consequently and creatively, within the general frame of historical materialism, gives us more advantageous results regarding the problem we are dealing with[…]”.160 Years after, Gándara will keep a similar position.161

The social and historical aspects have a relativistic connotation if taken to their last consequences, unless we think there are certain subjects capable of producing a universal objectivity, foreign to the world they live in and to their historical context. According to them, there must be one and only one correspondence between the essence and reality, the other ideas are “false consciousness” and the only correspondence between the subject and the object is called dialectical materialism: “the development of true knowledge is relative to objective reality and becomes wider and more accurate as the development of social practice diversifies and goes historically deeper. This principle supposes the unitiy of being as material existence, which implies an only theoretical answer as to the essential and general regularities that rule reality, including in it the human consciousness as material entity”.162

Few years after, the same Bate grazed the limits of methodological fundamentalism when he denied other possibilities or alternatives to interpret social reality: “social reality is one and the same, regardless how it is conceived by different observers”.163 The view they defend (of a metaphysical and impossible-to-contrast character) supposes that reality is one and that a bunch of laws (three from dialectic that unfold into a finite number in the social aspect) rule reality. If this is so, then the theoretical answer should be one and true and, although they do not dare saying it, the consequence would be a unique methodology. Dialectical materialism is at the same time ontology, epistemology and (logic) methodology, logic of the real. If this idea turned to be wrong and another theory had something of “true”, it could support relativism, because this other view would develop its own ontology, epistemology and methodology. But we must not worry, because this is not the case, at least from this perspective.164

Among them there seems to be an agreement at that considerably elevated level of epistemology. Then we would have to say which discrepancies to correct in order to share the program (or the goal) of having their theory translated” into a falsificational methodology, preferably of a sophisticated methodological nature (in the Lakatosian style), in which there is no refutation without an alternative to improve what is being refuted, so that the scientist is, at least at a superior scale, subject of growth through rational criticism”.165 Anyway, this would only be the passage from verificationism to falsificationism without overcoming them, because if we did, they would face the recent criticisms to the criterion of scientific rationality that attack the basis of dialectical materialism and of neopositivism, getting into the grounds of post-positivism. In fact, the manuals of dialectical logic appear as verificationist.166 And although logical positivism came to the rescue of Marxism, it is evident that the use of Popperian and Lakatosian terminology is not something common.167 I think that this is not a terminological confusion and that, even if we eliminated it and supposing that everybody talked about falsification, deep down each social archaeologist would act in a falsificationist, corroborationist and verificationist way, according to his/her own view of methodology, independently from ontology:

The archaeological approach to reality-society conceived as a concrete whole- starts from the proposition of an explanation about the whole and its development, a theory that has certain characteristics of a hypothesis. To do this, we use categories that explain the historical process; then we theorize again, we propose new hypothesis to guide the apprehension and, with this body of data, we are able to offer explanations of that reality, to propose new hypothetical formulations that will come back to the intermediate theory, not only as some sort of proof, correction or reformulation, but also as an explanation of the whole, this is, to the general theory that -in any case- acquires once again the character of hypothesis to continue with the cycle of knowing.168

When the eclectic monster that would emerge through the union of Marxism and positivism was still being criticized, they said that “the new research, whose methodological procedures derive from the new theory in its starting point, allows the knowledge of a new concrete phenomenon and opens the possibilities of modifying the initial theory through enrichment or correction. At the same time, this would allow the derivation of new procedures or, at least, of more precise ones”.169 This is the notion of progress they have regarding their knowledge, in which the falsification of their own theories or their refutation conditions have never been proposed.

Those who assume ontology and the theory of the “concrete society” as a whole, use the terms “corroboration”, “confirmation” or “verification” indistinctively, whereas Gándara and Sarmiento prefer the neopositivistic lexicon, in spite of the tendency of this author to systematically use the expression “archaeological indicator”.170 It is true that there are never “pure examples” of a position and that “perhaps except for the originators and champions of a theoretical position, most of their supporters tend to incorporate, with an eclecticism that is sometimes undetected or assumed, elements from other positions”.171

In social archaeology this is not a problem, although in the “epistemological-methodological area” we find the “methodology in a wide sense” that contains “a conception of the method (delimitation criterion, evaluation mechanism, logic of growth/non-growth of knowledge, etc.,), such as the specific and heuristic techniques and the observation theories”.172 As to these aspects that are central in analytic philosophy (the difference between theoretical and observational language), and only partially shared by other ways of reflection, the social archaeologists have also differences, not only historical or generational: “the specificity of the historical materialistic method in archaeology is not the theory nor the application of particular techniques, but the congruity between techniques, the logic of methodology and the theory, as an indissoluble dynamic unity”.173 What is most serious for its internal congruity resides in that affirmation introduced to justify the need to theorize on the relationship between social formation and culture:

…(logical) methodology cannot be formulated independently from the theory on the reality we want to know. This is, when we plan on how to research certain aspects of reality-and what characterizes science is the systematized planning of the research procedures- we must start from some ideas more or less clear about how this reality is. In other words, if knowledge is a reflection of reality conditioned as process and as result due to material existence, primary regarding consciousness, we cannot rationally explain or systematize a certain correct procedure of knowledge outside what determines it.174

When Bate established what he understood as orthodoxy, this is “the compatible adoption with the propositions of the ‘classics’-Marx, Engels, Lenin-” he said it implied “assuming a unitary solution that is consistently materialistic and dialectical to the problems of the theory of knowledge, the theory of reality and the method, the latter understood within the dialectical logic as an ontology of the real process of knowing, according to practice as category and as fundamental purpose”.175 This means that what we know determines the way and the means to know what we already know: tautology? Or else, the logic of growth they propose is by addition.176 However, they do not clarify how the overcoming of their theory can occur through the “transformation of quantity into quality.” Are we prepared to know a theory that implies a “qualitative vault” and a “denial of the denial” of Marxism?

In their thesis there is not room for the “creative vault” either. “From the general theory we can deduce the methodological principles that will direct the research process of concrete history. But from the general theory we cannot deduce the knowledge of real history, since research forces us to the empirical treatment of new concrete information that, as such, cannot be contained in the theory”.177 Reality turns to be an enriched example of the theoretical sentences. It is a shame there are not many research cases of concrete history. With the things in this state and showing consistency around the priority of ontology over methodology, they had to clarify that in order to know reality from the archaeological perspective, they had to

…adequately solve the problem of the relationship between theory and method, understanding the epistemic priority of ontology regarding logic, under a materialistic and dialectical position before the theory of knowledge. Then, there was the need to adequately formulate, at a theoretical level, propositions about the reality studied by archaeology, if the intention was to create methodological propositions for research.178

Bate argued that the Marxist conception implied a unitary solution to the problems of knowledge, of the theory of reality and of methodology, a proposition with which Hegel overcame “Kantian agnosticism”.179 In the text we can see manifested a strong identity in writing along twenty years of articles and books, which leads to suppose that there are few changes and novelties in the methodological search of social archaeology. It seems that the method of scissors and paste does make part of its methodological instrumentation.180

It is from the theories that the problems to be solved by methodology are defined, with all their problematic: “historical materialism can consistently come closer to explicative knowledge of real complexity, without incurring in abusive reductionisms denying the possibility of theoretically generalizing the determinants of society as a concrete whole. In order to do this, it is necessary to creatively display the heuristic implications of dialectical materialism as general ontology”.181 Maybe the heuristic implications directly lead to an economic determinism, to the typification of ways of life, and to understanding of cultural singularity. To do this, the direct reading of Hegel has been suggested. How would the terms culture and way of life be used in non-archaeological situations? Is the use of these categories necessary to explain the capitalistic formation of Mexico? What is the relationship between the phenomenic and the singular form of the taco and the charro suit and the contradiction capital/work? Perhaps this long trajectory is not necessary to explain some social formation of the Prehispanic period. Other ways of the Marxist social sciences prove it.

The priority of creating a consistent theory that resulted in the idea of society as a “concrete whole” to solve the problems of the method does not seem to have a lot of consistency. Those they call “minor differences” that are evident in the ontological and appraisal area have repercussions on their methodological area. Up to what point is that of little importance to be still considered part of one and the same theoretical position? Where are the limits, within its bivalent logic, to establish appurtenance? What is included and what excluded?

Although they have always insisted in that the “methodological procedures must be logically derived from the theory on the reality they operate”, they affirmed: “A conception of the research process is not a vademecum of methodological recipes”.182 And when he stated the principle of “methodological alternativity”, thinking that all the methodologies could lead to Marxist conclusions, he proposed:

Even starting from the same theoretical conception of reality in general and from historical materialism as particular theory of the social processes […], there is not an only method nor we believe it to be desirable to have one. It is wrong to suppose that the “dialectical method” is or should be a standardized sequence of logical procedures that, once its scientific efficiency proved superior to any other method, can be indefinitely applicable to the research of any problem. Why should we suppose that there is only one system of valid procedures that leads us to obtain potentially true knowledge? If the method is a way to reach this knowledge, isn’t it better to have the possibility of choosing different ways?183

Would they agree then with Feyerabend and his anarchist theory of knowledge, although the “everything is permitted” statement is the one that bothers them most as referent to relativism, and although they consider it to belong to postmodernity? Is it tolerance towards other methodologies as long as the dialectic is superior? It is about generating “true knowledge”: “All the procedures which lead to the generation of knowledge will be correct, even if they are not the simplest”.184 The option consists in that the derived method is not univocal, but alternative, that it has the possibility of combining various logical procedures of research:

The condition for this is that any methodological proposition has to be congruent with the general theoretical principles and conditions we have been noting and that the results have to be compatible with each other. The possibility of different logical alternatives that lead to compatible results is given by the principle of material unity of the world: reality exists independently from each subject (and from each methodological procedure) and it is only one and the same. If true knowledge is the one that, as a reflection of reality, is correctly correlated to its objective properties and, if the results of different processes to know new aspects of reality generate true knowledge, no matter what way we each follow, these should be logically compatible with each other. This suppose that, apart from being true, they comply with the exigency of logical validity and are, therefore, compatible and interchangeable.185

In this way, the unity of the world must not produce too much diversity, it approaches a methodological monotony and once again appears the idea of type-variety: the dialectical invariant and the methodological varieties that might occur.186 Hurtado de Mendoza confirms the suspicion insinuated by these words of social archaeology: “it becomes necessary to refine explicit research procedures that transcend the level of subjective opinion in favor of objective, reasonable and logically inter-subjective proof. In other words, it should be possible for any trained observer to have clear the possibility of seeing the same thing, given a shared theoretical frame of reference”.187 An efficient proposition to stop the knowledge from changing. The truth, beyond the criterion of Marxist praxis or of Lakatosian falsification, is only given by logical compatibility with the statements and propositions of Marxism of social archaeology. Since all the methodologies lead to true knowledge, that discovers the objective properties of the world that are dialectical and of historical materialism, there is no problem in making mistakes on the way: sooner or later all the researchers will arrive to the correct thought, the laws of dialectical and historical materialism will be recognized. At the end of history, we are all going to think in the same way. This is their evaluation criterion for the truth or falsehood of statements: if they coincide with their own, they are true, if they don’t, they are false. Is then empirical research necessary? Perhaps it is, in order to discover through other tortuous ways the dialectical relation of the social formation, the way of life and culture as determinants of the concrete history of societies, since these are irremovable, invariant and fixed; we are dealing with the great universal laws that are illuminated by the light of social archaeology.

To them, their methodological alternativity is a resource188 that coincides with the principles, laws and categories of dialectical materialism: “the coincidence between objective and logic dialectic implies that the same general principles, laws and categories that conform the theory of historical materialism constitute the fundamental logical formulations of the particular system of methodological procedures to research about this social reality”.189 But this does not clarify how we can know if what is thought of the world is a faithful reflection of reality and, therefore, true, unless it is through what they consider to be “compatible results” with historical and dialectical materialism. With this we understand how unnecessary and inexistent an archaeological praxis is. Contrary to Feyerabend, who was worried about the creation of new Weltanschauungs,190 social archaeologists prefer to corroborate statements that are dogmatically considered to be true. In this way, the “correct description of facts” means to define ways of life of economic social formations theoretically stated, about which we do not know whereas they really explain the past, since they have not been submitted to corroboration or falsification: old forms of thought adorned with new categories.

If the truth is what matters, is it reached by an inductive method, with a deductive one (or with their dialectical combination)? Would corroboration or falsification, or truth criteria different from those of dialectic and those of Lakatos’ be accepted? Would it be equally efficient to use any procedure, although it comes from profoundly different traditions? It seems their answer is affirmative, but there is ambiguity and ambivalence: when they paraphrase notions that come from other traditions: they use them as if they were their own, and the result is a novel and “revolutionary” proposition for their theoretical position, but for others, it is eclecticism. Here we see their easy way out of repeatedly establishing that they do not want to “give the impression that we intend to create an only and close structure”.191 They can play with inclusion and exclusion ad hoc. Both dialectical and formal logics are acceptable at the same time;192 an efficientist view of the method can and cannot be conceived; the way can be long or short, relativistic and monistic, verificationist and falsificationist, but never eclectical: “A methodological proposition can define general principles and specify them in its signification for a particular discipline, but also with respect to it, in a general way; it can suggest basic orientations and provide a total view of the system of the most adequate, most economical or most precise general procedures”.193

In the attempt to build this methodology, many decisions are ambiguous and inconsistent and we do not know up to what point we can get with the consequences derived from them, for instance, around relativism. They have not been able to avoid the immeasurableness derived from the Popperian statement (which they themselves use) “all observation is impregnated with theory” and to avoid Duhem-Quine’s thesis, not even by integrating processual views and analytic philosophy into their methodological job. Gándara was the only one to see the danger that implied the fact that the theories of observation were derived from substantive theoretical statements, and he modified the Popperian statement towards a sense that would more or less read as follows: “all observation is impregnated with observation theories”.194 However, we are dealing with arguments that far from opposing, from offering an answer, admit relativism and the Kuhnian thesis of immeasurableness. And in a footnote, he introduced more of his “Gandarian aphorisms” with a lot of Popper flavor: “If any one of you has data without sin, let him throw the first… theory”.195

With a different position and a certain Hempelian tone, Griselda Sarmiento affirmed that

In order to be able to contrast the statements of a theory with reality, it is necessary that the abstract entities to which they refer can be connected to proof implications, in observational terms, whose empirical reference is relatively clear. This process, which establishes the relationship between substantive theory and theory of observation is essentially deductive: from the general theories, laws and statements derive a series of concepts that allow to link in a direct way the internal principles to contrastable, observable and audible statements, that will be confronted to singular and concrete data.196

Are the statements directly observable and audible? Do we need any theory of perception, certainly universal, to face reality and transform it into data? Is this part of the dialectical miracles that occur in the objective observer that does not have problems when passing from real reality to data, thanks to praxis? Between the observable, audible and contrastable statement of the lowest level and the world, isn’t there any problem in the construction of the datum? Without worrying about these doubts of philosophy, he clarified that it was as far as this “deductive argument” would go, and that in the contrasting process, an inductive one is generated, because

In other words: from the substantive theories can be deduced or derived those observable concrete referents (hereinafter, indicators) that will serve to contrast theoretical statements, whose relevance and choice are determined by the principles or laws of said theories. However, the particular characterization and definition of the observable referents does not depend on the substantive hypothesis but on the characteristics special to said referents and to the empirical data.197

The theories through implications are confronted with data built by induction! In this case, each theory can build its own theories of observation and arrive to the hard datum, as if through induction we could build data free from subjectivity. The argumentation of social archaeology continues to be ambiguous: relativistically and paradoxically monistic. But its idea is being verificationist inwards and falsificationalist outwards. With the result that the methodological steps stated during more than twenty years have been so by means of inferences:

The course of research leads us, from the data, through a series of inference processes, to its general interpretation. Inferences are conditioned by the specific characteristics of archaeological information. At the level of the generalization of the knowledge inferred from data, hypothesis or theories are proposed and laws are formulated which discover new qualities of the phenomena, establish relations among them, etcetera. Besides, the voids of information are evidenced. This requires a comeback to reality in order to evidence, by means of proof or modification, or by a partial or total rejection, the truthfulness of the knowledge formulated as a result of the process of inference, with which it gets enriched. But the comeback to reality requires a planning process of the research, in which the logical criteria and conditions are systematized to test the existent knowledge, as well as to validate the new knowledge provided by the new confrontation with reality.((Luis F. Bate, Arqueología y…, 1977, pp. 20-21.))

Old empiricist statements that do not establish the meaning of information for the formulation of hypothesis, suppose that we plan only after the hypothesis, to close with the validation (corroboration) of the new knowledge. The logical consequence of the sentences of historical materialism to create a consequential methodology had to pass by the inferences led through specific and well delimited ways, in spite of the fact that Felipe Bate affirmed in 1981 that there would not be anyone to take care of standardizing methodological procedures, because it is not about Marxist “driving regulations” or a Marxist “recipe book”.198

The methodological recipe book was explicit since 1977, confirmed in 1978 and 1981 (1982) and with slight modifications it was formulated in 1989 (1990) and 1993 (1996): “The general methodological requirements we have proposed for the development of a global archaeological research answer precisely to the logical structure of the sequence of the research method that goes from the sensible concrete to the abstract, and from abstract to concrete. In this way, we have the requirements of: 1) definition of cultural sets, 2) inference of the economic-social formations and 3) concrete historical development”.199 Until now, the theory had developed the categorical relationships between economic social formation and culture, reason why the definition of cultural sets was associated to this category proposed since 1977. After this, the requirement information production, the inference of cultures (from the “cultural forms” to the culture of living society), the inference of ways of life and finally the explanation of concrete historical development were added.200 The changes between 1989 and 1993 were more humble,201 but they tried to schematically update the process called “information production”, mostly regarding

…the formulation of registry protocols, the technical and analytic procedures for field work and laboratory work (for instance, excavation techniques, typological procedures, etcetera) […] the creation of cultural equipments and ways of communication for the information produced.202

Although they did not inform beyond the statement on how to cover each step, they still exemplified the inference of the contents of the economic social formation from the level of observation of archaeological data:

A dart shaft , as a cultural form, represents a lithic “type”, for instance “fish tale”, “ayampitín”, etcetera. As datum of social content, it will mean:
– That it is a part of a hunting instrument and therefore provides information on such process.
– It gives proof of the work of carved stone and a certain degree of technical efficiency as to its elaboration
– It presumes the gathering work of the lithic raw materials as well as those for making the helve.
– It presumes the work for the elaboration of the helve, which is generally made out of wood.
– From the data on the environment, the origin of the raw materials will provide information on the shifting areas of the hunters, etcetera.203

A dart shaft has the shape of a dart shaft but, was it so in the past and through all its history as an object? Do hunting, the information on this process and everything else represent a lithic type? Was that its only cultural meaning? What happens to dialectical and complicated form-content relationship? Given all this presupposition and in spite of its incessant appeal to classic logic and to the disqualification of the other alternatives, isn’t the choice of the non-classic logics a better option? We are dealing with inferences that add little novel knowledge, they may well be the result of cultural history, but if we “add” to them all the data from the exploration and excavation (given the “fundamental cause” of social development based on the contradiction between productive forces and production relations) we can “estimate the degree of development of the productive forces”, from “the estimation of the productivity of the elements of the productive forces”. To do this, we must “infer the various activities of the social group, making an analysis for each of the archaeological sites” and order the activities to then classify them according to their spatial distribution.204 Then, we must rebuild the productive process through the inference of the work processes: we estimate the productivity, we infer the social division of work, we estimate the distribution and exchange, we infer the social consciousness, we determine the characteristics of institutionality and of the administrative functions.205 Then we define the production means through the inference of the production relations, if possible, through the quantification of the productive forces and then we “will have the knowledge about the essential qualities of the social formation”.206 What comes next is the synthesis of the “concrete historical development”, by means of the “sequences of historical development” of “a same society”, of “understanding the social processes” and the characteristics of development and qualitative change”.207 Lately, besides, we must identify “ways of life” and we leave aside the idea of contrasting the hypothesis on the means of production. Such is the way of alternativity, of simplicity and methodological efficiency.

It is not clear if they used this procedure to identify the essential conditions of the primitive, cacical and initial class communist social formations. Apparently, the so-called concrete historical development is nothing but a translation into Marxist terminology of cultural history based on the periodizations and on the definition of areas, because the phases of development can be analogous to the stipulation of phases, periods and horizons, whereas the notion of way of life has a connotation of structural and territorial stability similar to that of the cultural areas. Exactly the same method proposed by traditional archaeology. There is no explanation for social changes. Social archaeology does not worry about contrasting the laws of the socioeconomic formations, because it searches new laws and tries to know if they apply to concrete reality, nor about offering a content that is more precise to the intermediate link that turns to be useless, since everything fits this ambiguity. Rather, they try to identify ways of life, variants of structural stability to which they give adjectives without proposing statements of the law type.

The subject of inference worried Bate, Sanoja and Hurtado de Mendoza: archaeology “is an inferential discipline and […] it is precisely its nature which leads to the need of appealing to inference techniques [sic] developed by logic and mathematics”.208 Did he mean that archaeology works through reasoning and argumentation? This is obvious. Perhaps he tried to note that not only induction is valid, but also deduction (and vice versa, as a criticism to the new archaeology), in this case, it would be worthy to substitute the term inference with its synonyms in the texts of the authors, because this word leads to suspect it is used more as an equivalent of induction. Or is it that there is some discipline that, from classic science and logic, is not characterized by the use of reasoning and argumentation? What would make archaeology different?209

He affirmed that inference allows “to decide on something, but starting from that which is already known or which is supposed”210 and it is through this path that we pass from the apparent real concrete, which is obvious and can be registered, to the subjacent real concrete, which cannot be observed. This means “a true qualitative change, an epistemological rupture211 whose fundamental consequence is the passage from a pre-scientific stage to another one that is indeed scientific”.212 Newton, he affirms, managed to do this when he distinguished how apparent the falling of things is and how real concrete the force of gravity (or gravitation) is.213 In that field of reflections and given the background we have exposed, a reader who is not very familiar with dialectic could wonder: Do we know the contents of the social formation and from there we infer the way of life, culture and concrete history, or do we know the archaeological materials and from them we infer culture, ways of life and the contents of the social formation? If we chose the first way, we understand why the hypothesis of the social formation is not submitted to contrasting, if we chose the second one, we are dealing with an inductive way unable to reach the contents of the social formation. The answer is ambiguous:

The way I see it, the two options [induction and deduction] are indispensable to the application of inference to acquire knowledge on the phenomena, events and processes of the past. Moreover, the two procedures are irremediable linked. We need the foundations of the concrete data to generate theory, but the theory expressed as a result of the cumulation of experiences generates knowledge on its own, in an indirect way [sic]. It is through reason that we can reach conclusions that are structured as hypothesis, which turn to be predictive regarding what we can expect to be the real-concrete. In the sense of Newton’s main achievement, we can expect the apple to fall [!]. But regardless the capacity of the inference processes to generate theory, this has to be proved eventually [sic]. There is an ineludible practical need to confront what is deduced from a theory or from general theory, with the concrete archaeological data, which reflects what could be called sociological information that concerns the characteristics of the ways of life of societies that existed in the past.214

The confusion is expressed when they note that in order for “the inferences to become so rigid, support is necessary on patterns recognized as correct”:215 “if there is ceramic, then there is exchange”. “This pattern contains an observed premise: the presence of foreign ceramic, but the concatenation [sic] with the conclusion: exchange, is defective [sic] in the sense that the premise is not only and necessary evidence of the process considered to be the logic conclusion [sic]”.((Idem.)) From the logic to which it appeals, there terms concatenation and defective do not exist.216 Besides, the conditional statements are not interchangeable, it is not the same to say p OR q than q OR p or “if you die, you will resuscitate” than “if you resuscitate, you will die”. The first one is not equivalent to the second. In this way, “if there is foreign ceramic, there was exchange” is not the same as “if there was exchange, then there will be foreign ceramic”: foreign ceramic is not a condition for the existence of exchange, exchange is a condition, which is not sufficient or necessary, for the presence of foreign ceramic.217 In order to save what he saw as a problem, he proposed that “the premise should be perfected [sic], qualified[sic]: if there is foreign ceramic in abundance … etc., having to determine -with a certain precision– what we considered to be abundant, maybe regarding the absolute or relative frequencies of the local ceramic”.218 This is not material for classic logic! In it, the sentences are apofánicos apophantic and asertoric and those to which we cannot ask if they are true or false are left outside. This is why it is bivalent, one is or is not, plainly, without shades: certain precision and the modification abundance belong to the field of the non -classic logics.219

Everything seems to point to the fact that, for certain social archaeologists, contrarily to the methodology proposed by Gándara, inference is inductive, with sentences that are corroborated through experiments. In fact, the inference proposed by social archaeologists is inductive by reconstruction: “it establishes a relationship already disappeared, based on the documents, registries, testimonies and other subsisting indications, which are considered to be a proof of the existence of a fact or, at least, traces that make their past existence possible”.220 This kind of inference (very similar to some variants of polyvalent logic) is characteristic of history, archaeology, and geology, and in its elaboration exist many possibilities of making mistakes: “of course, with a single mistake made, the entire chain of reasoning can be invalidated”.221 Boundary marks that, together with others arising from dialectic logic and that did not make part of its reflection, were ignored in the elaboration of the chain of inferences of social archaeology.

Perhaps inductive inference in dialectic logic allows us to understand the very rare praxis of social archaeology. Apart from its inductive basis, a characteristic of this kind of inferences resides in that “the repeated practice of experiments performed to discover the correlations that link the sets to one another leads to the belief that it is enough to perform a small number of experiments in identical conditions, to have enough basis to describe the nature of said correlations”.222 And the correlations are already made: three social formations for Latin America, some ways of life already defined and the concrete societies stipulated in the same way that cultural history, through the distribution of features. Its conviction does not consider the limits that Popper himself noted for the empirical sciences and the truth of the universal sentences that are known through experience:

…it is clear that all the reports in which we give an account of an experience or an observation, or of the result of an experiment- cannot be originally a universal sentence, but only a singular sentence. Therefore, those who say we know by experience the truth of a universal sentence usually want to say that the truth of said sentence can be reduced, in a certain way, to the truth of other sentences -which are singular- that are true according to our experience, which is the same as to say that universal sentences are based on inductive inferences.223

Everything is permitted…

Although many theoretical positions in archaeology are usually inconsistent, social archaeology has the only one to have noted this is a problem that must be corrected in order to reach scientificity levels. However, social archaeology itself is not characterized by this, because in the theoretical and methodological fields, some of its adepts use the category of way of life and others do not, for some the relation of social formation, way of life and culture is relevant, for others it is not; some try to explain, others try to interpret or explain the interpretations; some intend the explanation to predict, and others interpret… what for? Some pursue the explanation of the “contents of the social formation” and others the identification of the variants of the local ways of life; although they all are monistic, some play with relativistic sentences; some are theoretic, others are empirical; some are Lakatosian-Popperian and others are dialectical, although formal; some are falsificationist and others are corroborative, some inductivist and others deductivist. One might ask if all the social archaeologists really share all the arguments, theoretical sentences, ontological, epistemological and methodological proposals, this is, if they are an only program, and not a proposal of theoretical position: Have they all studied in depth Marx, Engels and Lenin’s texts and, at the same time Hempel, Popper, Lakatos, even the relativistic ghost of Feyerabend’s, post-modern Clifford Geertz and of course, Hegel? In the end, do they know what unites them and which their differences are?

About this ontological diversity, it is more problematic to have a unified view of the methodology and to intend the integration of any of its variants, of the rationality criteria, of the growth/ non-growth logic, and even the same naïve or sophisticated falsificationism, without falling into inconsistencies. Each researcher with his/her own conception goes beyond the “reasonable eclecticism” proposed by Gándara, and this allows including all of them (those who wish so) into the same theoretical position. A good part of the social archaeologists have tried to create new “categories” (not concepts, definitions or theoretical terms); they have invented and recreated, from culture, the way of life-way of work, the theoretical position and the economic and artifactual “complexes”. This attitude does integrate them: the creation of concepts that are deemed true by the sole sentence and that aggregate one over the other to give the appearance of contrast capacity when they only cover and protect their hard core. The concepts of economic complex and artifactual complex ((Patricia Fournier, “Lo social y lo material…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 24.)) can be understood in this way. Due to their content, they work more as “auxiliary hypothesis” that create a curtain, move away Marxism from the requirement of “elegance” expected from a powerful theory, and integrate the concepts of historical materialism with those of the classifying taxonomy of cultural history. We should see how many social archaeologists get to use those concepts as part of their theoretical “corpus” that confirm the suspicion that Marxism needs a lot of cultural history: “The reason given most often for why social archaeology must be rooted in cultural history is that social archaeology cannot advance without sufficient cultural history, research in an area. We would ask how much is needed, when Peru and Mexico are probably, in those terms, the most studied areas of this century”.224

Social archaeology does not intend to test the possibilities of historical materialism in the field of archaeology, and in this way comply with the political goals of the appraisal area; it does not intend either to evaluate through empirical research the basic notions of any social formation “contents”, nor making research for the falsification or corroboration of the laws of its huge “protective belt” or of the central concepts of any means of production -I think, for Mexico, the one of the initial class society-. These are conceived as invariant, truths given beforehand by mere statement, unquestionable, so that the emphasis of researches is directed towards the “definition” of the particularities, this is, of the ways of life that, once defined, become a part of the invariant and irrefutable components of social archaeology. “Field” researchers of this archaeology have only identified variants of the stability without explaining based on laws.

The internal differences, although Gándara considers them to be lesser than the coincidences,225 polarize to fundamental inconsistency degrees the various authors, even in their own analysis parameters as a theoretical position. Their internal reading is charitable whereas towards the others it is intolerant: could they affirm from their twitched and bivalent logic that the hard sentences of a scientific theory are shared with different intensity?; are the differences in the notion of social class of the classical political economy and of Marxism by degrees?; is the congruity leftward, towards their view of the future, towards the appraisal area, towards their logic or towards their ontology? There are no public debates where the arguments and the reasons of each one of the common and divergent ideas are manifested.

Perhaps social archaeologists shared the wish of seeing the theoretical process “end in a crisis in which its own paradigm (of historical materialism, hypothetic-deductive and systematic) became the model for some sort of new Mexican archaeology”.226 Still, it is a marginal current within a Latin American archaeological activity full of cultural history. It supposes the idea of the cumulative character of knowledge, and social archaeology can be seen as the logical and natural culmination of reason, in which all competition ends up in addition and grows by “agglutination”.227 The result is the ease with which social archaeologists use terms, concepts, methodological procedures and logics arising from the most dissimilar traditions, even from their most acknowledged adversaries, such as cultural history, symbolism, post-modernity and the new archaeology, to accommodate them within their own “theoretical position”. Does this bring us near to the Hegelian notion of the end of philosophy and history? Is this how the progress of science is conceived? What is indeed clear is that there is not even one systematic exercise of falsification, nor a clarity of how the dialectical miracle of recognizing a better paradigm might occur, or a paradigm that, at least, could sufficiently compete so that, with its growth, it could substitute the stable truths, immanent and eternal, of the sentences of this kind of Marxism. Does this exist in its idea of dialectical rationality?

In this view of Marxism we see the great confluence with positivism, both ethnocentric and evolutionist, and they share monism and determinism. The methodological alternativity results so complex that it is hard to suppose that any archaeologist would ever take the chance to accept the challenge of corroborating or falsificating any of the central laws of the economic social formation: is the objective content of property defined by Bate228 for the initial class society falsifiable? Due to the fact that, up to what I know, there has not been any research towards this end, why is it accepted as an objective truth, as if it had been the reality lived by certain groups in the Prehispanic epoch? How can this interpretation-explanation be demarcated over other alternatives? Does credibility become an act of faith towards theory? What is the refutation logic they propose and exercise? This methodological complication has been one of its limitations:

…the generation of students who were influenced by the social archaeologists of the 1970s and early 1980s became dissatisfied with the lack of a bridge between “theory” (epistemology) and the practice of doing archaeological research. The social archaeologists argued for the use of dialectic materialism as a theoretical approach to archaeology. In practice, however, the norm was the production of archaeological reports without any particular theoretical focus. In other words, social archaeologists spoke and wrote about the epistemology of archaeology in Marxist terms but continued to produce archaeological research that did not depart from cultural history.229

Before this circumstance -that allows to understand it does not have a coherent and consistent praxis– the scissors and paste are not only useful to literally repeat their words through different works, but they are the basis for the identification of the ways of life, of the definition of historical phases, of the periodization and typification of concrete societies. In this way, they avoid their central objective: the nomological explanation for the prediction of the real-real future. The exposed idea gains strength: other reasons unite them, beyond the sharing of fundamental sentences of what they call the appraisal area and of “scientific rationality”. Something they have in common can be the delimitation of their adversaries, supposed or real, the “enemy to be defeated”, and the external agent against whom they must fight. One might keep on asking for congruity, for the consistency they demand, without finding it within their declaration of principles, profoundly ambiguous and contradictory.

In the same way social archaeology is not a dominant thought in Ibero-America, it is not the only way in which Marx’s thesis can be applied to archaeology and to anthropology either. In fact, it is difficult to establish what their future as a theoretical position would be, since the conditions that originated it have changed, not only as to the reflection on the theories and social thought, but also as to the political moment. Perhaps the “Marxist conceptions of all different colors”, which bothered social archaeology so,230 will become more fruitful for the understanding of man, of man’s being and future. However, we should pay attention to what Marx’s thought may mean within the history of philosophy and to what can continue to be valid for the understanding of the world we are now living, once we remove the readings that were made from supporter perspectives, and once they free themselves, in the words of Immanuel Wallerstein,231 from their own utopias.

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1. Graduate studies division/ENAH. This essay was made to be presented in the colloquium Mitos Fundadores de la Antropología Mexicana, of the Seminario de Historia, Filosofía y Sociología de la Antropología Mexicana. I would like to thank Mechthild Rutsch, Raymundo Mier, Ignacio Rodríguez and Silvia Mesa for the encouragement and comments for its creation; Arturo Soberón for his suggestions and Manuel Polgar, Laura Solar, Antonio Huitrón and Alejandra Chacón for encouraging the challenge at the huichapenses discussions. Translation: Denisse Piñera Palacios [↩]
2. Luis G. Lumbreras, Arqueología como ciencia social, 1974, p. 9. [↩]
3. Ibidem, p. 46. [↩]
4. José Luis Lorenzo (coord.), Hacia una arqueología social. Reunión en Teotihuacan (octubre de 1975), 1976, p. 11. [↩]
5. See Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones teóricas: aplicaciones a la arqueología social”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 27 (corresponding to July 1993), 1996, p. 12. The Latin American term was coined by Napoleon III in his Epic Essay , to justify his colonial politics on non-English America, when including France within the inheritors of the mother tongue, Latin, together with Spain and Portugal (Del Paso, 1994). He tried to become a champion of the Latin race in America and stop the United States expansion (Vigil, 1889). From this perspectiva, it is a wider concept than the Iberoamerican which only refers to the “set of inhabitants of America colonizad by the Spanish and Portuguese”, as defined in any dictionary (Diccionario de la lengua española). In none of the cases (Ibero- or Hispanic- American) does the term include the colonizer. [↩]
6. Luis F. Bate, Sociedad, formación económico social y cultura, 1978, p. 9. If it is not indicated otherwise, the italic printing is mine. [↩]
7. A reflection various readers and judges had to do of the article for its publication in this magazine. [↩]
8. Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo et al., “Social archaeology in Latin America?: Comments to T.C. Patterson”, in American Antiquity, 62(2), 1997, p. 365. [↩]
9. Luis. F. Bate, op. cit., 1978, p. 9. [↩]
10. Some researchers such as Othón de Mendizábal and Arturo Monzón, tried to apply this philosophy to their academic research, with sources foreign to the Childean view (Gándara et al., 1985, pp. 5-18). [↩]
11. José Antonio Pérez, “La vida termina mejor cuando uno está alegre y fuerte”, in Linda Manzanilla (ed.), Coloquio V. Gordon Childe. Estudios sobre las revoluciones neolítica y urbana, 1988, p. 406. [↩]
12. Luis G. Lumbreras, op. cit., 1981, p. 6. [↩]
13. José Luis Lorenzo (coord.), op. cit., 1976. [↩]
14. Manuel Gándara, op. cit., 1996, p. 13. In most of the editions of the Boletín de Antropología Americana there are two dates: one that corresponds to the number and another one for the edition. For instance, Gándara’s text has a date of edition of 1993, closer to its appearance within the general public. In the bibliography, I write both dates so that the reader has a more precise view as to the moment in which certain ideas were exposed. [↩]
15. Marcio Veloz, “La arqueología de la vida cotidiana: matices, historia y diferencias”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 10, 1984, p. 7. This archaeologist included in the list of the “social”, not only those founders and himself, but also Felipe Bate, Eduardo Matos, Julio Montané, Diana López, Manuel Gándara, Javier Guerrero and Héctor Díaz Polanco. [↩]
16. Luis Felipe Bate, op. cit., 1978, p. 9. [↩]
17. Congreso de Arqueología en Chile (1971), el Primer Congreso del Hombre Andino (Chile, 1973), Simposio en el Congreso de Americanistas en Perú (1970), el de México (1974), la publicación de las notas del curso de Lumbreras en la Universidad de Concepción: La arqueología como ciencia social (1974) (Bate, 1978, p. 9). José Luis Lorenzo organized the meeting in Teotihuacan (1975), to which were convoked Luis G. Lumbreras, Eduardo Ma-tos, Julio Montané and Mario Sanoja: “The names of the other participants are not included because there is no freedom of expression in their countries” (Lorenzo, 1976, p. 7). Besides, the mathematician Guillermo Espinoza, the biologists Lauro González Quintero and Antonio Flores, the “archaeologists and industrial engineer” Joaquín García-Bárcena and the “actuary” Artu-ro López attended the meeting (Lorenzo, 1976, p. 7). [↩]
18. The first number is dated June 1980. The conformation of the editorial counsel (coordinated by Luis F. Bate) is practically the same until this date, twenty years later. [↩]
19. Luis F. Bate, op. cit., 1978 and Arqueología y materialismo histórico, 1977; Mario Sanoja e Iraida Vargas, Antiguas formaciones y modos de producción venezolanos, 1974; Julio Montané, Fundamentos para una teoría arqueológica, 1980. [↩]
20. Luis F. Bate, op. cit., 1977, p. 16. [↩]
21. The conf$erences of the guetsts were published in the first numbers of the Boletín de Antropología Americana. [↩]
22. Organism of the Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA). [↩]
23. Iraida Vargas, “Arqueología, ciencia y sociedad”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, núm. 14 (corresponding to December 1986), 1988, p. 34. [↩]
24. Publication financed by the OEA through the Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia. As can be seen, in many moments the OEA has financed Latin American social archaeology. [↩]
25. Luis F. Bate, “Notas sobre el materialismo histórico en el proceso de investigación arqueológica”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, núm. 19 (corresponding to July 1989), 1990, p. 5. [↩]
26. Differently from Bate’s opinion (1989 [1990], p. 5), the name was taken from the ancient political pastorelas of Germán Dehesa’s and the theatre group Unicornio sponsored by the bookstore Gandhi during the eighties, where they talked about granting the Evenflo award to the most pretentious and boastful argument of certain Mexican politicians parodied in the play. [↩]
27. Luis F. Bate, “Notas sobre el materialismo…”, in op. cit., 1990, p. 5. [↩]
28. Ibidem, p. 6. [↩]
29. Idem. [↩]
30. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, op. cit., p. 8. [↩]
31. Idem. [↩]
32. Iraida Vargas, op. cit., 1988, p. 34. [↩]
33. Ignacio Rodríguez in this same volume. I want to note that certain Marxist positions and the neopositivistic one are not, deep down, so far away from the perspective of the philosophy of science, because they share a good deal of basis, such as determinism, methodological monism, the rigid criterion of demarcation and scientific rationality, the founding of knowledge in the true-false bivalence, among others. Vid. infra. [↩]
34. Manuel Gándara, op. cit., 1986, p. 16. Is this maybe an explanation of the similarities and differences through the typological system of cultural history applied to philosophy of science, with the notions of community, tradition and academic trajectory? [↩]
35. Fernando López Aguilar, Elementos para una construcción teórica en arqueología, 1990 and “Superficies y volúmenes. Aspectos de la construcción teórica en arqueología”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, núm. 10, 1984, pp. 23-34. [↩]
36. Luis F. Bate (pról.), Elementos para una construcción teórica en arqueología, 1990, p. 9. [↩]
37. The main polemics of Marxism during the seventies turned around the way in which were conceived the relationship between the means of production and superstructure, the articulation of the means of production and whereas the category of the economic social formation was abstract or referred to a concrete society. In that time were produced a great amount of texts around those notions that went from the “Althusserian” view to the Soviet orthodox one, the manuals such as Marta Harnecker’s and many others. [↩]
38. Stand out Veloz Maggiolo’s (1984); Iraida Vargas’ (1985 y 1990 -originally dated in 1987-, in the Universidad Central de Venezuela), as well as Felipe Bate’s (1989, 1993). [↩]
39. Luis F. Bate, “Notas sobre el materialismo…”, in op. cit., 1990, p. 18. [↩]
40. Idem. [↩]
41. Luis F. Bate, “El modo de producción cazador recolector o la economía del salvajismo”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, núm. 13, 1987, pp. 5-32. [↩]
42. Luis F. Bate, “Hipótesis sobre la sociedad clasista inicial”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 9, 1984, pp. 47-86. [↩]
43. Iraida Vargas, “La formación económico social tribal”, in Boletín de Antropología Ame-ricana, num. 15, 1987, pp. 15-26 and Arqueología, ciencia y sociedad. Ensayo sobre teoría arqueológica y la formación económico social tribal en Venezuela, 1990, pp. 93-116. [↩]
44. Iraida Vargas, “Teoría sobre el cacicazgo como modo de vida: el caso del Caribe”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 20, 1991, pp. 19-30; Arqueología, ciencia y sociedad…, op. cit., pp. 108-116. [↩]
45. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo y Bernardo Vega, “Modos de vida en el precerámico antillano”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 16, 1988, pp. 135-145. [↩]
46. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo y Gus Pantel, “El modo de vida de los recolectores en la arqueología del Caribe (parte I)”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 18, 1989, pp. 149-167 and “El modo de vida de los recolectores en la arqueología del Caribe (parte II)”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 19, 1990, pp. 83-118. [↩]
47. Luis F. Bate, “Las sociedades cazadoras recolectoras pre-tribales o el ‘paleolítico superior’, visto desde Sudamérica”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, vol. 25, 1994, pp. 105-156. [↩]
48. In Mexico, it was not applied to the cacicazgo, which was seen as a “superior phase of tribal societies” that “precede State classist societies” (Sarmiento 1986, pp. 33-64; 1992; 1993, pp. 95-108). Due to the same ambiguity of the term, it has been applied with different senses: Fournier identified it to the univocal exploitation of maguey to later associate it to an ethnic group, the hñahñu or otomí (Fournier, 1995: 71 y ss.), whereas Lazcano, from three agricultural activities, identified the way of life, the “chinampero”, for the Cuenca de México (Lazcano, 1993, pp. 133-162). The extended use of these categories has been restricted to the Caribbean area, specifically to Venezuela, Dominican Republic and South America. [↩]
49. Luis F. Bate, “Teoría de la cultura y arqueología”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 27, 1996, p. 76. [↩]
50. In Peru, a researcher on social archaeology commented the abandonment sensation regarding its “theoretical fathers” the founders, because the disciples do not have enough theoretical formation and are perceived as the “disguisers of information” so that the former achieve their interpretations and, of course, international promotion… [↩]
51. Luis F. Bate, “Del registro estático al pasado dinámico: entre un salto mortal y un milagro dialéctico”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 26, 1995, p. 49. [↩]
52. Paraphrasing José Luis Lorenzo, 1998, pp. 65-98. [↩]
53. Thomas Patterson, “La creación de cultura en las formaciones sociales pre-estatales y no-estatales”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 14, 1988, pp. 53-62. [↩]
54. Thomas Patterson, “Algunas tendencias teóricas de la posguerra en la arqueología estadounidense”, in vBoletín de Antropología Americana, num. 21, 1991, p. 5. [↩]
55. Randall McGuire, A marxist archaeology, 1992, pp. 62-90. [↩]
56. Ibidem, p. 68. [↩]
57. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 20. It is like searching for the lost key under a lantern because where it has been lost is too dark (Watzlawick, 1992, p. 32). [↩]
58. Luis. F. Bate, “Teoría de la cultura…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 77. [↩]
59. Patricia Fournier, “Lo social y lo material en arqueología: algunos conceptos y correlatos relevantes”, in Boletín de Antropología$ Americana, num. 26, 1996, p. 31. [↩]
60. Idem. [↩]
61. Ignacio Rodríguez, “El presagio de un prestigio: un año de Actualidades Arqueológicas”, in Actualidades Arqueológicas, num. 8, Sept.-Oct. 1996, p. 7. [↩]
62. Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo et al., “Social archaeology in Latin America?: Comments to T.C. Patterson”, in American Antiquity, num. 62(2), 1997, pp. 365-374; Manuel Gándara et al., “Arqueología y marxismo en México”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 11, 1986. [↩]
63. Patricia Fournier, “Etnoarqueología cerámica otomí: maguey, pulque y alfarería entre los hñähñü del Valle del Mezquital”, doctoral thesis, 1995, p. 247. [↩]
64. Luis Vázquez León, El leviatán arqueológico. Antropología de una tradición científica en México, 1996, p. 16. [↩]
65. Ibidem, p. 61. [↩]
66. Bruce Trigger, Historia del pensamiento arqueológico, 1992, pp. 172-173. [↩]
67. Luis Vázquez León, op. cit., 1996, p. 61. [↩]
68. Manuel Gándara, “La vieja ‘nueva arqueología'”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, 1982, pp. 7-70. [↩]
69. After finishing the writing of this text I had access to the book that resulted from Felipe Bate doctoral thesis (1998), reason why my comments and opinions about him are not reflected here. A light view makes me suspect that there are few changes in his central propositions and in his critical style. [↩]
70. He notes: “the emergence in Mexico of social archaeology taking advantage of Echeverría’s populism, the unusual participation of Professor Lorenzo at the Reunión de Teotihuacan and his not so unusual subsequent indifference, Felipe Bate’s arrogant discovery by official archaeology and then its inevitable exile, the theoretical efforts to adequate historical materialism to archaeology, the consolidation and development of the Evenflo and Oaxtepec groups, the theoretical paraphernalia around the concept of ‘way of life’, the delay of the operational definitions, etc.” (Rodríguez, 1996, p. 7). [↩]
71. See Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de…”, p. 18 y Luis F. Bate, “Teoría de la cultura…”, p. 79. Some examples are: “Other researchs initially formulated in this frame [he refers to social archaeology] were unfinished, we still do not know if some day they will be finished, they were only lists of good intentions (cf. López, Mercado y Trinidad in press), or they were given a radical change towards idealistic and relativistic tendencies to get into new trades that, more than theoretical positions, are anti-scientific poses [¡sic!] (López coord. 1994)” (Fournier, 1995, p. 247). [↩]
72. Derrida (1995). Wallerstein, 1998, p. 5, for instance, suggests reading again Marxism without the format of political parties that made in enter the dominant epistemology. [↩]
73. Ignacio Rodríguez, “El presagio de un prestigio…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 7. [↩]
74. Óscar Fonseca, “Reflexiones sobre la arqueología como ciencia social”, in Hacia una arqueología social. Actas del primer simposio de la Fundación Arqueológica del Caribe, 1988, p. 13. [↩]
75. Luis F. Bate, “Relación general entre teoría y método en arqueología”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 4, 1982, p. 8. [↩]
76. Luis F. Bate, “Prólogo”, in op. cit., 1990, p. 10. In spite of this note, Gándara, during the seventies, indeed diffused and defended the new American archaeology, together with the hypothetical-deductive method and Carl Hempel’s philosophy. It is enough to see his Master degree thesis “La arqueología oficial mexicana”, 1975, and other works of this period. [↩]
77. Luis F. Bate, “Teoría de la cultura…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 76. [↩]
78. Idem. [↩]
79. Idem. [↩]
80. Luis Molina, “Consideraciones sobre los conceptos operativos en arqueología social: formación social, modo de producción, modo de vida, cultura”, in Hacia una arqueología social, 1988, p. 147. [↩]
81. L’enfer, c’est les autres [El infierno son los otros]: Sartre. The construction of the other is part of the construction of the enemy. I do not know if others accepted the challenge and responded to the polemic. It seems they did not. [↩]
82. The sic is Bate’s, for a text that does not appear in the bibliography nor is quoted. [↩]
83. Luis F. Bate, “Relación general…”, in op. cit., 1982, p. 13. [↩]
84. Luis F. Bate, “Teoría de la cultura…”, in op. cit., 1996, pp. 77-78. [↩]
85. Luis F. Bate, “Relación general…”, in op. cit., 1982, p. 14. Bate discussed here Gándara’s proposal within his thesis “La arqueología oficial mexicana”, that, in Bate’s opinion, had already been “widely overcame by the author”. [↩]
86. Luis F. Bate, “Notas sobre el materialismo…”, in op. cit., 1990, p. 6. [↩]
87. R.G. Collingwood, La idea de historia, 1993, p. 249. [↩]
88. This old historical method, already overcame, emerged from authors such as Vico and his historical cycles, passed by Kant and his vocation of creating a cosmopolite universal history, by Hegel (Kant’s supporter) and his idea of history as the progressive realization of human freedom, and was used by two of his followers, Comte and Marx (R. G. Collingwood, op. cit., 1993, p. 255). [↩]
89. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 11. [↩]
90. Patricia Fournier, “Etnoarqueología cerámica otomí…”, 1995, p. 2. [↩]
91. Iraida Vargas, Arqueología, ciencia y sociedad…, 1990, p. XV. [↩]
92. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 12. [↩]
93. Iraida Vargas, Arqueologa, ciencia y sociedad…, 1990, p. XVII. Is the term episteme Marxist? It appears rather recurrently in the field of the analytic and the post-modern philosophy, especially in the French one, which doubts it. Everything is permitted. [↩]
94. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 18. [↩]
95. Ibidem, p. 19. [↩]
96. Imre Lakatos, “La falsación y la metodología de los programas de investigación científica”, in La crítica y el desarrollo del conocimiento, 1975, p. 287. [↩]
97. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis teórico: aplicaciones al estudio del origen de la complejidad social”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 25, 1994, p. 98. [↩]
98. Idem. [↩]
99. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 98. [↩]
100. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis teórico: aplicaciones…”, in op. cit., 1994, pp. 98 y ss. [↩]
101. Package in which are included very different philosophical positions, emerged from the anti-positivism of the sixties. [↩]
102. Ambrosio de Velasco, “La hermeneutización de la filosofía de la ciencia contemporánea”, manuscrito inédito. [↩]
103. Idem. [↩]
104. Idem. [↩]
105. Manuel Gándara, “La vieja…”, in op. cit., 1982, pp. 39-41. [↩]
106. Due to limitations of space, for the publication I do not explain in detail what a theoretical position is. I recommend the reading of Gándara’s article to understand what is comprised in each of the areas (Gándara, 1981, pp. 39-40). [↩]
107. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis teórico…”, in op. cit., 1994, pp. 96-97. For instance, which will be the appraisal charge of the theory of the cords or the theory of relativity in physics? Could we establish to which biographical vicissitudes of the authors correspond the categories of way of life and culture? [↩]
108. Ibidem, pp. 95-97. [↩]
109. Ibidem, p. 95. [↩]
110. Ibidem, p. 96. [↩]
111. Idem. [↩]
112. Idem. [↩]
113. Ibidem, p. 97. [↩]
114. […] “intuition without concepts is blind, concepts without intuition are empty”. “Thoughts without content are vane, intuitions without concepts are blind. This is why it is so necessary to become sensible to the concepts (this is, adding the object of intuition to them), how to make intuitions understandable (this is, bring them under concepts)” (Kant, 1991, pp. 41 y ss.). [↩]
115. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis teórico…”, in op. cit., 1994, p. 97. [↩]
116. In fact, Duhem’s thesis that Quine rephrased later as the “holistic controls” (reason for the name Duhem-Quine’s thesis with which it is currently known) doubted the experimenta crucis and proponed the empirical sub-determination of the theories, where it is specified that an isolated hypothesis can never be submitted to control, but a set of them: “When the experience disagrees with its previsions, this teaches it that at least one of the hypothesis that make up the set is unacceptable, and it must be modified, but they do not specify which one is the one to be modified” (Reale y Antiseri, 1992, p. 375. Los autores citan el libro Pierre Duhem, La teoría de la física: su objeto y su estructura). El argumento se representa así: h Ÿ h1 Ÿ h2 Ÿ h3 Ÿ h4… hn AE q. ~q ~h ~h1 ~h2 ~h3 ~h4… ~hn which is read as follows: h and h1 and h2 and h3 and h4 until hn then q. not q. Then not h or not h1 or not h2 or not h3 or not h4 until not hn Which is the rejected hypothesis? The decision involves something more than the rational criteria imposed by science, mostly as to the terms assumed by positivistic rationality that social archaeology seems to share. [↩]
117. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis teórico…”, in op. cit., 1994, pp. 99-100. [↩]
118. Ibidem, pp. 100-102. [↩]
119. Luis F. Bate, “Teoría de la cultura…”, in op. cit., 1996, pp. 81-82. [↩]
120. Ibidem, p. 82. [↩]
121. Idem. [↩]
122. “Dialectic turns to be a powerful heuristic because, for instance, enables the analysis, organization and understanding of different kinds of aspects of the social in concrete historical cases” (Fournier, 1995, p. VII, footnote). [↩]
123. Marvin Harris, El materialismo cultural, 1982, p. 167. [↩]
124. Ibidem, p. 83. [↩]
125. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis teórico…”, in op. cit., 1994, pp. 102-103. [↩]
126. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, pp. 12 and ss. [↩]
127. Ibidem, p. 13. [↩]
128. Luis F. Bate, “Teoría de la cultura…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 89. [↩]
129. Idem. [↩]
130. Ibidem, p. 14. [↩]
131. Are already classic the Popper-Adorno polemics in the sixties and Habermas-Gadamer in the seventies. Of course, the eighties were marked by the criticism to modernity, objectivity, determinism, rationality and teleology to recover the creative freedom of the subject (Picó, 1988, pp. 13 y ss.). [↩]
132. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 14. [↩]
133. Idem. [↩]
134. Ibidem, p. 15. [↩]
135. Iraida Vargas, “Arqueología, ciencia…”, in op. cit., 1988, p. 6. [↩]
136. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 14. [↩]
137. Ibidem, pp. 13-14. [↩]
138. Iraida Vargas, “Arqueología, ciencia…”, in op. cit., 1988, p. 34. [↩]
139. Luis F. Bate, “Notas sobre el materialismo…”, in op. cit., 1990, p. 5. [↩]
140. Mario Sanoja, “La inferencia en la arqueología social”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, 1984, p. 37. [↩]
141. Luis F. Bate, “Notas sobre el materialismo…”, in op. cit., 1990, p. 6. [↩]
142. Idem. [↩]
143. Luis F. Bate, “Notas sobre el materialismo…”, in op. cit., 1990, p. 8. [↩]
144. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 15. [↩]
145. Ibidem, p. 12. [↩]
146. Luis F. Bate, “Notas sobre el materialismo…”, in op. cit., 1990, p. 15. [↩]
147. It may be noted that in its old perspective, the means of production “includes three aspects or levels of analysis: the economic aspect or structure and the superstructure integrated by the social aspect or political-judicial, and the ideological aspect.” (Sanoja, 1982, pp. 5-6). [↩]
148. Luis F. Bate, “Notas sobre el materialismo…”, in op. cit., 1990, pp. 15-16. [↩]
149. Luis F. Bate, “Teoría de la cultura…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 87. [↩]
150. The use of the metaphor has been confirmed by other traditions such as hermeneutic and philosophies that disqualify post-modernisms, relativisms and post-positivisms, etc. [↩]
151. Luis F. Bate, Sociedad, formación…, 1978, pp. 106-107. [↩]
152. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, “La arqueología de la vida…”, in op. cit., 1984, pp. 8-9. [↩]
153. Ibidem, p. 11. [↩]
154. Ibidem, p. 9. [↩]
155. Iraida Vargas, “Arqueología, ciencia y…”, in op. cit., 1988, p. 41. [↩]
156. Ernest von Glaserfeld, “Despedida de la objetividad”, in El ojo del observador. Contribuciones al constructivismo, 1994, p. 20. [↩]
157. Iraida Vargas, “Arqueología, ciencia y…”, in op. cit., 1988, p. 41. [↩]
158. Iraida Vargas, “Modo de vida: categoría de las mediaciones entre formación social y cultura”, in Boletín de Antropología Americana, num. 12, 1987, p. 7. [↩]
159. Luis F. Bate, Arqueología y materialismo…, 1977, p. 14. [↩]
160. Luis F. Bate, Sociedad, formación…, 1978, p. 23. [↩]
161. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 17. [↩]
162. Luis F. Bate, “Relación general…”, in op. cit., 1982, p. 17. [↩]
163. Luis F. Bate, “Teoría de la cultura…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 79. [↩]
164. “Donde todo es verdad, también lo contrario” (Paul Watzlawick, ¿Es real la realidad?…, p. 79). [↩]
165. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 17. [↩]
166. When subjected to the experiment, the hypothesis can be completely proved, it can be refuted totally, or it can be partly proved and accuse the need to be partially modify. In the first case, not often, the hypothesis becomes a scientific theory. In the second case, when its experimental refutation is obtained, the hypothesis is rejected and instead it, a new hypothesis is formulated to initiate the process of experimental verification (De Gortari, 1974, pp. 33-34). [↩]
167. “When I say ‘social archaeology is (or should be…)’, of course what I am doing is obviate the inconsistencies that still exist within our position. Are used with great liberality, and as if they were synonyms, terms such as ‘corroboration, ‘confirmation’ or ‘verification’. I hope this terminological confusion is not a reflection of conceptual confusions, but anyway I relieve it would not hurt to eliminate it” (Gándara, 1993, p. 17). [↩]
168. Iraida Vargas, “Arqueología, ciencia…”, in op. cit., 1988, p. 10. [↩]
169. Luis F. Bate, “Relación general…”, in op. cit., 1982, p. 19. [↩]
170. Everything seems to indicate that it is a very free translation of the idea of contrasting implications (Sarmiento, 1992, p. 35) and supposes that the data are univocal. However, logic notes that in the conditional sentences, if p then q means that p is a sufficient but not necessary condition of q. In case p is given we can infer that q will be given, but from the fact that q has been given we cannot infer that p was given, because q can be due to other causes since it is never said that p is the only cause of q. For instance, from the sentence “If the State exists then there will be irrigation systems”, from the irrigation systems we cannot infer the State, because other causes operate into its existence. The case would be possible if we said “i fan only if p then q” which notes that p is a sufficient and necessary condition for q. From the fact that p is given we can infer q was given and from the fact that q was given we can formally infer p was given. For some evolutionist theories, the sentence “if and only if the State exists, then there will be cities” complies with the requirement that the State observed, the city is inferred, and if cities are observed, then we can infer the State. In this case the sentence is true if p is true and q is true or if p is false and q is false./We will have to make a history of the term archaeological indicator. At least in Mexican archaeology, it is of common use although its role in the research procedure has not yet been explicitly defined, because it seems to be a way to rename the old idea of the “diagnostic types”. Of course, no one talks of a biological, physical, chemical or paleontological indicator, or of one from any other science, because it lacks meaning in methodology. For now, since I do not know this kina of formalizations in social archaeology, I propose the challenge of performing a deduction exercise of the contrasting implications for a convincing hypothesis, the one of the initial classist society (Bate, 1984, pp. 47-68), although the attempts to transform the theoretical and methodological sentences towards a consequential application in a concrete case of study manifested its unviability (López Aguilar y Viart, 1993). [↩]
171. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis de las posiciones…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 11. [↩]
172. Ibidem, p. 16. [↩]
173. Luis F. Bate, Sociedad, formación…, 1978, p. 11. [↩]
174. Luis F. Bate, “Relación general…”, in op. cit., 1982, p. 18. [↩]
175. Luis F. Bate, “Hipótesis sobre la sociedad clasista inicial”, in op. cit., núm. 9, 1984, pp. 47-86. [↩]
176. A pre-Kuhnian notion of history of science that was the starting point for the making of an already classic book, turning point of the philosophy of science, La estructura de las revoluciones científicas (1962). From it post-positivism is displayed. Paradoxically, in the year of the original publication of this book, it was linked with the neo-positivism of American processual archaeology. Geography followed a path similar to that of the new archaeology, under the name of new geography, only to discover that the path of that science was far from logic positivism (Wagstaff, 1991, pp. 117 y ss.). [↩]
177. Luis F. Bate, “Relación general…”, in op. cit., 1982, p. 34. [↩]
178. Luis F. Bate (pról.), Elementos para…, 1990, p. 11. [↩]
179. Luis F. Bate, “Notas sobre el materialismo…”, in op. cit., 1990, pp. 7-8. [↩]
180. Vázquez noted that this creates the effect or super-position and “bothering reiteration of complete fragments that repeat over and over in successive publications”, only justifiable in the archaeologist that commented due to his links with art and historical interpretation that would approach him to the hypertext (Vázquez, 1996, pp. 215-216). [↩]
181. Luis F. Bate, “Teoría de la cultura…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 89. [↩]
182. Luis F. Bate, “Notas sobre el materialismo…”, in op. cit., 1990, p. 9. [↩]
183. Luis F. Bate, “Relación general…”, in op. cit., 1982, p. 43. [↩]
184. Idem. [↩]
185. Idem. [↩]
186. Of course, the non-classic logics are forbidden. A social archaeologist commented when first hearing of the blurry logic: “logic is one, what is blurry is in the mind of the researchers”. Which one is the good one, dialectic or formal? [↩]
187. Luis Hurtado, “Estratificación social…”, in Óscar Fonseca (editor científico), op. cit., 1988, p. 50. [↩]
188. Luis F. Bate, “Relación general…”, in op. cit., 1982, p. 43. [↩]
189. Ibidem, p. 20. [↩]
190. “The lesson for epistemology is the following: Do not work with stable concepts. Do not eliminate the counter-induction. Do not be seduced by the thought that finally we have found the correct description of the “facts”, when all that has occurred is that certain new categories have been adapted to some old forms of thought , which are so familiar that we consider their perimeters to be the perimeters of the world” (Feyerabend, 1975, p. 40). [↩]
191. “[…] share a theoretical position in general, does not mean there are agreements and absolute compatibility. Proposing a general proposition that is only and compatible for different positions is not our intention and would be a useless attempt due to its impossibility” (Bate, 1981, p. 41). [↩]
192. Luis F. Bate, “Relación general…”, in op. cit., 1982, p. 41. [↩]
193. Ibidem, p. 40. [↩]
194. “The data are never innocent, so it is worthy to review them before we proceed to abandon a theory or to declare it the winner in the race for knowledge” (Gándara, 1992, p. 97). [↩]
195. Manuel Gándara, “El análisis teórico…”, in op. cit., 1994, p. 97. [↩]
196. Griselda Sarmiento, Las primeras sociedades jerárquicas, 1992, p. 35. [↩]
197. Idem. [↩]
198. Luis F. Bate, “Relación general…”, in op. cit., 1982, p. 39. [↩]
199. Luis F. Bate, Arqueología y…, 1977, p. 23. [↩]
200. Luis F. Bate, “Notas sobre el materialismo…”, in op. cit., 1990, p. 12. [↩]
201. Idem. [↩]
202. Luis F. Bate, “Teoría de la cultura…”, in op. cit., 1996, p. 92. [↩]
203. Luis F. Bate, Arqueología y…, 1977, p. 35. [↩]
204. Ibidem, pp. 37-39. [↩]
205. Ibidem, pp. 40-47. [↩]
206. Ibidem, pp. 47-54. [↩]
207. Ibidem, pp. 55 y ss. [↩]
208. Luis Hurtado, “Estratificación social…”, in Óscar Fonseca (editor científico), op. cit., 1988, p. 51. [↩]
209. Logic is defined as “the science of the principles of formal validity of inference” (Deaño, 1993, p. 36). And he clarified with reservation: “we will consider the term ‘inference’ as a synonym of ‘reasoning’ or ‘argumentation’ […] a reasoning or inference […] consists in deriving a conclusion from some premises” (idem). [↩]
210. Luis Hurtado, “Estratificación social…”, in Óscar Fonseca (editor científico), op. cit., 1988, p. 47. [↩]
211. Epistemological rupture or transformation of quantity into quality? The attempt to build a scientific revolution in archaeology, similar to that of American new Archaeology is evident. [↩]
212. Ibidem, p. 48. [↩]
213. What is apparent is the falling of the bodies, the real content is the mathematical description of the fall of the bodies or of that mysterious force, but not its explanation, because Newton never established the causes that produce this effect! [↩]
214. Luis Hurtado, “Estratificación social…”, in Óscar Fonseca (editor científico), op. cit., 1988, p. 49. The apple fell without the need of Newton’s laws! Did Marx build Marxism from the mere observation of empirical data of English capitalism? If empirical corroboration is so important, what are the crucial substantive projects for social archaeology? [↩]
215. Idem. [↩]
216. “[…] sentences can only have-and necessarily have to have- one of these two values: truthfulness or falsehood” (Deaño, 1993, p. 69), without adjectives. [↩]
217. This is more than understandable with the table of values of truth and if we call exchange p and foreign ceramic q (1 is true and 0 is false): p q p- q q- p. 1 1 1 1. 1 0 0 1. 0 1 1 0. 0 0 1 1. Formal logia understands that the refutation of the condicional sentence (p-q, q-p): q does not refute p and p does not refuteq. [↩]
218. Luis Hurtado, “Estratificación social…”, in Óscar Fonseca (editor científico), op. cit., 1988, p. 49. [↩]
219. Alfredo Deaño, Introducción a la lógica formal, 1993, pp. 299-300. [↩]
220. Eli de Gortari, Introducción a la lógica dialéctica, 1974, p. 251. [↩]
221. Idem. [↩]
222. Ibidem, p. 249. [↩]
223. Karl Popper, La lógica de la investigación científica, 1996, pp. 27-28. [↩]
224. Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo et al., op. cit., 1997, p. 372. [↩]
225. “This is not the place to list the work or membership of the position-I wouldn’t be the one indicated to start this task, besides I cannot affirm a priori that all the postulates are shared equally or with the same intensity” (Gándara, 1993, p. 12). [↩]
226. Luis Vázquez, op. cit., 1996, p. 27. [↩]
227. Ibidem, p. 35. [↩]
228. Luis F. Bate, “Hipótesis sobre la sociedad…”, in op. cit., 1984. [↩]
229. Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo et al., op. cit., 1997, p. 372. [↩]
230. Luis F. Bate, El proceso de investigación…, 1998, p. 24. [↩]
231. Immanuel Wallerstein, Impensar las ciencias sociales, 1998, pp. 176 y ss. [↩]