Punk Archaeology and the Mainstream

Paul R. Mullins (from the Archaeology and Material Culture blog)

Perhaps all scholarship inevitably hazards descending into stale convention or becoming an

insular academic pursuit. One of the most novel recent movements to unsettle archaeological

conventions is “punk archaeology,” which is perhaps most clearly illustrated in William Caraher,

Kostis Kourelis, and Andrew Reinhard’s edited 2014 collection Punk Archaeology. A

fascinating Society for Historical Archaeology session last week examined punk archaeology,

especially the public dimensions that Lorna Richardson has most closely examined. Punk

archaeologists are leery of being narrowly defined, but a punk research perspective typically

takes aim on “mainstream” archaeology: that is, in archaeology and many other disciplines the

notion of punk seeks to transform scholarship that is normative, predictable, easily ignored,

apolitical, emotionless, overly academic, or simply dull. Punk archaeology embraces a critical

and compelling assault on unquestioned scholarly traditions and the academy, and it drew a

roomful of people at the SHA conference and has received plenty of press

coverage. Nevertheless, it may deliver death rites to a stereotyped mainstream and academy

that have already disappeared or never existed in the first place.

The DIY ethic of punk is perhaps best reflected in the host of show flyers made for punk shows, including this 1987 flyer for a St.Louis show (image JB Kopp).

Simply labeling any scholarship punk is a bit of a rhetorical maneuver, a point made by Zack

Furniss’ Punkademics and also underscored in fandom scholarship that has contemplated the

relationship between fans and academics since the 1980’s (cf. Matt Hills’ “fan-as-

intellectual,” Henry Jenkins’ “Confessions of an Aca-Fan” blog, and Tanya Cochran’s study of

“scholar-fandom”). A punk archaeology risks posing a clumsy contrast between, on the one

hand, the notion of punk as spontaneous, experiential, anti-intellectual, and anarchic and, on

the other hand, the stereotype of academic archaeologists as insular and unimaginative squares

committed to jargon and tweed jackets. The line between academics and everyday people has

long been much more complicated and frequently violated than we are often willing to

acknowledge; there certainly are some academics committed to deep-seated scholarly

traditions and clueless about The Simpsons, but there is little evidence that most academics are

indifferent to everyday life and popular culture or that popular artists are not themselves

intellectuals.

In 1968 this fan-published 48-page study examined the cultural impact of Star Trek, one of the earliest pieces of fan scholarship (image from Fanlore user Mrs. Potato Head).

Punk scholarship’s potential may rest with its capacity to intellectualize everyday life without

forsaking the meaningful dimensions of everyday experience. Such intellectualizing of a

popular passion like music or fandom is often greeted by the devoted as a violation of that

which can only be authentically understood by the faithful. In 1991, for instance, a fan

complained in the letterzine Comlink about academic studies of fandom, arguing that “putting

fandom under a microscope and scrutinized for the benefit of bored academics would have a

chilling effect. Spontaneity and free expression in fandom are already endangered

species.” Two years later a fan responding to Star Trek fandom scholarship wrote in The LOC

Connection that “I've been a fan most of my life. It may currently be in vogue to be a Star Trek

fan … but I was teased and insulted for it so unmercifully during my adolescent years that I'm

still sensitive about any nonfan even knowing about my affiliation. And that goes double for

K/S [Kirk/Spock fan fiction]. So I did feel quite threatened at the thought of these

`ethnographers’ and other scholars making our underground `culture’ public.”

Punk archaeologists may be correct in their implication that contemporary scholarly

conventions strip passion from our practice or refuse to acknowledge it publicly. Personal

passions shape all academics’ scholarship in ways we rarely concede, but punk archaeologists

and fandom researchers have given this sustained reflection. A host of fandom researchers

have followed Henry Jenkins’ advocacy of a scholarship that embraces our passions and studies

the likes of punk music, Star Trek, or cosplay if these are the things that fire our everyday

experiences. Certainly much of punk archaeology is fueled by a comparable affection for punk

music as a sonic, social, aesthetic, and material experience.

Nevertheless, Twilight scholar Melissa Click cautions that “combining fan and academic identity

may have negatively impacted our scholarship–we may have put our fan identifications before

our academic ones.” Media scholar Ian Bogost is likewise wary of shallow notions of academic

fandom. He professes that passion for the subject is part of all scholarship: “More often than

not, humanists in general get into what they do precisely because they are head-over-heels in

love with it, whether `it’ be television, videogames, Shakespeare, Martin Heidegger, the

medieval chanson de geste, the Greek lyric poem, or whatever else. Specialty humanities

conferences are just fan conventions with more strangely-dressed attendees.” Yet at the same

time he warns that “embracing aca-fandom is a bad idea. Not because it’s immoral or crude,

but because it’s too great a temptation. Those of us who make an enviable living being

champions of media, particularly popular media, must also remain dissatisfied with them. We

ought to challenge not only ourselves, our colleagues, and our students—but also the public

and the creators of our chosen media. We ought not to be satisfied. That’s the price of getting

to make a living studying television, or videogames, or even Shakespeare” (compare Flow’s

2010 column on their uneasiness with aca-fandom scholarship).

Much of punk performance and material style was meant to be funny, like this 1977 Ramones fan club mailer(image from The Design Observer).

Chris Matthews made one of the key points at the SHA session in favor of punk as a scholarly

metaphor. Punk music had quite ambiguous evaluative standards, favoring the joy of making

and hearing music—especially if it was dissonant, vulgar, and inept—over the social and

marketplace commodification that focuses on what is “good” or “bad” music. Matthews

argued that the sheer joy of playing music and perhaps unsettling some audiences is an

excellent parallel for archaeological practice and expression, but the pleasure of digging often is

missing in archaeological scholarship. Archaeology is not dull at all (compare Colleen Morgan’s

thoughts on the trope of archaeology-is-boring), but it sometimes finds an insular and tedious

expression in hotel conference halls or peer-reviewed journals that mask the curiosity,

idiosyncrasy, and pleasure of things.

Punk in particular and music in general works as a compelling metaphor underscoring

archaeology’s improvisational and idiosyncratic expressiveness, pushing back against status

quo standards that structure how we interpret material things. Good cases could be made for

hip-hop, death metal, or disco archaeologies that each aspire to represent particular

experiences, improvise in certain ways with their own goals, and craft distinctive expressive

forms. Jazz, for instance, invokes a provocative notion of improvisation rooted in the syncretic

and tactical nature of everyday Black life. Jazz’s central features are improvisation, spontaneity,

and performance, and much like punk it defies easy definition and routinely produces heated

debates over the distinction between authentic and commercial forms.

Jazz’s origins are in African diasporan music, but it is a fundamentally participatory expressive

form that has always incorporated other traditions and thieved from popular music as much as

it reproduced sub-Saharan musical traditions. Jazz was long popularly associated with African

Americans, often receiving the damning praise that it was an “authentic” or “primitive”

expressive form. In 1929, for instance, the astute dancer and jazz writer Roger Pryor Dodge

argued that jazz was music “produced by the primitive innate musical instinct and of those

lower members of the White race who have not yet lost their feeling for the primitive.” John

Gennari stresses that Dodge intended this as flattery, noting that Dodge likewise considered

Bach a “primitive” who shared jazz musicians’ improvisational flair.

An archaeology with a jazz instinct might take its inspiration from the likes of Tommy Potter, Charlie Parker, Max Roach (behind Parker), Miles Davis, and Duke Jordan (left to right), shown here in New York, 1947 (image by William P. Gottlieb, Library of Congress).

However, many more inter-war jazz critics were loathe to allow jazz a toehold in popular

culture, fearing the inter-racial appeal of African-American expressive culture. In 1922, for

instance, a New York City Episcopal rector intoned that “Jazz is retrogression. It is going to the

African jungle for our music.” In 1947, Morroe Berger reported in the Journal of Negro

History that the “intense, emotional opposition” to jazz revolved around “an image and an

interpretation of the Negro that were not compatible with the image and the attitude in the

minds of the leaders of white society in America.” Of jazz, Berger argued that there “is perhaps

no other area of Negro-white contact, except possibly in radical political parties, where the

Negro is accepted so fully as an equal (and so often admired as a superior) without

condescension.” In that formulation, jazz was a popular cultural expression with profoundly

consequential anti-racist implications that reach well beyond music.

A “jazz archaeology” framework revolving around improvisation, cultural syncretism, and the

impression of the color line is simply another way to conceptualize the material world and

archaeological practice. Both it and punk archaeology share an interest in shaping how we

define our fundamental scholarly and social practice. Punk archaeology’s resistance to

convention may distinguish it in some ways as it focuses on the means rather than the ends;

that is, punk archaeology is at its heart a critical voice pressing us to be wary of scholarly and

expressive norms but reluctant to establish or accept conventions.

In 1978, over 100,000 people particiupated in a ROck Against Racism march in London that concluded with a concert that included The Clash, the Buzzcocks, and Generation X

(image from Sarah Wylde, own work)

In that sense, punk archaeology is tactical, spontaneous, and situational rather than strategic

and universalizing. Punk music’s politics are sometimes clumsily reduced to shallow anarchism,

but an activist thread of UK punk in the late-1970’s included anti-racist labels like 2-Tone and

the Rock Against Racism campaign, though punk’s anarchic messages found an undesired

resonance with fascist groups like the National Front. Brock Ruggles’ dissertation argues for a

continuing American punk politicization in the 1980’s, focusing on examples like the

Washington, DC Dischord label.

Andrew Reinhard’s SHA paper “Disruptive Archaeologies: The Theory and Practice of

Punk” acknowledged the activist implications of punk archaeology, but his examples focused on

the political weight of tactical and spontaneous grassroots politics. Much as in music

fandom, spontaneity and tactical politics risk being cast as confirmations of authenticity denied

to rehearsed, constructed, and strategic scholarship. Reinhard's most interesting strategic

political goal may be advocacy for concrete issues like academic publication reform

(interminable publication delays and homogenizing peer reviews treat novel subjects unevenly,

and the inaccessibility of peer-reviewed publications outside well-funded institutions is

demoralizing for every author). Nevertheless,the central point of punk may reasonably be that

its goal is simply to defy convention and leave subsequent political formations to emerge from

other discussions.

Punk is simply one of many discourses that confirm none of us believes ourselves to be

“mainstream.” Reinhard, for example, characterizes punk archaeologists as “the margins of our

discipline, the neglected, the weird, the freaks on the very edge of archaeology and often

outside the Academy.” Much as in contemporary life, we all feel marginalized by a host of

dominators, capitalists, and squares, so nearly nobody seems to see themselves as the status

quo, let alone firmly situated at the heart of an untroubled bourgeois life: where we once all

sought normality, we now seem to all aspire to be on the margins.

Punk appeals to our self-embraced outsider indignation as it views most norms skeptically if not

contemptuously and betrays many scholars' frustrations with the discipline. Much of this

frustration with present-day archaeological practice may be rooted in the enormous labor

inequalities in the discipline, where many working archaeologists cannot secure a fair working

wage and increasingly more academic archaeologists are consigned to adjunct

posts. Nevertheless, suggesting a “punk sensibility” might be divined across time is perhaps

pressing the metaphor too far, searching for a past in which people are idiosyncratic, conflicted,

creative, and unpredictable: indeed, much like we fancy ourselves to be.

A post-processual critique of mainstream archaeology that began in the late 1970’s shared

punk archaeology’s wariness of convention, but punk archaeology’s roots in popular culture

and everyday life depart from the dense theoretical assault waged by post-processualism. Punk

archaeology remains complexly theoretical, evoking the likes of the situationists and Henri

Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life, but most of that theory is under-stated or implicit. Punk

archaeology’s central threads of DIY, spontaneity, irreverence, and idiosyncratic material seem

to owe more to Malcolm McLaren than Marx (who happen to both be buried in Highgate

Cemetery).

In 2013 the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Punk: Chaos to Couture" exhibit examined punk's impact on fashion and confirmed that punk is an acceptable topic for even the

world's most influential museums (image Metropolitan Museum of Art).

The apparent reluctance to over-theorize punk archaeology probably reflects a desire to break

from academic conventions and dense prose, but it risks lapsing into an instinctive picture of

the material world; that is, we hazard studying only the idiosyncratic things that resonate with

us. We should study the things we feel strongly about and use the emotions that we have for

those passions, but we should also turn our eye to the things we loathe, the subjects that seem

boring, and the stuff we cannot fathom. It is worth knowing the Clash’s oeuvre and the

prophecies of Lou Reed, but Muzak and American Idol deserve our attention as well.

Punk archaeologies borrow their namesake’s penchant to resist mainstream codes that

determine research methods and questions, instead championing a Do-It-Yourself ethic that

operates outside traditional funding sources, publication outlets, and familiar

data. Nevertheless, there will always be measures of what research is “good” or “bad” or what

is acceptable in ethical, methodological, or political senses that cannot admit everything

“outside the box.” Joshua Samuels raises this issue in his contribution to the Punk

Archaeology volume, where he contemplates the outcry against metal detecting TV shows:

Samuels points out that much of the anti-academic populism in series like Savage Family

Diggers may actually capture an anarchic spirit that punk archaeology encourages.

The mainstream academy is a much more complicated target than it appears in punk

archaeology critique, and the mainstream may be imagined if not ideological, rather than a

social and material reality. Punk secures much of its appeal because it so assertively positions

itself opposed to the predominant conventions that frustrate many of us, and much of its

power and pleasure comes from simply defying normality. It may gradually shift its focus to the

development of concrete strategic goals: Advocacy for labor fairness in archaeology, developing

new scholarly outlets, and fostering new mechanisms of community engagement all seem to be

at the heart of punk archaeology’s mission. It may not be that all scholarship becomes stale

convention or that mainstream academic convention inevitably dulls critique or muffles

passion; rather, it may simply be that there is no clearly defined mainstream at all and the

conventions may be much more fluid than we acknowledge. It may also be the case that it is

simply energizing and pleasurable to defy conventions, scream vulgarities at normality, and see

what comes from that everyday expressive politics.

References

Morroe Berger

1947 Jazz: Resistance to the Diffusion of a Culture-Pattern. The Journal of Negro

History 32(4):461-494. (subscription access)

Bill Caraher

2014 Towards a Punk Archaeology. In Punk Archaeology, edited by William Caraher, Kostis

Kourelis, and Andrew Reinhard, pp.29-34. The Digital Press, Fargo, North Dakota. Reprinted

from July 2009 Punk Archaeology blog post.

Tanya R. Cochran

2009 Toward a Rhetoric of Scholar-Fandom. PhD Dissertation, Georgia State University.

Kathryn Dunlap and Carissa Wolf

2010 Fans Behaving Badly: Anime Metafandom, Brutal Criticism, and the Intellectual

Fan. Mechademia 5:267-283. (subscription access)

Zack Furniss

2012 Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower. Minor Compositions, Brooklyn,

New York.

John Gennari

2006 Blowin' Hot and Cool : Jazz and Its Critics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Matt Hills

2002 Fan Cultures. Routledge, London.

Christopher Hitchens

1978 Britain Punks Go Fascist. Mother Jones 3(7):19-20.

Henry Jenkins

2006 Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York University Press,

New York.

2013 Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. 20th Anniversary

Edition. Routledge, New York.

The New York Times

1922 Rector Calls Jazz National Anthem. New York Times 30 Jan: 9.

David Pattie

1999 4 Real: Authenticity, Performance, and Rock Music. Enculturation 2(2).

Andrew Reinhard

2015 Disruptive Archaeologies: The Theory and Practice of Punk. Paper presented at Society

for Historical Archaeology conference session “Punk Public Archaeology,” Seattle, Washington.

Brock Ruggles

2008 Not So Quiet on the Western Front: Punk Politics during the Conservative Ascendancy in

the United States, 1980-2000. PhD Dissertation, Arizona State University.

Joshua Samuels

2014 Punk Provocation. In Punk Archaeology, edited by William Caraher, Kostis Kourelis, and

Andrew Reinhard, pp.29-34. The Digital Press, Fargo, North Dakota.

Michael Shanks

2008 Post Processual archaeology and after. In Handbook of Archaeological Theories, edited by

R. Alexander Bentley, Herbert D. G. Maschner, and Christopher Chippindale, pp.133-

144. Altamira Press, Lanham, Maryland.

Images

Charlie Parker group image from Charlie Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress

Punk Archaeology cover from Mediterraneanworld blog

Ramones mailer image from Design Observer

Rock Against Racism march image from Sarah Wyld, own work

St. Louis punk show flyer from JB Kopp

Star Trek 1968 study image from Fanlore user Mrs. Potato Head