Epistemic Objects and Embeddedness: Knowledge Construction and Narratives in Research Networks of Practice

Abstract

In this article, we explore the meanings of objectual practice that are revealed by examining embedded information structures and performativity. We conceptualize a network of practice as a nexus of interconnected practice, formed around materially mediated interdependencies across communities of practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork of archaeology research, conducted across multiple research disciplines and communities of practice, we identify the material components of embedded information and explicate the processes by which objectual and social practices shape the adoption of theories across the network, creating knowledge-in-practice. We conceptualize knowledge construction as a product of the constant tension between contextualization and decontextualization (embeddedness and disembeddedness). Our findings demonstrate the mechanisms by which exploratory interactions with the information embedded in things (research objects) produce breakdowns that reveal inconsistencies within current theories.

Keywords:

• archaeology
• embeddedness
• epistemic object
• narrative
• network of practice

Notes

1. Processual archaeology was inspired by “hypothetic-deductive positivism derived from Hemple (deducing statements from general theories and test them against observable data)” (Renfrew and Bahn 2005, 208).

2. Parallel to the works of scholars in the United States on the origin of agriculture in the 1950s–1960s, archaeologists in a group under the leadership of Eric Sidney Higgs at the University of Cambridge were interested in palaeoeconomy. This group also developed methods for discovery of botanical remains to study agricultural production. David French was a student of Eric Higgs at Cambridge and a member of this group.