Years ago, I wrote a bit exploring the idea of “slow archaeology” (you can get a sense of my ideas here). The idea, from what I recall, was to propose an alternative to what I felt to be the accelerating rate of field work and academic publishing as well as the pressures of contract and salvage archaeology. While my papers were generally focused on the fetishization of efficiency for the sake of efficiency especially in the introduction and use of technology in the discipline, they also proposed slow work as both a kind of resistance, an appeal to the roots of the discipline in craft, and as an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between disciplinary work and knowledge.
My papers never specifically defined “fast archaeology” as the opposite of “slow archaeology,” but some recent experiences and conversations have suggested that perhaps the concept of “busy archaeology” is a more appropriate counter point.
Like many people in the 21st century, I find myself feeling busy more often than not. Like many academics, at least some of the busyness is self inflicted. My daily routine has become cluttered with the need to grade over-engineered (and often under-theorized) assignments, unnecessary meetings, waves of emails, distracting tangents, and “priority churn” where each day introduces a new competitor for the position of “top priority.” (This phrase is a hat tip to my advisor, Tim Gregory, who reassure us us whenever we him to read or write something that it was his “top priority.”)
Of course archaeologists are busy and love to study busyness. In fact, in my little corner of the professional universe there are two famous articles the document the “busy countryside of late antiquity.” Marcus Rautman’s use of the term “busy” was deliberate especially in the context of Cyprus. Not only did it situate the island in Late Antiquity outside the “Orient” which, as Said has so famously shown, 18th and 19th century historians historically characterized as inhabited by “lazy bodies”, but also reinforced the division between Late Antiquity and the subsequent, more “Oriental” (at least in the hands of many historians past and present) Byzantine or Muslim worlds. In other words, the busy Late Roman countryside marked Cyprus and Antiquity as characterized by modern, Western, values of industriousness. This has particular significance on contemporary Cyprus where prosperity and rapid economic development characterize the Republic of Cyprus, which is part of the EU; in contrast the politically isolated “Turkish Republic” which governs the occupied part of the island languishes. Whether we should read Rautman’s (and Pettegrew’s subsequent) use of this term as an ironic reference to certain long-standing, if outmoded historical trends, a nod to the contemporary situation, or as a simple descriptor of the bustling Late Roman landscape remains unclear.
It seems that archaeologists have a particular penchant for seeing coastal towns, ports, and harbors as “busy.” They’re in good company, of course, E.P Thompson in his monumental Making of the English Working Class likewise notes “In London, the arsenal, the shipyards,, and the docks were busy…” (252), but also reminds us that “In the eyes of the rich between 1790 and 1830 factory children were ‘busy’, ‘industrious’, ‘useful’; they were kept out of their parks and orchards, and they were cheap” (342) and clearly linked the busyness as a virtue to the rising influence of Methodism among the management class in 18th century England. It is in this context where capitalism developed its virtuous view of busyness and came to celebrate a busy workplace, a busy commercial district, and busy employees.
By the 21st century, authors like David Graeber in his irreverent but incisive 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, makes clear that busyness (or “Busy-Bee” syndrome) is part of the core problem associated with contemporary work. As one might expect, Graeber largely blamed capitalism-addled middle-manager class for the growing need to appear busy. Managers often urged their workers to at least appear busy as a way to protect their jobs. At the same time, managers also often burdened these same employees with unnecessary busywork as a way to reinforce their own authority (and employment).
In academia, claims to busyness often seek to thread the needle between resistance and industriousness. On the one hand, most of my colleagues do their best to appear occupied (if not preoccupied) by their jobs. In fact, we often criticize individuals who aren’t busy (e.g. “I’m not sure what he actually does here”) and often see it as a kind of complicity with mechanisms of power that privilege particular faculty with free time at the expense of their colleagues.
On the other hand, faculty have learned (I’m assuming from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education) that when saying “no” to additional work, it is often useful to claim particular busyness. Once during a committee meeting when no one would agree to be chair amid clamorous claims to being “too busy,” I offered to take on the role, but only if everyone in the room explained to me how they were too busy to do it. After my colleagues proved only too willing to list off their obligations, I sheepishly told them that I was kidding and realized that indeed they were all too busy (perhaps to even do their jobs!). In this way, busyness has become a form of resistance even when it’s directed not at the small but powerful managerial class in academia, but at their colleagues. Academics are only too willing, it would seem, to use busyness as an excuse to drag their colleagues back into the bucket.
To my mind, this is a pretty intriguing historical and professional context, then, to consider what an archaeology of busyness. The challenge would be that busyness for all the energy it consumes, anxiety it creates, and movement that it embodies remains rather ephemeral. In fact, “busy work” both occupies a good bit of our time as academics, within capitalism, and in modernity, but the absence of any discernible or significant results distinguishes it from “real work.” It is both the opposite of “slow” in that it’s frenetic, hurried, and often impatient, but like the “slow” the measure of busy is in the moment. For many of us “the busy” isn’t so much the result of particular or specific external pressures, but the cumulative embodiment of a particular set of moral (or at very least ethical) imperatives to DO something.
The question becomes, then, what would the archaeology of busyness look like? What traces do our persistent commitment to doing leave behind when accomplishments are so often secondary to performance?
How does archaeology itself with its roots in modernity and capitalism occlude our ability to discern the traces of business and reproduce the moral imperative to remain constantly in motion?
One wonder whether the elusiveness of busyness is part of its persistence. It leaves no traces and as a result, we can deny or ignore its presence.
Archaeology of the Mediterranean World 