Academic copying, archaeology and the English language.

Bentley, R. Alexander

There is now a proliferation of new journals on almost every conceivable topic (e.g. Journal of Happiness Studies, Queueing Systems, Wear, World Pumps, with titles for archaeologists such as Anthropoetics, Archaeological Dialogues and Archaeoastronomy & Ethnoastronomy News), so that an author can publish almost any article by moving down the journal ranking far enough (Svetlov 2004). With the added stress on reviewers, and increasing stress on academics to publish in quantity (Larkin 1999; Mojon-Azzi et al. 2003), this has become a recognised practice (Adam & Knight 2002; Clausen & Nielsen 2003; Jefferson & Shashok 2003; Koonin 2003; Lawrence 2003). Increasingly therefore, academics must regulate their own writing rather than relying on editing and peer review to ensure meaning and clarity. Accurate, clear use of language is especially crucial because that language is now more likely to be copied by other academics. As editorial control decreases, academic writing is free to become more and more subject to fashion, with authors copying each other in an effort to stay on top of the latest ideas.

Prehistoric potters copied each other's decorations to use on their pottery, whether in North America (Neiman 1995; Lipo et al. 1997), or in Neolithic Germany (Bentley & Sherman 2003; Bentley et al. 2004; Sherman & Wilkinson 2001), so it is not surprising that copying also underlies the production of academic publications. Many aspects of modern popular culture exhibit the same statistical patterns as a simple model of random copying, including distributions of how popular the choices are, as well as the rate of turnover among the most popular (Bentley et al. 2004; Bentley & Sherman 2005). In the United States, for example, people's random copying of one another appears to be the predominant process in how names are chosen for babies (Hahn & Bentley 2003) and how dog breeds are chosen as pets (Herzog et al. 2004).

Through online journal citation databases, one can easily document the accelerating process with which terms or ideas catch on (Bentley & Maschner 2000; Bissey & Viossat 2003). Statistical studies of citation databases also show that most authors copy their references from other bibliographies rather than reading the articles themselves (Simkin & Roychowdhury 2003). Academic terms are particularly prone to this game of chance fashion, and although we cannot predict which new term will become the next buzzword, we can predict confidently that there will be new buzzwords in the future. For example, words such as 'agency' and 'nuanced' seem to be everywhere nowadays (Figure 1). After 1990, 'agency' caught on so suddenly (Figure la) that it resembles an example of the 'tipping point' that Gladwell (2000) has popularly described. Interestingly, archaeologists and anthropologists did not pick up on 'agency' until after 1994 (Figure lb), and a similar lag can be detected with 'nuanced' which since 1997 has been rising quickly elsewhere (Figure 1a, b). The consequences of academic language choice can be serious, as in the case of processual and post-processual archaeology. These labels tell non-archaeologists very little--doesn't every researcher, almost by definition, study a process? Even post-processualists study a process, namely how we narrate the past. Unfortunately, archaeologists are stuck with these horribly inelegant and non-descriptive labels. If we could write more carefully today, clear, descriptive language may begin to outweigh jargon. As a greater proportion of useful terms are copied in future publications, the entire vocabulary, and hence understanding of the discipline, could gradually begin to improve.

In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay, 'Politics and the English language', that has become a classic for many first-year writing or literature courses, and after 60 years his lament over the misuse of political language is still startlingly relevant. For Orwell, the importance of precise, meaningful language was critical because language not only communicates our ideas but directs our own thoughts. Orwell was particularly irritated by the use of 'ready-made phrases' that are repeatedly copied from one person to another:

'... modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set into order by someone else, and making the results printable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier--even quicker, once you have the habit--to say, "In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that" than to say "I think".' (Orwell 1946: 359)

The citation studies mentioned above suggest that archaeological academics are susceptible to copying strips of words from each other. This makes us all the more obliged to write our ideas clearly the first time. For doing so, Orwell (1946) provided five simple rules:

(1) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(2) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(4) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

In writings on archaeological theory, Orwell's first rule is perhaps most often violated, in phrases such as mobilization of resources, hitched to our empirical cart, throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater, in the context of and brought to bear to name only a few. More serious, however, is the copying of complicated words that violate rule 2, in that they are often used when the idea is either simple or poorly understood. Examples in theoretical archaeology include hermeneutic, epistemological, neo-evolutionary paradigm, analytical construct, post-processualist, meta-archaeological, historiographical socio-economico-political and so on. These are rarely used any more with any fresh definition. Other words, inserted to make a sentence sound more professional, are not complicated but extraneous. Common examples are complex, factor, process and dynamical. In an archaeological publication, one might read that prehistoric events were somehow part of a dynamic process, involving the complex interplay of social, political and/or ideological factors. What isn't? Generally, just about all entities in the universe are factors in a dynamical process, whether they are atoms of the Sun, plot twists in a narrative or worms in the soil.

As a proof of their redundancy, large complicated words are often linked in the same passage, violating Orwell's third rule, as in the article title (taken from the literature) 'Notes toward an epigenetic model of the evolution of "civilisation". Epigenetic (Greek epi for 'upon' and genesis for 'formation') is defined by the Chambers Dictionary as 'the science that studies the causes at work in development', which is very close to the definition of evolution. Is the title therefore any more descriptive than 'An epigenetic model of "civilisation"? If so, is the additional meaning worth the cost of scaring most readers away from a good article, rather than inviting them with a title such as 'On the evolution of "civilisation"?

Academics invent jargon prolifically, often by adding suffixes. As noted previously in Antiquity (Hawkes 1968; Lake 1997; also Service 1969), we have an increasing number of 'isms' in archaeological writing, including collectivism, reconstructionism, processualism, post-processualism, contextual-structuralism, neo-evolutionism, obscurantism, polyvocalism, progressivism and dual-processualism. Another favoured habit is to add 'ise' to adjectives or nouns, as in dehistoricise, monumentalise, racialise and normativise. A particularly gratuitous 'isation' is to use operationalise instead of do.

Another habit is adding '-ian' to surnames. Acceptable instances of 'ianisation' include Freudian, and possibly Durkheimian and Levi-Straussian, but surely others such as Hocartian, Gramscian and Weberian are unnecessary. In archaeology, perhaps the works of Lewis Binford are famous enough to warrant Binfordian, but one doubts that he has ever been asked whether he wanted this 'ianism'. Surely it is no benefit, since once 'ianisation' has started, it inevitably multiplies itself, as it has for the work of Louis Althusser (1918-1990), resulting in Althusserian, post-Althusserian, non-Althusserian, Althusserianism and post-Althusserianism. Academic word copying is not necessarily random. In fact, complicated words may be copied at the expense of simpler ones, even to the point of saturation, as in this example from a high-impact anthropology journal in 1985:

'The challenge to Althusserianism usually revolves around a critique of the structuralist concept of social totality in which ideology is viewed as a super-structural instance of the social formation, albeit an instance with its own historicity'.

Translating such a passage is a lot of work, and many readers will not engage in the struggle. A reader pressed for time will generally do two things: glide over the material, intimidated by its impenetrable density and, more to my point, begin to integrate the most incoherent aspects of it into his/her own vocabulary. We can see, for example, how similar language reverberates through this passage, taken from a 2004 archaeology journal:

'I have considerable sympathy for the intentions of both the pluralist commitments of the cosmopolitanists and the "emancipatory" interests of the sectionalists. However, both programmes are ultimately unsatisfying as they hold a greater commitment to depersonalizing and dehistoricizing the subject than to exposing the apparatus that inscribes subjects within a historically created field of difference'.

It is difficult to understand what this passage actually means. An added consequence of this runaway language copying is that the language itself has become the object of study, rather than archaeology. The topics have become cosmopolitanism and sectionalism, with the processes at work argued to be depersonalisation and dehistoricisation. When this happens, the redundancy becomes well hidden. For example, it is actually no surprise that a 'cosmopolitanist' would have 'pluralist' commitments, because cosmopolitan by definition means to consist of many dements from different places. Similarly, it seems that to 'dehistoricise' something must mean to take away its historical context, or, as the author puts it, not to expose 'the apparatus that inscribes subjects within a historically created field of difference'. Hence the passage is practically a tautology, and yet it is completely intimidating at first glance. If my effort to interpret the passage misses its meaning, than that in itself illustrates the point.

Complicated diction and fashionable vocabulary may impress in the short term, but they ensure that, in the long run, the ideas will be forgotten. Even worse, by introducing bogus jargon into our own published writing, we run the risk of spreading these poorly-understood ideas through future generations of publications and research. Orwell's (1946) main concern was that language be used 'as an instrument for expressing and not concealing or preventing thought'. Muddled language not only muddles our current understanding of things, but it also multiplies itself and infects academic thought in the future.

Received: 30 December 2004; Accepted: 25 February 2005; Revised: 13 April 2005

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R. Alexander Bentley, Department of Anthropology, University of Durham, 43 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, England (Email: r.a.bentley@durham.ac.uk)