Commentary

Greer offers an excellent primer on some Black Studies scholars’ critiques of humanism, for which he uses the label ‘counter-humanism’ after Erasmus (2020), distinguishing these approaches from ‘posthumanism.’ He identifies two primary strains of posthumanism relevant to archaeological interpretation, symmetrical archaeology and posthuman feminism, though examples of the latter are drawn from a broader body of academic literature and are subject to less critique. Posthumanists are shown to prioritize dismantling a human–object divide, while counter-humanists critique the human–non-human split. This may appear to be more or less the same project, but the framing of ‘A/not-A’ rather than ‘A–B’ emphasizes the hegemonic relationships between these categories, the continuity within, and makes more explicit the fact that people are included in both the non-human and object categories.