Blackwell Reference Online

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To begin to understand Foucault's archeology, it is first crucial to know that Foucault was not referring to archeology as an academic discipline or to any popular picture of an archeologist. Indeed, thinking of Foucault's archeology as having anything to do with digging in the earth for ancient artifacts is not useful at all. As Foucault (1972) says, The Archaeology of Knowledge “does not relate to geological excavation.” For the most part, these allusions will only get in the way of building an understanding of his archeological method. The archeologies are his most difficult methodologies to understand and, as a separate, second issue, his most difficult to apply. For example, Scheurich supposedly developed a “policy archeology” as a method for addressing public policy issues, but it fails as a Foucaultian archeology. The reason for this is it uses some archeological concepts, but Foucault's archeology is a complex, tightly interwoven methodology that directly depends on such concepts as savoir , connaissance , positivity, enunciations, statements, archive, discursive formation, enunciative regularities, correlative spaces, enveloping theory, level, limit, periodization, division, event, discontinuity, discursive practices, and so on. In other words, the nature of this method is that these constructs cannot be pulled out and deployed separately without fundamentally violating ... log in or subscribe to read full text