Abstract
This chapter argues that historical archaeology has been premised and practiced within the limits of the ontology of modernity; as such, it has promoted change and emancipation from the Western conception of democracy. Its goals can be reframed, however, they can indeed be reformulated, if read from the bottom up, from where the colonial wound still haunts the world. In doing so, historical archaeology would be radically altered: instead of fostering a modern view of society, history, and politics, it would rank with other efforts that seek to reinscribe alterity, this time not as a backward symbolic referent of the self but as a sovereign subject.
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Notes
- 1.
I use bottom-up intentionally to stress hierarchical/colonial arrangements whereby modernity is at the top of a progressive temporalized world order and nonmodern cosmologies (and peoples, etc.) are at the bottom. A bottom-up reading of modernity acknowledges the reality and brutal effect of hierarchies, yet seeks to destabilize them.
- 2.
Mitchell (2000, pp. 1–6) provides a comprehensive review of the challenges to this metropolitan conception of modernity.
- 3.
So vast an anything, indeed, that it freely ranges from the commodity form to ideas, from the most parochial opinion to the most sophisticated scholarship.
- 4.
As Viveiros de Castro (2004, p. 10) noted, equivocation
is not merely a negative facticity but a condition of possibility of anthropological discourse. … The equivocation is not that which impedes the relation, but that which founds and impels it: a difference in perspective. To translate is to presume that an equivocation always exists; it is to communicate by differences, instead of silencing the Other by presuming a univocality—the essential similarity—between what the Other and We are saying.
- 5.
Take the paradigmatic case of ethnoarchaeology, surely the best but not the only example of this move. Ethnoarchaeology is widely promoted as a contact with living peoples but is simply devoted to producing information for the translation of statics (the archaeological record) into dynamics (the operation of cultures). Living peoples are thus treated as moving objects performing their “cultures” for the sake of archaeology. Their life outside disciplinary needs is basically unimportant.
- 6.
“Present research must be a collaborative project between archaeology and local people” (Gosden (2001, p. 258; I added the italics). If this program was uttered over a decade ago and if the epistemic privileges of archaeology have not been challenged but strengthened ever since (thanks, mostly, to the appearance of “alternative” archaeologies), it is easy to see who this “collaborative project” has benefited.
- 7.
- 8.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in late 2010 that her country’s efforts to build a multicultural society had “utterly failed” and attributed the failure to nonintegrated immigrants (see lengthy world press reports on the topic, October 16th). In England conservative politicians attack multiculturalism because it divides and they distinguish “between nationality defined by culture and one defined by political rights” (Wright 2007, p. 134). In Latin America Wade (2006) has shown that the countries’ ethnic minorities (which in some countries, such as Bolivia, are not minorities at all), protected and promoted by the constitutions and the law, still are a problem whose living conditions have worsened since multicultural policies were enacted in the 1990s.
- 9.
The distance between diversity and difference is a characteristic and a symptom of the current organization of society. In fact, the decades that followed the last world war, but especially the last three decades, have witnessed the general abandonment of pejorative and stigmatizing categories (inferior, primitive, and underdeveloped races) and the enlivening of cultural relativism (diverse cultures) that deactivates widebase organizations, deracializes racism (but keeps it intact), and reifies/functionalizes differences (as diversity) to downplay inequalities. As Claudia Briones (2005, p. 22) pointed out “Cultural difference emerges as a quasi-ontological property because social relations that recreate processes of othering are presented and explained unlinked from the organization of capital and from international and national power.” The multicultural idea of diversity wants heterogeneity to be understood as “a mosaic of monochrome identities” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, p. 33), eliminating historical specificities, processes of othering, asymmetries, and power relations.
- 10.
Western academia still holds to the Western canon, leaving no or little space to the voices of the other. In this regard, let me pose a rhetorical question. Are Frantz Fanon or Aimé Césaire, to mention two powerful writers and activists of African ancestry, routinely read and discussed in departments of anthropology and philosophy in the same way and with the same interest and seriousness devoted to, say, Clifford Geertz or Plato?
- 11.
For instance, non-Western origins of modernity do not upset its logic nor a spatial primacy of the West. They simply point to “primeval” movements that were later articulated, developed, and captured, by the center, however defined. Their labeling as premodern indicates their position in a hierarchy, their direction, and their unavoidable march to modernity.
- 12.
“It is this novel myth of immediate presence, of an original material reality, a world prior to and apart from all work of replication, difference, antagonism, meaning, management, or imagination, that defines the peculiar metaphysics of modernity” (Mitchell (2000, p. 19).
- 13.
The disciplinary claim that research procedures have become autonomous by technical means helps to hide that they are linked to a pervasive and powerful cosmology, that of modernity. They are presented as mere technical operations in a cultural vacuum. Thus, the person representing (the archaeologist) is banished from the scene of representation and replaced by machines of all kinds. This is an extraordinary paradox (or, better, a simple mockery): the archaeologist has been supplanted by machines, one of many hybrids created by the concerted work of science!
- 14.
Mestizaje was not a biological fact (the exchange of genes) but an “inclusive and democratic” discursive violence (all are equal in a single unifying race) that cannibalized racial differences. It was not an “inevitable process” but the result of an asymmetric power relationship in which a modern elite (descendant of the criollos) established the terms of the process: the struggle for racial differences should give way to the peaceful, yet controlled and framed, democratic unity of mestizaje.
- 15.
I borrow this concept from Walter Mignolo (2005, p. 8), for whom
[C]oloniality, naturally, was (and still is) ignored or disguised as a necessary injustice in the name of justice. Coloniality names the experiences and views of the world and history of those whom Fanon called ‘les damnés de la terre’ (“the wretched of the earth,” those who have been, and continue to be, subjected to the standards of modernity). The wretched are defined by the colonial wound, and the colonial wound, physically and/or psychologically, is a consequence of racism, the hegemonic discourse that questions the humanity of all those who do not belong to the locus of enunciation (and the geo-politics of knowledge) of those who assign the standards of classification and assign to themselves to right to classify. [Italics in the original]
- 16.
In this regard Gayatri Spivak (1988, pp. 288–289) noted:
Outside (though not completely so) the circuit of the international division of labor, there are people whose consciousness we cannot grasp if we close off benevolence by constructing a homogenous Other referring only to our own place in the seat of the Same or the Self. Here are subsistence farmers, unorganized peasant labor, the tribals and the communities of zero workers on the street or in the countryside. To confront them is not to represent (vertreten) them but to learn to represent (darstellen) ourselves [italics in the original].
- 17.
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Gnecco, C. (2015). Historical Archaeology Bottom-Up: Notes from Colombia. In: Leone, M., Knauf, J. (eds) Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_14
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