Abstract
Focusing on the place known in the Palikur language as “Ivegepket” or “Lookout Point” in Amapá, Brazil, this paper considers the ethics of the choice not to excavate on a cosmologically significant sambaqui, during a public archaeology project in the Uaçá Indigenous Area in 2000–2001. It argues that the ethical choice not to excavate at that time offered the opportunity to develop a different kind of archaeology: not the kind that maps objects in space and time, but one that engages the ways in which different intellectual heritages counter the ontological assumptions of modernity that the world can be known by mapping objects in space and time. The article traces the ways in which calling the shells waramwi-giyubi (the sacred anaconda’s garbage) or a sambaqui (shell mound), speak to different concerns, and different rationales for having knowledge of the world. The chapter proposes that the challenge is to move beyond matching perspectives, theirs to ours, in relation to the material record, and instead points to the value of the challenge to engage multiple ways of accounting for “the real”. Such a project involves not only an archaeology of nature (materials) nor of cultural anthropology as such (with its focus on the world of mythology and ideas), but an archaeology of the ecologies of knowledge and knowing; an archaeology of intellectual heritages, their interactions, and their value in grasping multiple ways of seeing and knowing the material record.
This article is dedicated to the memory of Ivanildo Gomes, Palikur school principal, field guide, and challenger-in-chief to intellectual charity in any form, who passed away in tragic circumstances in August 2012. Much of my thinking here is informed by the memory of dialogues that were so difficult for both of us. Research was supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the South African National Research Foundation, the World Archaeological Congress and the University of Cape Town. I thank David Green for facilitating the fieldwork and translating the stories included here
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of tolerance and multiculturalism see Stengers (2011).
- 2.
In the context of a very different argument to mine, Meera Nanda (2003) calls this “epistemic charity.”
- 3.
For a full version of the story of Waramwi with an extended discussion see Dos Santos et al. (2013).
- 4.
- 5.
The Waramwi story cited here is excerpted from Dos Santos et al. (2013). Translation from the Palikur into English by David Green.
- 6.
The phrase is from Willerslev (2007).
- 7.
The argument about intellectual heritage that I am exploring here also calls into question the categories “indigenous” and “scholarship” themselves as concepts that come to have meaning, are enacted and historically generated.
- 8.
For a lucid exposition see Lien and Law (2011).
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Green, L. (2015). Archaeologies of Intellectual Heritage?. In: Gnecco, C., Lippert, D. (eds) Ethics and Archaeological Praxis. Ethical Archaeologies: The Politics of Social Justice, vol 1. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1646-7_14
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