Abstract
This introductory paper explores the emergence and consolidation of a multicultural ethics in archaeology, especially as it relates to a disciplinary accommodation to changing times, thus solidifying its modern outlook.
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Notes
- 1.
Contemporary democracy seeks to protect the rights of the minorities lest they are devoured by those of the majorities; yet, such a protection is mostly fulfilled by granting the disenfranchised access to dominant worldviews but rarely by protecting and respecting differences (ontological and otherwise). As Mario Blaser (2009:883) noted: “In the context of the encounters between diverse social formations and Euro-modernity, which is the historical milieu from which most contemporary claims of modernity arise, ‘modernity’ implied, first and foremost, a language of exclusion and, only then, a promise of inclusion—of course, always demanding that non-moderns reform themselves to be modern.”
- 2.
New undergraduate programs—characterized by their short length (normally no more than 3 years) and their technical emphasis—are being created to mass-produce archaeologists to fulfill the contractual needs arising from capitalist expansions (transport infrastructure and mining are the most salient).
- 3.
See Green et al. (2003) for a different conception of public archaeology.
- 4.
This is known in the West as relativism, widely performed in a power vacuum oblivious of ideologies and hegemonies.
- 5.
A well-known quote from The leopard (Il gattopardo), the novel by Tomassi di Lampedusa, depicts this process well: “Si vogliamo che tutto rimanga com’è, bisogna che tutto cambi” (“If we want that everything remains as it is, everything must change”).
- 6.
Consultation, for instance, is not a panacea in and of itself. When implemented in development projects in which great amounts of money are at stake (and, not surprisingly, transnational corporations are involved), consultation can be a simulation of respect and democracy while only being a formality besieged by corruption and threats. In this regard, it is worth recalling that the cultural project of multiculturalism is to “harness and redirect the abundant political energy of cultural rights activism, rather than directly to oppose it” (Hale 2002:498).
- 7.
Its universal/modern pretenses also shape its postmodern/multicultural morality—the righteous of archaeological knowledge (mostly science-inspired); the benignant character of archaeological stewardship; the Enlightened mission of most activist archaeologies.
- 8.
These “things” are what Bruno Latour (1993) called hybrids, neither fully natural nor fully social entities but socio-natural ones (half object and half subject). Archaeology operates with great numbers of hybrids that are presented as things-in-themselves—machines and artifacts as much as temporal/spatial structuring devices such as phases, types, horizons, and the like. They plague archaeological texts and curricula, yet are simultaneously denied, obliterated.
- 9.
Indeed, as Viveiros de Castro (2004:10) noted “It 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.”
- 10.
The effects of contextualism are far-reaching. It not just posits the separation of academic knowledge and context as absolute and given but it also posits their relationship as merely circumstantial. It is no wonder that contextual preoccupations are additive (and sometimes even dispensable) in academic settings. They are added to knowledge but are not treated as the creative conditions in which it occurs and in which it intervenes. Contextualism gets round the interdependence of context and knowledge.
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Gnecco, C. (2015). An Entanglement of Sorts: Archaeology, Ethics, Praxis, Multiculturalism. 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_1
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