Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 2004. New York. Penguin Books. 448 pages. ISBN: 0143035592 (paper).

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Algorithmic recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary cultural life online, suggesting music, movies, and other materials to their users. This article, drawing on fieldwork with ...

Captivating algorithms: Recommender systems as traps:

1. Demolishing the museum of sensory ab/sense 2. Archaeology, modernity, and the senses 3. Recapturing sensorial and affective experience 4. Senses, materiality, time: a new ontology 5. Sensorial necro-politics: the mortuary mnemoscapes of Bronze Age Crete 6. Why 'palaces'? Senses, memory, and the 'palatial' phenomenon in Bronze Age Crete 7. From corporeality to sensoriality, from things to flows.

Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect

Bruno Latour and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro provided the initial impetus for explicitly ontological research in archaeology. Their impact on archaeologists, however, has been quite different. What I call the “metaphysical archaeologists” trace their genealogy from Latour, though they are now equally influenced by “new materialism” and the “new ontological realism” (Gabriel 2015). They have introduced an alternative metaphysical orthodoxy to archaeology. In contrast, Viveiros de Castro and colleagues have authorized the return of the grand ethnographic analogy to archaeology, particularly in the case of animism. A second, quite different tendency inspired by these same anthropologists is to engage with indigenous ideas as theories to reconfigure archaeological concepts and practice. I suggest that a point of convergence between the metaphysical and the latter anthropological approaches exists in their focus on the concept of alterity.

Archaeologies of Ontology

Researchers have increasingly promoted an emerging paradigm of Indigenous archaeology, which includes an array of practices conducted by, for, and with Indigenous communities to challenge the discipline's intellectual breadth and political economy. McGhee (2008) argues that Indigenous archaeology is not viable because it depends upon the essentialist concept of “Aboriginalism.” In this reply, we correct McGhee's description of Indigenous Archaeology and demonstrate why Indigenous rights are not founded on essentialist imaginings. Rather, the legacies of colonialism, sociopolitical context of scientific inquiry, and insights of traditional knowledge provide a strong foundation for collaborative and community-based archaeology projects that include Indigenous peoples.

The Premise and Promise of Indigenous Archaeology

Both present academic theories and local native peoples' beliefs and practices are the result of complex colonial histories, and sometimes even evolved in curious interactions. Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that scientific and local native theories are usually on opposite sides of the colonial border. In this article I explore the colonial and decolonizing potential of the ‘animistic turn’ in archaeology, focusing on my own trajectory of research. Following Latin American post-colonial writers on ‘border thinking’ (thinking from the border instead of about it), my account here can be described, in short, as a move from research on animism to research from animism.

Animism, Relatedness, Life: Post-Western Perspectives

The year 2011 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the World Archaeological Congress (WAC). WAC marked a bold intervention in the politics of knowledge in archaeology in the context of the mid-1980s. But how has it fared in contemporary worlds of practice? In this paper, two senior WAC members take a close and critical look at the changing fortunes, meanings, and contexts of the organization. At its centre, is an account of the controversial meeting between the WAC Executive and Rio Tinto Limited, the mining multinational, in Melbourne in 2007. Other parts of the paper engage with notions of the Indigenous, and discuss the assumptions informing the WAC programme Archaeologists Without Borders. Framed as a challenge, the paper invites response and commentary, as a way of opening debate which allows us to envisage alternative futures for the discipline, beyond the banal prospect of 'Archaeology Inc.'.

What's up with WAC? Archaeology and 'Engagement' in a Globalized World

We can think of a kind of archaeological colonialism in terms of the exportation of metropolitan theories and/or methodologies to peripheral countries/regions, or in the way metropolitan academic institutions/archaeologists conduct archaeology in peripheral countries/regions But even if we manage to stop those kinds of colonial bonds, archaeology would remain being an imperial weapon And, moreover, it can be said that colonialism is not dependant on the overseas provenance of archaeologies and/or theories Beyond theoretical and methodological variability, it is archaeology itself what happens to recapitulate colonialist relationships; and this seems to happen even when archaeology is openly and deliberately oriented towards indigenous peoples’ empowerment, social justice, and peace It seems that theoretical and methodological paradigms and political intentions operate at a surface level, while colonialism is equipped with stronger streams operating below the floor where archaeologists stand What is there below our feet, making us move in one direction even when we walk in the other? Neither being the theories, neither the methods, nor the political intentions and nationality, what is that hidden force that govern the sense of archaeology in the contemporary post-colonial world? My argument is that the hidden force it is not hidden at all, but remains unseen because it is too obvious The disciplinary framework of archaeology itself -that is, its basic subject matter and method—beyond the theoretical and methodological paradigms and the political orientation in which we aim to proceed, or our nationality or whatever, recapitulates coloniality Without implying that theoretical and methodological debate within archaeological discipline is in vain, I dedicate this piece to write not within, but about the discipline In short, this will include talking about disciplining, its recapitulation in post-disciplinary contexts, and the implied proposal of un-disciplining archaeology

Un-Disciplining Archaeology

Decolonizing archaeological thought in South America happens through three paths: (a) a critical approach to the ways archaeology contributes to coloniality, (b) a criticism of the mechanisms by which coloniality informs archaeology, and (c) a varied exposure of archaeology to subaltern (that is, non-hegemonic and counter-hegemonic) knowledge. These three paths are sometimes taken together and sometimes alone, and the diverse pieces of thought reviewed herein provide examples of each. South America as a locus for the enunciation of archaeological theory opens the epistemic range of the discipline to include indigenous and African-descendant communities' theories of history and materiality. Ongoing research prefigures future trends in decolonizing archaeological thought around issues of land, memory, and knowledge.

Decolonizing Archaeological Thought in South America

‘Indigenous’ is a colonial category, and it is always related to particular colonial configurations of diversity and in relationship to particular colonial/national states. In this paper, the many historical configurations in which the terms ‘Indian’ and ‘Indigenous’ have figured are traced, including the Spanish colonial state and the Argentine state. The ways in which these successive systems of categorization are juxtaposed is described. Finally, post-Western understandings of what it could mean ‘to be Indigenous’ are explored.

Alejandro F. Haber

Papers

Animism, Relatedness, Life: Post-Western Perspectives

What's up with WAC? Archaeology and 'Engagement' in a Globalized World

Un-Disciplining Archaeology

Decolonizing Archaeological Thought in South America

This is Not an Answer to the Question “Who is Indigenous?”