Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

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Silencing the past: power and the production of history

'When I was your age,' my father was fond of telling me, 'I used to walk 5 miles through a foot of snow just to go to school.' I was impressed for a while, until I noticed that, as he got older, the distance got longer and the snow got deeper. Eventually, he claimed to have walked 20 miles through 6 feet of snow. I became even more suspicious when I found out from my grandmother that they had lived three blocks from school.

In an age of school buses and car-pooling parents, such stories, whether believable or not, conjure up visions of a world almost beyond the imaginations of today's children. I was reminded of that today by an email from my friend and Brandeis colleague Tom Pochapsky, who directed my attention to a fascinating article on the website of Beloit College (http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2014.php). Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, which provides a look at the cultural background of the students entering college that fall. The creation of Beloit's Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to the Beloit faculty to be aware of dated references. As the website notes, 'it quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation.'

So what's the worldview of the class of 2014? According to the latest list, here are a few of the things these 18-year-olds, born in 1992, have experienced - and not experienced:

• Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

• They find that email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail. They text. Oh, God, do they text.

• To them, Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive film director than as vigilante cop Dirty Harry.

• For them, Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

• They've never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.

• In their world, Czechoslovakia has never existed. There was no Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain is a meaningless phrase, and Russia has never had a Communist government.

• There has never been a world without AIDS.

• The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are classical music.

• Toothpaste tubes have always stood up on their caps.

• There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church.

• Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing good to watch has always been the norm.

• The US public has never approved of the job the US Congress is doing.

• Most of them have never seen a long-playing record, or even a tape drive. If they have ever seen a typewriter, it was in a museum, possibly alongside a dial telephone.

• They have never lived in a world without personal computers, the Internet, CD-ROMs or laser printers.

There are, of course, many things they have experienced that we also experienced at the same age. Among these are automobiles, jet airplanes, color television sets, and the Chicago Cubs not having won the World Series. Another commonality has been the enduring hostility between the English and the French.

But they couldn't imagine life without PopTarts, juice boxes, and movies you can have on your home TV, and they have no idea how we could have survived in a world that required carbon paper.

All of which got me wondering: what would the scientific worldview be like for someone, let's say, just starting graduate school today (and therefore about 22 years of age)? Born in 1988, how would their scientific lives differ from the lives of the generations preceding them (including mine, which is the only one I really care about)? It makes for some interesting speculation:

• For today's budding biologists, DNA fingerprinting would have always existed. Actual fingerprinting would have been a recent invention, used primarily to secure laptop computers.

• Protein crystal structure determination would for them never be anything but a routine tool.

• Molecular biology would never have been a discipline in its own right. Instead, it would always have been a set of techniques, introduced to students in better high schools.

• They cannot imagine a world without kits to make experiments virtually automatic.

• Since the first free-living organism had its genome sequenced when they were 7 years old, they have grown up in the age of genomics. They have had access to the complete sequence of the human genome since they were in middle school.

• They have never attended a lecture given with slides from a carousel projector, and they may not have ever seen one given from overhead transparencies either. PowerPoint has been in use for virtually their entire lives.

• In their lifetime, no one has ever pipetted anything by mouth.

• DNA sequencing, peptide synthesis, chemical analysis, and gene synthesis have always been farmed out to specialty companies rather than done in one's own lab.

• They have almost certainly never seen anyone blow glass. In fact, many of them may not know that test tubes were ever made of anything but plastic.

• They have always had the option of going into the biotechnology industry.

• The term 'enzyme' has always referred to both protein and RNA.

• Evolution has always been under attack, and science and religion have largely been seen as incompatible.

• There have always been 'big science' projects in biology.

• Chemistry has always been a declining field in terms of student interest, and physics has always been the province of a small number of practitioners.

• Believe it or not, they have never known a world without cDNA microarrays.

• For them, 'Xerox' is a verb, Polaroid makes LCD TVs, and every piece of equipment is computer-controlled.

• They have never requested a reprint. They probably don't know what one is.

• They believe that no science was done before 2000. Any science not indexed on PubMed was not done either, even if it was done yesterday.

• They cannot imagine that there once was only a single Cell journal, and just one Nature as well.

I'm sure you could think of lots more. I know I could, but we had 10 feet of snow last night, and that 50-mile walk to school is going to take me a while.

The past is a foreign country.

Missing link

The following bibliography is conceived as a selection of international literature on food as heritage and as a marker of identity within the huge amount of works recently produced on the topic of food. The bibliography has been produced within the “Food as heritage” project, performed at University of Bologna and coordinated by Ilaria Porciani, with a team composed by Massimo Montanari, Paolo Capuzzo, Raffaele Laudani and Marica Tolomelli. “Food as heritage” is part of a wider projec...

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Bibliography “Food as Heritage”

Continental Introduction.- Early Occupations Of South America.- Profiles in Pleistocene History.- Chinchorro Culture: Pioneers of the Coast of the Atacama Desert.- Early Occupations in the Southern Cone.- The Process of Sedentism in Northwestern South America.- Environment And Subsistence.- Central Andean Environments.- Plant Domestication and the Shift to Agriculture in the Andes.- Animal Domestication in South America.- High Elevation Foraging Societies.- Early Fishing Societies in Western South America.- Amazonia: The Historical Ecology of a Domesticated Landscape.- The Archaeology of Agriculture in Ancient Amazonia.- Agricultural Earthworks on the French Guiana Coast.- The Pampas and Campos of South America.- Lowland Moundbuilders.- Pre-Columbian Mound Complexes in the Upano River Valley, Lowland Ecuador.- The Archaeology of the Guianas: An Overview.- Barrancoid and Arauquinoid Mound Builders in Coastal Suriname.- Sambaqui (Shell Mound) Societies of Coastal Brazil.- Continental Variations In Non-State Complexity.- The Nonagricultural Chiefdoms of Marajo Island.- Ecology, Ceramic Chronology and Distribution, Long-term History, and Political Change in the Amazonian Floodplain.- Chiefdoms of Southwestern Colombia.- Late Pre-Hispanic Chiefdoms of Northern Colombia and the Formation of Anthropogenic Landscapes.- The Prehistory of Venezuela - Not Necessarily an Intermediate Area.- The Ecuadorian Formative.- Early Regional Polities of Coastal Ecuador.- Late Pre-Hispanic Polities of Coastal Ecuador.- Late Pre-Hispanic Chiefdoms of Highland Ecuador.- The Formative Period in the Titicaca Basin.- Paracas and Nasca: Regional Cultures on the South Coast of Peru.- Social Landscapes in Pre-Inca Northwestern Argentina.- Demographic And Cultural Expansions.- Early Cultural Complexity on the Coast of Peru.- Andean Urbanism.- The Tupi Expansion.- Life on the Move: Bioarchaeological Contributions to the Study of Migration and Diaspora Communities in the Andes.- Chavin de Huantar and Its Sphere of Influence.- States And Empires Of The Central Andes.- The Mochicas.- Wari and Tiwanaku: International Identities in the Central Andean Middle Horizon.- Between Horizons: Diverse Configurations of Society and Power in the Late Pre-Hispanic Central Andes.- The Chimu Empire.- The Inca Empire.- The Inca Khipu: Knotted-Cord Record Keeping in the Andes.- Experiencing Inca Domination in Northwestern Argentina and the Southern Andes.- Interactions.- Inter-zonal Relationships in Ecuador.- Cultural Boundaries and Crossings: Ecuador and Peru.- Chachapoyas: Cultural Development at an Andean Cloud Forest Crossroads.- The Llanos de Mojos.- Amazonian Mosaics: Identity, Interaction, and Integration in the Tropical Forest.- The Archaeology of Northern Chile.- Interaction and Social Fields in San Pedro de Atacama, Northern Chile.- Death Practices And Beliefs.- Prehistoric Funeral Practices in the Brazilian Amazon: The Maraca Urns.- Ancestor Images in the Andes.- Trophy Head-Taking and Human Sacrifice in Andean South America.- Ethics And Practice In South American Archaeology.- Archaeology, Globalization and the Nation: Appropriating the Past in Ecuador.- Cultural Heritage Management in Peru: Current and Future Challenges.- The Bennett Monolith: Archaeological Patrimony and Cultural Restitution in Bolivia.- Modernity and Politics in Colombian Archaeology.- From the Erasure to the Rewriting of Indigenous Pasts: The Troubled Life of Archaeology in Uruguay.- Public Archaeology and Management of the Brazilian Archaeological-Cultural Heritage.- Conclusion.- Conclusion.

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The Handbook of South American Archaeology

Cultural Heritage and Human Rights.- Connotations, Conflicts, Conundrums, Communities.- Closing Pandora's Box: Human Rights Conundrums in Cultural Heritage Protection.- The Indo-Islamic Garden: Conflict, Conservation, and Conciliation in Gujarat, India.- Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Human Rights in Indonesia: The Challenges of an Emerging Democratic Society.- Transnational Diaspora and Rights of Heritage.- Performing Slave Descent: Cultural Heritage and the Right to Land in Brazil.- Historical Disruptions in Ecuador: Reproducing an Indian Past in Latin America.- Plains Indians and Resistance to "Public" Heritage Commemoration of Their Pasts.- Empty Gestures? Heritage and the Politics of Recognition.- Archeology as Activism.- Genes and Burkas: Predicaments of Human Rights and Cultural Property.

Cultural Heritage and Human Rights

Peru offers important perspectives for understanding the presence of the past, particularly as expressed on various landscapes of national and local identity, social and political power, and economic development. As Peru's archaeological past is converted into a vast tourist project, contradictory, negotiated, and contested relationships are played out in a constantly changing drama, with ruins, indigenous people, ordinary city residents, foreign tourists, the Peruvian government, and the private sector as the actors. Concerned with how representations of the past are created and received differently by various groups in Peru, particularly in Cusco and Nazca, I show the importance of concentrating attention on the local context in which the pragmatics and poetics of archaeological tourism are orchestrated, demonstrating the insufficiency of studies focused exclusively on the role of nationalism/nationalist discourse in contemporary constructions of the past. [Keywords: Peru, tourism, authenticity, archaeological heritage, identity]

Touring Ancient Times: The Present and Presented Past in Contemporary Peru

1 Contested Cultural Heritage: A Selective Historiography, Helaine Silverman.- 2 The Stratigraphy of Forgetting: The Great Mosque of Cordoba and Its Contested Legacy, D. Fairchild Ruggles.- 3 Aestheticized Geographies of Conflict: The Politicization of Culture and the Culture of Politics in Belfast's Mural Tradition, Alexandra Hartnett.- 4 Blood of Our Ancestors: Cultural Heritage Management in the Balkans, Michael L. Galaty.- 5 Re-imagining the National Past: Negotiating the Roles of Science, Religion, and History in Contemporary British Ghost Tourism, Michele M. Hanks.- 6 Collecting and Repatriating Egypt's Past: Toward a New Nationalism, Salima Ikram.- 7 National Identity Interrupted: The Mutilation of the Parthenon Marbles and the Greek Claim for Repatriation, Vasiliki Kynourgioupoulou.- 8 Syrian National Museums: Regional Politics and the Imagined Community, Kari A. Zobler.- 9 Contestation from the Top: Fascism in the Realm of Culture and Italy's Conception of the Past, Alvaro Higueras.- 10 Touring the Slave Route: Inaccurate Authenticities in Benin, West Africa, Timothy R. Landry.- 11 Carving the Nation: Zimbabwean Sculptors and the Contested Heritage of Aesthetics, Lance L. Larkin.- Afterword, El Pilar and Maya Cultural Heritage: Reflections of a Cheerful Pessimist, Anabel Ford.

Contested cultural heritage: Religion, nationalism, erasure, and exclusion in a global world

From Tangible to Intangible Heritage.- The Heritage of Kunqu: Preserving Music and Theater Traditions in China.- Partition Memories: The Hidden Healer.- Gardens and Landscapes: At the Hinge of Tangible and Intangible Heritage.- Preserving the Cultural Landscape Heritage of Champaner-Pavagadh, Gujarat, India.- Governance and Conservation of the Rapaz Khipu Patrimony.- Geographies of Memory and Identity in Oceania.- Combating Attempts of Elision: African American Accomplishments at New Philadelphia, Illinois.- Folk Epigraphy at the World Trade Center, Oklahoma City, and Beyond.- Problematizing Technologies for Documenting Intangible Culture: Some Positive and Negative Consequences.

Helaine Silverman

Papers

The Handbook of South American Archaeology

Cultural Heritage and Human Rights

Touring Ancient Times: The Present and Presented Past in Contemporary Peru

Contested cultural heritage: Religion, nationalism, erasure, and exclusion in a global world

Intangible heritage embodied