The Social and Political Sculpting of Archaeology (and Vice Versa)
01 Jan 2017-Vol. 48, Iss: 1, pp 7-44
TL;DR: This article defined contemporary archaeology as "the study of human behaviour, past and present, through the analysis of material culture, both real and virtual, as situated within cultural landscapes".
Abstract: This article reflects on how archaeology globally has been sculpted by its social and political uses and how archaeology it self has shaped the various worlds in which it is situated. The thematic areas that are analysed are decolonising archaeology; community and engaged archaeology; archaeology for social justice; archaeology of the contemporary past; film, television and serious games; the internet and social media; and monuments as commemoration and heritage erasure. Drawing these analyses together, this paper offers a new definition of contemporary archaeology as ‘the study of human behaviour, past and present, through the analysis of material culture, both real and virtual,as situated within cultural landscapes’.
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TL;DR: Kohl and Fawcett as discussed by the authors discuss nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology in their book Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology, 1995.
Abstract: Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology. Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett. eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 329 pp.
45 citations
01 Jan 2012
TL;DR: Foster and Nettelbeck's Out of the Silence: The History and Memory of South Australia's Frontier Wars as mentioned in this paper explores the relationship between families and the Aboriginal inhabitants of their regions.
Abstract: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence: The History and Memory of South Australia's Frontier Wars, Kent Town, Wakefield Press, 2012. Reviewed by Stephanie James.As a descendant of Irish immigrants reading Out of the Silence: The History and Memory of South Australia's Frontier Wars, led me to reflect on relationships between these families and the Aboriginal inhabitants of their regions. A locally produced 1988 publication states that in 1879 when my Wicklow forbear died in the South East, 'Small groups of aborigines (sic) followed [the cortege], and many stood along the way because they sincerely mourned the man, who had always been a good friend to them. It is reported that they were inconsolable for days.'1 But in the fairly extensive family records of the Clare Valley family, the silence in relation to any surviving Aboriginal residents or to interaction is deafening. Inheriting this mixed record of knowledge and understanding about the role played by previous generations towards Aboriginal peoples, places me and those of my era, interested in making sense of family history and the past, in potentially uncomfortable positions. A local history of the Clare Valley, written in the 1970s, refers to 'the natives (sic) becoming 'troublesome" by 1841, but that '[i]n time [they] were brought under control.' No mention was made of 'control' measures, but Noye reports that 'it was stated that the white settlers 'always went about well armed''.2 So what had happened by 1862? Does the absence of Aboriginal people sanction relief that forbears were not involved in violence? Or does absence implicate the earlier generations in the very act of dispossession - they could only acquire their land because the Ngadjuri people had been driven away?3The title of Foster and Nettelbeck's book deliberately resonates with WEH Stanner's powerful 1968 characterisation of 'the great Australian silence' to describe this nation's capacity to obliterate memory, mention or marking of its Aboriginal past or present. In presenting a detailed and accessible account of both the actual record of frontier violence between 1840 and 1878, and the ways it has been documented over time, the authors present contemporary South Australians, ordinary citizens and those in positions of power, with a series of discomforting challenges.The book has a two part structure, the first part titled 'The war between the races.' Here the seven chapters detail the chronology of violent episodes as Europeans strengthened their occupation of the colony in the nineteenth century. Alongside the narrative, the playing out of the complex legal, administrative and operational issues about what constituted British citizenship and protection, and how anomalies were resolved (or ignored), about how the legal system responded to known crimes where suspects or witnesses vanished, where witnesses were subject to equal compulsion with suspects, and where the declaration of martial law ensured that legalities were bypassed. Some of the violent incidents are widely known - the Maria Massacre of 1839, the Rufus River events of 1841 and perhaps those of the Port Lincoln region in the 1840s - but many others are acknowledged only within their region. The 1841 introduction of the Mounted Police to the troubled Port Lincoln area (after a brief military intervention), led to some protection for settlers, but expectations that the latter would also use their firearms when necessary against Aboriginals, underlined the fact that all three groups were combatants in frontier wars.' (p.120). That the colony had Native Police will possibly surprise many readers who may be cognisant of the violent reputation of such groups in Far North Queensland, but ignorant of South Australian versions operating firstly during the early 1850s, and then on the Central Australian Frontier from the mid 1880s. This final policing episode, according to the authors, shows 'it was only possible to fulfil the rule of law when Aboriginal resistance had been effectively suppressed, and Aboriginal people themselves effectively subjugated. …
10 citations
TL;DR: In the last decades, significant urban transformations in Rio de Janeiro led to rapid structural changes in the historic core of the city and the favelas The following population removals, evi
Abstract: During the last decades, significant urban transformations in Rio de Janeiro led to rapid structural changes in the historic core of the city and the favelas The following population removals, evi
9 citations
References
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a reflexion teorico conceptual sobre paz and violencia in el contexto de la perspectiva critica de los Estudios para la Paz (Peace Studies).
Abstract: En su trayectoria como campo cientifico, la Peace Research o Investigacion para la Paz reconoce que definir “paz” es, de hecho, una parte fundamental de una estrategia cientifica. En ese contexto, se ha dedicado a conceptualizar paz de forma amplia, dialogica y compleja, tal como diverso y complejo es el mundo. Del mismo modo, definir violencia se convierte en una labor igualmente compleja, una vez que mas importante que llegar a una definicion o a tipologias, -pues hay, evidentemente, muchos tipos de violencia- indicar dimensiones teoricamente significativas de violencia es efectivamente lo fundamental, una vez que nos puede llevar a pensar, investigar y, potencialmente, actuar ante los problemas mas graves de la humanidad. Si la peace action debe ser considerada porque es una accion contra la violencia, el mismo concepto de violencia debe ser lo suficientemente amplio para incluir las variedades mas significativas y, ademas, tambien debe ser lo suficientemente especifico para servir de base para una accion concreta. En esa perspectiva, este articulo pretende presentar una reflexion teorico conceptual sobre paz y violencia en el contexto de la perspectiva critica de los Estudios para la Paz (Peace Studies).
4,890 citations
TL;DR: For instance, the Dictionnaire de la langue francaise in 1876 was, "On ne sait de quel genre il est, s'il est mile ou femelle, se dit d'un homnme tres-cache, dont on ne connait pas les sentiments" as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: TH1OSE WHO WOULD CODIFY THE MEANINGS OF WORDS fight a losing battle, for words, like the ideas and things they are mneant to signify, have a history. Neither Oxford dons nor the Academie FranUaise have been entirely able to stem the tide, to capture and fix mneanings free of the play of huinan invention and imagination. Mary Wortley Montagu added bite to her witty denunciation "of the fair sex" ("my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance of never being mnarried to any one among them") by deliberately misusing the grammatical reference. ' Through the ages, people have made figurative allusions by employing gramnmnatical termns to evoke traits of character or sexuality. For example, the usage offered by the Dictionnaire de la langue francaise in 1876 was, "On ne sait de quel genre il est, s'il est mile ou femelle, se dit d'un homnme tres-cache, dont on ne connait pas les sentiments."2 And Gladstone made this distinction in 1878: "Athene has nothing of sex except the gender, nothing of the woman except the form."3 Most recently-too recently to find its way into dictionaries or the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences-feminists have in a imore literal and serious vein begun to use "gender" as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes. The connection to grammar is both explicit and full of unexamined possibilities. Explicit because the grammatical usage involves formal
2,883 citations
"The Social and Political Sculpting ..." refers background in this paper
...…1992; Nelson et al., 1994), the absence of women in archaeological explanations of the past (Conkey and Spector, 1984; Gero and Conkey, 1991; Scott, 1986; Balme and Beck, 1993; Claassen, 1994; Nelson, 1994), ideology and unmasking relations of domination (Trigger, 1980; Bapty and Yates,…...
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors define the "exercise du pouvoir dans les etats africains depuis l'lndependance" as "a ete marque par un penchant for les ceremonies and par un esprit d'apparat plus surprenant quand le caractere and combien illusoire sont des grands travaux realises par ces etats".
Abstract: L'exercise du pouvoir dans les etats africains depuis l'lndependance—generalisee ici sous le terme de “post-colonisation”—a ete marque par un penchant pour les ceremonies et par un esprit d'apparat plus surprenant quand Ton considere le caractere et combien illusoire sont des grands travaux realises par ces etats. De plus, le pouvoir est applique a un degre de violence et de pure exploitation dont l'on trouve les antecedents dans les precedents resgimes coloniaux. Le peuple reagit par la voie de l'indecence qui s'exprime dans des festivites obscenes. La question generate est de comprendre la raison pour laquelle ce pouvoir, en depit de ses limites evidentes, a semble-t-il autant de portee. Et plus precisement, pourquoi la population joue-t-elle apparemment le jeu de son gouvernement? Comment peut-elle a la fois se moquer des simagrees de ses gouvernants et toutefois prendre part a leur celebration? L'argumentation soutenue ici, d'apres les faits tires principalement du Cameroon et du Togo, explique que, si l'on centre l'analyse sur les precedes detailles et les rituels de cette concertation, il devient clair qu'il se produit une intimite, un lien presque familial, dans la relation entre gouvernants et gouvernes, ce qui desarme emcacement les deux camps et met le jeu du pouvoir en representation.
594 citations
TL;DR: The history and memory industry has been a hot topic in the last few decades as discussed by the authors, with a renewed interest in memorization as an object of study in the field of history and history.
Abstract: WELCOME TO THE MEMORY INDUSTRY. In the grand scheme ofthings, the memory industry ranges from the museum trade to the legal battles over repressed memory and on to the market for academic books and articles that invoke memory as key word. Our scholarly fascination with things memorable is quite new. As Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins have noted, "collective memory" emerged as an object of scholarly inquiry only in the early twentieth century, contemporaneous with the so-called crisis of historicism. Hugo von Hofmannsthal used the phrase "collective memory" in 1902, and in 1925 Maurice Halbwachs's The Social Frameworks of Memory argued, against Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, that memory is a specifically social phenomenon. But outside of experimental psychology and clinical psychoanalysis, few academics paid much attention to memory until the great swell of popular interest in autobiographical literature, family genealogy, and museums that marked the seventies. 1 The scholarly boom began in the 1980s with two literary events: Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor: jewish History and jewish Memory (1982) and Pierre Nora's "Between Memory and History," the introduction to an anthology, Lieux de me'moire (1984). Each of these texts identified memory as a primitive or sacred form opposed to modern historical consciousness. For Yerushalmi, the Jews were the archetypal people of memory who had adopted history only recently and then only in part, for "modern Jewish historiography can never replace an eroded group memory." For Nora, memory was an archaic mode of being that had been devastated by rationalization: "We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left." Despite or perhaps because of their elegiac tone and accounts of memory as antihistorical discourse, these works found an amazing popularity and were quickly joined by others. In 1989 the translation of Nora's influential essay in a special issue of this journal and the founding of History and Memory, based in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, showed the crystallization of a self-conscious memory discourse. A decade later the scholarly literature brims with such titles as "Sites of Memory" or "Cultural Memory" or "The Politics of Memory. "2 The emergence of memory as a key word marks a dramatic change in linguistic practice. We might be tempted to imagine the increasing use of memor as the natural result of an increased scholarly interest in the ways that popular and folk cultures
559 citations
"The Social and Political Sculpting ..." refers background in this paper
...As Klein (2000: 131) states, these statues were ‘not just a mnemonic device to help individuals remember, but memory itself’ (Klein, 2000: 131)....
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