Making Sense of the Material Past

Making Sense of the Material Past

Past, present and future are three different and interconnected modes of being. We call “past” everything that seems to have vanished but may be partly “conserved” in our (individual or collective) memory. “Material past” would apply to all the objects that make our environment. Traditionally, archaeological objects (in their diversified scales, from the entire landscape to the small fragment of an artefact) were necessarily old, obsolete ones: things out of use, eventually enigmatic by nature, to be deciphered and conserved in museums. But we may also look at the entire material reality as an archaeological one, embedded in temporality. How do we make sense of this proliferation of past references? If modernity has implied the emergence of an elitist archaeology, late modernity, connected to mass tourism, would demand a “popular archaeology”. But it risks to be a commodity as any other form of knowledge, turned into “information”, an object of gaze for a “fast past” consumption. How can we try to invert this state of affairs (the industrialization of the world as a “museum”, as an mystified “heritage”), in order to build a new sense of community? My entire work always intended to be open to different suggestions, instead of giving an “impossible” response.

voj

An interesting debate in the WAC list...about the conference: "Constellations of objects: interactive material worlds" ... and my contribution

On 09/12/28 0:44, "Eleanor Crosby" wrote:

Linda Hulin wrote:
Call for papers for the conference: Constellations of objects: interactive material worlds
to be held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 5th June 2010.

I like the idea of this conference (...)
BUT, why are the organisers introducing aesthetics into archaeology?
The very concept is western and acultural (or rather mono cultural).
Have the organisers considered Practice Theory (which I've recently encountered)? The very example that drove Bourdieu to develop Practice Theory is indeed art studies. In his view aesthetics studies objects from a purely western (art historian's) cultural perspective - and he points out that such a view is totally opposed to the anthropologist's approach of attempting to understand the 'mechanics' of another culture in a manner that the studied culture would/could agree with. To my way of thinking all archaeologists owe an anthropologist's duty to the people of the past to primarily consider the remains of the past culture as far as possible in terms which that originating culture might have been able to understand/recognise.

It is in these terms that I have been pondering archaeological classification, particularly the limitations posed by its reduction to 'material culture' (for a criticism see Taylor 1967) rather than as the products of a cultural system called technology.

Does anyone else find this introduction of aesthetics disturbing?

Regards,

Eleanor
Dr Eleanor Crosby
Consulting Archaeologist
Turnix Pty Ltd
21 Castle Hill Drive South
GAVEN QLD 4211
AUSTRALIA


And my contribution:

Of course, what you say seems obvious. But as we do not have God’s eyes, every approach is always from a particular standpoint.
But it seems to me that you are too searching for an origin, an archè, a primordial truth.
I think that there is not such a primordial truth. This is just another error...
We should assume the fact that every knowledge is a perspective, there is no way of overlapping a researcher’s point of view with a point of view of the other, that perfect harmony is a myth, and it is a myth of the dominator, the anthropologist/archaeologist that would understand the other, making the other transparent.
Every knowledge is political, and Bourdieu knew that too.
That said, a remark: the book “Overcoming the Modern Invention of Material Culture” , edited by me and Julian Thomas (Porto, ADECAP – a non profit association – see http://adecap.blogspot.com/ ) and obtainable through Portico Librerías, Spain: Portico <portico@porticolibrerias.es> -could be of interest. It contains several texts, including a Tim Ingold’s finale...
Best wishes
Vitor Oliveira Jorge


Also about this, see:
"Aesthetics as a cross-culture theory" in Tim Ingold's ed., "Key Debates in Anthropology", London, Routledge, 2006. A fundamental book.

the archaeological excavation

Most people don't have the slightest idea of what an archaeological excavation is about. Among all open air scientific activities, it is the one that concentrates more intensively in one parcel of the territory. It is a detailed reading and recording of the soil, not to unveil a truth, but to put in practice a very particular physical and intellectual mode of reading.

For those interested: hundreds of photos in my facebook entry :

http://www.facebook.com/people/Vitor-Manuel-Oliveira-Jorge/1731452550

light

Poetry is light.

We can not photograph the face of the light, nor its heart.

Only its side effects, its shadows.

As we can never write the last poem.

Poetry is love by the sea, at home, at the heart of love.

That shining little thing. That ineluctable gaze.

It perforates our void.

What did you say? I could not listen due to the breeze.

We are tied by our void. Perforated by the same light.

From: FACEBOOK

POESIA DE VÍTOR OLIVEIRA JORGE

cells and open spaces: two scenes, two glimpses

ACT 1

Babel's scene

The academic system inserts us into boxes or niches, like prison cells, where we keep occupied all the time in develloping things according to a specific code in a particular field. This code builds up the walls of the cell. Inside the cell, like astronauts inside their capsules, one feels at home; sometimes one even thinks that he or she is very important, being aplauded by the other occupants. Outside the cell is the dangerous, undefined, unlimited unknown. Some people live in a cell all their lifes, looking prudently through small holes to the dangerous outside just in order to confirm the well-being of the cell. Cells of the same group communicate and exchange information, to reinforce the identity of the codified field, of the shared horizon.

The under-humanity thus confined has rituals and entertainments, of course. One is the entrance ritual; another is the issue one, when a member is too old or dyes. Then the cell opens an excremental way to get rid of it, leaving it to the silence and solitude of the outer space where it disappears.

The same sometimes occurs with those who disobey the rules beyond a certain limit. The are automatically expelled.

ACT 2

Centuries later

Boxes, cells, compartments, are curiosities of the past. Each one contains the memories of those who lived and died there. They are museums.

Life, research, innovation is outside, in the fluid outer space organized according to an universal management system. Everybody is free and each one makes its own path in the empty, ethereal space. People navigates constantly and make and unmake relationships and plans. They are programmers, and each one is provided with a translation system in order to transplant ideas from mind to mind, and to reconvert endlessly these ideas into new ideas or prospects. Time and space are abstract and particular to each project; they normally evolve at a enormous speed. People may migrate from one project to another. Everything is smooth and clean. Those who live in this motion picture flow.

My facebook account...

... was disabled, I do not know why.
I am waiting for an answer of the facebook's team.
If any of my friends there would like to contact me, as long as the problem is not fixed, please do it here, or to my e-mail. Thanks.

I HAVE A NEW ACCOUNT IN FACEBOOK. PLEASE JOIN ME THERE. THANKS !

Neo-Druids, local peoples's rights, archaeology, past-present continuity/discontinuity, etc.

A propos of a current discussion about these topics in the WAC list, this is my point of view:
-Groups like neo-Druids are interesting to study from a sociological and cultural/social anthropological point of view, as symptoms of contemporary society.
-There is NO CONTINUITY between our prehistoric or proto-historic past and our present in Europe, and that discontinuity makes all the interest of the study of those remote pasts – it is precisely their difference that makes them interesting.
- all those myths come basically from the XIX century and should be overcome today: but we know what is the dynamics of mass culture in our society – the fabrication/consuming of “fast pasts” as fast food for most people that seem to like that. This is also connected to modern tribalism, the need people have to identify with something, some niche available in the market – the commodification of identity in an epoch of fluidity.
- the situation is completely different in countries where there are descendants of people that lived there and were the victims of European expansion. In these cases archaeology, as a Western invented practice, must be negotiated case per case with local populations in (as much as possible) a fair and equal basis. Maybe many communities accept that the best way to pay respect to their ancestors is precisely to study them and to put them into an “exhibitionary complex” (T. Bennet) that is intrinsic to our modern globalized society.
- This is the interesting point of all this: archaeology does not proceed in the vacuum, it is a politic, engaged activity even when it says that science has nothing to do with politics. That a-politicization is of course political.
- a dead body is not like an empty banana skin (comparison made by one of the contributors to the discussion) in any known human society. Because we are not isolated as individuals, we belong to a society where we were born, a dead body (and its place of deposition) is very important as the focus of the mourning work for those who survive to us.
- I am an agnostic too, and I do not believe in transcendental entities, including a soul that would remain after my death. That for me is simply too infantile to be true. But I respect the memory of others to whom my death may be painful (I admit) and that need my dead body, as long as it remains, or any other symbol of me (a photo, a place etc), as a reference for their mourning.

the intermediation of machines

We all know well that we are living in a society of intermediation of machines. And we humans we are becoming remainders... We make a phone call and we hear a message. This message gives us clues as to go to the net and solving there the problem. Then we need a password, etc. Then you get an answer. No reply. Etc. This is only the beginning of a new era, the famous post-human one. The internet as a universal GOD, a provider of well being.
One day machines will inhabit the earth dealing with each other! I do not know what kind of advertising will be used for them to seduce others... probably still an anthropomorphic form and a voice of a former Hollywood star, miming the time of emotions?
Jobs in this world?! We do not need jobs, we need functions. And machines are much better in that. We need statistics, producing results to be shown in huge screens. The world is a huge screen and machines (more or less similar to humans, but do not get mistaken) are attending huge concerts to have metallic emotions. Marvellous. Wonderland.

To cut

For me, the inspiration of the richest modern critical thought comes from authors like Nietzsche that have proceeded to a systematic deconstruction of many of the Enlightenment dogmas.
The Enlightenment ideals were intrinsically paradoxical: in their desire of universality, in their cult of reason, in their obsession for Order, abstraction and totality, they have inherited some of the characteristics of former oppressive regimes of power and thought; therefore, they have open the way to all modern forms of fascism, from the public to the private life of humans.
That fascism, so to speak, started to be the domination of the absolute State, and later become the domination of the Market. It left us with no other values than spectacle, success, competition and ultimately money.
Archaeology is part and parcel of this “transparent” society where everything shall come to light, everything shall emerge from the inside to be exposed and become the commodified object of our contemplation. This regime of “truth” and “transparency” is the pornographic regime of the image striped of all its impurities, where everything may be dissected and watched, cleared from any inquietude.
Thus, to rethink the modern context in which archaeology has emerged is necessarily a political project, a project of putting aside every trial to tell a definitive narrative of the origins and development of mankind, and to try to excavate and expose not the past, not the origins, not the process of development, but the very foundations of this insane drive for the quest of origins, of fundaments, that aim at recuperating a theology, but this time based on human reason by opposition to the logic of Creation, to the Order of God.
When a critical archaeology will emerge, the fundaments of the present state of affairs will also enter into ruin, sooner of later. In that sense, archaeology may contribute to a real knowledge oriented by one goal: the overcoming of the ideology that supports the obscene state of affairs that is impoverishing the world and conducting life on earth to a point of disaster, with generalized violence and the absence of a universal law that may control and contain the system that promotes a continuous escape to common interest and well being.
Archaeology must be in that movement, in that quest for a way of cutting this spiral, or else it is just one of the entertainment industries that helps, by the cult of the (imaginary) past, to reinforce an indecent present.


“(…) Le savoir n’ est pas fait pour comprendre, il est fait pour trancher.”
M. Foucault apropos of Nietzsche, in “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’ histoire”, Dits et Écrits, vol. I, Paris, Galimard, col. Quarto, 2008, p. 1016.
[“knowledge is not made to understand, it is made to cut.”]

Desire

Maybe I am wrong, or simplistic, but this concept - desire - underpins all modern consciousness, all modern philosophy. It is a crucial discovery of the psychoanalytical inspiration, initiated by Freud.

That, together with the awareness that ultimately there are no fundaments for identity, be it individual or collective, that there is no transcendent reality or supernatural reality, or any kind of unity in which to settle any certitude, is strategical to understand what means to live in contemporaneity.

We are left with this noble condition of having no protective roof, no father. We are all homeless.

Many people does not know that. They keep accomplishing rituals in order to maintain tradition, in order to rescue some anchor that keeps them attached to ground.

One day they will learn to fly, to enter deep into the desert, to penetrate into dangerous waters where the dead live for ever. To shake hands with their sprectres. And to feel good. The happiness of solitude.

________

Photo: Johan Nilsson

Site: http://www.jnilsson.se

translation and complicity

I write in Portuguese, but I will try to have some of my poems translated into English as soon as I can. Each one of us express himself/herself in his/her mother-language, and that is fundamental to conserve, but today it is absolutely crucial to express ourselves also in a "translated way", i. e., in the language of the Empire, as when we Europeans we were colonized 2.000 years ago by the Romans.
I am absolutely convinced of the importance of having part of my poetry translated, but it is very hard to find anyone who can do that just for pleasure and friendship, which implies mutual admiration, a kind of love of course (translating poetry is rewriting a new poem, that "collaborator" should be a kind of poet too). A translated poem in fact is a team work... One of the greatest complicities that we may have with someone.
We long for The Translator as we long for love.

Apropos of the so called "lesbian kiss" in David Lynch's Mulholand Drive

In Mulholand Drive, the kiss filmed is extremely sensual, but in fact it must be contextualized in the very texture of the film as a work of art. I mean, I have nothing against any form of love, including the so-called "lesbian love", I am not homophobic at all, but in this film, as it is well known, the two women are a sort of specters, so what is in cause here is the very idea of identity... each one identifies with the other, it is a very complex, interchangeable game of roles, etc- like in other films of Lynch. That is the transformative capacity of art.But I have no moral judgment against, to the contrary, my feeling, as a man that likes women, is that this scene is a wonderful scene of love, too...certainly one of the most beautiful love scenes of the history of cinema. Those who do not understand this do not have any idea of cinema, of this art of fantasy so well done by David Lynch's incredible imagination!

Archaeologists as contemporary critical thinkers

Archaeologists as contemporary critical thinkers

Right from the beginning of archaeology as a “science” (19th century), its protagonists, like any other social scientists, tried to elaborate a “theory” of “man” and of “society”. Implicitly or explicitly, this “theory” is, and always was, meshed with any “practice”, be it the field work, the production of reports and other texts, or the presentation of “results” to the general public, etc. The vocation of the TAG’s meetings (Theorethical Archaeology Group Conferences), for instance, is precisely to make explicit the “theories” that underpin many aspects of the archaeological work, to trace their history and to delineate its current tendencies in order to make them more apparent and useful.
“Critical theory” - according to a well known book (“The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory”, ed. By Simon Malpas and Paul Wake, 2006), “aims to promote self-reflexive explorations of the experiences we have and the ways in which we make sense of ourselves, our cultures and the world.” (p. IX). In the case of archaeology, critical thinking does not consist in importing philosophy into archaeology, or in applying this or that theory to our field. It simply aims at maintaining and refreshing the ever existing impulse of archaeology to contribute to a general comprehension of life. This implies that archaeologists, being archaeologists, be also attentive to the modern debates in the other fields of knowledge, namely those debates and inquietudes that lay across our existence after World War II and the crash of communism. What are the contributions that archaeology has made to that dialogue? What is the role of archaeology in a modern politics of knowledge, if we want that the production and diffusion of our work have some effects beyond the purely academic world? That is the challenge of our job, trying to be situated in the interface of archaeology and a politics of knowledge, i.e., in a critical thinking and action.

About the book in preparation ARCHAEOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Vienna. Freud's house; a detail. Photo Gonçalo L. Velho.

As soon as I have launched the idea, I had several messages from different colleagues. As I was abroad in Leicester (Material Worlds conference) and in TAG 08 Southampton, I still need to organize all that information and to answer to many questions.
Probably the best way will be for me to develop the idea of the book in a short text, but one longer than the one that was published in the WAC list and in other lists, in order for the authors to see better what I have in my mind.
I am also waiting for an answer from a colleague of the area of psychoanalysis, that I have contacted, in order to eventually co-edit the book with me.
The difficulty is obviously the fact that both archaeology and psychoanalysis have many “schools” and perspectives and we need to make a coherent book and not something excessively heterogeneous... or even less a series of books...although the diversity of the book obviously may be in itself positive.
For me, the psychoanalytic inspiration, if taken as a doxa, is negative: we need to develop it into new approaches, getting inspiration from it. Just that: inspiration. The same with the theoretical “fathers” of archaeology. That makes everything more difficult, but it is the only reason for the book - its interest and opportunity now.
Particular chapters may be more historical (around the history of the two disciplines), but part of that job was already well done by my colleague and friend Julian Thomas in his book “Archaeology and Modernity” (Routledge, London, 2004). Or they may be more philosophical, more theoretical. They may be conceived from the experience of the archaeologist or, alternatively, from the experience of the psychoanalyst. But each needs to be grounded in a very strong basis, in a matured argument, whatever it may be. Perhaps the best way will be for each proposed author to develop his/her idea in an abstract of the proposed chapter and send it to my e-mail: vojorge@clix.pt
Thanks to all for your collaboration.
Happy Christmas!

VOJ

What means "cultural heritage" - a brief note sent by me to the Wac list

Heritage, be it cultural or natural, is a symptom of a typical Western ideology:
the split of two realities – nature and culture
the obsession with the archive – to frozen things and life, as identity anchors, to compensate the Loss (the loss of transcendence tied to modern Rationalism)
the turn of the world into a museum – the connection of that with tourism and tourist industry – the Other as an economic resource
heritage as cult – the relics, the pilgrimage, the recording, the storage, the trial to fabricate a personal archive based on photos
the omnipresence of the media and of the image as constitutive of the public space
Etc – the subject is immense.
One book between thousands, in French for instance:
Marc Guillaume, La Politique du Patrimoine, Paris, Galilée, 1980.

___________
contact: WAC@flinders.edu.au

Heritage- what is it?

My very short contribution to a discussion in course in the Wac list:

Heritage, be it cultural or natural, is a symptom of a typical Western ideology:

- the split of two realities - nature and culture

- the obsession with the archive - to frozen things and life, as identity anchors, to compensate the Loss (the loss of transcendence tied to modern Rationalism)

- the turn of the world into a museum - the connection of that with tourism and tourist industry - the Other as an economic resource

- heritage as cult - the relics, the pilgrimage, the recording, the storage, the trial to fabricate a personal and collective archive based on photos or digitalized documents

- the omnipresence of the media and of the image as constitutive of the public space

- heritage for all and for all kinds of leisure and the question of democracy - what does this word mean in a media society, when "reality" is hyperreality?

Etc. The subject is immense.

One book between thousands of others, this one n French:

Marc Guillaume, La Politique du Patrimoine, Paris, Galilée, 1980.

Architecture as pottery, etc: brief note

One of my main themes of interest as an archaeologist (and else) are not sherds, fragments of pottery inside architectures, and their typologies, etc., but earthen architectures, architectures conceived themselves in a certain way as pottery, placed at a totally different conceptual scale.
Obviously, this shall be extended to an entire landscape: a landscape as a permanent piece of handicraft, plasticity and transformation being the key words to understand it.
This idea does not conflict with the obvious fact that "natural" and "artificial" forces continuously interact in a landscape. A landscape, a term that derives from painting in post -Medieval times, is an enormous dynamic system in permanent unfolding and transformation.
Plastic, painted earthen architectures occur all over the world, together with the use of wood or other vegetal material, and they are an important part of the existence of people in their environment. Both (communities, environment) are not actually superimposed realities: they are just concepts that in pratice dissolve. People construct their social ties acting together in an environment, in a space/time, making and remaking it, and being made by it.
There is no point in finding any universal (or even local) "functions" for this fundamental activity: "architecture", as language, for instance, is a fundamental way of expression and communication of human beings.
Universals like houses, fortresses, etc, are functional naive projections of our mind. A completely different archaeology is needed, based in a deeper undertanding of both the conscious and the unconscious aspects of the complex and infinitely diverse human beings. A philosophy that will try to incorporate the inspirations of different fields of knowledge, including psychoanalysis of course, etc. An interdisciplinary adventure that will recompose totally the responsability and methodology of the (good, interesting) archaeologist in the next decades.
Archaeology, to seduce, needs as much (and as less) as any other activity: an open mind to every source of inspirational contribution.
A new shape, a new thinking layout, a new discursive trend - a different kind of looking at things, people, materials, artifacts, whatever.