Archaeology has often been used in
different parts of the world to support nationalist, colonialist, and
imperialist claims. There does not seem to be a way to exclude religion and politics
from archaeology, which is after all a social science and hence political and
partial. This can among others be seen in the Middle East and the Holy Land,
where Archaeology has been used to serve modern political goals.
In spite of growing self-reflection in
archaeology today (January 2005), archaeologists practice a profession that
ought to engage with larger social and political contexts. While one may
question whether the concept of global human rights is truly international or
one that denies the diversity of human cultures, it is certainly an endeavor in
which archaeology is emerging as a legitimizing voice. By excavating the past
and living in or alongside communities that are threatened in the present,
archaeologists have within their remit both a tool for change and obligations
to the people they work with. Archaeologists are participants in a social and
political praxis.
Novel Histories: Politics of narration
Most history books in the past were
written like a form of fiction where the authors did not apply the rules of
present day forensic (evidence based) research, thought in all better
Universities today (January 2005).
Instead politics of narration include
the author’s relations of production and the construction of a relational past.
The conditions in which authors work merit more consideration than
historian-archaeologists are willing to admit. Issues of class, religion,
nationality, language, connections to publishers, and affiliations with
institutions all help to structure a highly unequal field of discourse.
Even academic renderings of the past are
normally quite close to popular stories. Following a present fashion in
archaeology and inserting “living people” into the past would be equal to
succumbing to a historically unrealistic closure and harmony. If the goal of “peopling”
a narrative is to reach out to non-specialist readers, one could insert presentent-day figures who conceive of the past in
different ways.
Unfortunately, professional ideologies
produce the impression of a level field. However some “voices” are folded
into mainstream discourse as a means to domesticate them, as has happened with
some strands of archaeology.
Any narrative about the past is
diachronically relational since it establishes a link between a past and a
specific present. The metaphor of a “distant mirror” is employed by authors and
literary critics alike to characterize writings that emphasize similarities
between past and present. On the other hand, an explicit rift may be created in
order to preserve the past’s alterity. Academic history diverges from these
possibilities in that pasts are at best shattered distant mirrors or fragments
of alterities.
But the political implications are
comparable. Archaeologists opt implicitly for one or the other of these links.
Constructions of past world systems are a clear case of mirroring, as is a
recent book on women in the ancient Near East (See Zainab Bahrani
, Women of Babylon, 2001).
Currently relevant issues serve as the
foreground for an interpretation of the past. The present is conceived as
inherently “better” because more complex than the past. A remedy would be the
construction of non-directional, truly historical alterities. This entails the
development of a “hermeneutics of the unfamiliar” as has been proposed by
Hans-Robert Jauß.
Historians construct meaningfulness by
arbitrarily dissecting past residues into clearly delimited items, documents,
and contexts – sources – only to merge the disjointed fragments into a new
continuum. However, the new entity has a profoundly different character from
the originally encountered residual: it is linked in a linear textual
narrative. Yet History needs to be seen as cultural and historical praxis that
occurs in specific social relations of production. Like the standard novel,
what we know as standard history is a textual product.
Does this mean, that we should abandon
the pursuit of narratives about the past altogether? I do not think so.
However, there is a need to continually rethink their form. Historical and
archaeological narratives are ideological in that they generally claim
facticity, at least of sources. And the production of relations among sources
in the “rejoining” process of historiography involves fiction.
In contrast a task must be to
analyze the dialectical relation between the construction of datasets and the
creation of an interpretive narrative from them. This process is a social
praxis that cannot simply be seen as creative ingenuity or academically
rigorous method. It is driven by conventions, which in turn are recreated by
the act of narrative production.
The present use of linear textual
accounts in much of Near Eastern archaeology, with (suppressed) omniscient
narrators and an unreflective use of language for example, is in need of change
unless one accepts the implications for content that come with this particular
narrative form. Postmodern conditions should not have a place for know-it-all
historical narrators who skillfully weave autonomous “data” into meaningful
wholes.
When reflecting on narrative form,
authors often refer to the erroneous belief that comprehensibility of a story
is reduced when multiple perspectives are considered. Indeed, our notion of
perspective itself is a historical product. “Perspective,” or “looking through,”
has its origin in the individualistic gaze that originated in Renaissance art
and can be compared to strict points of view in literature.
History and archaeology have remained
impervious to the end of perspectivism because its demise weakens the rarely
questioned fundamentals of professions concerned with the past. Particularly in
hermeneutic approaches, a single-narrator perspective leads by necessity to an
unrealistic representation of the past. It conceals conflicts by telling a
story from one angle.
Media
Although reasons that reports on
archaeology of the Middle East appear in the news are limited solely to the
connections that can be made to contemporary politics, it striking that such
stories proliferate at times of political crisis. Of course, in the broader
scheme of things, reports a archaeology were just one small part of the total
coverage of Iraq or Afghanis in the context of mobilization for the Gulf Wars
and the invasion of Afghanis These wars would undoubtedly have happened even if
no mention had ever made in the press of ancient civilizations and biblical
connections of sites in or the destruction of the Buddhas in the Bamiyan
Valley. Yet, stories about archeology contributed to the overall efforts to
construct U.S. public opinion in favor war.
Yet during the Iran-Iraq war
(1980-88), not a single article that concerned itself with possible war- damage
to archaeological remains in either country appeared in the Washington Post or
New York Times, newspapers that frequently reported on archaeology in the
Middle East during the Gulf and Afghan wars.
The notion that Western civilization as
well as "Western" religions (Christianity and Judaism) are rooted in
the ancient Near East runs deeply in the minds of most educated people in the
West. This underlying belief made it easy for reporters to link the archaeology
of Iraq to contemporary political issues and identities, whether by claiming
the great achievements of the Mesopotamian past as our legacy or connecting the
modern government of Iraq to the most aggressive and unappealing aspects of
that past. Either way, military intervention in Iraq was thereby
"justified" in order to preserve the material remains of
"our" heritage and wrest humanity's (read, the West's) legacy from
the hands of tyrants who would misuse or jeopardize its preservation.
Journalists seem to have found it more
difficult to construct direct ancestral ties between the Afghan past and the
contemporary West. This may have been in large part because the prominent,
historically attested religions in Afghanistan have been Buddhism and Islam
rather than Christianity or Judaism. For the most part journalists highlighted
the exoticness and difference of Afghanistan's past and its status as a
crossroads of other, more familiar "great civilizations. That past was
often cast as part of world heritage, offering a reason for the U.S. to
intervene to preserve its material remains. In other instances, its destruction
was treated as principally a problem for Afghans, whose history and culture
were to be understood as decimated by the barbarity of their own people, the
Taliban.
Despite the variety of different
rhetorical strategies used in the news articles, they nearly all worked to
support the same hegemonic position - demonization of the declared enemy
(Saddam, the Taliban) and therefore justification for a U.S.-led war. The
appearance of diversity in the stories could lull readers into thinking that
they were reading diverse perspectives when in fact the underlying message was
the same. One means by which this is accomplished is by pitting
"experts" against each other in collections of quotes (or in talk
shows), but ensuring that the disagreements among them are actually trivial.
The past can be used to demonstrate
continuity and precedent but also, in a more liberatory fashion, to imagine
possibilities for change and a different future. Nonetheless, using identity as
a basis for a vision of change often carries with it problems of essentialism
and the static assumptions that lie at the heart of many concepts of identity.
Identity claims are necessarily selective and partial, and from an
"objectivist" position they can be critiqued and deconstructed.
Rather, practices of identity are part of the basic fabric through which people
constitute their senses of self; in that respect, they are no trivial matters
to be lightly demolished with the wave of an academic hand.
An alternative is for archaeologists to
focus of exposing the interests that are served by the selective uses of the
past in contemporary identity building, including in media portrayals. Such an
approach would point up the partiality of these depictions, highlighting how
particular interests structure specific uses of the past. By exposing
interests, one does not attack a collectivity's existential basis but rather
lays open the grounds on which a group claims to be distinctive and, in many
cases, privileged.
Reports about the archaeology of the
Middle East are likely to evoke for most non-specialist readers the daily
images of the contemporary Middle East which flood the news media, a place that
is regularly portrayed as one of violent and persistent conflict, of virulent
hatreds and rampant anti-Americanism.
This dialectic relationship of narrator
and story is complicated by the changing point of view of the narrator who
propagates on the one hand "life as it recounts itself" as the
historical original, declaring that he represents events in accordance with
their truthful reality.
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