Cosmopolitan Archaeologies - Rilegato

9780822344322: Cosmopolitan Archaeologies

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ISBN 10: 0822344327 ISBN 13: 9780822344322

Casa editrice: Duke Univ Pr, 2009

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An important collection, Cosmopolitan Archaeologies

delves into the politics of contemporary archaeology in an increasingly complex international environment. The contributors explore the implications of applying the cosmopolitan ideals of obligation to others and respect for cultural difference to archaeological practice, showing that those ethics increasingly demand the rethinking of research agendas. While cosmopolitan archaeologies must be practiced in contextually specific ways, what unites and defines them is archaeologists’ acceptance of responsibility for the repercussions of their projects, as well as their undertaking of heritage practices attentive to the concerns of the living communities with whom they work. These concerns may require archaeologists to address the impact of war, the political and economic depredations of past regimes, the livelihoods of those living near archaeological sites, or the incursions of transnational companies and institutions.

The contributors describe various forms of cosmopolitan engagement involving sites that span the globe. They take up the links between conservation, natural heritage and ecology movements, and the ways that local heritage politics are constructed through international discourses and regulations. They are attentive to how communities near heritage sites are affected by archaeological fieldwork and findings, and to the complex interactions that local communities and national bodies have with international sponsors and universities, conservation agencies, development organizations, and NGOs. Whether discussing the toll of efforts to preserve biodiversity on South Africans living near Kruger National Park, the ways that UNESCO’s global heritage project universalizes the ethic of preservation, or the Open Declaration on Cultural Heritage at Risk that the Archaeological Institute of America sent to the U.S. government before the Iraq invasion, the contributors provide nuanced assessments of the ethical implications of the discursive production, consumption, and governing of other people’s pasts.

Contributors. O. Hugo Benavides, Lisa Breglia, Denis Byrne, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Alfredo Gonz�lez-Ruibal, Ian Hodder, Ian Lilley, Jane Lydon, Lynn Meskell, Sandra Arnold Scham

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Informazioni sull?autore

Lynn Meskell is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is the author of Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present, Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt, and Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class Etcetera in Ancient Egypt. She is editor of Archaeologies of Materiality, Embedding Ethics (with Peter Pels), and The Companion to Social Archaeology (with Bob Preucel). Meskell is the founder and editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology.

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COSMOPOLITAN ARCHAEOLOGIES

Duke University Press

Copyright � 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4432-2

INTRODUCTION: Cosmopolitan Heritage Ethics Lynn Meskell..................................................................................................11. YOUNG AND FREE: The Australian Past in a Global Future Jane Lydon.....................................................................................282. STRANGERS AND BROTHERS? Heritage, Human Rights, and Cosmopolitan Archaeology in Oceania Ian Lilley....................................................483. ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE FORTRESS OF RATIONALITY Denis Byrne...............................................................................................684. THE NATURE OF CULTURE IN KRUGER NATIONAL PARK Lynn Meskell............................................................................................895. VERNACULAR COSMOPOLITANISM: An Archaeological Critique of Universalistic Reason Alfredo Gonzlez-Ruibal...............................................1136. THE ARCHAEOLOGIST AS A WORLD CITIZEN: On the Morals of Heritage Preservation and Destruction Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh................................1407. "TIME'S WHEEL RUNS BACK": Conversations with the Middle Eastern Past Sandra Arnold Scham..............................................................1668. MAVILI'S VOICE Ian Hodder.............................................................................................................................1849. "WALKING AROUND LIKE THEY OWN THE PLACE": Quotidian Cosmopolitanism at a Maya and World Heritage Archaeological Site Lisa Breglia.....................20510. TRANSLATING ECUADORIAN MODERNITIES: Pre-Hispanic Archaeology and the Reproduction of Global Difference O. Hugo Benavides.............................228Bibliography..............................................................................................................................................249Contributors..............................................................................................................................................285Index.....................................................................................................................................................289

Chapter One

Jane Lydon

YOUNG AND FREE

The Australian Past in a Global Future

Australians all let us rejoice For we are young and free We've golden soil and wealth for toil, Our home is girt by sea: Our land abounds in nature's gifts Of beauty rich and rare, In history's page let every stage Advance Australia fair, In joyful strains then let us sing Advance Australia fair. -"Advance Australia Fair"

The Australian national anthem continues to resonate with a popular sense of the country's relatively recent origin, unfettered by a grim European past-Australians feel "young and free," with a history still to write, no choice but to advance. This identity is of course defined in relation to an international community, as indeed it has always been-but in an age of increasing global interconnectedness, the importance of the nation as a framework for understanding the Australian past (and therefore its present and future), has in some respects only strengthened. However, against this powerful narrative, a well-established critique of Australian heritage has identified problems with this national framework, and especially the suppression of indigenous experience entailed in creating a solid national foundation. Calls for transnational histories that re-site the nation within more global accounts of migration and exchange (for example, Curthoys and Lake 2005) potentially de-emphasize the state and reaffirm the status of "first" peoples within longer-term trajectories of human endeavor. Heritage is now a global discourse and can also be seen as a discourse of globalization that enfolds diverse cultures and attitudes toward the past into a single narrative. Internal tension between an openness to cultural difference and simultaneously a commitment to universal values remains unresolved, yet new forms of significance that are emerging within international heritage praxis, as people become enmeshed within transnational alliances, reveal new modes of political community. Processes such as the participation of indigenous peoples in international institutions in preference to national ones do not merely challenge the legitimacy of the states' claim to exclusive jurisdiction over territory, but in fact constitute an "emergent cosmopolitanism" (Ivison 2006a) that is compatible with universal notions of justice and yet is also rooted in particular, local ways of life.

Cosmopolitanism and Heritage

Many theories of global interconnectedness focus on the tension between different conceptions of human subjectivity and difference, often expressed as an opposition between universalism and relativism, and linked to notions of individual versus collective rights, and concomitant conceptions of culture as either fluid and contingent, or as bounded and local. International heritage discourse is similarly structured by this dual commitment-to global peace and prosperity grounded in universal human rights, but also to cultural diversity.

As formative analyses of the complexity and flux of globalization suggested (for example, Hannerz 1992; Featherstone 1990), diffusionist models (sometimes caricatured as coca colonization) are inadequate to explain processes of global interconnectedness, which are characterized not merely by homogenization and integration but also by the proliferation of diversity. The dissolution of some boundaries-most clearly, through mediatization and capital flow, travel and migration-has simultaneously acted to strengthen others and, most notably, a sense of local distinctiveness. Despite the persistence or even intensification of some normative orders within global processes, a sense of difference is constructed in relation to others in an enhanced awareness of plurality. Although cultural forms may be global, their interpretation and use are shaped by local values.

Visions of the ethical, emancipatory potential of an interconnected world, such as Kantian conceptions of cosmopolitanism, are characterized by a commitment to the equal worth and dignity of all human beings, linked to standards of justice that are intended to be applicable to all while at the same time retaining an openness to local different ways of life (Appiah 2006a). As an intellectual ethos this stance transcends the particularistic and contingent ties of kin and country, constituting "an institutionally grounded global political consciousness" (Cheah 2006: 491). The tension between the principles of universalism and local difference is central to current analysis of global networks, linked to concepts of universal human rights and local values. As I explore further, this apparent conceptual paradox is identified as a dilemma within both human rights and heritage discourse as well as theories of political community such as cosmopolitanism; it is a problem not merely of articulation between different orders of practice, but of how to conceive human subjectivity and difference.

It is often argued that the proliferation of international human rights law over recent decades has rendered it "one of the most globalized political values of our times" (Wilson 1997: 1), giving rise to "feasible global forms of political consciousness" that may regulate the excesses of capitalist globalization (Cheah 2006: 491). One of the central issues in this area has often been expressed as a contradiction between universal human rights with their emphasis on individual equality, and local culture and group rights-sometimes termed the "universalism versus relativism" debate. Relativist critique of universalism identifies the socially and historically contingent nature of human rights discourse, which emerged in its current form in Europe in the aftermath of World War II (with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948) within a Western ideology of liberalism and the bourgeois categories of possessive individualism. Such critique points to the global diversity of legal systems and especially indigenous peoples' claims to communal rights to land ownership or self-determination. The relativist critique relies upon a conception of culture as an entity-static, internally uniform, and historically bounded, rather than a contested and emergent process. In practical terms, the concept of "unity in diversity" becomes problematic when "culture" violates "universal rights"-or conversely, when minority cultures are objectified and penalized for changing.

The tension between universalism and cultural relativism is also apparent within international heritage discourse. Like human rights, heritage now constitutes a world network of organizations, policies, and practices, represented at a global level by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which aims "to build peace in the minds of men" and to promote prosperity around the globe. Many have noted that in its promotion of Western notions of heritage-as material and authentic, for example-heritage can also be seen as a discourse of globalization (Ireland and Lydon 2005: 20). One of its key programs is the preservation of "culture," deployed largely through the framework of "world heritage" and the "world heritage list," conceived as universally owned. As UNESCO's website declares, "What makes the concept of World Heritage exceptional is its universal application. World Heritage sites belong to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory on which they are located," in a vision of a global cultural commons. To be listed, places must be "considered to be of outstanding value to humanity" (UNESCO 1972), yet this notion of universal value is predicated upon an understanding of humankind as irreducibly diverse.

It is also linked to a commitment to a universal right to culture, as human rights discourse is increasingly drawn upon by the international heritage movement. First articulated by UNESCO during the 1960s, in a climate of postwar decolonization, demands by the indigenous included the right to "enjoy their own culture." By the 1990s the perceived effects of globalization in homogenizing local cultures prompted the protection of diversity as a major theme of UNESCO's activity. The World Commission on Culture and Development's statement of 1995 regarding culture in the contemporary world-Our Creative Diversity-articulated a new ethic of diversity that reached its fullest expression in the Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity 2001: here for the first time cultural diversity was termed "the common heritage of humanity," the defense of which was deemed to be an ethical and practical imperative, "inseparable from respect for human dignity" (UNESCO 2001: 20). But as Thomas Eriksen's discussion (2001) of Our Creative Diversity points out, UNESCO's insistence upon cultural difference contradicts its promotion of a universalist view of ethics. Placing an exoticist emphasis on culture as difference-focusing on those symbolic acts that demarcate boundaries between groups, and the traditions associated with a single set of people and their heritage or "roots"-is linked to the anthropological paradigms of cultural relativism and structuralism. Yet the report simultaneously deploys a more fluid conception of culture as globalization, creolization, and "impulses"-a view linked to poststructuralist deconstructionist approaches. Hence the report simultaneously defends "group rights," "the protection of minorities," and the identification of claimants as living "traditional lifestyles" while also expressing a commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which accords rights to individuals, not groups. As I have noted, the dilemma in this dual position is the inevitable conflict between collective minority rights and individual rights.

Too often, the reification of culture has trapped minority groups between the identification of claimants (as leading "traditional lifestyles") and their own need to change and engage with global processes to survive. By detaching heritage from the local context that gave it meaning, heritage may disenfranchise communities. For example, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2006: 2, original emphasis) argues that through its metacultural application of museological methods to living people and culture, an asymmetry is produced between "the diversity of those who produce cultural assets in the first place and the humanity to which those assets come to belong as world heritage." Others suggest that in practice local concepts of value may be incorporated into Western heritage methodology, for example through heritage tools such as Australia's Burra Charter (Sullivan 2005).

Recent moves toward broadening the concept of culture to include intangible cultural heritage make these problems more explicit. As practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills "embodied in people rather than in inanimate objects," such heritage highlights its vulnerability to repressive cultural practices that contravene human rights-such as in Myanmar, where the use of forced labor for monumental restoration is argued to fall within the traditional Buddhist practice of merit-making. William Logan (2008; and see the chapter by Hodder, this volume) argues for the use of human rights instruments to regulate heritage practice and the development of a hierarchy of human rights forms, with rights to cultural heritage giving precedence to rights to freedom from slavery or torture.

Notwithstanding the recurrent framing of the relationship between universalism and cultural relativism as a dilemma, it seems more productive to avoid opposing these tendencies in any absolute fashion. Dichotomization of universal and local values overlooks the effects of globalization and transnational juridical processes: many indigenous peoples, for example, are adopting human rights doctrine, and referring to themselves as "indigenous"-that is, choosing to identify with a pan-global category. Such phenomena undermine bounded, static conceptions of culture as "values," expressing rather a dynamic, fluid conception of culture that is not necessarily at odds with human rights (for example, Merry 2003). To understand the "social life of rights" we need to attend to the actions and intentions of social actors, within the wider constraints of institutional power; ethnography of a network considers "the way people are drawn into a more globalised existence and become enmeshed in transnational linkages" (Wilson 1997: 13). Universality becomes a matter of context. Such analysis reveals the sets of conjunctural relationships that constitute local meanings and identities (e.g., Breckenridge et al. 2002), at the same time as transnational practices and categories are resisted and appropriated according to context; meaning does not reside within culturally bounded and set values but flows through global interconnections at local, national, and global levels.

Universal or Elite Value? Reinscribing the Nation

Recent critique of the notion of "outstanding universal value," a key concept for the World Heritage Convention, has pointed out that despite the centrality of liberal values and particularly participatory democracy to international heritage discourse, in practice such discourse reproduces elitist Western methodologies and ideals; through implementation at the level of the state, national myths continue to feature the heroic male, excluding other groups and notably women (Labadi 2005, 2006). Heritage management frameworks have overemphasized a bounded national past and underplayed the nation's involvement in transnational histories-for example of migration and empire.

Certainly, the nation has not lost its salience as the dominant framework for understanding the Australian past-it seems that an enhanced awareness of a global context has only increased this sense of distinctiveness, as nationalist legends are retold as a way of asserting membership in an international community. As the website of the federal Department of the Environment and Heritage (2007a) declares under the banner of "Australian Heritage," "By knowing our heritage-our past, our places and the source of our values-we can better understand our special place in the world."

A substantial body of critique has demonstrated (e.g., Byrne 1996; L. Smith 2000; Ireland 2002) that from its inception during the 1960s Australian heritage was used to tell a unique national story that masked internal complexity while marginalizing the nation's broader entanglement within transnational historical processes such as the spread of humans across the Pacific, indigenous settlement, and migration. As a form of historical consciousness, a focus of social memory and shared narratives, heritage has become the primary way in which the past is invoked by cultural institutions such as museums, enfolding conflict within a consensual national past (Ireland and Lydon 2005; Young 1999: 12-13). Heritage representations, grounded in archaeological and historical narratives, continue to reinscribe the national stories of colonial discovery and settlement, "pioneer" achievement, and freedom won through heroism at war. Such stories are linked to the values of "mateship," decency, courage, and egalitarianism that continue to structure current political arguments about issues such as immigration restriction, border defense, and the treatment of Aboriginal people. Postcolonial critique of the celebratory version of white settlement over the last two decades has shifted mainstream perceptions of the nation's origins, as indigenous experience and injustice have challenged or been integrated into public memory. Yet while such reappraisal is hotly contested (e.g., Macintyre and Clark 2003), the centrality of the nation endures.

(Continues...)

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