Identity/Crisis." Archaeological Dialogues 10/1:77-95 (2003)

Current Swedish Archaeology, 1996

This paper traces the conjunction of two interrelated epistemic phenomena that have begun to shape the discipline since the early 1990s. The first entails theorizing social identity in past societies: specifically, how social lives are inscribed by the experiences of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. The other constitutes the rise of a politicized and ethical archaeology that now recognizes its active role in contemporary culture and is enunciated through the discourses of nationalism, sociopolitics, postcolonialism, diaspora, and globalism. Both trends have been tacitly shaped by anthropological and social theory, but they are fundamentally driven by the powerful voices of once marginalized groups and their newfound place in the circles of academic legitimacy. I argue that our disciplinary reticence to embrace the politics of identity, both in our investigations of the past and our imbrications in the present, has much to do with archaeology’s lack of reflexivity, both personal and disciplinary, concurrent with its antitheoretical tendencies. The residual force of the latter should not be underestimated, specifically in regard to field practices and the tenacity of academic boundaries.

“Archaeology” is booming. In the twenty-irst century different meanings, kinds, forms and ideas of archaeology popularly circulate. It is used as a metaphor, as a tool, as a description of methods and as a way of thinking and practising. The “archaeology of media” is only one of numerous uses. Archaeologists-as-such now ind it dificult to make clear statements about the nature of the archaeological endeavour, and to ind a strong disciplinary position within this diversity. This paper tells a transictional story about the handling of such an identity crisis.

Undoubtedly the world currently undergoes a period of rapid social, political, economic, and ecological change – if it will not, in hindsight, prove to be a fatal tipping point in global history. Following Kintigh’s (et al. 2014) “grand challenges” archaeology as a scientific discipline is called up to carefully observe, analyse, and assess these trends and to bring them into a longue durée context ...

Current Swedish Archaeology 20, 2012

In the light of some significant anniversaries, this paper discusses the fate of archaeological theory after the heyday of postprocessualism. While once considered a radical and revolutionary alternative, post-processual or interpretative archaeology remarkably soon became normalized, mainstream and hegem-onic, leading to the theoretical lull that has characterized its aftermath. Recently, however, this consen-sual pause has been disrupted by new materialist perspectives that radically depart from the postproces-sual orthodoxy. Some outcomes of these perspectives are proposed and discussed, the most significant being a return to archaeology-an archaeology that sacri fices the imperatives of historical narratives, so-ciologies, and hermeneutics in favour of a trust in the soiled and ruined things themselves and the memories they afford.

Some years ago, postmodernist positions demonstrated the positivist and evolutionist bias of modern archeology. It was argued that the past is constructed from the present and for the present, as every human group needs to create a discourse on their origins in order to feel security and stability in that present as well as to legitimize and make sense of their present condition. Postprocessual perspectives already unveiled this “political” backstage of the archaeological reconstructions of the past, demonstrating the inconsistence of the processual pretended “objectivity” when studying the past. However, postprocessualists did not go further or deeper in their analysis. They did not question the links between the type of “pasts” that archeology recreates and the type of society we are constructing in the present. This issue will be the center of this text, which will try to analyze the ontological implications of constructing a discourse about human origins based on criteria as change (and not permanence), power (and not cooperation) and reason (and not emotion).

This introductory essay serves two purposes. First, we will argue that the pervasive search for identity through material culture, going back to the origins of archaeological thought, speaks to a deep concern at the heart of the discipline. Although it has met much criticism and many dead-ends along the way, it continues to resurface, a phenomenon which needs to be problematised. Second, we will argue that while approaches to identity are as complex and multifarious as the term itself, it is the search that is important, and thinking about the ways in which it has been used tells us much about why we do archaeology in the first place.