[PEN-L:2258] Re: Alan Sokal <199901181421.JAA03064@merhaba.cc.columbia.edu> <199901180736.BAA05096@echo.flash.net>

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(I had passed this along to Alan and discussed it with him at our lunch. It
is the concluding pages of Alice Beck Kehoe's "Land of Prehistory: A
critical history of American Archaeology," Routledge, 1998. He was very
uncomfortable with it. I regard Alice Beck Kehoe as one of America's
greatest intellectual assets. She has fought for indigenous rights within
the archaelogy and anthropology establishment. I only recently discovered
that after graduating from Barnard in 1956, she went to Browning and became
assistant at the Museum of the Plains Indian.)

Every natural-language word carries its bundle of associations, like a Maya
'chac'. But formal logic, the computer scientists have found, is no
panacea, because it, too, presupposes such "natural" categories as object,
predicate, discreteness. Archaeology is no worse off than the physical
sciences and mathematics in treading the boggy land of presuppositions.

Reviewing American archaeology through two centuries, several paradigms
have been visible. First, there was the Jeffersonian project of opening a
continent to Western eyes. This charge to record meticulously what is
encountered could not be sustained against Manifest Destiny ideology, for
Midwest earthen and Southwest stone architecture belied the legitimating
image of the bestial savage destined to be supplanted. A tacit assumption
that America's First Nations never reached a stage of civilization
comparable to that of the invading conquerors has been the framework for
American archaeology, within the Modern European paradigm of a four-stage
universal history of mankind. An alternative paradigm elevates equilibrium
to cosmological status, sharing with functionalism in sociology,
anthropology, and ecology the metaphor that viable communities are organic
bodies made up of separate interdependent organs. American archaeology
obscures the differences between these two paradigms, slotting the
functionalist descriptions into stages in the unilinear evolution model.
Finally, and not so clearly recognized as a paradigm, is "straight
science," often disparaged as routine data-gathering. "Ordinary science"
was the paradigm of "culture history" archaeology, picking up and laying
out shards and stones and bones to fill in the matrix of vertical time
columns and horizontal regions. Ordinary science under the New Archaeology
became studies of cutmarks on bones, edge-wear on stone, flotation
analyses, GIS systems, CRM, "public education"--all the straightforward
"this was in the ground and here it is cleaned and sorted."

Every one of these paradigms objectifies its research domain. For its first
century, American archaeology followed the Common-Sense Realism version of
Baconian science. Archaeologists were inclined to be hands-on men,
contemptuous of effete bookmen, so it is not surprising that many resisted
the New Archaeology's formal philosophy of hypothetico-deductive method,
trumpeted at the start of the discipline's second century. (A bit uncanny,
precisely a century between Wilson's "Prehistoric Man" and Binford's
"Archaeology as Anthropology" in American Antiquity. The first pulled
anthropology into the service of archaeology, the second claimed for
archaeology a dominant role in anthropology. Whether straightforward field
scientists or exponents of grand theory, American archaeologists played
into the ideology of modernity, accepting its third-person
analytico-referential mode of discourse as the only proper exposition of
our subject. The reification of abstracts such as "society," "culture,"
"sociotechnic mode," so pervasive in the discourse of modernism led
archaeologists to work toward models that were mirages reflected from their
own syntax.

Our perspective is, curiously, quite literally a product of the discipline
inaugurated in the Renaissance foundation of modernism. Art historian
Michael Ann Holly specifies the date, 1435, when Leon-Battista Alberti
explicated the technique of perspective drawing, the ordering of what is to
be seen into a coherent, centered composition presenting an edifying
history ('istoria'). In the 1840s, that decade of bourgeois ascendancy,
Jacob Burckhardt studied Alberti's treatise and transcribed the painter's
technique into a mode of historical writing; looking thus at an ordered,
centered past, Burckhardt felt he could, in his own words:

"get away from them all, from the radicals, the communists, the
industrialists, the intellectuals, the pretentious, the reasoners, the
abstract, the absolute, the philosophers, the sophists, the State fanatics,
the idealists, the 'ists' and 'isms' of every kind."

Until NAGPRA [Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act],
American archaeologists could find such escape in their researches, too.
Like Burckhardt, they could envision themselves in an outside vantage point
from which they could place what they saw into a meaningful picture. Daniel
Wilson told an 'istoria' of the Law of Variety-Production evolving
civilizations on every continent, and meritorious youths in many a humble
cottage and wigwam. Sir John Lubbock and Lewis Henry Morgan, one born to
wealth and the other having achieved it through investments in iron,
narrated another story, the stark contrast between their class and the
wretches they dominated. Holly notes, "The historical subject once ordered
(even if subjectively) assumes all the characteristics of an exercise in
objectivity. If it works, it does not appear possible for matters to be
other than they are."

For several centuries, it worked for the West. With literacy limited to a
dominant class relatively unified through pan-European aristocratic and
bourgeois cultures, an education based on a set of authoritative texts, and
linked economies, the history formulated by the Enlightenment philosophes
appeared obviously incontrovertible. NAGPRA's fallout threatening to
delegitimate American archaeologists' reading of the American past
indicates how insecure this accustomed dominance has become. It cannot be
coincidence that ideological dominance trembles along with America's
political-economic domination: Multinational corporations' global labor
pool and consumer market undermine the insular superiority of the West.
Disney's buckskin Pocahontas shares the multiplex cinema with Hong Kong's
audacious Jackie Chan; while the Disney company retells the story of a
country that hath yet her maidenhead, a swashbuckling Asian boasting
financial clout dramatizes to ordinary Americans a new cast to Manifest
Destiny.

The other Indians, over in India, have begun charting a world behind as
well as beyond the picture constructed by that land's British raj. The
Indian subcontinent, like North America, was and is home to diverse
nations, diverse in ecology, population, societal structures, worldviews,
languages and histories. The Archaeological Survey of India, like the
Bureau of American Ethnology, was an institution of the central government
established under colonial aegis, 1861 in the case of India. Indian
archaeologist Dilip Chakrabarti remarks that little notice was taken of
prehistoric data: "Even the discovery of the Indus civilization ... did not
lead to a change, except that history textbooks started printing
photographs of the brick-built drains of Mohenjodaro." The colonial raj
could not gainsay the subcontinent nations' achievements in religious and
palatial architecture, artifacts, and literature but it could aver that
these represented a timeless tradition-bound "archaic civilization". India,
Pakistan, Kashmir, and Nepal contest interpretations of the pasts of their
territories not only in law courts and academies but with armed troops.
Scholars, in contrast, have been seeking common ground by recovering
subaltern discourses and recognizing how frequently efforts to create order
have ridden roughshod over the fluid and adroit competencies of daily life.

Perhaps North American archaeologists can substantiate a modus operandi
emphasizing the syntagm, the actual detritus of daily life. This is not to
overlook the heavy challenges of determining the degree of cohesion of
assemblages, through meticulous attention to stratigraphy and taphonomic
processes. Archaeology is scientific insofar as its observations are
replicable, that is, its data available for inspection. An emphasis on
syntagmata lets an archaeologist present her or his technical work with
minimal baggage, then whatever interpretation seems congruent with the data
and fulfilling the legal and contractual obligations of the archaeological
project. Recording data, including photographs of artifacts, on a computer
disk or CD-ROM that could be sleeved with the report would enable
interested readers to examine the data in greater detail without unduly
burdening the publication. Potentially controversial data such as human
bones that appear to have been butchered could be described in technical
terms, an interpretation such as "cannibalism" given if the archaeologist
is willing to defend such an emotionally loaded inference, or the data
subsumed under "possible evidence of warfare" if civilty is valued over
blunt opinion.

Today, chances are that any American archaeologist, even one who is a
member of a First Nation and excavating under that nation's heritage
management plan, will be confronted by someone unwilling to see any
disturbance of remains from the past, or alternately, someone who objects
to the appropriation of their own forebears' segment of the past.
Archaeology today lies under federal, state, and local laws and
regulations, and is likely to be instigated to mitigate anticipated
destruction--there are no more General Pitt-Rivers exercising right of
domain on their own estates to dig out barrows. Given the likelihood that
excavation salvages jeopardized sites, a person who believes it wrong to
uncover the buried past can be presumed opposed to any displacement of
existing landscape, rather a difficult position to maintain unless one is
willing to live in a tent eating only wild foods and clothed in handwoven
wild fiber. Less radical, the contesting of the privilege to uncover and
discourse upon particular remains has been broached as an issue of
intellectual property rights.

A more pragmatic approach is to think through the circumstance that most
archaeology today is heritage management. Philip Duke emphasizes a very
basic guiding assumption in Western culture, that work is carried out to
achieve a designated goal. ("Work" is thus contrasted with "recreation.")
The goal of archaeological work has traditionally been a culture history,
whether of a particular "people," or area, or of the human species.
Interpretation of an excavated syntagm is felt necessary for closure: There
was a beginning, a middle, there ought to be an end. A CRM archaeologist
may be obligated to provide an interpretive summary in a report. Duke
proposes that archaeologists consider the descriptive report the opening of
a dialog, one voice the archaeologist's own, other voices entering from
their standpoints. Interpretations of "lifeways" or "history" invariably
reflect culturally loaded paradigms. The scientific report will be the
presentation of data described with care to eschew merely conventional labels.

"The past" is nowhere. It cannot be discovered. What exists now and has
been continuously existing since its manufacture is evidence of just that,
continuous existence for whatever length of time. To identify a tangibly
existing phenomenon as evidence of existence in the past requires
contextualization (inscribed, geological, or in terms of radioactive decay
processes)--a syntagmatic exercise. The scientific data, simply described
with age and associations, may seem inadequate return for the time and
funds expended for these data. Baldfaced inventories of material, metrics,
and technological attributes do add up to a compilation of traces of
actions carried out at a "where" and "when." If vernacular names--"knife,"
"bowl," "arrowpoint," "ornament"--are affixed to the objects, the leap is
made from syntagm to paradigm and thereby into multivocality.

The millennium, 2001, is the sesquicentennial of Daniel Wilson's
introduction of the word "prehistory" into the English language. American
archaeology is ready to be a mature science, one that accepts the primacy
of its empirical data--for these can outlast theories--and the political
and human ramifications of its actions, as it reflectively constructs and
compares interpretations. Tolerance for ambiguity is as essential as the
Marshalltown trowel. More often than acknowledged, inference to the best
hypothesis is a ranking of probabilities, not certitude. Relieved of the
hubris that demands universal laws, archaeologists can incorporate the data
of prehistory into the multiple histories of America. The Land of
Prehistory is not beyond a frontier, but our own backyards.


Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)