Once upon a time: Truth as an Expression
Tim Neal (The University of Sheffield)
This photo essay was presented at the Association of Social Anthropologist’s conference in London in 2007. It was part of a panel organised around the theme of “Modernising archaeological tourism: from image conflict to archaeological expressionism” convened by Ian Russell and Andrew Cochrane. Taking up the theme of mentality/materiality, this paper suggests that such duality can dissolve through archaeological/heritage tourism. However the normative impulse that informs the latter cannot be maintained where this non-dualist perspective is to flourish.
This paper has been difficult to dislodge from my mind and onto paper. Something about the subject of the session it was prepared for rather than just my own approach. Materialities and mentalities as a subject spoke directly to me because it finds itself at the interface between archaeology and anthropology, material being in a sense the matter of archaeology while mentalities suggest an anthropological domain. Also perhaps, this is a didactic issue that I am raising: how to teach, or facilitate learning, without simply effacing other teachings or learning?
When I sent through my abstract Ian suggested that I might like to offer a substantive example to illustrate my paper. I replied that I would try to do this while in France researching where to carry out my fieldwork for a PhD.
This is the story of that attempt to illustrate.
I was visiting the department of the Ariege in the Pyrennees. My PhD research is based around an extended period of participant observation in a French commune with a significant proportion of resident and partially resident British migrants. My interest in this was initially prompted by a concern to explore the way in which British migration was activated by a British sensibility towards aspects of European cultural heritage such as Romanesque architecture, deserted uplands and surviving ‘peasant’ traditions. I decided to visit the cave of Niaux in the foothills of the Pyrennees. This cave, much like similar caves in the Dordogne where I had been a guide, was decorated in the late upper Palaeolithic some 14,000 years ago, with friezes of bison, horses and more abstract designs. I duly phoned the cave and booked myself for the 3.30 visit.
As I drove over the mountains to the cave I listened to the radio in the car. I tuned into the French culture programme to which I listened hoping to improve my ‘cultural’ French. The programme was about the destruction of aboriginal rock art by mining interests in Australia and consisted of the witness of various French anthropologists to the effects of mining and the unthinkable demolition of a possible 40,000 year tradition of decorative art. As one of the commentators said:
“Would we, the French, allow Lascaux to be destroyed by such actions? These paintings are at least as valuable”.
The programme continued with a discussion of the movement of ethnographic items into the Musee de l’Homme in the 1930s detailing the diaries of the collectors en route. As I approached the cave I passed graffiti complaining of the ‘bear’, the protection of the Pyrenean Brown bear being hotly contested in the area.
I arrived at the cave with the programme still playing and parked my car in the shadow of the imposing sculpture that framed the entrance. I waited in a queue to collect my ticket.
I noticed the conflation in the display of different types of heritage, wolves, dinosaurs, snakes, decorated caves and donkeys.
I noticed the poster that offered the chance to ‘become a time explorer’; ‘To elucidate the mystery of the first men’, to ‘pierce the mystery of the Knights’ and to ‘discover the treasures of our ancestors’.
I observed the confusion of items on sale from Cave Beer to Palaeolithic statuettes from the Czech Republic.
Once I had paid for my ticket we waited while the guide smoked a cigarette and then lined up while he presented the length of the walk through the cave and outlined the plan.
Here the images stop. For photography was not allowed. We followed the guide for some 400 meters through the cave. He stopped at various points to note aspects of topography. To inform us that we must not touch the cave walls. To complain about the crying and slow progress of a small child and of course to discuss the Palaeolithic.
I pass over the details his presentation of the cave for I am - was - more struck by the movement itself through the cave. In single file. Here ducking. Here slipping. Holding torches. Passing much 17th to 19th century graffiti. Until we arrived at the roped off areas in the final gallery where the paintings were preserved. We were taken through them one by one. We asked questions. We were answered. We left. Following the guide back.
My interest had been ignited more by the later graffiti than the earlier paintings and I tried in secret to photograph them on my return, including one of Louis Napoleon 1809.
We left into the light and enjoyed the contrast.
I walked onto the sculpture and noted the continued inscriptions of the present day.
At the end of this edifice I looked at the scenery framed in its picturesque proportions.
How does this fit with materialities and mentalities?
Firstly is the coincidence of my hearing the radio programme about the destruction of aboriginal rock painting. The problem with coincidence is that it appears to be just that. May be it is more of a counterpoint, something that emerges, auditory in this instance.
My background, as I have said elsewhere, is above all as a guide. A tourist guide, hence my concern with this panel. This professional work developed in the direction of archaeological guiding in Palaeolithic sites, later I worked more broadly as a cultural landscape guide taking walking holidays through, and I quote, ‘the most unspoilt landscapes of Europe’.
I found the experience of this visit in fact quite liberating. The guide managed to encourage speculation, to draw forth imagination by always saying that there was ‘no evidence’ for interpretation that was final. He allowed an active spectatorship that moved beyond consumption. However on the other hand I felt that the somatic lesson of how to queue, to pay money, to wait, to walk in line, not to touch, to ask questions, to put my hand up, was re-enforced.
As has been discussed in other sessions the guide can be understood as both presenting the literal self of the guide, their own personal narration or negotiation of a site or wider locale, and at the same time the guide offers the history of the development of the self, of how we arrive ‘here’ at this moment in a cultural, for want of a better term, trajectory.
The guide builds a narrative of the west that allows for a free appreciation of contested histories that lie everywhere. By free I mean ‘completed’ maybe. Ended and having become moments or movements in history. The guided, the tourist, is the inheritor and through this process finds their rightful place in a completed present.
Here emerges one of the earliest critiques of heritage in fact, its agency in the romanticization of contested industrial pasts. For example the ‘working village’ or the ‘working mill’ but clearly without the hardship that was inscribed in the bodies of those originally participating.
I am suggesting that archaeological narratives are an expression of a set of relations which tend towards this. Tourism, of which my visit is an example, does not necessarily have an impulse to the production of a narrative that would be recognised by archaeology. Leisure, life-style, fulfilment of desire are features of tourism and are not considered to central to the archaeological project. Yet the archaeologist is engaged in a project that shares these features of leisure, life-style and fulfilment of desire but they are features of the archaeologist’s ‘life’ rather than their ‘work’. Interpretive archaeology acknowledges that all knowledge is produced, or constructed, and moreover is produced in certain contexts; historical, social, gendered and political. Abstract scientific knowledge in the context of material gained from excavation only gains in meaning by its engagement in an ongoing interpretive process through which meaning is made.
So while on the one hand the features that might characterise tourism are external to archaeology, the social production of knowledge within the discipline is accepted. Is it not that archaeology is as intensely socialised as tourism itself?
This is not a contentious point – archaeology is an intensely socialised discipline. Its engagement with tourism brings this further to the forefront however because it takes the sociality out of the control of the professional archaeologist and over to a lay public. A lay archaeological audience is not an uncommon phrase and has significance for this discussion. Tourism emerges with capitalist society and economy and developed principally in northern Europe and America where the protestant ethos was also highly evident.
The position of the professional archaeologist is perhaps like that of Protestantism, there is no direct mediation of the route to the deity other than personal responsibility. In other words professional archaeology cannot contain its purchase on truth but is obliged to recognise that there are many routes there.
The contentious point, if there is one, is that the truth, as understood by professional archaeologists does not matter. It is not the defining feature of archaeology. What defines the discipline is its subject and that subject is not truth. That subject is the past. The past is a mentality that can only be understood through the present by definition. Tourism is the present and tourist experience of archaeology is part of the discipline and is not less truthful because of supposed inaccuracy or lack of fit with the extended archaeological collections.
To sum up. Archaeology frames the present through the past and vice versa yet the two are not easily separated. It takes part in the construction of a trajectory or narration of a completed past. Tourism, in this example materialised through 18th century and modern graffiti, always challenges this, while at the same time becoming a potential object for archaeology itself. These are vital events and archaeological tourism brings them within the remit of the discipline itself.
See here for the original session abstract:
http://www.nomadit.co.uk/asa/asa07/panels.php5?PanelID=203
See this link for a review of the session: http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2007/05/association_of_social_anthropo.html