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February 5, 2010

The realities of the past: archaeology, object-orientations, pragmatology

Posted by Christopher Witmore

I have been fascinated by the implications of the speculative turn for archaeology for some time now (Graham Harman's blog provides a conduit to the world of speculative realism; Harman currently has several books in press on the topic). I have been pulling together several pieces--aspects of which were presented in previous Theoretical Archaeology Group Meetings (Columbia and Stanford) and at the recent CHAT in Oxford--for forthcoming publications. What appears here is an extremely condensed version of a chapter for Brent Fortenberry and Laura McAtackney's CHAT proceedings volume.

Archaeologists and historians inscribe the past as that which exists in advance of the present. Here, to exist in advance of has been synonymous, at least under a pervasive modernist empiricism, with existing apart from. By rendering the past as separate from the present, archaeologists and historians have enjoyed the ability to endow those things regarded as of the past with a determinative specificity that renders subsequent actor-relations as purely derivative. In other words, irrespective of any later adventures that may befall the marbles sculpted under Phidias in the 5th century BCE—that is, short of their utter destruction—they persist as enduring objects. No matter where they go, the marbles will always be, and have always been, the Parthenon Marbles whose genesis occurred in the Athens of 2500 years ago. This, as it is well known, is the stance taken by the Greek Ministry of Culture, which seeks the restitution of the sculptures.

“There is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere,” Alfred North Whitehead famously stated, because “[e]verything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity” (1978, 244). With this “ontological principle”, the past, which the modern empiricism mentioned in the preceding paragraph rendered as detached and broken from the present, is, from the angle of this former past, redistributed. For despite the fact that we all had childhoods that we may recall in various ways, what exists of our childhoods (well, my childhood)—boxed-up Atari video games, Kenner action figures, books, journals, photographs, marks of height at birthdays inscribed on the closet doorway—are simultaneously present in the various recesses of our parents’ house. To be alive is to coexist with such ‘mnemonic traces’ of what was (refer to: Gonzalez-Ruibal 2006; Jones 2008; Lucas 2005; Olivier 2004 and 2008; Schlanger 2004; Witmore 2006 and 2007). Even the supposed continuity I perceive through the ordering of experience in grey-matter recall is located in an occasion; more precisely thinking constitutes an actual occasion (see, for example, Hutchins 1995; also Malafouris 2008). With the ontological principle all pasts are our contemporaries.

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‘Traces’ and ‘pasts’, ontologically speaking, are grounded in actual entities and no such entity can ever exist separate from its relations. For an entity to be so would, for Whitehead, result in a ‘vacuous actually’. As Steven Shaviro puts it “[n]othing comes into being once and for all; and nothing just sustains itself in being, as if by inertia or its own inner force” (2009, 20). Whether the Parthenon Marbles or a box of odd and ends associated my childhood, the past has to be worked for (also Shanks 2007).

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September 14, 2009

Island of Abandonment

Posted by Alfredo Gonzalez Ruibal

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Mandji is as beautiful and perfect as a tourist poster. But it is also a rubbish dump of history.

A few bungalows are being built in the expectation of tourism. But tourists do not come. And the bungalows decay, even before being finished, while their owners leave for France or Spain in search of better economic opportunities.

There are countless logs stuck in the flat, siliceous beaches of Mandji—plastic-tagged and iron-chained trunks that fell from the ships transporting tropical wood to Europe.

There are plastic sandals that somebody lost in Libreville and half-carved canoes where white crabs climb.

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June 1, 2009

Innovation, future(s) making and archaeology

Posted by Christopher Witmore

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Components for wind turbines at port in Nafplion, Greece.

Last Wednesday I attended a workshop at MIT entitled “Relocating innovation: Places and material practices of future making”. Convened by Lucy Suchman (in residence with the Department of Anthropology at MIT for the Spring of 2009), Endre Dányi and Laura Watts, all of the Centre for Science Studies at the University of Lancaster (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/), the workshop sought to critically engage with discourses of ‘innovation’ through the comparative juxtaposition of “three different sites of social, technological, and political future making”: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Orkney, Scotland and the Hungarian Parliament. A basic premise of the workshop was that futures, or more precisely ‘future(s) making’, are located.

It helps to situate this premise—futures are located—by thinking about it historically. Thales in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, al-Haytham at Dar Al-Hekma, Edison in his laboratory Menlo Park, President Obama in the Oval Office; with each figure and site one encounters scenarios where horizons for substantial potentiality were designed. Whether we speak of geometry, optics, electricity or efficiency targets for the American Auto Industry, the practices undertaken with each site translated into futures that were made. (Of course, none of these futures were inevitable. The clinamen, Lucretius’ indeterminate swerve, is always a possibility.)

By centering our account upon these key figures, it is perhaps easy to see why popular culture persistently regards innovation as the province of the lone genius. However, Suchman, Dányi and Watts are much more cautious. Future(s) making, as the workshop sought to probe in more depth, is shaped by heterogeneous network of entities, contestations, utterly specific qualities of place and culturally oriented material practices. With each site of future(s) making one also encounters innovation at work.

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April 12, 2006

The Borderland. Ethiopia.

Posted by Alfredo Gonzalez Ruibal

Slavery/Fascism/Colonialism: Landscape in Gubba.

In a hill over the border town of Gubba, very close to Sudan, stand the remains of a small palace. Its owner, Hamdan Abu Shok, was an infamous slave trader in the late 19th and early 20th century. The surviving brick arcades are redolent of Islamic architecture elsewhere. The ruins look vaguely medieval and out of place – too ancient and too modern at the same time. When the palace was constructed, it was the only permanent building in the region of Gubba.

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The place is linked to slavery from another point of view. In the 17th and 18th c. the Sinashas, an isolated Omotic group, found refuge from slave raiders in the rock shelters dotting the steep mountains around the palace.

Hill and palace were occupied by Mussolini’s army between 1936 and 1941. British Blenheim bombers razed the place in October 1940. In and around the bomb craters we found porcelain from Abu Shok’s service, stucco from the walls, a copper shower head, an Italian bayonet scabbard, food cans stamped “Roma” and “Eritrea”, an 8 mm shell casing from a Breda machine gun, indigenous hand-made pottery. A few paces away, a rusty and hollowed Ford 1927 Model T, probably used by the Italian officers commanding the base – 60 years afterwards, cars are still something futuristic in Gubba.

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Not far from the hills, close to a centuries-old baobab, two ruined brick structures: the remains of a school built by the British after the invasion of Ethiopia in 1941, when they thought they could annex the Ethiopian borderland to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

Feudal monarchy/Marxism/Post-industrial energy crisis: The road between Gubba and Gilgel Beles.

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A dirt road, the main route through Metekel. It is probably not different to that used by 19th century travellers and elephant hunters, by slave raiders and gold traders well before (the Axumites came to this area for gold in the 6th AD) and by the King of Kings Haile Selassie in January 1941.

Not far from Gubba, four shattered trucks and a Soviet ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft gun, all torn apart by several RPGs and landmines. The red star on the ammunition box. Many 23 mm shell casings on both sides of the road. An ambush on a government convoy in the late 1980s. All the grasses and bushes around are burnt by swidden cultivators.

The local inhabitants are the Gumuz, a Nilo-Saharan group. Men walk around with bows and arrows, women with carrying sticks, transporting calabashes and plastic jerrycans. Amidst the dense savannah forest a few bamboo huts and mud-covered granaries appear here and there. Most villages are located far from the road to avoid slave raids – that only ended in the 1940s.

A savannah woodland of 85,000 Ha, formerly belonging to the Dach’igra clan, has been deforested by a European multinational for producing biodiesel.

The textures of daily life/The Fall of Berlin: A Gumuz village near Gilgel Beles.

An inventory of artefacts inside a Gumuz house:

-5 Pots for making and storing sorghum beer (tich’a).
-1 Pot for storing water (kula).
-1 Beer filter (dinga).
-4 Pots for making and serving porridge (antersa, mashiakwa).
-12 Calabashes for storing things and drinking (nekwa, baggha).
-1 stick for removing the stew (yinge).
-2 baskets for sieving grain (kakea).
-3 storing baskets (dikufa).
-2 beds – Sudanese style (intertwinned leather strings).
-1 wooden stool (dugu).
-2 plastic jerrycans.
-6 plastic and aluminium glasses.
-1 electric torch.
-2 grinding stones (gisha).
-2 hoes (t’äba).
-1 digging stick (gombe).
-1 axe (dela).
-2 bamboo carrying sticks (ndigha).
-1 net for fishing made with vegetable fibers (igha).
-2 bamboo bows (yedegwa) and seven arrows.
-1 PPS 43 Soviet sub-machine gun (Pistolet-Pulemet Sudaeva), dated 1944.

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