Is ‘religion’ one of the hard historical archaeological problems?

Alun Featured, The Past 5 Comments , , , , ,

Michael E. Smith lays down an inter­est­ing chal­lenge at Pub­lish­ing Archae­ology: What are the hard prob­lems in Archae­ology? What ques­tions haven’t archae­olo­gists answered and aren’t likely to answer any time soon? A couple of ideas come to mind. I’ll start with the easier prob­lem to express.

Is an ancient his­tory or archae­ology of reli­gion a sens­ible project?

I’ve got an interest in ancient sci­ence, but one of the things most people research­ing ancient sci­ence would agree that sci­ence in the ancient world didn’t really exist. There’s some­thing that’s a more sys­tem­atic inquiry about nature, but some­thing like nat­ural philo­sophy would be a bet­ter descrip­tion for the clas­sical world. I’m not sure that the same term would work for other soci­et­ies because philo­sophy car­ries a lot of bag­gage too. So when aca­dem­ics talk about ancient sci­ence, there’s this under­cur­rent that we’re not talk­ing about sci­ence. Ancient sci­ence is not the same as mod­ern science.

I’ve got an interest in ancient reli­gion too. I’m not so inter­ested in the con­tent as such, more reli­gion in a socio-political con­text. That’s some­thing you can say that makes sense to mod­ern people. If you said the same thing in the ancient world they’d think you were mad. It’d be a bit like say­ing you’re inter­ested in fish, but only the ones that live in water. In the ancient world it was accep­ted that reli­gion was entwined with civic life. There’s a second prob­lem that what we call reli­gion has developed from its ancient roots.
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Another Petition

Alun Politics, Science No Comments , ,

This time in sup­port of Simon Singh.

I thought quite a bit before put­ting this up. While I sup­port Simon Singh, I have doubts about Sense About Sci­ence. Sense About Sci­ence is loosely con­nec­ted with Spiked Online through Liv­ing Marx­ism, which seems to think Chris­topher Mon­ck­ton is a cred­ible speaker on cli­mate change. The cli­mate change debate is one of the major sources of pseudos­cientific non­sense on the web, so it’s dis­ap­point­ing that Sense About Sci­ence has so little on the topic. In the end I signed because Jack of Kent is ask­ing for sig­na­tures. It was a big help that George Mon­biot and Nick Cohen, who are aware of the his­tory of the group, signed. Even now I’m not com­fort­able with the title of the let­ter, which implies sci­ent­ists might some­how be exempt from laws that apply to every­one else.

This is another reason why I’m wary of sign­ing any­thing that gets passed along by a group. If you want to sign with hon­esty you need to look into exactly what you’re sign­ing. Often there simply isn’t time to do that.

Neanderthal Ethics

Alun Politics, Science, The Past 7 Comments , , , ,

Here’s an oddity I star­ted think­ing about fol­low­ing a tweet by Dr Kiki who poin­ted to this art­icle Return of the Neander­thals: If we can resur­rect them through fossil DNA, should we?. The strange thing was my reac­tion to this. The answer seems obvi­ous. I thought I’d missed the boat on this when The Philo­soph­ers’ Magazine blog covered it. Again the author, Jean Kazez, missed the obvi­ous objec­tion, so I left it in a com­ment, and it was eas­ily dis­missed — or rather ignored. See­ing as two people see no prob­lem with what I see as an insur­mount­able prob­lem I have to be open to the idea I’m being dog­matic.
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The Seven Wonders of Human Intellect

Alun Life, Science 3 Comments , , , ,

Duane Smith put up a post about what he called Intel­lec­tual Monu­ments which he thinks every­one should visit. By this he meant that there were some ideas so import­ant that people should make the effort to engage with them the same way they would with his­toric monu­ments. No so much by buy­ing a ticket to see Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics, but being able to ‘answer senior col­lege level ques­tions about them’. I’ve put that in quotes because, hav­ing not gone through the USA’s edu­ca­tional sys­tem, I’m not entirely sure what it means.

He has a good list, but Aydin Örstan also has a good cri­ti­cism in the com­ments, which is that you only have so much time on the planet. You can’t study them all. That’s a fair com­ment. You also can’t visit every his­toric monu­ment on the planet, but some are acknow­ledged as more import­ant than oth­ers. Tak­ing the ana­logy to break­ing point we can do the same by ask­ing what the Seven Won­ders of Human Intel­lect are.

Why seven?

Well first off there’s seven won­ders of the world. More import­antly it’s a good num­ber to argue with. It’s small enough that some pretty major achieve­ments will be left off the list. For instance I think the Michaelson-Morley exper­i­ment which dis­proved the exist­ence of the aether is a bril­liant piece of think­ing. Even so it doesn’t make my list. At the same time it’s not such a small fig­ure that the selec­tion becomes purely arbit­rary. Choos­ing one thing won’t neces­sar­ily make some­thing sim­ilar irrelevant.

Here’s my list. I’m sure I’ll over­look some of your favour­ites too. You can cor­rect me in the com­ments, or on your own blog.

  1. Deep Time
    I’ll start with the dis­cov­ery of Deep Time, by which I mean pre-biblical time, because it’s the con­text which many of the other achieve­ments fit into. The Earth is the stage which every human has walked upon, yet in com­par­ison the time of our own spe­cies is so brief. When look­ing at time in the con­text of bil­lions of years humanity’s suc­cesses, which are built on a found­a­tion of just a few thou­sand years’ writ­ing, become all the more stunning.
  2. Nat­ural Selec­tion
    If the Earth is the stage, then nat­ural selec­tion provides the scenery. There is beauty in the idea that so much com­plex­ity could be derived from such a simple algorithim. The res­ults are astound­ing. I share around half my DNA with the cab­bages grow­ing in my garden. Not a reg­u­lar basis, that would be wor­ry­ing. What I mean is the DNA found in the nuceli of the plant cells shows that way back it and I shared a com­mon ancestor. It’s an extraordin­ary state­ment of the con­nec­tions between all life on the planet.
  3. Mod­ern Atomic The­ory
    The next mind-boggling sim­il­ar­ity is that the cab­bage and I, if you ground us down suf­fi­ciently into out atoms, would be made of very sim­ilar stuff. I don’t know exactly how many things there are on the planet, but if I were to haz­ard a guess I’d say more than 88. I picked the num­ber 88 because, when you ignore Tech­ne­tium, Pro­methium, Astat­ine and Fran­cium, there’s only 88 nat­ural ele­ments that hang around for long. Yet every animal, veget­able and min­eral is made from com­bin­a­tions of these 88 ele­ments. The cyc­li­city of the beha­viour of the ele­ments is even more odd. Why does Potassium act more like Sodium than Cal­cium. The peri­odic table explains how the build­ing blocks of real­ity fit together.
  4. Clas­sical Mech­an­ics
    Plenty of people know that Newton’s work on mech­an­ics is con­sidered to be pos­sibly the greatest sci­entific work of all time. Con­sid­er­ably less know that it was Galileo, rather than Ein­stein, who inven­ted relativ­ity. In the 16th and 17th cen­tur­ies, these two, along with other sci­ent­ists of the day put together the know­ledge of how things move, how they don’t and how they can fit together. When men landed on the moon they were, like New­ton, stand­ing on the shoulders of giants. And the moon too — obviously.
  5. Geo­metry
    This is the first of two lan­guage choices. This one is a nod to poetry. Math­em­at­ics is a lan­guage but I’d fol­low Sundar Sarukkai in say­ing that it is a unique lan­guage. Sarukkai argues that math­em­at­ics is a lan­guage which refers to itself, yet this exer­cise in numer­ical naval-gazing has pro­duced things like π. Hard ‘n’ Phirm described π as an altar. If so this is prob­ably the only altar whose power is acknow­ledged around the world. Apart from a pos­sibly apo­cryphal Amer­ican state.
  6. Music
    My other nod to lan­guage is Music. I wondered which sort of music, but that kind of misses the point. Music seems to be another uni­ver­sal which may even exist out­side humans. Steve Mithen has argued that singing was the pre­cursor to lan­guage. Look­ing at the calls of gib­bons, who sing duets or even whale and bird song, there may be some­thing in this. At the same time I would give a nod in par­tic­u­lar to the music of 19th and 20th cen­tury Amer­ica. From the Blues, to Rag­time, to Jazz bey­ond even to Hip-Hop it’s an art-form which has spread across the world.

And now I’m stuck. I’d like to add the Moon land­ings, which were some­thing I think must have been a dream of a lot of Human­ity from the time human­ity first exis­ted. Still, look­ing at Duane’s list I’m also aware of so much else I’ve over­looked. Writ­ing is a very strong con­tender, the abil­ity to pass inform­a­tion through time to future gen­er­a­tions is incred­ible, but it needs some­thing more. Hence:

  • Set­tle­ment
    Some­time around the end of the last Ice Age some­thing unpre­ced­en­ted happened. Remains dat­ing from this period have been found which are noth­ing like any­thing that exis­ted before. The first set­tle­ments formed. Humans are unbe­liev­ably social creatures. It’s espe­cially hard to believe if you’ve ever been stuck in a cheap hotel in Ben­idorm with some of them. Non­ethe­less humans live together in their mil­lions. It’s the kind of com­plex­ity that you only see in other creatures like ants or ter­mites, yet at the same time a human set­tle­ment is unmis­tak­ably dif­fer­ent. It star­ted with the stage and scenery. The devel­op­ment of set­tle­ment provided the act­ors, the stage­hands, the tech­ni­cians and even pos­sibly the play (that last is a bold claim and I’ll try and jus­tify it in a future blog post). It allowed for the cre­ation of all the monu­ments above. One of the most stun­ning achieve­ments of human intel­lect is that they have found a way of liv­ing together.

Feel free to tell me I’m wrong and add your own list below, bet­ter still write it up on your own blog and leave a link to it here.

Reburial Redux

Alun Politics, The Past 1 Comment , , ,

Fol­low­ing Yvonne’s com­ment, I’ve uploaded the two pod­casts I recor­ded on Pagan reburial in the UK to Box.net. You should be able to access them at:
http://www.box.net/shared/z5k2bv7ao9
http://www.box.net/shared/sa1ojvzmnl

The reburial of remains issue is live again and it’s inter­est­ing for a couple of reas­ons. One is the eth­ics of study­ing and stor­ing human remains and the claims a reli­gious com­munity can make on the rest of soci­ety. This makes good head­lines. The other requires a bit more thought. Do the concept of the Pagan (or Chris­tian or Muslim) com­munity make sense?

The cur­rent reburial flap is centred around a fringe Pagan group. From the pod­casts you’ll see it’s not a main­stream Pagan pos­i­tion. Yet really what the pub­lic and the news media want from Pagans is simple and daffy ste­reo­type. White robes, long beards, made-up names and lin­eages. We’ll skip point­ing fin­gers at the dresses prom­in­ent Chris­ti­ans wear. The point is what makes a good story are people who play up to the ste­reo­type. Enter CoBDO®.

CoBDO® is/are the the Council(s) of Brit­ish Druid Orders. Back in the day when they were CoBDO® they were, if I under­stand cor­rectly a minor­ity group amongst Pagans. Since then CoBDO® have split from CoBDO West fol­low­ing a fight in a pub. I don’t know if CoBDO West is a registered trade­mark or not if they leg­ally a CoBDO or not. Hence the vague­ness over whether CoBDO is sin­gu­lar or plural. Any­way it’s all a big fight and the Judean People’s Front is hop­ing to stick it to the People’s Front of Judea by grabbing bones from a museum in Ave­bury for burial. Even if Eng­lish Her­it­age do say the bones can be rebur­ied, there’ll be a big fight to be had over whether it should be a CoBDO® or CoBDO West cere­mony which is performed.

This is all a con­cern to the major­ity of Pagans who don’t feel the need to get involved in a big shout­ing match to make a point. By play­ing to the worst ste­reo­types of the media a small group of people is get­ting to define what it means to be Pagan. That’s why I found the two inter­views with Yvonne Abur­row and Emma Restall-Orr inter­est­ing. You have two people from two dif­fer­ent Pagan pos­i­tions both with cri­ti­cisms of this cam­paign. It’s a micro­cosm of a pos­i­tion taken by the media for all reli­gions. Journ­al­ists and politi­cians are quite happy to talk with lead­ers of the Muslim com­munity or the Jew­ish com­munity, but is there a com­munity and who gets to speak for all? Does acced­ing to reli­gious requests mean that the gov­ern­ment will be endors­ing one form of a reli­gion over another?

As for the con­tent of the argu­ment that the bones should be rebur­ied, that’s an argu­ment for tomorrow.

Is it only involuntary euthanasia which is acceptable?

Alun Politics ,

2008 was a lousy year. 2009 con­tin­ues in the same way. I haven’t put any­thing about what happened in 2008 online yet. I’d skip the cur­rent prob­lems too were it not for an art­icle in the Times Higher Edu­ca­tion this week recently: “It is mon­strously wrong that patients can­not ask for euthanasia”. I’m tack­ling a prob­lem. It’s not the one below, but it’s close.

I am in prin­ciple in favour of vol­un­tary euthanasia. I know a lot of people aren’t and believe their beliefs should be imposed on other people. It seems par­tic­u­larly cruel form of bigotry to impose those beliefs on a dying per­son who may not have the strength to fight back. But there are good reas­ons to be wary of leg­al­ising euthanasia.

The most com­pel­ling reason I know is the pre­cau­tion­ary prin­ciple. There is a con­cern that if euthanasia is leg­al­ised then people will be pres­sured to take it as a way it against their wishes. While I think I should have the right to end my life at my choos­ing, I cer­tainly don’t think I should have that right if it means that other people lose theirs. The claim is that if you ban vol­un­tary euthanasia then invol­un­tary euthanasia will not happen.

Events in recent weeks lead me to believe this is a flawed argument.

As a thought exper­i­ment con­sider patient X. X’s mind has det­ri­or­ated to the state that he no longer knows where or when he is. They don’t know why he is where he is. Addi­tion­ally he doesn’t want to remain where he is. He wants to go home, which is 30 miles and 60 years away. Frus­tra­tion at being kept from home has made him grow prone to viol­ence. This makes him a danger to other people as well as him­self, so when he takes gets agit­ated he is sed­ated. These days he usu­ally gets agit­ated wak­ing up in what remains a strange place full of people who, he believes, are inject­ing him with some­thing to keep him there.

The ques­tion is: If the hos­pital con­tin­ues to sed­ate X until his heart stops in the interests of keep­ing him com­fort­able, is this a form of invol­un­tary euthanasia?

I think this is partly a mat­ter of your own iden­tity. If you see your­self purely as a being of flesh and blood, then clearly it’s noth­ing like euthanasia. The hospital’s actions are more likely to be pro­long­ing the life of the patient. I don’t know any­one who takes that kind of view though. We store our iden­tit­ies in more than our meat.

If you take the view that you are your mind the situation’s more com­plex. If X were in a per­sist­ant veget­at­ive state then the ques­tion doesn’t mat­ter because mind has gone. But in the para­graph above the mind, in a form, is there. If mind is a func­tion of the body, then does pro­long­ing the life of the body really pro­long the life of the mind? Pos­sibly in a calendrical sense, but in this case it seems the life of the body is being pro­longed by remov­ing the mind. It is the capa­city for inde­pend­ent action which is seen as the prob­lem. That’s the stick­ing point because if we are remov­ing inde­pend­ent action then what exactly are we preserving?

On the Times Higher Edu­ca­tion art­icle Car­los Martinez-Thiem argues that Soran Reader should wait for a ‘nat­ural death’. I hope he hasn’t fully con­sidered what a ‘nat­ural death’ is likely to be for someone who has lost most of their cog­nit­ive abil­ity. At best it would be wan­der­ing out and dying of expos­ure. It could be walk­ing into traffic, and injur­ing oth­ers. It doesn’t seem a very human response. So instead we cor­ral patients against their will and if neces­sary sed­ate them. Pos­sibly until what passes for their con­scious life is one con­tinu­ous round of sed­a­tion. I can under­stand why it’s neces­sary, you can’t leave someone to harm oth­ers, but it’s hardly a good solu­tion. I think what he means is that it would not be his wish to be removed from life sup­port. I can respect that, but I don’t his his own desires for him­self are suf­fi­cient jus­ti­fic­a­tion to impose his will on other.

I don’t want to say too much about what is hap­pen­ing at the moment. There are good days and bad days and it’s cer­tainly not as clear cut as the prob­lem above. As always with real life there are com­plic­a­tions. Some­times a thought exper­i­ment can help to pin­point what mat­ters. Another tan­gen­tially related link is How do you meas­ure qual­ity of life? at Com­ment is Free.

Whitley on Post-Positivism

Alun The Past No Comments , , ,

I’ve finally got my hands on ‘Pre­his­tory and Post-Positivist Sci­ence: A Pro­leg­omenon to Cog­nit­ive Archae­ology’ by David Whitely this week, and I wish I read it much sooner. It would have been fun on my MPhil course where much of the debate seemed to be about the great divide between Pro­ces­sual and Post-Processual archae­olo­gies. I found that unsat­is­fy­ing because the approaches I was inter­ested in were those which were cross­ing between sci­entific and his­tor­ical approaches. It seems I wasn’t the only one and David Whit­ley had been there earlier and writ­ten about it.

Whitley’s paper is inter­est­ing because he hits the gap between the empir­i­cists and relat­iv­ists in the centre. In doing so he argues that cog­nit­ive archae­ology need not be sub­ject­ive and relat­iv­ist, that you can study it sci­en­tific­ally. Equally he shows that the abstract struc­tures which pro­ces­su­al­ists study, such as eco­nomic sys­tems, are no more real that the ideas which cog­nit­ive archae­olo­gists seek to study.

The examples he uses are stud­ies of rock art. A lot of the mater­ial is African rock art which is a weak spot for me. He shows that ana­lo­gical reas­on­ing can be used to inter­pret Iron Age rock art, des­pite the fact that the people who cre­ated it were dead. This should be no great shakes to pro­ces­su­al­ists or post-processualists who are happy using eth­no­graph­ies for ana­lo­gies. From this he moves to Palaeo­lithic European Rock Art, which is another weak spot for me, but per­haps frac­tion­ally less so. Here he cites work by Lewis-Williams and Dowson who show that there are cross-cultural sim­il­ar­it­ies between peoples under the effect of hal­lu­cin­at­ory drugs, and then go on to argue that the bio­lo­gical sim­il­ar­ity of humans means that the same ana­logy can be applied back into the Palaeo­lithic. It means that a gap of 30,000 years of time doesn’t have to be pure guess­work. It’s bridged by eth­no­graphy and neuro­psy­cho­logy which lead to the same conclusion.

This jus­ti­fies a pro­voc­at­ive state­ment he makes, which is highly import­ant in his other case study. After cit­ing someone who is cau­tious of inter­pret­ing a rock art site because the site is a couple of cen­tur­ies older than the his­tor­ical record he notes:

My con­ten­tion here is with the logic by which it is assumed that, since 200 years have passed, change has neces­sar­ily occurred, as if time itself was the cause of change. This, in other words, is a gradu­al­ist doc­trine which mis­takenly con­fuses the fact that because change occurs over time, time is some­how caus­ally implic­ated in change.

He gives a couple of example cita­tions I’ll need to fol­low up, because while he is lit­er­ally right I’m not sure if it matters.

I would argue change is inev­it­able through errors in rep­lic­a­tion of cul­ture. This may be in edu­ca­tion of the next gen­er­a­tion, or it may be a case of mis-remembering and so acci­dent­ally innov­at­ing. Add in the fact that people are react­ing to a dynamic social envir­on­ment any­way, and in react­ing chan­ging that same envir­on­ment for other people, and change with time seems extremely dif­fi­cult to avoid. I’m not sure if that neg­ates his point or not. He argues that the pro­cess of change needs to be jus­ti­fied and in the light of evid­ence show­ing that things such as ritual are extremely res­ist­ant to change, change can­not be assumed and a mech­an­ism has to be shown, By show­ing a mech­an­ism I don’t prove him wrong as such, but from my point of view stasis is the anom­aly which needs to be explained.

His other example does this admir­ably. It’s his own work on the Coso Range in Cali­for­nia and shows what a huge prob­lem lack of change is. Set­tle­ment in the Coso Range appears to have sta­bil­ised between 3,000 to 2,000 BC, and noth­ing much changed until the his­tor­ical period. Set­tle­ment pat­terns remained the same des­pite changes in envir­on­mental con­di­tions, and the changes observed in other peoples in the west­ern Great Basin. He uses the rock art of the region, which is anom­al­ous as the key to under­stand­ing the soci­ety. Because he rules out change as a neces­sity, he can use eth­no­graphic inter­pret­a­tions of the rock art to build his model of soci­ety. For Whit­ley hunt­ing in this region is closely related to sham­an­ism, and prowess in sham­an­ism was used to account for suc­cess in hunt­ing and then in soci­ety. The sham­an­istic power struc­ture was there­fore self-reinforcing. It’s an inter­est­ing idea because his eth­no­graph­ies are not merely applied to the rock art he’s been study­ing but also the soci­ety as a whole. The rock art is a trace of the world­view of the Coso peoples who observed their cos­mos through the fil­ter of their sham­an­istic beliefs. The mech­an­ics of the world were bur­ied beneath these beliefs and so it is only through cog­ni­tion that the sta­bil­ity of the soci­ety can be explained.

I don’t dis­agree with this inter­pret­a­tion, I’m not sure to what extent it is post-positivist, rely­ing as heav­ily as it does on eth­no­graphic inter­pret­a­tion. Instead I’d argue his two examples com­pli­ment each other to show that cog­nit­ive archae­ology can draw on sci­entific and his­tor­ical meth­ods and need not be hos­tile to either.

It is heavy going. His paper ‘Issues in Archae­oastro­nomy and Rock Art’ in the recent Oxford pro­ceed­ings is much more access­ible, but not as in depth. Put­ting the two together it’s clear his view of post-positivism isn’t just a con­jec­ture he’s pulled from the air, but groun­ded in obser­va­tion of archae­olo­gists and cur­rent (or at least 20 year old) philo­soph­ical debate. I’ve got his new book on the archae­ology of reli­gion on order, so I’ll be really inter­ested to see what that is like.

Photo Hand Prints (cc) Xipe Totec39.

…but is it the opiate of the masses?

Alun Featured, Politics, Science 3 Comments , , ,

heracles
The Choice of Her­acles, Paolo di Mat­teis, 1712

What is it that makes a happy life? People have been ask­ing that for mil­len­nia and I have a few minutes while I wait to col­lect someone, so I might not have a com­pre­hens­ive answer. The reason I’m ask­ing is that Reli­gion ‘linked to happy life’ is one of the most emailed stor­ies on the BBC News site today. I have to admit I’m sur­prised that there are so few responses to the story on Tech­nor­ati, but maybe every­one like me is won­der­ing what a happy life is.

Or maybe I’m a bit early with the story and when this goes live that Tech­nor­ati link will prove me wrong.
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Like the postmodernism generator, but funnier

Alun Life, Politics No Comments , , ,

Good news for pomo­phobes, Julian Bag­gini has a new game pok­ing fun at cer­tain crit­ical pos­tures in aca­demia: Žižuku. I much prefer this to the post­mod­ern­ism gen­er­ator as a satir­ical tool.

The post­mod­ern­ism gen­er­ator is some­thing that fol­lows lan­guage rules to pro­duce gib­ber­ish. This is funny, so long as you don’t read the sort of mater­ial that it pur­ports to send up. I’m not say­ing that a lot of post­mod­ern­ism isn’t twaddle, but it’s a recog­nis­ably dif­fer­ent sort of twaddle. The reason Sokal’s hoax was funny was that it was indis­tin­guish­able from some of the straight mater­ial in Social Text. Essays from the post­mod­ern­ism gen­er­ator aren’t going to pass muster with another journal, even if the ref­er­ences are altered. Com­par­ing the out­put of the Post­mod­ern­ism Gen­er­ator with post­mod­ern schol­ar­ship is like com­par­ing a Lorem Ipsum gen­er­ator to a Latin text. Super­fi­cially sim­ilar, but not close enough.

What I do think is inter­est­ing is that if you loaded it with genu­ine ref­er­ences, and a bit more them­atic con­nectiv­ity then v2.0 might pro­duce genu­ine pomo text but that’s another matter.

Žižuku requires a bit more work, but I think it’s a lot fun­nier because I can fore­see this hav­ing ser­i­ous poten­tial. It’s from Baggini’s review of Sla­voj Žižek’s Viol­ence. In it Bag­gini notes a con­stant.

Žižek arranges his book like a piece of music with dif­fer­ent move­ments, with chapter sub­head­ings such as “allegro mod­er­ato”. This is fit­ting, because Žižek is some­thing of a vir­tu­oso, but as a player of para­doxes. His great riffs take one of a finite num­ber of forms. There is the simple psy­cho­ana­lytic trope of claim­ing that how­ever some­thing seems, its true nature is the pre­cise oppos­ite. Then you have the repeated claim that a cer­tain pos­i­tion entails its oppos­ite, but that both sides of the para­dox are equally real. Then again, there is the reversal of com­mon sense, in which, whatever the received wis­dom is, Zizek pos­tu­lates the opposite.

And that really is it: Žižek simply repeats these intel­lec­tual man­oeuvres again and again, albeit bril­liantly, sup­ple­ment­ing them with Lacanian embel­lish­ments such as the objet petit, the Other and the Real.

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Indiana Jones and the Post-Processual Archaeologists

Alun Politics, The Past 3 Comments , , , ,

Every­one else is link­ing to the trailer, so I’ll link to a paper from The Nor­we­gian Archae­olo­gical Review, ‘Why Indi­ana Jones is Smarter Than the Post-Processualists’ by John Bint­liff.

The most remark­able fea­ture of this latest con­fer­ence was the way in which speaker after speaker, Brit­ish and Con­tin­ental, dis­played a total dis­reg­ard for affil­i­ation to ‘Pro­ces­su­al­ist’ or ‘Post-Processualist’ fac­tions, and deployed an eclectic atti­tude to the vari­ous object­iv­ist and sub­ject­iv­ist approaches debated over in the last 20 years. Yet equally con­sist­ently, this mer­ger of formerly oppos­i­tional tra­di­tions within a new prag­mat­ics of prac­tice, saw the speaker ground­ing his or her feet on evid­ence, an archae­olo­gical record, test­abil­ity.

It dates from 1993, but has stood up well. The per­sist­ence of pro­ces­sual and post-processual camps in archae­ology and earn­est dis­cus­sion of them says much more about the social rela­tion­ships between archae­olo­gists than it does about the past.

I need to read more Wittgenstein.

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