[Archport] TAG (full day) session - Univ. of York - UK - December 2007 - call for proposals of papers - please spread - agradecemos divula çã o - agradecemos divulgaci ó n

[Vítor Oliveira Jorge <vojorge@clix.pt>]

Title: TAG (full day) session - Univ. of York - UK - December 2007 - call for proposals of papers - please spread - agradecemos divulação - agradecemos divulgación

Archaeology and the politics of vision in a post-modern context

Coordinators: Professor Julian Thomas (University of Manchester) (julian.thomas@manchester.ac.uk) and Professor Vítor Oliveira Jorge (University of Porto)  (vojorge@clix.pt)

Archaeology is intimately connected to the modern regime of vision.  A concern with optics was fundamental to the Scientific Revolution, and informed the moral theories of the Enlightenment.  And from its inception, archaeology was concerned with practices of depiction and classification that were profoundly scopic in character.  In the 19th century, with the invention of photography and then of the cinema, a certain cultural order - based in the centrality of "civilized" Europe and at the same time in the centrality of male, patriarchal power  reached its apogee.  This had been grounded in the emergence of new class relations based on trade and the free circulation of commodities throughout the Earth, and in the ideology of progress and natural evolution.

To put reality at a distance, to observe, to see and to describe, to control and dominate all the planet, and at the same time to "bring it at home" under the form of the museum, the zoo, the international exhibition, the idealized "nature"  were indeed two faces of the same coin.  The "consumption of places" by travel and tourism (J. Urry) and the creation of "place-myths" are intimately tied to this transformation of the subjectivity of modern people.  The "visual character" and also the desire for direct, sensorial experience of that consumption is obvious.  The idealization of the "material" and the "visual", the notion that to a certain point the image replaced the idea, are widespread today.  And both modernity and post-modernity are well -established notions too, in spite of the fact that the latter refuses be framed, self-defined, and has 
constant fluidity as one of its core characteristics.

But what is the role of archaeology in that changing context?  Are we just one more kind of many workers in the machine of "heritage industry"?  Is it still possible a reflexive, critical standpoint on a system that systematically divides rescue archaeology and academic research, melting at the same time the real and the virtual?

In this session we do not claim to have found any new means of redeeming a critical archaeology, nor do we offer an abstract programme for a cleansed and rejuvenated discipline.  There can be no such thing; the very enunciation of the "new" has become a problematic rhetorical move.

Instead, we encourage the presentation of case studies which, taking particular experiences as a point of departure, may connect them to different kinds of approach and method, dissolving the gap (sometimes so great  that it sounds like a sort of abyss) between "philosophic" and trans-disciplinary discourses and more descriptive/narrative ones.

Perhaps a good point of departure would be to use an imaginative scientific method  a sort of anthropology, or sociology of our own practice  to look upon our common sense and the "take for granted" concepts that we use in everyday archaeology.  Using a politics of sight to focus in a more precise way our most current concepts and intuitions.

http://tag07.york.googlepages.com/archaeology

This session will be published in a book (c. 14 papers).