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IDEOLOGIES IN ARCHAEOLOGY I ~ l I I I Ideologies in Archaeology EDITED BY REINHARD BERNBECK AND RANDALL H. McGUIRE The University of Arizona Press • Tucson The University ofA rizona Press © 2011 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved www.uapress.arizona.edu Library ofC ongress Cataloging-in-Publicanon v=r Ideologies in archaeology/ edited by Reinhard Bernbeck and Randall H. McGuire. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8165-2673-4 (c loth : alk. paper) 1. Archaeology-Philosophy. 2. Archaeology-Political aspecrs. 3. Archaeology-Social aspecrs. 4. Ideology. . I. Bernbeck, Reinhard, 1958- II. McGuire, Randall H. CC72J34 2011 930.1-do3 2011019162 Publication of this book is made possible in part by Harpur College of Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York. 0 Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper containing a minimum of 30% postconsumcr waste and processed chlorine free. 16 IS 14 13 12 II 6 S 4 3 2 I Contents Ideology and Archaeology: Between Imagination and Relational Practice 1 REINHARD BERNBECK AND RANDALL H. McGUIRE I. Complex Relations: Archaeologists' Ideologies and Those of Their Subjects 1. A Conceptual History ofldeology and Its Place in Archaeology 15 REINHARD BERNBECK AND RANDALL H. McGUIRE 2. A Hegemonic Struggle of Cosmological Proportions: The Traditional House of the Malagasy Highlands in the Face oflndigenous and Foreign Regimes 60 SUSAN KUS AND VICTOR RAHARIJAONA 3. The Archaeology of"Shoppertainment": Ideology, Empowerment, and Place in Consumer Culture 90 MATTHEW COCHRAN AND PAUL MULLINS 4. Archaeology in the Public Interest: Tourist Effects and Other Paradoxes That Come with Heritage Tourism 107 UZI BARAM 5. Imperial Ideologies and Hidden Transcripts: A Case from Akkadian-Period Mesopotamia 130 SUSAN POLLOCK 6. The Illusion of Power, the Power oflllusion: Ideology and the Concretization ofS ocial Difference in Early-Iron Age Europe 151 BETTINA ARNOLD vi CONTENTS II. Ideological Dimensions of Archaeological Discourse 7. Inventing Human Nature 175 KATHLEEN STERLING 8. Histories ofM ound Building and Scales of Explanation in Archaeology 194 SUSAN M. ALT 9. Secularism as Ideology: Exploring Assumptions of Cultural Equivalence in Museum Repatriation 212 CHRISTOPHER N. MATTHEWS AND KURT A. JORDAN JO. Imagined Pasts Imagined: Memory and Ideology in Archaeology 233 RUTH M. VAN DYKE n. Hidden Boundaries: Archaeology, Education, and Ideology in the United States 254 LOUANN WURST AND SUE NOVINGER 12. Ideology, Archaeology 270 VICENTE LULL, RAFAEL MlC6, CRISTINA RIHUETE HERRADA, AND ROBERTO RISCH 13. Commentary: Can Archaeology Change Society? 294 JEAN-PAUL DEMOULE Bibliography 313 About the Editors 391 About the Contributors 393 Index 401 Ideology and Archaeology Between Imagination and Relational Practice REINHARD BERNBECK AND RANDALL H. MCGUIRE All ancient Histories, as one ofo ur wits has observed, arc only fables that men have agreed ro admit as true. (Voltai,·e) In his well-known essay Man Makes Himself, V. Gordon Childe (1936: 134) wrote that "war helped in a great discovery-that men as well as animals can be domesticated. Instead of killing a defeated enemy, he might be enslaved." Generations of students and scholars seem to have read this sentence by a "Marxist" scholar without sensing a problem. Another well-known archaeologist, Michael Shanks (1992: 152), writes about ruins in the following way: "If! think of a visit to a castle, I think of entrances and doorways, passages and archways, access to and from enclosed spaces, views from narrow windows di rected across and within castle spaces." The artist Tom Tykwer exam ines a simple street photograph in Berlin to meditate about the human labor that went into making a door lock, a passer-by's leather bag, the graffiti on a house wall, a grayish piece of chewing gum stuck on the 2 BERNBECK AND McGUIRE ground, the granite cobblestone pavement, and an endless number of other items.1 Each of these constructions of past-present relations springs from a particular perspective and is therefore inevitably partial. Childe syn thesizes the progress of humanity by simply accepting the "collateral damage" of world history, and thereby explicitly praises past enslave ment on the way to a more enlightened present. Shanks silences all of the human labor that contributes to producing forbidding castles, along with all their violent history, and decides rather to enjoy their present ruins. Tykwer encourages reflection on past drudgery that went into making the daily materials that surround us. Such partial ity, a fundamental constituent of ideology, forms a problem for an academic system that seeks to generate knowledge of general value. Can we rid ourselves of our situatedness, or is the desire to make the past meaningful always dependent upon the position of the person who represents it? And if so, by what criteria do we judge some posi tions better or worse than others? How do we analyze the interests and hidden agendas that, often unwittingly, insert themselves into ar chaeological products? To what extent do the interests ofp ast peoples and representations of their worlds influence our accounts? How do we analyze those past ideologies? And how do our histories, some times mere tales and chronicles, subvert, bend, or even invent past relationships? These issues constitute the basic ideological dimensions of archaeology that are at the core of this volume. Ideowgy defies easy definition and clear understanding. None oft he authors in this volume understands it in the way it is used by political science, as a shorthand for a coherent and comprehensive worldview, such as fascism, liberalism, conservatism, or anything of that nature. Nor do they understand ideology as simply a false view that could be juxtaposed with objectivity. But enumerating exclusions does not give us a positive definition. Indeed, defining ideology positively with the brevity of a dictionary would itself be an ideological practice. No two authors in the present volume agree entirely on the meaning of this elusive concept. We can, however, identify some shared elements that pervade most chapters. First, ideology has no essence or substance. Rather, it is a relation ship, and a problematic one. The authors variously describe this rela tionship as between reality and its representation, between interests Ideology and Archaeology 3 and their generalized promotion, between a subject and the world that constitutes it, between practices and thoughts. Second, ideology is always bound into networks of power and re lations of inequality, such as gender-, class-, or race-based discrimi nations. Such power differentials include both synchronic and dia chronic relations. Third, ideological processes are driven by a desire to produce meaning in specific social settings, through representations or prac tices. Archaeologists often conceptualize the development of tools used to make sense of the past as something that happens on a plane that has no history: statistics, reflexivity, contextualization, and other notions seem to be abstract entities that exist outside time and space. Generalizations of this kind-the very basis of our theories-are the most ideological mechanisms of our discipline, and archaeologists gain power from mastering them. Fourth, analyzing ideology always means critiquing ideology. But there cannot be any straightforward method of evaluating ideology independent of space and time, as that would again be by necessity ideology par excellence. In the first chapter of this book, we provide a historical outline of the various understandings of ideology, concentrating on major stages in its intellectual trajectory. Archaeological thought about ide ology does not mirror the complexity of this history. This is a disjunc ture that we try to elucidate by juxtaposing philosophical reflections with archaeological applications. We hope that this volume will provide an incentive to archaeolo gists to become more aware of the importance of the concept of ide ology. In the remainder of this introduction, we weave together the many ways in which the chapters of this volume relate to one another, and how they might provide some guidance for further developments. As the references above to Childe, Shanks, and Tykwer make clear, archaeology is not-and has never been-an innocent profession in search of a truthful knowledge of the past. Our discipline in all its facets fundamentally shapes a space of mediated experience of the past that participates in constituting present identities and conscious ness. Archaeology constructs such indirect experience by means of pictorial and textual representations in books, exhibits, photographs, and drawings. These products not only contribute to supporting or.