The Fate of Walls

From a recent op-ed: For five millennia, politicians have proposed walls like Trump’s. They don’t work.  From The Washington Post, Sunday July 29, 2016.

The opening:

Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico to block the flow of migrants has been justly criticized on moral, economic and political grounds. But while the Trump Wall (as he has called it) is the most provocative proposal of the election season, it is not particularly original. Over the past five millennia, politicians have repeatedly turned to large walls to solve problems. We should look carefully at the track record of this ancient technology before we invest what some estimates suggest could be $25 billion in construction costs for a 2,000-mile-long wall, plus millions more in annual maintenance.

And the conclusion:

What is most captivating about barrier walls, like the Trump Wall, is neither the scope of their construction nor the resoluteness of their strategic vision. Rather, they are powerful symbols of a particular kind of hubris, the conceit that the translation of mania into masonry can alter the decisions, fortunes and futures of countless others through architectural intimidation. Here, the Berlin Wall should still live in all of our memories as a potent symbol of how walls and totalitarian politics often find common cause. Barrier walls are not simply clumsy, imprecise solutions to problems of population movement, past and present; they also represent a catastrophic failure of political imagination endemic to totalitarian thinking.

Click on the link above for the full op-ed.

We will remember!

A version of the following op-ed appeared yesterday in the Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank section of the Washington Wire.  I am posting the slightly longer version of the piece here.


 

What’s an effective reaction to Islamic State’s destruction of artifacts housed in Iraq’s Mosul Museum and the militants’ bulldozing of the ancient site of Nimrud, former capital of the Assyrian Empire?

The barbarity of ISIS’s assault has provoked not just condemnation but also parody. One satirical Web site, the Pan-Arabia Enquirer, jokingly awarded ISIS a prize “for its conceptual art piece ‘Smashing Mosul Museum To Pieces: Death To The Infidels.’ ” The mock award praised the extremists for “demolishing priceless 3,000 year old statues” and said that liberating the works from “bourgeoise, middle class concepts of ‘beauty’ [had] invited us to examine pig ignorance as an artistic expression in itself.”

That critique is hard to beat.  And it underscores a conundrum: ISIS is thrilled by the global outpouring of dismay. But shame has no power over the shameless.  Moral condemnation has no impact upon those convinced of their moral righteousness. The extremists opened their program of defilement with acts against the bodies of opponents, journalists, minorities, and innocents; they have moved on to assaulting a heritage prized not just by Iraq but also by communities across the Near East and around the globe.

Assaults on archaeological remains, the durable parts of our historical memory, have happened for centuries, including in the area now threatened by ISIS. The 7th century BC Assyrian king Esarhaddon, whose palace at Nineveh lies across the Tigris river from modern Mosul, demanded that any vassal who violated his treaty obligations would suffer the defilement of the graves of his ancestors.  But the wholesale destruction of a epoch of human history is something new.  Even the Taliban’s widely deplored demolition of 6th-century colossal statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan seems surgical compared to ISIS’s reported bulldozing of entire archaeological sites. Irina Bokova, the director of UNESCO, has described ISIS’s campaign against antiquities as a war crime, a “cultural cleansing” that attempts to eradicate all diversity by destroying the evidence of history.

So how can the world effectively react to ISIS’s assault if outrage has reached the limits of its efficacy? The most powerful rebuke to those who would force us to forget the past is to redouble our commitment to remembering.

The Iraq Museum opened its doors early as a retort to ISIS’s attempts at historical erasure. Other global museums should do everything they can to display the remains of the ancient world that have been preserved for future generations and, as much as possible, the specific heritage that ISIS has sought to burn. But museums are not enough. The remains of ancient Mesopotamia should be made visible everywhere, from neckties emblazoned with lamassu (Assyrian deities often depicted as colossal winged bulls or lions with human heads) to a television marathon of documentary films dedicated to antiquity.  If you are shocked by ISIS’s assault on antiquity, go take an archaeology class—in person or online—and become another who can say, “I will remember”.  If media are the chosen vehicle for ISIS to transmit its program of shock, they are also critical to a global response. On at least this issue, defeat for ISIS lies in global memorialization, in a refusal to forget the past that extremists seek to destroy. A renewed exploration of the ancient world would be a direct rebuke to the depravities of those who would impose ignorance.

Archaeology as a vital US strategic interest

After a fieldwork hiatus, I’m belatedly reposting an op-ed from Fox News (!) by my colleague Sturt Manning.

The piece provides a succinct warning that a failure of a society to grapple with prehistory and archaeology more broadly comes with potentially catastrophic consequences.  Moreover it offers a stark contrast with America’s geopolitical peers (and rivals) who are investing heavily in archaeology just as the US appears to be losing its nerve.  A selection here and the full piece at the link:

For the U.S., in particular, our past is a global one: its population has come from all over the world, from the first migrants more than 12-13,000 years ago, to European settlers, to African slaves, to later waves through the present day. Most of the evidence for this long, complex past comes from archaeology.

China invests heavily on research and preservation of its archaeology and history — sometimes even controversially, such as its massive spending on maritime archaeology as part of the assertion of Chinese control of the South China Sea.

In contrast, the U.S. spends a tiny fraction of the money that China, or Europe, invests in archaeological research and preservation. Moreover, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation – the FIRST Act – that would devastate the already limited support the National Science Foundation (NSF) provides toward the U.S. archaeological effort.

Archaeology as a vital US strategic interest | Fox News.

Artifacts, Assets, & The Limits of Monetization

In a much awaited decision,  US District Judge Robert Gettleman last week provided a summary judgment on a case that threatened to force the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum to sell vast collections of artifacts from the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  The judgment represents a victory for archaeological institutions anxious that works of heritage might be monetized to settle accounts for unrelated political action.

In September 1997, Hamas carried out a triple suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed 5 and injured 200 others.  Nine Americans sued in US Court for damages under a 1990s law that allows American victims of terrorism to seek restitution in U.S. courts if a foreign government was seen to be complicit.  Iran, a patron of Hamas, was explicitly targeted.  In 2003, the plaintiffs received a $71.5 million uncontested judgment against Iran.

But following the Iranian Revolution and succeeding decades of hostile relations, Iran had few assets vulnerable to seizure in the US since President Reagan unblocked Iranian assets that President Carter had frozen.  Unless artifacts held on loan from Iran in US museums could be held to be fungible assets.  The victims then sued the Oriental Institute and Field Museum, demanding that they sell thousands of tablets, seals, and other artifacts that Iran had loaned to the Institutions for study and conservation beginning in the 1930s.

As I read the judgment, the decision seems to turn primarily (though not exclusively) on one key issue.  The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act declares all property of a foreign state in the US to be immune from attachment with a couple of exceptions.  One exception is for assets used for commercial activity.  Are artifacts in a museum assets used for commercial activity?  Both the OI and the Field Museum clearly engage in commercial activity, though that is not their reason for being.  But, as the Judge found, their commercial activity is not Iran’s commercial activity.  The artifacts are not in the US in order for Iran to conduct commercial activity with them.

The plaintiffs argued that the OI and Field were effectively Iran’s commercial agents, equating the OI’s ongoing commitment to document and return the objects as evidence of a fiduciary relationship.  But as Judge Gettleman pointed out, Iran does not control the OI nor is the purpose of the relationship a commercial one.

Certainly the protection of the integrity of an important archaeological collection is the most obvious good to come of last week’s judgment.  But perhaps the more significant outcome is to preserve a relationship to things from rampant monetarization.  The tyranny of economics has led to the commodification of our ties to everything, with much noted ill effects.  What aspect of our material lives is not now susceptible to reduction to a financial cost?  But this is historically a very unusual, if not deeply pathological, way of thinking about the things that we make, share, use, and discard.  Our ties to things, whether artifacts or other, are far more densely complex.  It is heartening that the US District Court has effectively carved out a legal space where economics must not tread, where value is not defined by monetarization.  And perhaps this judgement opens opportunities to expand this space so that the depth of our engagement with things can be recognized as greater than a game on the Price is Right.

Despite both the pragmatic and more philosophical salutary aspects of Judge Gettleman’s decision, there is one interesting caution as well.  A key element of the judgment was the clear distance between Iran’s objectives and the OI’s.  The Judge noted that the OI was pursuing its own research objectives in studying the materials, with no linkage to Iran’s interest in them.  As the politics of archaeology have come to demand increased responsiveness of archaeologists to the various places where they work and a more collaborative approach to setting research agenda’s, one wonders if archaeological institutions run a legal risk of being understood as agents of foreign states.  As someone deeply committed to collaborative research, I nonetheless would balk at the extension of collaboration to conspiracy.

Civilization, the Barbarian, and Crimea

Detail of Gold Scythian Vessel from Kul-Oba Kurgan, Eastern Crimea
Detail of Gold Scythian Vessel from Kul-Oba Kurgan, Eastern Crimea

To read dispatches from the ongoing geopolitical conflict occasioned by the revolution in Kiev and Russian military intervention in Crimea, one might understandably think that the world was facing what the late Samuel Huntington called a “clash of civilizations”: a quintessentially late Modern form of conflict where traditional nation-state rivalries are sublimated into epochal battles between rival systems of beliefs and values.

Indeed, this impression has been ably stoked by many of the key players.  Referring to a planed referendum on Crimean independence, the new Ukrainian Prime Minister Andrei Yatsenyuk recently declared: “No one in the civilized world will recognize the results of a so-called referendum carried out by these so-called authorities.”  Here, “civilization”  denotes Europe and the West; Russia, the sponsor of the Crimean referendum, is explicitly excluded, consigned to the role of the barbarian, civilization’s long-standing antithesis.

Russian leaders are using much the same language.  Vladimir Nikitin, a member of the Russian Duma, framed the Crimean struggle in distinctly Huntingtonian terms, writing “The main battle of World War III is under way in Ukraine….  The aggressor is Western civilization, which includes the U.S. and Europe.”

But the circulation of tropes of civilization and barbarity on the Crimean Peninsula is hardly a novelty of late Modernity.  It is instead a highly unoriginal revival of a very old device.  The ancient Greek term barbaros (βάρβαρος) was used rather indiscriminately to describe non-Greeks, but was rather emphatically deployed to describe the peoples who occupied the Black Sea coast where Greek colonies encountered very different ways of life.  Scythians in particular became a kind of “type site” for working out the idea of the barbarian and hence of civilization.   Subsequently, the Romans came to see the people’s of eastern Europe and the Russian steppe as quintessential barbarians pressing against the margins of “Civilization” and forever seeking to blot out its achievements (take your pick from the threatening dotted lines on the map below: Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Huns, etc.).

Routes of the Barbarian Invaders

The ancient description of the barbarian carried with it a sense that those outside of Civilizations warm embrace were historical fossils or anthropological “primitives”.  Interestingly, we see this too in the current discussion of Crimea.  President Barack Obama has argued that the Russian military incursion into Crimea was a “violation of international law” which put Russian President Vladimir Putin “on the wrong side of history.” The right side of history is of course the path that leads to us while the wrong side leads to uncomfortable and undesirable futures.

The leader of Britain’s liberal democrats, Nick Clegg, effectively spliced the geographic and historical dimensions of the civilizational trope when he demanded that Moscow enter into a “civilised dialogue” over Crimea, arguing that the Russian leader had a “KGB mentality rooted in the Cold War”.

What is compelling about the redeployment of old tropes to the Crimean conflict is not simply the coincidental geography of its return, but its remarkable unsuitability.  The terms, always imprecise and obscurantist, now seem as tattered and torn as the flags on the barricades of Maidan Square.  It simply makes no sense–rhetorical or political–to claim a civilizational mantle when for both sides the interests are largely strategic: a warm water port for one, an expanded European sphere for the other.  And quite likely, uses of civilization have ever been thus.  The exclusivity of the civilizational club providing nothing in the way of social or cultural content but simply an opportunistic politics.  We might hope then that the absurdity of the civilizational rhetoric now swirling around Crimea might not be a harbinger of either a civilizational clash or World War II, but of a moment when the concepts lost their power to draw lines.

Soft Power Failure

Following in the heels of the recent flap over archaeology funding at the NSF, my colleague Chris Monroe pointed out yet another arena where the US government is failing the cause of research and preservation.  This time, it is the global stage of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).  A 1990 law passed by Congress law stipulated that:

No funds authorized to be appropriated by this Act or any other Act shall be available for the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof which accords the Palestine Liberation Organization the same standing as member states.

By voting to bar US funds for any UN agency that accepts Palestine as a member state, the goal was presumably to be preventative.  The US provides a sizable portion of UN agency budgets so the threat of a withdrawal of funds was presumably to work as a kind of soft veto over any effort to bring Palestine into the organization.

Only one problem: circumstances on the ground changed and the soft veto did not work.  In 2011, Palestine was admitted to membership in UNESCO and the flow of US dues was summarily cut off.  The US had been providing 22% of UNESCO’s funding so the damage to its programs was necessarily consequential.

But the damage doesn’t stop there.  UNESCO’s rules require that countries who fail to pay their dues for two years lose their vote in the UNESCO General Assembly.  As the New York Times notes, this makes it considerably less likely that “two American sites on the list to become World Heritage sites certified by Unesco will win approval.”

But perhaps just as importantly, the US can no longer use its role in UNESCO as a form of global soft power, leveraging its support for education, science, and culture as evidence of the good that the US does in the world.  As the government loses the tools of soft power, all that is left of US involvement globally are the tools of hard power–the very tools that are often counter-productive to US geopolitical goals.  So to summarize, a 1990 effort to exert soft power failed so dramatically as to fundamentally undermine the US’s ability to assert soft power going forward.

There comes a time to simply admit a strategy has failed.  This is clearly one of those times.  The US must resume its payments to UNESCO not only for the sake of the organization’s mission, but also for the future of US involvement in the world.

UPDATE: Archaeology and the NSF

As a follow up to my October 2 post regarding Eric Cantor and Lamar Smith’s USA Today op-ed on NSF funding for archaeological research, Rosemary Joyce, James Doyle, and I participated in a radio panel discussion of the issue on Joseph Schuldenrein’s VoiceAmerica program Indiana Jones: Myth, Reality, and 21st Century Archaeology.  It will be streamed on Wednesday November 13 at 6pm and then available by podcast two days later.

In addition, my colleague Sturt Manning has posted his reaction to the Cantor and Smith article.  Now that government websites are back up after the government shutdown, a couple useful statistics are available.

a. Does the US spend more on research and development than any other country? It depends.  According to the World Bank, in 2010 (the last comprehensive data set) we were 10th on a per capita basis, behind Israel, Finland, Sweden, Korea, Japan, and Denmark.

b. Nevertheless, measures of scientific productivity in the US contradict the notion of lost preeminence. As just one measure, the CWTS Leiden Ranking measures scientific performance of major global universities.  Of the Top 25, all but three are in the US.

c. The Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate represents 3.5% of the NSF’s $6.8 billion budget.  That amounts to about 0.000001% of our current national debt (based on yesterday’s figure).

d. Eric Cantor currently earns $193,400 in salary and his office spends another $510,375 in staff salary alone.  Lamar Smith earns $174,000 in salary and his office staff costs $403,983.  Taken together this is almost twice the expenditure of the archaeological research projects they flagged in their op-ed.

Of course I am not against paying our representatives in Congress.  But given budgetary constraints we must prioritize those who contribute directly to improving the quality of life of the American people.  For every $20,000 saved in Cantor and Smith’s salary, we can sponsor a Dissertation Improvement Grant in Archaeology that will lead directly to new knowledge.  This is not a matter of being anti-House Republicans, it is simply common sense.

Upcoming: The Sovereign Assemblage: Sense, Sensibility, and Sentiment in the Bronze Age Caucasus

Upcoming Lecture Series

Institute for the Study of the Ancient World @ NYU.

The Sovereign Assemblage: Sense, Sensibility, and Sentiment in the Bronze Age Caucasus

Adam T. Smith (Cornell University)

April 8, 15, 22, & 29 at 6:00pm
Lecture Hall
15 East 84th St.
New York, NY

Series Abstract – The Sovereign Assemblage: Sense, Sensibility, and Sentiment in the Bronze Age Caucasus
The modern understanding of political association has centered resolutely on the person of the citizen, whose interactions with other members of the body politic establish and reproduce the possibilities and limits of sovereignty. However, rarely do we interact with one another directly as citizens. Rather, a vast assemblage of things, from ballots and bullets to crowns and regalia to licenses and permits, incessantly intrudes upon our political relations. What role has this assemblage played in the historical formation of our political practices? What principles fundamental to sovereignty does an archaeology of this assemblage reveal?

Taking the narrow isthmus of the Caucasus as their geographic focus, the lectures in this series describe the emergence of a complex set of material assemblages that originated in the Bronze Age yet continue to shape our politics today. The lectures provide a detailed account of the transformation of communities in the Caucasus from small-scale Early Bronze Age villages committed to an ideology of egalitarianism to Late Bronze Age complex polities predicated on radical inequality, organized violence, and a centralized apparatus of rule. These formidable social transformations were made possible by the efficacious operation of three critical assemblages, or machines, that reordered human communities. Each was vital to the operation of the next, forging the polity over time in the articulation of things and persons along three linked dimensions: sense, sensibility, and sentiment. It is by attending to these points of articulation between our things and our selves that we can illuminate the enduring sovereignty of the assemblage.

Monday, April 8: The Sovereignty of Assemblages

Monday, April 15: The Civilization Machine in the Early Bronze Age

Monday, April 22: The War Machine in the Middle Bronze Age

Monday, April 29: The Political Machine in the Late Bronze Age

About the Lecture Series
Michael I. Rostovzteff, a Russian ancient historian, came to the U.S. after the Russian Revolution and taught for many years at Yale University as Sterling Professor of Ancient History. Rostovtzeff’s prodigious energies and sprawling interests led him to write on an almost unimaginable range of subjects. ISAW’s Rostovtzeff series presents scholarship that embodies its aspirations to foster work that crosses disciplinary, geographical, and chronological lines. The lectures will be published by Princeton University Press.

Fourth Annual M.I. Rostovtzeff Lecture Series – The Sovereign Assemblage: Sense, Sensibility, and Sentiment in the Bronze Age Caucasus — Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.

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