Just released in the UK and Europe:
Category: Sovereignty and the Political
New Maya Temple of the Sun God
A fascinating discovery of a temple of the sun god at El Zotz in Guatemala dramatizes the articulation of rulership with the cosmos. Two things of particular interest strike me most immediately. The first is the dynamic nature of the architecture, designed to in a sense draw the viewer around the building in rhythm with the arc of the sun. In this sense, it might well seem that the building itself is not still but rather orbits around an axis.
The second point of interest is the iconoclasm that resulted in the destruction of nose and mouth. Houston argues that this reflects an understanding of the building of the temple as itself alive, suggesting that we need to revisit episodes of temple destruction as not only opportunities for looting but more significantly as efforts to extirpate the gods themselves. To leave a community without their gods is presumably to leave them truly bereft, a mortal blow to the very possibility of life and sovereignty.
See video and text here: “Dramatic” New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces.
Timeo Danaos et Dona Ferentes
Greeks apologize to the EU with a gift of a huge horse
THE nation of Greece said sorry to the European Union with a present of an enormous wooden horse.
Left outside the European Central Bank in the dead of night, the horse has now been moved into the ECB’s central lobby where it is proudly on display.
A gift tag attached to the horse, which is surprisingly light for its size and has small holes along the length of its body, suggested that it should be placed in the bank’s vaults overnight to avoid it being targeted by thieves….
Must Reads for Summer
I’m starting to compile a list of new books to recommend as summer must reads. I’ll add to this list as I think of them but herewith, recommendation number 1:
1. I was delighted to see that Anne Porter’s book on mobile pastoralism in the ancient Near East has been published by Cambridge University Press. I first read the book over a year ago in manuscript form and was impressed by the lucid prose and cogent thinking on issues of mobility (social theory writ generally large does a lousy job of thinking about moving communities–nomadology is little help in this regard). The work is a subtle study that breaks important new ground in thinking about how mobile communities were critical to an array of practices and processes at the heart of the formation of complex polities. Find it here:
Repatriation and “Blackmail”
Imagine that thieves force their way into your house and steal all the paintings off of the walls. You know who the thieves are, but they are rude and uncooperative and the police are ineffectual. But get this, the thieves then ask to borrow some more of your things: a vase, perhaps a nice tapestry. You refuse to make the loan unless the thief returns the paintings they stole. The thieves yell “Blackmail!! I’m being blackmailed!”
This is roughly the narrative that Newsweek endorses in a piece on their ArtBeast blog about tough tactics Turkey has been using of late to guarantee the return of looted artifacts: Turkey’s Archaeology Blackmail – The Daily Beast.
There are things to be concerned about in Turkey’s approach. For one thing, it seems at best unwise to punish archaeologists for a fight that is largely with art institutions. Archaeologists as a community have generally been supportive of all claims to repatriation as part of the discipline’s intellectual commitment to context and political commitment to the communities in which they work. Aside from being unfair, it is likely an ineffectual strategy since archaeologists have little sway over the policies of the art museums that are Turkey’s main targets.
But Turkey is absolutely right to promote its indigenous archaeological community over the interests of creaky old foreign archaeological concessions that are more part of the 19th century than the 21st. Substantive collaboration between foreign and local archaeologists, with locals leading the way, is how a truly cosmopolitan archaeology can and should be organized.
This approach makes demands on all parties. Local archaeologists must be substantively engaged in all aspects of the project and cannot just be nannies to foreign teams. Similarly, foreign archaeologists must be eager and ready to learn from local collaborators, giving them the power to shape the recovery and interpretation of what is their nation’s responsibility: the slice of human heritage now within the territorial borders of Turkey.
It is not nationalism to assume responsibility for the archaeological record. Turkey has not demanded a specific interpretation of the archaeological past, merely that its exploration, maintenance, and preservation be taken over by local scholars. This is an extremely positive development. Over the last century and a half, European and American institutions have justified the appropriation of artifacts from countries throughout the Mediterranean and Near East on the grounds that they did not possess the talents and resources necessary to properly care for the remains of humanity’s past. Now that they do have the talents and resources, their efforts are derided as nationalism.
Heritage, Irredentism, Materiality
As described in a recent column in The Atlantic Armenia is opening a fascinating new front in the battle over heritage and repatriation:
To the British Museum, she is “probably Aphrodite,” the Greek goddess of love and beauty. To most Armenians, she is Anahit, an ancient Armenian goddess of fertility. Whoever is on the 1st century BC female bronze head with wavy hair and aquiline nose, it may serve as a political prop in Armenia’s looming parliamentary election campaign.
The bust, housed in the British Museum, is featured on Armenian beauty parlor logos, coins, banknotes and stamps alike. It is better known in Armenia than even the country’s state emblem, a recent TV opinion poll indicated. If asked, many Armenians most likely assume that the head, and a companion hand, are in Armenia itself.
And, now, Education Minister Armen Ashotian, a leader of the governing Republican Party of Armenia, along with the party’s Armenian Youth Foundation (AYF), want to make sure that, one day, they will be. In February, Ashotian and the AYF launched an online campaign to gather petition signatures aimed at having the British Museum turn over to Yerevan ownership of the 1st century BC hand and head.
The innovation here is that the bust was not found within the borders of the Republic of Armenia and spirited out of the country to feed the colonial appetites of the British public (a la the Elgin Marbles). Instead, the bust was found in what is today northeastern Turkey but had been since at least the early 5th century BC part of a territory named Armenia.
The Republic of Armenia’s claim on the bust is thus specifically cultural, a link defined by genealogy but separated from the national territorial by the political consequences of invasion, imperialism, and the Armenian Genocide. Yet the claim has a distinctly modern political consequences. Affirmation of Armenia’s claim to the bust is a de facto recognition of Armenia’s claim upon the territory of eastern Turkey/western Armenia. It is thus a deft sublimation of irredentism into the far more subtle lexicon of global cultural heritage, of landscape into materiality.
It will be fascinating to see how this develops to shape politics within Armenia, between Armenia and Turkey, and within the global heritage community.
Scenes from Material Culture, The Film–Part 4
The hypnotic object, from The Manchurian Candidate: http://youtu.be/HkP_eYtrF6I
The epitome of unexpected use: The Water-Cooler Canon
This from Mike Bobick with many thanks.
This amazing video that is but one of many examples of everyday items (beanbags, water coolers, abstract minimalist techno that has now been successfully co-opted for military uses. I thus present the watercooler as modern weapon. If you are ever in need of an assemblage that now runs the gamut from object of workplace gossip to new military weapon, there’s always the water cooler.
One can only wonder how long it will take for this device to be deployed in ways that transform the ridiculous into the repugnant. The pepper spraying of seated UC Davis Occupy protesters is an appropriate case to juxtapose with the water cooler canon. An assemblage (pepper spray) initially designed as a non-lethal alternative for situations where citizens might pose a threat to others or themselves was misused to inflict harm upon citizens who posed no threat whatsoever. The incident exposed the limits of what we might call an assemblage’s “toleration”. Ill used by the police, the pepper spray incited the citizenry and shifted the political terrain away from weapons of enforcement and back to the “weapons of the weak”.
Archaeologies of Sovereignty
The new issue of Annual Review of Anthropology contains an article of mine examining the emerging archaeological investigations of sovereignty. From the abstract:
Archaeology has long sublimated an account of the political into a series of proxy concepts such as cities, civilizations, chiefdoms, and states. Recently, however, the archaeology of political association has been revitalized by efforts to forward a systematic account of the political, attentive to the creation and maintenance of sovereignty in practical negotiations between variously formalized authorities and a publically specified community of subjects. This new, and largely inchoate, archaeology of sovereignty has pushed the field to attend to the practical production of political regimes and the material mediations that articulate authorities and subjects. This review is intended to highlight the latent principles that draw this dispersed literature into a shared archaeological concern with sovereignty by sketching the intellectual crises that created the space for its emergence and the key concepts that orient current research. Taken together, the works discussed here point to a new concern with the dynamics of authorization and subjection across a wide range of political practices.
“I am pleased to provide you complimentary one-time access to my Annual Reviews article as a PDF file (http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/eprint/Gtc6VXqVGmW5Ns6uhBqb/full/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145754), for your own personal use. Any further/multiple distribution, publication, or commercial usage of this copyrighted material requires submission of a permission request addressed to the Copyright Clearance Center (http://www.copyright.com/).”
Archaeologists Worldwide Urge Halt to “Museum of Tolerance” Construction on Ancient Muslim Cemetery | Center for Constitutional Rights
October 20, 2011, New York; Jerusalem – In a letter submitted today, 84 leading archaeologists worldwide, with support from the Center for Constitutional Rights CCR and the Campaign to Preserve Mamilla Jerusalem Cemetery, urged Board Members of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the mayor of Jerusalem, Mr. Nir Barkat, and the Head of the Israeli Antiquities Authority IAA to immediately halt current and future construction of the “Museum of Tolerance” on the site of Mamilla, a historically renowned Muslim cemetery. This plea comes as the Israeli architects commissioned to build the museum are threatening to resign from the project, as did Frank Gehry before them. The appeal is added to those of a growing number of cultural preservation and rights groups who have vocally opposed the project since 2010. Over this time, CCR has acted as legal counsel in appeals to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Special Rapporteurs on Religion and Racial Discrimination, the Independent Expert on Cultural Rights, and the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization UNESCO to halt construction of the museum.
To see the petition go here: