Category: Sovereignty and the Political

New matter for discussion in the Assemblages forum: Privatization and Nationalization.

Over the last decade, a primary thread of archaeological criticism has been to deplore the appropriation of various pasts by contemporary politics.  These criticisms tended to focus almost exclusively nationalism and claims made by institutionalized political actors upon archaeological materials.  So what are we to make of the move in Israel to privatize national parks, including archaeological and historical sites?  In a quintessentially neo-liberal moment, the outsourcing of the past promises to lash interpretation not to governmental institutions that at least aspire to present a contemporary citizenry, but to corporations driven by private rather than public interests.  How can archaeology simultaneously critique the insertion of the past into the political domain and decry its removal from the political domain without appearing hopelessly confused?

The pleasure of ruins supersedes the pedagogy of sites.

ANKARA. Turkey’s ability to manage its vast cultural heritage may be at crisis point, experts warn. The recent decision to transfer the excavation permits from three well-known classical sites from non-Turkish to Turkish universities—a practice almost unheard of in the protocol-laden world of archaeology—is a cracking of the whip over foreign scholars regarded as not working fast enough to transform the country’s extensive array of antiquities into tourist attractions.“The threats are direct and indirect and the atmosphere is just that much more difficult,” says Stephen Mitchell, the honorary secretary of the British Institute in Ankara. “Getting a permit is now a process of negotiation and academic concerns are not always the first priority,” he says.

via Turkish tourism drive threatens ancient sites | The Art Newspaper.

Cambridge Scholars Press has just published a new book on the Archaeology of Politics edited by Peter Johansen and Andrew Bauer.  The volume is an important new statement in the newly emerging archaeology of the political that will be a recurring theme of many of the issues I’ll be interested in sharing here: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.  As my first post to Assemblages, here is an excerpt from my concluding chapter in Johansen and Bauer’s volume.

On December 17, 2010, a policewoman in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid, 300km south of Tunis, confiscated an unlicensed produce cart from twenty-six year old Mohamed Bouazizi, the sole income earner in a large extended family. Humiliated by the brutality of the police and the imperious disregard of local officials, Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of the headquarters of the provincial government. This act of spontaneous self-immolation sparked riots across Tunisia that ultimately cascaded into popular uprisings across northeast Africa and the Middle East. By spring 2011, governments had fallen in Tunisia and Egypt, crackdowns against mass demonstrations preoccupied authorities in Iran, Yemen, and Bahrain, and Libya had collapsed into a violent civil war.

It is hard to imagine a more quotidian beginning to regional revolution than a confrontation over a produce cart that spiraled into a popular movement to renegotiate the terms of political association. Yet the 2011 uprisings did just that, following on a series of mass movements that have convulsed the early years of the new millennium (e.g., Serbia 2000, Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2004, Lebanon 2005, Kyrgyzstan 2005, Iran 2009), struggles—some successful, some not—that sought to redefine the limits of sovereignty and fundamentally re-order relations of authorization and subjection. Yet the episode that sparked Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution neatly encapsulates the central theoretical contention of the present volume, revealing how the political is located in a broad array of practices that are mediated by dense, and often surprising, material assemblages.