Professor Dawdy's keynote speech addresses some of the main challenges of the discipline in the 21st century. Archaeology should not be self-serving, and it can even become dangerous, a possible consequence of a quest for its usefulness. A possible solution would be to focus efforts on environmental archaeology. Looking for ancient sustainable agricultural practices, for example, in order to better inform contemporary human adaptations, would be a path to follow. According to Dawdy, this useful, futurist archaeology finds a public ready for such an endeavour.
Perhaps it is time to read again Walter Benjamin (1974, 700): ‘History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jeztzeit]’ (14th thesis, authors’ translation).
Jeztzeit is difficult to translate into English, different from Gegenwart (‘present’), so much so that the French use à-présent. As stresses Laurent Olivier (2008, 157), this is directly related to archaeology:
On considère que c'est la mémoire matérielle du passé qui est en question dans l'archéologie, et que la demarche archéologique consiste à étudier la construction de cette mémoire, à travers le temps. Dans ce cas, le présent, comme à-présent, devient effectivement le lieu central de l'interpretation du passé. C'est précisement l'approche que préconise Benjamin comme une solution à l'impasse à laquelle conduit l'historicisme.
The material memory of the past is the subject of archaeology and the archaeological endeavour is to study this memory through time. If so, the present as the presence of now is at the core of the interpretation of the past. This is exactly the approach that Benjamin advocates to overcome the impasse of historicism (authors’ translation).
The presence of now is a complex concept, opposed to a positivist passing of time (khronos), a full critical time (kairos) (Funari 1996, 51; Löwy 2005, 119). Whatever the translation, though, it refers to engagement with the present, with people, with interpretation. This means commitment to interaction with common people, indigenous groups, interest groups, and community groups, among a plethora of social agents. It also means critiquing the uses of the past for oppression and submission. The World Archaeological Congress is understood in this context as breaking with neutrality and positivism (Funari 2006). Anne Pyburn emphasizes (2008, 202) that ‘perhaps the most important reason for archaeologists to engage with the public is to encourage practitioners to develop a greater reflexivity about what they are doing and why’.
Epistemologically, interaction with people is thus relevant. It is not a fashion; even less is it a PR strategy or a way of selling archaeology, as Dawdy sometimes hints. Rather than smoothing the relationship of archaeologists with strained communities, interaction serves both archaeologists and communities in their common concern with the presence of the now. Social conflicts and inner contradictions and violence are at the root of Jeztzeit and archaeology plays a role in fostering discussion, not suppression, of tensions (Zarankin and Funari 2008; Starzmann, Pollock and Bernbeck 2008). Public archaeology has nothing to do with forestalling controversy. On the contrary, as Kersel, Luke and Roosevelt (2008, 315) propose,
Local interaction and engagement may not be what archaeologists have focused on traditionally, but they should become priorities, as should reflexivity and introspection in analysing our own actions and how these actions (our physical presence and publications and reports) have direct consequences on economic systems and social networks.
The involvement of communities is thus an epistemological move, to learn with people, as Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire (1993) stated several years ago. It is no surprise that such practices and their epistemological consequences developed early and fast in Latin America, for peripheral contradictions and conditions are prone to produce critical knowledge. Latin America has produced innovative practices and extensive literature. Some of this literature is published in English, but most of it appears in local languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese. Unfortunately it is not widely referenced even by scholars working in Latin America and the Caribbean. Fortunately, locals, not Europeans or North Americans, have dominated the landscape of archaeological practice in Latin America and have created several innovative practices over the last few decades. Some of them coincide in a way with Dawdy's proposals, particularly in the archaeology of missing people and dictatorships (Funari, Zarankin and Salerno 2009). Social memory, public memory and archaeology (Little 2002; McDavid 2004c; Delle 2008, 86–88) are here at work, fulfilling Benjamin's warning not to accept void time and an empty future. Contradictions within society, conflicts, diversity of interests and standpoints are rooted in those activities, aiming at a better, more diverse future.
Latin American experiences address a relevant issue raised in the keynote speech: environmental concerns. What is a river? What is a painted cave? What is a fossil? It is not only a natural taphonomic feature, from a modernist positivist perspective, but much more than that: the result of a myriad of conflicting interpretive subjects. Benjamin again helps us: ‘To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it properly was’ (wie es eingentlich gewesen, Leopold von Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ (6th thesis, authors’ translation).
No proper real past environment can tell us how to manage the environment today. It depends on the standpoint, on the interlocutors: cui bono? Who benefits by it? There is thus no neutral, natural, objective, empirical, positivist adaptation to the environment, but there are different interests and standpoints on rivers, caves and rock art. Take the case of natives: archaeologists working with indigenous peoples produce new understandings of the environment, to use a word charged with naturalist connotations. Perhaps taba, a Tupy word, is closer to this emotive perception, like its possible Greek translation, oikos, home (Sampaio 1987, 318). Of course, it is used in our common concept of ecology (knowledge of our home). Eco-friendly is a good translation of another native name, Tabaré – not by chance the surname of the present president of Uruguay! In other words, dignifying the standpoints of a variety of people is again a way of better understanding archaeology as inevitably concerned with power relations (pace Shanks and Tilley 1987a). The interaction with natives is an innovative feature of archaeology in the periphery. At Xingu, in the Amazon basin, archaeologists and other social scientists have been learning with natives. Empowering initiatives such as Xingu Cultural Workshop (http://oficinaxingu.ning.com/) show that working with the people is much more than PR, that it enlightens archaeologists, as we have proved ourselves.
Dawdy's keynote speech aimed at fostering discussion of the usefulness of archaeology and raised a series of challenges to all those concerned with producing knowledge with the people. Socrates’ motto is still valid: only a critical life is worth living (Plato, Apology, 38). Dawdy's arguments, even when we do not share them, are a reminder to us all that diversity is much better, and safer, than the acceptance that there is only one, right way. Who decides what is right? It is much better to heed a variety of voices, and much less dangerous and authoritarian.
Acknowledgements
We owe thanks to James A. Delle, Barbara Little, Michel Löwy, Carol McDavid, Laurent Olivier, Anne Pyburn, Melisa Salerno, Michael Shanks, Andrés Zarankin. We must mention the institutional support of the Centre for Strategic Studies, World Archaeological Congress, São Paulo Science Foundation (FAPESP) and the Brazilian National Science Foundation (CNPq). Responsibility for the ideas is our own and we are solely responsible.
