Subduing Tendencies? Colonialism, Capitalism, and Comparative Atlantic Archaeologies

Horning, Audrey

doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-0192-6_3

Cited by 18 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…While usable pasts are by their very nature unstable and dangerous pasts, it is here I find myself most sympathetic to this new formulation. My own research (Horning 2011) is bound up in the inextricable linkages of colonial pasts and presents, particularly as they express themselves in Northern Ireland. I have no choice but to engage with 'all of the pasts which are implicated in the present.'…”

Section: Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Surface assemblages. Towards an archaeology in and of the present

Harrison¹

2011

Arch. Dial.

128

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Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1380203811000195How to cite this article: Rodney Harrison (2011). Surface assemblages. Towards an archaeology in and of the present. AbstractThis paper explores a central paradox in the aims of the archaeology of the contemporary past as they have been articulated by its practitioners. On the one hand, its aim has been expressed as one of making the familiar 'unfamiliar', of distancing the observer from their own material world; a work of alienation. On the other hand, it has also aimed to make the past more accessible and egalitarian; to recover lost, subaltern voices and in this way to close the distance between past and present. I suggest that this paradox has stymied its development and promoted a culture of self-justification for a subfield which has already become well established within archaeology over the course of three decades. I argue that this paradox arises from archaeology's relationship with modernity and the past itself, as a result of its investment in the modernist trope of archaeology-as-excavation and the idea of a past which is buried and hidden. One way of overcoming this paradox would be to emphasize an alternative trope of archaeology-as-surface-survey and a process of assembling/reassembling, and indeed to shift away from the idea of an 'archaeology of the contemporary past' to speak instead of an archaeology 'in and of the present'. This would reorient archaeology so that it is seen primarily as a creative engagement with the present and only subsequently as a consideration of the intervention of traces of the past within it. It is only by doing this that archaeology will develop into a discipline which can successfully address itself to the present and future concerns of contemporary societies. Such a move not only has implications for archaeologies of the present and recent past, but concerns the very nature and practice of archaeology as a discipline in its broadest sense in the 21st century.

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Section: Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Surface assemblages. Towards an archaeology in and of the present

Harrison¹

2011

Arch. Dial.

128

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“…In a late- or post-modern society, this process is not altogether dependent on physical space, which was the case in early modern society. The localities of early modern colonialism, the Caribbean plantations, the silver mines of Sápmi or the European settlement in the Cape Province were all related, although each was bound to its particular landscape and its power relations (Lucas, 2006a; Horning, 2011; Nordin, 2012). Space was thus both local and global.…”

Section: Localities Of Colonialismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The centre of the world: The material construction of Eurocentric domination and hybridity in a Scandinavian 17th-century context

Nordin

2013

Journal of Material Culture

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The New World was present in material representations in the 17th-century castle of Skokloster, Sweden, in contrast to the concepts of history and centrality that were used in the construction of a locality of power in a European colonial society. Material displays, architecture and art visually constructed the New World as an integral, yet inferior, part of the Old World. The commodification of the material culture of the North American Indian reproduced the dominion of the colonial powers but at the same time included the New World in the old. Parallel to this process was the integration of history on the estate. Architecture, the construction of landscape and material culture became an arena for the display of a new, hybrid global culture, signifying the advent of modernity. Although juxtaposed in their display, the New and Old Worlds mingled and created a world of hybridity expressed and executed in the castle and estate of Skokloster.

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Introduction

Croucher

2014

Capitalism and Cloves

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Subduing Tendencies? Colonialism, Capitalism, and Comparative Atlantic Archaeologies

Cited by 18 publications

References 16 publications

Surface assemblages. Towards an archaeology in and of the present

Surface assemblages. Towards an archaeology in and of the present

The centre of the world: The material construction of Eurocentric domination and hybridity in a Scandinavian 17th-century context

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