CALL. 14.02.2019: [SESSION 4] Is Archaeology Practical? (EAA 25th) - Bern (Switzerland)
FECHA LÍMITE/DEADLINE/SCADENZA: 14/02/2019
FECHA CONGRESO/CONGRESS DATE/DATA CONGRESSO: 04-05-06-07/09/2019
LUGAR/LOCATION/LUOGO: Main Building, University of Bern - UniS, University of Bern (Berns, Switzerland)
ORGANIZADOR/ORGANIZER/ORGANIZZATORE: Joana Alves - Ferreira (Centre of Studies in Archaeology, Arts and Heritage Sciences, CEAACP); Ana Vale (University of Coimbra); Helena Barbosa (Transdisciplinary Research Centre: Culture, Space and Memory, CITCEM); Leilane Lima (University of Porto).
CALL:
Can archaeology become a place of resistance in terms of becoming-revolutionary and becoming-ethical?
In 1933, explicitly responding to Hitler’s ‘take-over of power’, Vere Gordon Childe addressed the political reality of his time and asked: “Is Prehistory Practical?” Driven by his own unrest, he wrote that: “in 1933 it can hardly be alleged that Prehistory is a useless study, wholly remote from and irrelevant to practical life” (Childe 1933: 410), and it was by addressing his reality – his actuality – that he pointed to the political and ethical conditions of archaeology’s place in contemporaneity. Thus, the issue raised in “Is Prehistory Practical?” encompasses not only resistance to the present but both the diagnosis of archaeology’s inadequacy when facing its time and the creative prognosis for its actual becoming-other, even if that is uncertain. Whether in 1933 or now, Childe’s question points towards the thought of resistance as a response that is both political and ethical.
The thought of resistance resists representation as it is not simply the inverted image of power, and neither embodies a form of non-power, or is radically liberating. Resistance is a mode of existence: becoming-always and already. Resistance is an act of creation: political, ontological, aesthetical and ethical. Therefore, resistance is an inventive practice of new knowledge and meanings yet to come via diversity, multiplicity and the destruction of identity as representation. Resistance is untimely. In this sense, how can we make archaeology practical? How can we respond as present-becoming? How can we make it untimely?
We are interested in critically approaching archaeology as a place for practical invention. As an always-experimental process of learning, in which materials from the past are an endless source of knowing and acting upon our historical conditions. We encourage contributions from different theoretical and political perspectives, and distinct chronologies.