The Process is the Outcome

Ethics are the key to what WAC is all about. It is our stated responsibility as WAC members to help shed the dark disciplinary past and forge a future archaeology of solidarity with the aim of fostering equality (but not sameness) among people everywhere. The present Forum section of Archaeologies showcases the scope and depth of the discussions surrounding this core aspect of WAC, which took place at the first meeting of the Committee on Ethics (henceforth CoE) at Stanford Archaeology Center (California, USA) from April 19th to 21st 2007. It is an invitation to WAC members and others to partake in the process of drafting a “General Code of Ethics” for WAC, a process that ultimately is much more about inclusive discussions and decisions on a framework for ethical practice than about writing a text or proscribing how to behave. The second affiliation for Julie Hollowell will be in effect from 15 December 2007.     

THE TIME OF THE SELF AND THE TIME OF THE OTHER

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical questions by engaging David Hoy's recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a “history of time‐consciousness” in twentieth‐century European philosophy. Hoy's book traces the turn‐of‐the‐century debate between Husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. For him, what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific‐objective “time of the universe” and the phenomenology of human temporality, “the time of our lives.” Hoy's approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of time—past/present/future—and to view objective‐scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of Hoy's work, I attempt to explore how “time” (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of “consciousness” (Hoy's thematic), but in terms of the self's relationship with an Other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time‐consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoy's project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting on time through the relationship to the Other rather than as a mode of the self's own “time‐consciousness,” I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.     

Ethical Responsibility and the Historian: On the Possible End of a History "of a Certain Kind"

In this article I try to answer the question posed by History and Theory's“call for papers”; namely, “do historians as historians have an ethical responsibility, and if so to whom and to what?” To do this I draw mainly (but not exclusively and somewhat unevenly) on three texts: Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, J. F. Lyotard's The Differend, and Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual; Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty have a presence too, albeit a largely absent one. Together, I argue that these theorists (intellectuals) enable me to draw a portrait of an ethically responsible intellectual. I then consider whether historians qua historians have some kind of ethical responsibility—to somebody or to something—over and above that of the intellectual qua intellectual; I reply negatively. And this negative reply has implications for historians. For if historians are to be intellectuals of the type I outline here, then they must end their present practices insofar as they do not fulfill the criteria for the type of ethical responsibility I have argued for. Consequently, to be “ethical” in the way suggested perhaps signals—as the subtitle of my paper suggests—the possible end of a history “of a certain kind” and, as the inevitable corollary, the end of a historian “of a certain kind” too.     

The septuagint-version of the book of Joshua

Abstract

After I published a book on the Covenant Code (A Law Book for the Diaspora, 2003), in which I challenged the early dating of CC in comparison with the Deuteronomic Code and the Holiness Code, three leading scholars of biblical law (Bernard Jackson, Bernard Levinson and Eckart Otto) wrote lengthy reviews in which they attacked my views in defense of the status quo, namely, the priority in dating of CC before D and HC. Each from his own perspective and methodology has brought forward his strongest arguments against my “revolutionary” views, so that this response to my critics should represent a fair test as to my views on the Covenant Code and provide biblical scholarship with a means by which to judge the merits of the case.     

The Initial Meeting of the WAC Ethics Committee

Audie was struck by how far many had come to attend the meeting at Stanford, making the time together all the more precious. He discusses the challenges of first, determining what WAC stands for by identifying core concepts and foundational principles, many of them embedded in existing WAC documents and, second, of where the organization should draw lines when faced with the contradictions that are a part of most ethical dilemmas. A Code of Ethics would not be expected to draw these lines, but to bring these conflicts and contradictions into sharper focus and provide a dialogue and forum for their discussion. One of the many things Audie contributed to the meeting was a discussion and definition of consultation with Indigenous peoples, based on his many years of experience. Another was helping us put our ideas in a visual form that enhanced our understanding.     

5. WHAT DO MEDIEVAL BUILDINGS MEAN?

The aim of this article is to review and reconsider what scholars, including historians, archaeologists, and those in other disciplines, are trying to get at when they attempt a “social interpretation” of English late medieval domestic buildings. I focus on the definition and interpretation of “meaning,” and I examine critically a series of concepts routinely deployed in social interpretations in the past, including my own work, such as type, zeitgeist, and intention. I argue that some of these concepts and interpretive moves are problematic and rather than aiding in our understanding, raise further questions in their turn about how buildings were lived in and understood by their medieval inhabitants. I argue for a shift in language and jargon away from “planning” and “meaning” to that of “lived experience”. I explore such a possible shift with reference to different understandings of and debates over the late medieval castle of Bodiam in southeastern England. Such a shift from meaning to lived experience raises fresh challenges for the development and empirical evaluation of interdisciplinary research on medieval buildings, but it also raises fresh possibilities and insights.     

Hayden White: Beyond Irony

A crisis of our age that is usually identified with the loss of the sacred was one of the causes of the fall into irony in the nineteenth century. In the case of historians, asHayden White has shown in Metahistory, this irony was caused by a“bitterness” stemming from the failure of reality to fulfill their expectations. Anironic apprehension of the world arose in an atmosphere of social breakdown or cultural decline.A current stage of irony manifests itself in a doubt as to the capacity of language to grasp reality. Thus we live in a “prison house of language.” An intellectual parlor-gameproduces “second-hand knowledge” that cannot satisfy the needs of post-postmodern men and women still looking for another metanarrative. Therefore, the main purpose of this essay is to answer the question: how can we go beyond irony? This text is a “post-postmodern post mortem topostmodernism.” I am grateful to postmodernism for many things, especially for giving me an alternative apprehension of the world in terms of difference and continuity rather than binary oppositions, but I am tired of ontological insecurity and epistemological chaos. I need order. I miss metanarrative. In trying to break with some modern/postmodern “principles” andretain within my discourse the premodernist perspective, I follow the current trend in thehumanities. We observe at present the breakdown of methodology and the rise of a more poeticapproach in the human sciences. Evidence of this phenomenon is the more autobiographical formof writing in anthropology (James Clifford, Clifford Geertz) and a more literary style inhistorical writing (Natalie Zemon Davis, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Simon Schama). This trendis associated with a revaluation of the subjective aspects of research. Perhaps, and I wouldwelcome it, it also could be identified with a reappearance of a Collingwoodian idea of history ashuman self-knowledge, knowledge about human nature, knowledge about “what it is to be a man . . . what it is to be the kind of man you are . . . and what it is to be the man you are and nobody else is.”     

《国际博物馆协会博物馆职业道德准则》的法律意义

一个行业的职业道德准则对该行业秩序的发展及其法制的完善都具有重要意义。《国际博物馆协会博物馆职业道德准则》作为博物馆行业的最低道德标准和兼采各国经验总结而成的国际性道德准则,对博物馆行业国际秩序的发展发挥着重要影响,对于一国文物、博物馆法制的完善也有积极意义。当前我国尚未真正建立起切实有效的博物馆行业自律系统,现行法制也不能完全满足博物馆事业发展的需要。以《国际博物馆协会博物馆职业道德准则》为参照,完善博物馆行业治理体系,是我国博物馆事业发展的必要选择。     

THE FINAL PHASE?

This essay reviews the recent book by Carolyn Dean that seeks to elucidate the ways in which complaints about a “surfeit of memory” and the privileging of Jewish victimization during the Holocaust as unique and as the emblem of radical evil in our times has shaped discussions of victims in general, creating an environment in which groups vie for victim status as a means of validating their grievances and making claims for justice. The hostility to such claims has, Dean argues, created antivictim discourses that end up generating aversion toward victims, primarily by denying the validity of their claims to suffering and, in the case of Jews, projecting them as “perpetrators” in their neglect of the suffering of others. At the same time, Dean argues, the demand that victims narrate their suffering in the aesthetically constrained style of “minimalism” equally undermines the legitimacy of victims' memories by demanding that they be presented in an already mastered form, thereby erasing the very trauma that, in principle, such narratives seek to represent. At stake in the debates concerning Holocaust memorial consciousness and its proper modes of representation, this article suggests, are larger historiographical and ethical issues about how to integrate the horrors of the past and the traumatic experience of terror into the normal protocols of historical writing, which rely on distance, objectivity, and interpretive critique as governing procedures. To incorporate terror into historical representation will mean acknowledging and accepting as historiographically legitimate the differing status of analytically recuperated “facts” and victim testimony and finding a way to theorize the reality of “voices” from the past without assuming the necessary “truth” of what they convey.     

Who am I without Exile?: on Mahmûd Darwîsh's Later Poetics of Exile

Who am I after these paths of exodus? I own a boulder that bears my name on a tall bluff overlooking what has come to an end. Seven hundred years escort me beyond the city walls. Time turns around in vain to save my past from a moment that gives birth to the history of my exile in others and in myself. Mahmûd Darwish, “Be a String, Water, to my Guitar” Our eyes and ears refused obedience the princes of our senses proudly chose exile Zbigniew Herbert, “The Power of Taste” Writing is impossible without some kind of exile Julia Kristeva     

“The Most Hated Woman in America”: Madalyn Murray and the Crusade against School Prayer

Throughout her life, Madalyn Murray (O'Hair) tried to obliterate the concept of God and Christianity. She first burst onto the national stage in the early 1960s with a lawsuit against the religious exercises her son was subjected to in a Baltimore, Maryland, public school. A colorful woman who flouted convention, Murray despised religion: “If people want to go to church and be crazy fools, that's their business. But I don't want them praying in ball parks, legislatures, courts and schools. … They can believe in their virgin birth and the rest of their mumbo jumbo, as long as they don't interfere with me, my children, my home, my job, my money or my intellectual views.” At a time when religious conviction was often equated with patriotism, Murray's public statements were regarded as heretical. The media naturally sought her out and as the public learned more about her, Murray was demonized as a belligerent, loudmouthed crank—“the most hated woman in America.” She was not, in fact, the first person to challenge school prayer successfully. That distinction belonged to a fellow atheist, Lawrence Roth, in Engel v. Vitale (1962), a highly unpopular decision against a state-devised prayer in New York. But unlike the reclusive Roth, Murray gravitated to the limelight and became the leader of American atheism in the late twentieth century.     

Sensuous Solidarities: Emotion,Politics and Performance in the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the political performance of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) during the protests against the G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland in 2005. In particular, the paper is concerned with how emotional experiences within political moments or events can be constituted through performances that fashion “sensuous solidarities”. Sensuous solidarities are generated through diverse bodily movements and techniques, and are indicative of both the performative character of activist subjectivities and the content of activists’ public (political) performances. Reflecting on my participation in CIRCA, this paper will argue that sensuous solidarities constituted a series of complex, contradictory and emotive co‐performances and resonances with police, other protestors and the public and in doing so will consider the efficacy of those forms of activism that Duncombe (2007, Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. London: The New Press) has termed “ethical spectacles”.     

Racializing Cities,Naturalizing Space: The Seductive Appeal of Iconicities of Dispossession

In pursuit of a critical geography of globality, my essay examines how racial hegemonies are sustained and perpetuated by the ways in which urban spaces inhabited by peoples on the margins of the world economy are imagined, represented, and brought to public visibility. Central to my inquiry is how iconic representations of “slum life” are produced for a white consumer public. Propelled by fantasies of racial essence, primal bodies, and exotic naturalism, the iconicities of “shantytowns” and the “black ghetto” are circulated as popular commodity forms throughout Europe's metropolitan centers. In analyzing this process, I identify “africanism” (spaces of contested black civility, premodern savagery, urban jungle) and “tropicalism” (naturalized landscapes of color and houses, childlike creativity, and happy workers) as representational codes for how “slums” as sites of urban dispossession are racially mapped and consumed.     

Seeds: Contracting the Audience in a Play about Science

Abstract

In pursuing the question ‘what can scientists learn from theatre?’ Particularly, ‘what can scientists, as scientists, learn from theatre?’ this paper argues that science lacks a normative framework that theatre is capable of providing. Despite science’s well-earned epistemic reputation, there is adequate reason to question its ethical reputation, particularly at the point where cutting edge scientific technology impacts society. I consider science as operating in four categories: the scientific method; the scientific hypothesis; the scientific experiment; and the scientist’s personal character. The realms of the scientist’s hypothesis and personal character are those where social pressures are reciprocally exerted, where imaginative play mentality and epistemic values are most in evidence. Theatre can examine these realms effectively because it is able to use narratives that appeal not only to logical and social moral judgements but to emotional and visceral responses, so as to situate science in the social context in which the pressures of law, funding, experimentation, society, and personal ambition converge in ‘the game of life’.

This can be seen in the theatrical process known as ‘contracting with the audience’. I point out a spectrum of traditional narrative tropes by which science makes “contracts with” audiences. The paper draws on theories of entrainment and theatrical game-play from Peter Stromberg and Philippe Gaulier, as well as my own practice and research into the process of contracting with the audience, to propose how to reach beyond tradition and to shift normalising contracts “outside the box”. To illustrate my proposition, I examine the play Seeds by Annabel Soutar as directed by Chris Abraham for Crow’s Theatre and Theatre Porte Parole. Seeds follows the controversial court battles of Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser against agricultural-biotech corporation Monsanto, which sued him for patent infringement of its Genetically Modified Organism Roundup Ready Canola. Seeds helps its audience define a public arena for discourse even as it brings to our attention the factors that make this difficult to do, while making an excellent contribution to the genre of ‘Documentary Theatre’. It is a successful contract with the audience that creates a public forum for discussion about contemporary ethical debates in science, thereby merging artistic ambiguity and scientific theory.     

Explaining "Auschwitz" after the End of History: The Case of Italy

Everywhere the 1990s have been characterized by an odd mixture of ideological triumphalism—Fukuyama's “end of history” being only the crassest example—and of ideological uncertainty—can there be, should there be, a “third way”? For all its pretensions to universality, the “New World Order” has never lost a fragility in appearance. Students of historiography can scarcely be surprised to learn that an uneasiness over the present and future has in turn frequently entailed uncertainty about the past and particularly about those parts of the past which had seemed most able to give clear and significant “lessons.” One evident example is the history of what in my Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima (1993) I called the “long” Second World War, that is, that crisis in confidence in the relationship between political and economic liberalism and the nation-state which, by the end of 1938, had left only Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia as in any sense preserving those “liberal” freedoms which had spread across Europe since 1789. In this article, I briefly review the most recent difficulties World War II combatant societies have had in locating a usable past in the history of those times. However, my major focus is on the specific case of Italy, very much a border state in the Cold War system, and today the political home of an “Olive Tree” and a “Liberty Pole” whose historical antecedents and whose philosophical base for the future are less than limpid. 1990s Italian historians thus give very mixed messages about the Fascist past; these are the messages I describe and decode.     

Readings on Thai Justice: A Review Essay

Abstract

How far can judges hope to address Thailand’s political problems? This article reviews six Thai-language books dealing with various aspects of the judiciary, exploring the historical and intellectual origins of the institution. Thirayudh Boonmee’s 2006 call for a judicialisation of politics – his own elaboration of two important royal speeches – builds on judges’ longstanding belief that they are acting “in the name of the King”. But their narrow, formalistic training ill-equips them to exercise broad powers. The article contrasts judges’ idealised self-understandings (as seen in a popular book on how to become a judge by Natthapakon Phitchayapanyatham, and in the 2010 Judicial Code of Ethics) with revisionist perspectives on the judiciary developed by critical scholars Nidhi Eoseewong, Piyabutr Saengkanokkul, and Somchai Preechasilapakul. Whereas judges may imagine themselves to be acting directly on behalf of the monarchy, revisionist scholars insist that since 1932 judges have formed part of a modern democratic order, in which they need to be more transparent and accountable. A close reading of these books reveals that there is no shared agreement in Thai society about the nature or basis of judicial authority.     

Isaïe 28–32 et la redaction d'ensemble du livre d'isaie

ABSTRACT

It is sometimes maintained that the dating of the Old Testament to the Hellenistic Period precludes any serious critical analysis of, in this case, the Pentateuchal narrative. It is my intent in this paper to state that this is not the case. On the contrary, the idea of the “Endprodukt” coming from a special period says little about the date of its individual parts. The essay will provide examples to show how the Pentateuchal stories rely on traditions (some will today say “memories”) with a very old history of their own. Furthermore it is also the aim of this paper to warn against a pan-Hellenism as a substitute for the old “pan-Babylonism.” There is no need to exchange a Babel-Bibel Streit with a new Hellas-Bibel Streit.     

Left-behind and Vulnerable? Conceptualising Development and Older Women’s Agency in Rural China

Abstract:

Concern has been growing recently in China about the well-being of children, women and the elderly “left behind” on the farm when family members leave the village in search of waged work. Increasingly, the left-behind are portrayed in academic and policy discourse as a “vulnerable group” of passive dependants, sidelined by modernisation and abandoned by their families. This paper challenges this discourse, arguing that while attention to the well-being of the left-behind is vital, there is an urgent need for a shift in focus from their vulnerability to their agency. The paper focuses on the agency of left-behind women between the ages of 50 and 80. It aims, first of all, to point the way toward an empirically richer understanding of the social construction of older women’s agency and well-being. The second aim of the paper is to suggest how different conceptualisations of “agency” and “older women” might contribute to more ethical and politically effective strategies for development and the improvement of women’s well-being. To further these two aims, the paper draws on fieldwork conducted in rural Ningxia, north-western China, and on critiques of the “capability approach” to development expounded by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.     

LEVINAS,HISTORY, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

In this book Anton Froeyman has provided us with a colorful and intriguing account of a Levinasian approach to historical inquiry and historical writing. In my discussion of his book I describe central features of his account and notice how he uses, to develop his view, recent developments in historiography—including the work of figures like Natalie Davis and Carlo Ginzburg, in philosophical thinking about history and historiography, and in various postmodern developments. I sketch central features of Levinas's ethical metaphysics and show that Froeyman's focus on Levinas's interest in our relations with other persons and in particular with their relative differences from us is too narrow. A proper understanding of our infinite responsibility to and for all others, as Levinas portrays it, leads to a broader account than the one Froeyman gives and one that enables us to understand with greater clarity how historiography fits into the Levinasian understanding of our temporal and interpersonal relations with others.