Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Throughout this chapter I argue that our concern for others, as archaeologists, has been
caught up in the neoliberal rhetoric of development, which helps to maintain and justify, in
the long term, the inequalities it purports to alleviate. Moreover, some archaeological
preconceptions in the past and some research strategies in the present have helped, in a
conscious or unconscious way, to construct indigenous communities as dispensable or
improvable. Here I propose another sort of archaeological engagement, drawing upon the
work of iek and Bhabha among others, which is both cosmopolitan and vernacular in its
scope. This archaeology excavates the present in order to understand from within the
destructive effects of globalization, modernism, and development, and it explores the
genealogies of collaboration between the discipline and universalistic theories of progress.
In so doing, it intends to provide a more radical critique of the modern world than it is
usually offered in our field of research. The work presented here is a mixture of
archaeology and ethnography that has been carried out in Ethiopia and Brazil.
Note
Data used in this chapter come from projects coordinated by Vctor M. Fernndez
(Ethiopia) and Almudena Hernando (Brazil), from the Complutense University of Madrid.
I am grateful for their invitation to take part in their projects and for the ideas that they
have contributed to this work. They are not responsible, however, for the interpretations
offered here. I also want to thank Lynn Meskell for inviting me to participate in this book.