Yesterday in Los Angeles:
A melee broke out at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday evening when activists rushed the Español stage to protest a talk by archaeologist Richard Hansen.
The protesters were targeting Hansen’s decades of excavation and research at a vast ancient Maya complex in Guatemala called El Mirador.
The group of about 15 masked protesters rushed the small stage where Hansen was being interviewed by L.A. Times en Español columnist Alejandro Maciel. . . .
The protesters toppled chairs, shouted “this is stolen land!” and “f— imperialism!” and unveiled a large banner that read “Gringo colonizer fuera del Mirador.”
As stunned spectators looked on, a tussle broke out between the demonstrators and some of the event crew who were desperately trying to clear the stage. One stage crew member emerged with a bloodied nose as police arrived quickly at the scene.
Hansen is one of the archaeologist trying hard to do everything right: he hires and trains locals, works closely with local leaders, supports cultural tourism programs, works against illegal loggers. The LA Times reporters who wrote this article tracked down somebody from an entity called Maya View who told them, "We totally believe in the work of Dr. Hansen."
So what's going on?
I suppose one should make some allowance for regular differences of opinion; Hansen is working with one faction of Maya leaders, but there could be others who disagree with the approach his friends are taking.
But what this really represents is that for many activists these days, archaeologists are bad guys, plain and simple. They are arrogant outsiders stomping on sacred ground, digging up ancestral graves, imposing their own views over local traditions, and generally acting as agents of imperialism. These activists think archaeology is another word for colonialism.
Archaeologists do have a lot of sins to answer for: looting, smuggling, grave-robbing, arrogance, etc. Archaeology really did develop as a colonial enterprise. People like Hansen, who represents the more usual sort of archaeologist these days, think they can make up for past archaeological sins by working with locals and using cultural tourism to help them economically. But there are some people too angry for that.
The thing is, I think the archaeologists are right. People around the world believe all sorts of false things about the history of their cultures, from Lakota who think the gods gave them horses at the creation to Southerners who think the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. But if you, like most anthropologists, think ancient cultures are wonderful things that should be preserved, then shouldn't you be writing down their stories rather than digging in the ground to find out what really happened?
What is the value of knowing the truth about el Mirador, compared to the self-esteem and cultural integrity of modern Maya? If what archaeologists dig up hurts people by violating their notions of their past, what is being gained to outweigh that damage. What is the truth worth?
People like our protesters in Los Angeles say, your archaeology has no value at all, it is only destructive of our lives and our ways. It is only a new kind of imperialism, colonizing our minds with your "scientific" ideas about our past. We don't want it, and if we have to, we will fight you to keep you from attacking our right to tell our own story in our own way.
Me, I don't much care, I propose to go on searching for the truth no matter who objects. But for anthropologists whose profession and identity are built around working with and advocating for indigenous people, it is a very hard problem.
5 comments:
I'm a tad confused - you seem to use anthropologist and archaeologist interchangeably throughout the post, which is odd to me.
Is this a case of some different school of thought I'm not aware of? My understanding has always been they are quite distinctly separate fields. Am I perhaps being blinded by adhering to a majority consensus, and a lack of awareness of a minority dissenting opinion? Could it go even further, and I'm wrong even about the majority consensus, and it isn't actually a thing? The internet certainly seems to support my preconception, but I'm open to being wrong...
Most archaeologists are trained in anthropology departments and thus absorb their devotion to preserving cultures. In the particular case of central America, most archaeologists consider it essential to work with locals against looting, destructive logging, oil drilling, and so on, and thus their is an alignment of interests between archaeologists and traditional locals. But that alignment only goes so deep, because archaeologists ultimately do believe that their methods are better than local tradition. Whereas, on the other hand, ethnographers have almost completely given up on their own scientific pretensions and made themselves into mouthpieces for native ways.
It is confusing, especially to archaeologists themselves, who find that however hard they try to straddle the gap between doing science and protecting native traditions, they always fall into that gap at some point, as Hansen did on Sunday.
It would be interesting to know who the protesters actually were. (The only one that's very visible in the picture of the scuffle with police officers looks about as Mayan as I do.)
It would also be worthwhile to know more about Hansen. In the picture of him in the article, he doesn't look too phased. You've depicted him as an almost pathetically earnest, hand-wringing-type liberal, but I wonder if perhaps we should see him more as a well-connected institutionalist at the top of his international game. It's not that I look askance at him or what he represents--I'm on the side of scientific archaeology as well, and not too unhappy with institutional liberalism, either. I just wonder if we should see him as that sad of a figure.
@David- absolutely to run a multi-million dollar dig like Hansen's work at el Mirador you have to be a big-time networker and institutional operator. He may actually despise modern Maya; but if so he keeps it well hidden. If he wasn't upset by thei protest that might be because he works in the part of the world where there are dangers like gangs of looters armed with automatic weapons, rebels armed with automatic weapons, paramilitaries of questionable legality, etc., and he has had to deal with all of them.
I don't know about the protesters either; that's why I just called them "activists." But I assure that there are natives around the world who hate archaeologists.
@John
I wasn't suggesting that he might despise the Maya, or anything like that. I was questioning the tone of a line like "trying hard to do everything right." I've heard of profs who tried hard to do everything right, and then got accused of insensitivity on one axis or other, and wept over it, and even quit, or considered quitting, their lifelong profession in despair. Maybe I was projecting, but it sounded like you were sweeping him into that category.
I can quite easily see him being the sort of person who respects the Maya. And for him, respecting someone would mean making deals with their accredited leaders, people like him.
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