The Languages of Archaeology: Dialogue, Narrative, and Writing
Language: English
Pages: 184
ISBN: B000W803UM
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This volume provides the first critical examination of the relationship between archaeology and language, analysing the rhetorical practices through which archaeologists create representations of the past.
relies on an already existing sharing, although in neither case is this sharing an identity. For Bakhtin, in fact, the condition required for communication is nonidentity. Otherness and Archaeological Authors Bakhtin was concerned with exploring the ambiguous position of the author, as someone charged with creating a provisionally finalized work. Morson and Emerson (1990: 179–86) suggest that Bakhtin was concerned with the ethical dimensions of authoring as part of the formation of the self.
(Bakhtin 1984: 183). “We only come to know what we have written by understanding the choices of others . . . We understand from the third person what we have written in the first person, but only in the process of reading the second person” (M. Joyce 1995: 237). R.A.J. November 2001 The authors and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: photographs of Maya pottery, copyright Justin Kerr, were used with permission as sources for images in
itself from an alien perspective and has come to understand how its own values and beliefs appear to the other language. When it is used subsequently, such a language can no longer directly and unself-consciously talk about its topic as if there were no other plausible way of doing so. (Morson and Emerson 1990: 309) In the same way, archaeological narratives written self-consciously become novelized (Morson and Emerson 1990: 304); they take into 38 writing the field of archaeology account
created equal, but the problem with versimilitude is the degree to which our own habitus shapes our conceptions of the “limits of the possible.” What seems commonsensical, parsimonious, or a matter of simple rationality or utility to us, must be viewed in light of the astute and now common critique of instrumentalist logic and rationalist or utilitarian explanation – that utility itself is socially constructed (e.g., Sahlins 1976: 12). So the problem becomes how to create multiple, unfinalized,
histoire is distinguished by “the exclusive use of the third person and of such forms as the preterite and the pluperfect,” through which the “objectivity of narrative is defined by the absence of all reference to the narrator” (White 1987: 2–3). Thus for White, the historical narrative is specifically that of an apparently objective speaker recounting what happened: beginning, middle, and end. While useful for White’s purposes, this particular formulation is almost the reverse of Genette’s general