Ideologies in Archaeology

10. Imagined Pasts Imagined: Memory and Ideology in Archaeology

233 10 Imagined Pasts Imagined Memory and Ideology in Archaeology ruth m. van dyke My task in this paper is to examine the relationships between ideology and a burgeoning archaeological interest in social memory. I see ideology and social memory as intersecting and overlapping constructs. At the scale of our individual lives, we know ourselves through our experiences in the world, along a temporal dimension. Along larger social and temporal scales, people construct identities and relationships in reference to their understandings of circumstances, events, and meanings that have come before. Inequalities and identities are always deeply implicated in interpretations of the past, whether these interpretations are expressed and created through written histories, oral traditions, archaeological investigations, or other venues. The discipline of archaeology is one way our contemporary society constructs social memory within both dominant and counterhegemonic discourses. An archaeological focus on memory is grounded in larger cultural phenomena, including modernist anxieties, postmodern subjectivities , social traumas, and the rise of identity politics. In the paper that follows, I begin with a discussion of the relationships among ideology, memory, and history. I chart the rise of memory studies in 234 ruth m. van dyke archaeology, discuss some of the ways in which these studies are useful , and examine the ways in which they are problematic. I conclude by placing archaeologies of memory within a larger sociocultural context. Ideology, History, and Social Memory There are many operative conceptions of ideology, not to mention history and memory. At the outset, it may be useful to explicate my own understandings of these key ideas. Multiple definitions of ideology exist (Eagleton 1991: 1–31; Geuss 1981: 4–44), and two usages are common in archaeology. In the first, the word refers rather generically to a worldview. In the second, it encompasses the ideas, beliefs, and values specific to a social group that assist in the promotion and legitimation of the interests of the group (Marx and Engels 1978). This second, Marxist conception of ideology explains how subjects willingly participate in practices that perpetuate inequalities. However, ideology is more than a tool used to mislead subjects into erroneously believing that their interests are coterminous with the interests of the dominant group (Althusser 1969a, 1971a; Habermas 1976). Multiple, overlapping and conflicting ideologies may be held by different factions, and subjects may consensually support regimes that serve the interests of the dominant because they resonate strongly with overlapping aspects of ideologies shared by several groups (McGuire 1992: 142). Ideologies may be perpetuated through a number of strategies, including the naturalization and universalization of beliefs so that they appear to be self-evident or inevitable; the denigration of contradictory beliefs; the exclusion of alternative beliefs; and the obfuscation or “mystification” of social realities and inequalities (Eagleton 1991; Miller and Tilley 1984b). In this regard, conceptions of the past are a powerful ideological tool for both dominant and resistant social groups. Hegemonic factions can foster the illusion that their power is the culmination of a self-evident progression of events rooted in the past. They can ally themselves with real or imagined past glories (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Those in authority often control the transmission of “official” knowledge about the past, and they can wield this power to suppress or edit alternative versions of past events Imagined Pasts Imagined 235 that do not support their aims. But subaltern groups can reconstruct alternate versions of past events and can disseminate counterhistories that challenge those in authority. The term social memory has been employed by historians, anthropologists , geographers, and archaeologists to mean slightly different things. The relationship of memory to history has been a particular focus for some social scientists, but most of these scholars are viewing this relationship in a slightly different way than I do. As I see it, every social group has ways to conceptualize, interpret, and understand past peoples and events. We might broadly characterize these practices as social memory. In Western academic discourse, the disciplines of history and archaeology constitute two of the official, mainstream ways in which we investigate, document, construct, and comprehend the past. Archaeological interest in social memory has emerged from the work of diverse scholarly forebears who attached a multitude of meanings to the term (Assmann 1995; Climo and Cattell 2002; Connerton 1989; Lowenthal 1985; Olick and Robbins 1998; Schama 1996; Squier 2004). Marcel Proust charted literary ground for memory studies in his seven-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu...