Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (review)

This book is the expanded version of a symposium on nationalism and archaeological practice organized for the meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 1991. The contributors of the sixteen chapters are almost all from the United States, but there is a clutch of Canadians and authors from the Czech Republic, Germany, Spain, and Russia.

The essays concern the connection between nationalism—the im-peratives of politics—and archaeological scholarship. There are two pieces on China, one on Korea, and another on Japan, but the nine other substantive articles are European in focus, as are the introduction and the two concluding efforts at synthesis (by Neil Silberman and Bruce Trigger). Most of the authors pick out a limited historical period and show how a certain regime encouraged a particular methodology or point of view. Thus, Katina Lillios has written an excellent account of archaeological research during the Salazar period (1932-74) in Portugal and the way in which the state shaped scholarship. There are more or less successful efforts on Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, postwar Japan, China under Mao, and so on.

All the authors have been predictably—indeed boringly—influenced by postmodern modes of thinking, and none of them approaches the material under study with an innocent eye. David Anthony's piece about Indo-European theorizing under the Nazis struck me as being more about some undigested bits of European philosophy than his chosen topic. But the other authors keep the theorizing in bounds. Some of the authors are what their opponents call "extreme relativists"—that is, they believe that politics in an invidious sense undercuts all attempts at archaeological objectivity. All the writers see this sort of corruption as a potent problem for scholarship, and their contributions to this volume illustrate how contemporary politics and culture in various regions have affected academic work. But as a whole this group is not one of extreme relativists; rather, the consensus seems to be that careful archaeological study can avoid the worst excesses of politics. The message is that totalitarian societies are the worst for scholars— what else would one expect from a group of Americans?—but that archaeologists in all countries need to be alert to the pressures put upon them and to strive, even if imperfectly, to circumvent these pressures.

The most powerful antirelativist argument is implicit in this book, but is never made explicitly. All of the essays imply that archaeologists, looking back on the books written by their predecessors, can see where politics and archaeology have unfortunately intersected. That is, the contributors point out just what sorts of distortions have occurred under just what sorts of circumstances. They all postulate that if inquiry goes on indefinitely, future researchers will be able to sort out the problems that politicians and a cultural climate of opinion have made for researchers in the present.

The consensus in the papers, I believe, probably reverses the usual causal relation between archaeology and politics. Bernard Wailes and Amy Zoll have written a fine essay on how European archaeologists have used the trope of "civilization versus barbarism." Like their fellow contributors, they suggest that scholarship can assist crude nationalist aims: simplified versions of the trope they have examined become part of the political weaponry wielded by partisans. Surely this is true, and can and does happen. But in my view it is more likely that scholars have picked up such tropes from the culture rather then imposing them on it. Moreover, where it can be shown that political debate is indebted to academic findings, I would say that political use of scholarship is opportunistic: if the politicians had not found what they wanted in archaeology, they would have found it somewhere else. The ideological justification of political action is crucial, but it is generally a mistake to...