Knowing the Day, Knowing the World: Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology

5. “Reading the Tracks of the Ancestors” : Resources for Assembling Times Past

161 CHAPTER FIVE “Reading the Tracks of the Ancestors” Resources for Assembling Times Past “reading the tracks of the ancestors” is the phrase that, somewhere along the route of the public archaeology project, replaced our initial translation of archaeology as “studying things left in the ground.” The latter phrase seemed to be profoundly significant, although at the time i had no way to explain why it seemed more than merely a different turn of phrase. People immediately responded to “ancestor tracking” as meaningful , while “thing studying” attracted the kind of polite looks that affirmed that the real conversation was elsewhere. Clearly, the phrase “reading the tracks of the ancestors” was connecting to local ways of thinking about the more distant past—but how? it seemed to have something to do with what i was beginning to understand about everyday story tracking, set out in chapter 2, and the ways in which story tracking exceeded the possibility of translation either as geography or as history, or even a combination of them as historical geography. in the years that followed, as David and i worked through the astronomical material and began to understand that it was based on movement rather than fixed points, the journey narratives through the cosmos also began to bolster the sense in which tracking ancestors might be an epistemological practice in itself. Perhaps by working with tracking as more than the ability to follow tracks but as an approach to assembling knowledge more broadly, it might be possible to support a dialogue that could generate interesting and useful approaches to thinking about times past. Bruno Latour’s “symmetrical anthropology” refers to the application of ethnographic methods to the sciences, including, for example, chapter five 162 archaeology.1 Latour’s anthropological research on scientific laboratories, for example, is “symmetrical” because the people who are in “the field” can talk back, to contest accounts of scientific theory and practice, and can ask questions about the ways in which the ethnographer writes. The anthropological account becomes accountable. eduardo viveiros de Castro takes this one step further: “What changes when . . . we apply the Latourian notion of ‘symmetrical anthropology’ to anthropology itself, not to lambaste it as colonialist, exorcize its exoticism, or mine its intellectual field, but to induce it to say something completely different?”2 Could anthropology move beyond describing different ways of thinking and begin to draw on them in ways that challenge and transform its own intellectual heritage and conceptual resources? The preceding chapters have argued that formal disciplinary knowledges and practices—chronology, cartography, the philosophy of personhood , ethics, astronomy, geometry—are indeed very different from the ecology of ideas here in arukwa. in this short chapter, i aim to consolidate what it might mean to track the ancestors, in order to return to the work of the archaeological project in the final chapter. What, then, can be said about “tracking the ancestors” as a historical practice? answering that question requires us to begin with a prior question: What does it mean to translate such a phrase? This chapter approaches the matter from two directions. First, it considers what it is to translate something, making the case that translation itself does not mean the same in Palikur as it does in english. The argument here is that in Palikur, the word wages that is translated as “translation” reflects the ability to reconceive one’s body—and that that kind of translation is an important skill for a tracker. in english, by contrast, the referential concepts for the idea of translation, deriving from Middle english, involved a change of territory, property, and polity. second, it proposes that “tracking” as an activity is not only good to think about but also good to think with. Tracking is not a “practice” that can be set in opposition to “theory.” rather, it is a way of building or assembling knowledge of the world from a range of cues. One might think of it as a practical philosophy, or as a philosophy of the everyday, as a way of world making. I The Middle English Dictionary, a rich resource for the origins of words, offers six possible meanings for the word “translate”—only one of which refers to changing languages: “Reading the Tracks of the Ancestors” 163 (1) To relocate . . . move . . . transplant . . . ; (b) to transfer . . . reposition oneself;—used figuratively; (c) to . . . disinter (bones or a body from a place burial); (d) to carry...