ASA09: Anthropological and archaeological imaginations: past, present and future

6th-9th April 2009, University of Bristol, UK

Events

The following special events are already fixed within the timetable.

Monday 6th April 2009

KEY-NOTE: The conference key-note opening address will be given by Professor Michael Herzfeld (Harvard).

Whose rights to which past?  Archaeologists, anthropologists, and the ethics of heritage in the global hierarchy of value

As the irony of a globalized vision of 'heritage' becomes increasingly apparent, with UNESCO listings and nationalistic forms of exceptionalism driving up the economic power of the concept of 'site,' professionals in both disciplines find themselves confronted as never before with wrenching decisions about what to reify, what to preserve, and what to select for whose vision of history.  Drawing on his work in Greece, Italy, and Thailand, and on related researches by other scholars in China, the Middle East, and Latin America, the speaker will outline these dilemmas and frame them in terms of the aftermath of colonialism -- a global cultural hierarchy that has been invested with an often under-appreciated force, and that will, unless subjected to extensive analysis and criticism, result in the massive confirmation of existing structures of power and exclusion.  He will make the argument that it is only through ethnographic investigations of archaeological practice, conservation policy implementation, and heritage politics that we can apprehend the damage that current global forces such as neoliberalism bring to local cultural formations; appreciate how these formations resist annihilation; and perceive the costs to them of so doing.

Tuesday 7th April 2009

HONORARY DEGREE: The University will confer an Honorary DSc upon Professor Ian Hodder. This will be preceded by the H.H. Young Lecture, given by Professor Hodder, with the provisional title Archaeology and Anthropology: the state of the relationship.

Wednesday 8th April 2009

FIRTH LECTURE: The ASA Firth Lecture will be given by Professor Tapati Guha-Thakurta (Professor in History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta).

Displaying cultures, simulating sites: on two exhibitionary complexes of colonial and post-colonial India

This lecture will take up the central trope of “imagination” as a ground for configuring the disciplinary fields of archaeology and anthropology within public domains of display and mass spectatorship, to explore some of the ways in which academic knowledges generated by the disciplines have come to circulate over time in two different kinds of colonial and post-colonial sites. Within these two types of temporary exhibitionary complexes, my focus will be on fabricated ensembles, archaeological and ethnographic, – on the recreation of historical monuments, on the one hand, and of village cultures and communities, on the other – and their combined effects in producing the lure of the exotic and of simulated travels in time and space. It will bring face to face the object-worlds, replication processes and larger cultural claims of these contrasting urban sites of exhibition and reception, to think of how we may map the passages from India’s colonial to post-colonial visual cultures.

The coming of age of the scholarly disciplines of archaeology and anthropology in the late 19th century closely coincided with the age of the ‘world exhibitions’, a key visual apparatus for the staging of Western imperial hegemony and its representational powers over the peoples and cultures of the non-Western world. Drawing on the large body of critical writing that have scrutinized the representational regimes of these ‘world exhibitions’ and the new technologies of vision, reproduction and display that exemplified the powers of Western modernity, I will be taking up the case of one such exhibitionary location from India’s colonial history - the example of the Indian pavilions at the Empire Exhibition at Wembley, London, of 1924. One of my main concerns will be to trace the kinds of Indian design, craftsmanship and artisanal practices that were transported to this imperial metropolitan site, and deployed in the fabrication of vast architectural replicas and village displays for a London public, each carrying the signification of an ‘authentic’ India, of her archaeological past and her ethnographic present.

From this archetypal colonial exhibitionary complex in London, the lecture takes a huge chronological and spatial leap into a contemporary popular festival scenario in the city of Calcutta, to present a markedly alternative example of a postcolonial exhibitionary regime and its own local prerogatives in staging world cultures as spectacle and display. The Durga Puja is a five-day long annual autumnal celebration, where the worship of the goddess has, for many years now, become synonymous with the biggest secular cultural festival of Bengal. Using my current research on the transforming visual worlds of Calcutta’s Durga Puja festivties, my lecture will look closely at the way the festival converts the entire city and its everyday spaces into a mega-exhibitionary complex. This is a milieu where temporary pavilions, in which the image of the goddess is housed, take on the shape of a variety of historical architectural structures or the look of distant primitive civilizations, where immense pride is taken by local designers and artists in simulating global and national monumental sites for vast crowds of touring spectators. I will be following a recent dominant trend within this festival field of the production of exact archaeological replicas (drawing on monuments from all over India as well as other parts of the world) as well as of a rich stock of rural craft and folk art tableaux in the thick of the congested city, to show how these come to serve different purposes of popular pedagogy and tourism and public art production.
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In critically juxtaposing a colonial with a post-colonial, a historical with contemporary exhibitonary site, while situating each within its widely divergent context, my lecture intends to throw open the multiple careers of archaeological and anthropological imaginations in these shifting public domains of spectacle and display.  I wish, especially, to make a case for moving our attention away from the much-theorized practices of the imperial ‘world exhibitions’ to new kinds of local, post-colonial exhibitionary sites (of the kind that my city’s Durga Puja offers each year) - to ask in what ways does the latter reverse the hierarchy of gazes between the West and India, enact its own processes of appropriation and assimilation, feed off its own discourses of exoticism and authenticity, and thrive on a contemporary global sense of the portability and reproducibility of cultures across time and space.     

Thursday 9th April

RAI ADDRESS: The Royal Anthropological Institute will present their Presidential Address, to be given by Professor Roy Ellen (Kent).