Polluted places: harbours and hybridity in archaeology

Abstract

What is the role of archaeology in a globalized and postcolonial world? The concept of cultural hybridity is here proposed as a viable approach to re‐evaluate the impurity of cultural expressions within the archaeological discourse. There are three major motives for doing so: 1) as a critique of the idea of cultural essentialism, 2) as a means to provide a new understanding of the harbour as an archaeological locality and 3) as a way of breaking down the boundary created by the modern project between the images of the mobile modern (and rational) being and the immobile (and irrational) pre‐modern native.

Why do we get so much pleasure out of being so different not only from others but from our own past? (Latour 1993:114)

Isn't the past a foreign country; isn't archaeology to write about the ‘others’ (…)? (Solli 1996:88, my translation)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I express my gratitude to Professor Bjørnar Olsen for his invaluable comments on this paper, and his support and inspiration. I am also indebted to Hein Bjerck for helping me with the language and for encouragement. I thank Andrew Jonathan Holt, Ingrid Økland, Ingvild Paulsen and Sidsel Ahlman Jensen for reading the manuscript and for interesting conversations. All inaccuracies and errors are, of course, my own responsibility. All the collages were made by the author.

Notes

The quotation is from reader published in 2000, but can also be found as chapter 2 in Appadurai (1996).

Diaspora will not be defined here, but is frequently used in association with cultural hybridity to define large migrations of people and the new identities that result from these movements (see Cohen (1997), Gilroy (1993, 1997), Braziel & Mannur (eds.) (2003) for discussions on the subject).