Toward the Archaeontology of the dead body

Abstract

The postmodern breakthrough revealed the limitations of history understood as the dominant approach to the past, but it does not follow that history should be abandoned. We might wish, rather, to try to seek an alternative to history, or at least a supplement to it. The search for such an alternative could begin on the border between archaeology and history, where the status of material culture and historical sources can be investigated. Contemporary Heideggerian or contemplative archaeology suggests the possibility of abandoning textualism and turning to questions of the past's materiality. For the historian, the Heideggeran approach encourages the rethinking of the historical source, considered as the trace-being and trace-Being, as well as changing the repertoire of questions. As a case in point, I reflect on the dead body and various aspects of its existence. Analyzing the case of the Argentinian desaparecidos, I discuss the dead body as evidence of crime, as an object of mourning (trace-being), and as the absent remains which refer to the unpresentable ‘absolute past’ (trace-Being). I situate the dead body's existence in the space of the non-absent past, whose ambivalent and liminal status protects it against the all-encompassing discourses of the living. In the context of those considerations, prompted by Heideggerian archaeology, I try to demonstrate that thinking in terms of the non-absent past and turning to the issue of ‘the ontology of the ashes’ may open up the possibility of a reflection on the past which turns to a- or non-historical approaches and whose reference point is the future-to-come.

Keywords:

• Ontological turn
• Heideggerian archaeology
• Archaeontology
• Traces of the past
• Human remains
• Argentinian desaparecidos
• Non-absent past

Acknowledgements

This article includes some motifs from the following papers: ‘Traces of the past’ (written with Włodzimierz Rączkowski), read at the conference ‘Time, Space and the Evidence of Experience: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Past’ (10 March 2000, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland); ‘Six theses on the archaeology-to-come’, presented at the conference ‘Narrative Pasts/Past Narratives’ (16 – 18 February 2001, Stanford University); and ‘The dead body as evidence of experience’, presented as part of the summer course ‘History and Memory: Twentieth Century in Retrospect’ at the Central European University in Budapest (12 July 2001). For consultation, criticism, and valuable insights which contributed to the final shape of this text, the author is grateful to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Ian Hodder, Arkadiusz Marciniak, Wojciech Kalaga, Andrzej P. Kowalski, Piotr Piotrowski, Włodzimierz Rączkowski, Richard Rorty, Michael Shanks, Edward Skibiński, Ewa Skwara, Ellen Spitz, Agata Stankowska, Hayden White, and especially Robert Harrison. Special thanks are owed to the professors and friends from Argentina who shared with the author the trauma of the past that will not go away and the nostalgia for the past that is gone never to return. Cristina Godoy, Alejandro Gomez, Gustavo Politis, and many others—thank you.

Notes

[1] Kerwin Lee Klein distinguishes two approaches to memory as ‘re-enchantment of the world’: the therapeutic, which uses Freud and refers to New Age ideology, and the avant-garde, related to the poststructuralist tropes of apocalypse and fragment (Benjamin) (see Klein 2000).

[2] In the early 1990s, when Anglo-American theory of history was dominated by discussions about the problem of representation, we could speak of an ‘aesthetic turn’, expressed e.g. in the conceptions of Frank Ankersmit. In the context of widespread studies of the Holocaust (the problem of representing the Holocaust), such reflection introduced ethical considerations into journals concerned with the theory and history of historiography. This phenomenon is not limited to history, though. Similar tendencies on a wider scale can be observed in archaeology and anthropology. Thus, when Dominick LaCapra recently called for an ‘ethical turn’, he only articulated the existing state of affairs (see LaCapra 1998, p. 199; see also Marchitello 2001 and ‘The good of history: ethics, post-structuralism and the representation of the past’, Rethinking History, vol. 2, no. 3, 1998).

[3] Symptoms of similar concerns can be found in the theories formulated by philosophers of science, especially Bruno Latour, who writes about current changes in social sciences in the context of the change in thinking about the relations between the social and material worlds (Latour 2000). See also Latour's recent call for ‘second empiricism’ (Latour 2004).

[4] Whereas the first study to apply Heidegger's philosophy to the interpretation of archaeological material was Christopher Gosden's Social Being and Time (Gosden 1994), it was only Thomas's book that provoked discussions on a wider scale (Thomas 1996) and the discussion ‘Towards a Heideggerian archaeology?’, Archaeological Dialogues, vol. 3, no. 1, 1996 and vol. 4, no. 1, 1997. Thomas, however, declares that his book does not attempt to construct a new paradigm of archaeology, but to test the effects of applying selected motifs of Heidegger's philosophy to archaeological reflection (Thomas 1997, p. 121).

[5] The discussion of ideologemes of ends and beginnings in the first paragraphs of this text brings to mind Heidegger's words, ‘To ask: how does it stand with Being?—this means nothing less than to repeat and retrieve (wieder-holen) the inception of our historical-spiritual Dasein, in order to transform it into the other inception’ (Heidegger 2000, p. 41).

[6] Whereas the idea that the products of past communities have their own lives has been present in archaeological thought for a long time, the notion of the Being of things (in the light of Heidegger's philosophy) has not been formulated before. In post-processual archaeology things are considered in the context of the possibility of reading their meanings (the artifact as a text subject to textual interpretation). Karlsson, on the other hand, speaks about contemplative archaeology which lets beings be. ‘Beings’, he writes, ‘are not there just for the sake of our benefit, pleasure or use. The most fantastic thing with artifacts from the past is not what they are but that they are, and that they have the same source of origin as ourselves. It is these beings, or rather their Being, that gave us the frameworks for our orientation in the world’ (Karlsson 1997, p. 118). It is in this text, which is a polemic with Thomas's book, that Karlsson first outlined the project of contemplative archaeology.

[7] It is worth noting at this point that Karlsson's dislike of the anthropocentric character of archaeology will not be easily overcome by means of Heidegger's philosophy, since the latter is also marked by anthropocentrism; its assumptions are different from those of traditional anthropocentrism. What is interesting and relevant to the understanding of Karlsson's idea is specifically Heideggerian ontological anthropocentrism, whose departure point is human involvement in Being and the interdependence of Being and the human being. The mistaken, zoological concept of man as an animal rationale is thus replaced by the idea of the human being as a partner of Being. Heidegger's dislike of the anthropological question about man along with his focus on the relation between Being and man in its ontological dimension may become the starting point for reflection on the human being's physical relation to the world, to which I return later on in this text.

[8] I borrow this coinage (forthtell) from the book by Deborah J. Haynes, The Vocation of the Artist (1997).

[9] Of the large number of books on this subject that have been published within the past decade, the following seem particularly important: Meskell (1998); Belk (1995); Krishenblatt-Gimblett (1998); Pearce (1992); Walsh (1992).

[10] It is worth knowing the recent developments in archaeological theory, since archaeologists not only put forward ever more interesting thematic and research proposals but also successfully apply them in practice. See Archaeological Review from Cambridge (1999), Special Issue: ‘Disability and Archeology’, vol. 15, no. 2; Archaeological Review from Cambridge (1998), Special Issue: ‘Archaeology of Perception and the Senses’, vol. 15, no. 1; Archaeology and Folklore (Gazin-Schwartz and Holtorf 1999); Archaeologies of Landscape (Ashmore and Knapp 1999); Pearson and Shanks (2001); Tilley (1999). Referring in this context to archaeology of death or landscape, I do not mean to say that these are new themes and manifestations of a breakthrough in archaeology, for it is not so much themes as the way of approaching them, that is, a different perspective of study and theoretical option, a new set of questions put to the material, and a different language of representation, that signals change. Thus, there is an essential difference between the scientistic The Archaeology of Death (Chapman et al. 1981), and Pearson's The Archaeology of Death and Burial (1999), which reflects contemporary dilemmas and employs new achievements of the humanities. Pearson's work includes reflection upon reading the body, feminism and sexual identity, the politics of the dead body, the relation between memory and death, as well as the ethical legal aspects of exhumation. Such concerns are absent from the 1981 collection.

[11] I do not mean, certainly, that these topics have not been discussed, but they need a different reconceptualization with the usage of different—to the recently applied, like semiotics or representation theory—approaches.

[12] See also Derrida (1976, pp. 61 – 62, 65, 70 – 71). In his Feu la cendre Derrida says that the best paradigm of what he calls the trace are cinders. As maison de l'être, cinders keep open the space in which the truth of being may come (Derrida 1991).

[13] Among recent publications in English Verdery's The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (1999) is particularly valuable. See also: Buchli and Lucas (2001) (especially texts included in part III, ‘Disappearance and disclosure’).

[14] Recognizing the differences between the dead body, remains, and ashes, I use these terms interchangeably to refer to various forms of the human body (of human recorporation) after death. I avoid such words as ‘corpse’ or ‘cadaver’ because of their semantic abjectivity.

[15] The report included job statistics of the disappeared. Out of 8,960 documented cases, 30.2% were workers, 21% college students, 17.9% clerks, 5.7% teachers, etc. One-fourth of the disappeared were women, 10% of whom were pregnant at the moment of arrest (see Nunca más 1984).

[16] Owing to persistent efforts of the organization of Grandmothers known as Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (a group of women who organized the search for grandchildren, their identification, and restoration to families—an estimated 400 children were born in prisons and assigned for illegal adoption under false names), in 1998 Videla and Massera as well as other high-ranking officers were again arrested and accused of abducting children born in secret detainment centers (see Hernández 1997; Arditti 1999).

[17] The exhumations were conducted by a group of Argentinian experts trained by the well-known American scientist Clyde Snow and under his supervision. Snow is famous for his participation in the investigation which resulted in identifying the remains of Doctor Mengele. On the exhumations he conducted, see Joyce and Stover (1991).

[18] Apart from the Polish example of Katyń, one may mention disappearances under the dictatorship in Chile, Guatemala, Uruguay, and other Latin American countries, and, more recently, the war in former Yugoslavia and the exhumations of its victims, or the exhumations after the Hutu massacre in Rwanda. Reports by Milos Vasić, a journalist on the Belgrade weekly Vreme hunting for witnesses of the mass killings of Kosovo Albanians, resemble reports concerning the Argentinian desaparecidos. Vasić writes of thousands of people ‘disappeared in Kosovo’, of transporting the bodies from Kosovo to Serbia and burying them in hidden mass graves, of treating bodies like refuse, and of taking away the identity cards of Kosovo Albanians deported to Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro in order to ‘create the greatest possible number of “unidentified persons” so that future attempts to determine the number of the disappeared would be more difficult’. The investigation of similar phenomena demonstrates that, even though we live in the time of the declaration Nunca mas (‘Never Again’), cases of genocide still occur (Vasić 2001, p. 6; see also Stover and Peress 1998).

[19] In his well-known essay ‘The uncanny’ (1919), Sigmunt Freud says that the feeling of anxiety, fear, and horror caused by staying in haunted houses, contact with a dead body, wax figures, or mechanical dolls may be described as ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich). ‘The uncanny’ is terrifying because it is strange and unfamiliar, yet we actually have this feeling in relation to something that used to be familiar (heimlich) but has become unfamiliar as a result of repression. It is something alien, weird, and demonic and whose experience is petrifying. In his definition of this concept, Freud cites a statement by Schelling, for whom ‘the uncanny’ is all that should stay hidden but has been revealed. One source of this feeling, according to Freud, is uncertainty caused by the ambivalent nature of a thing as to which we do not know whether it is dead or alive, man or machine, etc. (see Freud 1953).

[20] It is worth noting this interesting and controversial book which situates historical considerations in the context of a psychoanalytic scrutiny of the relation: religion – violence – psychosexuality. ‘My inquiry is grounded in the romantic belief that we can erode the viability of State violence by exposing the psychosexual structures perpetuating it and by demythologizing the politico-religious masquerade that endows it with eschatological necessity’ (Graziano 1992, p. x).

[21] This is the reason why Derrida criticizes historians of death (Philippe Ariès, Michel Vovelle) (see Derrida 1993, pp. 43 – 50).

[22] Despite the attractiveness of the secondary concepts proposed here, I would like to stress that I do not see them as new basic concepts on which a new way of thinking should be founded. Rather, I see them as ‘explosive material’ which, placed in the existing structure of meaning, may cause its explosion.

[23] I refer to Bataille's idea of the continuity of death versus the discontinuity of life (see Bataille 1986).

[24] Notwithstanding Kristeva's (1984) and Derrida's (1995) interesting analyses of the khôra, I only refer to Plato's (1957) understanding of this term.