Heritage bureaucracies and the modern nation state. Towards an ethnography of archaeological systems of government

Abstract

Drawing on examples from the West (Flanders) and developing East (Siberia, Russia), this paper investigates the subtle and often overlooked entanglements between the nation state and archaeology. Drawing on careful ethnographic assessments mapping the impact of the state on archaeological practice in Russia and Flanders, this paper illustrates that we need to transcend our traditional focus on nationalism and also look at the impact of bureaucratic procedures and documents. These at first sight benign systems of government greatly enmesh archaeologists with the nation state and its myriad of agendas, ultimately impacting both heritage management and academic research.

Nationalist archaeology and foreign oil exploration in El Tajín, Mexico, 1935–1940

“…Second, focusing on the ideological and discursive relationships between archaeology and the nation state may obscure the more mundane, practical dimensions of their entanglements (Plets 2016a; compare Salas Landa 2018). In Breglia's (2006) account, Mexico's de jure control over archaeology was never so complete as both legislation and scholarship implied; examining historical transformations in land tenure and usufruct at Chichén Itzá shows that de facto private control has been a facet of daily life at the site for the past century.…”

Promising pipelines and hydrocarbon nationalism: the sociality of unbuilt infrastructure in indigenous Siberia

“…A discourse underscoring the ecological benefits of gas is also further routinised by a drove of players on the first hand disconnected from Gazprom. Members of the Russian scientific establishment (in the case of Altai, the Novosibirsk Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences) play a central role in publicly underscoring the ecological benefits of pipeline transport for the region using a scientific framework and language (see Plets 2016: 207). Many of these scientists connected to prestigious research institutions are, however, dependent on Gazprom for research funding as a result of shrinking state support for academia.…”

Archaeology and the Late Modern State: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Debate over the primacy of agency or structure in shaping late modern state heritage regimes is limited in archaeological discourse (Dornan 2002;Plets 2016a), implying this powerfully conflicting yet dialectically entwined social force is largely taken for granted. Where agency is the ability of individuals to make their own choices (free will), structure is the social configuration that restricts or constrains choice.…”

“…One of the most pronounced characteristics of the late modern archaeology-state nexus is neoliberalism, although the subject has been largely overlooked by archaeologists until quite recently (Coombe 2012;Coombe and Baird 2016;Coombe and Weiss 2015;Hutchings and La Salle 2015a;Plets 2016a). Rosemary Coombe and Lindsay Weiss (2015: 44) note that ''Many heritage scholars characterize neoliberalism as an ideology privileging economic rationality that has contributed to a profit driven conception of heritage; others describe it as 'an ideological approach to the state's role in economy and society' (Gattinger and Saint-Pierre 2010: 280).'…”