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A genealogy of reflexivity: the skilled lithic craftsman as “scientist”
(Jensen 2002:45). This puts the question under the changed conditions of
the present, meaning that the: “knowledge seeking subject has become self-relating”
(Habermas 1989) rather than informed by tradition. Soon this loss would
become its own tradition or ideology, an ideology that ironically shunned
tradition.
Domestication of the past – science as
conventional thinking within tradition
Archaeology then, as represented by the archaeologist under the parasol, is
a representation of the way modernity has to
because the past is made into an object through disembedding. This need for
feverish “search for ontological security and thus for origins”.
Is this active search in the scrap heaps of past events the result of a “break
practice that is invoked in the wake of a lost or threatened identity or is it just
“a job”? “The job” being a metaphor for an embedded, unquestioned view of
archaeology, archaeology as a naturalized craft legitimized through the routi
nes of everyday practice. I will argue that this has bearing on the crucial and
complex relation between embodied knowledge and discursive knowledge in
cultural reproduction (Barrett 2001).
ge (read tradition), divert philosophy from the True and Eternal and concen
the occasional and volatile. The Transient? This is where we see the crack
that makes modernity possible, the loss of truth in the critical moments that
Giddens speaks of (Giddens 1984). These critical moments no doubt reveal,
through disembedding, your cultural code, and it has been the task of critical
theory in general to unmask many of the false ideals, repressive practices, ex
clusionary identities and other fallacies of science and modern culture.
“This sort of wisdom and its applications become problematic, however, when the
forms of criticism in which it was originally achieved are turned into academic genres
of critique and commentary, and the insights are recast as established and legitima-
Following Stenlund, the problem with much archaeology today, since it has
a long history of pretensions of being “a science”, is that the “unfamiliar” in
the past has become just too familiar again and thrown us into something
much more like a “cultural” practice characterized by “routines”; a dealing
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